Edge are running an interesting article about the name of the new Xbox, which is now apparently going to be called Xbox 360. Even if the name isn’t as cool as Xbox Next, I definitely like that they’ve made it white. That’s a nice break from tradition and you only have to look at the Dreamcast to see how good a white (OK, dirty white if you want to be pedantic) console can look. I’m sick of the multiple shades of grey and black and find the GameCube’s purple to be a step too far in the opposite direction, so white is good.

Anyway, that article certainly shows some really fucked up names for a console. Odyssey of the Mind? Optimal Ozone? The irony of the Xbox being called P2P at one point is also very apparent. I’m actually going to be watching MTV when it’s unveiled (or, rather, watching the fallout online as it will be shown in the US and posted online a long time before it comes here) just to see what they’ve done to improve what I thought was the best console of this generation.

White is good. Xbox 360 is acceptable. The hardware is excellent. No hard drive is bad. Wireless controllers are good when done right. The supposed picture of Project Gotham Racing 3 is incredible. Whether any of those rumours turn out to be true will have to wait until then. It’s just sad that such a potentially huge announcement is coming through a channel as malapropos as MTV.

EA can never be accused of putting too much emphasis on the artistic side of gaming (or anything for that matter), so it’s good to see a real artist letting their frustration with them known. Making their own GTA clone that could sell itself would have been too much work, so lifting one of the great works of modern (ish) cinema must have been the obvious solution. Paramount aren’t much better for actually selling the rights to them, but Paramount deserve credit for putting out The Godfather in the first place.

I’ll be surprised if it’s any more than Driv3r or The Getaway – a pale imitation of Rockstar’s games.

Today is both Charles and Camilla’s wedding day and the Grand National. I’m sure there’s an obvious joke in there somewhere…

In all seriousness, good luck to them in their marriage and good luck to me on the National. I should also be getting God of War for the PS2 soon which is by all accounts a stunning game. I’ll post impressions whenever I get it.

In the last few days RSS has really started to change the way I use the Internet. I’m still not into reading everything on the whole blogging scene (don’t worry, the irony hasn’t escaped me) but previously I was limited to having a Firefox Live Bookmark for Slashdot in my bookmarks toolbar, which I used to check up on their latest stories and watch the open source zealots chatter amongst themselves. I tried out Firefox’s Sage extension when I wanted to get some more feeds, mainly so that I could subscribe to Apple ones so that I’d know immediately when Mac OS X 10.4 was ready for release.

Now I’m sitting here with NetNewsWire Lite (the free version of NetNewsWire) pumping 35 feeds to me all the time I’m on the computer. I’ve taken the obvious step of finding feeds for all my favourite news sites so that logging on in the morning no longer necessitates hitting GameSpot, Penny Arcade, BBC News, DVD Answers, MacNN, Slashdot, Wired, News Askew, etc, but this new RSS addiction has also allowed me to find a lot of little gems that I’d otherwise have missed. Sites like BoingBoing, Daily Mail Watch, Daily Sucker, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Blog (the guy behind Rez and Lumines, amongst others), and Mediawatchwatch. It’s the idiosyncratic, occasionally self-righteous kind of stuff that made the Internet appealing in the first place, and that it’s easy to lose track of in the maelstrom of commercialisation that the Internet is fast becoming.

I suppose that getting the news delivered straight to you in this way cuts out the effort of having to go to the sites for your fix, and just lets you cherry pick the stories that you want to read. Even if laziness is the catalyst for the boom in feed-reading (and hence the growth of the blog), it can’t be a bad thing.