Thursday, August 16, 2007

My World Tour And Your E-Mail

Today I've been on the Panasonic Presents Torrential Rain/Doctor's Appointment/Cat Litter/Mandatory Ethics Training/Broken Camera Repair/New Recycling Bin World Tour!

Believe me, I only hope that no new concert dates are added. One is enough.

By the way, I mentioned a PC game last week that I believe may be the best PC game of the year, and the only reason I haven't done a long write-up yet is because I'm trying to write up a small play guide to have ready at the same time.

I played for four hours straight yesterday and never even got up from my chair. This game is that good.

So next week, I promise, I'll have the write-up and the play guide ready.

I stopped at Circuit City today to finally pick up my XBL Points Cards, a fiasco I originally wrote about two weeks ago. Again, I was really amazed by just how young all these Circuit City employees seem to be--almost all of them looked so new that the paint wasn't even dry.

That reminded me of an article from the Washington Post that John D'Angelo sent me two weeks ago, referring to what happened at Circuit City at the end of March:
Circuit City fired 3,400 employees in stores across the country yesterday, saying they were making too much money and would be replaced by new hires willing to work for less.

..."It's definitely going to have some cost-savings, but I think the bigger impact could be seen in weaker, poor service," said Timothy Allen, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. "I have a feeling the people they're letting go have probably been there longer, have more experience, more product knowledge."

Why, yes.

John Harwood told me this week that he had taken the time to write up a review of the latest Guitar Hero II downloadable content pack, which consists entirely of three songs by My Chemical Romance. He sent me an initial e-mail, and when I talked to him yesterday for a few minutes, he mentioned it several times.

You know John if you read this column on a regular basis. He's one of my best friends and I really value his opinion, so even though I thought it was kind of odd that he'd put so much work into a content pack review, I was looking forward to reading it.

Finally, late last night, he sent me this:
From: John Harwood
To: Bill Harris
Subject: The My Chemical Romance DLC Pack Review

Crap.

That belongs in the upcoming publication Spit Takes, Vol. 1.

I've been getting a fair bit of e-mail that raises additional questions about those alleged Stranglehold minimum hardware requirements for the PC version. For one, the minimum video card requirement is quite strange, because the ATI x1300 is a complete scrub of a video card compared to the GeForce 7800 series, and it's hard to imagine those cards having similar feature sets.

Also in question is the 2Gb minimum memory requirement, since 32-bit operating systems can't address more than 2Gb anyway [that's wrong--see the post two up for clarification]. It's fair to guess that if 2Gb is the minimum requirement, the recommended requirement might well be 4Gb, but that would imply that a 64-bit operating system is part of the recommended spec, which is inconceivable. So there's no definitive answer for now, but we may find out shortly that the specs were not accurate.

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