Hard Day

I had a horrible day.

Test Went Well

I think my test went well today, except for the fact it's a Saturday. Realised I left my student ID card on my desk at the end of a test I had earlier in the week. That annoys me because I have had that thing for four years and I loose it when I need it for tests and when there is only three weeks left. It has probably been handed in so I can go pick it up, but being a Saturday uni is mostly closed so that will happen next week now.

Mac Ads Again

I am actually surprised that all the webcomics are missing the biggest angle on the new Mac ads. Even my beloved Ctrl+Alt+Del missed it. Anyway here is what should of happened:

Mac: Hi I am a Mac
PC: And I am a PC

Mac: I am SO much cooler than you PC, I spent all last night playing Civilisation 3
PC: O' ye, played Civ 4 yet?

Mac: No what's that?
PC: It's the much improved sequel to Civ 3, and it came out like last year!

Mac: No sorry, not with you
PC: Guild Wars? Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend? Star Wars Empire At War? The Elder Scrolls Oblivion? Age of Empires 3? The Sims 2? ANY CSI game? ANY Grand Theft Auto?
Mac: Now I got The Sims 1 AND! got Age of Empires 2!

PC: How are you for multiplayer?
Mac: Lame
PC: I thought so

Tests

So this month I have tests for all the modules that I have been studying all year, but for some strange reason my Security Management Modal has it's test tomorrow (yes a Saturday) at 9am. I am sure University in their infinite wisdom did this for our benefit, but the reason why seems to escape me.

The funniest thing about the test tomorrow is that the case study is a telecoms company / ISP / Mobile phone provider who is buying up international companies who do similar business and who is getting concerned about it's security. I find this funny because my 2005 research report was all about a potential terrorist treat against the internet and I spent long hours pondering internet takedown, analysing the terrorist's motives and core competencies (what they are already good at). So I already am familiar with the situation discussed in the case study. Incidentally in case you are interested the conclusion for my report was that the most effective attack would be to suicide bomb a big ISP's server cluster causing complete disruption to all the ISP's customers and so touching an entire country trough loss of service (assuming the ISP has a very centralised service and they hasn't considered a centralised outage already). Anyway off bed, you don't need to wish me luck, computing security just happens to be one of my fortays.

High Price of PS3 and Disk Space

It is believed that the high price of the PS3 is going to be because of the Blu-ray Drive. Sony says that next generation games will need the space and it is the most requested feature from developers. Then Microsoft says that DVD will be adequate and not until the end of this generation before games begin to require more than 9GB of space.

I think both points here are valid and correct as Sony is looking at this from a Japanese perspective and Microsoft is looking at this from a western perspective. Most Japanese games will have ok game graphics and then very high quality pre-rendered cinematics which require a lot of space on disk. Western games have abandoned this formula because game graphics are now good enough that a transition from realtime to pre-rendered isn't necessary and most western games use very little pre-rendered sequences making western games very space efficient. So I think Microsoft was right to stick with DVD, but I wonder if in five years time wither Japanese developers will also abandon pre-rendered sequences.

Wii Virtual Console

IGN has a Video of the virtual console in action. I think the menu will be changed, but it's nice to see it working. No idea why this wasn't in the Nintendo Conference.

Nintendo Insurance Corp

I think Nintendo could make a big killing selling specialised insurance to Wii owners. With all that swinging and hitting with the controller something is going to break. Insurance quotes would consist of sending Nintendo a few digital images of your play area and the price of some of the times you want to insure in that so an accurate quote could be given. This would either be an excellent new moneymaking scheme for Nintendo or under the sheer number of claims bankrupt them. Either way gamers would benefit. Not sure if covering personal injury as well would be such a good idea because those claims are expensive.

Microsoft E3 Conference

Loads of new informations and it looks like 360 is going to be incredibly well established by the time PS3 arrives.

Attachment rate is 4.5 games and 3 accessories per console in the US. Although Peter didn't say wither that included Arcade titles or not, but if the 4.5 number is retail games then that is very impressive for a console.

Namco, Konami, Midway and Sega are supplying a steady stream of retro titles for Arcade.

Lumines will appear on Arcade also (yes the PSP puzzle game with the music), but because of an agreement with Warner-Brothers will also feature HD music videos as part of the game.

By this holiday, 360 will have over 160 games.

For Forza Motorsport 2 Microsoft will be delivering a wireless force feedback steering wheel.

A wireless headset will also be coming this year, as well as the already announced camera and the HD-Drive (which looks nice).

GTA4 will be launched first on XBox360 and will have exclusive episodic content from Marketplace.

Microsoft seems to be trying to make a distinction that PC games are Windows games. This will actually help them sell more copies of windows as it is something Apple cannot compete with Microsoft on (I have no idea why, maybe Jobs doesn't like games very much).

Bill Gates says that before the competition hits the market 360 will be up by 10 million units sold.

Live!, Achievements and gamer profiles are coming to Windows Vista.

Vista will now have built in desktop blade for gamer profile, friends management and game achievements.

Marketplace is coming to windows mobile to promote mobile games. The potential for actually buying a game for 360 and then have it instantly available for mobile as well. Again gamer profiles and messaging is supported by the mobile platform.

Nintendo E3 Conference

Just finished watching the Nintendo conference and it was great. It started with Miyamoto conducting an orchestra with the Wii remote and ended with a four player Wii tennis game.
Wii really looks like it has a fun and intuitive controller. Nintendo will have 27 games on the show floor for people to play so expect plenty of write-ups about it.

An interesting thing that was mentioned was that the console is never turned off. There is 'on' and 'standby' which doesn't use much power, but will allow background downloading and interaction of content like with an Animal Crossing village. So while you are away friends can visit your village and leave messages and stuff.

Halo3 Trailer

Marketplace is impossible so the best place to get the trailer actually appears to be from Bungie.

I didn't like the first two, but for some strange reason I am actually looking forward to this.

UNO Downloading

It's taking it's time.

MGS4 Trailer and Wii Controler Being Used

MGS4 trailer was a little disturbing and not just because of the cum that splatters on the screen at the very end.

Seen the Wii controller being used in Red Steel and where at the Warhawk guy in the Sony demo controlled his plain in a chaotic messy way, even failing to land his plain properly. The Wii controller seems ultra sensitive although I do believe that it will increase the number of gamers suffering from Muscular Skeletal Disorders as that thing does not look comfortable for long periods of play.

Sony Press Conferance

Finally finished watching the press conference and two things. The console is too expensive and $100 for an extra 40GB!! WTF?!

Worst of all is Nintendo's position, they where so careful to make sure nobody copied their controller and then Sony comes along and updates their fifteen year old design, gives it wireless and the exact same capabilities as the Wii controller.

