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The Day My Xbox 360 Was Resurrected July 2, 2008 |
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Welcome to part two (of two) of my Xbox repair experience. See part one here.
6.19.2008 - My Xbox arrives unannounced. I become excited as I realize what is in the box, and the UPS guy backs away slowly.
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The Day My Xbox 360 Died June 30, 2008 |
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My 360 hasn’t exactly been a model of high-tech gadgetry. In fact, it’s almost surprising it worked despite a number of scary ailments:
1) It liked to freeze and make clicking noises. This happened both at certain points (loading Treasury in GRAW) and randomly (about 1/2 the time during a Madden game).
2) The drive tray wouldn’t close by pushing the button - the tray itself needed to be pushed gently, so it began to close, then once it reversed itself and opened again you could push the button to close it.
3) On rare occasions, you might get a black screen and the infamous RRoD (Red Ring of Death), which would be fixed upon rebooting.
Needless to say, it’s days were numbered. Here is the story of the end:
5.29.2008 - My 360 dies.
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On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness May 23, 2008 |
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I’m not sure how many of our readers follow the webcomic Penny Arcade, but I certainly do. Religiously, in fact. Anyway, the guys behind Penny Arcade teamed up with Hothead Games to create an adventure game in the tradition of Monkey Island and Full Throttle, a genre which has suffered much neglect in recent years. My pet theory is that since adventure games tend to focus on good writing rather than lush visuals, their golden age must have been when computing power was still relatively scarce - but that doesn’t mean the market for adventure games is gone! Far from it - personally, I miss the wit and humor, two qualities that On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness has in spades. If you enjoy the comic, you’ll likely enjoy the game. If you like the comic AND fancy yourself a bit of a steampunk, you’ll absolutely adore it.
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I don’t know where to start.
How do you even write about a game like Grand Theft Auto IV? It’s great, for sure, but it isn’t for everyone. It’s tough to tell if someone will enjoy the game short of asking if they enjoyed any of the Grand Theft Auto III’s or another sandbox game - the open-ness, the sheer amount of choice is crippling. There’s a story here, but you don’t have to listen to it if you don’t want to. The driving aspect of the game is great, but you could avoid it and still have plenty to do. Combat is finally good, with a new cover system that allows for spectacular, movie-style gunplay. The hilarious radio DJ’s playing excellent music are still here; new are movies and the internet. In short, it’s the GTA you remember, but bigger and better.
Continue reading GTA IV: Worth Checking Out Whether You Like It Or Not
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Getting Into It: Face Mapping in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 April 13, 2008 |
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Apparently, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 gives bad haircuts. Today my brother picked up the Xbox Live Vision Camera when he learned that you could map your face onto a character for Rainbow Six. I of course, was totally in favor of this idea. But it turns out that while the face mapping is actually pretty impressive, as you can see from the pic of my brother above, the hair mapping is pretty lousy. I also did a character of myself, and we both took pictures of what we actually look like for comparison. Load the rest of the post to see those!
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Mortal Kombat Coming to iPhone? April 2, 2008 |
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You’d think people with really cool news would just wait until the 2nd to make announcements or start rumors they want believed, but I guess rumor mill knows no time. This time, it’s Mortal Kombat series creator Ed Boon with a coded message and some other videos floating around the net that point to a iPhone and iPod Touch port of Mortal Kombat II. The video shows player control through specific touches and tilt sensing. I’d take this with a huge grain of salt, given the date, but with the SDK out, it’s certainly a possibility. An awesome possibility.
Source TMRK
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50 Cent gets Blood on the Sand, another paycheck April 1, 2008 |
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I’m learning so much these days. First, I found out that bitch is the new black. Now it seems that the Middle East is the new hood. 50 Cent: Bulletproof came out just over two years ago and dazzled…well, no one. Somehow, though, it sold enough units to warrant both a sequel and my deep concern over how 18 to 25 year olds in this country spend their money. Get ready for 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Oh, and in case you were wondering, this is why the terrorists hate us.
Continue reading 50 Cent gets Blood on the Sand, another paycheck
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Rainbow Six Vegas 2: More Sin-City Gunplay March 24, 2008 |
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Last night I finally got a chance to check out Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, the sequel to one of my favorite shooters. I’ve long been a fan of the Rainbow Six franchise, but Vegas introduced an exceptional cover system that allows for really tactical gunplay. This mechanism remains intact and unchanged in Vegas 2; in fact the core of the game is all familiar, but many of the rough edges from the first game have been improved.
Continue reading Rainbow Six Vegas 2: More Sin-City Gunplay
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Army of Two: Equal Parts Marcus Fenix and Sam Fisher March 13, 2008 |
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The wait has ended - I stayed up until three in the morning last night, playing Army of Two (Xbox 360, PS3) with my brother; only quitting because the sun was rising outside his east-coast apartment (I’m in LA). We’ve been looking forward to AoT for months, seduced by the potential of a truly cooperative shooter ever since playing the coop levels in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Gears of War is a favorite of ours, as is Rainbow Six: Vegas, but neither actually requires a partner: if you’re good enough, your partner can just hunker down somewhere and let you clean house. In AoT, this just isn’t possible.
Continue reading Army of Two: Equal Parts Marcus Fenix and Sam Fisher
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Custom Legos - Rapid Prototyping Lite! March 1, 2008 |
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When I was a kid, my brother and I had a bunch of Legos to play with. We always had our eyes on some new model, of course, because we were insatiable. But we spent most of our time pulling thing apart and creating our own designs, eschewing printed manuals in favor of some instructions manual in our heads. Though most of the experience has been lost to time, I do recall some truly rad creations. The thing about Legos, though, is that you need a lot of them before things get really interesting - it’s not the sheer number of blocks so much as the selection. My brother and I were lucky, since there were two of us and we had great success in convincing my parents to purchase new sets for birthdays and the like - but there were still a few years of multicolored houses and freakishly mutated contraptions before our creations began to look legit. Fortunately, a solution looms large on the horizon: The Lego Digital Designer.
The Digital Designer is basically a virtual lego environment - a sort of primitive version of 3D modeling. It’s free to download and use, and creations can be uploaded to the Lego website to share with other people. Best of all, you can order your creation from Lego, and they’ll ship you the parts you need and the software will generate a building guide. The possibilities for customized gifts boggle the mind!
There’s a bit of an issue with parts, though - there’s not that many of them. The total number of bricks available is 763, but this turns out to be only a tiny fragment of what’s out there. I was hoping to construct a Supervillain Hideaway on the moon, but the cratered baseboard I was hoping for wasn’t there, and the only large option was entirely green. Not terribly lunar. Technics parts are also missing, as are many other special bits. Even so, it’s worth checking out - especially because I’m betting Lego will add more parts if people are using the software!
Image is a Lego Alien by Arvo. See more lego creations at Brickshelf.
