Puppy Tweets is a plastic tag with a sound and motion sensor that you attach to your pet’s dog collar and connect its USB receiver to your computer. Then you create a Twitter account for your dog and enjoy updates all day from Sparky or whatever its name is on your computer or smartphone.

Don’t settle for cheap knock-offs.  The Slanket is pure quality.

Conveniently, Target is the nearest store to my apartment.  Target has a little bit of everything, much like Walmart, except without the abundance of shoppers wearing NASCAR and professional wrestling t-shirts.  Yet while they have an entire aisle dedicated to barbecue, replete with display models, they lacked any purchasable grills.  I had already collected barbeque-related food items — along with a contextually inappropriate grouping of other things that I needed — but lacked a key piece of the puzzle.  Saddened by realization that without a grill, the raw chicken and toothpaste made no sense at all, my cart and I wandered toward the front of the store.

I bought Rock Band for the Wii when it came out and absolutely loved it.  Finally, a game that allowed me to express both my inner music nerd and video game nerd.  Then I played it on the 360 at a friend’s house and realized how godawful the Wii version really was.  No downloadable songs, no real online play, no real tour mode.  The 360 version offered all of that, and made for a much better band experience.  And in case you were wondering, our band, named “Cumulative Ass Sweat” in deference to the chair we took turns on behind the drums, was friggin’ awesome.  I considered my options.

The front of my local Target is home to the electronics section.  The game selection is anemic at best, but on this particular day, something caught my eye.  I had heard rumors that an XBox 360 price drop was coming, but wasn’t sure if it had already hit.  There, on the shelf with the other XBoxen of various disk sizes, was a 60GB model marked at $299.  This was the price point I was willing to pay, and I would soon learn that it was an especially good deal, since it was incorrectly set $50 below the $349 it should have been.  Against all of my previous inclinations, I purchased an XBox 360.

What you should know about me is that I’m a hardcore Nintendo fanboy.  My first console was a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I’ve owned every Nintendo system shy of the Virtual Boy.  Who needs Halo when you have Mario and Zelda?  The mere thought of owning a fratboy-friendly Microsoft console was gag-worthy.  Where the 360 and the PS3 shine is graphics, and frankly, who cares?  I don’t play games for the life-like visuals; I play to have an enjoyable experience.  The one console this generation that has placed a solid, consistent emphasis on fun is the Wii.

Sony treats their customers like criminals, and has turned their back on quality control since the apex of Walkman sales.  The rootkit fiasco was the final straw, with Sony earning a very special place on my boycott list.  The outrageous price tag of the PlayStation 3 is really just an excuse, albeit a good one, to avoid the PS3.  Microsoft isn’t my favorite company, either.  Not because they’re some evil empire, but because their products lack creativity and vision.  

My first week with the XBox has taught me much.  It’s no secret that Nintendo has spent the last several years dropping the ball in regards to online play; the friend code system is a joke to the point that I’ve never bothered taking the Wii online beyond testing out the Internet Channel when it was launched.  For everything that Nintendo gets right, this continually repeated failure is every bit as painful now as it was when I realized I had wasted fifty bucks on the GameCube broadband adapter.

For all I love about the Wii, it doesn’t feel connected to anything.  Outside of the ill-conceived Wii Mail system, there’s no status updates.  Worse yet, there’s no roster for me to check to see which of my friends is online and ready to play.  There’s no voice chat for most of the games.  For all I love about the Wii, there’s a certain loneliness to it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, a company best known for blue screen hilarity and spreadsheet applications, manages to get so much right.  XBox Live is a thing of beauty, turning the white box under my TV into a living, breathing portal to a world of activity and content.  Used to a console that ignores the outside world entirely, this connection becomes that much more powerful and engaging.  Add to this the achievements system, and you have a solid online community experience without forcing gamers to spend all of their time entering sixteen-digit codes.  Better yet, the Microsoft points system, where users pay up front for a number of points which can in turn be used to purchase content, requires entering payment information exactly once.  Compare this to the Wii Shop channel, which asks for credit card information for every points purchase.  The net effect is that I’ve spent way too much money on downloadable content.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure that’s a mark in the “for” column.

Wii this, Mario that.  It’s no accident that my first XBox 360 game purchase was Grand Theft Auto IV.  The driving factor behind the 360 purchase was Rock Band, but I wanted to start this off with an entirely different experience.  Looking at reviews, GTA4 has the highest scores of any 360 game, and seemed like an interesting place to start.  The game is very well-designed with high production values and an interesting story.  Plus I get to carjack police officers and beat up whores, just like in real life.  I also picked up Braid from the Live Arcade.  Strongly recommended, Braid is an old-school platform game with a twist.  It’s a lot like Super Mario Bros. 3, except instead of flying (by way of a leaf, which makes perfect sense) you control time.  Totally inspired with an amazing script.

Over a week and many hours of logged gameplay later, my experience has remained extremely positive, but there are some complaints.  Downloadable content in the XBox dashboard doesn’t always have the best description, particularly on Rock Band tracks, which in many cases listed only the track name, but not the artist.  The console itself is also a little on the noisy side.  This isn’t as noticeable during gameplay, since the music and sound effects are usually enough to cover up any white noise, but while poking around the dashboard, the 360 sounds like it should be cleaning my carpet.

Despite my begrudgingly-admitted affection for the latest addition to my entertainment system, the last week has solidified the notion that the two consoles serve very different purposes.  The 360 may be more of a gaming powerhouse with lots of online options, but the Wii offers a strong interactive experience and some very interesting titles.  The Force Unleashed has some Wii-exclusive levels and multiplayer abilities, for example, and Nintendo first-party games will always find space on my shelf.

Fanboyism can lead to myopia.  I choose companies and products to support for good reason, but it’s easy to become blinded by debate and stereotypes.  In all my talk about experience and gameplay, I was ignoring that Microsoft’s console could offer both, perhaps in a different way.  The nice thing about being an adult is that I don’t have to choose.  I can have a Wii and an XBox in my living room at the same time.  I can enjoy both.  The only real problem was explaining to my girlfriend why I came home with a video game console instead of a way to cook food.

As an Amazon affiliate program member, I received an email this morning suggesting that I pimp the Amazon Prime service.  I have belonged to a lot of affiliate programs over the years, and I get these all the time.  Usually they just end up in my spam folder.

But this is a service I use myself and absolutely love.  Knowing that I can buy whatever I want without paying for shipping and still get it in two days takes all the stress out of my online shopping.  And if I need something fast, the overnight shipping is upgrade is only $3.99, regardless of item size or price.

As a point of pride, I would never push a sponsor link if I didn’t already recommend the product or service to friends.  Prime is a godsend, and worth checking out for the free trial.

(Via technoweenie)