Twitter
 
A quite useless addition. One key reason being that you can't follow links of any kind - no surprise there, the 360 doesn't have browser support, but I hadn't fully realised how crippling that could be until I opened my account on my 360. Almost everyone I follow links to one thing or another, the exception being where one wants to tell me how good the sandwich they just had was and even then if they want to show me a photo of how well they stacked it - they can't. the other main point is that Twitter, for most users I would suspect and certainly for myself, is not something you do exclusively. By that I mean you Tweet and read Tweets while doing something else, whether that be browsing Giant Bomb or on your commute to work. When you use Twitter on the 360, Twitter is all you can do.
 
Facebook
 
It's nice going through photos on the large screen. It's a shame the resolution is so low. Other than this Facebook on the 360 fails because it doesn't have a wall. It's been stripped down, as far as I can see, to being a photo and status feed browser. Even the status feeds are a pain: you know how going through Live friends is a pain in the ass unless you do it via the Guide Button? Well it's the same thing here and browsing status updates shoehorned onto the NXE design is just bad. It's really bad. You can't send people messages, you can't view video, you can't use Facebook chat. The one good thing is that there aren't any ads, nor should there be for this bare-bones piece of uselessness.
 
Last.fm
 
Last.fm is probably the most useful and functional out of the three. Having a jukebox in the living room could prove useful and the sound quality is pretty ok - I'd suspect 128kbps as it is over the last.fm website. Twitter and Facebook are about what I expected, Last.fm on the other hand has ads; something I was not expecting at all. As a user of Last.fm for some time, I've enjoyed listening to my recommendations and other people's radio stations ad free on my PC with no subscription. Spotify has ads, and I'm ok with that (although less so these days as the ads seem to be getting longer and more frequent) because it functions more like a media player with a massive library than a radio station. Last.fm shares the same problem with Twitter in that using Last.fm is all you can do, I don't normally sit down and just listen to music and there isn't an option here to play your stations while in-game.
 
All in all I'm quite indifferent if a little disappointed. Perhaps I will find further use and hopefully there is added functionality and an overhaul in design where needed coming in the future. Is there anything I've missed?

People use the word inspire too freely. But... a certain GB member inspired me to play CoD4 and record my face.

That's about it and unfortunately I don't have such outbursts; I just tend to mutter and puff a lot and rub my eyes; in order to get something really entertaining I'd need to film for a week.


Shot over just 2 rounds of Free-For-All, one of which crashed. I get like that every time I play, if you catch me right after a round I can't say much it's like I'm having a come-down or something. If I do this again I'll stick another camera on the screen.

Would be cool if some moar GB users do the same thing, I'm sure we'd see very different and interesting things!

I know End-Boss was up for it.

Track of the Week #8 & 9

I've just realised I missed one from my last blog so here are 2:

I heard this on As Heard On Radio Soulwas Pt. 2 a long time ago and had to get a hold of it.

Hanayo - Joe le Taxi


This song just kicks ass with it's buildup.

Freeland -  Under Control (Alex Metric Remix)

Back in 2007 when I posted at Gamespot on The Virtual Underground board I had an idea:

"On another note I have a vision of putting Steven Segal, Dolph Lundgren, Van Damme and Stallone in one film - only this time have it win 6 Oscars and best film at Cannes. Actually it's all working out nicely in my head....Schwarzenegger should be in it too"

After another GS user Tequila-Zaire came up with the title "Hard Death" I came up with this image:



Now it seems a film much like it IS indeed being made. You may have heard of this already, but for those that don't know Silvester Stallone is directing a movie. And not just any movie this is going to be something special. It's called The Expendables and the cast contains 3 out of the 5 I depicted plus a larger, star-studded cast of the B-list. This is the greatest action star ensemble ever.

The Plot

The Expendibles have been hired to overthrow a dictator in South America. That's all you need to know.

The Cast

Silvester Stallone (Rambo, Rocky), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator, Conan)


Dolph Lundgren (Masters of the Universe, Universal Soldier), Jet Li (Once Upon a Time in China, Lethal Weapon 4)


Danny Trejo (Desperado, Con Air), Jason Statham (The Transporter, Crank)


Stone Cold Steve Austin (The Condemned, ...WWE..), Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight, Dead or Alive)


Micky Rourke (Sin City, The Wrestler), Terry Crews (Terminator: Salvation, Balls of Fury)


Randy Couture (the only five-time champion in UFC history), Rumour: Bruce Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction)


With screen names like Lee Christmas, Tool, Gunnar Jensen (Lundgren), The Brit and Hale Caesar we know exactly what kind of film we are dealing with. Something very self-aware and I don't see how it could possibly fail.

