In case you haven’t heard the recent cluster fuck that occurred in Boston, check this out. The long and the short of the story is that Aqua Teen Hunger Force had a publicity stunt where they put up Lite-Brites around Boston and other major cities. The Lite-Brites were flipping people the bird to promote their upcoming feature film slated to release in March. They placed several of these all over the city and they were deemed to be a threat to national security?! “Bean town” actually shutdown their bridges, subways and roads in fear of the very dangerous Lite-Brites, all I can say is Wow! “Bean Town” must refer to the size of a person’s brain, to think that a Lite-Brite may be a terrorist plot to kill them. Two people were arrested and now Turner Broadcasting System is being forced to pay the city $2 million dollars in damages for the confusion they caused. Let me just add that the two marketing guys that did this were brilliant, except they look like maniacs in court and actually laughed during their arraignment, shiet I wouldn’t laugh at the prospect of going to jail.

I’m sure I am like every other RPG player, more specifically MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), which gets drawn in full force and twitches if his/her fix of online enjoyment is not met. In all seriousness the addictive power of these MMORPG’s is ridiculous, it is like any other drug that man can get addicted to. Right now I am addicted to PSU on the 360, I want to start to wean myself off but it draws me in, it talks to me, just one more run, just one more level. I recently went to Best Buy and saw the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft, I held it, looked at it, sniffed it (ok I didn’t really sniff it, but you get the idea) and decided against it. I am still thinking about getting the expansion and firing up my old WoW character, but I recall the utter engulfment it had over my life, I would get home from work and fire up the PC play for hours and eat by the PC, and constantly fight with my wife over logging off. My life became instance runs, leveling, grinding and I always had something else to try and do that would only take me a bit longer. I look at the burning Crusade and I say not again Blizzard, you will not get me in the clutches of your crack, I fear Sega has already drawn me in and it’s too late, but I won’t do WoW, not again. The major problems with these games is there is no end, there is no final mission or goal, and if there was the developers will put out some new content, missions, weapon, item, etc. that will make you continue to play, they are truly and open ended scenario where you take your character as far as you would like, some just never know when to stop.

I have been having some disc read errors on my new replacement 360 and I have examined the discs and they are perfectly fine, so I decided to give good old Xbox customer service a whirl. I call up and get the robotic voice called “Max” steers you through their crappy menus. The automated voice first tells you if you are calling about a refund request please hang up because they will send it when they get around to it and you don’t have to do anything. I try to navigate through the menus to get some technical help and instead get a list of things to look out for and one of the most frequent problems is 3 flashing red lights on your screen. I then get to another set of menus that states they are the top ten ways to troubleshoot your system, let me list a couple out for you to judge:

• Cycle the power on the console, turn it off, wait 30 seconds and then turn it back on (reboot)
• Make sure the system isn’t overheating, “let it breath”
• Check all cables are connected properly, unplug and re-plug connections
• Turn off console, remove accessories, plug in and re-connect system, re-start (reboot)

I like how the majority of the suggestions are just to restart your machine, it kind of sounds like windows troubleshooting, when in doubt reboot. I then spoke to a real person and they gave me more brilliant advice. She told me to clear the cache (didn’t tell me how), take off all the accessories and to create a new gamertag!? WTF does that have to do with a disc read error? She then proceeded to tell me that she couldn’t help me without the serial number of the unit and told me to go to www.xbox.com and look at the troubleshooting section there. All I can say is that the interaction with customer service hurt my brain and did not help in the least bit.

My friend puma81 decided he had had enough. He was tired of the countless phone calls, the lies from support that a supervisor would call him back, and worst of all, the thought that the defective wireless headset he had sent in over a week ago was going mia.

He did some searching and came up with this:

Jabil Circuit Inc
5700 South International Parkway
McAllen, Texas, 78503-8931
Phone: 956-683-0698

Whats THIS?! A PHONE NUMBER!? Yes, that’s right, and FREE OF CHARGE!. Puma was able to find that elusive phone number for the McAllen service center. He told me a guy named “Girdy” answered the line, and so he asked for door #18 (microsofts section of the warehouse), and was promptly transferred. The next voice he heard was that of a microsoft employee…

“Microsoft” the guy answered… Puma then told him about how he had paid out of pocket to ship in his defective headset, and how he was getting the typical run around from the lame and useless outsourced tech support line.

