My "new" (read "refurbished") Xbox 360 arrived today. Happy, happy, joy, joy. I have yet to stress it with a large GRAW co-op game, but it read my much-abused Oblivion disc quite happily. For those scoring the home game I had no 360 for 8 days - not too bad for warranty service.

A while back there was a request for me to talk more about the 360 now that I've had it for a while. Glad to oblige, eventually! But this discussion must be peppered with sadness for tomorrow my 360 goes out for warranty service. I've seen occasional freezes in several games, but it's gotten really bad in GRAW (Ghost Recon Advanced Warrior) multiplayer. I've been playing GRAW in cooperative mode exclusively, and at first I only played two or the rare three player games (due to lack of friends with 360s). As Tony and I harassed more people into buying one we got larger groups, and last week we had four and five player games. Except it turns out my 360 will pretty consistently freeze in a five player game - pretty much guaranteed it will happen before 10 minutes elapse. There's no blinking lights, no error messages, just the screen freezes and the controller input is ignored. I have to power-cycle the machine with the main power button. I thought at first it was an overheating problem, but it happens with the box sitting out on the hardwood floor with PLENTY of ventilation. So, it's still under warranty and back it goes. I was humored with my first tech support call to Microsoft - as their support database was down. I figure they probably use IIS for their web server :-) But the second call went pretty smooth, they sent me a box and shipping label for sending the box back. I should get a replacement unit in a couple of weeks, so that's not too bad. Having said all that, what do I think of the console? I like it a lot, but the game selection is still pretty limited. If you don't want to play a FPS or a driving game it would be difficult to recommend the machine right now. The Live implementation is fabulous, and the recent dashboard update makes it even better. I can turn on the machine, start my custom soundtrack and queue up some files for background download. Then I can go play an arcade title while the files DL in the background, until somebody shows up in my friend list. We can voice chat, pick out a game, switch to the game and the downloads automatically pause when we go online. (Mind you, the custom music streamed from my Mac survives all of these mode shifts.) We can play a game (likely GRAW) for a few hours, then wind up with some more casual play in the Live Arcade. Both Billiards and Uno are surprisingly fun as a way to wind down after a few hours fighting terrorists. What games would I recommend for the machine?

• Oblivion
• PGR3
• GRAW

From the Arcade:

• Geometry Wars
• Joust
• Billiards
• Marble Blast Ultra
• Uno

The jury is still out on DoA4 - I've only tried it online once and we had some problematic connection issues (couldn't get a three player game working right.) Kameo was fun, but not epic. Perfect Dark Zero was pretty disappointing. I really liked Call Of Duty 2 for a while, but I started having some crashy problems with it (which might be my console's fault).

Has everybody seen this McDonald's Interactive thing? If not, go read it, I'll wait. In essence, McDonald's has this interactive sim arm that was created to train up-and-coming management. And those guys built some hyper-complex fast food chain simulator where the managers can face off against each other. And apparently it was fun, and things were going well. Enough so that they started plugging new modules, simulating more complex economics, etc. And then somebody added a climate simulation. Turns out the best strategies for maximizing McDonald's profits work great for a while and then destroy the planet. Oops. So what now? They futz with the sim for a while, and apparently ultimately decide it's not buggy - that it is correctly projecting the outcome of growing a bazillion cows and mowing down the Amazon to feed them. Now the key bit: McDonald's wouldn't listen. So apparently the McDonald's Interactive divison has up and left the parent company (I'm not clear how - and this might be all in Britain for even more confusion). They futzed with their simulation for a while and finally found that building up some harsh "legislation" to basically rein in the robber barons made the simulation sustainable - and eventually did good things to the global economy and reduced world hunger. But it's not profitable. The whole thing halfway reads like a bizarre marketing ploy. I guess the question is to see what they do next. But really, go read the link - it's fascinating stuff. If they are for real then I wish them well. Update 6/6/06 7:35 AM The consensus at Kotaku is that this is a hoax of some ilk. But there was a McDonald's Presentation from a"Strategic Communication Manager" at the Serious Games Summit. (This invalidates one argument presented at Kotaku - which is that Googling for the name of the guy produces no hits.) Alice at Wonderland has a dump of notes from a friend who was at the speech and the notes sound pretty similar - although it seems to say the guy still works at McD's and plans on making a ruckus until he gets fired. Stranger and stranger!

