tl;dr

Sainsbury’s are selling this for £29, if you don’t have a copy and are looking to get one today. There is a pic of my marked up copy here if you want to to a pricematch somewhere else.

Games Games

When the line between genius and madness is as thin as the line between pizza and cheese on toast!

(Two slices of home-baked bread, tomato pizza base from a jar, salami, and cheese. It tasted great, but then, everything that fatty tastes great after a few…)

Food Food, Photos

Just a little reminder that Fallout 3 is out on Friday!

Games Games, Photos

Personal

UPDATE: I no longer trade any of my games in at high street stores — the nifty new web-based game swap system, Goozex, has launched in Europe and I’m getting a much better deal from there. Read my thoughts on Goozex for more details or take a look at the site yourself.

Original article: As an experiment, I scooped up a pile of no-longer-played games and took them to four major stores to compare their trade-in prices.

The games:

• Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360)
• The Darkness (Xbox 360)
• Ghost Recon: Advanded Warfighter (Xbox 360)
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney (Nintendo DS)
• Phoenix Wright: And Justice For All (Nintendo DS)
• Meteos (Nintendo DS)

The quotes were (total for the six games):

• CEX – £40
• Game – £30.90
• Gamestation – £26
• HMV – £40

Firstly, I think it’s interesting that Game came out ahead of Gamestation. Historically I have always found Gamestation to give better trade-in prices, and I expected the firms to normalise when they merged last year. But today, at least, the prices were not only different, but Gamestation was the lower of the two.

Secondly, I wasn’t surprised that CEX came out on top, as they specialise in trade-ins and have always offered the best prices I’ve seen. They are also the only firm to publicise stock levels and trade-in prices on their website, which is very useful. However they didn’t have any stock of the game I wanted to get in return for the trade-ins (Dead Space). This is always a weakness for CEX; as they only sell preowned games, it’s never going to be the place to go for very recent releases.

Thirdly, HMV’s prices are interesting. HMV only launched their trade-in and preowned service, Re/Play, last week and I theorised that they would be very competitive, at least initially, because they have no historical pricing information to derive trade-in prices from and so have to guess. I suspect they are guessing (deliberately) a little high in order to create a good first impression. Also, I suspect their pricing algorithm has a stock level weighting built in, and of course they have very little stock right now. It will be interesting to run some more price comparisons in the months ahead to see how these prices change.

In the meantime, if you are trading in games (or DVDs for that matter), you should certainly consider at HMV. Note that the service is not available at all HMVs though, but only 160 of the larger stores.

Games Games

Where would Sunday dinner be without them?

Food

Clearly, with the economy crapping itself, luxury car purchases are becoming a tougher and tougher sell. Take this example from some company I had never heard of until just now, BroadSpeed:

The right-most of the smaller boxes on this (fugly) website (I have highlighted it in blue in the above pic) contains the offer:

• BUY NEW/UNUSED (less than 100 miles, 08 plate) Aston Martin Vantage (Coupe or Roadster)
• Pay full list price – or finance it on HP/ PCP
• Receive a 2008 Mercedes SLK at no cost

Wow. I think this implies quite a sense of desperation on the part of the seller, given that the SLK is worth £30k for a basic spec one (and I bet this offer is a basic spec) and the Vantage is £90k; that’s quite a steep discount. It’s also a very bizarre offer. “In these times of economic downturn, don’t buy one expensive-to-fuel, expensive-to-service, expensive-to-tax car! Buy two instead!”. Logically, if this works, I can tie two pigeons together to make an eagle, and Microsoft can buy Yahoo and somehow end up with a better search engine than Google.

Wonder if they have had many takers?

Personal

I normally try and resist randomly reblogging things — although XKCD makes it hard — but this find by John “DaringFireball.net” Gruber is just too marvellous to not pass on.

From the MSDN blog of Richard Sprague, a Microsoft marketing director, dated January 18th 2007:

I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone.  Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.

What!?!?  Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful).  People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life?  No keypad?  (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad).  And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time.  Will it do that?

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction:  I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.  Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones.  One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago.  I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building.  So what did we do?  We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”.  Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.

Two years, eh? He’s got about three months to turn it around then. I guess there’s a really fucking impressive WM7 shipping real soon now, yeah? Because right now, and I am speaking as someone who junked a WM6 smartphone for an iPhone and never looked back, I think he’s looking rather silly indeed.

Double irony points because the worst thing about my WM6 smartphone was that it absolutely did not work, immediately, as a phone, every single time. My favourite bit was when it would ring, and the UI would be so lagged it would have diverted to voicemail before responding to my “answer call” button press. That feature was aces.

Personal, Tech, iPhone

A much longer (1:50) bit of footage taken from the Spike Awards. This still isn’t a theatrical trailer (I think), but it’s longer and more coherent than the previously released teaser trailer.

This looks excellent; dammit, I want to see it already.

Personal Movies

Good grief, I know that water cooling is increasingly entering the mainstream, but this (allegedly less than $4000!) PC from some new outfit called Hardcore Computers immerses the entire system in oil. And wraps it up in a lovely bespoke case, of which this highly recommended article has many very nice pictures. Here is one to whet your appetite:

Assuming this isn’t vapour — note that you can’t buy this stuff right now — that has to be one of the more impressive PC designs I’ve ever seen. And not just for the crazy assed oil cooling either, but also for the port layout, externally accessible CMOS reset button and battery backup, all sorts of stuff.

Personal