ShadowReality

News appearing around the tubes of internets is that Video Market Place is finally coming our way (to the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany) at last. Thier past reson for not bring it sooner is not that microsoft didn’t want to, but there is a lot of licencing laws in different territories for film, well i’m not surprised it has taken this long, but I am glad it is finally arriving, I hope they get the pricing right.

With any luck they might make this go live on the winter update (4th Dec) , the other features revelaed so far are.

• Top level of “marketplace” has been reorganized and reduced to four categories: “Featured Content,” “What’s New,” “Game Store,” and “Video Store” (below top level, categories will be navigated by twist, just like the Game Library)
• “Personal Profile” added to Gamer Profile; text field allowing approx. 500-1000 characters, providing space to publish name, nationality, region, and self introduction. (Further social networking tools to accompany ‘Friends of Friends’ functionality)
• XBLA demos deleted from “Played Games” and Gamercard lists (THANK GOD!)

On a related note, my 360 has been repaired, and though it’s still awaiting pickup from Xbox repair centre from today I thank the gods that I’ll soon be getting my gaming back on track. mmm Call of duty 4…

It’s coming up to December already, 3 more weeks to Christmas and before you know it, 2008. It’s at times like these (when I have made no effort to get any presents) that time decides to speed up. I can’t wait to just relax in the holidays.

I sold some (3) of my old PS2 games on ebay, they got more than I thought they would (£25ish total) for the games that they were, so I think before christmas is upon me I’ll take advantage of one on ebays cheap listing days and get rid of a whole ton of stuff. Then I’ll buy a ton of stuff in the January sales.

Also what with all the Half-Life2 and Orange box related stuff, I decided to see how far I had got in HL2, it turns out I had not completed it, so thats another game I can occupy myself with until my Xbox360 is back. Which is currently officially being fixed I am told, but I wont get it back till about the 2nd week in December, how pooey.

Other than that I’m really really busy with work, I’m trying to get everything finished and out of the way, and other than that I feel Fantastic.

Much Like this song my Jonathon Coulton (visit his site NOW!), the same person who wrote the Portal Ending song (Still Alive) from the Game Portal , and also Code Monkey which is another great song of his. Audio clip below, theres also a very amusing Youtub vid.

“All I know is that this steak tastes better when I take my steak taste better pill”

Another nice little plugin I stumbled across helps me show some love back to you guys who comment on the site here. Showing off your name (aswell as a link to your website if supplied). Enzo is pwning all your asses right now.

With all this new stuff stuffed into that sidebar there i’m gonna do some decluttering, for example that huge archive list is going to be removed and have its own seperate page. Anyway I digress , if your have a wordpress site and wanna grab the plugin grab it here.

Do you like this new addition , want to see more cool stuff like this? Then drop a comment , you might make it on the list

Been thinkning about this a lot recently, but I think I am a horder. I have so many computer things stuffed around my house, every cupboard holds something. I have consoles dating back to the days when the computer would scream at you telling its loading. It’s time to clean house.

So Christmas is coming , people are looking for bargains on ebay I guess, so I have decided to sell a bunch of my old ps2 games on ebay along with some Xbox 360 games that I don’t think I will be playing anymore.

Now generally I’d probably keep a hold of my games, I have bookcases full of PS2 games, drawers of PS1 games, boxes upon boxes of Amiga games and I won’t even tell you what is in the loft. But times are a changin’, and this month has been pretty f**king expensive for me (new washing machine, xbox repair, etc). Well I gotta afford Rock Band somehow.

update:

Well to dip a toe in the water I sold 3 ps2 games, “Simpsons Hit & Run” , “Smackdown vs Raw” and “Spyro: Enter the dragonfly”. And combined I got almost £25, which is not too bad at all, not I gotta get rid of more of my PS2 games and maybe 1-2 Xbox 360 games that I won’t replay again. I’m going ebay crazy!

As I mentioned in an earlier post my Xbox 360 has recently stopped working 15 days outside it’s warrenty. Unfortunatly the repair of my washing machine in my house had taken presedance over getting my Xbox 360 repaired (only just) but now I have finally reached the point where I am about to ship off my 360 to that big repair centre in the sky, I am told it’s where all 360s eventually end up.. well I’m starting to think maybe that is true.

But thats not the point of this post. I’ve decided to keep track of my 360s little trip to microsoft on my site, not only to a guide to others as to how well (or bad) the UK support centre is, but also for my own records, and if they truley mess up I suppose I can always direct them to my site.

So tommorow (when I get a chance) I’ll stick up the story so far..

As Promised the repair status page will be updated as it unfolds.
http://www.shadowreality.co.uk/xbox-360-uk-repair-status/.

With the new larger layout I am able to have larger image widths.

Carcassonne is being given away free on Xbox Live Arcade for 48 Hours (12:01 PST November 15 through 11:59PM PST November 16) as part of Microsoft celebrating 5 years of providing its Xbox Live service. Carcassonne is normally priced at 800 Microsoft Points.

Carcassonne was initially a board game and it’s been given the video game treatment similar to that of Catan that was released a few months back.

Gamespot gives this a 7.5 / 10

“All things considered, Carcassonne is a solid addition to Live Arcade’s slowly increasing library of board games.”

Well You can’t really go wrong with a free game.

This is pretty much what happends to me every morning by my cat “Tribble”, funny anim I got sent by my sister.

I have recently been given the permission to add this cool Java applet by Ben Jaques, which can playback some of my pictures from the DS Pictoblogging category.

By Default I don’t display my scribbles on my main page here, instead I prefer to keep them inside a category, but from time to time I will upload a playback file so you can see what it looks like.