I think the poor looking graphics an a lot of the games is due to developer not pushing the console hard enough because it does look like it can do some nice looking stuff, but OMG Nintendo, their unique selling feature is now not so unique anymore, would suck to be them right now.

PS3 Graphics

It's difficult to tell from the videos as to what the PS3 is capable of, but the graphics from the trailers come in two categories. Either they are so good that I can't tell wither they are in-game or pre-rendered as in the case with Assassin's Creed or they look exactly like an XBox game running on a 360 with poor graphics, but a nice sharp resolution as in Bladestorm.

If you watch the Bladestorm trailer you will realise that it is short and poorly encoded. This is the state of most of the PS3 trailer so far and I believe this is deliberate on Sony's part.

Would link to a few more, but I have an IT Service test at twelve and I want to get there early.

Marketplace Server Broke

Looks like the Marketplace servers are broke as they won't let me download anything now. Don't know how Microsoft is going to fair tomorrow, but things don't look good.

E360 Content

I can hear some faint groaning coming down my cable from the Marketplace servers.

Sunscreen / Suncream

I like looking tanned, at the mo my skin is untanned. I want to look as good as I can for as long as I can. I know that the sun will make my skin look older than I am as I get older, so I wear Sunscreen.

And while on the subject of skincare. Soap is the worst thing you can put on your face. Even Dove which claims to have one quarter moisturising oil and a neutral PH will dry your skin. Instead use a daily face wash or just warm water.

Some Second Life Stuff

So I spent a little while in second life today and I took a few photos:

This is a furry club that I went to. They had some great music.


Me relaxing.


Would you believe this guy has been paid to stand in a box and model clothes! Even stranger later on I discovered Money Chairs which give whoever sit in them money. This is designed to get the popularity rating of clubs and bars up to get a higher ranking on Second Life's search engine.


A rock that actuality tells you what the weather is with 100% accuracy.


O' Rly?
If I right click on this image and select buy I can get this tshirt. Witch I didn't.


I was going to take a picture of a cinema I went to, but I didn't want to get sued or anything, because they where showing the first ten minuets of Hostal.

New Spore Footage

You can see the new trailer over at YouTube Here.

The Numbers they DON'T want YOU to Have

Every been in the situation where you have wanted to speak to a person on the phone who works at Amazon, eBay or PayPal, but been unable to find a telephone number to call?!

Well HardToFind800Numbers.com is just one big list of customer service numbers from big companies who for some reason fail to put their telephone number anywhere on their website.

Viva La Internet!

XBox Live! is like SO Innovative

Next week Microsoft will be singing about how successful Live! has been and will probably start pushing so much content onto Arcade and Marketplace that Sony and Nintendo find it hard to invade into, but the thing is that Nintendo actually did an arcade like service first called Satellaview for the SNES. Players could subscribe to a service, create an Avatar, walk around an Animal Crossing type town and play games that where downloaded through the service.

Random Fact

Super Mario Brothers 2 for the NES was called Doki Doki Panic when it was originally released in Japan and featured slightly different characters.

Network Performance Update

And what is this, what has reduced Microsoft's powerful network to this crawling wreck, a Top Spin 2 demo, that's what!

360 Network Performance

Somehow I don't think Microsoft's network is going to be able to handle E3.



For comparison here is what is should look like:

Consolas

Microsoft has a team of typographers that do a lot of work trying to improve the lives of readers all around the world. They do research on eye tracking, what increases reading speeds, decreases reading speeds and they are a very opinionated bunch, but their latest creation is Clear Type which was originally designed to take advantage of sub-pixel rendering of fonts on LCD screens. With a CRT screen a pixel is either red, green, blue or a combination of those colours from black to white, but with LCD displays each pixel is made up of three concentric diodes which from a few feet away look just like one pixel. So by manipulating the individual diodes instead of the whole pixel a better rendered font can be created (the article in the link above has more on this).

So anyway Clear Type will be making it's way into Vista and for that the typography team have invested a lot of time and effort creating some new fonts as the ones we are using today where created with the limitations of pixels.

One of the fonts they have developed is called Consolas which has been specifically designed for programmers, who incidentally spend an awful lot of time looking at text.

Today Consolas can be downloaded for Visual Studio 2005 from Here. I have installed it, it might take a little getting used to, but on a CRT Clear Type just looks like antialiased text anyway, but below is a before and after Clear Type.

Sometime in the Early Hours of Tomorrow Morning

01.02.03 04/05/06

Apple's New Ad Campaign

So Apple has a new US ad campaign (hope I doesn't make it to the UK) called Gat A Mac. This is yet another in a growing list of human conversation advertisements that Americans are being subjected to. The US has had these kind of ads since they where being sold cigarettes at the dawn of television. Even the FlintStones once proclaimed the benefits of Winston Cigarettes. Although that was before people realised about the Effect it was having.

Anyway after a long absence this kind of one-on-one conversation ad is back. Phillips is doing it with their ShaveEverywhere.com campaign which is cheesy, but then the average American finds it difficult to talk about male grooming so that's ok. And then there is the Game Killers by Axe (known as Linx in the UK) whitch is also trying to be you're best friend.

My problem with this kind of advert is that they pretend to have a conversation with me, but they don't have an adult conversation with me. The issue is especially present in the Phillips campaign. There are glaring details left-out from the conversations just like in the good-old days of the tobacco advert and I find that frustrating. Talk to me, pitch me a product, even show me some of those Sony Third Place Ads again, but not this silly conversation stuff!

It Has Past

Half an hour later than it should have XBox.com has been updated. MyXbox looks very different and you can now send and receive messages from the web.

No dashboard update and download seepds are back to normal, but I suspect not many people are downloading right now.

XBox360 E3 Content List

Only a few hours until Live! is backup and we can all see what has changed, but until then The Good Major has posted a lit of what will be released on Marketplace over E3:

Playable game demos and/or trailers from highly anticipated titles like:


• Crackdown (Microsoft Game Studios)
  
• Dead or Alive® : Xtreme 2 (Tecmo)
  
• The Lord of the Rings ™, The Battle for Middle Earth™ II (EA Los Angeles)
  
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Capcom)
  
• Moto GP™ ’06 (THQ)
  
• Sonic the Hedgehog™ (Sega)
  
• Splinter Cell Double Agent ™ (Ubisoft)
  
• Test Drive Unlimited (Atari)
  
• Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios)
  
• Plus a flood of HD trailers from games that have yet to be announced
  
  
  
• Call of Duty®2 – New Multiplayer Map Packs (Activision)
  
• The release of UNO on Xbox Live Arcade
  
• Game with Fame celebrity gaming sessions with stars like Jenny McCarthy, Method Man and Panic Channel (Featuring Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins, Chris Chaney and Steve Isaacs).
  
