I've been patiently waiting for everything to come together to buy my new gaming rig, and now that everything is in the clear, Newegg is slapping me in the face over and over again.

Everytime I go through the checkout and pay through paypal, it tells me they can't authorize the transaction or some bull error message along those lines. Apparently everyone and their dog has had this problem as many a forum have posts asking about the same issue.

The solution you're told: "Make sure your address on your newegg account and the address on your paypal account match perfectly."

Ok, so I did that, got excited again and went through checkout again....same message pops up. Ok so now I'm getting frustrated -- back to google to search for a solution.

Apparently, having the address in your newegg profile page isn't enough -- you have to add it to your address book as well. Oooooooooooook so off to change that. Alright, everything matches perfectly thanks to copy and paste, and off to checkout we go...

Can you guess what happened? Yah, you're right -- same error message.

I don't know how you could possibly make a transaction any more difficult then they seem to be doing, but holy damn. I have all this money that I'm trying to send off to newegg, thanks to them finally opening a Canadian branch, and they're doing a good job shafting me the whole way there.

Do any of you know what I could do here? I'll call newegg's support when I can but their hours suck harshly and make it difficult due to my schedule. Any suggestions would be great. I will NOT, however, buy all this stuff ($1,500 worth) with a credit card -- I don't have the limit and don't plan on increasing it just because Newegg can't get some decent customer service together.

That's all for now -- I'm going back to searching for an answer,

XR

Who here remembers the first time they put the Super Mario 64 cartridge into their Nintendo 64, and after playing with Mario's face for twenty minutes, proceeded to have their mind blown by what they saw when the castle courtyard loaded? I know I do. It was arguably the last great step in video games, bringing the plumber in red out of the two dimensional world and into the three. Its release subsequently saw the drastic change in how games were seen and made. Ever since then I've wondered who and what would bring such change to the industry a second time, and when it would happen. I think it's happening now, but it's not as striking as the 2D to 3D leap Mario took, and so it's harder to notice.

Before.

It's no secret that 2008 has been more than a banner year for gaming. 2007 was compared to the gangbuster year of 1998, but 2008 seems like it's taken the lead as the next closest comparison. Not only has the year seen the release of many sequels to some of the most popular games in the last decade, but it has also brought with it the releases of some very unique and almost daring titles. I'm talking about titles like Spore, which even though left many disappointed, certainly opened up a doorway to a new genre. Little Big Planet also has turned the ideology that community systems are where the industry is going, and made it more of a reality. Even Mirror's Edge, the shockingly different title from EA (who knew they had it in them?) brings fresh takes on old concepts in platforming and makes them seem new. Where am I going with all this? I believe we're seeing the next logical step in gaming before we go all Star Trek and start selling Holo-decks. I see it arriving in two forms: movement from point A to point B, and the use of community as a driver.

After.

It's obviously hard to beat such a ridiculous leap in technology that the Playstation and Nintendo 64 brought to the table. It's safe to say that it'll be a little while longer yet before we see such a huge step forward from one generation to the next. In the meantime though, developers are getting more creative with how they use their games as media and entertainment.

The less dramatic change that's noticeable is how developers are starting to experiment with how you get from point A to point B in their game worlds. From traveling a purely horizontal plane in the days of the NES and earlier, to adding the third dimension of movement, games have been forever tweaking the ways you can use movement and traverse the terrain. The age of the Playstation and Nintendo 64 saw numerous advancements, followed by the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube's improvements. As the years went on, controls were getting so complicated that the entry level gamer would find their fingers in a pretzel knot as they tried to simply climb up that ledge.

Let's see Mario jump off a billboard onto a crane!

Now however, developers for the most part are cutting back on the complications and attempting to streamline controls so that you can pull all those crazy Matrix cliché moves with one hand tied behind your back. Mirror's Edge is a good example of where games seem to be (and should be) going. You can do a plethora of actions to get yourself to your destination, and the controls make it a surprisingly simple thing to do. You will more than likely see more genres outside of platforming start to implement some of these designs as they help immerse you more than just generically jumping three hundred times to get up a steep, rocky hill. All this fancy movement stuff is fine and good, but the community is where the action is.

