Lik-Sang closes its doors

Lik-Sang.com announced today that they would be going out of businesses. Their press release about it basically blames Sony for the entire thing, since Sony recently won a court ruling againt them, that prevented them from selling imported PS3s. I can’t understand Sony’s logic behind this. The whole reason that there is a market for imported PS3s in the first place is that Sony isn’t capable of making enough to satisfy demand.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if Lik-Sang wasn’t having financial troubles anyway, and is using this as an excuse to get out of business. Regardless, this is a sad day for gamers. Places like Lik-Sang and Play-Asia are some of the few places where we can easly get Japanese games and hardware. I would hate to see more places go out of business.

2-day Threadless sale

Quick bargain: Threadless.com is having another of their $10 sales — all T-shirts are $10, which is quite a savings over their usual prices.

Trade games with Goozex

In general, I am the kind of person who likes to hang on to games. If I really liked a game, I want to keep it even if I know that I’ll probably never play it again. But there are a lot of games that I just don’t make a connection with, and sometimes I’ll pick up a game cheaply with the intention of playing it and just never get around to it. Those games I will usually try and sell.

Up until now I had been using half.com to get rid of this kind of game, but prices aren’t usually that great and they also charge a commission. Recently, though, I have been using Goozex.com. It’s kind of similar to half.com in that users send games directly to one another — Goozex works as a middleman, helping you find people who want your games. But instead of getting cash for your games, you get Goozex points which you can then use to request other games on the site. Normally I would say that getting “points” isn’t as good a deal as getting cash, but I’ve had a lot of success in trading my games so far. I’ve traded about 20 games that I wasn’t playing and got a bunch of new games that I’m excited about playing. At the moment, you can trade and receive Xbox 360, Xbox, PS2, PS1, GameCube, Dreamcast, DS, PSP and GBA games. (More after the jump.)

Stream music & photos to your Xbox 360 from your Mac

One nice feature of the Xbox 360 is that it can stream music and photos from your PC. However, it only works if you have Windows, and it doesn’t directly interface with your iTunes library either. Nullriver Software recently introduced Connect 360, which is a Preference Pane for Mac OS X that allows your Xbox 360 to stream music from iTunes and photos from iPhoto. Basically, it fools the Xbox 360 into thinking that your Mac is a Windows PC, and it also allows you to access your playlists and albums. It can’t handle iTS purchased music, but that’s no big surprise.

It’s a tad expensive at $20, but I tried the demo (which limits you to 100 randomly selected songs and photos) and it worked very well. It would be nice if it could stream video somehow. I believe this is possible if you have a Media Center PC. If Connect 360 can emulate a Windows PC for music and photos, maybe it can emulate a Media Center PC for video. Anyway, this is worth keeping an eye on.