Blagged

I’ve never been overly into fighting games, but today I decided to try out Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.  The graphics may be a bit lacking, and the dialogue in the cut scenes is super cheesy, but the game play is pretty decent and the cut scenes in Story Mode are still a nice break from Arcade Mode where you just fight round after round.  Story Mode is a bit short though, I completed the Mortal Kombat part of it in just a couple of hours.  I haven’t started the DC Universe part of Story Mode yet.

I haven’t played a Mortal Kombat game since the Sega Genesis days, but this game still has all of the familiar characters from the old game.  They have a lot of the same special moves and finishing moves too so anyone who’s feeling nostalgic of the old Mortal Kombat games can pick this one up and feel that familiarity.  All in all, if you like fighting games, this is a good one to try out.

The three red lights of death have claimed another two victims who are near and dear to me.  This weekend I received a phone call from my cousin informing me that my services would be required to penny fix his red ringed Xbox 360.  Then, last night I received a text message from this fellow informing me that he too has finally seen the dark days of the Xbox 360’s RROD.  Be strong gents, my heart is with you.

I’ve been saying for a while now that if I find something I like, I’ll blog about it, but only after using it for a couple of weeks.  Much like this fellow, I have a tendency to try something out, rave about how great it is, and then never use it again.  So here it is, my first Certified Awesome post and it’s about the redesigned taskbar that’s in Windows 7.  The Windows 7 pre-beta comes with the same old Vista taskbar, but there are ways to unlock the new one.  The new taskbar is more like a dock, but the live thumbnails of the running applications are fantastic.  They’re a bit clearer than in Vista, and you can even close windows right from the live thumbnail in the taskbar.

Other things I like are the ability to pin a running application to the taskbar, as well as the context sensitive pop out menus (jump lists) that you can open from the taskbar shortcut.  For example, if you have Notepad pinned to your taskbar, the jump list will contain the recently opened text files.  This comes in handy if you’re frequently opening the same log files.

Last but not least is the updated notification area (or system tray if you prefer).  Rather than “hiding” rarely used icons, there’s actually a new area where you drag them to, and that area is only shown on your command. It’s kind of like the old way of having to click the little arrow and it slides out to show your unused icons, but it’s more of a static type of window that opens up above the taskbar.  You also have the option to suppress balloon notifications for any application you would like to ignore.

Did I mention that you can also drag your taskbar items and system tray icons, allowing you to re-order them to your liking?

All in all, this much needed update to the Windows taskbar is proving to be pretty fantastic, and I already hate using the old Vista taskbar now that I’ve been spoiled by the new one.  Keep up the good work Microsoft, I can’t wait to get my hands on a Windows 7 build that will have the fully functioning peek feature.