The ability to moonwalk, apparently - at least as far as Madden ‘08 is concerned. The best part comes at the end of the video when Favre reacts. Great stuff, although those offended by the F-word should probably skip this.
After months of teasing, my Xbox 360 finally bit the dust this past weekend. It locked up 5 or 6 times on Friday night while trying to play All-Pro Football 2K8, not even letting me get past the first quarter. The lockups continued on Saturday, culminating with the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Sunday morning. Not a big deal, because I had the warranty from Gamestop - I didn’t have to ship out my console to Microsoft and wait weeks for its return. I detached the hard drive from my lifeless white box and headed off to replace it with a working one.
Except it wasn’t quite that simple. I brought the replacement 360 home and plugged it in, and it was DOA! Red ring of death right out of the box. I looked at the console manufacture date on the back, and it said October ‘05. Doubleyou-tee-eff. I know for a fact that particular Gamestop has sold out of 360’s at some point in the near past - how on earth does it end up with a 360 made before its release date? Microsoft, what are you doing sticking refurbished 360s in new boxes? To make matters worse, that was the store’s last 360 - and two other Gamestops that were called were out of stick as well. The gaming gods truly were frowning upon me.
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. A fourth Gamestop location was called, and not only did they have them in stock, but it just so happened to be one that was manufactured in July ‘07. Since it’s been produced after Microsoft finally acknowledged they had some design and reliability flaws, that means it should be more reliable and has a quieter DVD drive than the originals - and not only that, but it’s got an HDMI port too so I’m ready when the wife finally lets me get an HDTV. Huzzah!
I celebrated my return to gaming by thrashing maddhaze in Madden ‘08 last night. Now I’m looking for more victims. 
Since buying a new router the other day, I decided to muck around with streaming video from my PC to my Xbox 360. It used to be that you needed a PC running Windows Media Center for this, but as of last fall you could use a Windows XP-based PC with the right software - for example, Windows Media Player 11 or Microsoft’s Zune software. In theory, one could download various TV shows and video clips from the Internet and enjoy playback on a 360.
Except there’s a bit of a drawback: the 360 only understands the Windows Media Video (WMV) file format and codecs. Occasionally, I find myself needing to download a show from the Internet when my somewhat buggy DirecTV DVR messes up, and those aren’t WMV. Furthermore, video conversion is generally a pain.
Enter TVersity. It’s an Xbox 360-compatible media server with the ability to transcode video from almost any format to WMV on the fly. No need to pre-convert anything - I just call up a video via the 360, wait a few seconds, and bam, I’m sitting on my couch and enjoying it on my TV instead of trying to watch it while uncomfortably huddled around my computer monitor.
Combined with this handy DirecTV-Xbox 360 remote hack, watching video files just got a whole lot more painless for me. Huzzah!
Note to those I play fantasy football with: you can have Vince Young this year. I’m not going anywhere near him.
Four of the last five guys to grace the cover of Madden have gotten significantly injured, missing at least four games - and in most cases, suffered significant statistical dropoff. Michael Vick in 2003 is the best example of this. Shaun Alexander, who had never missed a game due to injury, missed 6 games with a broken foot last year - clearly the football gods were not pleased that he scoffed at the idea of the “Madden Curse“.
Clearly something sinister is afoot here. Don’t doubt the curse!
Not to be outdone by Playstation fanboys, Sony decided to include the whining in its hardware….
This is so cool! Now where can I buy me one? Heh.
I got the chance to check out the Opera web browser for the Wii this morning - what Nintendo is calling the Internet Channel, and here are some initial impressions after trying it out for about 10 minutes.
Scrolling is performed by pointing in one direction and holding down B, and how fast it scrolls depends on how close to the edge of the screen you’re pointing. This works pretty well. Most sites are too wide though, forcing you to scroll horizontally as well as veritcally. By default, text is very small and hard to read, at least with standard AV cables; I’m sure S-video or component will sharpen this up greatly, but it’s still very tiny by default. There is a zoom feature, however, which works well. Entering URL’s is easy enough, but the on-screen keyboard should have additional virtual keys for TLD’s: .com, .net, .org. Finally, although you can add/edit/delete favorite websites, I couldn’t seem to find an option to change anything but the display name when editing a favorite; it seems that if a URL changes, you’d have to delete the old one and re-add it, which seems silly to me.
All in all, a promising start. It works well for what it is, although improvements can (and should) be made. I look forward to being able to play Flash-based games within the browser from my couch.
Two weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360. I’d been waiting for a deal, and I finally got a good one. Gamestop offered $80 in trade ($35 more than usual) for an Xbox and $45 for a Gamecube ($20 more), then tossed in an extra one-year warranty and a copy of Call of Duty 2 for no extra charge. I picked up Burnout Revenge and an S-video cable, and ended up paying $345 for a package that would have normally cost about $560. I’d been wanting a 360 for at least six months and just couldn’t say no to that deal. I also found a deal on Phantasy Star Universe and an extra controller through Amazon. The reviews for PSU have been poor, but I’ve always been a Phantasy Star nut so it’s worth a try for $40 off.
Then three days later, I finally managed to score a Wii at Target on Sunday morning. I’d been shut out on launch day at Walmart after waiting for 3.5 hours, turned aside at Gamestop on Black Friday after another hour and a half, and missed out at Nintendo World in NYC the following week by a mere 25 minutes. Along the way I picked up all the games and accessories I needed - three games (Super Monkey Ball, Zelda, and Excite Truck), a Wiimote, Nunchuk, two Classic Controllers, and even 8000 Wii Points from Circuit City (they were $5 off, which is like four free NES games. All I needed was the system - and Target came through for me. I also picked up a copy of Madden that morning.
Finally, we had to replace our digital camera - a Canon Powershot A70 - after I bounced it off my wife’s knee the other night. It wouldn’t focus anymore, and repeatedly tossing the camera to the ground to undo the damage only made things worse. We settled on the Powershot A540, which I just picked up today. This means we’ve gone from 3.1 megapixels to 6, from 3x zoom to 4x, and we can now shoot 640×480 video at 30 frames per second for about 8 minutes. Can’t wait to play around with this.
So… can anyone spare some change so I can get something to eat?
Gamercard:
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