Firetop

This week we’ve begun an interesting experiment in my house; the television has been sold, replaced with an LCD HD monitor and a PC laptop. Everything that we watch is now downloaded via 8mb broadband using the BBC iPlayer or commercial offerings such as Channel 4’s on Demand service. Without any means of watching ‘live TV programmes’ from the BBC we no longer need a TV license… so we’re cancelling it. From what I’ve read this won’t go down too well with TV licensing but is perfectly legal, it seems they may wish to inspect our home but I’m quite open to that eventuality if and when it occurs. The BBC are not apparently expecting to see droves of people cancelling their TV licenses, in most cases they’re probably correct, but in an age where mass media is replaced with personalised services we’re definitely jumping on the cheaper, advertising free, optimimal viewing experience. (more…)

I’ve managed to give Halo 3 at least an hour on arcade mode and two on Xbox live since I received it after last week’s release date. Can’t say the arcade mode has blown me away - it’s not significantly different from Halos 1 and 2 and I really couldn’t care less about the background story told through trailers. Call me a heathen but I would have quite liked to have ditched the original theme track or given it to Paul Oakenfold to jazz it up a bit for the third installment. I’m never one for arcade modes on games generally though, AI munchkins just never come close to the difficulty of playing against experienced (and often stoned) human players on Xbox Live. (more…)

Today I came across two Google adverts offering ‘Free XBOX 360’s - a tempting offer which I’m sure gets many clicks, I for one was curious to see what it was all about. It turns out that a form of Pyramid Selling is doing the rounds online, instead of receiving commission on referrals however, electronic goods such as Xbox 360s and Apple iPods are sent to the successful originating participants ‘free of charge’. (more…)

For the past week BBC online has been quoting games producer and researcher ‘Emma Westecott’ who says ”Although women outnumber men in playing games online, only 18% of game developers were women”. “Hang on a minute” I thought to myself when reading the article - “Women outnumber men in playing games online… since when?”. I play on Xbox Live for at least ten hours each week, and in three years I’ve only come across two female gamers (and one of those could actually have been a small whiny American boy). Xbox Live was reported in March to have hit the six million member mark - are more than 3 million of those members women, and if so where are they? Since moving to the Xbox 360 in 2005 I had (until yesterday) met absolutely no females at all (more on that later). On closer examination of global industry metrics and demographics, it seems that what is crucial here is the definintion of a ‘female gamer’. (more…)

Since I wrote a posting detailing what ‘Microsoft Online SVCS‘ represents on a credit card statement (it’s for Xbox Live subscriptions), it has gone on to be the most popular entry I ever made. One would imagine that when people find my page, their mind is put at ease - or at least little Billy gets told off by his mother for borrowing her VISA card, and promptly loses hours of fun when she calls Xbox Support. However, of the many public comments made on that entry, so many people have said they were seeing multiple payments going out of their account, or were completely baffled by the existence of a payment at all. Having read about the experiences of Kevin Finisterre - a gamer threatened online with having his account hacked, and promptly discovering the next day that it had been… I’m beginning to wonder if the credit card hacking problem could be bigger than Microsoft are letting on. (more…)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m quite a hard person to please. When it comes to the Xbox 360 I’m even fussier; last month I slated award winning Gears of War (and still stand by that decision). This month, rather pleasingly, I became completely addicted to the demo version of Lost Planet on Xbox Live. I loved it so much that within a week I phoned my wife to have her buy the full game for me whilst she was out shopping. That decision has not disappointed; hours of immersion on Lost Planet pass by in the blink of an eye. Get up early enough on a Saturday and fight against a large population of Japanese players, not something I’ve come across before - but finally handy for the year I spent learning Japanese at secondary school - “Hajime mashte”. (more…)

Continuing with my reviews of newly acquired Xbox 360 games, tonight I put Gears of War on Ebay. That in itself about sums up how I feel about it after three evenings. I’m not sure why GamesMaster say ‘The best game we’ve ever seen’. Rated ‘Certificate 18′ with ‘Contains Strong Bloody Violence’ slapped on the back, the splattering blood is about all the game has got going for it. For some reason, in Xbox Live more than half of the competing players are Scottish (with strong Glaswegian dialect which sounded as foreign to me as French or German) upon discovering you’re English they boot you out… lovely. (more…)

Last weekend I bought Bethesda’s Star Trek Legacy for my Xbox 360, as a big fan of Star ‘Wars’ games (Battlefront etc.) I was hoping to be equally enthused about Star ‘Trek’. However, with Xbox live my main priority on any games that I play, this game should be renamed Star Trek ‘Let Down’. For forty five minutes last night I tried to play against other Live players, ten times I got an ‘insufficient connection speed’ message just before the game started, five times my 360 crashed completely and had to be rebooted. It wasn’t just me, everybody was complaining in the lobbies. In the end I had to settle for hosting my own two player game - hardly as much fun as four player… and the game itself isn’t really worth all the trouble anyway. (more…)

Following the Midnight Mass ceremony at Westcott Church I’ve had some sleep, opened some presents, completed Chapter One of Star Wars Lego II for the Xbox 360, chopped one hundred potatoes, and will now proceed to prepare the dinner table for visiting family due in fifteen minutes. Happy Christmas to one and all!

With four gamers reported to have died as a result of mammoth gaming sessions over the past four years, a clinic in the Netherlands (the Flying Horses Center) has started to treat addicted video gamers. This is probably long overdue, especially with millions of gamers hooked on the virtual world instead of real life. Apparently, being addicted to gaming is a lot like being addicted to gambling, with addicts having the ‘Just one more win and then I’ll stop’ mentality. What I found worrying there was that I’ve had that thought many times whilst playing Star Wars Battlefront on Xbox Live and put off going to bed until 4am as a result. What other symptoms are there? (more…)