Monthly Archives: October 2003

Interesting trend

The Xbox and the PS2 both have karaoke related products in their holiday lineups.

Karaoke Revolution for the PS2.

and Xbox Music Mixer for the, uh, Xbox.

Both games are bundled with microphones.

The PS2 offering is an actual game, where a “real time interactive audience” will react to pitch and rhythm. It’s virtual American Idol.

However, the Xbox offering actually allows you to choose your songs, purchase them online, and then use your PC to transfer them over to your Xbox. If you’ve already got an Xbox, and want a karaoke player, then it’s your best bet. The only downfall is paying $2 a song. But, having listened to the samples, they are using fairly good bootlegs of the original artist recordings. The catalog has over 20,000 songs, and when you download it, it’s a 1.03 MB text file.

It seems like the Xbox software is a little more exciting, considering you can pick what you want. Without a hard drive, the PS2 is left to its selection of songs on the disc.

Tagged

Mom and Dad?

Brilliant article. Take a couple of 12 year old kids and put them in a room with classic arcade games like Pong, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders. Write down what they say.

The article says that you should be prepared to feel old if you read it, and it’s true, for the most part.

Especially the bit where the kids start talking about Super Mario Bros. Euh.

The color of currency

Anyone gotten any of those new $20 bills yet?

I’m just curious.

It will be nice to be able to differentiate one bill from the various denominations, but I’m wondering when we’re going to be rid of the penny.

Makes me almost want to drink soda.

Almost.

So, Apple’s partnered with AOL and Pepsi. iTunes for windows should be available by the time you read this, and they’re giving away 100 million free songs from iTunes. 300 million pepsi bottles, 1 in 3 is a winner. At the going rate, which is $.99 a song, they are literally giving away 100 meeeellion dollars.

That’s a pretty impressive number. And this is pretty impressive marketing. Very solid, very costly marketing, but the rewards are almost assured. This is not even considering the fact that this is going to ship iPods.

Glad I got mine ahead of time.

Robot Ninjas!

Well, not ninjas exactly, but sumo, karate, and tai chi robots, certainly.

Sure, they’re only 30cm tall now, but wait until some scientist says to himself, “Hey, I’ll bet we could scale that up a bit.”

This is of course, following the usual, “FOOLS! They all laughed! But I’ll show them all, now!” speech.