There was a lot going on this year in the Xbox Live space, and we just put up a nice roundup on Xbox.com of some of the highlights of the year. Enjoy.

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On almost all the Halo 2 games I played today (about 10) none of the team mates I got matched with (not the ones in my party) either did not know they needed to push the white button to talk to their team, or just don’t talk at all. It’s kinda hard to strategize in a CTF or Assault session if you don’t communicate. Oh, and then there was this one dude who swears that he ?~used to not have to push the white button to talk?when did they change that?’ he said.
It drives me crazy when people don’t communicate..or better yet, don’t even have a communicator to use! Voice is a key part of the game play?I wish more people would understand that and use the damn communicator. After playing for a few hours tonight, it was a lesson in futility to try to get people to talk. On the flip side, there was a guy last night who told me ?~you talk to much dude.’

If you are looking for any of my old posts, you need to go to the old blog. The search box on this page ONLY search results from the new blog.

The old blog is here

Everyone else is doing a “best of 2004” type thingy so we decided to jump in and do something similar. Swing by Xbox .com and cast your vote.

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Wow. This could be big. The rumour mills think Apple will announce a low price Mac next month. I may pick one up, depending on the specs. (I used to be a ‘Mac Person’ in the mid 80’s and mid 90’s.)

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The folks over at Engadget have a ton of screen shots and a review of the Xbox Media Center Extender.

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If you want to subscribe to my RSS Feed, please use the link in the sidebar. DON’T let your browser or feedreader auto-detect any of the RSS or Atom feeds on my site. I know that Firefox pops up a little icon in the lower right hand corner that you can click on to subscribe to feeds, and Feed Demon my reader of choice does something similar. The reason I want you to use the link is that I run all my feeds through FeedBurner.com so that it will pick up the enclosure tag for my blogcasts, and it makes the one feed readable by 99.9% of the readers out there. What the auto detect feature look for certain files on my web server that create the feeds. If you pick use auto-detect, I can’t guarantee that you’ll get the feed all the time.

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All of the Tsunami news is pretty awful. This blog has a personal account of what it was like from one point of view. This blog has some of the video, which shows just a little of what was experienced. Finally, here is a good list of organizations accepting donations.

I have posted a couple of times on this, but I am not a portable gaming person. Both the DS and PSP are cool, but do I really need one? A guy here at XBox just got a PSP. It is drop dead gorgeous AND sexy. I played ?~Ridge Racer’ on it?and I was hooked. I’ll see if I can get grab some photos of it tomorrow.