deKay’s Blog

Hell hath frozen over.

EDIT @ 16:30: And it’s broken. Ace.

Kill it!

Today is my last day before I become amazingly famous. OK, so I’ve been on TV and radio before, but this afternoon I have a photo shoot for a major advertising campaign.

No, really.

I probably can’t say what the adverts will be for yet, and there’s a chance that my pictures won’t actually be used in the campaign, but if everything goes well I may, quite literally, look like the back end of a bus.

I’m not happy.

You know I rang Microsoft to ask if I bought an Elite 360, and transferred all my stuff over from my Premium, whether they’d be able to fix the DRM to allow me to play XBLA games even when offline? And they said yes, it was possible? Well, having transferred the data over today, I rang them.

And they can’t do it. So I now have £400-worth of content I can’t play, on a £260 console I wouldn’t have bought if they’d told me it wasn’t possible.

I’ve made a complaint that on their bad advice I’m now heavily out of pocket. Lets see where that gets me.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but the best game in the world, ever, is Run Baby Run for the Spectrum. For no other reason than to celebrate today’s release of a new version of Fuse for OS X, here it is.

Isn’t it lovely?  Of course it is.

On Thursday, as Microsoft had given me confirmation that they could sort the DRM issues out, I went and bought a 360 Elite from Zavvi. It was supposed to be 270 quid with three games, but somehow I managed to get it for 260.

Anyway, someone on rllmuk sent me the hard drive transfer cable which arrived a few minutes ago, and now I’m transferring everything from one drive to the other.

It’s going to take over an hour! Good grief.

I’ve decided that my solution to the issues I’ve been having with my 360 are to be resolved thusly:

1. Buy a new 360 Elite
2. Transfer data from my current Premium to the Elite
3. Get Microsoft to do the seemingly impossible and “flick the switch” to make my downloaded content and XBLA games playable on my Elite playable when I’m not online

The sticking point is with 3. Almost everyone who has transferred their stuff from one machine to another (whether it’s due to “upgrade” or repair) has been unable to play downloaded content and Xbox Live Arcade games unless they’re connection to the Xbox Live service. I can’t have that. Live is unreliable at the best of times, especially since Christmas, so I need a permanent fix.

To make completely sure this was all possible, I rang Microsoft today. Oh dear. How hard can it be to get my question across?
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Addendum! Encore en francais!

I was in Asda yesterday, and was horrified to see the sort of things they’re selling now. I’m all for “world foods” and new flavours and stuff, but this is… a little too far.

I gave up on playing computer games a long time ago. Games, yes - I play them (I expect you’ve noticed), but computer games? Don’t touch them. With my recent Mac conversion, the chances of playing computer games is now even lower.

Except for just one thing.

I was looking for some game demos to test the 3D graphics capability of my new iMac. Someone suggested Civilization IV, which actually turned out to be quite old and not really as graphically impressive as I’d hoped for. It ran fine, even on maximum settings, but I just don’t think the game has the ability to look better than a 5-year-old title.

Thing is, I was going to just have a quick go. Just to look. And see. And test.

And then I’d spent 45 minutes on it and used all of my 100 “trial” turns. And I wanted to carry on. Gnngh!  I’ve never really fully understood Civilization, but I’ve been hooked on Civ, Civ 2, Alpha Centuri and FreeCiv many times before. So, must resist.

Here’s a picture I took, but I don’t remember why: