Free Candy For Everyone

Once I realized The Departed was merely two and a half hours, not three, I mustered up the time to give it a viewing. I was glad I did. It was an impressive movie. The acting is fantastic. It’s very grim and violent, so it’s certainly not for everyone. I was talking to my mom about it and she said she couldn’t sleep after watching it. So beware if you’re susceptible to such a reaction.

A few years ago I saw the Hong Kong movie it’s based on, Infernal Affairs. It was very good, and so I wasn’t really sure why Americans really needed to remake it. But with such a cast - Jack Nicholson, Leonardo Dicaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, etc - I figured it was going to be impressive. Plus it won all those awards.

Spoilers ahead, don’t continue if you want to avoid any details!

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I rambled about signing up for Blockbuster’s online movie rentals a few weeks ago. The selling point for me was that I could go into a store and trade in my mail-ordered movies immediately for in store rentals. For free! Plus a coupon for another one free every month!

I had something of a movie marathon this weekend, and decided it was a perfect time to try out this service. I printed out my extra coupon and took the two movies I’d received and already watched in hand and went on over to my local Blockbuster.

Well. First I made a wrong turn. While out and about in the neighborhood, I’d walked by a movie store many times. So when I went to find my Blockbuster, I just went right over there. As I was walking, I had a bad thought, “Wait a minute, isn’t that store a Hollywood Video?” Turns out it was! They all glom together in my head. I had to walk home and check out where the nearest store was. Turns out it wasn’t quite within walking distance (well, it was about 1.5 miles away. And I’d already run over 4 miles that day, combined with walking over a mile roundtrip on my abortive Hollywood Video trip. So I was due for a relaxing car ride). I drove on over and looked for parking. And looked for parking. And had an awesome spot stolen right out from under me. Darn, parking can be hard to find in the city. Finally found parking and headed on in.

It was pretty simple, all things considered. I picked out three movies, handed them my 2 mailers for returns and a coupon, and walked out free and clear. Of course, now I have to find the time to get back on over there and return the movies before they start charging me ridiculous late fees. Or whatever Blockbuster does now that they have claimed the end of late fees (they auto-charge you the purchase price of the DVD if you keep it too long! No more late fees. Pshaw).

Anyway, all in all, it’s a good deal. The turn around time is about 3 days between dropping a DVD in the mail at my office and getting the next movie in my mailbox at home. I’d say that’s great. As with the last time I did one of these mail-in movie things, I find that I immediately watch the short, funny, amusing movies and the long, intense, possibly upsetting movies pile up (March of the Penguins was watched immediately, The Departed clocks in at 3 hours+ … oh, excuse me, 2.5+ hours … and has been sitting here for a week).

I’ve claimed it before, but that was almost two years ago. I haven’t played World of Warcraft in maybe two weeks, and I don’t miss it. In fact, it’s been kind of glorious. I’ve been playing all sorts of different games on my Xbox 360.

I started up Phantasy Star Universe this weekend. It’s not a great game. But there’s something really lovely about playing a role playing game that has an end. I’m playing through, I’m making progress towards goals, and I know at some point I’ll wrap up the story and move on to something else. I kind of love it.

Let’s be honest, I’m sure I’m not really done with WoW. I still have a group that plays every Sunday night (we’ve missed the last week, hence the hiatus). My main is still only level 69 - I have one more level to go before I max out. But maybe I’m done with the constant alt-rolling any time I’m bored. There are so many other games out there! So much I’m missing that could be awesome and fun. I need to get back to playing all those other games.

Maybe I’ll pick up Final Fantasy XII again… That was a good one that I never managed to finish.

I’ve been slowly making my way through Guitar Hero 2 and I’m wondering if I’m the only person who has problems with the game. No, my problems aren’t a lack of skill. I’m wicked awesome at GH, seriously! My problem is that playing the game causes my physical pain. Mostly it’s in my right shoulder, my strumming arm. But sometimes, I get pain in my left wrist too. Maybe this is for the best, since it only allows me to play for a maximum of 30 minutes or so. I can’t possibly play longer or the pain gets too much. But that can’t be normal, can it?

And an update on Operation Hoodwink. It would be good to read the terms and conditions of return on the back of the receipt. Turns out you cannot return opened video games to Best Buy, you can only exchange them. But ah, I’m wily and cunning and rather loud, so I succeeded in my ploy, though at perhaps a downgraded level of success. I walked out with store credit.

