Hooray for Kotaku

Thanks to the lovely Kotaku, there may be a way to salvage something from my xbox mess. Gamestop will accept the 360 plus hard drive and wireless adapter for around $200. The new 360 elite costs $250 for the bundle so I'll be in good shape. The only problem is getting them to accept it and hoping that the trade in value is the same as the article.

My xbox is fucked

Gee thanks a lot Microsoft, it already red ringed last year and now it breaks again. Terrible hardware and a mere 2 year warranty. And you'll probably want 100 bucks to fix it too. My first generation PS3 works like a charm all these years with zero problems. You can forget about paying for Gold now especially with the price increase.

Let's play a game shall we?

No, I'm not Jigsaw. What you do is you find a game or movie that you like, or at least is critically acclaimed, on Metacritic and check out the lowest reviews. It will probably make you question your faith in humanity.

Let's start with Half Life 2.

ShinsFortress "It's good, but not great, and certainly not enough of an evolution from one that is purported to be."
He gave it a 3. Which is good, not great I suppose.

JohanG "Overate and boring. Stupid game. Its like lets buy the valve rate team. So we can pwnd all other games. This game is bugged like shit unbalance and you can cheat."
Johan rated it a 2 and finally got around to reviewing it in January, 2010.

Company of Heroes

RonH. "Game Sucks, maybe I was looking for that rush I got from COD2. Immersed intantly in action, I played this for a half hour and never got to use a weapon I guess I thought it was a FPS, if your into strategy I guess you might give it a shot but if you want the kind of action like COD2 Do not buy it, another wasted 50 bucks any one want this game before I chuck it."
For the record, CoH is a real-time strategy game. Apparently this guy was fooled by the WW2 setting and thought it was a shooter. Plenty of other reviews complain that it isn't realistic which it doesn't purport to be.

Mass Effect 2

HaroldL. "The graphics are poor at best and the online is constantly laggy. Overall I was let down by the badly written story and generic characters. This game tries to copy Battleship Earth and does it badly."
I genuinely believe this guy was playing the wrong game. ME2 doesn't even have online play, the graphics are decent to good and how can anyone say that Wrex or Mordin are generic? Also what the fuck is Battleship Earth?

Hrm, how should I say this?

Well it seems Americans are just as ignorant about their own condition then ever. A new study shows that most American have no idea of the scale of economic inequality in this country.  They thought the richest 20 percent of our society controlled about 59 percent of the wealth, while the real number is closer to 84 percent. The top 5% control well over 50% of the country's wealth in case you were wondering.


Which makes it even stranger that these elites are constantly complaining about all the horrible taxes they have to pay. These poor people in the top 5% really need those tax cuts to survive, honest! It is true they pay taxes out of proportion of their total income but wealth is much more important than income. The percentage of private income tax paid by the top 5% is in line with the percentage of wealth they own. It should also be noted that the bottom 20% effectively has zero or even negative wealth since it takes debt into account. 


The good news is that most people polled favored some sort of more equitable distribution of wealth so maybe we'll some more support for letting the tax cuts for the expire.