[deprecated] muddyhorse

I broke down and bought a new Xbox 360 Arcade unit to replace my variously failing boxes.  If you [intlink id=”272″ type=”post”]remember back just a bit in time[/intlink], I tried a couple of strategies to fix my machine.  They all worked — for a time.  The time the fix worked, however, was variable, ranging from 5-30 hours for a good fix, and as short as 30 minutes for a bad fix.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the boxes, and unfortunately, the time I spent fixing seems to have eclipsed the time I spent playing.

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the process is that, while buggy, the 360 hardware is quite resilient.  With enough twiddling of screws, I can get a box up and running quite consistently.

I thought I was in the clear as far as the 3 red lights goes for the XBox 360… it happened, I was under warranty, Microsoft send a cardboard coffin, and I sent it back.  End of story.

Oops, it happened again.  There’s no free lunch this time.  Even if I paid the $100 to MS to repair it, they would only give a 90 day warranty on their work.  So, either buy a new one (with a massive extended warranty, of course) or try to fix it myself.  After attempting to buy a new Arcade unit for $200 at K-Mart twice, but failing both times because they were out of stock, I went the fix route.

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Buy.com recently had a great deal on some games and battery packs.  One of the games included was Crackdown.  Here’s a quick review, after playing about half the game.  I get the feeling that Crackdown is one of those games everyone’s heard of, but few have played.  It’s never had a mega promotional campaign, but it’s a solid, well put-together title.  To sum up my feelings about the game: it’s a blast.  And it gets blastier the farther along you get.

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My wife found a cheap copy of the Orange Box, from Valve.  It actually contains 3 full games (Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal) and two large expansions for HL2 (ep. 1 & 2) — a lot of content.

There was only one reason I wanted the game:  Portal.  I heard from friends and reviews about the thing, so I had a feeling I’d like it.  I did.  Great writing and mind-bending (but not too mind-bending) make for a fun game.

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It was brought to my attention that I forgot a game review of Portal, so I thought I’d lump several games in today that I’ve been meaning to review but haven’t yet.  This is in order of me getting each game, starting with last Christmas.

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Too Human is an action RPG for the XBox 360.  Sillicon Knights developed the title on-and-off for almost ten years.  The game combines features from several other well-known action RPGs.  To sum it up in a sentence, Too Human combines the frantic gameplay and hordes of enemies from the Diablo series with the weapon stylings and combos of Sega’s Phantasy Star Online.

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