till it happens to you!!!

Remember that post about a year ago when I earned my first Red Ring of Death Achievement? Well almost a year later it happened again. Yes, I was able to earn it again. I brought a friend over to show him how cool Bioshock looked and sure enough, those glorious red lights started flashing before his and my eyes. So instead of him seeing how great Bioshock looked we saw how awesome the red lights looked. “Wow!, this was amazing,” he said. And you know what makes this worse? PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo is going on this week and I have all sorts of people that are staying at my place. This put me in a pretty big bind, I could either send my 360 off for repair and wait hopefully no more then 3 weeks and have no 360 this week when everyone is at my place OR I could go out today and pick up a new 360 (that way I have one this week), and then send my broke one to MS for repair only to wait to sale it once it comes back. Guess which one I picked? I’ll give you a hint, I got a free HDMI cable for it!!!(But no damn transfer cable). So I want to thank Microsoft for putting me and everyone else through this garbage, please on your next console that you make, put more testing into it so we are not having to send these damn things off to repair every 6-12 months. For you to put your customers through this nonsense is total garbage.

Ok Maddenites, the time has finally come for you. The midnight sale of “the most highly anticipated football game of the year”, Madden NFL 08, is tonight. This midnight sale will take place at many local Gamestop’s and EB Games stores throughout the world. Check gamestop.com, and ebgames.com for more information.

Now if you are a fan of this franchise like I am, you should not be ashamed to admit that we have not been getting our money’s worth out of the next gen versions of the game since the debut of Madden NFL 06 for the Xbox 360. The 06′ version was completely barren, with only season and play now modes to choose from. EA’s attempt at making the 07′ version better with adding the superstar mode, franchise mode, and the lead blocking control was a good improvement. It did still fall way short of expectations, however, leaving the madden fans wanting more out of this year’s installment.

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I just saw this on xbox360rally.com and I thought you guys would really like to see this. Its a list of EVERYTHING for free on the Xbox Marketplace. Thats right, EVERYTHING. So go ahead and either click the xbox360rally.com link or click the read more to see the list.

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You heard it here first everyone (well almost first), according to an article posted on gamingrevolution.com, joystiq.com, and gamepro.com, many Best Buy’s are out of stock on the 360 core. They also do not plan on restocking their shelves with them anytime soon. So I thought I would go to a couple of local stores by me to see if this was true or not. Not only is there not anymore systems on their shelves, an employee there told me “We do not plan on receiving anymore systems, since they were not selling all that well“.

Where’s the proof you ask? Well it’s right here in front of you.

According to the area’s circled in the image above, the 360 core has been deleted from Best Buy’s inventory on July 29th. What this means is that this product will be removed from their shelves, and the online stores. Thus, leaving us to 2 types of systems for the time being.

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Ask any gamer, “what are the two biggest titles to release this holiday season?” They would have said, Halo 3 and GTA4, and you could go to Vegas with that answer. So, now that the dust has settled from the earth shattering delay of RockStar’s title, it’s got me thinking’…

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Yes, you read it correctly. Today, Take Two Interactive announced that Grand Theft Auto IV will be delayed until the second quarter of 2008 for both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Such a highly anticipated title for this year and the cornerstone of Microsoft’s “perfect storm” has now been pushed back several months due to “additional development time required to complete the title.” However, this announcement should not be viewed as unfortunate; but we now know that Rockstar Games cares enough to launch a quality AAA title. It is also understandable that Grand Theft Auto in particular would take a long time to develop due to high expectations and a likely hood of a plethora of tech issues. Being able to manage so much AI and physics at one time on a console must be difficult and it would require a long time. At least this is the first big title that is known to release for sure in 2008.

I know that I am not supposed to really bring anything out again until Monday, but I couldn’t pass this story up. This comes from an article I found on both filefront.com, and also on myfoxdc.com today. What this article gives is five after-school alternative activities for gamers, other than playing video games.

Here are the five suggested alternatives, and my interpretation of them:

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Yes, believe me, this was some big news for me as well as any other halo fan out there, the campaign in halo 3 is finally going to have some replay value other than just beating the same game on three difficulty levels. And they better, because gamers need designers to be more creative than “You beat the game on easy, well try it out on hard mode now”.

According to an article released by the Canadian press on Friday, Bungie announced that there were two all-new single player missions that were not shown at any of the major gaming events this year, but yet shown behind closed doors to members of the Canadian press.

One of the missions, called “The Storm”, has a part in it known as “The scarab conflict”, which is set in a factory complex. And according to the article, this level has more enemies than bad guys and allies in the first mission of the original Halo:Combat Evolved combined.

