The Big Big Dilema...well maybe not that Big

The situation? Xbox 360 is coming out in about 2.5 months. Dates aren’t official yet but I would be willing to bet that its going to be right before Thanksgiving, you know being the beginning of the holiday season and all.

The problem? It costs $399. This is considered the “premium” system, the “core” system is $299 but is honestly not worth getting. Here is what each system includes:
“Core” :
-Xbox 360 console
-Wired controller
-Regular AV cables
“Premium”:
-Xbox 360 console
-Wireless controller
-Xbox Live headset
-Detachable 20GB Hard Drive
-HD and regular AV cables
-Ethernet cable
-Remote control (limited time only)

Why would any gamer consider the core system? It doesn’t make much sense other than maybe attracting new/non-gamers to the system at a lower price point. The core system can be upgraded to use a hard drive and the wireless controllers which will also be sold separately, so presumably if you are strapped for cash initially, you could make your core system into a premium Xbox 360 at a later time. Did I mention that getting the Hard Drive separately cost $99? Ouch!!! It will hurt if you decide to buy it later on…

Also, the hard drive is needed for backward compatibility, so if you want to play Halo 2, Halo: CE, Jade Empire, GTA:SA, etc on Xbox 360 you will need it.

So based on all the information presented, for me it’s not eve a choice: the premium system is what I’ll get. This means that I’ll need $400 for the system, $40 for an extra controller and between $100 and $120 for 2 games (its not clear yet if games will be $50 or $60 yet). Grand total = $560 + tax. Shiznit…this is a pretty big size problem.

The Solution? Start saving now to avoid the “What did the five fingers say to the face?…………….SLAP!!!!!!!!!” when you get to the register at your store of choice [however instead of Rick James behind the counter it would be Bill Gates (with a dreadlock wig off course)]. I’ve been procrastinating about this part for a few months now but now that the window of time is closing I’ve decided to come up with a plan.

Method 1: I usually save whatever change I get throughout the day’s purchases ( morning coffee, lunch, etc), you see I rarely remember I have spare change in my pocket so I pay with paper and end up with probably more than $1 in change every day. So I take all that change every day and put it in an Arizona Iced Tea bottle that’s on my dresser. When the bottle is filled up I can usually get close to $100. There is only one problem with this method and that is that it takes at least 2 months to fill the bottle and even if it were filled by November, I would be way way short of the grand total needed. This method however could be used to pay for either the 2 games (if they end up being $50 each) or a game and the extra controller (wireless off course).

Method 2: I had to work “approved” overtime a few weekends ago, which basically means that I’ll get paid for the extra hours (as opposed to the “un-approved” kind which I provide for free as a way to thank the company for having a job *note sarcastic tone*, but honestly though I’d rather work overtime for free than not have a job). Anyway, I should be getting an extra $250 or so on my next paycheck, not bad huh? Which leads to method 3.

Method 3: Open a separate savings account which will basically be called “The Xbox 360 Fund”, where the overtime $$$ will be deposited earning a nice 3.5% compounded daily (which in reality will mean I’ll earn about an extra $1 by the time I purchase the system, not much but it’s a good trial for putting my actual savings on this account eventually,  if you want more info about this bank let me know). In addition I’ll setup a direct deposit of $50 per paycheck, with 5 to go that amounts to an additional $250.

After adding up each method I’ll have a grand total somewhere around $600, enough to buy all my toys!!!

Note: An additional or complimentary method would be to trade-in my current Xbox, controllers and games but I have actually spent a considerable amount of $ on it, modding it to do all sorts of things with it (from the looks to the actual functionality). So that is not an option for me since I feel I won’t get even close of my original investment. I could trade in my PS2, I barely play it anymore, but my wife is sentimentally attached to that one and will defend it with her life (damn Final Fantasy games!!!). Most people can do this though to lessen the hit, but don’t expect to get a huge amount. Check with your local videogame stores to see if they’ll have any trade-in offers like : trade your current Xbox, 2 controllers and 4 games, plus $200, for a premium Xbox 360 system…or something along those lines.

Alright, this thing got way out of hand, its too long and probably kind of boring. I hope all 4 of my readers enjoy it. I promise the next post won’t have any videogame references on it…I think *note Larry Brown style ambiguity here* Go Knicks!, yeah right…

Therapy – Reading Material – More Videogame crap

You know, I’m beginning to think this blog is like therapy. Is it a coincidence that since my last post I haven’t played even a single hour of GTA? Maybe, maybe not, but doesn’t it make you think…

In defense of my GTA addiction, there have been a few things happening around here that have made me unable to sneak down to the basement for a couple of hours. Hopefully I’ve made all 4 of my readers ask themselves “what can possibly keep him from GTA? Please do tell us!!!”. Ok, Ok, no need to beg, here it goes: we have adopted a puppy!!!!!!


