By Matt Banks on October 26, 2010 | Microsoft rolled out the red carpet last week for the latest and greatest version of Xbox.com. The problem is it just isn’t anywhere close to being the greatest version. Sure, you can edit your Avatar now, but the User Interface (UI) design is garbage. I used to visit the My Xbox section of the website almost daily, but I have completely abandoned using the site. As a web designer/developer, I know a thing or two about proper UI design. Microsoft obviously doesn’t. Based on talking to quite a few people (both gaming press and web designers), I’m not alone in this thought or even in the minority. They need to make some major changes and fast.
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Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, Microsoft, Websites, Xbox 360, xbox.com
By Matt Banks on October 13, 2010 | Last night marked the official end of my Samsung DLP’s life. She almost made it to her fourth birthday, but fell about a month short. While I used to sport a big bright 50″ 1080p DLP in my living room, I’m now squinting at the 32″ 720p LCD that migrated from my office to fill the void left where virtually all of my gaming and TV watching takes place. With a vaulted ceiling in my living room, the transplanted television looks absurdly small.
It’s been a long road with my Sammy DLP. She had her light engine and color wheel each replaced twice and I recently gave her a brand new bulb, but to no avail. I’ve spoken with a few HDTV repair shops who all said I should be happy I got more than three years out of my baby. When did TV’s go from being a long lasting household appliance to a disposable commodity that’s only built to last a couple years? Trust me, I understand the economics of it from a large corporation perspective, but as a consumer, it just sucks.
I guess it’s time to start shopping for a new HDTV for my living room. I was debating down-sizing anyway and will probably go with a 40″ or 46″ LCD (or LED-LCD, depending on the price). No, I will not be buying a 3D TV. I can’t see any reason to justify the huge jump in price for something I’d rarely use. My guess is somewhere in the $800-1000 range is the sweet spot for a pretty good HDTV that’ll last a while and have good picture quality. Maybe that new Sony Google TV model that was just announced yesterday… hmmm… Any recommendations, friends?
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, HDTV, Samsung
By Matt Banks on August 24, 2010 | This isn’t exactly gaming related, but it does pertain to the iPhone, which has games we write about, so stick with me here. I absolutely love my iPhone. It is dead sexy and makes my every day life easier with all the productivity apps I use that sync over the air back to my computers. If I didn’t have an iPhone, things would be more complicated. There is no denying this fact. With that said, I’m very close to abandoning my good friend and it has zero to do with Apple. AT&T provides horrible service and customer support and does not deserve a single penny of my money ever again.
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Posted in Articles Tagged Apple, AT&T, Broken Stuff, Customer Service, iPhone
By Matt Banks on July 9, 2010 | Many of you might have noticed Loot Ninja was down for a large portion of yesterday. We had some major server issues that caused the downtime — hardware failure that required the RAID array to be rebuilt and all data to be restored to the last full backup (Wednesday afternoon). So, we wanted to take this opportunity to apologize for the downtime.
Unfortunately, a few articles were lost that we have to rewrite and republish. Justin already has the latest Twisted Gamer Radio podcast up for your listening pleasure (scroll down one post) and we’re working to rewrite the two reviews that got lost in the shuffle.
I’m sure you didn’t know what to do with yourselves with the site being down. Your lives probably spiraled down into chaos, but don’t fear, we’re back now on freshly installed drives and ready to set the world on fire. Or something like that.
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, Downtime, News, Servers
By Matt Banks on March 1, 2010 | 
Sony has had its fair share of ups and downs with the PS3. What happened yesterday can be seen as one of the lowest lows. Due to some insane firmware issues that have yet to be 100% determined or confirmed, PS3′s around the world all cried in out in anger. Errors causing no PSN connectivity, preventing offline game play for those with dynamic Trophies, and general system crashes are spreading. Apparently it doesn’t affect PS3 Slim owners, although I haven’t turned on my system since last Thursday, so I can’t say for sure if my Slim is affected.
What’s really disturbing is that this “bug” is affecting debug PS3′s as well, meaning developers are stuck in endless reboot cycles and unable to test and develop their games properly. Great way to start your week leading up to GDC. With crunch time here for a lot of studios, it’s not a great time to be sitting around not able to do anything because all your test kits don’t work.
Some say it’s an issue with the internal clock, others say Gremlins. While Sony has stated they’re working on the issue tirelessly, it still leaves gamers (and developers) with a very sour taste in their mouths. Come on Sony, get your shit together. If you want to pull yourself out of last place, and it’s obvious you do, there can’t be these major issues repeatedly. I’m going to play my Xbox 360, because at least that works right now.
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, Firmware Updates, PS3, Sony
By Matt Banks on February 26, 2010 | 
I’ve been playing a lot of Heavy Rain lately. The game has been sucking me in at the same level as Mass Effect 2. I’ve had a deep emotional connection with the game’s characters that makes me pine over every decision. While I’ve been absolutely loving the game, that all changed today. You see, Heavy Rain has a major technical glitch: game saves won’t load and will crash your PS3. Yeah, that happened.
