According to a new study people that play violent video games are 58% better at detecting contrast differences. They studyed people that played 50 hours of Call of Duty 2 to people that played Sims 2. The sims players do not have experince the improved vision.

the entire article can be read at slashdot

A concept or design has been published in a Russia. I thought Russians only knew about Vodka. Apparently they know something about Apple that we don’t. The netbook is suppose to cost 899 with an atom processor,2gb ram, wirless a/b/g/n, and a Geforce 9400M.

For the entire article read it at slashgear

http://www.chooseresponsibility.org/

The drinking age used to be 18, then about 25 years ago, mothers against drinking finally got the age up to 21. This sent kids underage, into hiding their drinking, and it became some sort of taboo. Now the age is being questioned again, but this time in the opposite direction. John McCardell and plenty of others are trying to get the drinking age lowered, as to keep kids from doing it behind closed doors.

Check out the site for more info.

Apple leaked on their education page that there is a 17 inch iMac. The 17 inch model will supposedly cost 899. This would be the entry level all in one desktop for Apple.

read the full article at slashgear

In an effort to keep Japanese tourist from scoring a cheap PS3 (Koren PS3 cost $321 where the Japanese  PS3  cost $416) Sony has stop PS3 shipments to South Korea. Sony is afraid the “reverse-importing” would only get worse as the Japanese Yen gains more value.

read the entire article here at slashgear

These two titles are now some of the most well known games, in today’s modern video game era. The demand for Rhythm based video games has sky rocketed since Harmonix released the first Guitar Hero. Now over three years later, Activision and Neversoft now own Guitar Hero, while Harmonix has moved on and created the Rock Band series. Alright im done with the background information, time to compare and contrast.

I will start with Guitar Hero : World Tour -

This game is easily the most popular of the two video games, mainly because of the reputation that Harmonix created with Guitar Hero’s 1 and 2. This is now the fourth installment (not counting expansions) of Guitar Hero, and Neversoft / Activisions second Guitar Hero game. Guitar hero, has added a new difficulty called beginner mode, which all you have to do is strum the strum bar. They’ve modified the game play to have added on single notes to a sustain note (held note) and also added a touch sensitive slider to their guitar for certain parts of a song that may be tricky. Possibly the biggest and most talked about aspect of the game, is you, the player’s ability to create your own song within the game.

Pros - I will give this game credit for creativeness. The idea for the create a song is very nice, the create a character feature is very in depth and allows you to create a character that actually looks like you or make a character that wont look like a bunch of other peoples characters online. The create a guitar feature is out of this world, goes so much farther into the creation than I thought it would, from the body shape, to the wood type of the guitar, to the headstock, the inlays, the pickups, the strings, even the knobs! Guitar hero managed to get a bunch of epic songs on their setlist including, the two Ozzy classics, Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley, Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher, Joe Satriani’s Satch Boogie, and Michael Jackson’s Beat It (and a couple of extra songs that I thought were epic but thats just me haha).

Cons - Unfortunately creativeness cannot successfully make the entire game. Although the create-a-song feature is very new and a great idea, Guitar Hero failed to make it so that creating a song, won’t just be a bunch of 14 year olds shredding out impossible solos and then putting it on the net to see if anyone can play it. In order to create a song, you must have great knowledge of music before starting, such as scales, pitches, tempos and such. Then you have to know what you want to play, and then you have to play it and record it perfectly, which is very hard to do, due to the slight lag. Even if you manage to make your masterpiece and make it sound like an awesome song, no matter what, because there is only one amount of pressure you can put into strumming and hammering on/pulling off, your song WILL sound like a ringtone.

Although guitar hero had some great songs into the game, they also included a LOT of boring ones. Sure this is all opinionated by me, a metal head that can play the shit out of this game, but the setlist was not very evened out between difficulty, and there was very little music variety. For the hard songs in the game, due to the setup of the game and how it is played out, the game makes the songs themselves harder, the star power paths last forever making it harder to get star power, I can barely tell when I am missing, it is very hard to tell your multiplier because of the setup and color scheme they chose. The heaviest song in this game is Scream Aim Fire by Bullet For My Valentine, I love bullet, but they are not that heavy. To me the set list was either hit or miss, no real in between for me, I never caught myself saying “Hmm that song was ok” it was either “FUCK YEAH” or “what the fuck was that?!” Their “Tour Mode” is merely the linear mode that this game has been doing since Guitar Hero 1 where you simply go from town to town and play 4 or 5 songs around the same difficulty or similarity, I beat this in 4-5 hours.

After I beat tour mode, there really was not much to do, making songs is feeble, there’s nothing interesting that happens with online play except go on and beat n00bs. This game also has terrible animations with the characters, there is little or no movement or emotion by any of them while playing some of the hardest songs and its quite apparent that Guitar Hero continues to go with this fantasy rock star animation, where your character plays at some really bizarre shows and just ridiculous occurrences when you play an encore. The drums are not as entirely quiet as they were claimed to be. Because of the unusual positioning of the cymbals, certain drum beats feel very awkward. In order to activate star power you must hit both the orange and yellow cymbals, which is kind of stupid if you ask me. The singing is basically the same as any other vocal based part of a rhythm game, except they use a terrible font for reading the lyrics of the song. It is also pretty much impossible to 100% a song on vocals, even if you don’t miss a vocal phrase. It feels as if Neversoft, and Activision were aiming to copy Rock Band 1, instead of improve on it.