People that turned down roles or were unavailable include Kurt Russel, Jean Claude Van-Damme, Forest Whitaker and our beloved 50 Cent.

Filming started in March and we should see an early 2010 release. Click here for set photos.


Stallone's hat reads "Live Simply"... Statham's Badge reads "Global Wildlife Conservancy". This could be the greatest film of all time.

"Boys will walk into the theatre. They will leave men. Women will also leave as men"

It will be another game built from the ground up years from now. It might not be called "Forever" although if I got hold of the licence that would be the name I would use.

I've wanted to be good at Street Fighter IV for a while. For once here is a game where a large number of my friends who do not normally play games have taken an interest and made a purchase. The problem is that I am really no good at the game. This is even worse for someone like me as I'm pretty damn good when it comes to my main-stay shooter titles, I'm not used to losing so badly. After a while of waiting the SE Fightstick became available and since I have bought one, only to have my ass handed to me once again by a friend of mine online. This may be something I will just have to accept and move on from, but for some reason I feel compelled to persevere for a little while longer.

Customising my Fightstick and sorting out some artwork was always something I was going to do regardless. Just something about making something your own really appeals to me. For those in the UK reading this, there are two sites I have come across to get your Sanwa pushbuttons and joysticks and that's http://www.gremlinsolutions.co.uk/ and http://www.arcadeshop.de the latter has some colours not available on Lizard Lick, such as white, green, red, yellow and blue buttons with black rims. I'm almost getting these purely on an aesthetic basis and I have a question for those of you that do play SFIV and have installed Sanwa parts: do these things actually make a difference to your game? One thing I find hard to do is pull off super moves under duress, I just keep fucking it up. Does an 8-way joystick help at all? Also, how does a Sanwa compare to the standard joystick?

I may well do a video guide for this easy mod process so watch this space. Any excuse to use my DV camera, or in this case, Wacom tablet that hardly sees any action.

I must say the Fightstick has lead to an improvement, especially for someone using a 360 pad. Even if my being devoid of Street Fighter skills continues and I give up, I remember being pretty good at Tekken and we have a sequel round the corner, so this stick won't go to waste. Speaking of other fighters I have always preferred the Dead or Alive series over any other for it's countering system. That was a game where I could hand out an asskicking or two. All said, the fighting genre is not my forte, maybe I should stick to headshots and kill-streaks.

Anyone else out there buy Street Fighter IV on the back of the hype train only to find a game you weren't any good at?

And a noob question: what does the Turbo function do?

Change of subject:

I'm going to New York next month, is there anything in particular one could recommend? I like art, drinking, clubbing, live music and I'm 21. I hear the Sullivan Room is supposed to be good? I have a passion for strawberry milkshakes... if that helps.

Track of the Week #7

I'm not blogging that frequently so it's not like this is going week by week. And I'm not wasting my time blogging about a single track that you probably won't like.

I really do like CSS, their lead singer Lovefoxxx (what a cool name [no it's not her real name silly]) can't sing to save her life, but they've been a great deal of fun the two times I've seen them (and she's kinda hot). Just yesterday I stumbled upon a cover they did of Blondie's One Way or Another versus The Undertone's Teenage Kicks.


There are a number of tracks I have in my head right now but I'll keep it to one per blog post.

A few things I noticed:

These are just a few things I noticed while writing this -

Consoles and console accessories should be included in the Wiki (imo), not because they might be in a game like Katamari, but because it's information people like to know and it has everything to do with videogames. A page on the SE Fightstick would save me asking about Turbo.

If you are embedding video the real-time editor doesn't show you what the embed will actually look like. Say for example you are embedding a Youtube vid and you have the code configured for it to play in HD and at a particular size, it would be nice to just get a regular preview option to see what the post will really look like. It would also be handy for just testing out some code without having to post it and go back to edit or delete if it isn't right.

Also when you delete a blog post, it remains on your wall and simply links to a 404.

At the moment there is no option to remove a caption from an image.

It would be nice if there were a way so that if you stray from the page on which you've written a whole paragraph, you can hit back and the text will still be there.

The option to retroactively attach a blog post to the forums within a time limit of say a day would be nice.

Other things:

The password manager in Firefox doesn't seem to work with logging in (3.5b4)

The abbreviations for some games should be enough to find them in searches. For example cod=call of duty, graw=ghost recon advanced warfighter, dmc, mgs, doa etc. etc. etc.

It would be nice to be able to pause the download of the Bombcast in iTunes.

Bombcast page archiving was a good idea I read.

When someone sends you a friend request it would be nice to accept that request straight from the PM rather than having to click one step further to the requests page.