• Play and Win contests with the latest Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade titles
  
• Exclusive high-definition blockbuster movie trailer downloads
  
• Limited edition E3 Gamerpics and Themes
  
• A Backstage Pass to see developers preparing for E3

Now I don't know about you, but i wasn't expecting a Viva Pinata demo so soon.

Name Development Comments On The Wii

This is a company that just makes up names. So I was interested in what they Had To Say.

Strange Game Controllers

Strange Game Controllers

Something Not Right in the Land of Live!

When I first started downloading stuff from live my little NetMetre program display would all red and I would be getting a constant 250K/s download rate, which is my top download speed. Right now however I don't seem to be getting anything like that at all. This has actually been getting progressively worse, supposedly as more people have been getting 360s and downloading stuff. So I am thinking the maintenance tomorrow might upgrade the network a little and prevent Live from disappearing from the internet come E3.

No Dashboard Update

Tuesday XBoxLive!, XBox.com and the XBox Forums will be down for maintenance, but there won't be a dashboard upgrade.

HA!

A while ago I did a Post about the research Microsoft did at Cambridge with camera effects and stuff to make using a webcam more fun. Call me crazy, but I still think Microsoft will be using this with the 360 cam.

Anyway I don't know wither it just applies to the Logitech Orbit Cam, but you can indeed do all these cool visual effects with that camera, Check This Video.

Live! Will Be Down Tuesday

Major Says That Tuesday between 10am and 11pm GMT XBox Live! will be down. No word on why, but I suspect an upgrade because the only time previously Live! has ever been down was because of the upgrade from the old Live! system to the nice new 360 version.

Rumours in trend at the moment are:

• Camera support
  
  
• A DirectTV blade for streaming TV and cinema

Additional: here are a couple more rumours that have been going around:

• Background downloading of marketplace content so you can do other stuff while a demo or movie is downloading.
  
  
• Ability to stream video from your computer without a copy of Windows Media Centre Edition.

Metal Gear Solid 4 - Realtime Devkit Demo

YouTube has a Video of MGS4 running in realtime on the PS3 devkit. This thing looks very good, snake's hair looks especially good, but to achieve this I wonder if they did the same trick that EverQuest II pulled where each character was highly detailed, but the environments where low poly.

PS3 Real Time Footage- Brother in Arms

So I was checking my RSS feeds when I seen This on DIGG which is a link to IGN and a Brothers in Arms Video supposedly running on the PS3.

If you read the comments, some people are debating the framerate, but if you actually watch the video you will see as I did that this video is so blatantly not realtime. Yet this is a trailer for E3 2006 so that tells me Sony will be pulling the same trick that they did last year. *sigh*

Joystiq actually constructs an argument

Joystiq has actually done a well constructed and intelligent Article on Wii and why it doesn't compare to any other made-up name.

And to fill in their table:

• Wii
  Wii sounds like 'we,' which emphasizes that the console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.

Slamming

64mm is a Skateboarding video production site with a Videocast of skater videos which is nice, but This latest video with the Grom Twins (Nic & Tristan) was something else. These kids are just eight, skate like pros and slam hard. Literally if it wasn't for their protective padding they would both have serious longterm injuries, yet they skate like pros. Maybe it is the combination of not caring about the broken ribs and blurred vision that has made these kids so good. Maybe we could all learn something from them and forgo personal safety when trying to achieve something. If your head hits the concrete then just standup (if you can) and keep trying until you get it right.

Japan doesn't like the name either

From Joystiq on what Japan is saying:

post 39: "Wee is an english baby word for pee or penis according to foreign forums. This might be bad. May be this is why foreigner's response is pretty bad."
posts 47-49: "I think Revolution was a better name."
posts 60, 62: "It is better naming than Revolution."
post 116: "It looks good if you write it, but awkward if you say it."
post 122: "'Can I have Wii.' It's little bit embarrassing to say it."

The Name

I can't do a serious post on the name without it sounding stupid so just read what Matt Says because I agree with him.

The Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii! WE, oui!?
The name has been met with a unified WTF!
I like the mature stand the IGN staff have approached this news however:

Mark Ryan (IGN Guides)

Erik Brudvig (IGN Guides)

Craig Harris (Nintendo DS)

EDIT: Some more below.

Steve Butts (PC)

IGN Roundtable Discussion

Theme Song

A Wii list of games for the new console

Bankshot Billiards Achievement

So for the past week and a half I have been trying to get the Bankshot Billiards Addict achievement on Bankshot Billiards 2, which requires players to complete 200 games. I wasn't originally going to bother, but a game of three ball doesn't last very long and it's something to do while I am listening to a podcast. So it was only a matter of time before I got the achievement, today I got it, but What I wasn't expecting however is to now be ranked 36 in the world on 3 ball. Which is nice, but I have only been playing against the easy AI and thats only because the hard AI drags games out too long. It's not like I have any skills at this.

Crystal Ball Gazing (E3 2006)

For E3 there are so many rumours flying around here is a summery of what you can probably expect:

Microsoft

• Will be showing off a few new titles (this is actually confirmed).
  
• Putting a lot of E3 content up for download from Marketplace. Including videos and some playable E3 floor demos.
  
• We will hear all about the new camera accessory. Which will be used by the up coming UNO card game on Arcade.
  
• And I suspect they will also launch some new Live! Arcade titles during E3.

Nintendo

• The name of the Revolution finally spoken.
  
• Playable floor demos.
  
• No pricing.
  
• No launch date.
• Something about an American DS launch.

Sony

• A cover-up on how badly the PSP has been doing with movie sales AND games sales.
  
• Redesigned controller unveiled.
  
• More CGI movies from top Hollywood studios showcasing what Sony would like their games to look like.
  
• Talk about the online hub and how wonderful it is going to be, but with a mention that "we are not directly competing with XBoxLive!" as if.
  
• Playable games running, but only on dev kits behind closed doors.
  
• Possible price announcement.

Additional: This year Microsoft will have 165 game stations!

A Soda at The Mall

So the wizards tower has been released for Oblivion and the word is that this add-on is ok because it's cheap (150 points) and you get a tower, herb garden and a battle spirit that you can summon when in combat. The thing I found most interesting about this however is how people on forums are talking about how cheap this is in dollars as they always choose a fast food simmily.

Common $1.85, that's like a soda at the mall.

Burgers have been used a lot too!

