The Guitar controller feels very cool.  The buttons work nicely, it’s comfortable to use, and is a load of fun.  Lifting the neck high to activate Star mode is cool too.  After an extended session, my left hand does feel like it’s been slammed in a door, but that’s just my lack of co-ords more than any fault of the controller.  After a 10 minute rest, I’m ready to go again!  How well somebody who isn’t into music and had never tried to play guitar in real life would enjoy GH2 is debatable, but as for me, well, I’m majorly into Guitar Hero II!

I just wish my sister didn’t kick my butt at it so much!  Must go practise before she comes over again!!!!!

The story isn’t all bad though.  When Xbox 360 was launched in SA, the distributer made a deal with Microsoft to support imported consoles that were purchased before local launch.  No idea why they did that, but it was jolly decent of them.  Mine has been arranged to be replaced under this deal, which is fantastic, and not the kind of putting the customer first experience we usually get here in Africa.  I commend MI Digital / JNC on this move, and thank Waggy ZA for his part in helping me out.

Some stats about my first year of Xbox 360 and Live from MyGamerCard.net and 360Voice.com:

Number of Games: 62

Total Score: 17269 / 36165

Total Achievements: 519 / 1278

Rep:  5 Stars
GamerScore: 17269
Zone: Recreation

Completed XBLA: 0 / 9
Completed Retail: 6 / 30
GS Completion %: 47.75%
GS % (Non-Demo): 54.71%

Country Rank: 16/868
World Rank: 12240/982215

Most Played: Project Gotham Racing 3

Longest streak: 28 days
Play percentage: 84.5%
Largest achievement gain:10/21/2006 (13)
Largest gamerscore gain:1/16/2007 (550)

The drive unit itself is about the size of a medium sized hardcover book, and follows the Xbox 360′s “exhale” design.  Sitting on top the console, it is the same length as the 360, and looks good.  Included in the box is a power supply (which is disappointing, but the USB interface obviously couldn’t handle the power requirements), a Xbox 360 Media Remote, some manuals etc, a USB 2.0 cable, a disk you must insert in the console BEFORE connecting the drive, and a copy of the King Kong HD-DVD.

Inserting this disk in the console seems to install some software to enable HDDVD playback.  Not sure why they couldn’t do this over Live with a dashboard update, as it seems pretty small, only taking a second or two to complete its process.  One possible reason is that they couldn’t assume all consoles using this peripheral would be connected to Live.  There was an update available over Live, which I got prompted for the first time I used it though.

The drive connects to the rear of the console (or the front, but it looks better in the back), which uses up your USB port back there.  If you happen to have the Xbox 360 Wireless adapter currently running off that port, fret not, as the HD-DVD drive includes 2 USB ports on the rear of the unit, and the necessary clips for attaching your wireless adapter, so you lose nothing.  In fact, you gain a USB port, so you can still connect your Live Vision Camera (review to follow soon) to the rear of the unit, and keep cables out of the way.

My 360 is connected to my Dell 2405FPW 24″ LCD screen via the Microsoft Xbox 360 VGA cable.  This screen has a native resolution of 1920 x 1200, and I have it set not to scale, therefore I have small blck bars at the top and bottom of the screen in order to keep the proper 16:9 aspect ratio.  My console is outputting 1920×1080. 

I eagerly inserted the King Kong HD-DVD disk.  As a quick aside, let me say that I really like the smaller cases HD-DVDs come in.  They do make any DVD racks you may have obsolete, but they are much nice and way smaller.  Anyway, back to King Kong………

I sit here struggling to think of how exactly to portray in mere words how good this movie looks in HDDVD at 1080p.  The jungle scenes are absolutely incredible.  King Kong himself is too good for words.  Every hair on his body seems to be moving individually, and the detail you can see on his face is down right scary.  I sat through the entire three and a bit hours in absolute awe, like I was watching my first ever moving picture.  I was literally, blown away.  The best analogy I can come up with is this:  DVD is like watching moving photograph taken with your average camera phone, and HD-DVD (in 1080p) is like watching a moving photograph taken with a good quality 5 megapixel digital camera.  It is mind-blowing!  The only downside to this kind of spectacular clarity is that there were some scenes you could clearly see had been green-screened.  The focus just looked ever so slightly wrong, something I very much doubt anybody would have seen in the movie theatre or on standard DVD.

