What If the kid did it himself to garner attention?  Just as plausible as someone at MS erasing it for....fun.

If this story is legit, it's going to get digg'ed and the kid will get a new, signed cover in 3 weeks.

As much as I hate saying the 'L' word, it's time for him or his parents to visit a lawyer.

Put the three of these together and it pretty well describes why I'm a little skeptical of all these shenanigans. 

True or not, the story was posted to GAF, where there are Bungie reps as members, and they have already started putting something together to send him.

Hmph, there has to be some way to fix this.  I downloaded Puzzle Quest last night and the 80MB file took about 2 hours.

So you're connection is always that slow?  Or does the speed sometimes improve?

If the speed varies, it's probably a problem with Live, or some type of wireless interference in your home.  My only suggestion would be if you have a wireless PC to see if its having problems at the same time as your 360.  Or if possible plug an ethernet cable directly into the 360.  You might also want to try cancelling and restarting your downloads, or trying in non peak traffic times.

Regardless, your speeds shouldn't be that slow, but it would be nice to know if it's your problem or Microsofts.

When I first got my 360 and used it wired, my downloads were fast.  Since I have had my wireless adapter, speeds are slow.  There are quite a few other wireless computing devices in my house (a few Tivo's, a few computers) and they all perform great, even when I am using the 360.  Unfortunately I can't run the 360 wired because I don't have a good place to run the wire - before I had the wireless adapter I was running it through an area it was easily tripped over.

Hmph, there has to be some way to fix this.  I downloaded Puzzle Quest last night and the 80MB file took about 2 hours.

I have incredibly slow marketplace downloads on wireless and I want to know if I just need to shut up and deal with it. Any hints on how to diagnose the issue would be appreciated as well. I have "open" NAT settings on my connection test, and UPnP opens up the right ports when I am online, so I know it's not that.  Supposedly MS had put a download test out a while back where you could compare file downloads from the Live servers vs. regular MS servers but it seems to have been taken down.

The only thing I can think of is that you have it set for a manual IP.

Some possible hints on this page.

Does that say "HP 300/300" in the upper left?  Does Hello Kitty give beatdowns in this game?

HAHA I didn't even notice that!

How can a game like this possibly have anything to do with combat..

Maybe they are "Happy Points" and if Hello Kitty doesn't eat enough chocolate she loses points.  Except Hello Kitty has no mouth. NO MOUTH. How does she eat chocolate? How? How? HOW?!

I've played several Xvid files from burned discs, and they've all played just fine.

On a related note, some of the files I've tried to play don't fill out to the edges of my screen, like its playing the file in its original resolution instead of stretching it out to fill the screen.  Does anyone know if there's a way to tell the 360 to stretch or zoom the video out to the size of my screen?

-Autistic Angel

yup, press A to bring up the controls and use the d-pad to go over to the right and you'll find a control for the aspect ratio.  It has like 5 different options (zoom, letterbox, stretch, etc.)

Does that say "HP 300/300" in the upper left?  Does Hello Kitty give beatdowns in this game?

How about FIFA 2005? Nope.

well if you had bought any other version of FIFA you'd be fine, but nnnnooooooo, you got to be difficult.

Same with MVP - 2003 and 2004 are BC, but 2005 is not.  I actually searched to see if 2005 was compatible and found sites that said it was.  Later I found some sites that explained it had initially been announced in error by MS and some of the sites that printed the list never went back and deleted 2005.

Felt like sitting on my bed and playing a sports game, any sports game.  Don't have any for the 360, but I have a few for my old XBOX.  Let's put in MVP 2005. Oh, it doesn't work.  How about FIFA 2005? Nope. Madden? Sorry.

Guess I'll watch some tv.

I had a strange thing happen the other day, wondering if anyone else has experienced this kind of behavior.  I had a disc full of episodes of a tv show that I needed to catch up on, in xvid format.  Popped the thing in the 360 and watched 3 or 4 episodes, no problem, looked great.  Got up to one episode and the machine told me that it couldn't read the file and put a red circle with a line through it next to the file.  Then all of a sudden the same icon started appearing next to a lot of the other files, and episodes I had already watched suddenly wouldn't play.  Wondering if there is some sort of ability to recognize copyrighted material?  That seems far-fetched.


As a side note, did you know that you can watch all 3 seasons of Lost on abc.com in streaming HD with just some small 30 second commercial breaks?  Very cool, although they only have limited episodes of their other shows and generally not in HD.

Mine has occasionally shown up as disconnected, but pulling out and reseating the USB cable fixed it.  Still, I'm not too impressed, as it's less than 2 months old.  Marketplace is also really slow, although I don't know if it's related.

Starcraft/Myth/just about any real-time strategy - I just can't get the hang of these games.

Civilization/SMAC/just about any turn-based strategy - I always just get bogged down in the complexity.  The only turn based game that has ever worked for me is Combat Mission, since it gives you one basic task to do.

