If you didn’t notice, that’s my face on that winning characters. This is a promotion for the new Street Fighter IV game. An update to the excellent Capcom series and king of fighter games. This is probably one of the best promos ever for a product. Head on over to My Fist in Your Face to try it out and then go to your local shop and pick up a copy of Street Fighter IV.

I wanted to do one with me fighting against Nat but she was already asleep and trying to wake her up to do this successfully just wasn’t going to happen. If you do one, please share a link or post it to your Facebook. I’d love to see it.

You deserve to see this.

Peanut Butter Jelly Dance from Samuel Febres on Vimeo.

Here’s me as an avatar. What do you think? Did I do a good job?

Avatar Me

The Real Me

Here are a couple of my friends on xbox live. If you know these people personally, how do you think they did (I actually made Natalie’s)?

My Wife, Natalie

Jon Owens

Angel Rios

So, are you on xbox live? Do you have an avatar?

Post a link to your avatar below, or include it in the comments. If you’ve made your avatar on xbox live, just copy and paste the following link into your browser: http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(yourgamertaggoeshere)/avatar-body.png Remove the parenthesis and drop your gamertag in there and you’re good to go.

Taking a photo is an in-game feature for a game called Gears of War 2 which released on the xbox 360 and I have decided to take advantage of it.

I’ve tried to take photos from interesting angles and point of views. They seem a little dark, but I think that has to do with tv settings.

For kicks, I created a flickr group called Gears of War 2: in-game pics. If you’re a player out there, definitely check it out, join, and share some of your photos.

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the photos. Let me know what you think of them. I wish I had a nice Digital SLR to take better photos but I think these came out ok.

Here’s a bit more of a description from the creator’s site. His name is Julian Oliver.

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

Alright, makes sense right? Now to see it in action, watch the video below.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Amazing, yes?

Hmmm…

Anyway, if you’re on Xbox Live, what’s your gamertag? You’ll probably be seeing more of me around the Live block.

My gamertag:

Natalie’s gamertag:

I love my wife… she’s so awesome. She hates him.

How does it work?

“…artists can freely distribute their music online, via NoiseTrade’s remarkable and embeddable widget, offering fans the choice to tell 3 friends or to pay any amount in exchange for an immediate download.”

Seems fair enough. An artist gets extra promotion and the opportunity to expand their base while the music fan gets a copy of the music they wanted for free. If you don’t feel like sharing music with friends, pay a little something to get the tracks (the minimum is $1) to download. Seems like everyone could possibly win in this scenario.

For an artist, an email address and zip code is quite a valuable bit of information. With this information, they can more easily provide information about when they’ll be out on tour in your area so that you can come to the show and purchase tickets and merchandise directly from them, in addition to other promotional information they could provide regarding album releases or other special events. However if fans choose to pay, 90% of the funds go directly to the artist.

Below is one of the widgets you can embed on your blog or social networking sites. I shared the email address of 3 friends and was able to download Sixpence None the Richer’s newest EP for free. That’s right, Sixpence is apparently making a comeback. I’m a fan.

Check out the EP sample below and if you’re interested, click to purchase or share some email addresses.

For more information, check out noisetrade.com

Tons of new features for the new Xbox experience just hit. Rip full games to the hard drive, access (and queue) marketplace on the web and come home to find them downloaded to your console, a completley new dashboard with all of the current dashboard’s functionality built-into the guide; along with Avatars and 16:10 support for wide screen monitors.

I sold my 360 a while back, but I am definitely looking forward to getting one when Gears of War 2 and any new Splinter Cell game comes out. With the updates and improvements Microsoft has been making to their console, it’s getting harder to imagine resisting that splurge once GoW2 releases. These updates sound pretty sweet.

read more | digg story

Yes ladies and gents. I’m a Gear-head, and this time, I’m not talking about music equipment. This game is ridiculously fun, and the online portion is addictive. I will be looking for a 360 come November of this year, AND hopefully a price drop. Anyone else excited about this?

read more | digg story

Ok, so, I lied about the pregnant part, but it certainly got your attention, didn’t it?