After spending about 7.5 hours with the game, getting roughly 45 chapters into it, I can no longer play. When trying to load my save, the screen goes black and locks up my system. Sadly, this is a somewhat common occurrence, as hundreds of angry gamers are flooding the official PlayStation forums with complaints of freezing and other glitches such as audio being out of sync (for the record, I’ve had that happen twice). With no remedy in sight (not even loading the same or previous chapter), I won’t be able to finish the game until a patch fixes the issue. Most people have stated that if you have the problem once, starting a new game will exhibit the same freezing problems.
Since I can’t get through the rest of the game, our review will have to wait. Had I been able to finish without major technological issues, it most likely would have gotten 5 stars. Taking into account everything I’ve gone through already, that won’t be the case anymore.
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, Heavy Rain, PS3, Sony
By Matt Banks on February 14, 2010 | 
The problems surrounding Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer has been a huge turn off. I haven’t played the game in over a month and don’t know how much I’ll go back. With all the glitches, hacks, and assholes online, it’s a tough sell for what was expected to be one of the best multiplayer experiences of this generation. The latest patch, available now on Xbox 360 and PS3, fixes quite a few lingering issues.
- Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades sprint speed normalized.
- Fix for “infinite care package” exploit.
- Sentry Guns: Improved placement detection, preventing cases of Sentry Guns inside geometry.
- Model 1887: Bling using Akimbo and FMJ combination now has same range and damage as non-Bling Model 1887s.
- Fixes to prevent various XP hacks (including the prevention of negative XP)
The infinite care package exploit is still out there on the PS3, which will be fixed in another patch. I’m sorry, Infinity Ward, but I think you should have done a lot more testing before releasing the game. Everyone knew how popular Modern Warfare 2 would be. By the time they get their act together, everyone will be moving on to Halo: Reach or something else.
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Glitches, Infinity Ward, Patch
By Matt Banks on December 4, 2009 | 
Yesterday I ran into a troubling issue with my PS3 Slim where none of my three DualShock 3 controllers sync to my console via the wireless Bluetooth standard. Whenever I press the PlayStation button, all I get is four flashing lights as the controllers make a valiant attempt to sync with the PS3, but fail miserably. After going through the troubleshooting steps provided by Sony, I did what any frustrated gamer would do: I searched Google. Turns out, there are quite a few people experiencing the exact same issue, some of which are having trouble with Bluetooth headsets and Blu-Ray remotes as well.
I found a 31 page thread (at press time) of angry gamers on the Official PlayStation forums, all of which now have to use their PS3 controllers connected with a USB cable to play their games. It seems the issues are largely isolated to the new PS3 Slim, although some early PS3 owners are also having issues. Sony has been tight lipped on the problem, but it’s about time they did some talking. This needs to be fixed.
Loot Ninja spoke with a Sony representative who was unable to comment on the situation. Hopefully they’ll acknowledge the malfunction, but that’s unclear at this point. The bad news is we have no idea when an updated firmware will be released. I can tell you one thing: I won’t be doing much gaming on my PS3 if I have to sit really close to the TV connected to my console with USB cables. There are a number of PS3 games I really want to play right now, but until Sony fixes their firmware blunder, I’ll be leaving the system on standby.
Posted in News Tagged Bluetooth, Broken Stuff, DualShock 3, PS3, PS3 Slim
By Matt Banks on November 20, 2009 | 
I was honestly excited when Sony announced their adhocParty software coming to the US. I downloaded it this morning and got ready to play some Gran Turismo PSP online against people all over the world. After firing up the software on my PS3 and clicking any of the buttons, I was given the above error message. Yup, you need a wired internet connection to use adhocParty. Those of us who connect to the internet with the built in wireless in the PS3 are screwed.
The funny part is that if you click the Information button, the PS3 opens the web browser and tries to display the manuals (which gave me an error message that “There is not enough memory. The window content was replaced with a blank page.”) So at least something works over wireless internet. The only thing I can hope a this point is that Sony will update adhocParty. Running ethernet cables isn’t very feasible in my house right now. I guess my dreams of playing Gran Turismo against kids from Guam are squashed.
Posted in News Tagged adhocParty, Broken Stuff, PS3, PSP
By Matt Banks on September 23, 2009 | 
I’m not naming names here, but someone spilled a full glass of water into my MacBook Pro, completely frying most of the internal components. Seeing as that computer served as our audio recording and editing machine, we won’t be able to rock out a podcast this week. I should have the system back from Apple in time for the next regularly scheduled podcast (as long as there aren’t any hiccups in the repair).
In the meantime, maybe you can catch us online for some ODST action tonight? Myself and Steve will be finishing the campaign and I know a few others will be Firefight and possibly the Halo 3 multiplayer disc. Tea bagging shall commence.
Posted in News Tagged Broken Stuff, News, Podcasts
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