Yes - about half the stories posted on CNN are now video, so I'll find myself having to skip over stories I want to know about often.  You really can't blame them, though, they can just repurpose stuff they've produced for tv, which is easier than making the video story and a written version.  Maybe I should just be looking at CNN less during the work day? 

I'm not in there either.  Sure, I tend to be 2 years behind on games, but you never know.

I ask this simply because I'm curious and not because I'm an achievement whore - do the XNA games have achievements?

[KOTOR]

I hate to say this, but KOTOR.  I played up through the first 2 planets and I just got kind of bored.  There just didn't seem to much to the gameplay.  You went into areas, talked to a few people to get a quest, did some fighting, and then moved on. Rinse, repeat.  I really want to go back to it at some point, but I don't feel very motivated.

Devil May Cry - I want to be good at games like this, but I'm just not.  The sword/gun combo stuff is very cool, but I couldn't even get past the first boss.  My Devil May Cry 5th anniversary box set is getting sold with 2 of the games still in the shrinkwrap.  As far as this type of game goes, I loved God of War, but DMC just doesn't work for me.

When I put it out on the dmz, my NAT value was "moderate" and I didn't really notice an improvement with Live, so I put it back to the normal setup, which gives me an "open" value for NAT.  Live is still not performing too well, although I don't know if it affects online play as I haven't done any.  Just have to wait a lot for things to load as I go through marketplace.

The Mets will win the series.  That is my completely unbiased opinion.

Talk about conspiracy theories, a well known Scientology opponent found in "apparent suicide".

What are the chances I just got off the phone with a R-Tard bitch and this is the first post I see. Not saying your either of the two negative extremities used Teggy, we all have moments..
This lady bought a 4GB flashdrive to back up her Computer..COMPUTER.. she plugs the flashdrive in the computer, per her accounts, waited for the light to stop flashing then took it out and proceeded to take her computer to the store to have the OS reinstalled... She comes home put the flashdrive back in waits for the light to stop flashing and tries to find all the files and programs before she reloaded the OS... WTF now she wants to file a lawsuit for us producing faulty products..WTF...
I just needed to vent for the incompetence of some people..
once again Teggy, nothing to do with you. I still try to jump 2 foot walls with my character.

pffft...even I know after the light stops flashing you have to say, "computer, copy files."

[Spoiler]

Fired up Oblivion on the 360 for the first time yesterday.  Made it to the first gate, talked to the NPCs and got stuck.  I was going to go back and try and figure it out but my curiosity got the best of me and I did a faq search.  Turns out my problem was

Spoiler for Hiden:

You can't just walk through the gates, you have to click on them to enter them.

 

The first test - the system staying up overnight - was successful.  Hopefully it will stay up, and after that, it will just be figuring out what's up with Xbox live.  I may throw the xbox out on the dmz and set up the port forwarding I have read about that is supposed to help.

So my hacking was successful - I am now running on just the WRT54G, and it is running the most recent version of dd-wrt micro.  Only time will tell if the issues have gone away. One disappointment I have so far is my XBOX live performance.  I was hoping this would improve performance there, but my first attempt to log in took forever and it is running extremely slowly (example: all the ads are taking forever to load, and I went to the Xbox originals page and after a couple of minutes none of the box arts had loaded.)

I think what I'm going to try and do is simplify my network. I currently have a BEFSX41 acting as my router and a WRT54G acting as an access point.  The BEFSX41 is there because my wife's former employer had a very finicky VPN and she needed it to log in to work.  However, she works for a different company now.  I think I will try to remove the BEFSX41 from the loop and update the WRT54G to use dd-wrt, which people claim works very well.  The one think I need to make sure is that the micro version (which is the only one that fits on the v5) has VPN passthru, since my wife and I still use VPN occasionally for work.

Definitely some interesting stuff there.  I'll have to fiddle a bit with the router tonight.

I have a linksys wrt54g that I use an access point connected to a non-wireless linksys router (model number is escaping me at the moment) which handles the dhcp.

Our wireless phones run in the 5.8-6 range.  We live in a house but have nearby neighbors.  The fact that this started right when I got the Xbox really makes it seem like that is the culprit.

Well, 2 days have passed and I have had to reset the router both days.  I tried channels 1 and 11 on the wireless router and it doesn't appear to have fixed the problem

It's well known that Nintendo has seriously slacked off when it comes quality control for games on their systems - they took the word "quality" off the the Nintendo seal, after all.  There is a ton of shovelware out  for the DS and Wii.  There are great games for both systems, but it doesn't take a statistical analysis to know there is also a lot of crap - just look at the shelf at Gamestop. I would like it if Nintendo was a little more stringent with what they let on their platforms, but any smart gamer should do their homework before buying a game, so it really doesn't matter to me.

fnord

?? He's using the 360 ON the wireless network; if he changes them so that they are on their own channels, there will be no Live connectivity.

