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

On the Friday afternoon I met up with Janine and saw Tim Minchin. Well I say ’saw’, unless we jumped up and down we couldn’t actually see anything as they’d draped black fabric over the metal fencing. He was great as usual. Caught some of Streetlight Manifesto and then The Horrors, saw a little of the Deftones. Saw Florence and the Machine and she was brilliant, I was really impressed. Soulsavers were really good too. But the highlight of Friday was definitely Faith No More. For all the people who said having them play inside a tent was a stupid idea because it would be rammed… nuh-uh! I went to the loos in plenty of time before they were on stage (which were awesome, clean and I didn’t have to queue for them at all over the WHOLE weekend, a festival first!). The loos were right near the tent so when I came out I could see the tent was really empty with spaces at the front so I made the most of it! Stood at the barrier at the front left and waited for them to come on. WOW! They were amazing! Absolutely loved it, although it wasn’t right seeing a guitarist who wasn’t Big Jim. Maybe I should’ve stood on the right and blocked my view of him with a post so I could pretend it was him! It took ages to get out of the festival site that night, but at first I really didn’t care because I’d finally seen FnM! I was meant to go to their infamous Brixton Academy show in 1990 but for some reason didn’t go. I don’t think I could afford it at the time. A lot of my friends went and are visible on the You Fat Bastards video. I am still jealous!The queue for the taxis was immense. I’ve never seen it that huge. Ever. I’d got blisters on my feet on the way to the festival site from the station at 12:00 so by 00:30 they were killing me. I knew I had 2 large blisters on each heel that rubbed with every step. I’d had plasters on them but they’d rubbed off over the course of the day. It was the first time I hadn’t taken my chair to a festival either, thinking I’d just buy one in the arena. Except this year they decided not to sell ANY chairs in the arena. Madness! Not sitting down all day coupled with blisters made walking a slow nightmare. Queueing for a taxi for two and a half hours was bad enough… but spending that time with idiots shouting “Haha! You don’t know how to get to the station! It’s only 10 minutes walk you fucking morons!” made me get really, really angry. I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE STATION! It would have taken me about three hours to get there considering I could only shuffle in agony and even if I got to the station, what then? No more trains that night. They really didn’t consider that not everyone was getting a cab into the town centre, I was getting a cab in the opposite direction! Eugh… RETARDS!

Saturday I got to sleep in a bit, first band I wanted to see was Eagles of Death Metal at 14:35. they rocked as usual. Always makes me feel good seeing them live, they seem so happy! Jesse dedicated a song to his little girl who was sat at the back of the stage in ear defenders on Dave Grohl’s knee. She went really shy and hid from the cameras. Bless! There was an hour of rushing around, bumping into people and getting food before the band of the day, Them Crooked Vultures! Although I’d heard of the collaboration, I didn’t know that was their name until Claire & Tony told me on the Thursday, along with the rumour that they would be playing. Sure enough a big X appeared in the field on google maps on the Friday \m/ They were in the same tent as FnM the previous night but it was a whole different story. We got there fairly early and already it was pretty rammed. We got in a little way so we could just about see the stage and the screens, then it got ridiculous. As the band came on stage huge waves of people forced into the tent. I got annoyed that there was hardly a sound for each member of the band until Dave Grohl walked on stage and they went insane. We even heard people express their confusion that he was drumming and not singing, “who the hell was the ginger bloke with the mic” *sigh* Then another wave of people barged in sending me flying and pushing Claire over into Tony. I had enough. I just shoulder barged my way out. I no longer cared if I annoyed anyone. I set up my chair outside and watched on the screen, it was a better view and I could sit down and eat at the same time. Claire & Tone joined me soon afterwards. They were the last band I need to see that day really so I spent the rest of the night walking about looking at stalls and checking out smaller bands in the little tents.

Got in on the Sunday late again, which was silly really as I knew I was going home really early that night and getting a lift home from outside the Orange campsite entrance. No traffic made it bliss and made me feel smug Got into the Dance tent for deadmau5 and he was amazing. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the stage or screen at first for the evilmau5 entrance, the tent was rammed. I’ve never known such a polite crowd though! I was at the edge of the tent and everyone who walked past me said excuse me and thank you. I was really impressed. After that I spent the day wandering about catching bits of bands and bumping into people again. I couldn’t believe I was leaving while Bloc Party were playing. It was about the earliest I’d left a festival since my ex started hassling me after I saw Butthole Surfers one year. I only saw that one band that year but as the day ticket was about £20 back then it wasn’t much a big deal! Oh how times have changed! I wandered around the camp-sites for a bit, bought some ear-rings (I always have to buy at least one thing from every festival as a souvenir) and wandered out for my lift.