I've disappeared again. And more importantly I took Captain Arcolier with me. I've missed two weeks of serial posts now, and generally been non-posty, even through the depths of E3 (which I didn't go to, but I have a veteran's eye view of all the coverage and some talks with friends who did go). Here's the scoop. Many of you know that I picked up some part-time contracting work (yes it's in games, but it's mainly work from home) recently. If you don't and it's meaningful to you I'm working on tools for Ms. Chickenhead. If that's not meaningful . . . well it's not really a bloggable topic but send me an email and I'll fill you in appropriately to your friend level. :-) So the idea is that I'm going to do some coding work part-time and write part-time. There's a bunch of reasons for this, money obviously being one. We can survive and pay the mortgage with Karin's income but my income will pay for vacations and techie toys. :-) More importantly I've discovered being a full-time writer isn't very good for me. The thing is that while I enjoy writing I can't do an entire day of it productively. On a good day I get in a few solid hours and then things trail off. Also, although I enjoyed being at home over most of the last year round about January or February I realized that I was only leaving my house once a week (to go grocery shopping) and well over three-quarters of my conversations were with cats (the vast bulk of the rest being with Karin). So I decided getting some external work was a Good Thing(tm) and this gig seems to make sense both to me and to my employers. What does this have to do with our illustrious Captain and her fight against the Cantrellans? Well two things. First off, you've caught up with the material I wrote while goofing off from the Magic novel. I need to plot and write new segments. Second, the "part-time" work sort of exploded into full-time (I'll probably even be doing some work over the holiday weekend). This is a mix of things including a problematic deadline that I can help on, but needs more effort than I'd like. Another part is the normal ramping up to speed on a new codebase which is aggravated by the remote link. I've run Perforce flat out in the background over a couple of weekends just getting assets on my home machine. Lastly it turns out that after a year of non-coding I'm surprisingly rusty and it's taken a few days to blow the rust off and get my coding muscles back into tone. So those combo into a situation where I need to take some some serious time on my "goof-off" web serial work and I don't actually have that time right now. Well of course I do if I went into "crunch mode", but that's ridiculous. The good news is that all of those "part-time ballooning into full-time" factors have an expiration date that's less than a week away. So my current plan is to miss both next week (May 30th) and the week after that (June 6th) on the serial posting. That first week in June will get some serious writing time down and I'll get several parts of the serial done. So expect to see a super-spectacular episode on June 13th and regular updates thereafter. Apologies for the delay but I don't want to put up work that I don't have the time for my best effort and that's what posts right now would entail. I'll try to get some erratic non-fiction posts in over the next few days. Whiskey asked for an update on my 360 feelings and I have a bunch of links backlogged - probably mostly due to E3. I should probably write up a coherent "thoughts on E3" post now that the dust has settled. Reviews of New Super Mario Brothers and Field Commander could also be in order if anybody cares about those.

While the fanboys in the various camps get busy falling on various swords (their own or wielded by others) over the PS3 price point, here's some interesting number crunching. Short gist is that adjusted for inflation the PS3 is expected to cost less than an Atari 2600 did at launch. Now, the charts show a big drop in console prices after 1982 - the only post '82 consoles to crack $500 (in 2006 dollars) are the silly outliers (Neo Geo, CDi, and 3DO) and the Saturn (which was too expensive at launch as well). So Sony is still jumping up a big price point - compare the Xbox 1 -> 360 jump of less than $100 with the relative flat PS1 -> PS2, and then the PS3 is double the PS2. It occurs to me it would be really interesting to see the same chart with inflation-adjusted prices for the Japanese market and in yen. Another interesting little tidbit is that every succeeding Nintendo console is cheaper than the one before, when adjusted for inflation. Lastly - check out that whopper of a price tag on the Intellivision. Woo boy!