Matt Charlton

Well, today is the first time I’ve used my laptop (properly) since probably sometime on Christmas Eve.

We spent Christmas at my mum and dads and we’re at Sue’s mum and dads at the moment, or at least I am – Sue is at work and is driving back over tonight (she drove back there this morning at about 5:30am!)

I felt rather silly but brought over my Xbox 360 along with my laptop table, my 20″ Dell monitor and all my games.  The plan was to set this up somewhere (probably upstairs) and actually play some of the games that I have accumulated over the last 12-18 months and just not had the time to play.  I ended up setting it up in the front room, so that although I was being anti-social playing on the console, I wasn’t doing it in another room. 

I managed to start and finish the Battlefield : Bad Company single player campaign on normal.  I liked it – it was fab.  I especially liked the way that the game handles death – you just respawn at your nearest save point but with the game having carried on up to the point you died – ie infantry and tanks you took out prior to dying are still dead – makes progressing a little easier.  I fancy replaying it on hard to get some more achievements

The rest of my Christmas presents arrived from Amazon (the ones I ordered myself using various gift vouchers) – Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour are fantastic.  I transferred all of the songs across from Rock Band to Rock Band 2 for 400 gamerpoints which means I no longer require the Rock Band 1 disc – wonder if I can get £10 for it on Ebay.  Then again, everyone is probably doing the same thing which means it’ll be hard to shift – it might be best keeping it for backup purposes – in case I lose my hard disk and I have to restore.  Everything else is redownloadable – this isn’t. 

I also ordered some graphic novels – Serenity and the Buffy season 8 books.  They are now on their way back to Amazon in a jiffy bag.  Completely and utterly useless.  Just under £30 they cost altogether and they’re really thin.  Interesting route the writers took though, turning Buffy into a lesbian, that was interesting.  Wonder if they’ll carry on that theme if they ever make a(nother) movie. 

I plugged the Xbox 360 in to the net yesterday to backup my achievements online (sad) and to update Rock Band/Guitar Hero/copy songs across to Rock Band 2. 

Rock Band 2′s first set begins with Eye of the Tiger.  Awesome song.  GHWT kicks off with Living on a Prayer – just as good if not better. 

GHWT also has Oasis – Some Might Say – I love the guitar riffs in that song. 

I didn’t get much of a chance to play some of the games but got some time in on Fifa 09, The Simpsons and some XBLA games. 

Sue is working Friday afternoon when we get back, also all day Saturday.  I’ll be bean bagging it up in front of the TV with my Xbox 360 methinks.  I might even find time to unwrap Little Big Planet from it’s shrinkwrap and play that too.  If I get time to plug the PS3 back in that is.

I’d wish everyone who reads this post a happy new year, but I’ve not finished posting today yet :p

Towards the end of November the Fall update for the Xbox 360 will be released. 

Traditionally this has contained a large number of bugfixes with the occasional new feature.  Last year saw the support (finally) for xvid avi files and a number of other things. 

Over the last few months it has become apparent to anyone using an Xbox 360, particulary for marketplace purchases that something isn’t quite right.  Due to the way that the spoke and menu selection systems work, once you get a lot of content, it can be very hard to navigate through and find exactly what you want.  Browsing XBLA (Xbox Live Arcade) titles can be very tedious. 

Details on what exactly will be changing can be found here:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/nxe/

We’re getting avatars and allsorts :p

Towards the end of last week, Major Nelson – Microsoft’s Xbox Live Directory of Programming posted a tweet with a teaser to keep an eye on his blog because news of how people can get the NXE would be appearing shortly. 

Sure enough on Friday night I checked majornelson.com and found the details and a link to the survey you had to fill out.  I signed up and started to fill the survey out, then noticed I needed my console ID.  I was in York and the 360 was back in Bradford.  FAIL.

I gave it up as a bad job and by the morning signups were full anyway.  Oh well, I can wait a few weeks it doesn’t matter.

When I got home today, I decided to have a look, just to see if the signups were still closed.  I clicked the link and signed into Microsoft Connect to see the same error message as other people have been seeing.  The only difference was I had a link in the side bar to “available surveys” – the NXE one was there, probably because I’d started it but not submitted. 

Filled out the info and sent in – we’ll see if I make the cut when the emails get sent out at the end of the week. 

It’d be nice to get to grips with the new features before everyone else.  Will also give me a chance to write a half decent review, which would be fun.