My Xbox 360 is one from the 2006. That is the third one came back after repair/replacement. It is one of those noisy, heat generating, disk scratching machines. As soon as I turn it on it fills the room with noise. I have no idea where it is coming from. If I don’t save games to disk, there is another level of huge drive noise that gets added. I also think this hardware is inadequate to handle the new experience and also the latest games. May be the heat is impacting the performance? I don’t know.

I am guessing that Microsoft and Game developers are using newer hardware to test the software. When it comes down to my system everything is sluggish. The dashboard stutters, each game load causes the system to slow down even more requiring me to use age old technique of restarting the console.

There might be remedy for this. Get a newer Xbox 360 hardware. I will get an HDMI output as well. But I do not need a controller, cables or hard drive. If there was something like a bare console at a lower price I would have gone out and purchased one. Not sure if there is a good market for it.

For now I am watching for deals on the arcade model.

These guys were in a party. Others couldn’t hear what they were talking so there was not much of a team play. 

oXCycloneXo

ZOMBEAST 2

I replied to the first message saying they should have played as team.  Anyway, this is the kind of players you get on Gears of War 2. I am not sure why I was matched up with players in the Underground zone. 

Microsoft seems to take action quicker if you complain about gays (?)

I have a Linksys WRT610N router that replaced my old faithful D-Link DI-524. I play online on Xbox live. I almost never can win a chainsaw dual in Gears of War 2. I probably suck big time. But when I mash the A button 5 times to make one jump I doubt it is just incompetence. Anyway I have really pissed off a bunch of people because to them I am not shooting or moving fast enough. Below is a message I received from someone.  My zone is set to recreation. This guy’s zone is underground. Why was I teamed up with this guy? What does zone mean to XBL if there is any meaning at all? 

I recorded a game today just to capture my Gears of War 2 online play. On this website I have posted my connection speeds. They are pretty good. Either the game suck or the router suck. I do not remember such a bad experience since Call of Duty 2 initial release. I don’t remember if I started experiencing lag after installing this router. I returned the latest dual band D-Link router to get this one because that one would reboot while in the middle of a gaming session. 

Rebooting the router seems to have some positive effect on the performance. Xbox is connected directly to the router using ethernet cable, not wireless. I just setup the QoS to medium for xbox. Let me see how that works. It won’t improve my gameplay though.

Religious?

Race?

Nationality?

The most obvious is being looked up by Microsoft as we speak. Could cause cancellations from pretty large groups. Whatever they do, it may be a good idea to hide it from others unless they expressly want to see it.  

Personally I don’t have a problem with people having preferences as long as they are not forcing me to accept their preferences and beliefs.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/scratched-360-discs-affect-less-1

It is old new but I have to tell you. I have a bunch of disks that are scratched by xbox 360. I haven’t noticed it from the latest one. Also, I started installing the games on to the hard drive.

That is this month. I was about to fold the game for ever. I had good fun with single player and co-op. There were glitches throughout the game. Some were more annoying than others. Glitches are not a problem for casual playing. But when you play hard core and insane difficulty, there are really a problem.  

Online multiplayer in Gears 2 is a disaster. The matchmaking process is unbelievably time consuming. The number of steps needed to get in to action is annoying. After all those minutes you spend, you get a message saying that the connection to the host was timed out. WTF? Who the hell was the host? What are those 10 year olds doing in a 17+ game anyway?

Have you played the horde mode? It requires all the 5 players and a determination to stick around for more than 2 hours to complete it. The game does not allow you to quit the horde mode but all you need to do is to get back to the dashboard or turn off the xbox. On a public xbox live, new players cannot join and you are stuck with oo remaining players to hoplessly fight the horde. I spent 2 weeks trying to complete the 50 waves on public xbox live. I could not because one or two players would always quit after a few waves. When it gets tough towards wave 8-10 and they die, they quit. I completed the waves by going private and calling my buddies. We completed with just 4 of us working together.

After completing all the 50 waves I am trying to help others get throug it on the public xbox live but with the same result. I stick around until everyone dies or the host quits.

Microsoft is determined to win this round and came out with NXE. There is nothing to compare it with in this generation. They copied ideas but made everything look and feel better. 

Nintendo is determined to make money without doing much. 

Sony is determined to loose. PS3 is still pricy and it is no longer the best media experience it claimed. Except the quality of audio and video of course. Whether you play a standard DVD or bluray, sound and picture from PS3 is lot better than xbox 360.

All games have bug. Some are difficult to capture because you are in the middle of the action or cannot repeat at will. Since this is a turn based game I could capture it. The bug is in the message at the bottom left.

It’s been a week since the NXE (New Xbox Experience) came out. Finally there is a true next gen user interface for a current gen console. It is a concoction of PS3 XMB and Windows Vista Flip 3D. But that is exactly what makes it superior to both and any other UI out there. 

Avatars are a good concept copied from elsewhere and implemented pretty good. Classic Microsoft style innovation. Actually I am kind of a fan of that style. There are not many true innovators in the world. The rest dependsand profits on improvisation. It is better than having a few control the innovations they bring and control them forever. 

The best feature of NXE in my opinion is thee NetFlix streaming. I have netflix and was never happy with PC streaming. It never worked good when I connected to TV. This one is as good as watching a movie on a DVD player. I used my logitech harmony remote and that was all I needed to control the movie watching experience. As of now I have only experienced stereo audio. That is lame. Not even standard Dolby Digital. I could not locate a setting option to change that. When I clicked on the Audio button (press display on the harmony remote) there was only one item that said English 1 and that wa just stereo. Video quality was better than DVD for one of the movies I watched. My comcast internet connection is pretty fast. 

I also liked the install on hard drive feature. Gears of War 2 loaded quitely after installing it on hard drive. That is more important to me than faster start up times. Too bad my hard drive is only 20 GB. I cannot install the other 2 games I am playing, Fallout 3 and Call of Duty 4. I had been complaining about Microsoft’s lack of vision when it comes to foresee future applications of it’s platforms. Today’s xbox 360’s have what it should have been 3 years ago. At least they should provide a way for others to make hard drives cheaper. Not sure when both Microsoft and Sony (forget Nintendo) will realize that storage is the king. Bandwidth will always be premium until we have pervasive broadband wireless available. Invest in local storage for your customers if your business model depends on rich media. 

I haven’t used other features like photo party etc.

We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to still keep our pace,” he added. “But I think whenever I look at what I think are good examples of sci-fi — the War of the Worldsredux that was done by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise is a guy that’s just trying to get back to his family in the middle of an awesome alien invasion. The Transformersfilm, yeah it’s about giant robots and the All-Spark and all that. But it’s also about a boy and his car trying to get the girl of his dreams.”

I liked both movies and the only aspects I hated of those movies surprisingly were what the dude describes here. Wow…