So the past few days we have been on training mode, you know, make sure no shit or pee gets deposited on the carpet ( or anywhere inside the house for that matter), which is reason enough to put GTA on hold (even though my hand is itching to go grab a controller and “pop a cap” on someone’s ass). Its fun, its hard work, but we love it. Her name is Lilly and is a very loving girl, she is surprisingly calm for a 6 month-old puppy which helps in the adjustment process (for all of us). Unfortunately for our other dog Honey, Lilly is a pointer mix which means that she is already bigger than him, she has a long tail which at least for now hits him in the face and last but not least she follows him wherever he goes looking to play. Honey is 6 years old and even though he loves to play with people, he apparently is too cool for puppies so sometimes you hear some growling. Looking at it, I wouldn’t be happy if all of a sudden my wife came home with a new boyfriend and asked me to play Xbox with him so he would feel welcome, us alpha males understand each other you know? Grrrrr, where my dogs at? woof...

Alright, enough puppy stuff.

Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) is recommending a book each week to read, why? I know why but it would take up too much time to write it, if you are interested in the reason go to his website (link is on the right side of this blog), I think its in one of his blog entries. Anyway, he recommended last week a book called The Last Shot, it follows 4 high school basketball players from Lincoln High School in Coney Island, NY (starting in the summer of 1991). One of the players followed is Stephon Marbury when he was getting ready to be a freshman, I’ve read the first couple of chapters and so far its excellent. If you are into basketball this is a great read. It reminds me a little of the documentary Hoops Dreams which was also very good ( I think Simmons mentioned this also), the book for me leaves room for imagining how things look based on the writer’s descriptions. Hey, if you have some time, give it a chance…

And finaly, I was going to write some stuff related to the recent price announcements for the Xbox 360, but its time to take the doggies out, so I’ll leave you with this for now: if you are planning on getting this thing at launch, start saving now, the $399 system is the way to go. More details on my next post.

I’ll see you in San Fierro this week fo’shizle…or something

I'm Addicted...(YES! Another VideoGame Post)

I have been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas(GTA:SA) lately, as in the last two and a half months (it would be 3 months but I had some family visiting for 2 weeks and couldn't play at all while they were here). In this time I've logged about 20hrs of gameplay, which does't sound too bad untill you factor in the 300-500 times I've re-loaded a "mission" for various reasons ranging from not wnating to drive too much to not losing my current set of guns (yeah an AK47 is expensive man). This probably puts the actual time at around 30-35 hrs total. And to make it worse I've read this game can take more than 100 hrs to complete (yikes!, I hope those divorce papers don't come to my door by then) What can you do in this game? Pretty much anything you can think of in real life:

* Workout at the gym...check
* Have a girlfriend...check
* Kill people...check
* Solicit female companionship *wink*...check
* Buy guns...check
* Kill anyone that pisses you off...check
* Drive a car, ride a bike or fly an airplane...check
* Buy some fly clothes...check
* Get some bling bling...check
* Parachute..check
* Kill people...check
* Gamble at the casino...check
* Kill people...check
* Kill people...check
* Have sex...check (only if you have the correct tools, and by tools I mean files perverts!)
* Did I say you can kill people?, anyway...check check check

Ok so I kill a lot of people, so what? they are fake digital people anyway. In case u r wondering, there is a story. U r in the role of CJ a former gang member who comes back to the hood when his mom is killed. Touching right? Hey, I feel his pain, that's why I spend countless hours trying to help him out. The game is set in the '90s, and has '90s music playing throughout, although I mostly listen to the Reggae radio station almost every song brings back memories of High School., this makes the game even more entertaining.

Now the dilemma is: when does playing this game become bad for me. There are many levels of badness ranging from "I can cut the grass later" or "That roof leak is not that bad, the forecast call for sunny anyway" to "I wonder what would happen to me and my car if I ran over those people on the sidewalk". I'm definitely on the "I'll cut the grass later" stage but have had crazy thoughts while driving(I'm not saying what...). I'm pretty sure there has to be people worse off than me, which makes me wonder: Do they sprinkle some crack on the game disk? I mean damn, are we the Tyrone Biggums of GTA: "Honey, there is something you don't know about me, I smoke rocksssss.....ur...I mean I plays GTA:SA".



I'm just saying...I don't want to end up 20 years later on some show saying "GTA:SA is a powerful drug...."

Note to self: stop playing this damn game so much. Must lay off the pipe...I mean um GTA...uhhhhh, its useless I'm going to hell.

Madden or...um... Yeah nothing!!

I was on ESPN's Page 2 and stumbled on a great column about Madden '06 (read it here http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hruby/050809). It's a bunch of interviews with people who get the game on release day and what they do to skip work for the next few days so they can play the hell out of the game. It's a good read if you like videogames. I remember when Halo 2 came out in November last year there were people calling in sick and taking the week off and things of that sort, but some of the stuff in Madden beats all of that, probably because it comes out every year as opposed to a game like Halo 2 which took about 4 years to come out.