After being stunned by King Kong, I quickly threw in Superman Returns.  Superman Returns is a hybrid disk, with one side HD-DVD, and the other side standard DVD, which can be played in any DVD player.  As mentioned in my HD-DVD vs Bluray article, this is one of the major benefits of the HD-DVD format, enabling people to purchase movies like this, and be able to use it as a standard DVD until they upgrade to HD-DVD.  One of the main differences between DVD and HD-DVD is that the movie starts straight away, without going to a menu.  The menu is available with a press of the Menu button, but comes up as an overlay while the movie continues to play.  From this menu, you can pause the movie, so you don’t miss any while you’re fiddling around, change the sound settings, see extras etc.  You can also activate the IME (In-Movie Experience).  This is basically the next generation of director’s commentary.  It brings up little picture in picture windows while the movie is playing to show special extras such as how they did the scene you’re currently watching, actor or director interviews etc.  It’s pretty cool, and not nearly as boring as director commentary!

I looked at Superman Returns playing for a minute or two, then ejected the disk to make sure it wasn’t playing the standard DVD side by mistake.  It wasn’t.  I put the disk back in the drive, and skipped to the scene of the airplane / space shuttle accident, where Superman saves people for the first time in the movie.  The picture was good, but not great.  People’s skin looked plastic and a little fake, there was a lot of noise (speckles) on the picture, especially in darker scenes.  Don’t get me wrong, it still looks MUCH better than DVD, but if I hadn’t just finished watching King Kong, I wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed with this whole HD-DVD thing.  I removed Superman, and put in Batman Begins.  Now this looked MUCH better.  There is no noise in the scenes, you can see the pores on peoples faces, making them look a lot less like plastic mannequins, and the sharpness in the scenes of Gotham City is excellent.  This not so super Superman made me do some thinking.  The director of Superman obviously wanted a softer look to all the scenes, and it probably does look great in the movie theatre, but on HD-DVD, it’s disappointing not to be able to see every pore on the actors skin.  Maybe it’s just me, and I am looking at the picture rather than watching the movie, but again I say, after King Kong, it looks rubbish.  As for the noise on the picture, I assume that came in during transfer from film to digital.  Not all transfers are equal, but Superman Returns looks quite bad.  Or, maybe King Kong was just particularly good, which is why it is included with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive as a showcase?  I don’t know, but I’ve seen what’s possible, so I now expect it everywhere!

I can’t comment on the sound of the movies.  HD-DVD includes Dolby Tru-HD sound, which is essentially a lossless compression algorithm.  This should allow much more detail in the sound track, especially in the bass, highs and little detail sounds you often hear happening behind you.  Unfortunately, only very high-end home theatre decoders support this right now, and only via HDMI, so the Xbox 360, since it doesn’t have HDMI for now, has to down mix the soundtrack to standard Dolby Digital 5.1.  It’s ok, but just ok.  I also had to crank up the volume of my speakers, as the sound output of HD-DVD is quite soft for some reason. 

In conclusion, I would like a new pair of eyes, as I think they’ll soon be the weakest link in my home theatre.  Once decent sized 1080p screens start to cost less than small countries, and Tru-HD decoders are mainstream, the cinema is going to become quite obsolete.  With HD-DVD, I get all the benefits of the movie house, and none of the sticky floors, people taking, blind projectionists who can’t focus the picture, cell phones going off etc etc.  And, I can pause whenever I want.  I LOVE the HD era.

It was awesome!!!  They used a really nice projector (looked like 1080p) and everything was set up very well.  The sound was excellent, and the picture was superb.  Several people who qualified had obviously not played much before, and only got a good laptime on the qualy track by doing tons of laps.  There were some really good players though.  It ended up with myself and another guy in the final, who was definitly the best player there (besides me, but I’m not going to toot my own horn…. toot.).  We had a good close race in the final but I managed to stay ahead of him.

I won another Xbox 360.  I’m really chuffed, because I was very nervous when the whole thing started.  I must congratulate Gerhard (my opponent in the final) for a great race.  Also, thanks to Nu-Metro and Cinevation for coming up with this awesome competition.  I really enjoyed it, and hope there will be more like it in the future.

I have a serious issue with the disk replacement policy, or lack thereof, exhibited at every South African Gaming retailer I’ve seen. The fact that I can’t return a damaged disk and receive a replacement is an outrage . I am more than willing to pay a small handling fee of R50 or so, but making me buy a new copy of a game I bought for more than R500 is ridiculous. The reason for this sad state of affairs may not be the fault of the retailer, but rather the distributor; I don’t know, but something must be done.

