I went to use my 360 this evening, and as soon as it powered on and logged in, it froze. Restarted it, and the same happened again. Zomoniac off of ugvm reported similar problems yesterday.
After some faffing around, I tried disconnecting my network cable and starting the 360 up again - and this worked. Plug in the cable, connect to Live, and it freezes. Naturally, and following the problems with Live all week, I assumed that it was Microsoft’s servers up the spout.
Then a post on rllmuk linked here. Turns out than an incomplete download of the new Pro Evolution Soccer game is to blame. And what was I part way through downloading when I switched my 360 off last night? Exactly.
So I disconnected the 360 from the network once more, started it up, deleted the incomplete demo download, and reconnected to Xbox Live. The result? It works once more! Phew!
That’s right - Xbox Live is down! And on forums the world over, it’s as if civilisation has collapsed. People are having to do other things! Like go outside! Or play with Lego!
Or just get on with it and playing offline like we used to in the Dark Ages.
How excited was I, as a fan of train driving games, when I saw this title in Sainsburys this morning? About as excited as I was disappointed when I realised it wasn’t a train driving game at all. Bah.
I’m a bit hooked on Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise at the moment. One of the new features of the game is the way you can take pictures and upload them to www.vivapinata.com. Unfortunately, all my photos just make my garden look dark, dreary, and in some cases, somewhat evil.
It looks impressive. Very impressive. And I’ve always been slightly tempted by the series. However, it’s made by Sega (with whom I am currently not best friends), and it’s PC game. And I don’t have a PC.
It would seem that the Wii Homebrew “scene” has now matured to the point where not only are fully working games, apps and emulators now available, but there’s a modchip-free way of installing them. You stick a hacked Zelda save game on your Wii, load the game, and it crashes allowing some code to run. This installs the amazing “Homebrew Channel” on your Wii.
There are loads of things you can do with it, but, as is my “thing”, the most obvious was to get a Spectrum emulator up and running. FUSE, the emulator I tend to use on my Mac, has a Wii port. So I installed it… Read the rest of this entry »
As I have been quite vocal about, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 downloadable content DRM is rubbish. When I replaced my Xbox 360 with a 360 Elite a couple of months ago, I lost the ability to play my games offline. What made it worse, was that before I bought a new console, I rang tech support to ask if I could transfer everything over and still play games offline - and was told yes. Naturally, they’d lied to me and having laid out £260 for a new console I was then told I was stuffed.
So I’ve spent the last two months going round and round in circles, ringing support, ringing complaints, emailing… even writing a letter (on paper and everything) and posting it to head of Microsoft UK. Still no fix for me, or acceptance they got me into this situation. I have £400 worth of games I don’t have full use of, and it’s all Microsoft’s fault as they gave me bad advice.
But there may be light at the end of this tunnel! Today, it was revealed that Microsoft are making changes to their DRM system:
I can tell you that the team will be releasing a new digital rights management (DRM) tool next month that will allow you to better consolidate your licenses for downloaded content to a single Xbox and allow you the freedom to be able to play your content both online and offline.
Finally! I’d like to think that my persistence has played a small part in them deciding to do this. If it actually happens, I’ll be very happy indeed. I feel I’ve had a little victory!
Here’s the interview where this was revealed (along with other Xbox related stuff):