Untapped Markets

Been thinking about untapped markets that video games haven't entered yet and there are several. My final year project doesn't require players to be able to see. Amputees that only have one hand or people with other hand disabilities, or even people that want to multitask in a way I would rather not think of will actively seek games that they can play one-handed.
There is a population of people out there that suffer from a type of epilepsy that was probably discovered when they where playing a video game as a child and can't allow themselves to watch any flashing lights or repeated patterns. For epileptics the conditions for them to have a fit are very specific and there is software out there which will monitor what is being displayed on a screen and produce a graph of probability of a fit occurring based on what is displayed. The worst offending titles are older, so called 8bit titles, so many newer games would probably pass such a test without incident.

I really do think that a sticker on the back of a gamebox describing the control interface of the game or wither or not the game is safe of epileptics would benefit the disability community and grow the gaming population a little.

Sony's E3 Efforts

Sometimes I do a post to simply bookmark something for future reference. And this is certainly one of those occasions.
Sony has put together This Site for some self E3 coverage. Maybe they don't think that the journalists attending E3 will be covering Sony's announcements correctly or something because this site feels unnecessary, but the thing I really don't understand is why the streaming video show on the site has be targeted at twelve year olds!?

DDR Corrupting Our Youth

Video games might be degredating the very foundations of society, but they do give kids some 1337 skillz.

UNO On XBox Live! Arcade

It's not there yet, but Here are some images and video of UNO being played on Arcade. No word on when it will be out, but looking at this content, not long.

A Theory Of Fun Revisited

Recently I have been thinking about What I Said in regard to A Theory Of Fun and now I think I can articulate better what Raph is trying to say in his book and why I disagree with him (hence the revisit).

From his point of view all games teach the gamer something. Wither it be dropping blocks in Tetris, galactic domination or shooting people in the head. Every game is a learning experience for the player. He thinks games become boring when the player understands the game's pattern (how the game's rule system works). For this he looks to Tic-Tack-Toe because this is a game that most people become tired of after they gain a certain level of expertise. He mistakingly sees this learning aspect of games and this rule complexity aspect as the catalyst for fun.

He is right in that when a player fully understands the play strategies to a rule-system in a game then there is an opportunity for that player to become board, but a rule-system present in any game that the player has not yet mastered or has not learned everything there is to learn about, is NOT the reason why the game is or is not 'fun'. This is where I feel the book's argument completely collapses because he never defines what fun is, it's associated effects (anticipation, gratification, disappointment etc) or why some games are considered fun and others aren't regardless of the learning experience or rule system represented in the game. Instead he spends a lot of the book talking about the cultural significance of games and their relationship to art which is completely subjective.

My 360 has it's own RSS feed

My Xbox360's RSS feed is Here and he is blogging thanks to 360voice.com.

Free Game: In The Pit

This is a game that requires a XBox360 controller to be connected to your PC, but In The Pit is an excellent audio only game that showcases these kinds of games biggest asset, their fiction and simple play rules. You are a monster living in a pit and have to eat whoever falls into the pit. You can Download it Here. It is a short game, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Free Game: Rocket Commander

Rocket Commander is a free game programmed in C#. You are a rocket and need to get through an asteroid field to your target.

There is a Mods Page on the site that will allow you to download Flower Commander which turns the asteroids into none lethal Sunflowers. Plus there is a preview of a space ship mod called Coop Commander which is a mod that adds deeper missions and ships that you an pilot.

The thing about this game is that it is running on the .Net Framework, which C++ programmers would have you believe makes all applications run with appallingly awful performance issues. They consider the facts that it doesn't crash when it launches a miracle and that there is nothing better than an application written in C++. They are wrong of-course and this is the future.

BitTorrent Magazine

I thought This was kind of funny.

State of the Blog: Just Thinking

A while ago I Posted about blogs working against the bloggers that write them and the reason why I titled this block 'Self Deprecating' is an aknolagement that I would indeed make a tit of myself with some of my posts.

Now as a hardcore gammer these comments are going to come out of me wither they are on this blog or not. No I didn't like Halo, Halo 2, Half Life 2 and I think Lucasarts is making crap. And it occures to me that this might hinder me getting a job in the future. Specifically in the games industry because any employer becomes partly responsibe for their employees and wouldn't want to be assosiated with such deprecating comments. No-matter how true they might be.

So I am just wondering wither when it comes to getting a job if I should clean out anything witch directly targates a franchise or remove this blog all-together. I believe it would be premature to do anything right now, but just thinking anyway.

Oblivion Paid Expansions

The Orrey is now avalible for Oblivion, costs 150 points from Marketplace whitch works out at £1.28. And I have been reading the Backlash on the Bethusday Forums.

After thinking about this I have come to a few conclusions. The horse armor wouldn't even be worth a download if it was free. The Orray supposadly adds ten minuets of gameplay and some powers whitch nobody will proably use. The mighty powers include gamplay ogmenting additions like fortify inteligence by ten for a minuet and such. Whitch is frankly useless as there are scrolls all through the game that do the exsact same thing.

The reason why I think there has been a backlash from this content is because they don't change or add anything new to the gameplay. They won't make you replay the game from the start after adding them, but from the description of them on Markstplace they offer the promis of something more than they deliver. Hence the backlash.

I don't know why they are charging so many points for this content either. If they could charge one point and still turn a profit, then why not!
What people want is a mod that will deliver what is described. So say another race you can play as, some easter themed skins or themed quest, more weapons & armor or maybe even some more animals that players can ride. Add a ridable dragon that breaths fire, does lots of damage and players would love it.

Something that I think they could add that would also be well recieved would be a Warewolf quest series, like there was in Morrowind. Put a few long quests in there and it would well be worth the points. Plus players would be left with something to play with that would drematically change gameplay. The Vampire thing in Oblivion is irratating so shove something in so the player can controle transformation and it would be brilliant.

Additional: Thinking about it a giant wolf that players can ride that does a lot of damage in combat would be perfect because it would be able to use the same horse animations. Bethesda they would only have to add the model and some sounds. I say it should do a lot of damage in combat because otherwise it is just a model and some sounds without adding anything to the gameplay.

Halo 2 (Completed)

I didn't get on with the original Halo because the fiction was lame and the level design consisted of the level designer using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V a too much. Halo 2 does nothing much to change that and in some respects the level design is even worse than the previous game. At several points in the game you are put into a massive hall and (I at least) spend the next fifteen minuets trying to find the door out long after everything has been killed.

The level design brief for every stage in game goes something like this:

He walks into a big room. And stuff comes out. And shoots at him. And then more stuff comes out. And shoots at him. And then he goes through door to get to next room.

There is a suspended space station that is kind of interesting. I thought the big cable was an antenna at first, but it is a cable going up into the sky. No word on what the station is for or what the cable is attached to, but judging by the design of the level I think the station is a deathmatch arena with lots of stuff to kill.

