The Blog of Oa

Last week my XBOX 360 broke. The surprising part is I'm not upset by it at all. I was playing Call of Duty and it froze. I restarted, it froze five minutes in. Then the next time it red ringed on me.
It was fairly late anyway, so I called up the guys I was playing with and explained why I dropped out, then watched some Mighty Boosh before going to bed. The next day I picked up a new one on the way home from work.
My original XBOX 360 isn't under warranty, but because it's a hardware failure Microsoft will do the repair for free. I booked it in and I'm sending it off tomorrow.

The thing is I know I shouldn't be so cool with it. I treat my consoles well enough that this shouldn't happen. It interrupted a really good game of Team Deathmatch and instead of getting angry I went out and brought another one (on the plus side I got Halo Wars and some other games free with the new XBOX).
I didn't even get mad when a database error forced me to call XBOX Support by phone rather than booking the repair online.

I'm actually sort of looking forward to getting my old XBOX back so I can start double bokkin'. I'll probably flush even more money down the toilet buying games I already own for system linking.

While browsing Kotaku today I noticed a very familiar looking screenshot. It turns out Crispy is doing some awesome charity work to help out with bushfire relief.
So now thanks to Crispy you can rule the universe with an iron fist AND feel like a hero.


-Inventive Dingo
-Kotaku

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?"
-Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai.


I think this sums up what went wrong with the PS3. "We can't beat the Wii outright, but if we ran the PS3 into the ground we would be able to make more progress than the Wii simply by not having loan sharks blow our toes off at the end of the generation".

I'm a little late to the party, but I've just started playing the Star Wars Galaxies.

It's not the greatest but it does do a few things really well. They didn't lock out major features just to include them as progress rewards. I'm only level 13 and I've had a Z-95 Headhunter that's capable of hyperspace travel for quite some time.
I don't have to catch the space bus until level 40 simply because they needed something cool to unlock on a milestone level.

I don't mean to sound like a brat with no attention span, but ever since I got my first mount in World of Warcraft I've been unable to play on the low levels. The game just can't hold my attention when I have to run across the countryside for ten minutes just to kill goats in a cave, then walk another ten minutes back to where I started to get told to go back out there and kill an elite goat.

I actually follow the quest plots in SWG because I don't have to gather as many quests for an area as possible and do them all at once. I can do the quests one by one and not waste three hours walking.



That said, the game is really dated and the engine is pretty bad. I don't think I'll play longer than a month or two. So anyone know of any other sci-fi MMORPG's that let you fly spaceships and own droids without pouring in weeks of effort?

This movie sort of killed my Resident Evil 5 buzz. If the writers of this have anything to do with Resident Evil 5's script then the game is going to need an AWESOME engine just to pick up the slack.
For starters, these people are just dumb. They live in a post-Racoon City world where everyone is up in arms about 'bioterror' yet nobody other than Leon and Claire get what's going on. I don't mean in a Die Hard 'those two highly trained men who just shot up the luggage section were probably just petty thieves' denial sort of way, I mean they don't understand zombies.
Even after Leon has briefed a group of special agents they don't seem to get what they're dealing with. I'm having trouble thinking up zombie movie characters who were more clueless than pretty much the entire cast of RE:D.
There's one scene where one of the main characters, who knows why they're there and what they're dealing with, runs off to help someone on the ground. She picks him up to carry him to safety without even looking at him (it actually looks like she purposely avoids looking at him). Even after he's attacked her and she has seen his clearly not fresh face she yells at Leon for shooting him.
Luckily Leon is there to offer his sage-like advice of 'look' as it's revealed that the room is clearly full of moaning and groaning zombies. She probably would have rushed to help those guys too if Leon hadn't pushed her out of the way and started shooting.

Even the security response team in the lab that was working with the G-Virus don't seem to understand.
They also love long countdowns for some reason. 'Ok, if the virus gets to this point we need an automatic self-destruct to contain it, but even though we're sacrificing our own people indiscriminately lets throw a five minute timer on it just for kicks'.
Their entire containment system centers around the idea that anything that was infected would get so distracted by the countdown they will just stand there and wait to die.
Seriously, they don't even seem to have doors between the different containment areas. 'Oh no, he's walked into a different area that isn't going to self-destruct', 'Don't worry, the 15 minute auto-destruct sequence that failed to get him in the previous area will surly stop him this time'.


With pretty much the entire cast being brand new this movie really highlights the writers inability to create American characters. Claire and Leon work because they've had games/stories to build their backgrounds on, but the new guys are really poorly written.
Japanese writing seems to get stuck using stereotypes. Even when they write Japanese characters they tend to be stereotypes of whatever group the person is a member of. When they don't really understand the groups it gets pretty bad.
I'm not going to say their use of western stereotypes offended me, but it was harder to enjoy the movie with such poorly written characters.
I think this has potential to be a really big problem for Resident Evil 5. The initial 'outrage' was that the zombies were almost exclusively black and I think that was more of a knee jerk reaction than a legitimate gripe with the game. However, I also think this movie is a good indication that when the game is released there will be legitimate problems with the non-zombie African characters.

I'm sure Capcom are taking measures in that area after all this fuss has been made, but they're naive enough that they may screw it up in some weird way (ie, satisfying African's rather than African-American's).


Overall this movie is something to watch once when you've got nothing better to do. You might enjoy it but it's not worth rushing out to get.