As mentioned previously I’m having some woes with my Xbox.  The main issue is video failure – audio continues fine.  This occurs with different cables and on different TV’s, so the fault is definitely with the hardware.  Unfortunately, since this isn’t the Red Ring of Death and since I’ve had the thing for about 2 and a half years, it means I have to reluctantly pay £56 to get it fixed (new ones recently only cost £99 at Sainsburys).

Not happy Microsoft.  Here’s hoping you do an absolute diamond repair job or give me a new one.

I’m gonna miss Fallout 3 launch day because of this :(

I’ll keep this post updated with how things are going.  Tomorrow I’ll be booking the UPS collection of the box.

Update: I got a replacement console on Wednesday 12th November – thats a turn around of roughly 2 weeks.  Not too shabby.  Feels good to have a new 3 year warranty on it now – then again, I did pay for it.

So I thought it was about time I gave the blog a breath of fresh air using a new theme (Rihanna for WordPress).  Hopefully it doesn’t feel too cluttered.  I like it anyway!

Note: Since my old theme worked with images up to a width of 480 and this new one works only to 450, I’ve had to scale some of the images on old posts down.  They look fine on Firefox, but IE’s resizing of images seems to be a bit naff.  Anyway, thank God for the max-width CSS :-)

Wordle generates a “word cloud” from whatever text or site you provide it with.  I decided to give it a go on this blog, and here it is:

Hmmm… I swear I’m not an Xbox fanboy.

*cough*

Gamesradar have a pretty excellent article online entitled 10 Reasons Why Its Hard Work Being a Gamer – definitely worth a read.  I can particularly relate to point 5, since my Xbox 360 pretty much died this week (without the 3 red rings).  It seems to have gained life again through some divine healing, but something tells me thats only temporary.  Good timing, what with Fallout 3 coming in 2 weeks :(

*fires up oven*

More random spewings from things I found out this week!

• For anyone in the UK looking for a cheap Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360 console, check out Sainsburys supermarket.  From 3rd October to 12th October, the Wii is to be priced at £149.97, the Xbox 360 Arcade will be £99.97, and Xbox 360 Premium (60gb) will be £139.97!  For the 360 consoles, thats a freakin’ bargain! [Source]
• iPhone games Space Monkey and Amnesia are free for a limited time.  Grab them now while you can (well, if you have an iPhone that is)!
• I pre-ordered Fallout 3: Collector’s Edition this week for the Xbox 360.  God damn that lunch box and the items contained within it look good.  I’ve never played any of the Fallout franchise before, but having loved Morrowind and Oblivion, I couldn’t miss out on this since Bethesda are the developers.  Hoping for great things!  Hoping to pre-order Little Big Planet (PS3) very soon as well.
• My USB ports on my desktop machine (Windows Vista, Asus M2N motherboard with Nforce 570 chipset) are corrupting data I transfer through them (writing to a disk in particular).  The files appear to copy fine, but any larger files then give corruption errors when accessed later from any machine.  Anyone got any saving ideas?
• I’m really enjoying Wipeout HD on the PS3 right now.  I’ve enjoyed previous Wipeout games, but never got engaged with them to the extent that I am with this one.  Pity I suck at it though.
• The final achievement on the Xbox 360 port of Galaga is killing me (achieve a perfect bonus round).  Its actually driving me insane.