So it's with great pleasure and pure excitement that we bring up the newly revealed news that Gears of War will be fully co-op. Not content to have a few co-op missions, you and your buddies can play through the whole game together. I can honestly think of few things that sound more fun that tearing through this game with friends.

Seeing a company take co-op gameplay seriously makes us happy. CliffyB rocks the house.

Personally I find I have mostly limited time I can devote to gaming that usually boils down to a couple of hours a day, usually late at night after my wife has gone to bed. Recently I've been working swing and night shifts while she has the normal 9 to 5. This change has actually opened up the amount of time I can play. Very rarely before this would I spend any time playing while both of us were home, unless it was the weekend. There's house chores, lots of TV shows that we both enjoy and since I actually like spending time with my wife, call me crazy, I pick her over the games.

What I'm getting at is that I don't have the time to devote to 30-40+ hour ventures unlike a lot of hardcore gamers. There are many times when I wish I could do nothing but play as soon as I get home until I fall asleep but that simply is not reality for me. Tack on to that the notion that I like to finish games and you'll see how all those factors affect the type of games I play. I generally like a game that is fun, engrossing and doesn't last a whole lot longer than 12 hours. I consider myself a moderately skilled gamer so if a review lists a game as taking about 8-10 hours to complete I figure that it wil take me closer to the 10 hour mark. I generally don't like turn-based RPGs or strategy games which typically take longer to complete but there are always exceptions to these rules.

Maybe possibly we may hear some potential information about reserves sometime on Friday. How do I know this? I went to my local Gamestop this afternoon, and they were hanging up signs for the Wii and PS3. So I figured I'd throw the question out there. "Any news on taking reserves?"

The manager tells me there's a manager/owners meeting in Texas on Friday where they'll find out how many units each store is getting, so if there's to be pre-orders it should happen soon thereafter. It's unconfirmed of course (except for the meeting, I did confirm that with another Gamestop) but what the hell, we'll throw it out there and see what happens. She's never flat out lied to me before, so maybe this is how it's going to shake out. We'll see.

The next gen brought us DVD players. Sony, in a bid to make the Playstation an all in one entertainment device, offered DVD play back and even sold a separate remote if you wanted to impress the ladies and not skip chapters with a controller. I’m still amazed at how many people took advantage of this and made their PS2 their primary DVD player. Sony stuffed the crappiest quality player they could in there to keep cost down. The picture quality had so much artifacting it rivaled Egyptian tombs. I realize that after dropping three hundred on a system, some people might not have the money, but if you didn’t buy the remote, and skipped two years of buying Madden, one could have themselves a much better player.

So over the weekend I went on a bit of an Okami bender. Now I'm waist deep in Okami-ness since my shipment from Play-Asia.com arrived this morning containing the 5 cd box set soundtrack. I've decided to make it a trifecta and find some sweet high-rez Okami wallpaper for the ol' work computer.

But get this... the English version of the site has the wallpaper in the not high-enough-rez 1280x1024 (I know, it's better than 800X600... but still).After poking through the Japanese version of the site (which unfortunately is ENTIRELY in Japanese) I found the wallpapers... and they're offered in better resolutions! Putting aside the craziness of not just putting these on their English pages, I've decided to just pull them down and offer them up here. It's easier for you guys because their entire site is in flash and there's no easy link.

Just click 'em to embiggem 'em:

New Wallpapers found!

Here's a link to the Japanese site, if you're interested.

Once again I put $200 into an account and started playing poker over the internet. What follows are what I consider to be the pros and cons of online poker versus live poker.

The Blinds (a strong opening)

Advantages

1. Playing in the comfort of your home and at your hours

2. There’s always a game going

3. You see more hands and experience more situations

4. Get to play with a variety of different people from punk kids to pros

5. Freerolls and Bonus Rewards

Disadvantages

1. It’s Hard to set-up a Real Money Account

2. I Get Distracted Easily on the Internet

3. Don’t Drink and Play

4. The Majority of the Players are Crazy

5. Trusting the software, is it a fair game?

The Flop (advantages)

Let’s start off with the advantages. First of all, if you don’t live near a casino or if you don’t have any friends that play poker than online poker is your promise land. And it’s great that you can play whenever it fits your schedule and not have to worry about spending money on gas, tolls, or parking garages. The other great thing is that there is always a game available no matter what you want to play. If you want to play Stud, Hold’em, Omaha or even Razz most poker websites always have at least a few tables of these games in progress. Sorry, I haven’t found a poker website that offers Acey-Ducey yet though. And with all these games available your poker experience is going to grow faster than it would in a normal live game.