I purchased Project Gotham Racing 3 for XBOX 360 a few months ago, and REALLY enjoyed this game. Because I am very careful of scratches etc, I made sure I ALWAYS returned the disk to its case after use. However, this careful practise of clicking the disk into the case over and over again caused a small crack in the disk starting at the centre hub, eventually spreading into the data area of the disk, rendering it unusable. I had to purchase another copy in order to keep playing this game. I know of several people with similar stories. Sometimes, the disk is damaged due to negligence, which is why I am happy to pay a small replacement fee, to ensure people do look after their disks in a reasonable way.

Thinking about this lead me to thinking about DRM (Digital Rights Management), which basically is protection of intellectual property by using various methods of copy and usage protection? The studios (in the case of a movie) or the publishers (in the case of a game) insist that you do not own the digital information contained on a DVD or game disk you purchased, but merely have a license to use it as they see fit. That same argument surely cuts both ways, in that if I purchase a game or a movie on a fragile plastic disk, and the disk breaks or is damaged, my license to use or view the content is still valid. I didn’t pay R500 or more for a stupid little piece of plastic and a small booklet. I paid for the game or movie, or the “license” to view or play it.

I’ll be honest; I haven’t always paid for every game I’ve played in my life. Since I got my Xbox 360, (and what a great system it is!), I have become 100% legit, and will not even consider modding my console to play unoriginal games. I’m definitely not condoning piracy, but my issues mentioned above cause me (and millions like me) to rethink this decision. How does this help the gaming industry at all, if thousands of newly reformed ex-pirates decide paying twice for a game is insane, and simply go back to their old ways?

I trust somebody in the gaming industry will read these thoughts and remedy this situation. I know a friend of mine in the USA damaged one of his game disks and EB Games replaced the disk for him at no charge. I don’t know if this is something they do for all their customers or if he was just lucky, but I do know that here in South Africa, he would have gone home a very bleak boy. Surely, as long as I can give them a damaged original disk, case and booklet etc, that is proof enough that I do have a valid claim to a replacement?

Duncan Rae

Xbox Live GamerTag: DuncThePunk

Which segways nicely into my next point. The bad of GamerScore. GamerScore can become a futile addiction. A never ending pursuit of that next thousand. If you are involved in a community of players, and have a large friends list, the competition can become quite intense. The advent of Xbox Live Leader boards hasn’t helped matters at all. Suddenly, being just off the first page re-ignites a fire of rage, and you’ll find yourself walking to the mall and going straight to the game store to buy another 1000GS worth of game. This is where is starts to get ugly. Suddenly you’re playing a game you hate, just to get through it for maximum GS. You start to turn down invitations to play games online unless you can get GS out of it. You start to lose all sense of fun and enjoyment as it becomes your all encompassing life goal. You pass 5000, then 10000. Still, you want more. You’re deep in debt; you have no friends left, either real or online. You’re starting to turn grey due to lack of sunlight and adequate nutrition. Then, all of a sudden, it hits you. Gamerscore has taken over your life.

You decide to stop with this futile chase. You’ll never have the highest GS. There will always be someone with more time and money than you.

This is where I find myself now. I have done the chase for a little while, spurred on by a number of fellow Xbox Live players to stay on the first page. I’ve since re-evaluated my stance. A high GamerScore is really not something worth pursuing. Achievements are worth chasing, as the sense of accomplishment and reward can be extremely gratifying, however I no longer compare myself to others based on GamerScore alone. I look deeper, into how they achieved that score. High scores for games like PGR3, MotoGP, Call of Duty 2 etc are worth far more than King Kong, FIFA RTWC etc, which have GS so easy to achieve it’s almost insulting.

So, Gamerscore. It’s good, no doubt, but it can be bad, and even downright ugly. Enjoy it, and let it be something to help you experience games like never before, but it shouldn’t be what your gaming life is about, at least not for me.

SA Live users will still be able to access Live, like I do currently, but we won’t have any official support. Doesn’t look like we’ll be able to pay for the Live subscription in Rands either, which sucks!

I’m not refering to small problems here that only a small percent of users will ever notice. The two worst examples so far are to be found in Call of Duty 2 and MotoGP 06. CoD2 was pretty much unplayable on multiplayer until the patch came out about 4 months after release. It was VERY laggy, there was no game lobby etc, it was aweful. Thankfully, the patch fixed all that, but this was a terrible problem. Maybe Activision thought everyone would be so involved in the single player campaign they wouldn’t notice that multiplayer didn’t work?? I don’t know, but that was just plain shoddy. MotoGP 06, which is also a great game, just locks up the console whenever you try to see your friends lap times. Full lock up. You have to cycle power. How did it get through QA like this? Apparently it only happens if you have more than 25 people on your friends list, but still! Really pathetic. This is made even worse because the actual game is so good.

