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Amidst the ridiculing of Nintendo for its name change and the whirl of excitement as E3 brings many surprises, my friends at Olin found a good way to pass the time: DOA3. It's been our main multiplayer game since spring break, and we've converted several new fans over to the glories of Team Ninja. However, when you're playing as Hayabusa and you can't use the trigger, things seem desperately unfair.

So, at the prodding of one of my friends, we did the only thing we could: repair the broken right trigger on an old fatty Duke XBox controller. In hindsight, I really should've taken pictures, but I hope just the news that it can be done will be news enough for anyone interested. If you do care how to do it, it's quite simply really: the failure in our case (and most cases, presumably) was mechanical. The ABS trigger itself fractured (no surprise there, material scientists know that ABS is pretty brittle as plastics go - and as for extended hammering of the part over a period of years...yeah, you'd expect this thing to happen pretty often). The repair consisted of us trying to take out all the parts and epoxy them together - which would've worked, except you can't fit a whole, unbroken trigger back into its place once its out. So, we did something tricky - we purposefully refractured the piece and glued it back together when it was already in place. After a few minutes of drying, the trigger and the controller were back in use, good as new.

As for this blog, my last school commitment is wrapping up tomorrow, so things should be speeding up. There'll be talks about all the E3 news (expect lots of Halo 3 and FFXIII discussion), along with half a dozen reviews I'm in the middle of writing, and a roundup of demos out right now for your try-before-you-buy enjoyment. Additionally, there'll be some layout changes to reflect the additional authors and make commenting more intuitive and more compatible (especially in IE).