Apparently, the parent’s called for lights out, the kid said no, they said, ok, take this! and took away the wireless connection to the internet. The kid had a cow, and punched his momma then locked himself in the room. Then the parents ended up calling the cops, who also got punched as well.

First of all, WFT?!!?!?!?!!?!!?!?!
Ok, I don’t know who these parents are, rather, who this father is, BUT I do know that if my son (who incidentally, I don’t have) punched my beautiful wife EVER, it probably would not be my son riding away in a police car, but me. Seriously! What kind of kids are people raising these days that kids would even THINK about throwing a temper tantrum the way this kid did?
A father needed to step up to the plate on this one and let someone know who’s boss. okay?

Read Halo 3 player punches mother after video game is taken

PS: This kid has an attitude and addiction problem. Video games are the symptom, not the problem. That’s for everyone looking to blame video games for this little scuttle. That, and his parents need to be better parents. Halo 3 is rated M for Mature. That means that it’s not advised for kids under 17 to play. Respect the ratings and love your kids.

This past Sunday, Guitar Hero III released for most consoles out right now. If I still had my 360, I would definitely be looking at trying to pick this game up for the 360. It’s really hard to explain the game if you have never played it. The best description I can give is that it’s like DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) for your fingers. That may not sound all that exciting at first, but trust me, it’s like crack once you pick it up; you don’t even have to know how to play guitar to do well.

I actually found it a bit more difficult to play knowing how to play guitar on some of the easier levels because I was trying to play what I was hearing, and it just wasn’t working out for me.

Now, even though I don’t have a 360 anymore, I might still be able to rock Guitar Hero at home on a Mac, so who knows, I might get it at sometime in the future anyway.

Happy Sunday… Please, please, please don’t let your friends or anyone you know support this type of work.

It’s just not good.

Have a great Sunday, praise the Lord, Amen.

It looks like Sam Fisher has grown a healthy head of hair plus a beard, dropped some of the gadgets, but even without them, he is still kicking some major booty.

I don’t know how the online play will work with the story this time around, but if they don’t try something new (like they did when they created the cat and mouse game that was so addicted in Pandora Tomorrow & followed up with Chaos Theory), then I hope they bring back the strategy of the online game with lasers, video cameras, spy traps, and things of that nature.

Check out the videos after the jump for more gaming goodness. Thanks to xbox360 fanboy for posting these up online.

For those unaware, I own a Mac, which already made it difficult (impossible) for me to stream my music, photos and videos out of the box from my computer to the 360 since I did not own a Windows PC (somehow, I’m not surprised Microsoft did this). Fortunately, someone created a nifty little program that allowed me to do just that. I could finally stream music, photos, and videos from my iMac to the 360 except the 360 only supported WMV files, which, quite frankly sucked. Not only do I not like (or find the quality to be all that great) in WMV files, but it’s freakin’ hard to find anything in that format for download (free or otherwise) if you’re on a Mac. I was able to find a few things here and there, but I certainly didn’t want to invest in converting files to WMV.

Well, Microsoft has finally (I’m sure kicking and screaming) decided to support a few more common and open/standard formats available so I no longer have to deal with WMV (I’m sure Apple TV might have had something to do with this change of heart as well).

The newly supported formats are as follows:

• H.264 video support: Up to 10Mbps peak, Baseline, Main, and High profiles with 2 channel AAC LC.
• Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 5Mbps peak, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC.
• PlaysForSure (Don’t care much for this one).

I now have the capibility to stream movies and other such downloads from my Mac to my 360. Once I get that nifty little HD tv set (not anytime soon unfortunately), I’ll be able to stream 720p or 1080p video (audio will still just be in stereo as Apple TV does). Engadget did a little testing, and apparently, videos in the .mov container didn’t work (at least for them. .mov is a Quicktime format container. Not surprised), but mpeg containers seemed to work fine.

Can’t wait to try this out when I get home.

