Join Me and Improve Television

As some of my earlier reviews may have suggested I'm not a huge fan of most TV shows. TV is a horribly predictable creature; only rarely able to learn an exciting new trick and then unashamedly thrashing the colourful new element until it turns the same putrid brown as everything else on the moron box. Television is dying a slow death and is pulling out the cheapest tricks in the book to try and claw back fans that have turned to the internet or DVD boxsets. But while I'm watching the TV networks groan and writhe about in agony with a malicious grin on my face I wouldn't mind seeing something good on it for a change. That's about all I want in my introduction so let's just cut to the chase. It being Thursday and all I watched Zero Punctuation this morning and was told that the pilot for GameDamage was up and on the internet. GameDamage is a show by Yahtzee, Yug and Matt and seems to be something of a Topgear for gamers. The eventual plan is to hopefully get a TV network to pick up the show and pay the lads to make a series out of it and I for one would be very happy to see this happen. I don't know exactly what we, the little people, can do to make the show a reality (I'm blogging and that's about it I guess) but just on the offchance that any of my readers own a large multinational corporation in great need of sponsorship I suggest you check out the pilot and take it from there. Anyone who's interested (probably none of you ungrateful bastards) should click this link here. Oh and Keep checking up on Infinite Possiblogities. I promise I'll start bullying shit again soon.

Just a Quick Few Words

Just incase anybody was interested in my earlier post about video games getting banned Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, the creative genius behind fullyramlomatic.com and the Zero Punctuation video reviews (give him a chance damn you!), has recently written an interesting article on the very same subject. Here's the link.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24493980-5014239,00.html

The Thursday Morning Ritual Plus Some Other Shit

This morning I got up and like I did last Thursday (and indeed have done practically every Thursday since about Christmas) I watched the new Zero Punctuation video. Zero Punctuation is a weekly video game review series by a guy called Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw who incidentally landed himself a job through his own website, or indeed, blog. Don't think I haven't noticed all you folks out there on "the web" casting doubt on the whole blog scene in what I can only assume is an undercover attempt to create a blog, infiltrate the community and bring us down from the inside. You don't fool me though, I can spot that fake moustache a kilometer off (we do use metric after all). Anyway, Zero Punctuation is worth checking out, even if you aren't really a gamer.

Here's a link http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

Anyway this week he reviews Braid. A game that I myself recently downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace and have been enjoying thoroughly . But I'm not actually here to talk about Braid. I'm here to say how shitty I think the whole "Microsoft Points" system you must use in order to buy the games from Xbox Live Marketplace is. Here's a rundown on how it works.

1. In the REAL world you use your REAL money to buy Microsoft Points



2. You sign into Xbox Live and start shopping around



3. You see something you wanna "buy" and you pay for it with Microsoft Points

It sounds fair enough (if a little arbitrary) but there IS a catch. You see you can only buy points in certain increments. As an example I bought a 2000 point card the other day and only needed 1200 of those for Braid. So what happens to the left overs? Well they're still there as points but I can't get them back as money if I don't want anything else. It's like you're being forced to let Microsoft, one of the richest multinational corporations in the world, "keep the change." Microsoft aren't the only ones either, Nintendo uses Wii Points to buy Virtual Console and WiiWare games in the same way. I have 200 Wii points on my Wii that can't buy anything and can't be exchanged for money. To use them I'd have to buy more Wii points to add to the pile. Why can't I, oh I dunno, buy the the games I want with MONEY! All this points buisiness is deceptive and silly. What it all boils down to is buying money that can ONLY be used at one very specific store. I just hope that it stops here. Imagine if you had to buy points for every store you shopped at. Imagine if you couldn't use the change you got from buying an awesome shirt to buy a Coke from another store? It would be fucked, that's the answer.