This Post Was Supposed to be About Street Fighter IV

Which I got supremely juiced up for. I popped the disc in my Xbox 360 and was totally blown away by the awesomeness of the opening screens (which is highly unusual for me). I selected my character and I watched their intro cutscene. I started fighting. It felt good. It was smooth and sexy but before I knew it the bitch wasn't "in the mood" anymore. After seriously no more than 10 seconds of play time my Xbox 360 was experiencing hardware issues (one blinking red light told me this, non-gamers might not get me on this bit). Fucking Microsoft. I've already had the damn thing fixed before with the highly popular "Red Rind of Death" issue and now I was experiencing some other problem. I called up customer services and they ascertained that because my warrenty had expired I would have to pay $140 to have my Xbox fixed. That pissed me off a whole bunch. They know damn well it's their own fault and they should've done a better job fixing the console tha last time I sent it to them. I still have a working Super Nintendo from the 90's and here I have a console that's broken twice in about 14 months through no fault of my own. This picture pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter (note: not my hand, not my xbox and not my picture).


I was extremely happy a few days later when my girlfriend, who had sympathised completely throughout my bitching, saw the console and asked "so what's wrong with it." I turned it on to show her and something beautiful happened. It was STILL a hardware failure, but it was a good one that Microsoft has had such issues with that they saw fit to extend the warrenty for this particular issue for up to 3 years. My console now had the red ring of death. I must've been the happiest person ever to have their console fuck up. I called up customer care and sure enough they're repairing the console free of charge. I don't know what the deal was, I guess a broken Xbox 360 is kinda shit at self-diagnosis (makes sense really). Kinda seems sketchy especially when warrenty is a major player in the game. So anyway I'm expecting it back soon so expect to hear about Street Fighter IV soon (in this regard you probably wanted my console to stay broken).

The Thursday Morning Ritual Plus Some Other Shit

This morning I got up and like I did last Thursday (and indeed have done practically every Thursday since about Christmas) I watched the new Zero Punctuation video. Zero Punctuation is a weekly video game review series by a guy called Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw who incidentally landed himself a job through his own website, or indeed, blog. Don't think I haven't noticed all you folks out there on "the web" casting doubt on the whole blog scene in what I can only assume is an undercover attempt to create a blog, infiltrate the community and bring us down from the inside. You don't fool me though, I can spot that fake moustache a kilometer off (we do use metric after all). Anyway, Zero Punctuation is worth checking out, even if you aren't really a gamer.

Here's a link http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

Anyway this week he reviews Braid. A game that I myself recently downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace and have been enjoying thoroughly . But I'm not actually here to talk about Braid. I'm here to say how shitty I think the whole "Microsoft Points" system you must use in order to buy the games from Xbox Live Marketplace is. Here's a rundown on how it works.

1. In the REAL world you use your REAL money to buy Microsoft Points



2. You sign into Xbox Live and start shopping around



3. You see something you wanna "buy" and you pay for it with Microsoft Points

It sounds fair enough (if a little arbitrary) but there IS a catch. You see you can only buy points in certain increments. As an example I bought a 2000 point card the other day and only needed 1200 of those for Braid. So what happens to the left overs? Well they're still there as points but I can't get them back as money if I don't want anything else. It's like you're being forced to let Microsoft, one of the richest multinational corporations in the world, "keep the change." Microsoft aren't the only ones either, Nintendo uses Wii Points to buy Virtual Console and WiiWare games in the same way. I have 200 Wii points on my Wii that can't buy anything and can't be exchanged for money. To use them I'd have to buy more Wii points to add to the pile. Why can't I, oh I dunno, buy the the games I want with MONEY! All this points buisiness is deceptive and silly. What it all boils down to is buying money that can ONLY be used at one very specific store. I just hope that it stops here. Imagine if you had to buy points for every store you shopped at. Imagine if you couldn't use the change you got from buying an awesome shirt to buy a Coke from another store? It would be fucked, that's the answer.

What I Thought of Beyond Good & Evil

First up I'd like to say that I lied in the title. I haven't actually played Beyond Good & Evil...EVER! I want to, but I haven't. Let me tell you my story...

Over the past few months I've been hearing great things about a game of the last generation called Beyond Good & Evil. BG*ampersand*E was very well received by critics but ultimately failed to make a big splash on the public. Now because I'm one of those guys who likes to support excellence and originality and believes that video games are a developing art form I decided to traverse the cyberweb in search of a copy. I was in luck, I found an XBox (the original one) copy on ebay and outbid all my opponents. Just to illustrate again how under appreciated this game is I was the only bidder and I got it for $5. I was extremely chuffed. A few days passed and and the game arrived. Eager to see what all the fuss was about I popped the game into my XBox 360 (I don't own an original XBOX) and tried to play it. This is what appeared on my screen...

This original Xbox game is not

supported by your Xbox 360

console. An update to support this

game may be available. For more

info, go to www.xbox.com/games.

Grrrrrr...damn Microsoft have screwed me again. Not only did they make a console that gets so hot that it desolders critical hardware (which I had to have sent away recently) but it's also got the most bullshit backwards compatibility next to the PS3 (the current model of which has none). Of course, they will make an emulator so that I can actually play the game EVENTUALLY. But for now BG&E is on the shelf, once again being under appreciated.