The Random Ramblings of a Gamer

Le Tour de France is nearly here. Saturday 4th July sees the greatest bike race in the world leave Monaco, cover 3,500km of France, Spain and Switzerland, before finishing on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Despite the repeated disappointments of drug scandals in previous races, Le Tour still captures my imagination every year, this year more so with Lance Armstrong’s return. The prospect of Armstrong returning to the tour and fighting for yet another title fascinates me, can the American win it again?

Le Tour de France

 I’ve managed to find a window in my chronic EvE Online addiction to have a poke round the interwebs, and this new Blood Bowl trailer is the one thing that caught my eye. I loved playing the table top game when I still had friends willing to admit to playing table top RPG’s, and I really hope this is going to be good. In my experience, Games Workshop computer games have been a little hit and miss in the past, so I’m praying to the God of game devs that this one’s not a stinker.

Now, back to EvE…..

Well, not satisfied with selling a poorly made console that will almost certainly go wrong at some point in it’s life, Microsoft have finally made it official – no more coffins. For those that don’t know, coffin became the term for the box MS used to send you when your RRoD 360 went back for repair. I understand that waiting for a box to put your broken console in might have lengthened the process a little, but I can’t help feeling this is a little bit of a cheap move from Microsoft.

Microsoft kills 'coffin' policy, time to pack your RRoD Xbox yourself

OMG! I’d given up on anymore DLC being released for Mass Effect, but it seems I was wrong if Joystiq are to be believed. I am really looking forward to ME 2, so some new DLC as a warm up will be pretty sweet. Link below.

Mass Effect DLC to be announced soon

Recently, for gaming reasons, I’ve signed up for both Twitter and Facebook, both of them seem to be Xbox’s latest darlings and both of them leave me wondering just why Microsoft seems so ready to disregard it’s own Spaces so quickly. Now I will admit, Twitter has it’s uses. In the main I’m still convinced it’s just one big conversation with everyone talking at the same time, and with nothing particularly interesting to say, but it is handy for following game developers and what they’re up to. Facebook on the other hand I cannot understand.

I get the social network part of it, what I don’t understand is why Microsoft went to the expense of of buying FB in the first place, and why Spaces is allways at the back of the que when it comes to adding anything that will add to it’s popularity. To my mind, Spaces is much better than FB, you can do more to it, and it links in nicely to my Windows ID, so why does it seem that they’ve given up on it? I’m sticking with Spaces, both my Twitter and Facebook accounts will be little more than extensions to here, but I still can’t get just why Spaces get such short shrift from it’s creators…?