extricate.org » Gaming http://extricate.org A subtle blend of technical geekery, judo and the life of a football referee. Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:43:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 New Xbox Experience http://extricate.org/2008/11/20/new-xbox-experience/ http://extricate.org/2008/11/20/new-xbox-experience/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:09:01 +0000 Tris http://www.extricate.org/?p=61

The New Xbox Experience is now live. And very impressive it is too. That is my new Mii^W^W^W sorry, avatar, on the left.

The whole update just oozes polish. Very much in the style of Apple with panes swooshing all over the place, and CD-rack style collections of games and options. The opening movie seems designed to say, “Yes, well, Nintendo did the cute avatars first, but check THIS out”.

The avatars are stunningly put together and animated. Lots of cute little touches like headbutting the screen should you rotate them back then forward again. And of course they wave and generally dash about. It will be very interesting when more games start to take advantage of them.

I tried out the “Install game to hard disk” feature with Fallout 3. Painless, and although there wasn’t a huge increase in speed afterwads, I could play the game without the aircraft taking off DVD drive noises. Excellent.

Of course, now I have pretty much zero hard disk space, so the 120 Gb Hard Drive Expansion is looking mighty appealing. Predictably, Amazon are sold out now.

]]> http://extricate.org/2008/11/20/new-xbox-experience/feed/ 0 Movie trailers from the past! http://extricate.org/2007/12/22/movie-trailers-from-the-past/ http://extricate.org/2007/12/22/movie-trailers-from-the-past/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2007 22:26:08 +0000 Tris http://www.extricate.org/2007/12/22/movie-trailers-from-the-past/

Microsoft have finally released the UK Video Store for the 360, as reported by Kotaku.

There are some recent titles there, as well as old, and one of the old ones is Superman III. For some (well, mostly geeky) reasons I enjoyed this film as a child, but it has NOT aged well.

Check out the embedded trailer. Not only does it look OLD (1983!), notice how the trailer SPOILS THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE FILM:

]]> http://extricate.org/2007/12/22/movie-trailers-from-the-past/feed/ 0 End of a virtual era – Scott Hartman leaves SOE http://extricate.org/2007/12/16/end-of-a-virtual-era-scott-hartman-leaves-soe/ http://extricate.org/2007/12/16/end-of-a-virtual-era-scott-hartman-leaves-soe/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:39:15 +0000 Tris http://www.extricate.org/2007/12/16/end-of-a-virtual-era-scott-hartman-leaves-soe/

Several years back, and several stone heavier (very much pre-Judo) I was very much into EverQuest. Despite everything being much healthier now, I do sometimes look back at those times with some nostalgia.

(It is amusing seeing World of Warcraft players have the exact same debates, rants and severe social issues as EQ though. Nothing changes!)

Now, one of the lead developers (and subsequently producer of EverQuest 2), has called it a day.

Brings those memories flooding back! It will be an interesting blog to keep an eye on. It is a huge development feat to keep that sort of game running, and one I am always interesting in learning about. Server farms, large databases, fast responses, network traffic etc.

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