In my case, I've only bought Madden once ('04 Mike Vick on the cover) and even played in a GameStop tournament that time (where I got owned in the first round by a guy using the Falcon's and Vick). Last year, I got ESPN's football game and thought it was on par if not better than Madden, however the NFL decided to sell its license to one bidder only which ended up being EA Sports (the publishers of the Madden game). Where am I going with this? Lets say that the NFL license deal never happened, fast forward 10 years and assume that ESPN kept putting out a good if not better product than Madden every year. Would ESPN have developed a similar following? Would gamers be calling for an ESPN Football national holiday? I say probably so. Can you imagine the fanboy battles on release day at your local GameStop, that would be worth waiting in line by itself. Most of the reason for Madden's cult like following is the fact that good competition did not exist until, Sega's Dreamcast came out and the whole 2K series started coming out in 2000. Remember Madden has been around for more than 13 years. Also the 2K series wasn't really competing until 2002 when Sega began to port the series to PS2, XBOX and GameCube (2K and 2K1 were only available for the Dreamcast system). We'll never know the outcome of this debate since once again Madden has no competition for the next 6 years I think (or maybe 10, I'm not sure). So, love it or hate it, if you play videogame football you're stuck with Madden like or not...or you can keep playing that old copy of ESPN Football, also you could do what my buddy Mike does: he buys the 2 year old version of Madden for 5 bucks used, if you really think about it the advancements from year to year aren't huge and if you don't care about them too much, you're good.

Wow this was really a rant...don't drop those controllers!!!

Computer Woes, Blogs of Interest and Cooking Shows?

I was writing this massive post about "chick flicks" or movies that women like and men don't...but with a twist: unlike most of my friends I like a lot of these movies (don't ask). So what happened? After about 2 hours of clever writing (or nonsense writing depending on who is reading) my computer locked up, and by then I wasn't going to start over so I turned the thing off. I will start using MS Word from now on (instead of the blog's text editor) since at least you can recover parts of the text when there is a computer crash. At lest now you know what to expect for the next update.

To give you something else to read about, I didn't realize that our good friend, mom and aspiring writer Delcia (or Delcia from the Block whichever you prefer) has also started a blog. I'm not sure if she wants everyone to see it but I'm posting the link anyway http://wheresdee.blogspot.com/, it's titled "The Telltale Mind". There are a couple of posts on there already and they are pretty good in my opinion. Delcia, I wish I could sleep with a nipple in my mouth too but I'll leave that for a later post (people, read her blog before going crazy on me).

Also, on the comments section of my last post Delcia (bronxdialect is her username, was bronxena taken?) wrote something along the lines of [I'm paraphrasing]: "If the fat kid can get a show on MTV maybe I can get cooking show on there too" [read the comments section for exact wording]. Anyway, I was listening to the radio this morning where they were interviewing Lil' John and at one point he said...you guessed it, he is pitching what he called a "ghetto cooking show" to MTV, which I'm assuming will consist of BBQ ribs and fried chicken all heavily seasoned with some herb (if you know what I mean *wink*).

Later...

Bigu Dikku Master

Ok, Felix (or Mamamelo on the comments section) sent me this link http://www.outpostnine.com/editorials/teacher.html

Its not really a blog since each entry is pretty long, however a lot of if is very very funny. Its basically an American english teacher who moved to Japan to teach. He narrates all the crazy stuff that happens to him or has hapened to him. At least check out the very first entry titled "My Kids are Perverted" so you can better understand the title of this entry, beleive me its good comedy.

While we are talking about comedy, if you haven't checked out the Andy Milonakis show yet please please do, MTV repeats it at about 11 or 11:30PM every night. Any show that starts with a fat white kid rapping the following: "I rock peas on my head/but don't call me a pea head...Bruce Lee's on my head /but don't call me a Lee head", has at least a 75% chance of being good, mix in cameos from famous rappers like Fat Joe, Snoop Dogg, Lil' John, etc and you have a hit in my book. *in lil' john's voice* yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!! Here is a link to his website too, he has a blog and some other crazy stuff http://www.mtv.com/onair/andy_milonakis . Enjoy.

Kancho wishes for everyone!!!! *hint: the first word in that sentence is japanese*

Just thought this was funny...

On my last post I wrote about Greg Ostertag going back to Utah, as a follow up here is what ESPN's Page 2 Sports Guy (Bill Simmons) wrote in his column about this:

"I think Jerry Sloan was watching "Eddie" on HBO3 one night after about 10 drinks and suddenly decided, "You know what? He drove me crazy, but I miss that big oaf! Let's get him back!""

You can view the whole article here http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/050804.
I'm out like Dave Chappelle, biaches...

Holy S#$%, I'm Blogging

Hello Everyone and welcome to Monkey's Random Thoughts blog. As the title says, I will be posting some random thoughts, which really means that I'll be writing about whatever interesting stuff is going on (well at least interesting to me).

For example, the largest trade in NBA history just went down a few days ago. Now, I'm not really a fan of any of the teams involved, but geez how can 1 of the 5 teams get good players while the rest get, well crap!! And really, wasn't Utah trying to get rid of Greg Ostertag for years? They gt rid of him for one year and now they want him back???? Whatever. Anyway, I don't even think Miami (the absolute winners of this trade) will be that much better, in fact I think they will have more trouble than most people think.

So there you go, my first post, that wasn't so bad , was it? Feel free to comment thats part of the fun...