Videogame reviews

I've decided to start making weekly reviews on videogames. The first of which will be Gears of War 2. Being at the height of videogame season (fallout 3, farcry 2 etc.....) I might have to go back in time to get some good unreviewed tittles instead of releasing rewiews as the games come out. (I have to play them!...) so expect these reviews soon.....

High Definition: is it really worth the trouble???

Most people today ask themselves if it's worth the 800$+ to buy an HD compatible TV. But to really enjoy an HDTV you need to have HD content available and there are three main ways you can do this.

    The first way to do it is by hiring HD channels, available only on specific satellite television providers, like HD discovery channel or things of that sort. This is pretty nice to watch with a good HDTV but the bad thing is you need to pay your providers extra for the channels, and even if you did, there are very little channels available on HD.

    Another way to put use to your HDTV is to download HD content from the web both legally or illegally. This is not a good idea if you don't have a very fast internet connection or a 'shitload' of time to download movies or TV-Shows ranging from 15 to 30 gigs.

   And Last but not least is gaming. Alot of next generation games look great on an HDTV but gaming isn't the only thing you can do on a console. Both Sony's Playstation 3 and Microsoft's xbox 360 have High Definition disc compatibility. The xbox 360 supports HD-DVD but to use it you need to buy a 200 dollar add-on for the console. This makes it a very stupid decision if your just looking for an HD-DVD player, as you can buy for around 200$ without the 360. The Playstation 3 comes with Blu-ray included in it when you buy it. This makes buying a PS3, which ranges from 400-600$, the most affordable blu-ray player on the market. Although the PS3 definately has an advantage over the 360 in terms off disc compatibility, The xbox 360 has the capability to download HD movies and TV-shows straight to your TV, which might be seen as an incentive to own a 360 over a PS3. Now, there is an ongoing, pointless 'war' between both High Definition formats with massive publishers like Paramount pictures or Warner bros jumping from exclusivity to blu-ray to exclusivity to HD-DVD. But no-one really cares who will win the 'war' as long as someone does, and we know in anticipation who that will be. right now it's looking good for blu-ray but neither of the two formats has a library of even a hundredth of all registered DVDs in the market. And even if they did, that would never persuade people to buy movies they already own in a better format. 

     So, In conclusion, the money it takes to buy an HDTV, an HD compatible player (Blu-ray or HD-DVD) and 30$ movies is not really worth it. For now. But as the VCR dominated the Video tape recorder, and the DVD dominated the VCR, in the future one of these formats will dominate the DVD. And when that time comes all the HDTV owners will say I told you so.

About Me

Hi, this is my first post of what might turn out to be my future blog. My name is Tom Varsavsky and I'm Martin Varsavsky's son. I'm only 13 years old but it would be an interesting experiment to try starting this blog. As I'm only thirteen I don't really have much of a life story to tell, I haven't got any work experience except for the school I go to but I do have 'peculiarities' that make me different from most thirteen year olds in the world.

Last year I went to speak to 2 conferences in Scandinavia. But I didn't really make a speech, it was more Q & A. Overall I found it very fun to travel from Spain (place of residence) to Stockholm and Copenhagen and apparently I was a big crowd pleaser. The first conference I went to was a version of SIME(Scandinavian Interactive Media Event) taken to Denmark.The Panel I was in was called Digital Natives, which is a denomination for people who were born when the internet already existed. I was in the panel alongside another boy who was 16 years old and it turned out really really well. The second conference I was in was the original version of SIME and therefore was much larger. Here I was in a very different panel than the other one ,as my fellow panelists were a 30 year old man who worked in match.com and a 40 year old man who had other businesses. But this event was too a surprising success and people enjoyed my witty remarks. There is a video of an interview I had in this link
Both events were partly organised by a good friend of my dad and I whos name is Ola Ahlvarsson. Ola has a very interesting story. He became kick-boxing champion in his early 20s and later developed two companies (maybe more not sure) one that was similar to Amazon dedicated to e-commerce and another (which he has now) that is called Result and helps other companies go international.

Once I had been to these two events I thought that the fact I was invited was only a matter of good connections, mainly from my Father. But while I was on vacation with my family I heard a story from my dad which made me think that I actually impacted someone with my funny remarks at the SIME events. My father told me that in a meeting that the ITU(International Telecommunications Union) made to think about speakers to invite to an event they are hosting in Cairo one of the guys said "Oh I know a perfect candidate, he's 13 years old and really funny". This really made me feel like I was going to a place for being myself and speaking well in public. But what is even better is that I got invited to another conference called DLD, which will be held in Munich and is one of the most important events in Europe.
So, overall I'm writing this post which will hopefully be the first of many in this blog which will be centered mainly on technology.