I might have to start waiting until I see that Service Pack 1 is out for each game before buying it. Sad!

-EDIT- I sent an email very similar to what I wrote above to Major Nelson, and he said he would pass it on to some folks around his office. Hopefully this problem will get better in the future.

-UPDATE- A patch was released for MotoGP 06 which has fixed the Friends Lap Time issue.

-Edit- I wrote to Matt Goyer (who works on the Media Center dev team) about this, and he confirmed that there will be zero support in Vista for old extenders. He didn’t give any reasons, but it was nice of him to reply I suppose.

I know he plans to set up tournaments and ladders etc, so it should be great!!!

All XBOX 360 games use the trueSkill Ranking system. This serves 2 purposes. It tugs at the competitive nature in all of us to get better and better, and thus actually see our ranking increase, and it enables better and fairer match making for multiplayer games. Playing against people much better than you, or much worse isn’t that much fun. No one likes just getting shot up all the time, or only seeing your opponents in a racing game up to the first corner before he leaves you in the dust. If possible, the TrueSkill system will match you up with people close to your own ranking, which should result in some good gaming.

From what I believe, there are 30 levels in the Trueskill system. When you first start playing a game, your level will be 1. Some games show your level in the game’s lobby. Level 30 means you are a machine, and nobody must mess with you. The system that determines your ranking uses 2 numbers to get to it. The first number is your actual ranking, which is 1 when you start. The second number is the systems certainty of your ranking, which is kind of inverted, meaning a high certainty variable means the system is not very certain of you. Let me explain it via an example. You have just loaded PGR3 for the first time. Your Ranking is 1, which is the lowest. The system has no idea how good you are though, since it is your first race, so the certainty variable is high. Lets assume you are Kimi Raikkonen and you win your first race. Because your certainty variable is very high, you will jump many ranks and now you may be a rank 8. You win your next race also, but now the system is a little more certain of you, so you only jump up 5 ranks, to level 13. Your next race, some idiot takes you out early on and you finish 7th. Your ranking will go down quite a few places, since your certainty variable is still high. You may now get to rank 9. As you race more and more, your certainty variable gets smaller and smaller, as the system gets to “know” you. After 100 races, you may be ranked level 20. If you win a race, you won’t rank up very much since the scope for ranking up is smaller because your certainty variable will be much lower. The benefit of this is that a single game won’t effect your ranking very much after you have been playing for a while. A bad loss or a lucky win won’t change things much. If you are consistantly winning against players of a similar rank, you will rank up, but fairly slowly, and likewise if you are consistantly losing.

It’s a good system, and although I wish my rank was higher, I need to consistantly win races to get there. I hope this explains it in a simple way. The people who designed it are hardcore mathematics guys who deal with complex statistics etc, which is a bit beyond me, but at least this should shed some light on the subject for those who are a bit confused as to how it works.

-EDIT- There is a lot more information (which is a lot more technical) now available at the Microsoft Research Trueskill Website.

The box it comes in is surprisingly small. Everything is packed really well. Setting everything up was disappointingly easy. I like settings, so having everything just basically work straight out the box was a bit boring, for me anyway. The first time you plug it in, it downloads a dashboard update, and then you’re ready to go. It also came with a 1 month free XBOX Live Gold membership.
I have it hooked up to a 19″ flat screen running at 1280×1024 via the VGA cable. The only game I have right now is Dead or Alive 4, and at 1280×1024 with all the Anti-Aliasing and everything else that cool graphics chip does, it looks eye-poppingly good. Especially the African Safari arena. The blades of grass and the texture detail is fantastic, The game is really hard though, but I’m not really a fighting game man. I can’t wait for PGR3 to arrive!!!! That is going to be cool.

I also loaded up Halo 2, which required the compatibility download before it could be played. This happened very quickly, and the game launched. When trying to sign onto XBOX Live though, it kept telling me I had to get a game update. When I clicked Ok, it would take me back to the dashboard saying that the game did not support my display settings. I tried dropping the resolution, but this made no difference. I looked on some forums, and discovered that the Halo 2 content downloader doesn’t support progressive scan, and this is what causes this error when it is connected to a progressive display. I carted the entire thing downstairs and plugged it into a standard TV, and it worked perfectly. I also had to download all the new Halo 2 Map Packs before I could play online. Once this was done, I happily got my butt kicked over and over again on Live. Very cool. Not the butt kick part but….. you know.

