Yay, I have my own 360 now! Although it may only be a Core system (and thus lacking Hard Drive and headset), it’s still a fucking 360!

Gaiscioch from the Games Soc posted that he was selling the Core 360 he won at the last World Gamer Live event, so I thought it’d be worth it. Especially given he was selling the console AND Rainbow 6: Vegas for €250 (seperate in-store price: €370) – so yea, as you can tell I bought it

The lack of a headset does mean I won’t be playing online on any of the games I get – playing without voice is sooooo boring. However, my memory unit makes up for the lack of hard drive space and allows me to keep gaining the achievements I so whore!

So to come, in excruciating detail, is my 360 – and maybe something about how I game!

Yes, I do whore achievements, only problem was the fact that I lacked my won 360 and had to use the one at work all the time! However, even with working limitations, I still managed to get a good few of them, so my Gamerscore now hovers around the >3k mark. Of course, now with one at home there are less restrictions on achievement gaining. And that is also the main reason why I got my memory unit – as I wasn’t gonna leave my profile on the Hard Drive (people were using it online!)

Anyways, my 360 is the stripped-down Core system (no HDD, headse, chrome disc tray etc). Of course the lack of a chrome disc tray means nothing to me, as that IMO was purely aesthetical.But yes, the lack of a HDD (and presence of a grey mesh) is hard as it means I can’t play any of the Arcade games I’ve bought (UNO, Texas Hold ‘Em, Worms, Bankshot Billiards to name a few) or play Halo 2 at home. But that should all change once the 120GB HDD is launched sometime next month – Microsoft Unveils Xbox 360 Elite – then I’ll have all of them and more

Well that’s really all I can talk about right now, I’m falling asleep at the keyboard after staying up a good bit last night to play PDZ and wait for Live to get back up. At least I managed to get another 3 30GS achievements (1000 Kills in Team Killcount, 1000 Melee Kills, 1000 Sniper Kills).

Who really wants a PS3? It seems no-one given the following scenarios for the European/Australian launch at midnight today:

London – Sydney

Yep, you did read correctly – they did give away a HDTV to all of the 100+ PS3 buyers, and the cherry on the top was a free taxi ride home! Just goes to show how desperate Sony must be to sell the PS3. Of course the stupid ad appearing in Windows Live Mail yesterday was fucking annoying. It also made me wonder “How come the PS3 logo is the same font as the Spiderman movie logo?”.

Oh, and EA shipped over a copy of Def Jam Icon for the PS3 to us. Only problem is, we don’t have a PS3 to play/review it on…..

Also, it doesn’t help when Microsoft have a river boat looking like this passing by your river-side launch in Paris:

In today’s really huge mix of stuff:

• How I’m fucked in French
• Poxy Proxies in college
• Xbox Ambassadors and how there aren’t any who speak Irish
• The upcoming weekend and why a big deal means big shit

Fucked in French

Yea, I missed the deadline for the French brochure thingy – so AFAIK, I’m fucked for getting 55 in it this semester and thus making up for last semester’s 33. So if anyone out there wants to do me up a brochure and an oral speech in French, for a 4-day weekend somewhere in France with a maximum spend of €800m (including travel from Dublin) – be my guest! You’ll save me repeating next year

Poxy Proxies

Yea, college computer proxies suck major fucking ass.

It is because of them that I have to play CSS offline against bots (the only way to play online is in bot-less 1.6 on the Games Soc server), I can’t send e-mails from Thunderbird (yet, I can still get them – WTF?), and I can’t get any FTP connection through.

In all in, a load of bull-shit for a gamer and website designer.

Irish-less Ambassadors

I kinda wanted to be an Xbox Ambassador for an oh-so sneaky way of getting more people to read my blog. Whilst viewing the list (of which my good mate Dynamo Matt is part of), I came across 2 Irish Ambassadors. OK, so there’s fuck-all of us. I then went to by language. Look for Irish – no dice.

Yet the thing that really pisses me off is that WTF languges like Tagalog and Urdu have Ambassadors. I think it’s time the existence of am Ambassador who speaks Irish came to be!

Paddy’s Day

Just a word of warning – ANYONE who mentions this to me this weekend will be fucking murdered. It’s bad enough other people and countries make a big deal out of it, without it being shoved in our faces. Just leave us be and let us get drunk without having the activities of other countries put in front of, and compared to us.

