This year felt different. I can’t place my finger on it. But overall it was still a great show. The attendee’s and costumes were amazing, as were the Enforcers. Even with those that will remain nameless on this post, but you can find out here.

I was once again an Exhibitor Assistant for Microsoft’s Xbox, so thank you Jenny, Allison, and Beth for putting up with me for another 5 days. I absolutely love working with you folks each time!

And new this time were:
The Behemoth: Emil and crew. Thanks for everything! I think my wife is going to steal my pink knight since I didn’t get her a shirt. :p

Twisted Pixel: Maaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwww….. That’s what my wife said when I told her I was working with you folks. I don’t know how you did it, but you made that space you had work! Even with the raffle, it was a feat for sure! Great job!

Demiurge Studios: I don’t know what to say. I almost started to wonder if you would ever need anything from me, but I finally got my quest from you. Find your chairs. :p Glad you had a good showing!

And to all of you named, glad you had a great show and look forward to seeing you next time!

I didn’t get to do as much as I would of liked since I was so busy, but I did manage to meet a few new people that were great. And made a new friend as well. And I hope to get Meg to go next year so her and I can go around Boston. I really do want her to see New England. But maybe I will hold off until the fall.

Most of the pics are on my Facebook page and a few video’s on YouTube, which I should be adding a few more, depending on how they turned out.

In any case, here’s a few i’m partial to:

And for quite a bit of time, my back had really been bugging me. I am seeing a pain specialist now and they were able to reduce the pain a bit with a shot. Not sure what he did differently, but its been a relief. I do still have some pain and cramping in the legs, but it is alot better.

Other than that, I’ve done a bit of reading while watching my shows. I’m really looking forward to the return of Game of Thrones on April 1st.

I just finished watching the Game of Thrones: The Complete First Season [Blu-ray] and it was great. Even more so with the features it includes that you can access while watching. Character info, background history of the houses, locations, etc.

Two others I bought and recommend:

NOTE: If you have a Sony BD Player or PS3, this version will not play on it. You will need to get the one narrated by Oprah

Gaming… Yeah… Xbox is locking up so need a new one, so haven’t even been able to play Mass Effect 3. Makes me sad.

Til next time.

Oh, Frozen Planet starts tonight on Discovery!

Then a few weeks ago, I get a call from my sister telling me that my dad, who had just been put on the heart transplant list a few weeks before, is getting a new heart. So I head out to Virginia to be there.

That Saturday, I get a call from our agent, Nalani Young of Northwest Prudential, who has been absolutely wonderful, telling us Wells Fargo finally approved our offer. That news, along with the transplant being a success, made for a great feeling.

So our closing is set for Sept 6th. Which makes for a VERY busy two weeks. We have PAX, then spend a week with my brother Brett in Cali, then back here to sign the papers.

I need that vacation. But the stress taken off our back waiting, is a relief. And knowing my dad is getting a second chance, is a blessing.

Thanks to everyone who has been supportive.

One thing I don’t have to work about anymore are my brothers. Both John and Brett are back. John is the one who had been injured by the IED during his deployment and just recently received a Purple Heart for that. He is still dealing with his injuries but his holding the faith that all will get better.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. Maybe I’ll get back into posting here more often when things sort themselves out. Until then, be excellent to each other.

I can feel myself starting to twitch, my feet crying out for me to stop already, even though I haven’t started.

Depriving myself of sleep, day after day, just to put on that shirt.

Being with like-minded friends and cohorts, who I get to see once, maybe twice a year.

What do I speak of? PAX of course!

If you’re going, see you there! But this time in Boston! New England baby!

Seriously, i’m excited. And I get to see a cousin of mine who lives out there. But I also feel like i’m going home. I haven’t been back to New England in years, and can’t wait.

-j

If you don’t, I had to put my beagle, Mabel, down. She had developed cancer some time ago and it finally got the better of her. We had her cremated and buried her at my parents house with one of their other beagles.

Christmas was good. Was helpful spending it with my parents, seeing my sister and two of my nieces and nephew. The trip coming back though was rather rough.

The storms wreaked havoc on many people’s travel plans. Including ours. Flights coming back home were cancelled, delayed, causing us to sleep in airports and take two days to get home. We were rather upset with Southwest’s policies. They do not give meal voucher’s, refunds, or hotel accommodations. The return trip tickets were put onto our accounts for use at a later date and they made a token apology by giving us both a $200 voucher, so that pays for our trip to Arizona for spring training and my trip to PAX:East.

And now we have a cat that has renal failure. Not looking forward to the that end.

/whine off

For those that have seen my twitter posts before or that have been over to our place, have seen that we’ve got a Kinect. I actually had it for awhile since I was quite lucky to be selected to be part of the beta test for it. And of course, there being a NDA, could not talk about it unless someone was here and played around with it.

But since its been out now for a few weeks, i’m more than free to talk about my thoughts.

Up until I got it a week before PAX, I was a bit skeptical. Things said about lag, motion capture, and it being a novelty, all sort of actually pushed me away from it since something like this really hadn’t worked in the past with other platforms.

