Wii've Missed You?

OK! Let me just quickly explain the title of this post, which I've now used twice. Once I got over the initial disappointment of my 360 dying early last week I thought that it might actually be a good thing, which is when I wrote my last post. I was looking forward to going back and diving in my neglected, yet growing, games collection for both the Wii and PS2, with some games even quietly sitting in their wrappers. But, as you can see now, the title of this post has a question mark after it.

Since my Xbox died, the days have slipped by and I've done no more than 2-3 hours of gaming since. Before my Xbox died, that total would have been almost a daily minimum (I have no life, I know). So, as you can see... something isn't quite right but what is it that's slowing me down? It's not like I'm doing anything else with my time, in-fact I'm really quite BORED.

There are a few reasons I can think of but I don't quite want to talk about them yet, because they are still simmering away in my mental notebook. So, instead I'm going to try and force myself into playing more, it's not a good sign that I have to force it rather than switch on almost instinctively but that's something I hope to change.

Maybe it's just me? Any suggestions?

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Loose Ends

I know readers are slim to none so I'm mainly doing this for me because it's buggin' me. When looking back through my posts (the visible ones, at least) there are a few tales that are left un-finished, so that's what I'm goin to do now.

Blogger and CSS:

As you can see, I am currently a template whore, though I did make a couple of changes (I'm sure Google don't want me hiding their search bar, which isn't actually that bad). I just couldn't wrap my head around Bloggers innards and numerous tags. I tried to make the page bulletproof but Blogger is pretty much incapable of valid code, which is a shame... Wordpress can do it... but anyway, here we are. I'm currently planning my next move for an online home.

The (first) Red Ring of Light:

Soon after I got my 360 back Microsoft announced an extension to their warranty, so I got my money back! Happy days, just thought I should put that straight as they did a good thing.

The PC Saga:

After a trip to a PC repair shop and a new motherboard I discovered the CPU was to blame. No Google search helped me figure this out, neither did the PC repair shop and they charged me £30 for the privilege! So I sent the CPU back, bought a Quad Core in the mean time and ended up with a perfectly good, replacement CPU, motherboard and a £15 graphics card (bargain!). Luckily my sister wanted a new PC, so I built her one for a knock down price. Both are running fine now. Aww.

Assassin's Creed

Ok, I'm slightly very ashamed of this one. After my epic rant over the bug rich game... I went back and completed it, I didn't collect the flags I had achievements for, I just did what I had to for the 1000 gamerscore. And I used a walkthrough to find the collectables, what kind of whore am I. An achievement whore, thats what.

END!

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Wii've Missed You

Well, here I am again, taking another stab at this blogging business. For this, there are a few reasons. First off, my Xbox 360 died (again) last night, so it's out of commission for at least 2 weeks (2 weeks! what am I goin to do!?). Secondly, I've been wanting to start chatting more about games, the Internets, projects, life (self-absorbed? I'll come to that), about anything that takes my fancy and I've been kind of inspired to actually do what I want by twitter and by one or two of it's inhabitants. Finally, I've been in a not too nice place lately, enough to seek council, so I'm trying different things to generally scrape myself up from the floor. I do tend to feel totally self-absorbed when I try blogging and twittering but something has to change and I need to build up some confidence and self-esteem if I am to survive. If I'm not choosing the right way to do this, I'm sure I'll find out and my blog will fade further into the ether rather quickly.

I know this blog is very unlikely to be seen by... pretty much anyone but while popularity is not my main focus, I'd still very much like to hear from anyone regarding my musings/rants/experiences in an effort to just make the world a slightly better place, I guess.

Thank you.

P.S. I didn't actually intend to write that much, instead I wanted to talk about what I'll be doing while my 360 is at the doctors (thus the title) but I'll save that for next time.

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Assassin's Creed Smells

For the past two weeks I've been making my way through Assassin's Creed on the Xbox 360. Today everything came to an abrupt halt.