Here’s the press release from Microsoft PR:

Windows Live Messenger Comes to Xbox LIVE, Uniting Friends and Families on the TV, PC and Mobile Phone
Starting tomorrow more than 6 million members of Xbox LIVE can instant message with people on PCs and mobile phones, one of the hundreds of enhancements coming with the Xbox 360 Spring Update

Beginning May 9th, Xbox LIVE, the most interactive gaming and social network available, is once again expanding with the arrival of Windows Live Messenger on Xbox 360. This new feature, available as part of the Xbox 360 Spring Update, will connect people across Xbox 360 consoles, Windows PCs and Windows Mobile devices. Xbox LIVE members will be able to socialize with people on their unified friends list, including their contacts from the more than 260 million Windows Live Messengers across the world. With Instant Messenger, Xbox LIVE members will have the ability to:

• Chat via instant messenger with up to 20 contacts in a single conversation, and have up to six different conversations at the same time with people on PCs, mobile phones and other Xbox 360 consoles.
• Instant message while playing games, listening to music or watching movies or TV shows downloaded from Xbox LIVE Marketplace.
• View at a glance if friends on Windows Live Messenger have gamertags and add them to a unified friends list.
• Utilize the virtual keyboard on the Xbox 360 to text chat or connect a USB keyboard to the console. Launching later this summer, the Xbox 360 text-input device accessory will connect directly to the controller to support instant messaging.

In addition to the availability of Instant Messenger on Xbox LIVE, the Xbox 360 Spring Update will bring with it hundreds of other features and enhancements to the console. Here are just a few:

• On-screen pop-ups that immediately display the name and gamerscore value of a just accomplished Achievement, allowing gamers to see their progress without leaving or pausing the game.
• An even safer way to communicate through Xbox LIVE with enhanced family settings that enable different default settings for video chat and voice chat.
• A new, standalone Xbox LIVE Marketplace blade houses all Xbox LIVE Marketplace content in one easy to navigate space.
• Xbox LIVE Arcade enhancements that showcase what games friends are playing directly from the friends list. Boasting about high scores, comparing progress and checking out leaderboards are all easier now as well.
• Faster access to free, trial version of Xbox LIVE Arcade games through an improved Auto Downloads feature.
• The ability to fast-forward, pause and rewind video as it is being downloaded on Xbox LIVE Marketplace.
• Owners can now set their consoles to turn off after downloading content from Xbox LIVE Marketplace to help save energy, and download speeds have been increased.

The Xbox 360 Spring Update is free to all Xbox LIVE members. For more information, please visit http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2007/0408-im.htm.

According to a news article at Fort Bend Now, a teenager was arrested for creating a map for him and his friends to play an online game. What’s the big deal, right? Mods are common in the computer video game enviornments.
Well, apparently, the big deal was that the student created a map of his high school.

Some parents got wind of the mod, and reported the information to the Fort Bend Idependant School District who after “investigating” the situation, had the student arrested. Not stopping there, they even searched the boys house and found a hammer in his room (The hammer was used by the student to fix his bed), which was seized by the police to as a potential weapon. The school district also removed the student from the school and will not allow him to participate in graduation ceremonies with his classmates. He was placed in an alternate education school.

Seems a little bit harsh, no? In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the young man is an Asian (Chinese) student. It’s unbelievable that a school district would be so ignorant, racist and overact to something like this because of a young man’s race. If you cannot make the jump, they are punishing this kid for what someone else did half the country away just because he and the V.Tech killer are of Asian descent.

Mods are common in computer videogames. Most games (shooters, particularly) tend to have the capability to create or modify them so that you are able to create a new map, change backgrounds, etc. This sort of thing is nothing new, and shouldn’t be surprising. I find the real problem here is that the parents did not have a problem with their children playing violent games where individuals murder one another but were more concerned with where the preceived killing was taking place.

See a bit of hypocrisy here? We don’t care that you’re killing each other in a video game as long as it’s not related to a real place like your school.

Give me break. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?

Read the article at Fort Bend Now.