XBL Radio Daily Minute 12012006
Video sent by Steve519
Xbox 360 Sold over 7000 units last week
EA brand name continues to get worse
Pimps at Sea is out now!
Wii Virtual Console gets 4 games a week
We want to know what the hardest achievement was for you to get or that you couldnt get. Was their ever an Achievement you gave up on? Was their an Achievement you were damn proud of? Was their ever an achievement you said, “Screw this, I’m not even trying!”
Some Achievements matter more than others. We want to know which one matters to you!
Vote in our POLL section, and listen to ver 33.0 to hear what XBL Radio listeners have to say.
I tried to write 360 things to do, like our friend Trixie, but I have to admit it’s too much work. So while I wait for MS to send my return box, it’s been 2 days since my call, I figured I might as well add something to the BLOG. Here are some things you can try to do while you wait for your 360 to get repaired…
1. Go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907586 to seek help.
2. Call MS Support at 1-800-4myxbox to get the ball rolling.
3. Surf Google for: Xbox 360 broke. (It makes you feel not alone)
4. Call a friend. (Headsets are not the only way to communicate nowadays)
5. Go out to dinner. (Give the pizza delivery guy a break)
6. Play some Solatair
7. Talk to your Family. (It’s been a while, they may have changed)
8. Read a book.
9. See a movie. (That doesn’t take 4 hours to download)
10. Break out the old gaming consoles. (and realize how many MS points you’ve wasted)
11. Take a walk.
12. Learn a new language.
13. Start a forum for abandoned 360 owners.
14. Take up a new hobby.
15. Listen to some podcasts.
16. Go Christmas shopping.
17. Buy a pet.
18. Practice YoYo
19. Write that great American Novel.
20. Stand in line for a PS3.
21. Stand in a shorter line for a Wii.
22. Stand in the checkout line for another 360.
23. Hope that every car that comes down the driveway is a FED EX truck.
24. Take Bowling lessons.
25. Learn the art of mime.
26. Learn Oragami.
27. Ride a bike.
28. Go to the Zoo.
29. Get a DS
30. Get a PSP and regret not getting a DS.
31. Visit www.xblradio.com/forums and bitch to gamers who care.
32. Collect Tom and Katie baby photos.
33. Make a TOM and Katie collage with the photos you collected.
34. Watch every episode of 24 in order and realize that the 360 isn’t coming back any time soon.
35. Go Skating.
36. Go fishing.
37. Type a list of things to do while your out of your 360.
38. Buy a real Pinata (Then talk to it in your front yard)
39. Go camping.
40. Exercise
41. Take a long hot shower.
42. Reformat your PC.
43. Re-organize your drawers.
44. Make of diary Starting with the day your 360 died.
45. Find God. 46. Find some change in your couch.
47. Find the meaning of life.
48. Start a pod cast.
49. Start a revolution.
50. Start something.
51. Study.
52. Take out the trash.
53. Take out a friend. (without a private chat invite)
54. Go to a funeral.
55. Go to a wedding.
56. Learn how to sew.
57. Learn how to knit.
58. Play minature golf.
59. Bake a cake.
60. Try to see how long you can hold your breath.
61. Mourn over the Pam and Kid Rock divorce.
62. Write a letter.
62. Type a letter
63. Write an e-mail.
64. Type an e-mail (I’m running out of list ideas sorry)
65. Take up bungee jumping.
66. Learn karate
67. Learn how to break-dance (It will come back)
68. Try a new food.
69. Start a diet.
70. Mow the yard.
71. Vacuum the carpet.
72. Adopt a 3rd world child.
73. Start a cult.
74. Shave your head.
75. Shave your head then start a cult.
76. Serve Kool Aid at your cult meetings.
77. Quit Smoking.
78. Start smoking.
79. Become a recluse.
80. Become more sociable.
81. Get some rest.
82. Take a vacation.
83. Take some viagra.
84. Buy a pony.
85. Go to the mall
87. Take a drive.
88. Visit Steve Erwin’s memorial.
89. Go to Graceland.
90. Go to a concert.
91. Go to a foreign country.
92. Watch Nick Toons Spongebob marathon.
93. Go skinnydipping.
94. Go skinnydipping in someone else’s pool.
95. Go skinnydipping in someone else’s pool you don’t know.
96. Hang up Xmas lights.
97. Hang upside down.
98. Play Lotto.
99. Realize your 360 isn’t going to fix itself.
100. Wish you had bought the wired controller so you could end this stupid list!
Any other suggestions would be helpful. As you can see I am desperate…
So a couple weeks ago I got my hands on Viva Piñata! You know? One of the handful of “E” rated games for the Xbox 360. In fact, considering all games marketed for young kids this is one of the 2 or 3 depending on how you look at it. So with that in mind, I believe there are no good games for that market. That is, until Viva Piñata came our way. Now this game is obviously marketed to a much younger audience, but I have to say I absolutely love this game.