The fiction in the game is like walking into an action film half way through. There is a slight mention this time about the construction of Halo and we finally findout how it acts as a weapon although still no mention on why it has all those islands or plants on it's inner edge. I assume the whole thing was constructed to destroy the flood, but that is just my own assumption as the game doesn't even attempt to offer an explanation.

The Covenant are very affluent so how the hell they ended up going to war with the Americans I don't know. And yes I am also am assuming they are at war with the Americans as the game also offers no explanation in this respect either. Maybe it was the Covenant's refusal to buy Hollywood films and end the domestic dominance of the market.

Some of the weapons in the game are a little bit awkward to use and having to keep picking stuff up from the ground only adds to their awkwardness, but it slows down gameplay so maybe this is by design. And to prevent the player from simply running through all the levels.

I could go into micro detail and talk about how the second level earth city doesn't feel alive because there are no civilians or evidence of life except a few abandoned trucks, but all the levels in the game suffer from not being anything else than deathmatch arenas for the Chief to fight in.

Multiplayer is good.
1/5

E3 2006 Floor Plans

Yep this year's E3 Floor Plans are up. Nintendo and Sony are both in the west hall while Microsoft is in the South Hall where all the big publishers are. And that makes since when you consider this year Microsoft will be announcing a storm of games.

From what I know, Sony will be showing off some games behind closed doors running on PS3 Dev Kits. And Nintendo will show off what they hope to release in Japan later this year.

The one to watch will be Microsoft has even now 75% of what income most developers make from multiplatform titles comes from the PS2 (it's probably because of the amount of PS2 owners). Microsoft has to change this otherwise getting support from publishers in the long-run will be very hard.

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion (Completed)

It took 76 hours, 52 minuets and 58 seconds, played over 23 days for me to complete the main quest and all the achievement giving Guild side quests. That averages out at about three and a quarter hours a day. I manually saved 633 times and here are my other stats:

Days Passed: 262
Active Quests: 7
Quests Completed: 135
Skill Increases: 444
Training Sessions: 53
Novice Skills: 7
Apprentice Skills: 7
Journeyman Skills: 4
Expert Skills: 3
Master Skills: 0
Bounty: 0
Fame: 115
Infamy: 78
Days Jailed: 53
Items Stolen: 1762
Items Pickpocketed: 4
Trespasses: 0
Assaults: 62
Murders: 37
Horses Stolen: 3
Largest Bounty: 8505
Creatures Killed: 911
People Killed: 506
Places Found: 136
Locks Picked: 239
Lockpicks Broken: 106
Souls Trapped: 22
Ingredients Eaten: 12
Potions Made: 625
Oblivion Gates Shut: 6
Horses Owned: 1
Houses Owned: 0
Stores Invested In: 0 (no I don't know how to invest in a shop)
Books Read: 16
Artifacts Fund: 4
Hours Slept: 1878
Hours Waited: 1791
Days as a Vampire: 21
Necks Bitten 7
Jokes Told: 275
Diseases Contracted: 15
Niroots Found: 40

Oblivion is a good game, the most exciting moment in the game is the anticipation you feel just before you enter your first Oblivion Gate. However the worst and most tedious part of the game is having to close those very same Oblivion Gates. This isn't however the game's biggest failure. The biggest failure is by the designers not thinking the game through at design-time.

For starters although the graphics looks great the castle architectures would have benefited greatly if the level designers had of visited an actual castle. Some of the great architectural qualities of castles, chapels, green rooms, ball rooms, dungeons etc, and some of their most impressive defences, murder holes, "portcullis", arrow slits etc, are completely absent from the game. I don't know why because the architecture present is so generic that there is no question that the game would have benefited greatly from these additions.

O' yes and that big tower in the Imperial City. I CAN'T go to the top! Who said THAT wasn't an important feature!!! As a player you put something like that in front of me and of course I want to get to the top. Otherwise don't put it there.

Another big criticism is the language of the towns folk. All the voice actors have all recorded the same generic lines as each other. So you speak to a guard and get the 'Hero of Kvatch' speech, then talk to a woman and get the exact same 'Hero of Kvatch' speech, but with a different voice, yet she will repeat what the guard said word for word. Writing a little bit of variation for each voice actor's script shourly wouldn't have been so difficult.

Also with the language, all the towns folk have the same primp and proper way of speaking. The entire of Cyrodiil has the exact same vocabulary. It is as if the writer wrote all the spoken text with just one character in mind. There are a few exceptions, the Gray Fox for example starts every sentence with "Capital!", the Emperor has some great lines, Martin, Jauffre and there is a demon you can speak to later in the game who has a slightly different way of speaking, but the use of language is all so BLAND! Give me people with pirating accents, people that say one word too many times, people who use abbreviations, people who speak too fast, people who always shout, lisps, I don't care just not this same primp and proper way of speaking all the time.

Then there is the emotion of the characters in the game witch detracts from the believability of characters. First they are like "GET OUT OF MY HOME!" then they are "hello friend" and then "I AM CALLING THE GUARDS!" even when they asked you over or where expecting you. This could have been fixed with just a little bit more coding on the quests, but it wasn't done.

Almost every quest involves lots of killing and I have no idea how many times I have done a "somebody went to that cave, could you go and see what happened?" quest. Which almost always results in finding more dead bodies.

It might sound like I am being a bit harsh and I am because these issues should have been spotted at design-time. I am not even going to talk about the limited dialogue options which seem to have only been placed into the game to create the illusion of a conversation or the fact that the speech-game to get people to like you is a wasted feature. These faults are acceptable as one is a time & money thing and the other is a failed attempt which is ok because at least they tried. The lockpicking game could have been a negative, but is great and it wouldn't hurt to see other developers copy that or try something similar.

A good solid simplified RPG then, but the plot misses something and all the side quest stories miss something. Sometimes I think there might be a good story attached to the quest then it ends in a lot of killing, so maybe the quests are either too predictable or they need better closure. The main quest is not great, it is far too automotive to feel player driven or that player's action is even needed. Then there are the whole "how are oblivion gates opened" and "why would someone open one" questions. You can assume power, but the best villains in any game always have good motives for what they do and the evil guy in oblivion is only on screen for a couple of minuets at best so there is no chance of him commenting on the human condition.

Maybe Oblivion is a great game and I just have a problem with how the fiction is communicated to the player.
3/5

Best Selling Coincidence

The best selling game on XBox Live! Arcade is GeometryWars and the best retail selling game on the XBox360 is Oblivion, but the similarity comes when you look at their game logos.



Coincidence!? I think not.

Random Fact

Video games sold in Japan that are made by foreign developers are labelled as foreign games in stores.

