• 1Mar 08

  Red rings of sadness...

  So the "fix" that is the towel trick leads to fleeting results...so while yes the 360 did start workign again it started locking up after a week and overheating on it's own. It got to the point where I had to put a household fan pointing directly at the back of it to get it to run. Even then it locked up randomly. Until the point when I tried DMC 4 the other night on my second playthrough and it RRoD on me. To be honest I've been waiting for that to happen because the lockups have gotten out of hand, almost to the point of me just going out and buying a new 360. Luckily, or unluckily, I got the RRoD and Microsoft has sent a box to me. It has yet to arrive, but it is on the way.

  The funniest thing of the entire ordeal was when I called Microsoft and the operater wanted to confirm that my xbox "has expressed 3 red flashing lights" Wow. Didn't realize my 360 had something to say or even express, but that is the case.

  The way I look at it is that the RRoD phenom is similar to puberty. Not everyone gets there at the same time, but eventually and inevitably everyone will.

  Oh and I bought a new car today. Yay for spending 5 hours at the Honda dealer! Achievement unlocked!

  • Posted Mar 1, 2008 10:01 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 4Jan 08

  Red rings of FUN...

  So I know I haven't updated this in a while. Mostly cause I'm busy as hell, but also my opinions have been rather voiltile as of late, and I won't want them to be taken as fanboy drival.

  Anyways I'm bored and I still have about 15 minutes on my egg timer as my 360 bakes itself to goodness while wrapped in towels. Yes, I have fianlly recieved the red rings of death...I have a launch 360 and have treated this thing like a newborn baby since I've had it. Then it decided to go feral on me. It's been rather dodgey where it just locks up with no red lights and the screen locks up and fragments up. Then tonight, I'm sittign down to play some hot assassin's creed achievement action and "Hi, I'm your buzz kill red ring of fun!"

  So I searched the internet for a demo of the infamous towel trick to see if it sounds reasonable enough to try. I found cheapy D from cheapassgamer.com video of the technique so I decided to give it a try. Now I'm at 12 miinutes, gonna check real quick to make sure my living room isn't on fire....

  ...ok no fire, but the outter towels are warm...and I've got 10 minutes to go..wow.

  The only thing I can think as to why this would work is because there are like 54 sodier points and it one of those are disconnected Microsoft assumes you are the haxxor. So you over heat the system and that heats it enough to soften the sodier enough to reconnect. Though that's my take on it, not sure if it's true. I'm just waiting to see what comes ofCES, where I'll know I can buy a new 360 with smaller microchips and more hard drive etc, because I don't want a bootleg refurbished model from 18004myxbox. I'm a snog when it comes to game systems. I've had every major system at launch and refuse to have one that's been touched by humans other than the ones on the conveyer belt at the factory...

  This blog has been brought to you by Red Bull and Vodka....

  Update...The towel trick worked...WTF?

  • Posted Jan 4, 2008 10:52 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 1Apr 07

  My GDC experience Day 2. (Now finished!)

  So we made it to GDC in time to get in line for Shiggy's speech. Sometime around 9:45 and it started at 11. Unfortunately since we wanted to make sure we caught Shiggy's keynote we had to miss cliffy B's speech at 9:00. Oh well. So when we arrived at the building we found that they had decided to string the line around the block instead of around the building making the walk to the end of it exceptionally longer. The previous day we went from 3 people inline and absorbed about 10 more friends just standign there so the green shirts were in force gustopo mode on thursday.(The green shirts were mostly college kids or interns who acted as the bouncers/guides for the event). We decided to see if we could catch anyone we knew and jump in line with them so we went around the line from front to back. Well this one green shirt decided to be a nazi and try to tell us we couldn't go around that way. My buddy Ron wasn't havign that, he's like I'm goign this way and we just followed him. Then the green shirt said I'm goign to follow you. Ron laughed and proceded forward. Realistaclly we could've taken our gdc lanyards off and been like we're just walked here, who the hell are you to tell me what to do? Anyways it was a bit annoying.

  Sowe got into the Speech after waiting in line for an hour and got seats in the 2nd row. I had another Sessler sighting too, though no suit, casual day apparently. SO we waited, and waited, and waited. Listening to to the same 3 daft punk songs over and over again. "One more time..." echoed over and over again in a repetitve fashion to make you wonder if it was irony that they were goign to play the song..just one more time. SO fianlly it started...very late. It was about 20 minutes late and the crowd went wild when Shiggy came out. He did a clever thign where he stood with 2 other guys and their Mii's showed up on the screen behind them. Then Shiggy went of to talk. First thing he said in English was that he had a REALLY good time last night. I'm guessing a little too good, and that's why he was late. SO he went on to talk for a while about the wife o meter and then about the importance of accessibility in the design of a controller. Most of this stuff can be found in official reports of gdc. I wasn't aware that he was involved in the controller design of every nintendo console! Impressive. Unfortunately it looked like it was going wrong long with no news so we had to make it to the fable presentation so we ducked out at 10 till Noon to go found out what the new innovation was.

  So we made our way to the Presentation and sat in the front. Sat amongst a bunch of Lionhead folks and waited for the presentation. SO Peter was in prime form. He was pretty hilarious and entertaining the whole way through. Then there it was - a dog! The most impressive animal I've ever seen in a game. It's behavior was dead on and a little scarey because it was so convincing. I like that you don't control the dog, the dog reacts to your actions. I'm sure there's plenty up on websites about specifics, but the whole presentation left me very impressed. Especially when he mentioned you could buy every house and shop in a town and have a child or children! I can't wait for Fable 2.

  The rest of the day was Art and Technical presentations which were really cool. The tech on Crysis, is amazing. They had some really nice stuff happening, especially their tree and foilage, and the way they create it.

  The night that followed the gdc was a wild one. As with any fun night it started with Vodka Red Bull. We met up with some people from lionhead, criterion, and the people behind Little Big planet. We caught dinner with them at a French restaurant and then a group of us headed to the White wolf party(The guys behind Eve Online). Wow. That was quite a party they had this little club decked out like a geeks vision of a vampire club! The front room had TVs that were playing from Dusk till dawn. Then we walked to the back room and they had interview with a vampire playign on a big screen and the Song from Rave song from Blade pumping. I had to stop and laugh. Then the best part, the suicide girls! Or at least suicide girl wannabes. Lots of tats and peircings and Leather. SOme were dancing topless in a cage that was suspended above the dance floor. Up on the 2nd floor you could see sillohetes of people getting wiped by domanatrix dressed women. Nothing funnier than fat game makers taking off their shirts and getting wiped. We met up with some folks we knew from Texas and proceded to enjoy the ever flowing free alcohol. Needless to say Icelanders know how to party.

  After we were there a while and took some incriminating photos of my wife with one of the suicide girls we went to another party that was supposedly jumping. When we got there it looked like an awesome party ended 2 hours earlier. It was just a bunch of strange cat in the hat kids playing with bouncing balls and some phillip glass worthy music playing. So we decided to take off as it was about 3 and we had stuff to get to for Friday's GDC.

  • Posted Apr 1, 2007 2:52 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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