Puma was then informed that there are new headsets, a new hardware revision that is coming soon, and they were holding off on shipping out a replacement for him until that revision was in stock. Whether or not they have been shipping out these new revisions, or whether or not they actually fix the COUNTLESS problems with the headsets remains to be seen… but at least everyone now has a good starting point if they are getting nowhere fast with 360 tech support.

Kotaku is reporting that the newly released Call of Duty 3 Valor Map Pack for the Xbox 360 just plain doesn’t fucking work. There’s 5 new maps in the pack, costing 800 MS Points and weighing in at approximately 800MB. The problem is, users can’t select the maps in the game. Anywhere. Yeah.

Let’s break this down, shall we? Microsoft supposedly has huge certification processes for games and all forms of content. Hell, we’ve seen demos and stuff delayed because of it all the time (can anyone say Crackdown?). Now, to get content onto the Marketplace, it has to go through the developer’s QA (if that even fucking exists anymore) and Microsoft’s certification process. How the bloody fuck did no one test this? You would think selecting the map in the game would be the first place to start with testing. If you can’t load the map, you can’t test if something is broken in it. I seriously would LOVE to know how this passed any form of QA or certification.

There’s a huge uproar on the Xbox forums over this, and rightly so. The developers state they’ll have a fix out “as soon as we possibly can.” That means a few months. I would hope that Microsoft and the developers would make this right by the people who shelled out their hard earned money, but we all know that’s never going to happen.

After so many accounts of people breaking things in their homes, hurting pets and each other, there is now a story of a woman that actually died trying to get a Wii. A Sacramento radio station held a contest entitled, “Hold your Wee for a Wii.” The basic concept was to have people drink a couple gallons of water in 3 hours and then have them hold in having to go, there was one contestant that actually became ill and died the following day from “water intoxication” or an overdose of water in her system that is very rare.

As a Wii owner now I have to say all of the warnings plastered all over the literature and in game screens is a bit excessive. You can’t turn a page in the owners manual without seeing a picture demonstrating how to correctly put on the wrist strap to avoid injury, there is even a video on www.my.nintendo.com and messages before Wii Sports game loads up. I have to say that the whole flinging your controller across the room thing is over-hyped, but I do see some legitimate danger in standing near anyone playing a game with the nun-chuck, my cousin actually hit my laptop and cracked the controller, I promptly cleared the area after that.

So EA today announced (press release here) they’re “making” an XBLA game, called Boom Boom Rocket. The game is actually being created by Bizarre Creations, the people behind the widely successful Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing. The basics of the gameplay is that you fire off rockets in time with music as you travel through a 3D city.

Knowing EA, they’ll charge way too much for the base game, then you’ll have to buy the rockets on the Marketplace for 200 points each. Yay for EA ass-raping people with pricing! I would probably pass this up on principle because it’s EA, but Bizarre makes some great stuff. We’ll have to see how the gameplay goes and how much it costs

A credible users on AVS Forum posted a conversation he had with Sony support regarding his broken PS3. What he found out is that because he wasn’t using Sony approved component video cables, the warranty on his PS3 had been voided and they are not replacing it for him. Fucking WOW.

If this is true, I’m guessing that 95% of the user base has a voided warranty, since Sony released the console with no cables. Hell, I can walk into any electronics store and NOT see any Sony cables for PS2 or PS3. I really hope this is just a case of a customer service rep being retarded.

So my power is back finally. It was bouncing all around all night. Hasn’t gone out since about 4am. I also got cable back. The main junction box froze up and then a tree fell on it, so I was without tv, internet, and phone, which was a pain in the ass. Anyway, I’m back now and I’ll hopefully be online tonight with some Lost Planet and Gears.

We’ve got a good 2-3″ of ice all over everything, which has made it fun with power outages all over the area. Our power has been bouncing in and out all day, with most people being without power since early this morning. It’s only supposed to get worse overnight tonight, so I’ll probably be MIA for a day or so until power comes back.