This Should Work

When the iPhone arrived back in June my wife asked what I thought about it.

“I would buy an iPhone without the phone,” I said, “I’m not about to break our Verizon contract, then spend $500 on a device then pay an even larger monthly cellphone bill.”

Well on Wednesday, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone. After watching the Apple keynote, I-like many other Apple lemmings- too the plunge and pre-ordered the iPodTouch. Even though it won’t ship until the end of this month, I’ve got a warm, giddy feeling inside knowing I’ll receive mine by the first week of October.

There is another big ticket item that comes out later this month, Halo 3. This is THE GAME of the fall/holiday season for pretty much every XBox360 owner. So I-like many other XBox360 owners-took the plunge and pre-ordered Halo 3.

Needless to say, I’ve spent alot of money and have nothing to show for it, yet. But the end of this September/beginning of October I’ll be a happy camper.

This week I finished a huge project at work that’s consumed many weekends and nights over the past two months. So to celebrate I thought I’d go back to playing video games on my Xbox 360 today.

I turned on the console only to see this:

If you’re a Xbox 360 owner you know the light surrounding the button should be green, not red–red means bad.

I went to the Xbox support site and tried all the troubleshooting techniques listed, but none of them would worked, so I broke down and called tech support. After ten minutes of automated messages I finally reached a real person. After speaking with him for five minutes he said “we’ll send it to a service center and have it back to you in two weeks, tops.”

Unlike my first iPod, my first Xbox360 is still under warranty, so it can be re-built at no cost to me. I’m hoping that the DVD player is broken (which is my guess) and that they replace it with one of the newer, quieter drives instead.

So I’ll be with my 360 for a while, which means a few more weeks before ChaoticScroll returns to the Xbox Live world.

image from technabob

Akismet went ape-s$!t on me some time ago and I wasn’t paying attention. Somehow I ended up with enough blog spam to break the Wordpress “Awaiting Moderation”User Interface; there was so much spam (over 7600 blog spam comments) that I had delete them in batches of 30.

It was the same repetitive motion over and over: Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh… all the while flashing on my screen were phrases like these:

• Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
• Hey! If you like that, then you’ll totally dig my manga porn at …
• Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
• COme join our fiesta at cumfiesta…
• Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra
• Love your design. Check out the Hot MILF’s at…
• Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra

While I’m doing this insanely repetitive task of deleting spam (Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh) and thinking about giving up I remembered that once when I was young played a video game (Final Fantasy on the NES) for 6 hours just to level up my characters to the point where I could kill almost any bad guy in one or two rounds. Talk about insanely repetitive, I had my characters walking through the same small area over and over again and fighting the same bad guys over and over again just to gain more experience points. Hell, if I could to that when I was young then I can certainly knock this spam out.

After about an hour of work (Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh. Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra Viagra. Select All, Delete, Confirm, Refresh.) I got down to under 1000 blog comments, the “Awaiting Moderation” function started working again, and I was able to delete the rest of the spam with two mouse clicks.

Since I do have access to my own server, I might try adjusting the file that drives Apache, or try re-installing Akismet. Either option would be better than doing this again.

Prey for the Xbox 360 and PC has been in the making for about 8 years and has now come out of development purgatory to reveal a game that’s visually amazing and relatively fun.

The “story” in this sci-fi first person shooter is par for the course; a dude, Tommy, finds himself on an alien spacecraft and must kill everything that moves in order to save yourself and ulitmately save the world. The plot device that makes this game different this: Tommy can’t die. Tommy, because he’s a Cherokee Indian, enters the “Spirit World” when you run out of life. From the Spirit World you find your way back to the real world and pick up right where you left off.

The Spirit World makes it pretty easy, but this game is still fun because of all the level design. There are two things that help set this game apart from other FPS games: portals and wall-walking. Portals allow Tommy to warp to different place, or he can look through the portals and shoot or throw bombs at enemies .

The wall-walking is where things get a little dizzy. There are pathways that allow Tommy to walk along the walls and ceilings of certain rooms which can make for some dizzy-ing effects. I would find myself tilting my head to the right as Tommy walked along the walls.

This game is based-on the the Doom-3 engine which means it has a high level of light-shadow details. However for a game that has a high-level of details you rarely see it becuase everything is so dark! Most of time I’m running around with some external light source (in most cases Tommy’s Zippo lighter) just to see where the hell I’m going.

Overall it’s a fun game and I’m glad I got it.

[tags]xbox 360, prey[/tags]

ChaoticScroll. It’s my Xbox Live gamertag. If you’re every on Xbox Live and see someone with this name, it’s me.

How did I come up with this name? Well I wish there was some cool story about how I took the initials of my first and last name then blah, blah, blah… but in reality it went like this:

I finally got around to connecting my Xbox 360 to the home network, so it was time to “experience Xbox Live.” I after a few attempts, I was finally able to sign-in and the first question it asks is “Do you want to use your current profile.” I had created a “local” profile on the 360 with a very original gamertag: “carter.” I said “Yes” and Xbox Live checked for the availability of this gamertag but it was taken.

Xbox Live then asks for me to choose another gamertag through two options: Type in another gamertag, or show available gamertags. I picked “Show Available” thinking it would return a list of names like Yahoo! would if you were to sign up for an email account. Things like:

• carter082006
• carter1209334

Instead Xbox Live returned some rather inspired choices; most of them included my name but others were just random. Here’s a small sample of what was “available:”

• RebelCarter
• BookishCarter
• UncutCarter
• SmokedShoe
• SinisterTen

There were about four screens full of different names, but I chose ChaoticScroll because I got tired of looking and couldn’t come up with anything as cool as ChaoticScroll. However, less than 24 hours later it’s becoming very uncool. It sounds too much like I’m trying to cool, like it’s the name of “still-in-development” anime cartoon about a distopia with ninjas and mechs fighting each other. That’s not me. I’m somewhere in between “carter” and “ChaoticScroll” but I don’t have a name for it yet.

