Graivehouse Blog

I’ve decided to download and watch almost every episode of the British Motoring Show, Top Gear (a few episodes here and there are missing, but, oh well) and all their talk about horrible and great cars has gotten me in a sort of critic mode. And there are a few cars I cannot stand.

1. The Mazda Miata. Unless you’re a girl or a homosexual, you shouldn’t be driving one. Seriously. They’re cute…and not in a good way. I don’t care how much Richard Hammond likes them. In fact, the colors the Miata should come in are girly ones like pink and purple…and others. Just to discourage guys from buying it.

2. The Porsche 911. If you’re looking at it, it doesn’t scream for your attention. Every rich idiot has one and the design hasn’t changed in forever. They’re boring.

3. The Bugatti Veyron. The Top Gear crew love it, and I can’t see why, although I’ve never driven it. But, it’s ugly, big, and yes it has a great top speed, but it takes a little while to get there and it really doesn’t look like something that started out life as an experiment to see if VW could get a production car to go 300mph without ripping itself apart. It just looks like a Bugatti. Yawn.

4. And this one really does drive me mad. What I call the F. U. V. or Fake Utility Vehicle. Seriously, what’s the point of spending money on an “SUV” if it can’t do what SUVs are supposed to do: go off road. Heck, Subaru has an entire line of SUV CARS that can perform better off road than some of these things. These FUVs include: The Hummer H2 and H3 (AMG got it right with the H1, but GM ruined it), The Cadillac Escalade, The BMW X5 and X3…and pretty much any other GM SUV. Sport Trucks and SUVs I get. They for show and aren’t really designed for anything but the race track, but If you’re going to spend $30,000-$60,000 on a SUV, you should get something that can handle an little bit of dirt. The Escalade is just pathetic. It’s a as useful as a big shiny gold chain around your neck and handles the dirt like a prissy valley girl who cares more about what their wearing than they do their own life. The Hummer is more pathetic than the Escalade in my opinion, ’cause it was inspired by an ACTUAL capable offroad vehicle. But GM took it and turned it into an Escalade with big, mean looking tires.  I mean, it’ll go over your neighbor’s car just fine, but it’s still a horrible offroader. Top Gear showed why the X3 sucks. I mean, it’s completely pointless to buy an FUV. I mean, if you watch the movie Zombieland, it demonstrates this point well. The two SUVs that were left after everyone turned into a Zombie were the Cadillac Escalade and the Hummer H2. That’s because, no Zombie wanted to go near them because they were already useless. The blended in with the Zombies. Look, all you rappers and other people looking at buying a Hummer or Escalade (and I’m targeting them because they’re ridiculously expensive), stop a moment, and punch yourself in the face, it’s a stupid idea. The only thing that a Hummer or Escalade say (and they say the EXACT same thing) is, “I’m rich.” But there are a LOT of other other cars that you can say that with. If you want to buy an SUV and you want to spend a lot of money on one, get a Land Rover. They’re just as expensive AND you can take them offroad without breaking them. And a Land Rover says “I’m rich, smart, AND I’m not afraid of a little dirt.” Better yet, buy a BMW or Porsche if you want to fit into that “I don’t care what I spend my money on” crowd. AND the Escalade and Hummer get HORRID gas milage. The ironic thing was the Hummer was GM’s answer to their own Electric car. ‘Cause nothing says I’m enviromentally friendly like a Hummer. I think I’ve made my point.

This prize would have to go to Microsoft. I mean, they released Vista, promising there would be not security issues with it, and within a week of it’s release, they release a security update. AND Vista is one big resource hog. If you look on the back of some Games for Windows, in the system requirements, some actually have a different memory spec for Vista. Example: I’ve seen a bunch that have said 1GB of memory was required for everything else, but if you had Vista, you needed 2GB. why? because Vista’s gonna suck up half your memory.

And then there’s the Xbox 360. The original Xbox was built by Intel and worked and was a pretty cool system. The 360 was built by Microsoft. Why a software developer decided to build hardware, no one knows. But, I sure hope Intel or someone else builds be next Xbox. The 360 gets the Epic Fail of All time, so far. I mean, this system was hyped up and down and then MS purposely under-released it. Well, it’s more like they knew they didn’t have as many systems as they hyped and they also knew every single one of the initial systems weren’t actually complete and all of them suffered from the Red Ring of Death. And most everyone suffered through those issues or swapped the 360 for a PS3. That was until Forza 2 was released. I have never seen a computer reject software as much as Forza 2. Both Microsoft and Turn 10 denied that the sudden slew of RROD crashes had nothing to do with the recently released racer, but, I know for me, my system was working fine until I put FM2 in. In fact, I think everyone who played Forza 2 had the RROD.

This actually forced MS to spend nearly $4 million to extend the warranty on the RROD issue. Before that, MS had spent millions of dollars to fix the RROD issue, and eventually it was “fixed” or rather, they replaced it with a different warning, which means the same thing the RROD did.

These issues were unfortunate, too, ’cause the system itself was a pretty decent system with some great titles. But, with the RROD issues, space issues (MS not only still operated with DVD-ROMs instead of just installing there 15GB a layer HDDVD drive in the system and letting their developers use that, but they also have a system that doesn’t have a Hard Drive, which makes developing games difficult ’cause you don’t want to leave anyone out.), the 360 has suffered needlessly.

However, there are some hints that MS might be partnering with Sony to release a Blu-ray enabled system soon. MS has denied that there would be a 360 with Blu-Ray, but that doesn’t mean that the next Xbox wouldn’t feature Blu-ray. I think it would be interesting to see what developers like Turn10 and Bungie could do with 33.1GB of space.