My Life and Code

I've been meaning to write this review for awhile, but life has been keeping me pretty busy lately. In fact, while I'd like to have spent more time playing this game, I haven't had much opportunity -- or energy -- of late. Rocksmith allows you to plug a real guitar into your PS3 or (in my case) Xbox 360 and play along to real songs (using a special cable included with the game -- plug one end into the guitar, the other into your gaming console). It adjusts the difficulty up or down depending on your skill (or lack thereof!) and no matter how badly you do, you can't fail out of a song as in games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. When I first heard about this game, I was intrigued. But when I happened to come across it the day it came out, I was hesitant to purchase it. What if it didn't work well? What if the mechanics were off? I decided to hold off until reading some reviews. By the end of the day, a steady influx of glowing reviews had piled up on Amazon (the...

I recently picked up Your Shape Fitness Evolved for Kinect on Xbox 360. There aren't currently a lot of Kinect titles, but this one is one of the best I've tried. Having used Wii Fit, Wii Fit plus, and EA Active for Wii, I can safely say this game gives me a better workout than any of them, though it isn't perfect. The game offers 3 different types of workouts: a personal trainer guided workout (of which there are several regimens to choose from), fitness games (for example, Virtual Smash, which has you punching blocks that appear in front of you), and Zen workouts (Tai Chi). After messing around a bit with the games and zen stuff, I decided to get down to it with the personal trainer workouts. I thought I was in pretty good shape. Well, at least not bad shape. I'm relatively active, and do a lot of walking, including a daily lunchtime walk that lasts about half an hour which I've been doing for almost 10 years. So I was surprised when Your Shape decided to destro...