Tag: xbox 360

And that's it? The game took me about 6 hours to finish. Yes, I understand that each level can be completed in several different ways, choosing different methods of taking out or bypassing enemies, but still it feels like too little for a game they spent so long making and polishing. The story didn't impress me, it resembles a mix of Modern Warfare 2 and the show "24" too closely, and everything was already in those: the race against time, a woman president, the main character's daughter, traitors in the highest circles, mass EMPs...

Although no, the game does have a few touches of its own. For example, one of the villains is Ukrainian, my namesake, dressed in a vyshyvanka and a Ukrainian sash :) There are moments with him in the trailers for the game, you can take a look at them in these videos (for example, in this one, at 0:47 and 1:32).

The game is high quality, the gameplay is interesting, there are both pure stealth levels and action levels, although most of it is stealth-action. The way the story and, especially, the missions are presented is excellent. I think the next installment won't take as long to make and will be longer, with a few small additions to the mechanics.

So, I couldn't resist and bought the console in question, with the iXtreme LT firmware. I do want to play the new releases after all, and the toad of greed strangles me at the thought of spending a third or a quarter of my salary on a single game — exclusives like Heavy Rain don't count, those are rare, and for now I'm not even letting myself grab both Uncharted games and all the God of War ones. I also wanted to finish Dragon Age: Origin — my saves are still on the hard drive that didn't get banned. I had no desire to bother with repairing the dead Falcon; even if I re-soldered it, you can't get into Xbox Live from it anymore without a ban. A gaming PC is even more of a hassle and needs a lot of resources, so I wasn't really thinking about buying one, especially since publishers like Ubisoft have now started actively fighting against PC games.

On top of that, next month Splinter Cell: Conviction comes out, which I really want to play, and in May the exclusive Alan Wake. Dragon Age: Origin — Awekening and the reckless Just Cause 2 with its insane aerial battles across a huge open space, which is something GTA 4 lacks after SA, are already up on the torrents now.

Only it didn't all go smoothly with the console, even setting aside the delivery problems. After switching it on, the wireless gamepad wouldn't get detected, no matter what I did: I changed the batteries, pressed the sync buttons, tried different controllers, disconnected the hard drive. Already in despair, I gave the console a gentle shake — after that the original gamepad connected; I think if I don't touch it, it should keep working fine. There's no point sending it back to Kyiv for repair, no telling what'll happen after another round of shaking during transport. I found a video about fixing this problem without breaking the warranty seal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeG_IO5yyvk Might come in handy in the future.

Updated my LJ profile, put my XBL gamertag in there via Silverlight; I know most people don't have it installed, but it's convenient for me.

Finished Assassin's Creed 2 in less than a day and a half, played all Saturday and a few hours on Sunday — you get a lot of points for completing the game's story line, over 800. In the evening I decided to play a bit of Dragon Age: Origins, which I'd been playing through for the last two weeks; a few minutes into the game artifacts started crawling across the screen, and after a reboot — a red light in the bottom right corner and E74 on the screen. After a while I turned it on, the first few minutes were fine, then it happened again, and this time the error wouldn't go away. The console is a first-revision Xbox 360 Pro Falcon, 17.5 months old; counting the times I was away, when it sat idle packed in a bag, it comes out to about 14 months of actual use, always standing vertically in an open space. Lately I'd been trying not to switch it off right after playing, avoiding temperature swings, and while I was playing through Assassin's the console froze dead twice while loading locations, and I had to do a hard reboot.

Judging by what people write on the forums, it's the standard problem — the GPU solder has come loose. You can cure it for a couple of days or weeks by overheating the console to two red lights, wrapping it in a blanket. Otherwise, the chip needs a reball, and nobody in town does console repairs — the sellers send you off to Kyiv or Dnipropetrovsk. And even that helps for a few weeks, a year at best.

It's a shame I'd only gotten about 60-70 percent through Dragon Age — it's a great game, I was thinking of playing through it a second time after the first. For now I don't know what to do — I'd like to find somewhere to bring the console back to life at least for a while. After the new year I'll get some kind of replacement, maybe a PC, maybe a PS3, or better yet an Arcade with the new "undetectable" firmware. I haven't logged into Live the last few weeks, to avoid getting banned, so the data on the hard drive isn't corrupted and it can easily be moved over to a new console. On the other hand, for now I don't see any games worth buying a console or a computer for — I got the Xbox for GTA IV, finished it and had my fill, beat both of its add-ons, though I haven't quite had my fill of those yet, but I got the main enjoyment out of the playthrough. And the need for an HD TV has now gone away too.

