I was out looking for some Christmas gifts on Friday and realized how great a job Sony did in the HD media war.  First, they overpriced their format so much that the general public had to believe that it was far far superior to HD-DVD.  It just had to be.  The overpricing can be seen by the fact that the original players were over a grand while the PS3 came with it standard, at $600.  That’s the second smart thing they did.  Having it as part of the PS3 gave them an immediate early adopter install base, and a rather large one at that.  Now, with the competition defunct, the players are cheap enough that no one thinking about buying a new movie player would think twice about choosing the Blu-Ray player over a DVD player, especially considering the biggest barrier to buy a Blu-Ray player, backwards compatibility with the DVD format, doesn’t exist.  Nice work Sony, nice work.

  The credits at the end of Gears of War 2 are great.  Instead of just having scrolling names, they gave each of the core members a chance to dedicate, quote and thank people.  This is an excellent job of giving the developers the face time and recognition that they deserve.  And, the fact that half of them made reference to a bad ass crunch period, it’s nice that these guys can say thanks to their families for putting up with the long hours.  Great job with recognizing the people behind the game, Epic.  I hope more studios adopt this.

  I find it funny how no one is talking about how low gas prices are getting again.  It seems like everyone is afraid of jinxing it.  I’ve seen sub $2s this week, something I haven’t seen since leaving NYC 3 years ago.  So, now everyone can blame me when it starts going back up.

  Netflix on XBox 360. Yes! Yes! Yes!  The new experience is okay (my Mii looks much more like me than my 360 Avatar), but Netflix on the 360 is frigging brilliant.  I just signed up for Netflix a couple of weeks back, and didn’t consciously realize this was coming this month.  Such a great surprise.

  Entourage episodes always feel too short.  It’s the only show that I get this phenomenon with.  Every time it ends I’m caught off guard by it.  It should definitely be an hour show.