Here’s quick gameplay montage of the Xbox 360’s E3 2005 lineup of showcase titles including:

• Quake 4
• Ghost Recon 3
• Top Spin 2
• Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (sequel to Morrowwind)
• Call of Duty 2
• Perfect Dark Zero
• A bunch of sports games
• A bunch of racing games

E3 is this week. For those that don’t know, the E3 Expo is the most important convention in the world of electronic entertainment. This is like Christmas for all news video gamey. So if you see a higher proportion of video game posts this week, and you will, that’s why.

IGN has a preview and trailer of Call of Duty 2. I don’t know if it’s coming out for multiple platforms, but it’s filed under the PC section, yet the trailer indicates that it’s for XBox 360. Anyway, it looks great. I finished the first Call of Duty for the PC a few months ago. It’s the best WWII FPS I’ve played.

Don’t want to give some company your demographic or personal information in order to view the content of their site? BugMeNot.com is a great way to bypass registration for a number of websites. I have no idea how many or what types of site it has information for, but I’ve tried it on news sites like NYT and Washington Post, but it works great. You just go to BugMeNot.com and enter the URL of the site you want to view. It gives you a valid login and pw. Alternatively, the have a Firefox extension so you don’t even have to visit the BugMeNot site. Not using Firefox? Well, you frickin should.

“Your powers are weak, old man. “

Some Swede has designed a glowing door handle called Brighthand. It lights up red when the door is locked and green when it’s unlocked. Only available in Scandinavia. Aside from looking toyishly like lightsabers, these will only uncourage laziness among Nordic burglars.

Time magazine (via Gamespot) writes:

Note to the hard-core faithful: the next version of Halo will not, repeat not, be ready in time for the launch of Xbox 360. It will be part of the all-important second wave next spring. ‘It’s perfect,’ Gates says, radiant with bloodlust. ‘The day Sony launches [the new PlayStation], and they walk right into Halo 3.’

Also of note, that pose on the Time cover is ironically close to the long-standing symbol of the evil empire used by Slashdot.org:

The evil, but pretty, empire of tabletop miniatures gaming, Games Workshop (aka crack for young geeks), puts on an event once a year in each of its major markets called Games Day (inspired name). At this convention they host a painted miniatures competition known as the Golden Demon awards. Here are the 2004 UK winners (click the category links) and the 2005 US winners. There are some truly amazing paintjobs to be seen.