Finally flashed the console's drive with the iXtreme 1.6 firmware; before that it was 1.4.1. Earlier I couldn't get around to it for understandable reasons, but now I have free time both to flash it and to play new games.

Still, it's a hassle taking apart an Xbox 360 for the first time with makeshift tools, even with a detailed guide — it's especially hard to release a row of latches at the back all at once.

I flashed a Philips-BenQ VAD6038 drive on an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard. I did everything according to the guides from Xboxland.net; at first I tried JungleFlasher, but the program didn't detect the drive, it only found one I/O Port. After that I rebooted several times, changed the BIOS settings, setting "Enhanced Mode Support On" to "S-ATA+P-ATA", as in the screenshots. The drive was detected fine in the BIOS, although in the example it was "Secondary IDE Mater", while mine was only "Fourth IDE Mater". I even put the drive into service mode, leaving the tray half-closed, although that shouldn't have affected whether the drive was detected. Besides JungleFlasher I also tried DosFlash, but this program didn't find the drive either.

After several reboots and setting changes I didn't know what to do, I was thinking of either getting an additional SATA controller or updating the BIOS, since I couldn't remember ever updating it. Toward the end I also connected the drive to a different SATA port and set "Onboard IDE Operate Mode" in the BIOS to "Compatible mode", although the guide said something different. JungleFlasher still kept finding only one port, while in DosFlash it was detected without any trouble and flashed according to the guide without problems — I didn't even need to put it into service mode again.

There's still something about this I don't understand, and the guides, it turns out, aren't complete either.

For my birthday I decided to get an online card for shopping on the Internet. The main goal was to buy Xbox Points, but it didn't work out, because they had already added a check on the card's country, and for Australia at that — that's where I registered my Xbox Live account. Of course, you can buy top-up codes, but that comes out to around $35 for GTA IV: The Lost and Damned (a seven-hour add-on to the game) — I'm not ready to pay that kind of money, and I'm also not ready to create a US account and lose all the achievements and points I racked up on the Australian one. So I decided to do without TLaD and n+, and just bought a code for a month of Xbox Live Gold membership through WebMoney.

But there was still money left in the bank account, so I turned my attention to Amazon UK. I didn't want to buy a lot right away — it was the first time, after all; and not too little either, since the shipping comes out too expensive for a single item. In the end I picked two books: Mystery of the White Lions: Children of the Sun God, Christian the Lion and the DVD film The Lions Are Free. I placed the order overnight from Saturday into Sunday, when I noticed that a good discount had appeared on the main item I was after. I thought the order would be processed on Monday, but on Sunday they let me know everything had been shipped. This Saturday evening there was already a notification about a parcel that had arrived — too bad the post office is closed on Sundays and they didn't bring the package home on the day it arrived, as they should have. Only this morning did I pick up the parcel with my order:

Congratulations to everyone who cares about this date. I know that this year many decided to mark the date of the limited release of "The Lion King", but in past years more attention was given to the film's all-American premiere, and I've gotten used to July 24th — after all, this number has meant something to me for almost five years now, since back in 2003 I read a congratulatory message on the cartoon's release in the guestbook of some website. And besides, I'm too lazy to change passwords :) I only learned about the 15th not that long ago anyway.

To honor such an occasion, I decided to watch the classic theatrical version of the cartoon, the one given a wide release 14 years ago. I probably last watched it on a videotape with a voice-over translation, back before the SE version came out. This time I'd be watching it from a licensed DVD with the original soundtrack. I also decided to check how the Xbox 360 plays video, since my main nineteen-inch LCD monitor is connected to the console anyway, and I was once again too lazy to reconnect it to the laptop, while the regular TV and the seventeen-inch CRT monitor were out of the question. Naturally, the first film I watched on the Box was TLK.

The disc read fine, although a quick search for information said that consoles play region 2, not region 5 — maybe it's because the disc is Ukrainian, or maybe the drive's firmware plays a role. I'm too lazy to figure it out; the main thing is that it works. The picture turned out good, no different from what the computer produced — a shame, of course, that there's no way to watch DVD and HD on something bigger. But the sound was a pleasant surprise: for the first time I could enjoy the audio at maximum volume without the extraneous noise that was always there when output through the built-in sound card. And the music in this cartoon is one of its main components. Now I can think about getting a proper sound system to replace the pair of speakers with a subwoofer.

As for the viewing itself, there's no point going on about it — others have said it all already.