Review: Assassin’s Creed 2
CrunchGear in China: Seeing Where the Tech Sausage Is Made
The Freedom Tray: Made in America, used everywhere

Do you have any idea how effen cool it will be if Redbox kiosks start spitting out video games? Think about this: you would be able to get your beer, Funyuns, and rent the latest gaming titles at one location. The future is near, friends and Redbox is still pursuing the game rental market.

Actually, Redbox is experiencing some technical difficulties. You see, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, and NBC Universal have cut off access to their collective libraries because they do not get any revenue from the rental kiosks. Plus, Redbox is stating that 20th Century Fox and Warner Home Video are somehow stopping the company from purchasing movies at retail from Target and Wal-Mart.

Welcome to the jungle, Redbox. The movie industry makes it worse here everyday.

A friend of mine just asked me a few minutes ago whether she should spring for an SSD in her new laptop. No way, I told her — SSDs are improving far too quickly for a consumer to invest hundreds of dollars in something guaranteed to be superseded almost instantly. And lo and behold, almost as I was texting her, I noticed this post over at Giz about the newest Microns breaking speed records that were probably set within the last couple months.

I have written about gadgets and tech and whatnot for four long years now, but this is by far the greatest thing I have ever seen. It’s called the Freedom Tray, and it’s going to rock your world… with freedom. (Freedom haters need not apply.)

Ubisoft needed to publish something amazing given their anemic financials thus far this year, and Assassin’s Creed 2 delivered. Assassin’s Creed 2 was simply put, amazing. The sequel vastly improves upon Assassin’s Creed which given all the hype, was disappointing to say the least. The game plays on the strengths of Assassin’s Creed, most notably the free-running, and is no longer monotonous and repetitive, like its predecessor. If you want to complete all of the quests in this game, I would suggest setting aside around 35-40 hours. It took me a little over 25 hours to complete the main quest, as well as completing about 80% of the side quests (feathers notwithstanding, there was no way I was going to look for 100 of those).

If you never played Assassin’s Creed, I suggest taking the time to look online for synopses of the game so that you get a feel for what happened as Assassin’s Creed 2 does a poor job of rehashing the tale. I played the first game almost a year ago so i was hazy on the plot and was a bit disappointed that I had to look up the Wikipedia page to figure out what was going on. Ubisoft could have done a better job here by having some flashbacks, or even some dialogue at the beginning of the game to help those who are new, or haven’t played in a while.

After watching Generation Kill, my anxiety for our troops went up quite a bit. War is an ugly business to begin with, but when you’re driving around a battlefield in an unarmored Humvee with electrical problems, it tends to look even uglier. Afghanistan is still an extremely hairy theater, and the vehicles they’ve had over there over the years (years, people) just weren’t cutting it. So the Pentagon had some new ones drawn up which are just now starting to deploy. And buddy, they are some serious-looking pieces of machinery.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time. And as Sony showed with the PSP Go, sometimes it’s hard to please any of them. The lack of a UMD drive wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they’d made the switchover process simple and easy. But that’s not really what happened, and the PSP Go was somewhat of a disappointment for everyone involved.

Logitech, feeling sassy, has decided to capitalize on that disappointment, at least if this totally uncorroborated rumor is true.

Man, this thing is actually going to come out. GM said today that it’s going to release the Chevy Volt late next year in California, giving the Golden State first dibs on the car.

I just had a visit from a courteous and helpful (really) Comcast guy that was quite illuminating. You see, a few months ago I had a new cable modem installed, since my old one was freezing up every few minutes. The guy who came then happened to have an extra modem in his van of the correct spec and installed it right away. Everything was fine until a week or two ago, when I started losing connection in the morning consistently and finding the internet moving at an unbelievably slow pace — we’re talking 1KB/s here, and I pay for the fattest pipe Comcast offers in the area.

So I called it in, and today the guy came and told me that the Terayon modem I’d just recently had installed was a piece of garbage. Uh, okay?

Earlier today, I got a look at Time Inc’s new digital magazine concept. While I was there I captured some of the demo on video. Actually, Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell was kind enough to shoot the video above while I played with a prototype version of the tablet mag showing an SI issue on an HP tablet computer with a touchscreen.

You can see how quickly the digital magazine lets me swipe through pages and photo slides, and get a general idea about some of the navigation elements. When you tap on a page, a navigation wheel pops up with different sharing options and ways to call up additional information, live stats, photos, and videos. The voice explaining the features belongs to David Link of the Wonderfactory, who did much of the conceptual design.