I know, I know I’ve been a bad Hex. I just haven’t been inclined to write about anything lately and a certain game has been eating a lot of my free time.

I’m going to write a new post soon and then I’ll go back and retrospectively add some of the old posts I started writing, but hadn’t finished or formatted.

Well the launch of Sky Player on XBL was a complete disaster! I logged in straight away on the day of launch and downloaded the app only to be greeted with various network errors whenever I tried to use it. I had a look on-line and there were hundreds of stories from people in the same situation. It turned out to be a problem at the Sky end, they massively underestimated how many people would be checking this out the minute it launched and as a result it took down all their servers!

The deal is this: If you’re already a Sky subscriber then whatever package you pay for you can stream for free as long as you have Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. Current Sky subscribers can pay an additional £9.75 per month to stream for free if they don’t have either Multiroom or Broadband Unlimited. If you’re not a current Sky subscriber you can pay £15 per month to have access to the basic package. On top of this there are options to rent some programmes for £0.98 per programme. That seemed fairly reasonable to me, though I certainly wouldn’t want to pay for a series like that. It’s more suited to one off documentaries. Films would’ve been good, but maybe Microsoft thought it would be in direct competition with their revamped Zune HD Marketplace.

You don’t use MS points to buy any of the programmes either, you need to sign up for a SKY iD and create an on-line payment account. This links in to your 360 so you don’t have to sign in every time (although there is a security feature to enable that).

You can only use Sky Player on one console per account. It’s linked to the actual machine not your xbox account. I believe you can change this on the web-page for your Sky account if you need to (new console/replaced console, etc.) but I think that’s limited to one change per month.

Watching the sample channel now (Sky News) and even on High Quality I have to say it looks horrible Certainly nowhere near as crisp as Freeview. I’m also disappointed with the programmes I could purchase as PAYG. Hardly anything on Sky One at all. There were a couple of History documentaries that looked interesting, but they also looked quite old so would probably end up on freeview very soon if they hadn’t already. Not as impressed with this as I’d hoped, but in fairness it is the first time they’ve tried it and if they have the technical side working now maybe this will open the door for more. I would love to see a browser on the 360 (even Internet Explorer) just so more opportunities become available for us. iPlayer on the 360 would be great.

There are some voucher codes to make it a little cheaper to check out the features, these are the ones I know of:

One month free Sky Player Multiroom for Sky TV customers: XBOX1MONTHFREE

Three months Sky Player TV for the price of 2 for non-Sky TV customers: XBOX3FOR2

As above but from the Sky site: SKY3FOR2

I haven’t written anything in ages because I am a rubbish person! That’s about the only excuse I have, not like I’ve been busy…

I’ve decided I’m not going to be a very social person, at least for a while. Almost every time I’ve been out in the last few months I’ve been let down at the last minute and I really don’t think people appreciate what a big deal it is for me to get into town. It’s not just a 10 minute bus ride for £1.50 for me. If I walk, it’s a 45 minute walk then a 15 minute train journey for £3 (also, I can’t walk down my road when it’s dark as there are no lights and no real surface to my road). If I get a lift it’s 25 minutes, but I can only get lifts when it’s convenient for other people, so it has to be arranged in advance and can’t be spontaneous. Getting back is even worse as I can get a train back to Wokingham before 22:30, but taxis there know my road and refuse to drive there. Leaving me stranded. This means I have to fork out £25 for a black cab back from Reading. I just can’t justify it a lot of the time, especially when I’ve spent the evening sat in a pub all on my own because no-one can be bothered to let me know they’re no longer coming out.

I’ll probably go out more during the day when I can walk back from the station in the light or get a lift when my Dad’s on his way back from work. Evenings are saved for special occasions now though. Xmas and NYE don’t count as taxis are like £50 for that and that’s ridiculous!

Sooo… as I have no money at the moment I decided to buy a pair of shoes. I know, bad Jo! They were only £39.99 though and then I got 10% off with my NUS card – wheeee! I love them though, they have brought me joy. Shoe joy. They’re a pair of T.U.K. Black/Red Skull/Bow medium heels. So comfortable and easy to walk in, and they make me tall.

I wore them out on Monday when we went for Tony’s birthday meal at Xen. Very nice food. Wish I’d worn my trousers though as my skirt was a little tight so I shared Claire’s rice rather than getting my own. I had Thai Chicken Satay and Thai Green Curry. Yummy! I really wanted Indian food (they do Thai/Indian/Japanese), but as I can cook it so well myself now I’m loathe to pay for something that I don’t like as much! Can’t wait to make my onion bhajees at Christmas, they’re so lovely!