It can be changed, but it costs ” 800 Microsoft Points” which can be purchased for the low cost of $12.00. So I’m sticking with this for a little bit.

[tags]xbox 360, xbox live, gamertags[/tags]

For my birthday, my wife completely surprised me and got me an Xbox 360! I was not able to do anything with it for a few days because we were in North Carolina, but the day we got back I had it hooked up and ready for action.

The Xbox 360 is amazing device that really has set the bar high for Sony and Nintendo when they release their next-generation console. First off, it supports HDTV right out of the box, also the console can be turned on and off from the wireless controller, and the controller itself is smaller then the orginal Xbox controller with better button designs.

The day after setting up the console, it traded in a bunch of old games for a couple 360 games (Ghost Recon-Advanced Warfighter, and Project Gotham Racing) to test drive on the new system; I put Ghost Recon for a spin and sat back to enjoy. At first I thought ‘is this it? The graphics aren’t that much better.’ I paused the game to check both the in-game settings and the 360’s settings, both were set to the highest HD quality (1080i). So I went back to the game and within a few minutes of playing I started to see the added improvements.

It’s subtle, but it’s there. With the Xbox 360, the gamemakers are able to add the little things that help the game seem more realistic. In Ghost Recon, if the character is taking cover from gun fire behind a car, the enemies will shoot out the windows and you can see small shards of glass bounce off the character. It’s little details like glass bouncing off the character’s head that were missing from previous games consoles.

I have yet to sign up for an Xbox Live account, but will probably do so in the next few weeks to give it try. I’m also looking forward to trying out the Windows Media Center extension portion of the 360 (videos, music, and photos can be streamed to the 360 from a Windows Media Center PC). If there’s a downside to this device it’s probably one of these two things: It’s loud (cooling fans spin constantly) and the external power supply is rather large (about one-third the size of the game console). But I would trade it for anything.

[tags] xbox 360, Ghost Recon[/tags]

Saturday I was in an 80’s state of mind.

It started early in the morning when I woke up with Eddie Murphy’s Party all the time stuck in my head.

As I’m walking down the stairs “My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the tiiime!”

Making coffee “My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the tiiime!”

As I was flipping through the channels drinking my morning coffee, I came across a show about the Mike Tyson/Robin Givens divorce. Seeing the old Mike Tyson, not the crazy-looking current Tyson, reminded me of a video game I used to play when I was younger, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. With a quick Google search, I found a website that allows one to play classic video games through the web browser.

So for a while I was playing classic video games from my past like Punch Out, but also , Rolling Thunder, Rush N’ Attack, and Kid Icarus. I briefly considered looking on eBay for a cheap NES system that I could hook up downstairs, but I didn’t follow through (maybe later this year I’ll pick up a Wii).

I also caught a few moments of Beverly Hills Cop on Comedy Central. While watching it I was thinking ‘hey this is a really good movie. Why don’t I own it on DVD?’

We also went to an 80’s themed birthday party this weekend. Everyone was supposed to get dressed up in some sort of 80’s outfit, so I hit Goodwill and picked up some Don Johnson/Miami Vice inspired clothing . The ten dollar investment paid off; I won a contest for “The raddest outfit.” The prize: a Tiffany record.

But now it’s Sunday and the 80’s vibe is now starting to fade. As I’m writing this post I’ve gone from listening to A Flock of Seagulls to Jay-Z. But it was fun to revisit the past.

image from gamespy.com, video from youtube.com.

[tags] 80’s, Eddie Murphy, Mike Tyson, Miami Vice, Nintendo[/tags]

As James pointed out in a previous comment, it’s prime video game playing time with the wife away. After doing a little bit of research this weekend I settled on buying a game called Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. In retrospect, I probably should have made another choice.

I’ve played this series before and the last one was ok at best (decent gameplay, over-the-top story, terrible dialog, even worse “acting”). But everything I read pointed out that the story was much better this time around and the gameplay was more in-depth; one review even gave it a 9.8 of 10. So I thought I’d give it this series a try one more time.

So I place the disc in my Playstation 2, and start the playing game–or so I thought. I first had to sit and wait through a 12 minute cut scene that sets up the plot the game. When that was over, I move my character a through a few frames and then to listen to some more dialog (for about two or three minutes) that reveals a little more about the plot. Finally, fifteen minutes into the experience I get to actually play the game.

That pretty much summarizes how this game is designed: 10-15 minute cut scene, move through a few frames where there’s little to do, listen to 2-3 minutes of dialog, fight somebody, repeat. The story is a little less over-the-top, but the writing is horrible at best.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there is actually one moment in this game where your character climbs a ladder for 5 minutes! Why? So that you could hear a f**kin’ song that they wrote for game! Seriously, I pressed up on the controller with one hand, and walked into the ktichen and emptied the dishwasher with the other hand (Thank God for wireless controllers).

There are a few good moments in this game (there’s a sniper battle that’s entertaining), and the Bonus materials are pretty good as well. The second disc includes the original Metal Gear game from 1987 which was fun to go back and revisit, also there’s an online mode that’s supposed to be pretty good (I wouldn’t know because my Playstation is not networked yet).

I’ve learned my lesson; I’m selling this game back this week and swearing off this franchise for good.

image from lik-sang.com.

[tags]Metal Gear Solid, Video Games, MGS3, [/tags]