Our good buddies at 360friendspot.com are celebrating their one year anniversary. And to help them celebrate, they are giving away Command and Conquer 3 for the 360.  Here is the link for more info. (more…)

So as many of you have noticed, our site was down today. I figured I would tell you why, apperantly someone hacked into our site and used it to send out many spam email, thus causing our server to shut us down. So I took care of all the issues, dealt with the host, though many, many emails (no phone support sucks). And now our site is up, so I hope you enjoy it for now. In a couple of weeks though, we will be planning on shutting down the site for a week while we move everything to a new host. Until then, hostgator will do.

Steve

Our good buddy Avid x3ro,

from www.360style.net is giving away a free game and you can win it!!. The game is Civil War - A Nation Divided, and I know what your thinking, Civil War, that sucks. But you know what, its free you dummy! All you have to do is email him at contest@360syle.net with your name and your address. Thats it, so go ahead and flood with in entrys, and while your at it, do me a favor and tell him Steve sent ya. I just want to thank Avid for letting me post this.

I have a little treat for you.

I have had this for a while but I couldn’t talk about it, but since the game is out I now should have free access. Sorry for the poor quality it was take with my camera. This is Vicious from unclegamer.com and Major Nelson from MajorNelson.com. Hope you enjoy it.

This is a new segment to XBL Radio. Its a chance for community members to shine and let everyone know who they are along with community sites. This week, we have RR WalkerTR, from www.kontrolfreek.com

Let me know what you all think and if you want to be a part of this, and if your a member of our awesome forum, you can sign up here. Next week I will have a community site for you call and then the week following I will have another one of our great community members.

You can download by clicking here(right click, save as) OR you can actually subscribe to your XBL Radio Extras feed by clicking the picture below, and with that you will get all the full uncut interviews that we do with developers, the community podcasts, and whatever else we decide to throw on there for you awesome listeners to enjoy.

Recently one of our Hosts, Steve519, was featured on on10.net. He was highly exstatic about being on the show and promoting our small community. However he seemed a little disgruntled (for a Postal-Worker that’s ironic) about his name being mispelled.

I tried to console him by telling him: It’s about the community as a whole, so enjoy the perks and take the good with the bad. I hope it helped him to cope… but if not, he is in good company!

Check out the artical and watch the video: 10.net

or scroll down a post to watch it off the site

Alright I have a site that you all have to check out. Its called 360friendspot.com. The reason I really like this site, is because unlike your Xbox blogger site that are out there this site keeps track of everything. I mean, time played in each games, time in your dashboard, time offline, all in simple bar graphs to show you. So if you have a minute and wanna check out an awesome up and coming website check out 360friendspot.com. Here is a pic of one of the things it shows you:

Are you just having a hard time getting those elusive achievements? Well do I have the way for you to show your friends how good of a gamer you really are?

Just go over to http://achievements.schrankmonster.de/ and have fun.

If you have not downloaded XBLR Podcast 36.0 yet, then here is another reason to get off your butt! Nate and Natalie from the Planet Xbox 360 Podcast join MrCarpalTunnel to share what goes on in their world.

Find out how they met and get the scoop on their history. Are Nelson and Natalie a couple? Hear them explain how they started the PlanetXbox360 podcast in a fun, down to earth chat.

Download version 36.0 now! And check out planetxbox360.com to see a whole new world of Xbox! Plus get some funny outtakes with the special guests at the end of the show.

When the Zune first came out I did a review on it, it was a pretty favorable review, with nothing really bad being said about it, and if your interested here is the link. But after a few weeks of owning it and screwing around with it, I started to notice a disturbing trend, it was shutting off on me for no apparent reason out of no where. I even has it shock me through the ear buds once while listening to podcasts at work, wasn’t to thrilled about that. So what I did was I wrote another post about that to see if anyone else noticed a trend like this and this was what I got. But that was the last Zune story that I have wrote and I had a lot of people ask me what has happened with my Zune, so I figured I would write an update on it.So I stuck with my Zune for a couple months because I really wanted it to work but all I was doing was delaying the inevitable, I ended up returning it. It was a several reasons and now I’m going to go into them. First 3*3, the 3 plays 3 days thing is retarded, it really is, if I own the rights to something, ie The XBL Radio Podcast, I should be able to share it as much as I want with the receiver getting to play it for as long or as many times as they want, for MS to put there own drm on my music is a bunch of crap. The fact that I couldn’t share videos was another thing, why does the Zune have Wi-Fi if we can only use it for certain features, the Wi-Fi capabilities was way to locked down. Another Wi-Fi thing that sucked was I couldn’t find anyone else with a Zune to share music with in the first place. Nobody I knew had a Zune except for some MS employees, that was it, everyone I new either had a iPod, Zen or a Sansa.

Another huge issue I had was podcasting, as a podcaster I need to have the ability to download podcasts quickly and easily like with iTunes, and that is so not happening with the Zune. I had to have 2 extra programs running for my podcasts, I used Juice for my audio podcasts, its a pretty good program which allows autotagging and a bunch of other features but it had issues with my video podcasts so then I had used the program called FeedYourZune for my video programs, you can also download audio podcasts with this one but I didn’t like the features on this one too much, plus this was a huge memory hog. So now I have to have 3 programs running at all times for my podcasts to be on my Zune, there was the slow and bulky zune program too. All this to do what iTunes has always done for me.

Now one of my favorite things about the Zune was the large screen, but what good is a large screen if its not being used? iTunes has movie and tv downloads but the Zune, not so much. If you want video on your Zune you have to go elsewhere to get it, not through Microsoft but either though things like video podcasts, direct downloads or by buying video converting programs to get videos on your Zune right. And even then its not always effective. I had many videos that would work on a iPod that the Zune program wouldn’t even put it on my Zune. And while we are talking about buying videos, lets talk about buying other things for the Zune. Lets talk about the Zune marketplace and what a disaster it is. First I friggin hate buying things with MS points, all that does is make you forget that you are wasting real money on downloads, and a perfect example of that is the marketplace for the Xbox 360. Microsoft had a perfectly good music store with there Urge store, they shouldn’t have abandoned that for the Zune, stupid move I thought.

So like I said at the beginning of this post, I returned my Zune. In fact I returned it and I picked up an iPod which I’m very happy with, ya the screen is not as big and it doesn’t have crippled down Wi-Fi, nor fm radio (so far the only thing i really miss), but it does have a brighter screen plus about 12 hour battery life, which is a lot more then the Zune. It had podcast functionality built in to the software and it also allows tv and movie downloading.

There you go, now you all know. And I will not be jumping on the Zune bandwagon again till MS fixes all the things wrong with it and really I won’t even now about it unless they also send me a demo unit because I’m also not spending money on another Zune again. I hope this will help future Zune buyers in swaying there decision as well because I do not want you guys to have to go though what I had to go though.

BTW, do you know that with every Zune sold Universal gets a royalty because they figure that you are stealing music? How crappy is that?