With a CPU acting as dealer instead of a human dealer that has probably been dealing cards for the last 2 days straight you’re going to see more hands and get to react to more poker situations than you would in a “live” game. You can also play at more than one table at once which also increases the number of hands you get to play in a night, something that would be hard to do in real life unless you have arms like Mr. Fantastic. By seeing more hands you learn faster when to bet, when to call, when to raise and when to fold. You’re also going to experience more bad beats, but that’s poker. And if you’re a good player you should be receiving more bad beats than you dish out. Most of your bad beats will come from the sea of newbies who are green to the game after watching it on ESPN. Just like in real life you should always be looking for the sucker at the table. And as the old saying goes, “if you can’t spot him, it’s probably you!”

Check out his entire flickr set here

Video games and news started out on pretty good terms. The only time the news would say anything about video games is when it was impossible to get a Gameboy for Christmas. As time has gone by, the news has change to what I like to call “slum news” where everything they report on has to make you worry. Topics like “how to protect your kids from Myspace!” are a perfect example. At some point, a very astute investigative journalist (there’s a bit of sarcasm in there) noticed that kids would rather play video games than do homework. They also noticed that kids are fat and lazy and would rather watch T.V. and play video games than go outside. I refer to this as the first attack era. All the sudden video games are bad for you.

The second attack era happened when some overly concerned parent showed Joseph Lieberman Mortal Kombat. There was a national outrage towards violent video games that sent overly sensitive people everywhere into a frenzy. “Oh my god! Did he just rip his head off and hold it up with his bloody spine dangling?” Yes. Yes he did.

In a quick reversal, the $139 I just paid Microsoft this past Sunday night after my 360 broke is being refunded. Free repair FTW!

I learned this quite by accident since I decided to follow up with customer support to find out where the hell my empty UPS box was there were supposed to have to me in 2 days so I could ship my console back to them to get fixed.

It would seem the comapny has pulled a total 180 and is now covering the repair costs of any console made prior to 2006. In other words if you bought the console at launch or for Christmas, you won't have to pay anything to have it fixed up.

So if you've recently had your fixed or it's currently broken (Fronz this may apply to you), call up and make sure you're getting it fixed on their dime (It's actually 1390 dimes, but you get the drift)

There's no doubt the Wii is going to be fun. But can it ever move beyond simple pick up and play games? Obviously games like Wario Ware:Smooth Moves will excel on the system. But is something like Zelda really going to be better on the Wii controller? Or even preferable? Portions of it would be (fishing, arrows, boomerangs) but what about platforming, boss battles, and stealth? Can the Wii-mote completely replace the standard type of controller we've all gotten used to? I played Zelda at E3 and while it was impressive to control, I wouldn't say it was any better, just different. In the end I'm pretty sure I'll be buying the Gamecube version.

Games like Excite Truck are perfectly suited to the system. The system of tilting and turning your car in mid-air is more fun that it initially seems to be. But could you ever play a game like Gran Turismo? People will argue that they'll sell a steering wheel attachment or something similar, but if you look at the percentage of peripheral controller sales you'd know that the idea of buying all these attachments and upgrades will never catch on for the majority of users, therefore the support won't be there %100.

Now I'm not down on the Wii, I really enjoyed playing it and I'm really excited to get it into my home. I just don't think it can live up to the image we have in our minds. It's not going to change the face of video gaming anymore than the DS has. And it's not like innovation ends up living up to the expectations all the time (Rembmer those Virtual Reality games from the 90's?).

I guess what I'm saying is be careful for what you wish for. For some reason the Wii is commanding positive press like I've never seen in a console launch. And if everyone out there believes this system is the second coming, and it turns out to just be a lot of fun, we're all going to be let down. I think we're putting un-due expectation on a system that it has no way of meeting.

So what do you think? What games do you think will and won't work on the Wii? Will it be able to please the hardcore?