• I can deal with the occasional glitch. No, not the ones programmed into the game, which mean that you can't skip the cut scenes... ever, they even made an achievement out of it, gotta catch 'em all (or 85% of 'em, at least). I mean real glitches... or BUGS as they should probably be known, like:
  • Altair standing still in a crowd of 4 or 5 guards, despite my endless button mashing. This usually leads to pain or death.
  • Inconsistent abilities, sometimes I can climb a wall, sometimes I can't. I can run up to what seems like a grab point but he does not grab. When running from guards this also leads to pain or death.
  • Wonky AI, where do I start?
  • Animation ignoring walls. I ended up inside some geometry in Acre's Middle District after an animation put me in there. The only way out was to either quit the level or make enough noise to attract a guard and trigger a new animation to get me out.
• I can deal with the repetative gameplay. The game repeats itself 9 times.
• I can deal with the limited script and audio loops as NPCs repeat the same lines over and over again.
• I can deal with a predictable storyline, I was up to the 7th assassination, I knew where it was headed.
• I can EVEN deal with the lack of accessibility features such as basic subtitles, despite the limited script.

I cannot deal with the fact that a game gets released with critical errors, never mind fatal ones.

I was in Acre for the third time, I had one flag left to find, a couple of sub-missions to complete and a final Templar to kill. I found the bugger and was sneaking up on him from behind, via the roof. At this point the disc stopped spinning, it didn't bother me anymore as the disc stopped during gameplay regularly so I presumed there was some legitimate reason for it, it never affected the game. I began my decent, the Templar spotted me, somehow, so I jumped down to kick his ass... he grabbed me, I reversed the grab and threw him to the floor before hitting the "Assassinate" button (if only real life were that simple, ey?). BOOM! The screen dulls, dashboard flies open claiming "The disc is buggered, it must be dirty!!!". I took it out, it was flawless. I put it back in to resume my game, which revealed the image you see above. My save game file was corrupt. How pissed was I?

I had completed 6 assassinations and their tedious sub-missions, I had collected every single flag up until that point. I had killed every Templar. I had listened to Lucy prattle on and on about her 3 abusive boyfriends and her drunken night at band camp, where she woke up in a pool of seminal fluid. I injected caffine into my veins so that I could stay awake to catch the glitches in the cut scenes. I had a full energy bar. So, yeah... I was pretty pissed. Still am, there's fook all I can do about it. It shouldn't even be an issue, was this game even put through testing or was it excused with "yeah, but it looks nice!"? Shite.

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You know you've played too much Bioshock when...

Ok, so Bioshock was released here in the UK on Friday (24th August 2007) and I've been playing the crap out of it all weekend. First up, it's a freakin' awesome game. It totally absorbs you with it's story, it's gameplay and it's environments... everything about it! I'm sure no one needs me to review it here. There is, however, one teeny tiny drawback to something this good... Bioshock is in my head.

I swear that things keep gleaming... I see them, in the corner of eye. I want to go pick them up or search them for cash, ammo and EVE. When it's quiet, I can hear the distant groan of a Big Daddy, in search of someone to protect. All of a sudden I have an interest in Art Deco architecture (is that even right? I'm not sure, sorry). This is what Bioshock has done to me in 3 days it's a haunting experience but I bloody love it! Hopefully, these effects are as far as it will go, I haven't tried to emit electricity, fire or ice from my left hand yet (telekenisis is another story... in a galaxy far, far away) and I don't fancy the whole 'jabbin a glowing needle in my arm to see what it-does' thing... I hate needles.

Bioshock has renewed my faith in gaming, I expect to be playing and replaying it for many years to come. The gaming bar has been raised... good luck to those who want to top it this generation (you're screwed).

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New PC!!!... Oh noes!... *cries*

So... I made a big song and dance about getting a new PC over a month ago now (has it been that long!? crap!)... I got the new PC, I built the new PC, I even took pictures of the build process and my lovely cable management! But thats's where the fun ended and the nightmare began! To save myself some typing, I'll paste my cry for help from the ebuyer forums...

That first moment I booted up I thought all was well, I went into BIOS, told it to boot from the optical drive and rebooted. Windows setup started without a hitch, formatted the drive, installed all the files and rebooted itself... here is where the problem begins. As soon as Windows tries to load I get one of three things:

1. black screen and it reboots itself
2. shows me the windows loading screen (sometimes gets to the setup) but eventually reboots itself
3. BSOD telling me that i should check my memory and video card with the catch all STOP 0x0000007F code.

