Justin Thorn

Welcome back everyone. Hope you all had a wonderful New Years celebration. Mine was a little more low key than usual but that was OK this year. I had to be up and on the road to Raleigh early New Years morning so partying hard into the 5AM hour was out of the question this year. Lauren and I went over to her friends house in town for dinner and games. It is a mixture of 20 something wives and their husbands who I have gotten to know better over the course of last year. They really are a great group of people and a lot of fun to hang out with. The women all sat around and played with the babies and took pictures and talked. Us boys….well boys will be boys. We had ESPN on the big TV watching the Raiders game. Simaltaneously we had a nice 23″ widescreen LCD screen in the middle of the room with a brand spankin’ new Xbox 360 hooked up to it. Joe, the bachelor of the group, managed to get one off eBay for a good deal before the holidays. He had four controllers for it and four games. Kameo, Madden 06, Tiger Woods, and Perfect Dark Zero. The graphics on this thing are killer. Joe demoed Madden and Tiger Woods real quickly for us just to show off the graphics. The quality was easily broadcast level graphics that looked just as real as if you were watching it live on TV. Sometimes even better than live TV thanks to its razor sharp high-definition graphics. I can’t wait to see what the PS3 can do later this year. After the quick demos he popped in Perfect Dark Zero and it was ON! We hooked up 4 player split screen death-matches. Since this game is developed by Rare studios who was responsible for the ultimate multiplayer game of all time Goldeneye this game was top notch. We must have played it for nearly two hours trading off every so often. The gameplay, level styles, and weapons are very reminiscent of Goldeney and nearly as addicting. We also played a couple quick matches of Halo 2 (Xbox 1 game) which looked sweet on the Xbox 360. The ball dropped at midnight, we popped the bubbly then Lauren and I had to head home early since we both had to be up early to leave for Raleigh. Her baby cousin was being baptized and her dad’s side of the family was having an informal belated Christmas gift exchange since they had not seen each other yet. The rest of the time off was spent relaxing and watching football and more football. With the final week of the NFL’s regular season and all the college bowl games there was plenty of it to go around. I thought it was interesting that iTunes is now offering condensed 15 minute versions of each BCS bowl game for download at their store. Check it out! Until next time….