The Media Center extender is fantastic. It required a 20MB download on your Media Center to enable it, then it works. It is brilliant. Every transition and effect is there. It’s really great. Trying to navigate around with the controller is a bit difficult. I have ordered the 360 remote, and it will arrive soon. I discovered however that my standard Mediacenter remote works with the 360. Everything works except the volume controls. Not sure if this is by design or not.

I have heard all about these overheating rumors, but everything went fine for me. The unit does get warm, and the air coming out the back is quite warm, but nothing too bad. The power brick (which is surprisingly big to behold) didn’t get much above room temperature either during a good 3 hour session.

It comes with some HD videos on the Hard Drive. One is a trailer for a Snow boarding video, and the other is an Adidas advert, which is pretty good.

DVD playback is acceptable rather than fantastic. The DVD picture quality played on my PC on that 19″ screen is a bit better.

The standard visualizations that come with the built in media player are very nice. Streaming music from my PC via Windows Media Connect works very well. The pictures don’t work so well though. All the music’s album art gets picked up as pictures, which is a bit annoying. This might be a configuration issue on my PC though.

Overall, this is a great piece of kit. Just can’t wait for Project Gotham Racing 3!!!!

Copy the Extender program’s XBE to your PC, and open it in a hex editor. Search for ’8B5728508B4730508B472C518B4F0452′ and change it to ’508B4730508B472C518B4F04906A0090′.

This works for the standard version and rollup 1.

Awesome! Thanks BlueCopter! You’re a genius!

Fortunatly, with the new “Silver” Xbox live, if you have ADSL you should still be able to play online, as it’s free and hopefully you won’t need a foreign credit card to get access. You won’t be able to play on the weekends or enter tournaments though.

I put the blame (maybe unfairly, but I don’t care!) squarely on Telkom. I’m sure if bandwidth was cheaper, the market for this would be bigger, and it would be a viable option for MS, but not at the moment.

I’m now running UnleashX, XBox Media Center (23–07–2005) and can now play NTSC or PAL games on a stock standard (well, hardware anyway) XBox. 

To complete this awfully simple task, and free your XBox from all these terrible constraints placed on it by Microsoft, simply download the Softmod Installer 2.0 from XBox Tribe or any other web site you choose.  The Softmod installer includes exploits for Splinter Cell (NTSC and PAL), Mech Assault and 007 Agent under fire.  You need to have the originals of these games to get this working.  I am fortunate enough to have Splinter Call and Mech Assault.  Please bear in mind that the Classics range of games NO NOT WORK.  You need the older version.

It is a lot easier to complete this task if you already have a modded XBox or can borrow one from somebody.  You need to upload these Save Games onto a modded XBox using XBox Saves Manager, or just extract them and FTP them onto E:\Udata.  Take a XBox memory card and plug it into a controller connected to the modded XBox.  Load M$Dash and go to Memory.  From here you can copy Save Games onto your memory card.  Copy the relevant save game (depending on what exploit you’re using) from the XBox to the Memory Card.  The Splinter Cell exploit is 2 files, a Linux Installer, and a Splinter Cell Save game.  The Linux Installer is 485 blocks, so you’ll need your memory card to be virtually empty to have enough space.

You should make sure you have the latest M$Dash (5960) before doing this.  Run a newish game, and select XBox Live and it should update the dash for you, or go to XBox Live, and select Account Recovery, as this seems to also update your Dashboard.  Just quit when it asks you for account details.

Now plug the memory card into the new XBox.  Use M$Dash’s memory manager to copy the saves from the memory card to the Hard Drive.  Now load the game.  Go to load save game, and you should see a Linux save game.  Load this save, and voila, the game crashes and a nice Dashboard Installer pops up. 

If you want to play on XBox Live with this XBox ever again, you will need to make a backup of your original C partition.  The Softmod Installer 2.0 gives you the option of doing this.  It creates a Backup Folder on E:.  I suggest you copy this onto a PC and or write it to a CD to keep it safe. 

Now install UnleashX or EvoX (your choice) and you’re done.  Reboot your XBox after this and your new Dash should load up. 

To undo the softmod, simply boot up your XBox with the Drive open, and the SoftMod Installer menu will come up.  Select Restore C Backup and you’re back, good as new.

Along the same lines, WINDVD 7.0 is out. I’ll be installing it on my Mediacenter shortly.

I will be at the Avril Concert, but my Media Center should take care of recording it for me.