ShadowReality

This last weekend I finished up my custom gamercard code and it works very well, and I am now working on a central control panel where you can customise it further, and then i’ll be adding different sizes / designs too.

Here’s what the card currently looks like, very close to the concept.

The information refreshes every couple of minutes, and should convey the same information as the gamercard in my sidebar. I’ll be posting updates as I add more over the coming weeks.

Wow! On Tuesday I arranged for UPS to come and collect my Xbox 360, it was shipping of to Frankfurt in Germany for it’s repair, I believe it’s something to do with repair center queues. So this morning I check the Xbox.com support area to check up on my status and it was marked as arrived, so happy with that I continued my day.

Then this evening, mostly out of boredom or longing for Call of Duty 4 I checked the support site once more only to find they had updated the status again….

For the 2nd time, my Xbox 360 has broken…

Having been through the repair process once already last year (I even blogged about it) I know what to expect this time, and didn’t freak out as much at all. I was enjoying some great Call of Duty 4 with some friends when all of a sudden the textures had a wierd matrix effect on them, it looked pretty cool. Then upon rebooting I got an E 74 error which I hear is often referred to as “The black screen of death”, how original.

So it’s queued up for it’s repair already and since theres not many big games out for the Xbox360 at the moment I think I’m quite lucky and should have it back soon enough. I think i might even blog about my Xbox’s second adventure to the magical repair shop.

As discussed on the recent Noobtoob Community Podcast I have picked up a copy of Condemned and have contributed to Jam and Locke’s fantastic videos. Seeing as Jam started in the shopping mall I decided to flesh out the beginning of the story, and after this who knows which part I shall cover next (suggestions welcome). So turn down the lights, turn up the volume and enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

As of right now my Gamerscore is 9988, and I’m pretty psyched about passing the 10,000 barrier. But there’s just one stain on my record, no not king king.. it goes my the name of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

Most games generally give achievements ending in a zero or five, however UKM3 gives it in 11s , or 12s, and since I havn’t beaten the game yet I am 12 points off my target, well no more I say! Next month i’m going to work on getting that stain off my record, i’m going to train like Rocky and kick ass like the Karate Kid, and then I will win.. CUE THE MUSIC!!

So I have not yet decided on what achievement will push me over the barrier, but I won’t make it something cheap like undertow, I’m stil plowing through Call Of Duty 4 on veteran, and just past one of the hardest parts (”One Shot, One Kill” at the ferris wheel) so it might be that.

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/.

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.

So 14 days outside my 360 warrenty my Xbox has died from the Unplayable Disc error that seems to occur more and more in boxes with the Hitachi drive, pretty much sods law as I was going to extend my warrenty what with the much speculated high failure rate in 360s. I didn’t think it would happen to me, my 360 was so well looked after, but I guess it doesnt matter, it’s just poor manufacturing components. Anyway i could open it myself and fix it, as there is a fix for this (read entire post for details) but instead im just gonna send it back fo repair and hopefully have it back in about 2 weeks or so. Anyway I’ll update the blog as I progress with this.

So in the mean time, I’m catching up with some DS gaming as the new Zelda Phantom HourGlass just came out here, hopefully that will satisfy my needs until M$ sorts out my 360. So far i’m loving it , but I am worrying about 1 part of the game where you seem to be doing the same dungeon over and over again (going deeper each time, but still annoying doing the beggining part over and over)

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