Late posting for the lose. I guess CES is little more than an afterthought at this point given that I am posting this way after the con had ended. Anyway, I had the pleasure of attending the Consumer Electronic Show this year with someone special (<3 2-man raid FTW). For those who don't know what CES is: it is a trade show held annually in early January, showcasing the latest and greatest in the world of gadgets, electronics and doodads.

So the show: Being a first timer, I can't really draw a comparison to last year's CES. It's my understanding that the recession has obviously hit the electronics industry. There was a lot on display, but not too many big announcements or anything that reallywow'd me in terms of being innovative or new tech. Of the popular 'themes,' 3D home theater technology was obviously the big thing this year; Nearly every major booth had some sort of 3D television or device on display.

All but the lenticular 3D television display (missed this one sadly) utilized wireless polarized glasses with active shutter technology to produce the 3D effect. They are kind of like the movie theater glasses, but chunkier and more expensive. The televisions themselves need to be 3D capable in order to work, though speculation is that at some point, this feature will be integrated into the new televisions whether you want it or not.

I honestly don't see it being integrated into home television viewing life any time soon. The 3D effect itself is pretty neat, especially on movies and videos designed to maximize the effect (like Avatar). It's still an expensive gimmick though. The equipment is expensive, the glasses are kind of uncomfortable and dumb looking, and there aren't many videos designed for it yet. One of theTV's was very angle sensitive. The effect didn't seem to work well at all unless we were standing dead center.

I was very impressed with what Nvidia had to offer in terms of 3D for games. I know that this has been on display at several cons, but I've just sort of brushed over it before. It is still a glasses based system that requires a special monitor (well, 120hz refresh rate); and it's still expensive, but it's usable on the current generation of video cards and looks fantastic in my opinion. I think that this system has a lot of potential in the future but it's still too expensive and too taxing on most systems (huge FPS hit when the 3d effect is on according to several benchmarks).

We spent quite a bit of time at Microsoft's booth playing with the Surface and enjoying the cushy carpet on our weary feet (seriously, it was soft). The 4-player touch tower defense game was one of the things that instantly drew me. Multi-touch in general was on display in multiple booths. I think I have a video somewhere of Intel's cube thing.

The LEGO MMO looked much much better than I really had ever expected it to be for whatever it is worth coming from a dedicated WoW veteran. I have looked into it further since the con and have only heard and seen good things. I am pretty jaded on newMMO releases at this point but I might keep track of this one because it looks interesting. Oh, the bit about being able to build things in game and then order the model in actual LEGO bricks is pure win.

D-Link had a router that also served as a digital picture frame and NAS drive dock. I am not sure why this sort of device isn't more common. Networking equipment is butt ugly and a pain in the ass to keep out of sight or hide unless you are particularly clever about strapping things to the underside of your desk. So why not make them attractive looking of functional in some visual sort of way? D-Link offers this solution.

Overall, CES was great. I attended mostly for vacation purposes. Consequently, I missed quite a few things that I kind of wanted to see and unfortunately didn't bother taking too many notes. I think next year I am going to see if I can get a press pass and perhaps uuh have an itinerary of some sorts. It's such a huge con, so much to see. I took quite a few pictures, most being goofy/cute couples photos for my personal collection. I'll post of the a few on this site later.

Hey everyone Blizzard updated the WoW Armory. Neat! Err, been generally absentish over the past week (or so...) doing holiday stuff and preparing for/attending CES over in Las Vegas. I'll do a quick post later this week if I have time. It was lots of fun; the company I kept was the best part (you know who you are <3).

Oh Dragon Age is fun by the way. My obsessive need to play every quest to completion is actually the other reason why I have been "absentish" and not on WoW as much as I usually am. I should post a belated review when I complete it. I think I am almost towards the end. It's a pretty long game.

So I've had to send in a couple of tickets the past two weeks. We totally bugged out the Skybreaker encounter two weeks ago. Noobness happened which resulting in a successful kill with only the people in the cannons up; The loot master not being one of those two people. So consequently, the chest wasn't lootable. Oh, we also got the [I'm on a Boat] achievement despite not really earning it...lol? Kudos to Blizzard for resolving that issue even though it took forever. Protip: don't email support during a holiday weekend.

The other support ticket: Long story short, one of our officers got hacked last week. The hacker cleaned out not only all of his characters, but the entire guild bank as well (time to review bank access policies for the sake of security). Blizzard did a complete restore, but since I am the guild master, I now have the entire contents of our guild bank in my mailbox. Is this what I get for putting off sorting the bank for the past year or two?