If you like softer easier songs, playing with family, or completely trying to live in a fantasy guitar world, then I highly recommend Guitar Hero : World Tour to you.

Now for Rock Band 2:

The employees at Harmonix never cease to amaze. Although Rock Band isn’t as popular as guitar hero (a very good reason would be, because either people don’t like the guitar peripheral of rock band, or it is viewed as you have to get all 4 peripherals and spend a lot of money to fully enjoy this game, which is not true (but it does help)). Harmonix has taken all sorts of consumer reviews, requests and so on to make the improvements to Rock Band 1, and create Rock Band 2.

Pros:

Rock Band 2 has improved in pretty much every aspect of this game. They have added breakneck speed, no fail mode, and stage mode which were truly needed for this game. This game is playable for everyone, from beginners who need to play on easy, for people who generally just enjoy playing songs, or, the hardcore ridiculously good rockers who play to get the best scores and master songs (me). The variety of genres is truly incredible, from grindcore, to pop-rock, from country (dlc) to classic rock, etc. The variety of difficulty is great as well, there are such easy songs as My Own Worst Enemy, and Eye Of The Tiger, and then there is the ridiculously hard songs such as Battery, Panic Attack and Painkiller.

The graphics look stellar, you can feel the emotion of the characters when playing, and you feel as if your at an actual concert, there are venues that do look like actual venues and not fantasy (however if you enjoy less realism then this is a con). Online battle of the bands mode is great, and will pretty much always give someone something to do. Tour mode feels like a tour where you go around playing setlists in different towns earning fans and money and hiring people to help you with the tour and having to make pre-concert decisions etc. Now included is a drum trainer to help people become better at drums faster, which in my opinion is the hardest peripheral. There are now over 500 songs available to play in rock band 2 and the number is growing. The drums are bar-none the better of the two sets.

No drum beat is too awkward to play, and you can go and buy expansion cymbals that when you plug them in, during drum fills, they play as cymbals instead of toms. These cymbals are also optional, you don’t have to buy them, and if you do buy them, while your playing you can still just use the pads while playing if a part seems a little too hard to try and use them. Vocals haven’t changed much since the first one, although it is much easier to sing “talky” songs, you can say pretty much whatever you like during these parts and you will 100% it.

Cons

The new guitar still is not quite as good as guitar hero’s guitar, it feels nicer but still kind of has an awkward feel to it, there are no clicks and unless you are making sure it is not elevated at all, it will activate overdrive without you wanting it to. The leaderboards and other aspects in the game are still flawed like they were in the first one, such as high scores and such. If you play solo player and get a high score but play with two players, get an ok score, but that score was higher than when you were single player, it will count the two players score as your high score, instead of only using that score when you are using two players. There should be a ranking system in my opinion for online play, for people like me who basically gold star every song, and have a lot of downloadable content, so we don’t go online and find someone who plays on medium with no downloadable content.

If you enjoy rhythm games at all, I highly recommend Rock Band 2 to you.

Final Verdict : Rock Band 2 > Guitar Hero : World Tour , Plain and Simple. Guitar Hero will probably get boring after a month, if that. Rock Band, I am still finding stuff to do, making friends online, and having fun.

Anheuser-Busch has taken another bold move in creating American Ale. This new beautiful red amber ale brings alot hype and talk to Budweiser’s line of beers. Budweiser has made there name prodominately with their line of lagers. But enough about that, let’s dive into ale.

This beer brings the whole package. Nice interesting smell from the minute you pop that cap off, and a beautiful bold head when you pour yourself a glass on tap. It’s got great character and a tasty malty flavor with a kick of hopps.  Here is my breakdown that I typically do with beers

Taste= 7/10

Smell=9/10

Head=8/10

Finally, I’ll add whether this beer makes for a rager or a kick back.

A  rager,being a beer that your ready to chug and lookin to get shit faced. Kick back beer would be one to watch the game with or have with a ballin slice of hawaiin pizza. Budweiser’s American Ale definitely makes a great kick back beer. Though it wouldn’t be too bad to serve at a party, i wouldnt recommend it.

Hope you liked this review, feel free to request any.

-Drew, your college beer drinkin guru

Puget Did. It is a 16 core system. That means 4 quad core cpu’s. Why, I have no idea. 32 gigs of ram. 2 veliciraptors in RAID 0 and 6 1 TB HDD in RAID 5. To top it all off a 360mm x 360mm watercooling radiator to keep it quiet. Why would someone need so much power. Video rendering? Madness?

thanks to the people at tomshardware for finding this system.