It was an awesome festival this year and even though I didn’t see many full sets I caught performances by countless bands,  wandered an awful lot, met some great people and had a fantastic time. The new layout of the arena was really impressive. There was a HUGE space set aside for toilets, I’ve never seen so many! No queuing and there was always loo roll and soap! Amazing! They also had some tents a little closer together this year but had big metal fences between them which did a really good job of stopping the sound merging. Great work. I’d been dreading this festival as I had a real sense of foreboding but it turned out to be unfounded. Roll on next year!

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Spotify. I have to admit it took longer for me to check it out than normal because it was being compared to Pandora, and try as I might I just didn’t along with Pandora. I occasionally used LastFM’s radio feature, but I own a hell of a lot of music. I’ve been buying CDs since I got my first CD player in 1989, they take up a lot of room.

Unlike a lot of people I don’t hate iTunes, it is a bit slow with the amount of music I have, and since I got my new iPod Touch I am no longer able to use iTunes on my win2k server machine. This means most of the music is run from a network directory making iTunes on my XP PC even slower. Not great… it also skips sometimes if I have FireFox open. I used to use foobar2k but as I have an iPod that needs this PC to sync now I ended up using iTunes more and more. I gave SongBird a go but found it slow and it was worse at dealing with networked music than iTunes.

Anyway, I finally gave Spotify a go the other night. Signed up for the free account as I wanted to see how the ads worked. I was impressed. Linking it up to my lastFM account made me happy as I really love my lastFM and probably wouldn’t use anything that didn’t update it. It’s very quick, it hasn’t skipped on me at all yet which is good as my internet connection is pretty dire speedwise and most things give me the dreaded ‘buffering’ messages. The image/text ads are really small and unobtrusive. I didn’t get very many of them either. It took a good while to get my first audio advert. This is where it really impressed me. It’s not particularly clever, it’s just a small thing that pleased me greatly. When you get the audio ads (mine were nearly all about Climate Change awareness so I’m fine with that!) you can’t skip them, that’s expected, but the best things I found were that they aren’t scrobbled to lastFM and also they don’t show up in your IM status if you have ‘currently playing’ selected. Awesome! How good is that?! So simple, yet it made me really happy.

One downside I’ve found is that the radio options aren’t very good for me. They don’t seem to be all that accurate. You can skip as much as you like though. The best use I’ve found for it is to create your own playlist (or find one on the vast number of spotfy playlist sites sprouting up) and preview albums/artists you’ve wanted to give a go, but don’t want to buy just in case you don’t like them.

Saw the first episode of the BBCs follow up to Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, last night.

This one is set in 1981, so I do actually remember a lot of stuff from that time. The Audi Quattro certainly brings back memories as does the creepy Pierrot clown. A cousin of mine decked out her entire bedroom with them back in the 80s. She had the dolls on her shelves, they were on her pillows, her duvet, the rug…. eugh. Creepy things!

I can’t say I like DI Alex Drake anywhere near as much as I liked Sam, but we’ll see if she gets less annoying as it goes on. None of that really matters though, because it could all just be a blank screen without Gene Hunt. He makes me grin like an idiot. “You. In leather… holding that. Gives me the ‘orn.”

A few years ago I heard about a film called Survive Style 5+ and it sounded pretty cool so I wrote down the name on a notepad. As time went by I moved it to my WishList. It stayed there for a couple of years, but no-one bought it for me. As my folks were in Florida and I was sick of getting no post, I ordered it from Play.com. I watched it about a week ago…

WOW! It is now in my top 5 films list! I love it! It’s completely mental, really laugh out loud funny the whole way through. The fight scenes look brilliant. The colours are magical. It even manages to have a real lump-in-throat moment near the end. It bombards you with mentalness and then suddenly BAM! Hits you full on with something so wonderful it makes you want to cry. It’s likened to Pulp Fiction quite a bit due to the 5 seemingly unrelated stories intertwining, and Pulp Fiction is also one of my favourite films… but I think Survive Style 5+ tops it. The soundtrack is fantastic and upbeat, I’m going to try and get hold of as much of it as I can.

The storylines go like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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).