The unthinkable has happened - my 360 has died on me.

It’s not a run-of-the-mill RROD, either. It all started towards the end of a good gaming session when the graphics suddenly began to distort, as if the colour depth had changed to 16-bit. Eventually the signal output had completely vanished, leaving me with a console that could produce sound but no video. It was well out of warranty (and, if I remember correctly, the extended warranty only applies to RROD symptoms).

I was playing 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand at the time, so perhaps there was some kind of karmic force at work.

After a bit of investigation, I deduced that an X-Clamp mod was needed. After spending a bit of money on some opening tools and the necessary screws and washers, I cracked it open and got to modding.

All things considered, it went quite smoothly at first. The guide I followed to dismantle my 360 was extremely detailed and well written, and removing the x-clamps was not as difficult as I expected. Soon I had a neatly arranged pile of parts. With any luck, I could be done by this weekend.

Then I got to the heatsink.

It was a GPU heatsink that already had some standoffs screwed in. It had a hex head so you could use a wrench to remove it, but as I worked at it with the wrench I found that I was gradually stripping the edges. It was stuck fast.

Not to be taken aback, I decided to get a dremel and cut a line across the top so I could use a flat-head screwdriver to remove it. The screw was still stuck hard - so hard that when I tried using the screwdriver, the metal on the screw began to warp.

Dejected, I resorted to one last try - drilling a hole straight through the middle of the screw and using a screw extractor to gradually ease it out. After successfully getting the screw extractor to catch, I began to wind it out…and the tungsten screw extractor snapped clean off with a surprisingly clear *ping*.

So now I have a 360 GPU heatsink with a screw stuck in one of the holes. A replacement one is on its way to me.

Now that I think about it, I could have saved myself the money spent on drill bits and screw extractors and bought the replacement heatsink in the first place…but it’s the principle, damn it.

I’ve been playing a lot of fighting games recently. It started off somewhat innocently, throwing a few carefree fireballs in Street Fighter 4 and thinking nothing of it.

And suddenly I felt like something more. Maybe it was the lack of gritty realism. Perhaps I just wasn’t convinced that a Honda, a sumo wrestler, could exhibit such a display of dexterity and agility. Or it could have been the fact that Seth was pounding my characters skull into the screen while stealing my credit card numbers and using my computer as part of his spam botnet.

So I moved on to UFC 2009 Undisputed and Fight Night Round 4.

Fight Night Round 4 feels a lot more sedate than FNR3. FNR3 was about big haymakers, dramatic counter-punches and chicks in bikinis. It was larger than life, so to speak.

FNR4 is more grounded. There’s a lot more focus on how inside work is done, thanks to the improved model clipping and counter system. Stray punches can get caught in the opponent’s arms and wild blows can be hit and miss. Counters are somewhat easier to pull off and are a lot more punishing. Leaning isn’t as effective as in FNR3 but the addition of Weaving is useful (if somewhat open to abuse). The controls are bit more accessible and don’t require as many buttons. Clinching is still pretty rudimentary, since you can just press a button to push the other guy off you.

Undisputed, on the other hand, makes FNR4 look like a tickling competition. Nothing says “mainstream lower-middle class society” than glorifying no-holds-barred fighting, and Undisputed is king of the hill in this regard. Within 15 minutes I was going Muay-Thai on some poor sucker’s ass, whipping his neck and driving my knees into the bastard’s face. The submission/ground work wasn’t all too intuitive, with a lot of stick and button mashing to get some kind of action going. (Not to mention that seeing two sweaty grown men writhing on the ground can easily give the wrong impression.)

That wasn’t to say that, after spending a session on it, I felt the urge to drink a glass of raw eggs mixed with protein powder and join a kickboxing gym so I could “defend myself” after I’ve had a few drinks and some guy was trying to steal the girl I’d been hitting on all night.

I also find it amusing that the Government elect decide to say one thing about how it’s bad that we’re jacking cars in GTA, and yet they decide to classify a game that involves two grown men beating each other to submission in a cage. But hey - I figure the youth of today need to know when to tower over someone and beat their opponent’s face in.

The people at my work don’t look like they play games. They always talk about skiing trips, hiking treks and salsa classes. Some of them look like they’d barely know their way about an analog stick.

Yet it always surprises me when our lunch time talk turns to games; from debates over hardware and consoles to the latest and greatest titles, as well as reminiscing over old ones. (I guess it’s hard not to expect this coming from an IT environment, but I figure that we have a lower proportion of hardcore nerds compared to other companies out there.)

The push from companies to promote gaming in the mainstream is impressive. Games that I never thought would’ve taken off are overnight celebrities - Guitar Hero, Brain Training, The Sims. Game previews have moved on from the full page spreads in gaming magazines to rubbing shoulders with movie previews in the cinema. My local game stores are packed full during sale season to the point where I find it hard to move around, and the larger retailers now have whole sections dedicated to games instead of the piddly aisle or two.