Union Jack 400 Years Old Today

Yep the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom is 400 years old today.

Coming Attraction On Arcade: Mad Tracks

Mad Tracks is a Micro Machines styled, Revolt gameplay type racing game by a French developer that is coming to XBox Live Arcade about June time and there is an interview with the Business Dev over at K1lla’s XBox Domain.

Bankshot Billiards 2

I have been itching to get a new arcade title for a couple pf weeks now and Bankshot Billiards 2 just got updated with a 3D version. This is an update so anybody who bought (1200 points or £10.20) the old 2D version will get this when they are prompted to update the game.

It's a good virtual billiards game and probably the best I have ever played. Plus with it being an arcade title it is very convenient to start and has multiplayer, but I think I should have waited until I got a bigger TV because it is very difficult to see anything on my 14" screen. Not as bad as the multiplayer score table on BF2:MC. but it's not far off.

EDIT: It is Bankshot not Buckshot.

Killer App Being Killed by Halo

I have been noticing a slight change in language recently. Instead of people saying 'killer app' more and more poeple in the games industry are saying 'Halo'.

This is our killer app.
This is out halo.

They need a killer app.
They need a halo.

Not hared anybody from Nintendo or Sony saying it, but all the western journalists and Microsoft folks seems to have gotten used to the term. Not sure if it will stick.

Boot and Nuke

If you ever want to make sure you remove information from a hard drive Darik's Boot and Nuke is what you should be looking at.

More Oblivion Lockpicking

Roger Wong had made a video showing the different tumbler speeds and sounds. And this technique works very well, but there is an even better way. By doing the Nocturnal Quest which gives you an unbreakable Skeleton Key.

2Ghz PowerPC Vs 2Ghz Intel

Gear Live has a Video Up with two Macs. One is a Mac desktop G5 PowerMac with two PowerPC CPUs running at 2Ghz each with 4.5GB of ram. And the other is a MacBook Pro with one Intel Dual Core CPU with 1GB of ram.

Now just a couple of years ago apple was singing how much faster the PowerPC was, but by this test where they compiled a load of Java files (a CPU and hard drive intensive task) the laptop was 36% quicker. Even though it had less ram, a slower hard drive, access time to the hard drive was limited because it is encrypted and laptop is just running one CPU. I think this calls into question what Apple has been preaching for the past few years.

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved (Completed)

I finally managed to get the converted one million point score on Geometry Wars Retro Evolved (my actual high score is 1,264,325) so I guess that means that I have completed it.

This is going to be very short because this game is just very good in all areas. It's addictive nature comes from what I am now going to call Nondeterministic Death Phenomena or NDP for short. What this means is that at no point in the game do you know when you are going to die. This means that when you do die there is an immediate knee-jerk reaction that death could have been avoided. GWRE achieves this by having very simple and easy to kill enemies.

"I almost had it that time!"
- GWRE Player

Compared to the Retro game mode Evolved is alot easier with slower opponents and a bigger game surface. No single enemy would ever possibly kill the player in a straight fight. The player is completely overpowered considering the enemies, but because GWRE keeps filling the screen with more and more enemies with each passing second there is an ever increasing chance that the player might die by being placed in an awkward or unfamiliar situation. Difficulty of the game thus increases by the control and increasing number of these death circumstances as the game progresses by filling the screen with loads of easy opponents.

NDP is also present in Tetris where the shapes will fall ever faster, but GWRE does a much better job at implementing NDP as there is no indication at any stage of the game wither it is going to be a high scoring or low scoring game. With Tetris you can see a game going bad long before the player actually dies, but with GWRE this is not the case at all. Thus GWRE uses NDP to better effect than Tetris, so in theory GWRE should be a more addictive game.

Live support only makes the game ten times better with the leader boards (global ranking can be viewed by cycling through the filters). This is most certainly a modern day classic that everybody will be talking about for years to come.
5/5

Additional: Just been thinking and the game could be made much more addictive by having a better reward sound for killing the enemies.

Oblivion Horse Armor

Complete wast of £1.70. Will not protect horse from damage and only gives you two types, steel and elven.

Oblivion Gold Cheat

This is very easy to do.

Essentially what this cheat is based around is that if you have a weapon equipped and are riding a horse then you can't unequip the weapon. If you try selling the equipped weapon then you won't give the weapon to the sales person because you are on a horse, but you will still get the gold for the weapon from the NPC you are bartering with.

1) Equip your most expensive weapon.
2) Get on a horse.
3) Ride to Kvatch (the little camp of refugees south of the Oblivion gate)
4) Talk to 'Batul gra-Sharob' the female Orc and start Bartering.
5) Now you can sell that weapon as many times as you like, it won't be removed from your inventory, but you will get the gold for it.

Copy Protection On Demos

So I downloaded the new Tomb Raider Legend Demo and all I can say is that "the security module could not be activated" because that is as much play experience as I got from it.

I don't know why anybody would put copy protection on a downloadable demo, but in this case and in a few others it has stopped me demoing the game. If that happens I go from "might not buy game, but see what the demo is like first" to "fuck you publishers, see if I ever buy anything from you again".

Oblivion 28 Hours In

This is what I know:

• Most of the quests involve people bitching about someone else or require lots of killing. So far in twenty eight hours I have only had two quests that do not involve slaughter. The first is someone who is pissed off about somebody in another town that looks like them (who turns out to be their twin brother, but that quest later requires some killing) and the other is the thieves guild initiation quest where you have to steal a diary (specifically without killing anyone).
  
  
• Took me ages to figure out how lockpicking truely works.
  
  
• The speechcraft thing where you can persuade people to like you is add and experience breaking. Fallout did an excellent job with it's talking heads by having multiple toned speech options and depending on how you communicated with the NPC influenced their opinion of you. With Oblivion you just select a keyword and that NPC will tall you what they know. There is no actual conversation, they just talk at you. And then if they don't like you, there is a little puzzle game you can play to get them to like you. I just think this feels odd.
  
  
• Controls and menus are excellent.
  
  
• A walkthrough for almost any quest is unnecessary because the quest description tells you what to do step-by-step. It says stuff like "you should talk with" or "you should follow" or even "go to wherever and kill whoever" which is a common one.
  
  
• the game is filled with bugs, as is traditional for RPGs. The game has locked-up once and I have had three CD read errors that required me to restart the game so far.
  
  
• Most of the quests do involve a lot of killing. I walked into a tavern once and the first thing the bar maid said to me was "THAT [insert name] MUST BE KILLED NOW!" and that turned out to be a Necromancer who I went and killed.
  
  
• The music is the same everywhere so all the towns have the same feel to them.

