Apparently, jobless and alone. It's amazing how, as a kid, I would have dreamed of the day where I had all the time in world to just sit around and play video games. Now, I feel guilty for it every second I'm doing it. It sucks all the fun out of it.

Stupid economy. I guess now I can redouble my efforts on figuring out what i actually want to do with my life. Journalism seems like a dead idea.

Part of the reason you bought Left 4 Dead when it came out, despite the lack of number in the level department, was the promise of new, free levels from Valve to help support their game. So now, with word of a way too early Left 4 Dead 2, what we're getting is a level pack for, supposedly, full retail price? I guess I can understand why Valve would do this; after all, this is one of those rare situations where I'll actually end up buying it anyway, so why should Valve make as much money as they can? I will, however, do it begrudgingly, with my infinite love for Valve scarred.

In general, I haven't had very much success with the Fallout 3 DLC. Besides Operation: Anchorage being mediocre at best, suffering from the combat-oriented gameplay that is not Fallout 3's strong suit, it wasn't all that bad in the end. The only part of it that I didn't welcome was the consistent crashes post-DLC, and a slew of little annoying bugs that also didn't exist before the download.

Now we fast forward to The PIt, Bethesda's second promised bit of DLC. Already, I've been having exponentially more crashes (5 alone on my way to the quest marker, alleviated slightly after my updating my Xonar D2Xs sound drivers). I haven't even made it further than talking to the quest-giver, but I also hear of purely broken DLC from both the PC and 360 versions once you get to Pittsburg. I'm crossing my fingers, praying that nothing happens to me, as some people have had sucess getting the PC version to work.

But the real reason I stopped to write this post is what I believe to be a glaring story-line plot mishap. Obviously, there will be some minor spoilers in the coming sentences, so stop reading here if you want to avoid it. However, I believe this is all pretty much explained in the description of the DLC itself, so whatever. Anyway, you're told by the slave that starts off the events of The Pit that the Brotherhood of Steel swept through and cleaned the place out "around the time (he) was born." However, the kid you talk to at the Citadel was also supposedly saved by the Brotherhood during this sweep. The slave from the Pitt seems to be a full grown adult, so if his story is to be believed, then the kid from the Citadel would not have been alive to be saved.

Now, I don't know if maybe I'm remembering something wrong, but I don't think I am. I guess Video Games have far fewer continuity checkers than novel writers seem to have, but things like this make me take the story far less seriously, since the illusion that Bethesda was trying to foreshadow the events of the DLC by including little snippets about The Pitt in the original game is ruined.

My second 360 died, and I just can't understand how Microsoft has gotten away with this whole fiasco without being sued into oblivion. No one outside of Microsoft will ever know if the company knew about the problem from the start; however, it's been almost 3 years now since they fessed up to the issue, and yet people to this day are losing consoles to the 3 red rings of death. You would think they'd have had things sorted out *before* sending me a "brand new," refurbished, and obviously not fixed, console. You would think that given the millions of dollars they are eating "trying to correct the issue," that they would have wanted to nip it in the bud with the first round of console fixing.

If I knew it would solve the problem, I would just take the damn thing apart and put it all in one of those Lian-Li boxes that, while looking butt ugly and taking up about 3 times the space, actually have adequate cooling for the hardware. I'd love to have a modded 360 case like that, but I'd much rather have a console, still under warranty, that I knew was going to work.

As it stands, I am now faced with a 4 day wait for the coffin to arrive (I don't trust sending it in any plain old box, and am not savvy on shipping at all in the first place), and a perhaps multi-month wait for a new box. In the mean time, I am down my only upconverting DVD player, my media center for playing recorded TV, and my primary/secondary gaming machine (PC is arguably seeing more use these days in that reguard). And worst, during a time when I was just about to play some Lost and Damned and my fresh copy of Burnout Paradise.

Get your shit together, Microsoft.

(P.S. : please send me one of the updated units that won't break a third time. I could really use HDMI, too.)

Pachter says the PS3 could outsell the 360 at a $299 price point. I have to agree that it's a possibility for this year alone, considering we know of about 5 or 6 high-profile games coming to the PS3 and perhaps 0 for the 360. However, the economy will certainly cut into that potential for victory, considering how many people have made their choice of consoles for this generation by now and won't be able to afford another even if they wanted to.

Also, I find it hard to understand how Sony could be in the hole so much cash from their games department when the PS3/PSP is so huge in Japan. Last I knew, the only place that the 360 was so huge was in America.