Technofranki's blog

Galaga was relased in the arcades in 1981. I wasn’t an old boy then, so I have probably not play it ib the arcade.
So what do you get for 400 point. Well, an exact replica of the ’81 arcade game, nothing more, nothing less.
What do you do? Shoot as many alienships as you can an don’t try to loose any lifes. It’s that simple, and hard.
Some of the other arcade relases have updates graphics also, this game has not. So is it worth 400 points? 200 had been a good price for this game. This is a game you can play when you have 10 minutes to spare. And it’s always motivating to beat your own or your friends record.

Three weeks ago I had to send back my ‘360, the one they send me was faulty. Iv’e been without a Xbox for 7 weeks this summer, but got a new (well refurbished) one today. I hope this one will last. It was manufactured on May 24th, so it’s pretty new.

A couple of days ago I had a visit from the wild life around where I live. It was a roe-deer just walking through our garden.

At last, a new edition of the mag for all the retro fans out there. And they are now on no. 27. The whole mag is a highlight, but if I have to pick a few that may be of interest:

• The making of… Boulder Dash
• Sega Mega Drive
• The making of… Zelda: “Wand of Gamelon” & “Link: Faces of Evil” (CDi)
• The Definitive OutRun

As allways, it’s fun to read the Back to the Eighties. There’s so much I didn’t know that I actualy knew, when I read this sections. If you haven’t bought this issue yet, go out and buy it or why not subscribe to Retro Gamer, it’s well worth the money.

A month ago my Xbox 360 crashed and didn’t start again, the famous “Red Rings of Death”. And today I got it back from repair. I played Burnout: Revenge for about an hour just to test it out. But since we had so nice weather her on the south coast of Norway, I had to get out. Sunny and about +27C.

So after a nice day and after watching Germany-Italy (0-2), I wanted to play some more. Well I wish! When I turn the 360 on, I got the three red rings again. And as all FAQs suggest, take all conectors out and reconnect. I did it, just to do it. The 360 wouldn’t start. So I have to call support tomorrow, and probably wait another 4 weeks to get a new (or refurbished) Xbox.

But at least, we in Norway have 2 years warrenty (allthough Microsoft says 1 in the manual). So there should be no broblem. I know US only have 90 days (and can buy extened warrenty), and UK and most of Europe have at least 1 year. So we have a pretty good deal here in Europe.

It’s summer, so I don’t play so much, but I really want a working Xbox.

UPDATE: Talked to the support today. There may have been an error on their side resulting in sending me a wrong Xbox. So now they will send me a new return box and I’ve probably have four weeks to lookforward to not playing my 360. On the other side, the support guy I talked to was a friendly Swede.

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A Side note: In Burnout: Revenge I’m ranked at 56384 and that’s because the Xbox crashed three times in a row last month when my 360 died. The funny side is that my sister haven’t played Burnout since Easter, and she is now ranked at 6031 and only dropped around 1500 places in three months. So I wonder how the rank system works.

This is actually a very nice pice of hardware. The M3 miniSD adapter is a flashcard for the GBA and NintendoDS (all versions). This allows you to play both commercial games and homebrew for GBA and NDS and it works perfect. I used a 2GB miniSD card for this test and copied some games using the supplied softwaremanager. This software creates savefiles on the miniSD and you are also able to patch the games with cheats if you want. When you have played a game and start the GBA/DS the next time, the device backp the SRAM to the savefile. In GBA games you can also save at any point in the game. This is veryusefull.

M3 can also read (plain ASCII) text, show pictures and play (converted) movies and music. If you use the MoonShell software, you can play MP3 without the need to convert. Great.

There excist a lot of good homebrew for both GBA and NDS, games and utilities. I’ve tried a few and it works. There is some problem with NDS homebrew because not all software support writting to miniSD and so…, but with time this will get better. After a lot of tries I managed to play Monkey Island 2 with ScummVM DS. This was great.

Over all, this is a great device and other review I’ve read on the net says the samething. Well worth a buy.