Oh, and on a final note, I’ve got €0.97 left on my current 3V voucher – if you know of a website that could do with it lemme know!

I was just casually browsing the Worms leaderboard after checking to see how many people from Ireland had beaten me to the 200 points (3 people to be exact) – when I found out that someone (from the US) had a C&C NOD logo Gamerpic.

Naturally, being a huge Command and Conquer fan myself (see my Xfire games list for proof), I wanted one. But when I go and search the Marketplace for it – I can’t find it.

So, since I had a hunch it was US-only, I go take a look at the Marketplace as H3L TheChrisD – since I created that tag as a US tag, although the console’s locale shows it’s flag as Ireland. Alas, there it is.

It’s content like this that they fucking stupidly set as US-only that really pisses me off. It’s like the Halo 3 Beta as well – how you could get in easily in the US, but over here you had to win a place or buy Crackdown.

Other benefits I see to having a US-only Gamertag are early releases of some games (GRAW 2 for example), video marketplace (I’ve never seen it on my main Gamertag), and of course the fact that you live in the same country as Microsoft is based.

In a way, this looks a lot like the way poor countries have nothing and rich countries have everything. The poor countries represent non-US and Canadian Gamertags, the rich countries the US and Canadian Gamertags. The rich countries get everything they want from the suppliers, while the poor countries either get the supplies later, or not get them at all. It’s fucking prejudice, I say.

Of course, it will all be so much easier if they just offered the same stuff to both types of countries, that way everyone would be happy and they’d make more money. Because, at the end of the day, it’s all about the profit, isn’t it?

And, one last thing – the US Xbox.com home is a whole lot fucking better than the Irish Xbox.com home. Can’t they just be the fucking same for once?

Very effective meaning cheating – yea, I got bored always never getting higher than Rank 3 in Pinball (you know, the one that comes on every single Windows PC – just let Xfire search for it and it’ll find it) – so went looking for fancy cheats.

Seems if you type “hidden test” while playing, you can move the ball around by clicking and dragging it around the table. Needless to say, this means you can have scenarios like this:

Pretty cool, huh? Yea, but of course, now that I know about it – I doubt I’m gonna play the game legit again….. ;(

Oh, yea you might be wondering why I have TWO posts today, when usually it’s ONE every three days or so. I thought I may as well start blogging about more of the stuff that happens rather than waiting until I feel it’s been too long since a post and blog about anything that is occuring.

Oh, and I kept going in that game:

Mmmm, two of my all-time favourite things came out this week:

• Shamrock Shakes
• Worms on the Xbox Live Arcade

Yes, it’s one lovely minty milkshake and an Xbox Live Arcade game week!

It’s not every week I get to say that….. Read the rest of this post…

It’s been one of those days at work where every time I’ve seen the only customer in finish up and planned on closing for 2 minutes, run over to Spar and grab some food – someone else has come up.
I can tell you it is so fucking annoying sitting here starving because customers just can’t stay away for 2 frigging minutes. In fact, I have a strong urge to just turn off all the computers, get everyone to leave, run over to the shop, get the food, and then let the customers back in.

Of course, that wouldn’t fare well for business – or my job

At least good old Paddy was there to do my shop run for me. He must realise I’m never able to go there myself cos every time he goes during one of his marathon internet sessions – he asks me if I want anything.

Well, maybe he needs some work on the locations of everything in Spar – yesterday I asked him to get me a King Pot Noodle for my lunch, preferably Curry flavour (I even told him exactly where to get them) – and he comes back with a non-King Pot Rice. At least he got Curry flavour.

Anyway, back to this morning – I realised the bitch machine had brought in a letter addressed to me and not told me. It was from 3V, apparently I had a voucher with €20 on it that expired at the end of January. So attached was a cheque for €17.50 (by know you should know they charge €2.50 to get back any funds on it) – so now I kinda have to lodge money into my student bank account.

It’s odd – I opened the student account at the start of the semester. I tried to put money into it a few days later and was told it hadn’t been fully activated yet. So I left it there. Since then I’ve received the ATM card for it, but never used it (well once to change my PIN but apart from that, haven’t used it at all) – which reminds me, I’ll need to put €20 into the account for the yearly Government levy on ATM/Debit cards.

So yea, I think I’m gonna have to drag myself to the bank (handily on campus ) and lodge that cheque and another €100 that is my current 360 fund. Otherwise, I can guarantee you I’m gonna spend it on crap.