HD DVD add-on meets the Blu-ray player

With the Xbox 360 in between, I can officially call this one an awkward moment………

They said to Jump In… [Update]

Today my local EB Games finally dropped the price of the HD DVD add-on I’ve had on hold for the last two-weeks. $45 CND later and I got myself an HD DVD player!

I’m excited about the possibilities for the future of the platform and am glad I spent my hard earned monies to buy it.

Oh…. what the hell…..

Update: Joking aside, I thought it was a good time to grab the drive. $44.99 for it at my local EB Games with the King Kong freebie still neatly tucked inside. Also, the fact that the 5 Free HD DVDs expires TOMORROW helps!

I ended up dropping $10 of my own cash after trading in a game I don’t play anymore. $10 for an HD DVD player and 6 free movies? Do want. Did buy.

1am ramblings from the new home at thelevelgrind.com

So The Level Grind Blog took a leap into the domain name pool today. All of you (you five that is) can update your bookmarks to point to thelevelgrind.com

Dustin recommended GoDaddy since all I needed was a redirect, wordpress is fine and dandy for me – for now.

I picked up Gears of War on PC today, only a few weeks after grabbing it on Xbox 360 again. Why? Points of course… but more on that later.

I’m running a decent rig here. Dual core Intel P4 @ 2.8ghz a core. Radeon x1950 pro and a gig of ram but this thing is CHUGGING. My computer is notoriously horrible, I swear it has more viruses than Windows NT and it doesn’t help that I’m running Vista – which desperately needs that first service pack to be released. In Gears PC, I jumped into a multiplayer match after knocking all the settings down to low and when it finally loaded I couldn’t move. It was horrible.

I windowed it @ 800×600 and tried single-player and that was a no go. It works but a one-legged man is quicker than my pc was running the nearly 2 year old title.

The issue is RAM. I’m slopping around with two 512mb sticks of DDR400 and it’s not working out for me. The next purchase will be the best DDR400 ram I can grab, since it isn’t the norm anymore.

I sent a few Live messages to friends I know own the HD DVD add-on to see if they were willing to part with it, that was a no go. They’re doing what I want to do, stock-pile HD DVDs when they drop to insanely low prices. I’ve said it before, I think that current HD DVDs has a better feature set than most Blu-ray movies and I’d like to go grab HD versions of the Bourne flicks, 300, American Gangster and a few others.

So outside of X3F I’m in college and have another part-time job in retail, but that’s about to change. I’m probably ditching the other job in favor of focusing what little spare time I have on finishing up my program – which is almost done. Knuckles told me I should probably have something else on the side for pocket money and while he’s totally right, I’ve just got so much on my plate it’s harder to deal with than that last airplane level in COD4 on Veteran.

So Gears on PC. Funny thing I learned, as everyone did a long time ago, is that the PC and Xbox 360 version have almost the exact same achievements (only one is different and the extra ones aren’t added on the PC version) and not only that but you can go get them all over again since the PC version is considered a different game. Points don’t matter you say? Well, maybe you should just click that little X in the top right corner now sir… cuz they do.

I have a long list of games I’ve added to my pile of shame. Games I own and neglected or games I bought and haven’t even played.

I grabbed Titan Quest and the expansion a few months back and really wanna dive into that. Company of Heroes was a staple during my gaming sessions, but I haven’t been able to play it in a while – see the PC problems above for answers.

Today at my local EB (they still exist in Canada) I grabbed Phantasy Star Universe for $9, figured I could squeeze a few points outta there eventually and a few points cards for future releases (IKARUGA!).

A while back I padded the Xbox 360 library with Perfect Dark Zero (which I hated btw) again for $5, Crackdown new was $10 on Boxing Day as was Stuntman: Ignition, which I played to the end and quickly put it back on the shelf. Added others like Condemned, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, The Red Star (PS2), Saint’s Row and Superman Returns (yeah I know it’s terrible… but even bad games have points – the flying is cool enough for the $10 I paid).

My what’cha playing list (see the ride side there?) has gone old school and I’m loving it. Marvel vs. Capcom 2? Still one of my favorites, I don’t care how broken it is! Lost Odyssey might as well be ancient because the gameplay is such a throwback. I’m on the fence with the game right now, but I’m still going through it out of interest (not only because of the points).

When I was a kid I could play through Final Fantasy VII, VIII, Chrono Trigger and Cross and never get bored… but now, I just don’t have it in me. Maybe the shooter is to blame because before there wasn’t anything like a Halo or Gears or Resistance that grabbed my attention. Yeah, that Resistance.

Shout out to crYm fYtr who tipped me off to the Xbox 360 Dashboard theme to use with my new HTC Smartphone. It looks crazy, like full on 99’s. Thanks man.

XdM OUT!

Addiction+

Wow, it’s been a few days since I updated but what can I say – its been busy.

It’s been a solid two weeks since I’ve gone to bed before 3-4am EST. Other than bringing the news to the X3F Army, I’m on the media relations team for the 2008 Humber College Art Show along with trying to maintain my school schedule and a part-time job.

Sleep has taken the back seat to working with the great Joystiq network, college, parties, smoking cigarettes and drinking plenty of coffee. TIM HORTONS FTW!

A lot of cool stuff has happened lately, one of the coolest has to be the upcoming XBLA game Schizoid having an achievement inspired by Xbox360Fanboy.com! Richard Mitchell has grabbed all the deets you need.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on a few new features we started on X3F you’ve already seen COMMUNITY CONTENT where we break down the best content available for Halo 3 and WOULD YOU RATHER … a weekly pick-one of these and bitch about it in the comments story. This week is all about Halo so go VOTE!

Speaking of Halo, COMMUNITY CONTENT might not only be Halo 3 related in the future… hrmmmmm…

Oh and before I wrap this up like a jimmy-hat. Why is this post called Addiction+? Simple. Go download n+ on XBLA on the asap… it’s 12 kinds of awesome.

Teh New Hotness…

I needed a new phone, so I decided to go all out and pick up the latest (at least in my area) HTC Window Mobile phone. Came standard with the meh Mobile 5.0 but HTC was offering free Windows Mobile 6 upgrades online.

This thing is fantastic so far. Wi-fi and Windows Media player alone are going to make this worth the price tag.

Now I can load up the latest episodes of the Xbox 360 Fanboy Fancast and listen on-teh-go.

I just need to find some decent software for it and all will be perfect with the world.

Also, if you have any mobile access and are dying to check your favorite Xbox 360 website, remember Xbox 360 is mobile on: http://m.xbox360fanboy.com