I’m still having ranked match issues in Gears of War. I can search for a quick match or custom match, but every time I try to join one, I get a message that “You have lost connection to the host.” So I still can’t get into any ranked matches. Didn’t feel like player matches last night, not too many people from my friends list were on. So I haven’t had a chance to test the new maps. Maybe Jmel, Loot Ninja’s resident Gears fanboy, can give some impressions. 
Apparantly, the patch messed up VGA for SD resolutions. Text is overlapping, everything looks washed out, and resolutions seems to be dropping to 640×480 no matter what you set it to in the dash. Hopefully Epic will fix the issue for SD users.
So today I woke up early and wanted to see if the Gears of War patch was out, but was greeted with an auto update for the dash when I signed into live. I didn’t update because the last time I did, it killed my system slowly over the following week.
There are a few threads on the xbox.com forums speculating what might have been included in the update, but as of 11 a.m. there is still nothing solid.
I will try to post back when I have more information.
UPDATE:: http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2007/01/09/today-s-dash-update.aspx
Major Nelson posted about the dash update with enough information to satisfy a 2 year old. When will ms start giving us some info when they fix or break something? Oh, and by the way, NEVER use 1up for your xbox 360 news. They really screwed the pooch on the news of the udpate.
Personally, I think the update did something to fix either vga issues, or something video related as well as possibly fixing whatever clusterfuck they started with the nov 30th update (gpu clock? anyone?). I noticed right away after updating that now my background doesn’t cover as much as the screen as it did. I’d love to find out more.
UPDATE (from drunk pandas): They didn’t fix VGA. Mine still sucks donkey balls.
So I decided to hook up my Xbox 360 with VGA cables to my new Samsung 1080p HDTV, since the only way to get 1080p from HD-DVD with the console is to use VGA. Yeah, absolutely retarded, I know. Can you say HDMI cable? Anyway, I am among the close to 100% of VGA users who are experiencing issues. You either get washed out colors, extremely soft picture, or both. I’m experiencing the ridiculously soft picture quality. You can tell right away with the text in the dashboard looking muddy. Another huge problem I have is that the picture doesn’t seem to truely be 1920×1080. When you first turn it on, the image doesn’t fill the screen at all. There’s a 1-2″ black border around the whole screen. I was able to zoom the picture with the TV menus, but it still is not the same picture as the component video cables. You can tell it’s not zoomed in as far.
I’ve read a couple places where Microsoft outputs in a non-standard way over VGA, which is why people are having issues with VGA. Seriously, why the bloody fuck can’t Microsoft just put out an HDMI cable? This would solve just about every issue people with 1080p sets are having right now. My guess, which I would wager a good deal of money on at this point, is that the hardware just isn’t there to output digital video. Unless they update the hardware, there’s no chance of getting HDMI output on the 360. And I know for damn sure I’m not buying another one. If they could do it, they would have released one already to combat the only thing the PS3 has going for them.
[Update] I know a lot of people have no problems with the VGA connection on a computer monitor. I was referring to TVs here.
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