God of War III

I finally finished God of War III for the PS3, it's the end of the trilogy about Kratos's search for revenge against the gods, Greek gods that is.  I didn't play the first teo but I knew the general story.  He was tricked into killing his own family and doing the general bidding of the gods against his will.  He finds out the Zeus is his father and goes to seek revenge with the help of the Titans.  Visually, the game is a pure treat and shows the capabilities of the PS3.  The sheer scale of the Titans is incredible; what's even more amazing is that these huge behemoths are walking around causing destruction while you're on them or as they walk by in the background.  I didn't feel that I needed to play the previous two while playing GOWIII, but I'm sure it does help and may have caused even more shock and closure to this already amazing story.  My favorite games have a great story, message, and are scattered with memorable quotes.  For me, I will remember this one for it's epic story and scale along with a message left by a dead companion to our antihero Kratos, "Hope is what makes us strong, it is why we are here.  It is why we fight with when all else is lost."

Mass Effect II

If you don't know, I have a PS3 and the Mass Effect II demo for the PS3 came out yesterday.  I have downloaded and installed it today.  Currently, I'm customizing my character and giving it the run through.  Heard it's a fairly involved demo and the only game on the 360 that I wanted to play.  The full game comes out on January 18 . . . I'm excited.  Always love great stories and that's my reason for playing video games.  What do you guys think about the Mass Effect series?

HP DV6t Select Edition Initial Impressions

Hey, it's been awhile so I thought I'd update with the initial impressions of one of the products I've purchased, the HP DV6t Select edition laptop.  To give you an overview of the system, it comes with 3 USB ports and a powered eSATA port (USB/eSATA combo port), a 5 in 1 media card reader, CD/DVD optical drive, finger print reader, HDMI port, and VGA port.  The screen is 15.6" with a resolution of 1366x768.  I customized my unit on HP.com so I have a Core-i7-720QM quad core processor, 8 GB of RAM, 640 GB hard drive spinning at 7200 RPM, and integrated bluetooth.

To give a perspective of where I'm coming from, my other laptop and the one I was using primarily has a Core 2 Duo dual core processor running at about 1.7 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.  It probably seems like I wanted or needed a performance increase.  Well, in all honesty, my Core 2 Duo laptop was holding up just fine for my applications.  I use it for school, while watching videos, doing occasional photoshopping (yes it's a word), and light programming.  I will be graduating this June, so the school portion will be going away soon, so I didn't shop for a new one in terms of that.  I wanted raw power so that it could better stand the test of time.

Likes:
I definitely like the extremely quick boot up time and wake up from sleep.  From sleep it takes about 5 seconds, if that, to get to the log-in screen and after I press enter of swipe my finger across the fingerprint reader I'm logged in almost instantly.  Windows 7, I had Vista on my previous laptop, seems to be less problematic in comparison to when I first started using Vista.  Of course 7 has been out for awhile now, but it's still good to see that changing operating systems hasn't caused my any issues.  The key board feels great, it's a chiclet style keyboard and I was a little leary, but it has bosed no problems for me.  In fact, I type slightly fast and with significantly fewer mistakes.  It just feels good.  The hot keys around the keyboard are also very helpful.  They allow you to control the volume, screen brightness, keyboard backlight, etc.



Dislikes:
The clickpad and the large power block.   The click pad is sensitive to the the touch, but I'm not yet use to not having separated buttons.  The bottom part of the click pad is sectioned off with lines to show buttons but they aren't physically separated from the click pad itself, so you're left with buttons that are very hard to press.  With that being said, with the various gestures that symantic provides for the click pad, it's not that big of a deal.  Gestures such as double tap to click and drag, two finger scroll, 3 finger swipe to open up an application, etc.  I like the large size of the click pad, just not the implementation of the buttons.