I think maybe the conclusion I am coming to is that this is an excellent game, but because of some short sighted design decisions it isn't as good as it could have been. I am still very much enjoying it and it has been years since I last played a free-form-RPG.

Random Thought: Great Dance Club Music

The difference between dance music and club dance music is that the club stuff will enhance any drug trip you are on while listening to the music.

Random Thought

I think people's voices are increasing in pitch because less people smoke now.

Random Idea

I think this one is good enough to make it to my black book, but it's not technically a game idea.

Have cameras fitted in every room of your house. Then wear a headset with LCD screens so that all you can see is the output from those cameras. Then you have an instant fixed camera third person view of your life. I really think it would be cool because you would actually be abandoning the standard first person viewpoint of human living for something else. Imagine trying to make breakfast or go the toilet like that! And could you extend that to other areas like driving!?

Michael Jackson Composed Sonic 3's Music

This is one of thoes crazy theries that actually Stands Up Very Well.

GameSpy Daily: Fargo's Impression of GDC2006

Was just checking my email and Fargo who writes the very small daily column in the email had this to say about this year's GDC:

In the coming days I'll likely write up a full editorial about this, but this year's Game Developers Conference (see our GDC coverage) had a very different spirit than years past. There was a lot of hope in the air. In previous years a pall of gloom had almost seemed to descend over the place. Everybody was talking about the bad news: spiraling development costs, lack of innovation, difficult work environment, lack of opportunity... But this year, the outlook was positive.

Several factors were at work. Both Nintendo and Microsoft were fostering warm fuzzy feelings of innovation and outreach -- Nintendo with their unusual experimental wide-appeal games, and Microsoft with Xbox Live Arcade. (The latter looks to prove that small developers now have a platform to release simpler titles on and still turn a profit, and the company is really hungry for experimental games.) Meanwhile, Will Wright's talk last year spawned off a flurry of talks about prototyping at this year's show, along with other new ways of developing large games while still remaining flexible and innovative. In the past, attendees would complain that new and different game ideas were unseen by the masses and could never achieve success. This year, students showing off crazy game concepts could boast about millions of downloads and the Independent Game Festival was absolutely outstanding.

There were no big announcements at this year's show, no groundbreaking headline-grabbers. Despite that, I found this year's show to be inspiring for game creators from all over the spectrum.

And I would have to agree with him. I am once again a console gamer. There are actual gammes once in development that I want to play. So there is something changing and I think it is the abandonment of the cash cow squeesing that had been going on for so many years.

Extremely Large Game Collection

An Interview with the videogamecollector who possibly has the worlds largest game collection ever (well with the exception of the New Mexico Desert of course).

Cheaper Microsoft Points

I have been looking for a way of getting cheaper Microsoft Points and here is the best I have come up with.

From Live each MP is worth £0.0085 nomatter which package is bought from Marketplace.
If however I got to Game and buy their 2100 points for £17.50 pack then it works out at £0.0083 per MP.

Not much cheaper but that means for every 60 points I buy from Game, I save £0.01. Whitch also means that by buying from Game instead of Live with that pack I get 35 FREE points!!!

Not a lot I know, but it's the best I could come up with.

Battlefield 2 Modern Combat on the 360

Xboxyde has a Video of BF2 for the 360 and it looks great. Rather than doing a standard port the team had replaced all the graphics in the game and it shows. In fact I think it looks better than Oblivion.

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion: Master Lockpicking Guide

I have been playing around with Oblivion's lockpicking and discovered a few things that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. So I present this mini-guide that will help you defeat all locks in the game, overcome the need to carry hundreds of lockpicks and shy away from difficult locks.

The tutorial for lockpicking in Oblivion only tells you to toss the rails up into the upper part of the lock. The FAQs so far on the web talk about timing, but I have found a slightly better way of describing how successful lockpicking works.

A higher security level will make lock picking easier. Lockpicking works by tossing a rail up into the upper half of the lock and pressing the 'A' button on the 360 pad (or by left clicking with the mouse on the PC version). Once all rails are locked in the upper half of the lock, the lock becomes unlocked. If you don't press the 'A' button at the right time the rail will come crashing down, break your lockpick and you will have to start again with a new lockpick.



What nobody will tell you however is that there are different speeds to the rails. If you push a rail upwards the game will take your security skill, lockpick skill and luck to calculate a rail speed. If you are better than the lock, the rail will rise slowly and then fall slowly making it easier to pick. If however the lock is better than you, then you are going to have to keep tossing the pick up until the rail rises at the lower speed. The trick is to listen to the rails noise because the lower speed makes a slightly different noise to the faster tosses. I have managed to pick locks on noise alone. Simply toss each rail a few times until you are confident you can lock it, once it raises at the slower speed, lock it, don't bother with the faster tosses. With this technique I have managed to pick Hard locks without loosing a single pick and I am only level four and I am not even playing a thief character either (in fact I haven't yet managed to successfully pick pocket someone yet). And the auto-lockpick breaks all my picks too, so taking your time really does payoff.

One last thing, if you want to break into a house without being seen or chased by guards, go into sneak mode next to the door you want to open, wait until the eye in the centre of the screen goes dark and then activate the lockpicking mode. Time is stopped at this point so you can take as much time as you like. Once the lock is open you will be inside, but because you where in sneakmode when you picked the lock and nobody was watching, no guards will be looking for you. The only thing you have to be concerned about is the homeowner.

Planetside Reserves

Sony Online Entertainment has just launched Planetside Reserves witch is a free version of Planetside with some scaled back features.

It is obvious that they are hopping to repopulate Planetside, but because you can't win or loose in the game, that makes it a very limited MMOFPS Video Toy.

Got Oblivion

So I got Oblivion today. I put the game disk in and then I played a little (nine hours) and I like it. Not sure if I would call it the greatest game ever of all time, but it's up there.

Gaming Hub > Metroid Prime Hunters Highscore

Looks like I EAT POO is at the number one spot in Metroid Prime Hunters Leaderboard.

Nintendo GO Features Sega Games

Nintendo GO (that's the Revaluation's new name) will feature over 1,000 old classic titles from Saga's old systems and TurboGrafx. This is great, but old titles are old titles and if you don't care about the law you can already find sites that allow you to download and play these games already in emulators. So what the long term appeal factor is in this and wither the GO will sell better than the Cube is yet to be seen.

PS3 Demos

YAY! A Video of the demos. OMG they don't look any better than what I could run on my GeForce4!

Ok maybe my GeForce4 couldn't run the ducks demo, but everything else looks very runnable. Probably wrong, but I wasn't impressed. Still there is always E3 for that.

hmm

Was thinking about doing a mini review on all the Live Arcade titles, but one of the fun things about arcade is the ability to try all the games. So mini reviews would be a bit pointless.