I've tried eliminating as much as I can from the boot process unplugged all internal USB connections, moved the SATA connections. Disabled the JMicron SATA connection and used the Intel ones. I've run memtest a few times without fail, taken memory sticks out, swapped them around, done a HDD fitness test, updated the motherboard firmware... everything i can think of. Unfortunately I don't have another PCI-e graphics card that I can use to eliminate the 8800 GTS.

The kicker for me came when I put a Ubuntu Live CD in... and it ran, perfectly (if on HAL graphics drivers). I then proceeded to install Ubuntu on to the hard drive and again, not a problem (until I told it to use the nVidia drivers). So why does Ubuntu run and not Windows?

The folks over at ebuyer where as helpful as they could be but no one seems to have experienced anything like the issues I had and they weren't the only ones. I wasted hours and hours googling and searching forums for something similar, but it wasn't to be. In the end the ebuyer users and I came to the same conclusion that a driver is to blame, most likely the graphics. Another kick in the teeth came later when I made an attempt at installing Windows XP Home from my current machine (my dad's idea, way to go dad!). It installed and ran perfectly!

Of course at this point I was getting excited again as I thought, "hey! maybe I can use my new MCE disks to upgrade!!!" So I tried it, installed my graphics drivers first then upgraded the OS before...! Back to square one. *cries*

So now I'm in a position where I probably need to buy ANOTHER operating system, but which one!? XP is old and Vista still doesn't have the support it needs to run properly with all the hardware that is knocking around... a pickle I am in.

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New PC!!!

Well... I got sick of waiting, I've been after a new computer for a while now as my PC is 4 years old, a bit noisy and cries when I play certain games (F.E.A.R. for example, I cry too but not because it's hard work, it's scary!). My idea was to wait a while and get a shiney new iMac when they release the new OSX and the new (rumoured) hardware... but damn it(!) I can't wait any longer so I took the plunge and ordered up the parts to create a new PC while Apple delays it's new OS until... whenever.

I decided that I wasn't going to spend a huge amount of money but still wanted to get a decent PC so I based my spec on this article. But then I pretty much swapped most of the parts out to either cheaper ones or ones I could actually get hold of easier, transforming my spec into the following:

PC Specification. Final Cost £800

Component	Choice
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4ghz) Socket 775 FSB1066 4MB Cache
Motherboard	ASUS P5B Socket 775 Core 2 ready P965 chipset onboard audio ATX
RAM	Crucial 2GB kit (1GBx2), DDR2 PC2-6400, 240-pin DIMM
Hard Drive	Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache
Graphics Card	EVGA e-Geforce 8800 GTS / 320MB / PCI-E / Graphics Card
Power Supply	Antec EarthWatts 500W 80%+ Efficiency PSU - 80mm Fan 4x SATA 2x PCI-E
Case	Antec P182 Gunmetal Grey Super Mid Tower Case
DVD Drive	NEC Optiarc AD-7170S-0B 18x DVD±RW/DL/RAM Serial ATA Black
Card Reader	XPro Black Internal 3.5" 17-in-1 Card Reader With USB2.0 Port
Operating System	Microsoft Windows XP Media Center 2005 SP2B (Release 2)

Some folk may think I've made some odd choices there but I'm pretty happy with it all. I've chosen Windows XP MCE because... well, i don't trust Vista yet, it's new, it's not had a good enough start and support isn't there with drivers, software and whatnot. So I've gone for the fancy version of XP Pro (basically, it is), with it's media center part hopefully becoming useful in the future, when I plan to replace most of my home entertainment with this PC and it's media capabilities (TV recording, DVD playback and, of course, music). I say in the future because I haven't bought all of the parts I need to complete the dream, as it were. I will at least need a digital TV tuner card and a remote/fancy wireless keyboard.

So there it is, my new PC. Coming soon under a desk near... ME! oho! I hope to post the process of creating this beast on here/Flickr soon!

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1 Month Free!

1 Month Free!
Originally uploaded by greenboyroy.

So, I was cutting down the box that my 360 was returned in for recycling when a small piece of plastic fell out, on to the floor. "What is this!?" I cried.

It was only a 1 month gold subscription card for Xbox Live! Get in! Good job I recycle!

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