When Microsoft first launched Xbox Live way back when, they obviously had quite a vision for the future. At the time it wasn't like they were going to blow the PC out of the water for online gaming, but as the service grew it started separating itself from its PC counterpart by offering more and more unique options for the end user. Community gaming and connections almost instantly blew up and changed everything. Suddenly it was shameful if a game didn't have some sort of online functionality.

Take Bill Gates out for an icrecream! Virtually!

The PC world was changing too, and services like Steam were taking root and getting games and content out to the public in a faster and more efficient way than ever before. Truly with the existence of Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Steam, and their counterparts, we're seeing a community gaming explosion that will forever change the industry - much like everyone's favorite 3D plumber. As the Internet grows and expands, gets faster and more feature rich, gaming will take on more forms, become more customizable and personal, and go in yet another new direction for the future.

Gaming has grown from infancy, gone through puberty, and now we're smack dab in the middle of its young adult years. As we continue to watch our beloved child that is gaming continue to mature we're sure to see some pretty crazy things unfold. Yes, it will probably get a bit drunk and stumble out of one or two sad situations, but the next big life plateau approaches. Look sharp, people! The future is now.

That's all for now folks, have a good one!

XR

Well it took gamespot half a millenium, but they finally fixed the video uploader. So without further delay, here's the latest Life's a Glitch video, which would have been much more relevant had it been up when it was supposed to be but whatever.

In other news, I beat Silent Hill: Homecoming last night. Without ruining anything I will say this: The last two hours of that game are messed uppppp.

Have a good one,

XR

Ok I'm trying really hard to not get upset with Gamespot for the millionth time. I've been around for over 5 years at this point so I obviously I have been able to put up with everything the site has thrown at me in some unintentional attempt to make me throw my hands up and leave. However, it's getting more and more difficult to put up with everything.

Two things in particular kill me about this site, and neither of them have anything to do with reviews. No, I couldn't care less about the reviews, news, and the like that gamespot provides because that stuff at this point is pretty terrible. No, I'm more annoyed with the most basic community level functions of this site: Blog posting and Video uploading.

There's been an ongoing joke about how everyone thinks Gamespot is coded by a bunch of half-witted monkeys pounding their heads off the keyboard in some weird experiment called a "website." Sadly enough, many people including myself are actually starting to think that there's more truth in that statement than was once intended.

Trying to write a blog using the gamespot editor is about as user friendly and well optimized as most new windows platforms, and to say that using the editor is painless would be a blatant lie. It loads painfully slow, everything stutters as it chugs along trying to compute...typing. The best part of it all is the way it likes to randomly lose your post upon submission, erasing everything you'd done. Some people use MS Word (which I'm doing now because ironically GS wiped half of my message out of nowhere and now I'm re-typing it), while some people constantly highlight everything and Ctrl+C their work every three sentences. Some people who live life on the edge and have nothing to lose, actually trust the editor to keep their work intact.

Some will say that all of this is redundant ranting because they'll never fix it, but I'm an optimist and so hear my cries! All kidding aside though, let's be serious about just how ridiculous things are. It's not like the editor is doing something mind blowing. The thing can just barely operate at the most simple level of changing text size (although if you want to go back to the original size there's a trick to doing even that), bolding and italicizing. The most sophisticated thing it can pull off is planting pictures into your posts. Not to draw dumb fanboy attention, but even Giantbomb.com in its infancy has a super smooth editor that my grandmother could use without a problem. I personally don't think it's too much to ask for an editor that at least runs smoothly and efficiently, even if it can only manage the most modest of tasks.

