Harsin

My 360s currently being tended by microsofts carefully trained repair sloths. Has anyone gotten a repaired one back and then had it RROD again? Or is it pretty much immune? I don't want to be doing this every three months.

Used to be that an MS repair job was pretty much guaranteed to go kaput within a few months. However recently they've been taking a lot longer doing whatever they do and adding an extra heatsink, but this has only started recently so it's a bit early to tell the reliability of these.

July NPD should be interesting, although it'll be August that'll show whether it's simply a spike or not. I reckon it will still beat the 360 in August, although there will be a significant drop off.

Doesn't seem that unlikely that the PS3 could beat the 360 this month when you take into account the price drop, some much needed good publicity and big games release in Japan coupled with the reliability issues with the 360 reaching mainstream news outlets.

Er..... its a PC game too you know, with probably its biggest fan base coming from PC gamers or 360 owners that also play (or used to play) PC FPS's.

I'll wager that it'll sell more on 360 than PC.

Now whether more PC gamers play it is another matter entirely...

I think it'll do pretty well for it's platform. the 360 hasn't really broken away from it's core 'hardcore' audience in any significant way, and we know that that audience likes dark n' grim shooters.

EDIT

FFS reuters has a pressence there, with news about the goings on in second life. What's going on?? WoW i can understand, This???

http://secondlife.reuters.com/

I can't remember who said it, but someone described the population as (paraphrasing) half people pretending to be anthropormorphic foxes making giant robots that fire cocks and the other half are the media watching and chucking about terms like 'paradigm' and 'zeitgeist', and they were bang on

You've got to admit that his column was pretty boring though, now and again it would perk up but the rest of the time it was snoozeworthy.

"Oh bummer man I just got a note from the MAN at Microsoft 'Jeff can you replace the word Tempest with the word Space Giraffe on the title screen?' what a downer. Llamas lol!"

Will Michelle Rodriguez be playing a tough girl who can keep up with all the guys or tough girl who can keep up with all the guys but has one crying scene. She's got range.

Even better if she has a name that can be mistaken for a bloke's name and then when all the tough marines meet her they'll alll be "Omg you're a girl" and then she'll school them in how tough she is.

There's still one feature on some tolkien-inspired medieval/fantasy adventure that you could be fogiven for thinking EDGE dreamt up to fill some space (no joke, there's been some special feature on one of these type of games in virtually every issue for years now. Can't tell them apart at all).

Is it by an Eastern European developer for bonus points?

Double bonus points if they try to describe it by adding together two games - "Ya it is like the Oblivion crossed with the Dance Dance Revolution".

Does it have respawning enemies. That's a dealbreaker for me.

It does seem that he works on it, but doing what? Coming on here and saying it only lasts 6 hours I guess he doesn't work in their PR department.

He's Andy Serkis!

Even if FFX was the best game in the history of the world, I'd have docked it 4 marks for the laughing cut-scene alone.

Guest AND Minter are absent this month

/Mexican wave

I think it sets a dodgy precedent. back before marketplace launched we had people insisting that games wouldn't be purposefully gimped to try and flog additional digital downloads, but look where we are now.

Come to think of it whatever happened to the entire 'microtransactions' thing anyway, in all the pre-launch media they were talking about downloads costing a couple of pennies a pop, but the apart from individual gamerpics everything costs a few quid at least.

Are there any platformers on the 360? Any of those damned party games? Or do you have to strap on a headset to get your fix of mulitplayer 'fun'?

They're trying to cash in now with Scene It and an upcoming Viva Pinata party game, but let's be honest it's all going to be too little too late.

Speaking of Viva Pinata, the 360s initial attempt to woo the family market, it struck me as amazingly inaccessible compared to the best of Nintendo's efforts which are selling like gangbusters to the non-traditional market. the sheer amount of infodumps the game throws at you at speed in the early stages is mind-boggling. there's a good game underneath if you slog past that, but I can only imagine the reaction of somebody new to gaming sitting down to play that for the first time.

It would be nice to see some more PSP games that don't require that you turn your hands into wizened claws just to try and cope with a game engine and camera designed for twin analogue sticks clumsily shoe-horned onto the PSP's control system.

Has the 360 even hit 10m yet? Can the Wii beat it to 10m?

Shipped it has due to MS' naughty channel stuffing shennanigans. Sold I'm not so sure about.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how surprised is everyone that tronied would rather watch paint dry than train his brain?

How MS can still get away with peddling a product with, as that report says, a manufacturing defect boggles my mind. Yeah okay the warrenty is okay for people already with one, but even if 'Falcon' hardware rolled off the assembly lines it would still takes months for you to get one in the shops due to MS' channel stuffing shennanigans, you'd think by law they'd have to recall those models still in stock rooms around the world by law wouldn't you.

Nobody's noticed this with their power supply?

Must be normal then.

If nobody else has noticed it then that would mean it's abnormal.

None of mine have done that and all broke, so it could be a sign of healthy Xbox mind you.

You can tell it's pretty ropey when even on Playstation specific forums they seem to have taken an unwritten pact not to talk about the actual gameplay and instead get post after post of "Wow did you see those cut-scenes!!!!!".

Seriously, how much grief can one console bring to a man. i'm seriously losing the will to live now.

I find myself actively looking for reasons to make the switch to PS3 (I'll galdly swallow the extra cost for a reliable console) and still find it coming up short, which shows how poor Sony's game is at the moment.

Remember somehow these have got through various approval processes and committees and apparently at all these stages someone thought they looked good.

I can only imagine it's some other J. Allard type (or J himself although I thought he was off failing dismally with Zune), you know some 40 year old tosser who wears a hoody and thinks he's 'down with the kids innit' and proabbly thought these looked 'wikkid'.

Does anyone know if Argos will will just let you just change a faulty machine for a new one or will they try to make me go through MS?

I brought a three year warranty when i brought the console will that help?

Hang on, three year warranty with MS or Argos?

They'll make you go through MS (and this was with a two month old machine). Although might be worth a try I might just have got a mentalist store manager as it's against the Sales of Goods Act if the machine is under a year.

I enjoyed Tales of Symphonia, but it was if they had entered a competition to make the most cliche JRPG story possible.

Oh God don't remind of their hideous hold system, just what you want to hear when your Xbox has gone tits up and you're about to be without it for a month is some 'hip' yank bellowing down the line about how "rad" faceplates for the 360 are and you should buy them straight away followed by dance music that sounds like it escaped from a nightclub in Bognor in 1998.