Major Nelson Podcast Ridiculousness

For those who haven’t seen the story yet, check out the story on Kotaku called Major Nelson Mocks Gamers, Undermines Position.

In summary, essentially we have another case of Xbox Live’s Major Nelson teaming up with the simply-named “e” to marginalize player opinions once more. Personally, I’ve had it with the Major Nelson cast. The following is a post that I made no the Major Nelson blog.

“MN: Damage done, to be honest I’ve been listening to your podcast for a long time now and will probably not continue. I’ll still use your site for news of upcoming 360 and Live content of course.

Any time I’ve ever heard e on the podcast the two of you are usually addressing something to do with a Live update, some special bit of content, etc. That’s fine. But when addressing the concerns of Live’s paying customers the two of you frequently come off with a very condescending tone that’ll usually have me stopping listening to it.

I know you’re human, I know you’re trying to inject humor into it, but this kind of thing has been going on for a while now. That is, the marginalizing of the opinion of your consumers. Nobody’s asking that MS and the 360 developers bend over a barrel for every wish that everything be free, only that someone somewhere listens to us telling you that we’d have less of a problem purchasing content digitally if it was priced reasonably when taken in context with the content itself.

The problem is nobody sees that happening when time after time the consumer is given content which is unreasonably priced. It reads like we’re not getting heard, that developers are greedy, and faith is lost.

Anyway, just my opinion that I wanted to share, because I do see the value in the things that you do.”

I’m sure nothing will come of it, that no response will be garnered from Nelson himself, and that the various Xbots out there will flame the bejesus out of it, but oh well. This is just bad community relations, and at the very least he should be aware of how the consumer feels.

EVE 4th Anniversary

Congratulations are in order for the fine folks at CCP Games, as this weekend they celebrate the 4th anniversary of EVE Online! As someone who’s been playing since the beta, I have to say this is the longest I’ve ever played a single game in my entire life. Longest by far.

Following up on the EVE Voice launch, CCP’s asked me to do a splash screen for the game. For those who don’t have access to EVE, here’s what went online this morning:

EVE 4th Anniversary Splash

Congratulations again, CCP! Here’s to another four awesome years. Hope you guys get a chance to party hard this weekend!

A new PC is born

So finally I managed to get a PC worthy of a gaming rig. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say that. First, a shot from before the upgrade. That’s my old PC and my iMac, sitting happily together on my desk. Ah, the memories. It’s like a silicon version of the black and white cookie.

Before the upgrade

And now, the new gear. First, a shot of my case and PSU in their boxy homes, and second a shot of my motherboard. I decided to be lazy and let the guys at the store mount the CPU and memory for me with my cooler. Saved me some time, and it was free of charge. Can’t complain about that. Lastly, a shot of the case after I installed my PSU.

Boxes of goodies Motherboard, CPU mounted and ram already in PSU installed

After that I got pretty busy installing all the other stuff, so I didn’t take too much time to take pictures. On to the action shots.

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Got the requisite “gamer in the dark” pictures accentuating my lack of sunlight exposure, and the last one has a flash on to show some details on how much I need to wipe down my glass desk. My iMac has subsequently found a home off to the right where my printer was, and the printer is on the floor waiting for a home.

It was a great bit of fun doing the build, I have to say, and it’s even better that it booted up on the first try. At some point I’m going to have to wrangle the cables a bit better, but this thing blows away what I upgraded from. Here’s a list of what went inside:

  • Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case
  • Intel Coreâ„¢2 Duo Processor E6600 2.4GHz w/ 4MB Cache
  • Zalman CNPS9700 NT Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
  • Asus P5B w/ DualDDR2 800, 7.1 Audio, Gigabit Lan, SATA II, PCI-E x16
  • Corsair 2GB XMS2-6400 TWIN2X Dual Channel DDR2 Kit (2 x 1GB)
  • eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB PCI-E w/ Dual DVI, HDTV-Out
  • Seagate 320GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache
  • Corsair HX 620W Modular Power Supply w/ Triple +12V
  • Dual Samsung SyncMaster 206BW 20in Widescreen LCD w/ DVI, 2ms, 3000:1

And no, I didn’t go with Vista on this thing (yet). No real reason to yet. 🙂