Now you start off with this beat up small piece of land, with junk all over it. What you have to do is first, beat all the hard dirt, clean up your land and plant grass. When you get points you will already start to bring in piñata’s to your farm. You will get these cool little worm thingys, these are the most basic and easiest type of piñatas to get. Once you have two of them on your farm you can then “romance” them. (Now parents don’t worry because when you “romance” piñatas they go inside their house and dance.) Each piñata has there own special piñata dance that was done pretty creatively and no two piñatas dance alike. Once you have two piñata’s of the same type, you have to meet special requirements to ramance them. All different for each piñata, like for the worms all you have to do is have there type of house built. Once that is done you can let them go at it. Later on it the game however, things get more complicated. You might find yourself having to feed your piñatas other piñatas banana splits or many other things.
Now in this game there are many other things to do than just romancing your piñatas. For instance, they will fight each other. Yes, they fight if their personalities are not compatible. You have to worry about keeping them happy, and protecting them from the “sour” piñatas outside your farm, along with many other things.
Now for the overview of the game.
First, gameplay. Its all pretty simple, you have to meet certain requirements to lure piñatas to your farm, to make them residents, to romance them and to keep them happy. Thats the gist of the game, you do this over and over again. However, in Viva Piñata you don’t always feel like you’re doing the same thing again and again… even though you are! There is a ranking system and here are a few things you need to do to get your rank up. Get piñatas to your farm, plant new and exciting plants and make varients of piñatas or plants. As your rank goes up, you’ll unlock upgradable tools, new items in your store, new piñatas among many other things. Overall on gameplay I will give this game a 7, ya it’s fun but as you get high in rank you start to feel like you’re repeating things that you have already done.
We will go over controls next. Wow, this game is so simple to pick up and play, and while your playing you get hints along the way with a button diagram in the top right of your screen that doesn’t get in the way. Great job on this Rare, so I have to give it a 9 on controls, just because its so easy for everyone to pick up and play.
Now lets move on to sound. While there’s nothing spectacular here, Rare does the job and does it OK. Interesting sounds all around but still nothing special, so I have to give it a 6.
Graphics, this game is a pretty game. While I don’t feel its maxed out to the full capabilities of the 360 they still did a great job with the bright colors, amount of detail put into the piñatas and with the surrounding areas. I absolutely love the colors in this game and how bright everything is, so I am going to give Viva Piñata a 9 in the graphics dept., great job.
Overall, now remember, Viva Piñata was made mostly for the younger audience and to get them to jump-in on the Xbox 360 bandwagon and I think that Microsoft and Rare did an excellent job of making a game with such potential. But what hooked me was that as an adult, I still love playing this game myself. So I am going to give Viva Piñata a 8.6 overall.
Now if you do the math you will notice that things don’t add up but thats because I don’t feel certain things like graphics or sound should count as much as gameplay. I don’t just add all the numbers together and go from there. I go off of what I feel the overall rating should be. If you’re an older gamer I would strongly recommend that you check this out. If you don’t, you’re only cheating yourself because this is so much better then some of the games out there for the 360. If you’re a casual gamer on the other hand or wanna get this for your kids I would ask “Why are you reading my review instead of going to the store right now to get this game?” Viva Piñata is so made for the kids or casual games that you just have to pick it up.
Now if you like my review please feel free to comment here in the blog. If you do not like my review, feel free to send evil piñatas to my farm through the games cool mail system.
Stay tuned to show 32.0 where you will be given a “KIDS PIX” from MrCarpalTunnels kids. It’ll be cool to listen to a review from a kids prospective, which I will be waiting to hear.
If you are one of the 360 owners who bought a wireless headset and cannot get it to work, you are not alone. It seems that many 360 wireless-headset owners are having trouble being heard! (even with their headsets on)
Over at the official Xbox.com website the forums are full of posts about the lack of support from MS over the wireless headset issues. Many loyal 360 owners were waiting for this headset with high hopes. Here at XBL Radio, where we record on Xbox Live for our LIVE show, we were hoping to have a peripheral that would allow us to use the controller for our LIVE Roundtable: enabling us to have more freedom as we record over LIVE. However Rusty Ranchero and Carpal will both agree that the headset is another stumbling block on the 360 accessory releases.
Issues such as: constant communication drops, excessive beeping during conversations, clarity of dialogue during chats, and a very small line-of-sight area have made the headset more of a hassle than a convenience. Many consumers of the headset have tried, to no avail, to get support on their headset woes. So far MS has yet to acknowledge that the headset is causing a lot of consumer woes. One website, 2 old 2 play, even posted a story about their quest to get support from MS. However, in reading the article it seems we at XBLR are not alone.