Oblivion Post Development

One of the Oblivion developers has Posted about how developing the game has affected him. Certainly worth a read.

Starforce Just Went Too Far

Starforce one of the many copy protection systems that publisher put on game disks to prevent piracy, has decided to start forcing immediate reboots on users computers if anything suspicious is detect by their embedded software. No word on what a suspicious action might be, but because I don't like my system rebooting without my consent or notification (making me think there is something wrong with my system) Here is A List of games that I am now boycotting (I am going to impose a new level of boycotting for these and refuse to acknowledge their existence).

To see if Starforce has installed it's driver level DRM copy protection on your system (like it was on mine):

1. Right click on My Computer from the desktop and select Properties.
   
2. Select the Hardware tab at the top and click the Device Manager button
   
3. On device manager click View -> Show Hidden Devices
   
4. Then scroll down to see if you have anything with Starforce inthe name.

If you do then you should download This Tool witch will ask you to reboot your system to remove the drivers.

Battlefield 2142

When EA said that the next Battlefield game would be set in the future the general reaction wasn't positive, but that's before anybody seen The Trailer. Now it looking to be one of this year's hottest titles.

Final Year Project Progress

The bastard program works! Finally I can get on with it. The bug has kept me at bay for six weeks and I have just fallen further and further behind with the whole project, now it is fixed and I can play a game from start to finish with all the game logic working just as it should.

It wasn't even one bug either, but at the time I was writing the code to finish it I was doing so many hours on it that I didn't know what I was writing. All the logic was there just that I had gotten confused about what I was doing. And then when I made repeated attempts to fix it I didn't understand what I was doing because of the sheer number of methods that where being called.

The odd thing about fixing this is that I think by completing my Compilers assignment last week, that might have actually contributed to giving me the skill necessary to find and fix the faults with my project because that dealt with loads of loops, passes and obscure seemingly random errors.

XNA Asset Tracking

Just finished watching the XNA Overview and the most interesting part of that is they took Mech Commander 2 (purely because they where allowed to release the source code for it) and had a look at it's asset usage in XNA Studio. They found that 40% of all the textures that the game loads where never used.

Play and Charge

Handed in my Compilers work today (woke up at 11, think it needed to be in for 12 got there at 11:45) and on the way back got a scart adaptor from Curries, had a play on their 360 display unit and if I had a memory card unit I could have downloaded an exclusive Burnout Revenge car that is only available from the demo kiosk. Just a shame I don't have either Burnout or a Memory unit, maybe if they had something going on a kiosk that I really wanted I might get one. Then went over to PC World to see what their demo unit was like, same disk, but the unit kept freezing so I had a look at their new flat panel screen display and they where all running some grainy Driver game trailer (it was a very poor quality encode).

Then on the way out I had a look to see if they had any play and charge kits in stock and they did, and they where £14.99. So I bought one because that matches the best price that I have seen online (not often I see that from PC World). I was going to try using the same rechargeable batteries that I use for my digital camera, but that would still interrupt gameplay if my batteries ranout.

A Few Days of 360 Action

I know everybody said the 360 was good, but actually owning one is SO much better. To my mind whatever Sony or Nintendo does will be inferior. Not because their products won't be good, but because they won't have the heritage that is prevalent in the 360. The 360 builds directly on to where the original XBox left off. It is progressive in the true sense of the word. Plus new innovative features into the mix like the integrated Gamer Cards don't just put the bar up a notch, but a whole generation ahead.

Before I received my 360 someone on the Evil Avatar forums said the 360 was XBox 1.5 and I couldn't argue because I say the same thing about the PlayStation2 as it came out a year earlier than the Cube and Xbox. And you could see it in it's graphics capabilities that it wasn't truly last gen. Well the 360 is next gen, so next gen that makes me weak at the knees to think of what delights we will be subjected to over the next five years.

Well done Microsoft you deserve every bit of future success that is coming to you.


P.S
I still don't have actual game disk to put in this thing, BUT I DON'T CARE! WHOO!

XBox360 Hacked

It took the guys four months to hack it, but The Specialist has been credited with the hack. As far as I know it is something to do with the drives firmware and the hack allows the 360 to run backed-up games.

Also this supposedly works on both DVD drives types. The guys aren't going to release the hack because this would allow modified games to run on Live (as far as I can tell anyway). If you read the thread lookout for comments by TheSpecialist and robinsod.

Happy St Pads Day

No I am staying in, work and XBox.

IGOTMY360!

It came thismorning and it's birthday on the serial strip is two weeks ago. Been playing Outpost Kaloki X which is a game I almost bought for the PC, but it was just a little too much for what it was worth, but with arcade I think it was only £6.

Out of box experience for the 360 is excellent, not like opening a Microsoft product at all and my hard drive came with twelve music tracks, an Adidas and Warren Miller Films ads. Plus Hexic HD which isn't my kind of game, but it was a nice surprise. There are a couple of things which aren't perfect with the 360 like how the console is effectively useless while it is downloading content. And the console and powersupply does seem to run very warm, but I truest Microsoft have looked into this closely.

I had a play around with the Media Connect and that is excellent, but for all this cool stuff I still don't have an actual game disk to put in the thing. Not that it matters because I have been playing demos and Outpost Kaloki for the past few hours. If Sony can match the quality of the 360 then I will get a PS3 too because the level of craftsmanship here is amazing. Plus with Live there is always something to do and I don't think I will ever be board of the games I have with this as there is so much here.

Anyway my GamerTag is Decompiled feel free to send me a Friends Invite if you haven't already. Now I am going to download some more demos and finish my Compilers assignment. Wanted to do that thismorening, but woke up late and got distracted.

It's Coming!

We are pleased to inform you that your order for has been dispatched by our team in Basingstoke.

Thank you very much for ordering from us here at gameplay, you should receive your package in 1 working day.

This dispatch contains the following:

Xbox 360 Console - Premium Pack

MSoft did say that the shortage would be sorted by the end of the month and it looks like they where right.

As far as this impacting work goes it shouldn't because I have gotten the habit of working from 7pm to whenever I go bed. Compilers should be in tomorrow, then I just got to start my Service Strategy report and catchup with my Final Year project which will either be something very quick or take all of next week.

Everything Could Change Next Week

Monday is the start of the GDC and Microsoft will be showing off XNA and a demonstration of how cool Managed XBox360 programming is (been lots of movement inside MS for that). Hopefully this will get developers off their needless addiction to C++. The senior programmers need to just faceup to the fact that Managed Code is just better in almost every way and the ways in which it isn't better aren't worth worrying about. Plus I won't go into the industry as a programmer unless they move to Managed code. That alone should be enough of a reason for them all to switch.