Matt’s Journal

Oddness

Posted by Matt under Gaming

It’s been crappy weather the last few days, Saturday was scorching and since then it has been rainy and miserable.

Anyway, I digress.

This morning I come into work and find I have seven emails in my Gmail account waiting for me, for the first time I thought, could they all be Spam? I had two or three pointless emails there that I deleted and then I spied an email with the following subject:

Strange I thought as I had already pre-ordered the game with a rival company called Gameplay (£5 cheaper I hasten to add!), the order should be waiting for me at home when I return this afternoon!

The email also contains codes for free Gamerpics and Xbox Live points, should I spend them? There’s a moral dilemma for you first thing in the morning!

Wii Fit

Posted by Matt under Gaming

You may have seen the adverts, Wii Fit has finally hit our shores. After reading Hotukdeals where they suggested Sainsbury’s may be the best place to buy Wii Fit, myself and Katie ventured to that very supermarket on the Friday night.

With the added bonus that if you spend over £50 you get a coupon for money off petrol, we purchased Wii Fit and also I am Legend and headed home in order to bust out and get Wii “fit”.

It was a good night, we hulaed, we skied, we ran and we did press ups, we were very hot by the end of the night! I recommend getting it, the Wii Board knows when you give up, it calculates your weight and BMI and helps chart your progress as you bust out the moves. It even knows when you hold your breath, that’s a tad freaky!

Roll on November!

Posted by Matt under Gaming

/prepares for endless nights of chainsawing and co-op play..

Traveller IQ Challenge

Posted by Matt under Gaming

I took this test and got 193,194 points, level 6 and an IQ of 94. I wish the widget was a tad bigger so that you could see individual countries better but its great fun, let me know what you get!

TVersity Errors on Xbox 360

Posted by Matt under Gaming, Tech

You may have applied a recent update to your Xbox, come to stream a movie and your 360 throws it’s toys out the pram, showing an error message.

The error may be the exact one that I have experienced:

Unplayable Content

Can’t play this contet because it may not be supported. For more info, go to www.xbox.com/support

Status code: 69-04-80070057

There is only one way to fix this at the moment, encode all your movies and files to a format supported by the Xbox 360 itself, so far these are WMV, MP4 and some MPEG files.

Stick with the lads at TVersity, I’m confident they will have this rectified soon.

Update: There is a new version of TVersity out, download it from here. I have downloaded but haven’t had the chance to see if it works yet.

Update No.2: The update has worked for me, make sure you have a codec pack like CCCP Codec Pack or KazaaLite Codec Pack and make sure that on your “Transcoder” option inside the GUI, Use DirectShow for Windows Media Encoding is ticked.

Bioshock and Halo 3: Say Goodbye to Bedtime

Posted by Matt under Gaming

Bioshock, what a game. While it didn’t transcend the FPS genre, it certainly innovated where it could. The ability to combine “Plasmids” such as Telekinesis and Enrage (which could attract a far away object or cause an ememy to attack one of his own kind) with weapons, really made for a game that just flowed effortlessly. The level detail was staggering, being able to look out of Rapture’s thick glass walls and spot marine life aswell as the rest of the submerged city made you really feel like you were miles from home.

I have just finished this game, the sense of story really is paramount to this game as you learn about why Rapture was created, how it descended into ruin and how your part in the whole game is played. Finishing couldnt have come at a better time, seeing as I am due to receive the latest instalment in the Halo series; Halo 3.

Halo 2 was mauled by critics because of it’s cliffhanging ending and it’s one-dimensional single player. It did however take multiplayer gaming to a whole new level. Halo 3 has been created for the Xbox360, making it the first in the Halo series to be specifically for a next-gen console. I was fortunate enough to get a beta-invite for the game when I purchased Crackdown, new weapons, new options and significantly different physics showed millions of us what we were to expect when the 26th of September roles around.

4 Player Cooperative inside Single Player mode, Saved Films (a complete recording of your multiplayer match) and much more, looks for an exciting few days without any sleep