Entries from December 2007 ↓

Have a happy *holiday thing*.

Well, I did it! I bought Team Fortress 2 for the PC and I’m not even mad about spending another $30 to get it. Because, now I can easily find a game - even at 6AM eastern I was able to jump right into an almost full server and start fragging.

I spent several hours on playing on Thursday and had a great time - I forgot just how nice it is to game on PC. I didn’t have to mute other players or anything! Actually, I wish I still had a headset for my computer - it would have made it much easier to play. Stopping to type just doesn’t work and usually ended with my being killed and not getting the information out anyway.

Another nice thing about my shift back over to PC gaming, is that on Wednesday I received a Ideazon Reaper Gaming Mouse from Brinstar. She wasn’t a big fan of the mouse’s design and was willing to part ways with it. So, I spent Thursday playing with my old Dell scroll-wheel mouse and Friday with the Reaper - and it’s damn nice. The difference between the old mouse and the new one is like night and day. I guess gaming mice may actually help improve FPS gaming a bit. I’ve never been “super-hardcore” with the PC FPS games so I never bothered to pick up a mouse just for gaming - but now that I’ve got one…

Anyway, I need to go finish buying some gifts so I can get back to playing TF2.

Team Fortress 2 is fun! Well, it would be if I could actually find games to join on the 360. My schedule has been a bit strange lately so I’ve only tried a few times but, I’ve had a tough time - quickly - finding a game. I was discussing this with my friend hisloudness, who told me he finally gave up on Live and just bought the game through Steam. I am seriously considering doing the same. I would really like to play - most of all I’d like to play with friends. Even with the issues with lag that accompanied the games Xbox 360 release aren’t fully to blame with the seemingly lack of players, Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 (both huge games with consoles players) contributed significantly.

So there is my dilemma, should I re-buy Team Fortress 2 at $29.99 or the entire Orange Box at $49.99? Or should I just go play some Halo 3 and be done with it? Looking at Game-Monitor I can tell I would have no shortage of US based games I could join. Maybe I should just make use of Steam’s gift buying feature and tell my PC playing friends to get it for me… hint hint.

Sometime yesterday afternoon, I received an e-mail from Xbox Live support telling me I should try to recover my account one last time, and if it didn’t work I should then call the tech support line. Well, I’m glad to report that it worked and I was finally able to recover my account. Yay! I really didn’t want to have to call and deal with tech support. My account and achievements are safe - for the time being.

On the Guild Wars front, Saturday saw a flurry of e-mails from PlayNC support which ended in my support request being elevated to a “Senior Support Representative”. Which means “wait till Monday and someone will get back to you”. Sure enough, someone finally got back to me this afternoon. According to the Senior Support Representative Johnny, the charges were approved and did go through but, they “will not capture due to the transaction being voided in our billing system.” It appears that they were not simply able to give me access to the content and had to void the sale. Johnny suggested that I try to place my order again. Once the charges are actually reversed - maybe I’ll give it another shot.

I hate Fridays. Well, from now on I hate Fridays - I had the worst Friday yesterday. After a long day of ‘computer consulting’ I decided to stop off at a friends house so I could finally check out Assassin’s Creed. The first thing I did was attempt to recover my gamer tag to his Xbox - after all, if I’m going to play I better get my achievement points. Anyway, a some point during the recovery process I get a message stating: “Xbox Live sign up is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” No big deal, I’ll try again later. So, after playing the game (and not getting achievements added to my gamer tag) for a while I decide to try and recover again. Still, it’s not working. I returned home and tried several more times over the next couple of hours - only to have it fail each time. Now, I’m starting to get a bit panicked - I don’t want to lose my score or achievements. So, I contact Live support through Xbox.com and this morning I receive a canned e-mail, from someone named June. The e-mail informed me that I could be seeing that error message under certain conditions, most of which seemed to involve moving a Live account from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. Not something I wanted to hear - I had already read about that. So, that’s where I am with Live right now - unable to full recover my profile and waiting to hear back from tech support. If it isn’t resolved soon I’m going to go crazy. I need my achievements!

While all that is going on, I had decided I would play some Guild Wars. Well, I wanted to play but, I didn’t actually get a chance to. After logging on I decided that I should finally pick up Eye of the North and Nightfall, after all if I bought them now I’d get 50% off Nightfall. I believed I had finally moved past the need to own the physical box and game disc. What a mistake that was. During the check out I received an error: “Product distribution failed (Code=1751126)”. That’s just great! Looking at my debit card account I can clearly see there is a charge pending for the exact cost of the PlayNC transaction. Perfect! The charges go through - and I don’t get my games. I’m so glad I decided to give digital distribution a try. Looking at my PlayNC account you can clearly see that something has happened to my account yesterday - as a new serial number was applied. But, still I don’t have access to the games.

Blargh. I hate Fridays.

Well, it’s finally happened - I can finally say the Xbox 360 is a great console.  A few moments after downloading the dashboard up and then the “optional” media update I was successfully watching “X-Files - Fight the Future.avi”!  Would have kept watching too except for the fact that I need to get some work done today.  I didn’t mess with it to long but the player does not seem to support .SRT or .SUB files for subtitles.  Which is a bit disappointing.  I’ll mess with it a bit more just to double check but, I have a feeling Microsoft didn’t implement that feature…