My legs are all shot to hell and I could use about 13 hours of uninterrupted sleep, but despite the immense fatigue I'm still smiling after leaving the 2006 International CES, which was held within the deliciously naughty confines of Las Vegas, Nevada. The show wasn't necessarily eye popping (at least not like the Adult Entertainment Expo), but there were numerous points of interest, many of which revolved around videogames and the industry's future, but this stuff was really few and far between. Most of the show's highlights included TVs bigger than three Fat Alberts, cool looking phones, all sorts wireless gadgets, and of course, the giant pissing contest between Blu-Ray and HD DVD (and believe me, there was piss all over the place). But anyway, here's my notes on the show, all wrapped within classy bullets.

Microsoft Lets the Xbox 360 Out of its cage

The PlayStation 3 was at CES (more on that in a bit), but the 360 was large and in charge because numerous exhibitors chose to display high definition movies/games running off the machine, and this included respectable companies such as Dolby and a few porn distributors as well. But almost everyone had a 360, and to drive the point home Microsoft kicked off the festivities by announcing an external HD DVD drive, which will be available late 2006.

Now we all saw this coming. Sony's preparing to blitz everyone with this Blu-Ray player that comes packaged inside of the PS3, so Microsoft had to respond after releasing its 360 with the respectable but aged DVD drive. But as a consumer I'm really not down with the external drive because I highly doubt it'll be cheap. Having spent over $400 on a 360 and games, the last thing I want to do is plunk down $200 or more on some high priced peripheral. I mean, damn! Let's close the wallet for at least a little while.

In addition to the external drive announcement, Microsoft also had games at its booth. Most of them were old such as Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo, and DOA 4 (yes, after a couple weeks on shelves, it's officially old news). But they did have Full Auto, Dead Rising, and Fight Night: Round 3 and those were worth checking out, though I wasn't impressed with them all. Full Auto is the coolest of the three because the frame rate's been bumped up significantly, Dead Rising was all right, especially since I dug beating the crap out of zombies, but while in the shopping mall the game needed to load whenever I left a store and that really sucked. As for Fight Night, there's no doubt that the game looks amazing, but it still moves too slow and the animations are quite jerky. But the juiciest tidbit of information is its release date, which has been officially bumped to winter 2006. Leads me to believe that that's when the PS3 will be launched in North America.

Ah yes, and Dolby was showcasing Burnout Revenge for Xbox 360 and it's an absolutely spectacular game. At first I didn't think I'd be impressed because the content is pretty much the same, but having played it I it's really obvious that it's a superior version. The draw distance is sweet and the physics are much better in the Xbox and PS2 versions. It's just way more intense.

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