I'm curious to Bioshock and Dead Rising, but fucking hell, these consoles are expensive nowadays... :S

I'll play Shenmue again I guess (saw the avatar from retribution... what an awesome game)

Bioshock is great, excellent story, good use of graphics and the sound is amazing. The whole atmosphere of the game is just amazing, the lighting and setting of the game makes it more suspenseful and enjoyable to play.

Dead Rising is your typical Capcom zombie game, hordes of zombies come at you and you use anything around you to get rid of them. The story is about a photographer who comes into a quite north American town and finds its overrun with zombies.

You get dropped off on a roof of a three story shopping center and you have 3 days to find out whats going on. While you're doing all this you get to save everyone in the shopping center...but thats optional, most of the time you can leave them to be eaten alive. lol!

You also have a full range of weapons to choose from, anything you see you can pick up and use as a weapon...so thats, cash registers, bikes, guitars, clothes lines, chainsaw, hammers, umbrellas, basketballs, lawnmowers...the list goes on for awhile.

You can also change your clothes when you wish, since you are in a massive shopping center you can wear whatever you want. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Awesome game.

I never really got that far into the game to give it my full judgment, but its a pretty fun game.

I've heard there is going to be a remake of Shenmue for the Xbox360, but they haven't decided weather it will be a DVD based game or something you can download from the Xbox Live Arcade.

BlueRaja and Archetype: If you do buy a 360... Buy 2! The first one you'll try is bound to break down at some point, then you get out the second one. When that one crashes, the old one should be back from repairs, and so on.

But seriously: If you want to buy an Xbox 360, wait for a little while. The Core package is about to be replaced with the Arcade package, which will offer wireless controllers, 256MB memory card, HDMI output and 5 arcade games, for the same price as the Core. Much better deal

BlueRaja and Archetype: If you do buy a 360... Buy 2! The first one you'll try is bound to break down at some point, then you get out the second one. When that one crashes, the old one should be back from repairs, and so on.

But seriously: If you want to buy an Xbox 360, wait for a little while. The Core package is about to be replaced with the Arcade package, which will offer wireless controllers, 256MB memory card, HDMI output and 5 arcade games, for the same price as the Core. Much better deal

Yeah Biert is right, wait about another month before you buy an Xbox360 cos Microsoft have supposedly fixed this breakdown problem in their systems.

This was due to MS just chucking the systems on the market without testing it to its limits. Some systems have been running fine since there initial release in 2006 while others only last afew months and they were only made like 5 months ago.

My system was made in December last year and I thought I was ok, but it seems they didn't fix the problem til now. I sent my machine back due to me getting that stupid 3 rings of death, I got my system back with new heatsinks and a updated chipset.

The Elite comes with this update, the update is a 65nm chipset. The original systems came with 90nm chipsets, so there is a massive difference from new and old systems. I'd wait about a month or two before buying an Elite or Premium system as the models that have these new chipsets were limited.

They will be in mass production after the hype of Halo 3.

If you do get the 3 rings of death on you're machine, you should get an updated chipset like I did. There was a massive recall in Australia due to the ACCC and our laws as consumers. Seems we finally got our way and we got our systems fixed.

I'm sure the same thing happened in America, but for awhile Australia wasn't allowed to sell or resale Xbox360's as they all had to be shipped off to repairs and upgrades.

Even with the downfall of this problem, 360's are still great machines. They have a wide range of games to suite everyone, the arcade selections are awesome and the machine is very user friendly.

At the moment Australia is selling a Premium system for around $500, at that usually comes with a free game and a controller with the added bonus of 2 months free of Xbox Live.

In all its a good system, aside from the odd mishaps the machine has gotten in the past.

I've heard the Red Ring Of Death problem is not fixed with the new 65nm chips, the problems are still reported. But since the new Elite isn't very old yet and I think the other systems aren't supplied with 65nm chips yet, I guess only time will tell if it's really fixed or not.
Whatever the situation, more Xbox360's have broken down in a year than that should break down in a lifetime.

