March 2008 Archives

Just wanted to post quick note on the consumer advocacy blog, The Consumerist.

I don't know about other people, but I personally love this site and find reading it to be a daily dose of entertainment and education.

-Jeremy

CNET's Crave gadget blog is reporting that Best Buy is unloading their HD-DVD inventory at the bargain basement price of $9.99 a disk.

I'm still feeling burned about my Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on purchase.  At least it up-scales regular DVD formatted movies on my Hitachi HDTV.

-Jeremy

In an quite unexpected move on the part of the good folks at Bungie, it was reported earlier this morning that a gamer, who had previously sent in his autographed Xbox 360 console for post RRoD service and repair, only to get back his "repaired" console back from Microsoft scrubbed free of his valuable collector's markings. 

In an effort to "unscrew" this individual, Bungie staff quickly moved to compensate this individual with an awesome "swag bag" of Halo 3 related merchandise.

What an awesome move on the part of Bungie (now completely seperated from the clutches of Microsoft) to step in and do something quite awesome in its extensiveness, to correct the ongoing bumbling and fumbling that has been the Xbox 360 console repair and service system.

It is bad enough for Microsoft to have a near 30% failure rate on their hardware, to lose out to Sony in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, and to continue to treat it's Xbox 360 and Xbox Live customers with the same "bastard-step-children-you-are-and-you-peasants-will-do-what-your-told" mentality that they have long treated their operating system and productivity software consumers to over the years.

This is just my opinion, but it is just too bad that it takes a company like Bungie (whom from everything I have seen, rocks my socks off) to step in and clean up after the steaming pile that is Microsoft Xbox 360 warranty and repair.  For those of you who have been frequenting the gaming news sites and blogs over the past year, you are fully aware that the Microsoft Xbox 360 system is just getting pummeled in the court of public opinion.

It's not hard to see how Bungie either proactively planned their seperation from Microsoft when going into the Halo IP (intellectual property) agreement, or frankly (and this is my belief) probably decided they had seen enough after being rushed into the Halo 2 debacle, and sought to part ways quickly thereafter.

Rock on Bungie!