Archive for the 'Gaming' Category

Halo3 Legendary Map Pack, April 15th…

So, Bungie is releasing their Legendary Map Pack for Halo3 on April 15th…  I can’t wait, in fact, this weekend I’ll be going and buying some Marketplace Points for the XBox360 so I can be sure I’m one of the first Halo addicts with the new maps…

However, I’m not one of those hardcore nerds who wants them to be the first few players playing them…  I want to be one of the first few nerds attempting to find all of the glitches in the maps, then be the top archetect editing the maps…

In fact, I had the Heroic Map Pack in December when it first came out and I rarely even played the stock maps until they begun to be in the standard rotation this week when they became free…

Which brings up another point…  When the next map pack comes out, the previous will be made available for free.  So since the Legendary Map Pack will be out 4/15, this month the predicessor (Heroic Map Pack) was issued out free.  So, where I could wait ~4 months and get them for free in August/September, I’d really rather have the edge on hacking at the maps (I work on so many maps that I’ve reached my editing quota several times and had maps overwritten and gotten the editing warning that so few rarely see).

One thing that I don’t like however is the price…  The maps cost 800 Marketplace Points, which amounts roughly to $12.95…  Well, I bought Halo3 for $60 when it came out, and it came out with 11 maps…  So for a fifth of the cost I’d expect more than 3 maps when I got a game and 11 maps for a bit more…  I’d expect say 5 maps per map pack… Yes, that’d make a happy Gizmo…

I think I may type up a couple of little tidbits about the new maps and what I like about them and expect to do with them through observations of what I’ve seen on them a bit later…  Two of them look pretty beefy, but the one looks rather small, so I’ll get back on my plans when I have a bit more time to rant and lookup images for detail…

Well, that’s my nice little halo3 map pack rant…  now that you’re all asleep…  I cut the cheese.

Oh my scam batman!

So, I get a mailing to my www.undergroundnews.com email address from some “spades online” gaming site interested in our “US Traffic” as they put it… I go and do a quick google search and see hundreds of people whining about how this company (Cyprus based) is nothing but a scam…

A quick polite email to the (no doubt bot) person who sent me the message:

Upon researching your company through search engines, I regret to inform you that we are not interested in associating our community with your services.

Sincerely,
James Corthell
UGN Security President

I wonder what the response will be?

XBox Memory Issues…

Well, I bought the Sandisk Cruzer 1gb drive which matches the stock feel of the XBox Core/Premium system, and I have a standard key (which I didn’t think was working) for my XBox360… Turns out, ANY USB device cannot access saved games or
XBL data…

So, what’s the problem? Well, I bought them so I could copy my XBL account to Walter’s XBox (and vice versa) so that he doesn’t have to bring his over all the time so we ca link systems to play together on our respective accounts…

So, now I have to buy the XBox Memory Card to do this… I found several of the 512mb’s on EBay though for under $20 (after shipping); and I can supposedly use them as storage devices (vs media devices) in the xbox. So I should be able to store downloads on there, such as game downloads, like Halo1 should I choose to blow 800 points on it ($10~).

So, a word to the wise:
USB Devices - Media Devices, music, pictures, video.
Memory Devices - Game Saves, Downloads, Storage.

The hunt for the XBox… A Black Friday story…

Soooo, we get the bright idea on Black Friday that we want an XBox360… We have money, why not… Eventhough it’s rent and food money ;)…

So, Walter gets down here (From Vancouver, WA (Approx 30-35mi)) at about 10pm… We go to Walmart, they’re out. We go to Fred Meyers as we await sam to return a game (we bought the wrong version of it, which cost twice as much), they’re out… We go to toys r us, they’re closed… All in all, we hit every store on 82nd that was open in about 20 minutes… All out…

Long story short… We ended up in Camas, WA (Approx 30-35mi or 25mi from Walter’s house in the opposite direction)… The Walmart there had 2, core machines… the old ones… Old as in no HDMI, no “new chips”, no “additional heatsync’s”… So lets just hope we don’t burn out or I’ll have ot send it in for service…

Well, I have the XBox now… Halo is much more fun when I don’t have to wait for Walter to have to come over with his XBox lol… Made loads of new acquaintances :).

XBox 360 - Recovering Canceled Accounts

Well, a fine slap in the face from Microsoft… Turns out that when you cancel your gamertag for the XBox Live service, you cannot recover it in the future… Most people wouldn’t care here, but I do for two reasons…

1. Moguai is mine on their service, i’d have preferred to keep it…
2. If you port your old gamertag up to XBL for the 360, you get a free copy of Halo3…

As I can’t port up, I can’t do the deal :(…

Why did I cancel my XBL you ask? Well, in 2003 they overcharged us, and refused to refund us as their systems “didn’t allow” for it; so I had my creditcard company do it on their behalf and told them where they could put it…

So, now I’m on XBL as Gremelin, but still wanting to take part in the XBL thing to get a (second) copy of halo3…