Childsplay 2006

It’s that time of year again, where one gets the warm fuzzies and actually helps out his fellow man. One of my favorite holiday charities is Childsplay from the folks over at Penny Arcade. It is a collection of games and toys for the Children’s Hospitals around the United States donated by you, the gamer.

It was amazing to see photos of their garage overflowing with Nintendo DS’s, Xboxes, and Playstations. This year I hope to see some ps3’s going to help kids escape a little bit of the realities that they are too young to have to deal with.

So please give what you can to help out. That one copy of Super Monkey Ball could help bring a lot of joy to someone who really needs it.

XBOX LIVE STREAMING/DOWNLOAD UPDATE- WELL SORTA

For those of you who are concerned, we did have to take down our article on the future of the Xbox Live movie download service. Not because some almighty Microsoft Lawyer came a knocking at our door, but because our source felt a little uneasy about all the attention. I do believe that our source was reliable, but it seemed odd that nothing was on the web about it. So after much debate, the author thought it was best to take the story down until an official word came out from Microsoft.

Word had already spread quickly, and we were being quoted on many game sites. It was interesting to see people place more pieces of the puzzle together like:

- The surprise announcement about a super exciting feature on the 1st anniversary of the Xbox 360.
- The hopeful release of a larger hard drive.
- The added categories in the 360 dashboard.
- The hazards of streaming and storing HD content.
- Microsoft could hold the answer to the HD format wars by just offering raw HD downloadable content.

I would like to thank the gaming community for their support and for their enthusiasm about the idea of being able to download movies via the Xbox Live marketplace. It is fascinating to see the future of journalism in action, where someone takes a credible (but vague) announcement to a place where the world can view it, and other people add more information to it, and then it becomes something solid, and real.

I hope that the world finds our site somewhat entertaining as well, and not just a one trick pony. We mainly offer our commentary on pop culture and world events, but we know people who are in the know, so when they let us know something, we will pass it on to you so you, too, will–uhhh– know.

And now, a word from our sponsors