Another digression - one of the things I love most about the Xbox 360 is the achievements system. I talked about it and why it’s great when I first got my Xbox a while ago. Today I was playing GH2 to acquire achievements. There is an achievement for playing a song without missing a single note, an achievement for beating the game on easy, one for getting 5 stars on every song easy, etc. I thought I’d start out trying to knock some of those out. I’ve been playing the game on hard and slowly making my way down the list, but I’m stuck in a venue where I don’t like any of the songs. So I have to play through 6 songs to move on and I don’t like a single one. Seemed like a good time for a side quest.

I started with the first song of the game on easy. And I didn’t get 5 stars on it! It was so easy that I was falling asleep. That’s my only explanation. I decided to press on. The next song was better. I was hitting every note. I thought I would make it all the way without missing anything! But then on the last few measures, I mucked it up and missed 2 notes. That was infuriating! 3 minutes of perfect play, messed up in the final 10 seconds. *sigh* But the song after that worked it out. I hit every note. I didn’t miss a thing. I was a rock star! And for my pains, I unlocked not one, oh no, not one, but TWO achievements! I got my perfect song and I got an achievement for hitting a 500 note streak. Oh, that was nice. I played a few more songs and decided to call it a night.

You can go online and see all the achievements available. I just went and took a peek at the Guitar Hero 2 ones. There’s some funny ones, like “Refuse an encore” and “Fail a song on Easy.” I should do that failing one. Free points! I love points.

It took me a good long while, but I finally managed to get a working copy of Guitar Hero 2 this week and have been slowly but surely making my way through the game. I was a huge fan of the first GH (note my rave review and all my other posts about the game) but I didn’t immediately buy GH2 when it came out. They’d announced an Xbox 360 version was in the works so I decided to hold off.

I’m not new to the Harmonix fan-dom. I have lots of their earlier games, including the Karaoke Revolution series. And what happened with those is that I bought the first few versions for the PS2, but then they had all the previous songs downloadable on the Xbox so not only did I go out and buy the new version on the Xbox, I re-purchased all the old songs again so I could sing any song without having to swap disks. Lesson learned, I was buying GH2 on Xbox 360 since I knew there would be downloads of songs.

The wait seemed long, but I got a bit of time in at work when people brought in their PS2 copies of the game and we played over lunch or after hours. But when the release date was set, I hopped on over to Red Octane to look for more info and was pleased to see they had a store! So I pre-ordered there because they offered free shipping and a nifty bag to carry my controller. Big mistake. Big.

My game showed up about 2 days after the launch date, which wasn’t too bad. But my buddies had all run over to the local Best Buy and just picked up copies on launch day. Oh well, what’s a few days, right? Wrong. I rush home after work and load up my game. First up, you have to enter a name for your band. I seemed to be having a ridiculous amount of difficulty accomplishing this. I’d hit the strum bar to select a letter and it would overshoot my target or keep going even when I wasn’t pushing anything. Weird, I thought. But I soldiered on and got my band name in there. But then I tried to play the first song and I realized the controller was completely broken.

Strumming downwards didn’t work. And if I shook the controller, it thought I was strumming. Something was broken in there, and this wasn’t good. I was sooo sad. I immediately went over to the Red Octane website to find out how to get a refund and return this stinker. But there was no email address and no phone number to call anywhere! They had a web form, so I filled it out saying I wanted to return the thing. My thinking was, they mailed this out once and it was broken, I don’t want an exchange where they’ll just send might just send me another broken unit. It could go on for months like that.

A week goes by and I hear crickets. Finally, I get an email with a refund id and instructions to ship it back at my own cost and the information that I’ll be charged a 15% restocking fee. At this point I go a little crazy. They expect me to pay them for the privilege of returning their defective product??? That’s not right. In lieu of being able to chew someone out over the phone, I have to settle for another angry message into their form system. I go off on how this is not proper customer support, and the fact that they’re having known quality issues with their product means they shouldn’t charge their customers for having to deal with their problems. And blah blah blah, rant rant. I don’t hear anything at all back.

So I give up on Red Octane. They may manufacture the controllers, but they don’t know how to run a store. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT purchase anything directly from their store. Customer service doesn’t appear to be something they’ve invested in.

I decided to take advantage of the large corporation known as Best Buy. Operation Hoodwink underway. I purchased a new copy of GH at my local BB. Hallelujah, it works! I’ve been playing all week and I’m so glad. Now to get rid of that old controller… I’ll leave the rest of my plan up to your imagination.