So if you can hear us MS (which wont be through the XBOX Wireless Headsets) please help us to have faith that we will soon be able to leave the contollers on the couch as we relieve ourselves during long UNO games!
Peter Moore was on stage at the Showcase event in New York City, and just announced a partnership with CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Turner Broadcasting, UFC, and Warner Bros Home Entertainment to digitally deliver high-def (or SD) TV shows and Movies to Xbox Live Marketplace. The service goes live on November 22, and by the end of the year, we’ll have more than 1,000 hours of content to download to own or rent.
Some examples of content that will be available on the network by the end of year include:
You can access Xbox Live Marketplace with a free Xbox Live Silver subscription and a broadband connection. For more information about the content available on Xbox Live Marketplace visit www.xbox.com/marketplaceentertainment. More detail can be found in the press release we just issued.
From GamerScoreBlog.com
It’s time for the 2nd Annual Xbox Community Awards 2006, hosted by Gamertagradio.com!
XBL Radio has been nominated for Podcast of the Year, one of the nine catagories to vote on. All voting tabulation will be kept private untill the results are officially announced on the Gamertag Radio Podcast in December 2006. The GTR staff carefully planned and rolled out this awards program, so go give it a look. Plus, they are working on a few surprises for XCA 2006, so be ready for that too!
Go register at Gamertagradio.com and vote for your favorite podcast today. Voting Ends Nov 30, 2006 at 12am EST.
-Rust.
Microtransactions or: Death by a thousand paper cuts. Sure, it all seemed so innocent at first, but then we started having Oblivion horse armor, Kameo Uno decks and now EA’s Need for Speed: Carbon shows up exploiting the system to its full and most disgusting potential — oh wait, EA already did that charging for Madden tutorials. And how many are willing to pay and feed this exploitation?
A group of writers at GamerFeast created a microtransaction tracker and started keeping tabs. Guess who’s the top offender? (Find out in the list below) They’ve also broken everything down in spreadsheet form to review with a fine tooth comb, if you wish. It’s a great resource and know we’ll be checking back in again soon. The top 10 (MSRP + Content as of 11-3-2006):
1. Need for Speed Carbon - $94.97 - Electronic Arts
2. The Godfather - $90.79 - Electronic Arts
3. Chromehounds - $83.73 - Sega
4. Tiger Woods 07 - $74.23 - Electronic Arts
5. Oblivion - $74.11 - Bethesda
6. LotR - Battle for Middle Earth II - $68.74 - Electronic Arts
7. Prey - $59.99 - 2K Games
8. Call of Duty 2 - $54.98 - Activision
9. Lego Star Wars II - $52.49 - Lucas Arts/TT Games
10. Kameo - $39.99 - Microsoft
found at www.joystiq.com
This Sunday may be one of the best chances to insure your kids will have a Wii by Christmas. Little is known about how well the Nintendo launch will go. However, if we’ve learned one thing, from previous launches, there is almost always more demand than supply. So if a Wii system is desired in your household by years end, you may want to get to a Toys R Us, on Sunday October 29th, to grab a pre-order. I got my Xbox 360 from Toys R Us on their launch. I had no problem showing my voucher and walking out with the system.
*RUMOR ALERT:
The PS3 is also speculated to be pre-order available on the same day.
It seems like this may be a great time to get your Gamers Xmas list complete.
Good Luck!
A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced a bus tour that kicked off in New York and would travel around the US to 19 other cities. If you didn’t catch our story on it, or Xbox.com’s official artical, then continue reading for a brief rundown and the link to our interview.
Microsoft was doing this because they wanted to educate parents on some of the valuable tools that Microsoft has made available, on the Xbox 360 and the PC, that would help parents protect young kids. To me, this was a great idea! So I contacted MS to get some more info and they warmley accepted my invitation. Now since I don’t have any children, I took it upon myself to do this for friends and listeners of XBL Radio who do have kids.
So I want to share with you the entire interview that I had with Molly O’Donnell from Microsoft. She’s the head of the Xbox Public Relations Group. We talked about the Parental Controls for the Xbox 360 and the 20 City Campaign Buss Tour. I hope you find this 16 minute audio very informative like I did.
Download Here (right click, save as… for best download experience.)
BTW, ultimately I think that it is the parents responsibility to monitor what their kids are doing online. But, I think that it’s cool how Microsoft is providing parents with tools to help protect their kids along with information and education about how to do so.
And if you have any further questions about this or about protecting your children on Xbox Live, you can contact me at Steve@xblradio.com or check out Microsoft’s website set up for this http://www.xbox.com/isyourfamilyset/.
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