The other mission, called “Tsavo Highway”, is set to be the first vehicle mission in the game, and takes place in a dark tunnel cave, and mountain landscape. No more details were released on this level, but let’s hope it has just as much excitement as the other mission mentioned, or gamers are going to be bored. The lead sandbox designer from Bungie, Jaime Griesmer stated that “This just gives you an idea of the scale that we are going for”, he also said,”and these are not even the largest encounters in the game, the size really ramps up as you got through”.

Now where does the replay value come in you ask? Well, there was also talk about halo 3 having a point system to help increase replay value. Things like headshots, boarding vehicles, and assassinations will all be figured into this system, and then posted on leaderboards on Bungie’s website.

If somehow this was all configured to gaining achievements for each type of kill you get in online multiplayer and the campaign, then this could give the game more replay value than it has ever had in the past, and that could be a very good thing, especially if you’re a halo junkie like myself. Sept. 25th isn’t too far away, and if the game is anything like the article stated, than we have a lot to look forward to. But I am out for today, see you next time gamers.

Take care,

Mr B4

A lot can happen in a week. I was recently on Vacation, with my family, this week. Gaming was the last thing on my mind. However with E3 and the Billion dollar warrenty situation; I may have picked a good time to take off.

Well now I am back, and something is eating away at me. So here I go with my “Conspiracy Theory” (or thats how it was reffered to on Major Nelson’s Podcast)

I will start by stating Peter Moore has done a lot for Xbox. As far as a figure-head goes, he promotted the console in a vibriant, intelligent manner. He made his name a staple on the MS team. I tip my hat to what I concede as a job well done.

So why am I writing this? I want to let Major Nelson and Moore know why people will draw conclusions to his departure:

You’re the Captain of the Ship. In smooth sailing you stand at the helm and bask in the glow of those green rings. However when the dust hits the cooling fan; you don’t jump ship.

You’re on record as saying your a Family man first. That was a big reason for your departure. I saw Titanic several times. Isn’t it “Women and Children first” or were you just referring to your family?

You also said your Children wanted to move:

I, like you, have kids. They, like yours, want to eat. With that in mind my career comes first.

Finally the last thing you announce at your MS title is your taking up residense at EA. Isn’t this the same company that took micro-transactions to a whole new level? So EA goes from leaving the Xbox out of the loop (remember the early Xbox days) to owning the one person who spoke loudest for the console.

In the end it doesn’t matter to most why Peter decided to jump ship. However callingthose who post and blog about possible scenarios “conspiracy theorists” is just lame. Perhaps thats the reason you had a hard time relating to all those pissed off red ringed customers. You couldn’t read your own writing on the wall.

-There I said it!

Wednesday at 5 AM EST, Wing Commander Arena, a space combat action game, was released on the Xbox Live Market place for 800. Wing Commander Arena is a spin-off from the franchise Wing Commander, which was released in 1990. Wing Commander was published by EA and developed by Gaia Studios. Just as expected for an Xbox Live Arcade game, Wing Commander Arena was completely remade from the ground up; having better graphics, sound, and enhanced features such as multiplayer over Xbox Live as well as playing in 2D as opposed to 3D, so don’t expect a souped up port.

This is being written from the point of view of a person who is looking for another good Xbox Live Arcade game. Just seeing the videos on IGN made me excited for this title, despite not playing its predecessors. When I played my first single player match, I noticed that the controls were very easy to pick up. Everything felt fluid and natural. The first game that came to my mind when I played this was Star Fox for the N64. I felt a similar level of enjoyment from Wing Commander, despite playing in 2D. As far as game balance goes, Giga Studios nailed it. It was as easy to go on the attack as it was to defend, making for very interesting battles. Other than straight up deathmatches, Wing Commander had an interesting gametype. This gametype had two GIANT motherships. The object of the gametype was to destroy the opponent’s mothership. The mothership was equipped with turrets and weapons. The mothership could not be destroyed by firing it in general; it could only be destroyed by taking out the mothership’s weakspots. Overall this gametype was intense and lengthy.

The best part of Wing Commander is the plethora of power-ups and ships at your disposal. Power-ups had a wide variety of effects ranging from defense to offense. Some of these included energy efficiency, clone, absorption, refill weapons arsenal, enhance shields, and MUCH MUCH more. Ships in Wing Commander ranged from little fast ships to colossal tanks. Each ship could hold four weapons and had its own stats such as hull strength, thrust power, turning radius, and velocity. However, I was very disappointed about one part of Wing Commander Arena. It lacked 4 player local multiplayer; a feature that is now becoming less and less of a trend on the Xbox 360. 4 player splitscreen would have been totally possible, but it only has single player and online.

If you are looking for a fast paced action game, Wing Commander Arena is for you. Only playing for just a few hours, it feels like Wing Commander Arena has made its way in the top five Xbox Live Arcade Games. Overall, Wing Commander Arena is definitely worth the 800. I would definitely recommend Wing Commander Arena as a purchase for any hardcore gamer.