That being said, I always get better reception on Channel 11.

As to my comment, the router can only handle so many threads before it starts getting choked up.

Rather than restarting your router or restarting the 360; try restarting all the other devices that use the wireless connection. Often something like torrent download/uploads will fuck with your router.

That and if you have a Belkin. Then it's just product choice. I found that the 360 wireless connection is actually more solid than a lot of PC wireless NICs.

Well based on the article, it seems that the wireless controllers are interfering with the 802.11b/g frequency that the wireless devices are using, so it seems choosing a different sub-frequency than the default might work.

I switched to channel 11 and I played on the 360 for about an hour and so far things are working, but only time will tell.

As far as using up all the threads in the router - I haven't been running anything out of the ordinary lately, so I would hope that isn't the issue.  I've got 3 or 4 computers that are using the wireless connection, the 360 and a couple of tivos.  I have run torrents in the past, but not recently.  I can definitely pinpoint the problem starting around the time I started using the 360.

I have been having problems with my wireless network every since I bought a wireless adapter for my 360, but after reading a little, I'm thinking it may have been since I bought my 360 (which was only about a week prior).  Often after using my 360 my wi-fi will drop out intermittently, and sometimes my computers will be completely unable to get an IP address from the router.  If I reboot the access point, the problem goes away.

After reading this article, I'm now wondering if it is the 360.  Has anyone else experienced this?  It's getting pretty annoying to have to reboot my router constantly.

go into the router settings and change the wireless channel (which will change the frequency) that the router uses.  play around with it till it isn't conflicting with the 360.  any pc with a wireless card should automatically change channel to match (might have to reboot).

I'll give that a shot, thanks!

It's more likely a limitation with number of connections and your router may not be closing them out.

Could you elaborate?  I'm not familiar with this concept.

I have been having problems with my wireless network every since I bought a wireless adapter for my 360, but after reading a little, I'm thinking it may have been since I bought my 360 (which was only about a week prior).  Often after using my 360 my wi-fi will drop out intermittently, and sometimes my computers will be completely unable to get an IP address from the router.  If I reboot the access point, the problem goes away.

After reading this article, I'm now wondering if it is the 360.  Has anyone else experienced this?  It's getting pretty annoying to have to reboot my router constantly.

A= 90-100
B= 80-90
C= 70-80
D= 60-70
E= 50-60
F= <50

Plusses and minuses are based on top or low mark in the caste.

My grade schools were closest to this, except that generally <65 was an F and there was no such thing as an "E".

There hasn't been one good commercial.  Not one.

The FedEx commercial with the pidgeons and the Coke commercial with the parade balloons were both great.

The developers themselves admitted that the ending was bad, so yeah I don't think it is worth going back to for the ending.

My main beef with the game was that there was very little game to it.  There were the "Simon" sequences, which can only be so entertaining, and the adventure/puzzle parts were so easy that it was hard to even consider them puzzles.  I remember one instance where an old woman agrees to give you important info, but first she needs you to light some candles.  But she tells you where the candles are (and they're about 1 room away) so all you're doing is going through a bunch of unnecessary motions.

I thought there was potential there, though.  I'm hoping Heavy Rain is better.

[Spoiler]

I think I mentioned this in another thread, but I played Super Mario Sunshine and got far less than 120 shines and got out of there.  I probably couldn't have gotten all 120 anyway.  Super Mario Galaxy made me want to get all 120 and I did.  Getting them was easier than Sunshine, but getting them all was by no means easy.

I think what I liked most about Galaxy was, because of the gravity, you could make mistakes and still recover, which meant you were willing to be a little more adventurous.  For example, you could blind jump off the side of a planet knowing it was unlikely you were heading for insta-death.  Not having to repeat things over and over = more fun IMHO.

And the

Spoiler for Hiden:

Toytime Robot

was one of the most fun platform levels I've ever played.

I say pack it up and play God of War instead.

I've played (and beaten) God of War on normal. There's God of War 2, but I won't pick that up until I've knocked a bunch off the backlog.

[Spoiler]

I picked up DMC (the first) this weekend and played up to the first boss -

Spoiler for Hiden:

the spider

.

I think I have a pretty good handle on the moves you are given at the start of the game - I was using "high time" fairly deftly to knock guys in the air and juggling them with my guns until they blew apart. I was dodging pretty effectively.

However, when I hit the first boss I was dispatched in almost no time.  I tried about 4 times and was able to keep adding on a little damage, but each time was killed in under a minute.

I know this game has a rep for having a steep learning curve. Am I setting myself up here for epic frustration?  Should I sit down and see if I can work this out, or should I just pack up the whole 5th anniversary set on eBay and move to something else in my expansive backlog?