Oh but then there's the videos. Oh Lord in heaven, the video uploading on this site is about as nonsensical and annoying as humanly possible. I'm not bashing it for when it works, because when it works it's actually decent. However, the video uploading is horrendous and has gotten worse with the new site update. Three times in the last month the video uploading has gone down due to some strange software issue. Three times we've been told it's fixed, and then a day later it's broken for another week. Oh and with the new update comes my favorite thing about the videos. On the old version of the site, there was a Blog It button that would allow you to make a blog based on the video with a click of the mouse. Now that button doesn't exist and no amount of copying and pasting code has seen me have any success in getting my videos into my blogs. Honestly, it's about as ridiculous as you can imagine that a site that is community driven (because let's face it, the community is all that Gamespot has at this point) is as ridden with stupid bugs that any normal, small team run site has fixed in no time - or doesn't have the problem at all.

I was hoping to have my next Life's a Glitch video up for over a week now and yet; Gamespot refuses to let me as per usual. I love Gamespot because of its community, and I just want to be able to enjoy it for what it is, but damn is the site ever making it hard to even do just that.

Anywhoo, that's my rant for the year about Gamespot haha. I will hopefully bring you that video whenever they "fix" the uploader again. I'm also finally in the last stages of buying my new gaming rig, and you can bet that when I have it in my room I'll take lots of pretty pictures to let you all see it in its glory!

Have a good one,

XR

Well I think a lot of us saw this coming for a while now. It was a bit obvious that the moment EA got their hands on Bioware, the odds of the next KOTOR game being a single player experience just about tanked (and don't even get me started on Mass Effect). As expected, they released what they thought was mind blowing and shocking news...that a KOTOR MMO is in the making....SURPRISE!

Ok so it's not a shocker, but I think we are all secretly intrigued as to how Bioware will handle an MMO. Sure, KOTOR enthusiasts such as myself were really hoping that there would be a KOTOR 3 to continue or lonely Jedi journeys throughout the galaxy. Swing and a miss. I can't say I'm not a bit interested though. Obviously, anything KOTOR related deserves at least that much. However, I honestly find it hard to believe it will work as well as they hope.

They've already seemingly lost quite a chunk of their previous player base since the moment they announced it as an MMO. I think it's safe to say that they won't be bringing this to consoles, and so there goes a hefty portion of players right there based on those who don't have a gaming rig PC. For those who do have a gaming rig, some of those again will ditch it because we all know that even though they say they haven't finalized a payment scheme yet, it will be at least $15.00 a month -- many people don't have that kind of cash to blow on one game. However, this isn't what I think is really going to hurt this game.

From the interviews, we know that they plan on having many different classes and races and character choices. Apparently, you won't necessarily need to be a Jedi or Sith, but instead you can be one of many other recognizable classes from the Star Wars universe. In my opinion this will not work as well as they think it will. Much of the alure of the single player KOTOR experience was that you knew you were one of VERY few Jedi left in the universe. In this MMO though, you know that the vast majority of people are going to be a Jedi or Sith. The lightsabre and force powers will draw the masses to choose one of these two classes, and so instead of a few Jedi kickin' around, you'll see more like thousands upon thousands. I think this will kill a lot of the cool factor that the original KOTOR games had, and definitely hinder the experience.

This could of course be remedied by making the other classes look very powerful and attractive against that of the Jedi and Sith. It'd be hard as hell as far as I'm concerned to make anything but a Mandalorian bounty hunter look cool enough or feel powerful enough to draw the attention away from slicing up dudes with a lightsabre. Also, if they HEAVILY instance the game, it would at least semi help out with thinning out the amount of Jedi you see and interact with. I think based on how much they're leaning on story that they will more than likely be forced to instance it a great deal, but you never know.

Overall I'm on the fence about the whole thing. On one hand I'm super dissapointed I'm not going to have my single player, console based KOTOR 3. On the other hand, I know this is Bioware, and they haven't really messed up a game in quite some time. It will be very interesting to see how this game unfolds over the next...millenium. I just hope that when this all comes to an end and the game is released that the KOTOR universe isn't ruined for the next installment -- MMO or not.