I updated my 360 today, the NXE update didn’t take too long. I hate the avatars though. I was annoyed when my Mii could only have natural hair colours and Microsoft have gone the same way. Seems so silly as surely it can’t be that hard to have a wider palette?! So my avatar looks more like Abby Sciuto than me now as I’ve given it black hair. Gonna see if I get any hassle, if I do I’m making a male avatar. Best thing about NXE though is definitely being able to transfer the games to the HDD so you don’t have to listen to the loud DVD drive. It’s bliss Played around with it a little more and it seems it keeps on crashing in the friends list which is well annoying. Lots of other people having this issue too. Hopefully they’ll sort it.

I’ve been playing Rock Band a fair bit since I got it a few weeks ago and… I LOVE IT! The Guitar controller is a MUCH better shape for me and although the strumbar having no clicky sound throws me a bit I think it’s probably better and wish I’d started out with a silent strumbar so I’d be used to it.

The drums are really good fun, but sadly I have ELs so they have no sensitivity whatsoever (no sock mod for me). I haven’t even got around to finishing the Easy Drum Tour yet, but there is another reason for this. The drums are pretty loud to people downstairs (and I can’t do a lot about it since I have ELs) so I can only play during the day. This means I play the guitar tours mostly… but… and this shocks me. When people are out I’m actually finding the Vocal Tours the most fun! Took me a while to get into it. I don’t sing unless I really have to, which is usually never, I mimed my way through assemblies at primary school. It shows that whilst I obviously can’t sing my guess of the pitch is pretty spot on (which is all RB cares about). I am slightly worried about the ones I keep 100%ing though. I mean ‘Maps‘ (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) is easy so that’s expected, but ‘Celebrity Skin‘ (Hole), ‘In Bloom‘ (Nirvana), ‘Black Hole Sun‘ (Soundgarden) and ‘Enter Sandman‘ (Metallica)..! Is there a grunge kid trying to get out here? Am I reliving my flannel-shirted teens?? ‘Sabotage‘ (Beastie Boys) is a nightmare for me though as it doesn’t seem to think I’m saying the words right and there’s no actual singing in it. You’d think it would be easier… but no. Maybe I need to put on my NY accent for that song.

It’s such a natural progression from GHII as well. I know they’re releasing Guitar Hero: World Tour, but really… as soon as they add in Co-Op Career on-line I’m content with Rock Band and just getting DLC for it every now and then. Talking of the downloadable tracks – wow! There are millions! OK, slight exaggeration, but there’s a bit of everything in there. I’m not downloading any (except GLaDOS’ ‘Still Alive‘) until I get to the point in it where I’m totally at my level and have to try to pass songs. I’m working my way through Easy-Medium-Hard-Expert on all the instruments to get the most out of the game. Such a shame I’ll never get any of the Band Tour achievements though. No-one ever comes here, and I’m not lugging the instruments into town. On-line co-op career would be perfect.

Another thing that I absolutely love is the character customization. Soooo much better now I can have my characters looking like me! My guitarist one is scary, she really does look like (a thinner version of) me. I love the way the band interacts too. With guitarists singing along on parts of the song. Looks so much nicer than GHIII. The guitar parts are a lot easier though. In a way it’s good, but also I don’t feel like I’ve achieved quite so much being halfway through the Guitar Tour on Expert.

I really need to update my ScoreHero now, but there’s singing to be done!

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/08/rock_band_uk_release_date_set

So, we now have a date for the UK release of Rock Band, Friday May 23rd 2008. We also now have a UK price for the full Rock Band bundle, £180… yes my US friends, you paid $169 we will be paying around $360. Sadly I think the level of boycotting needed to get our prices down is beyond the realms of possibility.

Aaaaaages ago I saw this site and thought it was really cool. Sadly the only console I had that was on-line was my Wii so no chance of anything fun like that for me

Well since finding myself very single, very alone and with no friends and nothing and no-one to do, I bought myself a 360 (I got the Premium in the end). His one drove me insane with trying to make his off-line account link to his on-line one (had to delete the off-line one and start from scratch in the end), but so far mine has been good. Bought some 2nd hand and cheap games. Trying to 100% Assassin’s Creed if I can, just because samey & boring though it is, it’s single player. Managed to lessen my Viva Piñata addiction a little too, that was getting scary.

360Voice is very cool, I’m enjoying seeing what my console has to say about me Only real issue I have with it is the site updates so slowly. I know it has to wait a while to update, but the rss feed updates so much quicker. You’d think they’d both be the same.