360 care
lay it down horizontally, vertical has more chance of disc scratching, since microsoft used a cheap disc tray
well ventilated and thats about it

dead rising is great, but some people have problem with the save system, and timed game
basically, the game evolves around a time base of 3 days, where 1 day = 2 hours in real life
so if you save at the wrong time, you can get stuck and have to restart
but you can restart with all your stats
beyond that, awesome game

Thanks for the advise guys. I'm sure I'll end up buying one eventually. My mum bought a 360 last Christmas just so she could play Star Wars Legos (yeah, she's 60), and she's really happy with it, but I don't think she plays it as often as the average gamer.

I'm hoping she loses interest in it and gives it to me.

I tried to play Dead Rising, eventually gave up as I literally could not read what was being said.

The font size roughly this big, and unless you have an HDTV you WILL NOT be able to read shit unless you sit right in front of the TV for the entire game.

Thanks for the advise guys. I'm sure I'll end up buying one eventually. My mum bought a 360 last Christmas just so she could play Star Wars Legos (yeah, she's 60), and she's really happy with it, but I don't think she plays it as often as the average gamer.

I'm hoping she loses interest in it and gives it to me.

Lego Star Wars is the shit!!! I laughed my ass off first time I saw one of those Lego-jedi whipping tha light saber around and the opponent disintegrate to Lego bricks!!
Good times playing that game with my brother.


Looking into (soft-)modding an (original, old, big, black) Xbox. Anyone with experience?

It is a lot of fun, unless you're playing in 2-player mode and the other person, supposedly your BUDDY (bitter), keeps shooting you, slapping you, or cutting you down with the lightsaber.



Not that I would do that, of course.

the elite doesn't have the new chip set... its only officially being rolled out on the halo 3 boxes and then on the strandard ones after the new year

360 care
lay it down horizontally, vertical has more chance of disc scratching, since microsoft used a cheap disc tray
well ventilated and thats about it

dead rising is great, but some people have problem with the save system, and timed game
basically, the game evolves around a time base of 3 days, where 1 day = 2 hours in real life
so if you save at the wrong time, you can get stuck and have to restart
but you can restart with all your stats
beyond that, awesome game

My disc drive stuffed up the other day, it kept on opening itself when I put in a DVD or game. It's getting fixed now so hopefully this is the last time I have to get it repaired. Bloody Americans and their inferior products.

Josiah right about the text in the game, most of the time I just skipped it cos its so bloody hard to read.

I'll play Shenmue again I guess (saw the avatar from retribution... what an awesome game)

Yeah, I think so too I think that there's still many things in the game that haven't been done after it by others. Like all the voice acting and the huge amount of different NPC's. Or the arcade halls, the way QTE's were etc.

I've heard there is going to be a remake of Shenmue for the Xbox360, but they haven't decided weather it will be a DVD based game or something you can download from the Xbox Live Arcade.

I've also heard some rumors about that. It would be cool. I even think that Shenmue Online would do ok on consoles. Although I don't like the concept 100% it's still bad the project seems to have halted totally.

Microsoft actually are lucky with their consoles. Not all console manufacturers can get away with these kind of problems. But they didn't seem to lose popularity or anything strange enough. I myself am still waiting a bit and looking at coming releases (Shenmue 3 anyone? ) before deciding which new console I'll buy.

Hmm, looked up Shenmue on answers.com (err, wikipedia equivalent) earlier... Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment?! What the... That doesn't even make sense! Aside from the pretentiousness of inventing a new genre like that, they could at least pick four words that actually make sense together. Seriously, can someone explain just what that means? Reactive... Eyes? What the shit?

Haha, you know...when people want some acronym they always try to give it some meaning I assume they wanted it to be read more like "Full reactive" and then "eyes entertainment". Aka Fully interactive eye-candy

It's just the creator's idea of a certain sense of freedom in the world. Like being able to wander around, look around, ask questions as you wish. And at the pace you wish for a large part. They tried to create a more living world back then with dynamic weather and time, all NPC's having their own routines, background and voice overs. Stores open at certain times, one could go to the arcade hall and play classic games from the creator like Outrun or Afterburner. Or you could stalk/follow people ( ), go through lockers, win video games in some lottery, train martial arts moves etc.

So that was supposed to be his concept of FREE..Well, that and you know how the Japanese are with English very often

Halo 3 is fucking fun! Seems like they took the best elements of Halo 1 and 2 and gave it a huge upgrade.

Anyway, GT is Duh Duh Derek if anyone has Live and is up for some slayer or Co-op.

What I'm really waiting for tough, is Serious Sam 3. No news on that though.