And, to be perfectly honest, I would have never thought that the Wii would have taken off like it did. But it was so accessible. The learning curve was as difficult as you were proficient with handling a remote control. The interface had decreased from the 360’s imposing 10 button + two analog stick finger trap to a wand with a thumb button and a trigger.

What many adults had cast off as a bit of childhood fun has now suddenly become “socially accepted”. (Well, tell that my workmate’s newly wed wife who doesn’t want him to spend his days going “pew pew pew”.) Let’s ride the wave while we can.

I’m not against advertisements. They’re a great way to let us, the money-soaked public, know of new titles that we can look forward to soon. If the advertisement is witty / amusing / insightful in some way, then all the better.

What I’m against, however, are those background-cum-sidebar ads you see on various gaming sites. Am I the only one who finds them incredibly intrusive? I understand that these kinds of sites live off adsales - it’s their lifeblood. But I believe they’re less effective than marketers make them out to be.

Let’s take IGN as an example - this month, they have an advertisement for Assassin’s Creed 2. Fantastic; I’m looking forward to it very much. I wouldn’t have known it was Assassin’s Creed 2 if it weren’t for the other 2 flash banners ticking away on-screen, because the images consist of some blurry photo of a guy being strangled from behind, and a generic gloved hand with a patterned blade underneath. I could convey the same meaning by smearing Vasoline on a camera lens and going to a local goth pub. As for Gamespot, it feels like that there is more ad than content, thanks to the awkward “navigation bar” at the top of the screen and the giant image of Altair pushing the content about a third of the way down towards the fold.

I don’t like the fact that background ads are becoming more popular because they’re intrusive enough as is. I’m just dreading the day when we’ll all be wearing Internet implants and we’ll be getting these ads burned into our brain stems.

Just had a bit of a go at this over the weekend, and I thought that they were leaving the base-building stuff a bit too late. It felt like…an extended tutorial.

When my mate told me that they took the base-building out of the game completely, I was surprised. Wasn’t that one of the appeals of the original Dawn of War, where you can amass a real army, complete with tanks and towering mechs, and have it butt heads against another army over and over again?

Without doing any proper research, my assumption is maybe the boffins at Relic thought that the formula was already done to death (3 expansion packs can’t be wrong), and that the new RPG-like focus would reward micro-management and case-by-case tactics. It’s almost a bit like SWAT 4 on steroids.

After a brief bit of Googling, I found the following excerpt from CVG:

CVG: Why won’t this be like other RTS games?

In Dawn of War II, you control an elite strike force that grows stronger over the course of the campaign and you get to customize your troops with Wargear, abilities and accessories between missions on your battle barge in space. Because these choices happen between missions, you can get straight into the action when the mission starts. There’s no fussing around with wood chopping or nail hammering!
(cont.)
We want players to become more attached to their units which in turn will make them care more about the battles they are fighting. Traditional RTS games have you controlling faceless soldiers and band boxing your way to victory as you send these generic units to their death, wave after wave. That paradigm is stale, and it needs to change. We believe attachment is the key to reinvigorating the genre.

VideoGamer.com has a more marketing oriented explanation:

VideoGamer.com: The emphasis seems to be less on buildings and more on a small number of squads. Why have you decided to take this approach? Is it true that there will be no base building at all?

Jonny Ebbert (Lead Designer): We want you focused on your squads, what they’re doing, and making sure they are kicking as much ass as humanly possible. This is the reason we’re downplaying base-building and giving it a much smaller, and much cooler role. Your goal isn’t to build a city; you stake your claim over the map with a few key structures at a few key points.

So, how does it feel to be kicking ass…humanely? For me personally - so far, so good…but all it’s doing is reminding me “when the hell is Diablo 3 coming?”

Taking into account my new goals and various commitments, I don’t have the time to keep abreast of game releases and tap out rants about them anymore.

I might write up some brief impressions of games that I’m currently enjoying, but I’ll be steering this blog into a more personal direction from now on.

If you’ve been reading my reviews, thanks for your interest. I’ll also make an effort to keep up to date with my blogroll.

I have returned from my trip, and I feel like a new man. I’ll probably be putting up some recollections from my travels.

On another note, I’m going to be slowly weaning myself off gaming, as it is distracting from my other great love (writing) and general day-to-day life. That’s not to say that I’m divorcing myself from it altogether - it just means that I’ll be limiting myself to casual sessions of an hour at a time or on bus trips with my DS.

Well, that depends on how forgiving Advance Wars: Dual Strike is going to be…or if I end up stabbing the screen in frustration.