Anyhoo, this post is a list of all the 360 type things I’m on, feel free to add me so I can pretend I have friends:

Finally got round to playing this last night (haven’t played a real game in years, it’s been all about Guitar Hero, Peggle Deluxe, etc. for me recently), can’t say I find it that great. The climbing and diving into bales of hay is cool and the killing is cool, but the walking about everywhere bores me silly. I’d only been playing for about half an hour when I got the 360 achievement for staying alive in battle for over 10 minutes… mainly because I was so bored of walking/riding I just killed… Yahtzee was spot on, it should be called Faffing-About Creed. And yeah, that FUCKING hill is well annoying.

It’s really lovely to look at (although Kristen Bells’ cross-eyed face in Heroes is bad enough without seeing it in all the lab bits too) so now I think I’ll stick doing just that, watching my mate play through it and telling him when I spot flags and stuff.

I did have fun though, when I ‘parked’ my horse next to another horse while I climbed up to a View Point, came back and some mad woman was twirling about around my horse!

Right, having played GH:III (Wii version) for several more hours now, I thought I’d re-write the previous entry:

The StarPower meter is absolute arse. It’s great that the Wii controller rumbles when you first attain starpower, but there’s nothing flashing or anything to show when it’s 100% full… so I just forget all about it. The annoying Star Power Ready text that used to explode up from the fretboard making me miss notes and therefore have to wait to use my starpower has thankfully gone. They have introduced some more annoying text that tells you when you’ve achieved 50/100/200, etc. notes in a row though. I don’t see the point in that, although the little counter that shows the number of notes in a row on the bottom left is nice. Also, why on Earth does the Wii controller use the rumble function the whole time you are using StarPower? The fret board is lit up and pretty obvious on screen, I don’t need the woooom-woooom-woooom to tell me as well. This is all assuming you can get starpower to work. You need to learn the knack of lifting slowly than shaking the controller down. It takes some getting used to. As does the new HOPO system. It was done by hand so not all of the ones you’d think are now HOPOs, but they do show up lighter than other notes which is good for working out where they can be used, even if they’ve left them out of some solos making them really hard…

I hate the male singer. In general, but mainly the close-ups of his scary, large, out of sync mouth full of shark-teeth. He’s creepy. Stop it. The crowd’s good though, the stage-diving took me by surprise and made me smile. I also giggle at the inmates synchronised dancing too much. It’s a bit distracting. The in-between ‘levels’ animations aren’t that good, and they’re a bit long. They’re amusing the first time, but nowhere near the joyful simplicity of “vroom-screeeeeetch!”

The controller is a bit pants. This is the Wii one, and I’ve been used to the old ps2 ones. I don’t like it. I love that it’s wireless and doesn’t seem to suffer from that like I’ve heard the new 360 one does. I measured it up against the old ps2 ones and it’s only slightly shorter, but that small difference is enough to have me hunched over and really uncomfortable. I play sitting down, I may have to start playing standing up. Now I have the added annoyance that the whammy bar on mine is really loose and wanders off. So I spend most of the song trying to put it back in a position where I can use it to gain star power… then it’s gone again, winding down to point at the floor. Looks like I’ll be voiding my warranty then… *whistles*

GuitarHero.com is good, linked up my account and got my friends accounts on there, nice to see it updating so quickly. This was the main reason I got it. I wanted the whole on-line thing. I’ve been using ScoreHero with Kna to fuel our insane competitiveness with the GH series but it’s always really slow when you want to update, so I end up with scribbles of my scores all over notepads. Looks like I still will though as comparing people on GuitarHero.com is nowhere near as good as on ScoreHero.

I worked my way through Easy on a friend’s Wii and annoyingly GH:III is one of those games you can’t transfer via SD card. So I’m doing it all again now just to get the bat guitar. You also earn cash and have encores on Easy which is new, the cash counts towards your career so it makes sense to play through Easy for a change. It took about 2 days for my 100% on Easy achievement Award to show up. We also had fun with the on-line scoring as GuitarHero.com got a little confused by one Wii having 2 profiles. I’ve found you have to sign in to WFC whenever you start the game too, or you’re not logged in. The scores do update later, but it takes a while as they seem to trickle through. It was updating the wrong profile for a while at the weekend, but the scores slowly righted themselves and although the high-scores look like they could be wrong, the number of groupies and percentages of the game played are now correct.

The reason why I bought this as soon as I could and didn’t pay too much heed to the crap reviews was for the on-line playing. I don’t have a 360 so this is quite a new thing for me & consoles (Animal Crossing on the DS isn’t quite as competitive). I’ve now played a few games on-line against friends and strangers and it totally rocks! There isn’t any noticeable lag at all. OK, so twice my Wii froze on me making a really nasty feedback sound, but both times that happened before I was in the match and playing, so no massive deal. I really can’t wait for RockBand to come out over here, although I may end up staying in forever :s

Links:

My GuitarHero.com Account (Hexy).
My ScoreHero Account (Hexy).