F'ing cars

I had to take my car to the shop last night. When I press on the clutch is basically goes into the floor, and getting in and out of gear is next to impossible. The problem first surfaced yesterday morning on my way to work, and by the time I wanted to drive home the car was nearly impossible to drive. I took it to the local Firestone, where I’ve had work done before, and they referred me to this transmission place since they said they don’t really do transmissions, other than really simple things like changing fluids and stuff.

So, I brought the car to the transmission place, described the problem, and left it there. They should get back to me sometime later today with what the problem is. I hope it’s not a really big deal but you never know.

I did a little research last night on the problem and it seems to by a hydraulic issue. Basically, something is not providing the clutch the hydraulic pressure it needs for it to work properly, which is why when I press on the clutch pedal is goes to the floor with little to no resistance. I won’t act like I know any more than that but the term Master and Slave cylinder kept coming up in my research, which leads me to believe it’s probably an issue with one of the two of those, or both, on the transmission. I guess I’ll know more when the shop gets back to me.

I had a chance to take a look at most of official E3 PR stuff from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo last night. I’ve downloaded all three press conferences and will watch them in their entirety tonight, although I did download and watch the Halo 3 trailer, which was sweet. I’d say the big winner thus far is Microsoft, by default. Sony dropped the ball, big time, and I think it’s going to cost them with the PS3 launch. Considering what the PS3 was supposed to be, and how much its going to cost, it just doesn’t look that much better than the 360. Sure, the Metal Gear trailer looks sweet, but its still not playable footage, it’s a cut scene, and I don’t care if it’s in game rendering or not, it’s still not game play footage. Gears or War on the other hand was game play footage and by God that looks amazing.

Sony had a chance to decimate the competition with the PS3 launch. However, once all the fanboys get their hands on a $600.00 PS3 who else is going to be waiting in line? I know that when a mom is faced with a choice on a 360 for 399.99 (or lower), a Wii at probably 250.00, or PS3 that’s not on the shelves, what do you think she’s going to buy? My bet is on the 360, and I think the issue is going to be that once the rush wears off and the 360 has two holiday shopping cycles under it’s belt, Sony will be playing catch up the rest of the year and maybe longer. $600.00 is a lot of money, too much, and I just don’t see that it’s worth it, at least not with anything I saw yesterday.

Nintendo on the other hand is playing it’s card very smartly. They know they’ve got the “lowest” processing power of all three next-gen systems, but I don’t know how big of a deal that may or may not be. Anyone who’s played Metroid Prime can tell you just how sweet things can look on even the current hardware. Instead of “10 billion floating point calculations” and other figure that no one understands, Nintendo’s premises was simple, “You’ve never played video games like this before, and we’re going to show you with 27 games on the floor tomorrow.” The line was drawn, and Nintendo has it’s card stacked. This is a big gamble, hoping that people are going to be able to get over “super machines” and “super graphics” and buy a system because the games are fun and something you can’t get anywhere else. We’ll see how things shape up today when the first hands on demos start to be reviewed.

-Steve