clubs

Wayne Cunningham is an evil, evil man who obviously takes pleasure in the suffering of others. Case in point: Midnight Club Los Angeles. A few weeks ago Wayne offered me a copy of the game on the Xbox 360.

I went down to Wayne's lair office and asked for the game. When dealing with the devil there are always strings attached, and before I could leave his office he asked me to make sure I write something up on the game. Damn. OK, playing games is one thing, but the pressure to actually have to write something up on it afterward changes the experience. Now I actually have to play it sometime soon and pay attention.

This won't be a review of the game. I haven't spent nearly enough time with it for that. No, this will be more of an assessment of how seemingly pathetic my gaming skills have gotten since I began playing World of Warcraft.

I've always considered my myself a good gamer as far as skill goes. I was never at the level of the savants who come into an arcade and beat you silly while hardly looking at the screen. My skill was always at a level where I could beat most players that I encountered, no matter the game, and I finished most games (at normal difficulty) the same day I started playing them.

So imagine my surprise when Midnight Club Los Angeles proceeded to chew me up and spit me out in the first few hours of play. The game is a street racer. You basically drive around L.A., looking for computer-controlled opponents to race.

In those first few hours, I could not for the life of me win a single race. Not even the first race, which in games is usually a freebie designed to teach you the basic concept and make you feel better about yourself by making it very easy to win. … Read more

As I write this, the temperature in the City of New York hovers around freezing, though it's expected to be warmer and wetter by the time this post gets published. Not the right conditions for high-performance driving, to be sure, but that won't stop enthusiasts from planning for better weather.

Eager drivers in the area have several new options since this time last year. The Monticello Motor Club, for example, is a 4.1-mile racetrack (a road course, of course, not a mere oval track) that opened last July in Monticello, NY. It's just 90 minutes by … Read more

Looking for the perfect holiday gift for an Xbox 360 owner? When a signed copy of Gears of War 2 by creator Cliff Bleszinski isn't enough, Sam's Club has up for auction a 19-inch-tall replica head of a locust drone--you know, one of the several thousand or so that you must take out on your way to finishing the latest blockbuster title.

This svelte little number, sure to delight your significant other with its presence on the fireplace mantle or dining table, was designed and sculpted by Epic Games Art Director Chris Perma. If you're a … Read more

After playing Midnight Club: Los Angeles, for the past week, I have to agree with the GameSpot review: the races are very difficult. But that's just the initial impression.

Grind for a while, make some money to get your car tuned up well, and you will start winning races. You start with a small potential selection of cars--I chose the 1998 Nissan 240SX--and get to drive around Los Angeles looking for people to race. Prepare to watch the other cars streak past you at the starting line, and spend the race negotiating your way through traffic and around turns, following your competitors to the finish line. But after grinding like this for a while, you build up enough money to upgrade your car. Performance mods, like forced induction (turbo) and sway bars, are essential. Then you will find yourself winning maybe 25 to 50 percent of the time, which is still a long way from rewarding.

I found that freeway racers seemed to be the easiest to beat early on, even if they have a higher level of difficulty. After upgrading my Nissan, I built a big enough bank account to buy a muscle car, the 1987 Buick Grand National GNX. That one is very fast, but the handling is lousy, even with all the suspension upgrades available.

This car also proved a problem because of the bad controller mapping of the game. You use the right stick to accelerate by pushing forward. Push back for braking and reverse. So on the approach to a turn, you want to brake. But this car has a nitrous injector that, when spooled up, also gets activated by pulling back the right stick. Braking for a turn suddenly turns into a high speed excursion into a wall. Fortunately, there is a handbrake, but without careful application you'll be pointing in the direction you've just come from. … Read more

Stories this morning in the New York Times, TechCrunch, and Valleywag are spelling the doom of the peer-to-peer lending business. Battered by high default rates, regulatory blocks, and investors skittish to fund new concepts with their own cash, the model appears to be one for happier times. In this economy, who wants to monkey around with flaky Web 2.0 financial instruments?

But perhaps it's not the model itself that's flawed, it's just the implementation and the timing. One of the peer-to-peer lenders, Lending Club, just this week received regulatory approval to pursue not just peer-to-peer lending … Read more

One of the topics I didn't get a chance to write about during last night's Churchill Club speech was Steve Ballmer's comments on virtualization.

Here's a ZDNet video with Ballmer talking about Microsoft's "opportunity to democratize virtualization."

For those who want to skip to the money quote, here it is:

"If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization," Ballmer said. "For certain high-end applications, the approach … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company may be the only one with a chance to rival Google in search over the long term, but acknowledged that it will take several more years and a whole lot of money.

"It's going to take us a while," he said, during a speech at the Churchill Club. "We've got a lot to do."

Venture Capitalist Ann Winblad, who was moderating the talk with Ballmer, noted that when Ballmer addressed the club in 2006, he said search was a five-year battle.

"It's … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-- Microsoft's Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were both making speeches Thursday, but to widely different audiences.

Gates, the company's chairman who has stepped away from full-time Microsoft work, was at the United Nations to discuss global progress in the fight against poverty, while chief executive Ballmer is here to address the Churchill Club, a collection of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives.

Gates was before the UN wearing his hat as head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to speak on where the world stands versus the Millenium Development Goals. Although the metrics … Read more

The 404 is proud to present our official podcast from the Tiburon Launch party. The event was held at the elegant 450 Club complete with hors d'oeuvres (vodka spritzer, anyone?), desserts, and of course, an open bar. After sitting down with a host of people and later sifting through a mountain of cuss words, deviant behavior, and otherwise inappropriate material, it's easy to see that people had a blast. The new CNET.com looks fantastic and we all worked hard to see it come to life, so a big thanks to everyone that came out, especially Jim Loughran … Read more