I'm having a lot of fun doing the new content. We got Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and the Airship down last Friday, which was nice after kind of a slow raid the week before. Improvement is nice! Deathbringer might have gone down if my internet hadn't decided to take a huge dump on me. We are still well within the awkward attendance threshold though in that there is an interest in getting back to into guild only 25-man raids, but not enough people (the semi-PuGs just aren't the same. Fuck random people).

I keep meaning to run the new 5-mans (hilt hilt hilt hilt) and the daily random more regularly, but a longish commute during rush hour sort of kills a significant portion of my play time. I got a few more tanking upgrades though during last week's raid and from badges, etc. I really need to work on improving that gear and macro set (awesome guild member posted a bunch of really good ones on the forum a while ago, must find). My raid time is actually pretty evenly split between tanking and DPSing at the moment, with perhaps a slight bias towards DPSing.

Other games that I have been playing: Modern Warfare 2 was fun. I am not really certain has to how much value I received for my $50 given that the single player campaign is short and the multiplayer is gimped to hell. Like the first  game, MW2 retains the same fast pacing and excellent narrative. But at the same time, there are many instances where the game feels distinctly on rails with whack-a-mole-esque gameplay and obviously triggered scenes. Lots of fun either way. I wish there was a co-op option for the entire campaign rather than select missions. More games need co-op.

But anyway, since it is unlikely that I will squeeze out another post before the end of the year: I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Wow this game is serious gun porn. Just an incredible amount of weapons; And it's not just the quantity, but the presence as well, seeing how they drop like candy out of a pinata. Expect constant weapon swapping! Weapons are divided into basic classes: Sniper Rifles, Shotguns, Machine Guns, Rocket Launchers and so forth. 200,000+ guns sounds very impressive within the context of a first person shooter, where 20 weapons would be considered a lot. But, within the context of a role-playing game? Not so much. In reality, most of the guns are your standard randomly generated RPG varietyala Diablo II or WoW (they even follow the same color system: white < green < blue < purple < orange :P). Most of your drops are going to end up being vendor trash.

But, that's not to say that each weapon is drab or similar feeling. Weapons are differentiated between each other by variances in damage, firing rate, reload speed, elemental attributes, etc. While minor statistical differences might not seem like it would matter much, would would be surprised at how differently some of the weapons play. For example, a pistol with a large clip, low damage and high reload speed plays very differently than a slow pistol with high damage and a large clip. It is very much about finding a weapon that suits your play style and situation. Besides, all bets are off when you have a sniper rifle that sets targets on fire.

Okay, so I have a half-assed Borderlands review rotting in my temporary post bin. Long story short, I started a new job a little while ago. So between that, the upcoming holidays and what not, much of what I was going to post on this site kind of got pushed to the back burner. Oh so I built my new computer a couple of weeks ago and zomg, I can raid 25-man instances again without locking up or dropping below five frames per second. Yay! The video card that I wanted (Radeon HD 5870 wasn't in stock anywhere...I'll have to order that later :/

PuGs: For the past month or so, my guild has been running regular Wednesday night 25-man PuG runs in Trial of the Crusader to some success. Every week we seem to get close on Anub, but fall a bit short in terms of DPS performance. After our first PuG run, we started holding the loot tokens, patterns and orbs for end loot (separate loot roll table from the other boss drops, which are rolled off after each kill). Doing so seems to have stopped the, "rotating door of PuG members who like the suspiciously perma-DC from the raid" problem for the most part.

3.3: My guild hosted a 25-man Icecrown Citadel semi-PuG raid tonight; Basically in place of TotC in the interest of doing the new content. We cleared trash, did a few attempts at the first boss and then called it a night (we end the raid at 10pm). Not so much luck on Marrowgar, but it's fun learning new content. Thinking that we will probably have more luck bouncing strats off of one another in guild versus in a 25-man PuG. It's nice getting input from fresh faces, but kind of a pain getting random ass people to organize in an instance that no one is familiar with. I haven't had a chance to do any of the new 5-man instances or use the random LFG system. Tomorrow night maybe?

Stuff: I was one and a half achievements short of the thanksgiving title and pet. Totally got busy that weekend and forgot about it. Oh well, at least I have my shiny purple 310% proto-drake. This whole new long ass daily commute + time management thing: I'll figure it out and start posting more.