Never thought I’d see the day. Well, maybe I thought I’d see it but that it wouldn’t be affecting me.

Apparently, this latest fall update patch for the patch patch, firmware update patch, is causing some problems. I have a 360 that was manufactured on the 22nd of October in 2005, and never had any overheating issues, NOTHING until just these last few days when I sat down to play a bit of viva pinata to show the wife.

On saturday I managed to play for 4 hours, with only a few hitches here and there, and since I saw people having the occasional lockup on the forums, I figured perhaps that was just normal for the game, I mean, games are buggy as hell these days, and theres always some patch out for this issue, or that untested bug or whatever.

Well, I turned the system off for about 30 mins, and then powered on again to show the wife some stuff I read, and bam, it hits me, over and over like a machine gun filled with forks. Lockup after lockup every 30 seconds to two minutes. It’s like a barrage of suck and it won’t stop. I figured maybe it was the dog running around causing these minute 360 shattering vibrations in the floor, I had no idea.

Then today I get to do some testing as I was too frustrated last night to think straight. I open the entire 360 up and load up viva again. Now, it’s been a cool 50 to 60 degrees in the great room since the night before, and the 360 has been off, so it’s cool to the touch. Load up, bam, lock. Load again, bam lock. I feel the heatsink. Warm to the touch, not hot.

WTF!

Now I’m getting a bit pissed, so I try small arms…lock…I try gears of war…lock. I try without hard drive…lock. I try every possible thing I can think of, and still the same results. Finally I start thinking about what the patch did, and perhaps its something with a video driver or scaler or something and so I set the dash to 480p. I play 3 rounds of small arms without a lock. I played gears of war for 10  mins with no problems. I played viva for about 15 and then got a lock again. Well, if that ain’t curious, I don’t know what is. Viva I think has it’s issues, but if setting the dash to 480p might help some of this freezing until ms can figure out what the hell they broke this time with their patch for the patch, then I guess I’ll have to keep it this way.

I thought ms was supposed to make gaming more fun, and now we are getting their windows update treatment where every new patch brings new problems. This is getting rediculous beyond words.

A few xbox.com threads for your enjoyment:

http://forums.xbox.com/8561117/ShowPost.aspx

http://forums.xbox.com/8584407/ShowPost.aspx

EDIT- Just an update, I tried closing the 360 back up, and it seems to lock up just as fast in the viva pinata menus… I tried even doing 480i, and some games I get a bit further in, but it’s crazy. If ms doesn’t fix this this week, I dunno if I am going to hold on to my 360. It’s getting that bad to me. It would be one thing if these updates were optional, but to have poorly tested updates be mandatory, they are killing themselves.

So, I broke down and did it. I purchased my 2nd live arcade game. Yes, my second, as I’d only paid points for uno before this one, and that was just because it was cheaper than buying a deck of cards locally. I don’t usually buy many microsoft points because I’m not a fan of how any of it has been handled yet, as far as bang for the buck, and I really don’t like how you can’t just buy the points you need. I’ve amassed my points from a few places… I got 1600 points from the 360 achiever promotion with true.com, 500 points from a verizon contest that was really a failure in my opinion, and another 1600 point card from bonus credit card points.

Today though, I picked up Small Arms. It was 800 points, or 10 dollars. Overall I really like the game. I hear it is like a Nintendo game called Super Smash Brothers, but I’ve never played it, as I’m not really a big Nintendo fan. Never really have been. I was always that guy with the Sega systems growing up… The master system, the genesis, the sega cd, the game gear, the dreamcast. Oh well. Anyway, the game is like a little fighting game, where you choose (initially) one of 8 characters (of 12 total, 4 are locked) and go to battle on one of 8 levels. Your characters vary from fluffy animals to a mutant tree, to a robot. I don’t care so much about their stories as much as how they looked, and the character models were pretty impressive considering the size of the game (about 47 megs). You can ”battle” with up to 3 other players or ai players and to shoot each other till the death until the end of the match. Pretty simple, so just about anyone can pick it up pretty easily.

Each character has a different weapon, and a different subweapon, though during the match you are able to pick up other weapons as you go. I found myself using the cat guy the most because he is the first character on the list, and I was on my lunch break. Some of the levels are pretty cool, like the tornado and train levels, as the level itself scrolls past you, and you must continue hopping and moving and shooting so as not to fall off the screen.

My only 2 complaints with the game would have to be the controls and the camera. The camera isn’t really a big deal, it’s just that it zooms in and out very randomly it seems, and makes it hard to see what is going on sometimes with all the action and small characters. The controls however, is a tough nut to crack. There are 3 possible jump buttons, the a button, or the left or right bumper buttons above the triggers. Now, to fire your weapon, you must use the right trigger to fire, or left trigger for secondary weapon, and at the same time use the right thumbstick to aim. It gets really hairy when you have to actually jump aim, and shoot all at the same time. As you probably can figure out, it’s pretty damn hard to press the a button while you are moving the right thumbstick. The solution would seem to be to use the right and left bumpers but for some reason I couldn’t get used to it… I don’t often hit both bumpers at the same time, and crossing over just felt weird. Instead I found myself sacrificing the ability to jump and aim at the same time a LOT.

If you can get past these small issues (or if they aren’t issues to you), the game is a must buy in my opinion. The price is decent for the replayability on it, and as I said in my title, it’s not old crap, its a new game (though it could be argued a copy of an older game) but the graphics look great, and it’s a lot of fun to play both offline and online. I usually don’t advocate purchasing arcade games, but if Microsoft can continue to get developers making these kinda games, more people such as myself will come around.

I’ll leave everyone with this last thought however, I played a demo on the pc of that game “Heavy Weapon” and my God, that is the most boring crap I think I have ever wasted 60 seconds on. Don’t believe me? Give it a try. For the life of me, I just couldn’t get into the basic, repetitive sprites coming in wave after wave. I’ve played this game before, a million times in the 80’s and 90’s and it looked MUCH better and played MUCH better then. Arcade doesn’t have to mean lame and crappy, so why push out a game like that?

Okay, Drunk Pandas has been wanting me to do a post for a while here, and so today, I felt the need to really let it all out about another thing that has grinded my gears. So, I check out my rss feed for majornelsons blog around 2:05 today, and am shocked to see that not only is he mentioning content that I thought had been on the nickel and diming place…I mean “marketplace”, but that this content is not going to be available to silver members for another week.

Alright, I guess this is fine, if this was like some kinda inside cool stuff for free for gold members to show appreciation… but what’s this? It’s A FUCKING COMMERCIAL! Good God, it’s not even something I’d WANT to take the time to download and waste my precious bandwidth that could be netting me kills in gears of war…no, it’s a commercial to sell 360’s and now ms wants to withold those from the very people that they’d need to watch it. It’s basically promoting xbox live, and they are going to give it to the gold members (um, who have obviously already paid for the damn service) instead of the silver members (who are getting all the content for free).

Does the left hand talk to the right hand at the xbox division? Hilarious.