But after hooking it up and playing around with it, I was hooked. Meg sat and watched the first few times, not really all that interested in it since she had her Wii. But after getting her to play around with Kinect Adventure’s (which comes with the retail Kinect), Kinect Joy Ride, and Kinect Sports, she was loving it. I think she said it best the first time she tried it while I was at work when she called me and said ‘OMG, this thing is kicking my butt! I’m totally tired now!’ It had given her more of a work out then the Wii ever did.

Rewinding a bit.

Setup was not all that hard, and maybe a bit exciting for me considering i’m a techno-geek, once I figured out a small issue since I didn’t read the instructions fully. Since I had the original Halo 360 console, I had to use the splitter that comes in the box to power the Kinect sensor, but if you have one of the new 360 Slims, it will be powered directly from the console.

After turning it on, doing some updates, and trying several times to get through the setup (remember that not reading the instructions part above?), I found that you must have the sensor’s USB connector plugged INTO the back of the 360, not the front ports. And it cannot go through a USB hub either. This is due to the amount of information transmitted back and forth and hub’s split the time between ports, this goes for the 2 front one’s as well. They’re not on a dedicated bus. But I got it up and running.

The tutorial does say 6-8 feet of distance, but I found that 8-10 feet was the sweet spot. Being at 6 feet caused the sensor to miss some things. This required us to move the couch back and the coffee table out of the way and moving one lamp for better lighting, but once that was done, things were good.

Joyride was the first game I played and it was alot of fun. Sports had some fun things in it, but it seemed a bit Wii-ish in characteristics. And when Adventure’s finally came around, I had so much fun playing it that I did not heed the warning about taking breaks. I suffered the next day with muscle’s I didn’t even remember having being rather sore. And during this time, I really saw no lag to speak of, the motion detecting at times was a little rough though. This required a quick recalibration since the sensor would be vibrated out of position a little from our ‘spongy’ floors. But overall the experience overall was enjoyable.

The voice recognition works surprisingly well and is a real convience to use when pausing a movie, sports viewing in the ESPN blade, or launching something. One thing, it doesn’t distinguish between players voices, so this might be a nuisance if too many people are calling out different commands while playing around. The one feature that is missing that they had talked about at E3 was the Xbox on/off. This was left out during development. And from an interview on Major Nelson’s podcast with Alex Kipman, he stated that would require the 360 and sensor to be using some power at all times, so it was opted to be left out.

The automatic sign-in works a majority of the time. Where I’ve done the Kinect ID 4 times or so, Meg’s only done it once or twice, and it shows. 90% of the time it recognizes me as long as the light is decent, and signs me in. But Meg has only about a 25% success rate. It does state though the more you do the connect ID in various lighting or time of day conditions, the more success it will have.

Overall, Meg and I really like it. I don’t see how it would work with FPS’s though, but with adventure and party games, its going to be great. This is actually a great product to get the whole family involved. It has something for everyone and gets you off the couch. And the friends and family that we have come over have enjoyed it themselves as well. A few even now owning it themselves. I can see our Wii now sitting unused except for the Netflix streaming on the TV in the bedroom.

On my brothers. At last contact, both are doing well despite the conditions and pick up in fighting over there. But the packages my family has been sending have been helping. I also ran across this back a month ago:

That’s my one brother, 1stSgt Jonathan Wyble. He was injured not to long ago in an IED explosion, and thankfully only received minor wounds and a stage 3 concussion.

Now back to trying to get rid of this damn cold. So until next time, be well.

This post was more to just vent and show how pathetically stupid customer support for the gaming industry really is (there are some exceptions).

So as I had previously posted, Brett is wanting to play Mafia II, but is unable to get it installed since he doesn’t have internet access except for email. Steam was absolutely of no help saying over and over ‘He will need to connect to the internet at a cafe or such to do it then.’ HELLO?!?! HE’S IN A GODDAMN WAR ZONE!!

And then there’s 2k Games.

Here’s my original email to them:

From: thejaxx@gmail.com
Date: 20/10/2010 02:50:37
To: usa@take2support.com
Subject: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia I

Name: David Wyble
Email: thejaxx@gmail.com
Platform: PC
Game: Mafia II

Question: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia II and emailed me with a problem. He can’t install it on his laptop due to no internet connectivity. Unfortunately they do not have internet access over there except for email through the Dept of Defense system and therefore cannot install the game. He still has approx 7 months left and asked me to help him out. If you want to email him directly with some suggestions or a way to help him out, his contact info is as follows: GySgt Brett Wyble – ************** Or please reply to me with something that may help. Thank you much.

Pretty clear I would think.

Well, three weeks later… Yes, three weeks, I get this response:

Dear David,

Before we look into your problem we require more information on the system you are running the game on. The best way to gives us this information is to attach your Direct X information to an email.

To do this – Start menu > Run > type DXDIAG > click Ok, this will then load the Direct X diagnostic tool. Once this has been done click on Save information and save the Text file on your PC.

Now reply to this email with the file attached and we will look into the problem and be back in touch as soon as possible.

Kind regards,
Matt

Technical Support

I have no words to describe my utter astonishment.

So if anyone know’s anyone at Valve or 2K or know’s how to help, please let me know.