Frost Nova

I won this Mario plushy ages ago from a skill tester at that arcade in Albury at the bottom of the cinema. I forget the name of the place, but Mario got stuck on the claw and was hanging there precariously until the attendant came over and eased my despair. Anyway I was bored the other day and took this photo. Getting his hands to stick to the controller required some trickery…

I just bought a 20G hard drive for my Xbox 360 for a couple of reasons:

1. The space on the 256MB memory card is not enough to download Braid,
2. A hard drive would enable me to play old Xbox games. The only ones I would want to play are Halo, Halo 2 & Half-Life 2.

So now that my new Xbox can play old Xbox games, there’s not much point keeping an old Xbox around. That is, it has ceased to be useful as a games console. But I wonder, should I bother to give it a rebirth as something else? I could…

• Install XBMC on it… no wait, the new Xbox does everything I would use that for. Plus I can’t be arsed installing a mod chip.
• Install Xbox Linux on it… Meh I’m kinda over screwing around with Linux. Ditto re mod chip.
• Convert it into a NAS device… and utilise it’s whopping great 8 GB of storage. Yeah baby. Plus that would be the most oversized NAS on the planet.
• Gut it and use the case for something else…but what? And can I really be arsed?
• Pull it apart just for the fun of it (so far this is winning).
• Trade it in for like $2.
• Donate it to someone who wants it (let me know).

It’s a bit sad really to see it sitting there, useless and helpless as it is.

On a related note, I preordered Fable 2 the other day. You should too. Even if you don’t have a 360. The game is going to be that frickin good.

I bought an ex-rental copy of Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube for $10. It loads the menu but when I try to play a game I get disc read errors. Poo. A working Gamecube game for $10… I knew it sounded too good to be true. Oh poo. Well at least the guy said I could return it if it didn’t work.

Behold, the insightful musings of Bajo, in his latest blog post.

If anything, E3 made me realise how very very small Australia is compared to the rest of the world.  I guess this is why we have to pay a bit more than the  US .. and suffer some awful pings… but our industry is growing, and the types of people turning into gamers is changing… . more ages and genders of humans are becoming gamers… this can only be a good thing in helping our industry grow here.  If there was one thing that more developers at E3 said to us more than anything else, is that NOW is a good time to get into the games industry – it’s strong, it’s growing, it’s changing and finding it’s feet through chaos, commercial pressures and the artistic needs of some great minds who just want to make great games.

I don’t care how small we are, it still doesn’t justify the price fixing on Wii points.

So I bought that Brawl game everyone’s talking about. I used the Gamecube controller. I tried the Wiimote/chuck setup but with these intense games (MK is another one) my left hand very quickly starts to ache from holding the Nunchuck like I am trying to strangle a small animal.

Single player adventure mode is absolutely awesome. Clever cut scenes that make the characters look like they are ready to kick some serious butt. Strangely it feels like I’m playing Final Fantasy again. Great way to have some fun while getting to know the different characters.

Now online multiplayer… I tried the quick brawl feature to “play anyone, anywhere” and to say I was disappointed would be the understatement of the year. I don’t know how this game’s hosted (server or P2P) but the brawl was UNPLAYABLE. It would lag every second for about half a second. And the worst part: you can’t exit even using the Home button. So it was hard reset time. VERY POOR. Let’s hope this is fixed somehow or at least the friend battles are lag-free otherwise there will be A LOT of Aussie Brawlers who are gonna want Nintendo to suffer. And I mean suffer on the scale of Microsoft Antitrust suffering.

UPDATE: From a quick glance at some forums, it may be that Nintendo’s servers can’t keep up with the demand. Found some more info from Nintendo, limited in usefulness as it is.

…and Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 and Beautiful Katamari and Bioshock and Ninja Gaiden II (assuming I like Ninja Gaiden I).

In what we can only assume is an effort to steal sales away from Nintendo, Microsoft have dramatically reduced the price of their Xbox 360 console. RRP is now $349 with some retailers such as Big W selling for as low as $279.

However, an Xbox 360 hardware refresh is rumoured for sometime in 2008/2009. But this latest price drop makes me care alot less about that.

So… Should I get one?

UPDATE: I just found out its the Arcade version, with no hard drive. And apparently you need a hard drive to play original Xbox games, and they’re about $60-80. Not a huge problem since I can always play the games on my Original Xbox.

I can now play Tyrian on my Wii. My life is complete. It doesn’t get any better than this, folks… Well, it could be better if I could actually save my game >_< Oh yeah, and getting out of OpenTyrian requires a Wii hard-reset 9 times out of 10 but come on, it's Tyrian people, TYRIAN! Arcade mode is actually quite fun. And hard. I forgot how hard this game is.

I used the Twilight Hack to install the Wii Homebrew Channel (HBC), and it worked first go, like an absolute charm. I remembered to back up my Zelda savegame first, and will restore that soon. Once HBC is loaded you really have no need for the Twilight Hack again.

There are some pretty neato apps for the Wii so far, but most only use the “fake Gamecube” inside the Wii, which means this really isn’t worth doing unless you have a GameCube controller. ScummVM uses the Wiimote which is impressive. There are also emulators for just about every Nintendo console before the Gamecube, so I ask: Why aren’t Nintendo jumping up and down? It’s obviously a huge threat to the Virtual Console. Maybe VC sales are just a tiny fraction of their income though so they don’t care?

But there’s still one thing missing and that’s DVD playback. My good ol’ Panasonic DVD player has recently carked it. I loved it to bits because it was region-free out of the box, and I have a lot of non-R4 DVDs. There is still no .elf DVD app that can be loaded with HBC, but Wii Miidia looks quite promising. I’ll be waiting for an official release, though; I’m happy to give everyone else the chance to brick their Wiis using the betas.

If anyone wants to borrow my copy of Zelda to get this going, let me know.