The Lair of the Monkey

Well, I like to have a little bit of this now and again.  I’m not talking about plastic statues, but fan service.  Chun Li is a legend in gaming, having come from Street Fighter 2 and appearing in just about every other iteration of this extremely famous Capcom game ever.  If you’re a fan of 2D fighting games, then Street Fighter 2 will either be remembered fondly for a great balance and Ryu Vs Ken, or overlooked in favour of more obscure stuff like Dalkerstalkers.

Personally, I really liked Street Fighter 2: Turbo.  Now that’s retro.  I owned it on the SNES - now that was a proper console.  You could drop that from two metres and it still wouldn’t break!

Hope you enjoy the figure, I’m off to find out how much an original arcade cabinet is.

Well, as my Xbox 360 has bitten the dust I’ve gone back to retro.  This means that on the PC I’ve been playing:

• Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield Gold Edition
• Rome: Total War
• Neverwinter Nights

Even better, the GameCube has seen some action.  Arguably one of the most under-rated consoles of all time (second only probably to the Dreamcast), the GameCube is a great machine.  Nintendo really didn’t market it very well, which means that the GC never really got to show people what it could do.  Yet the following games were all great:

• Metroid Prime
• Donkey Konga
• Super Paper Mario
• Animal Crossing
• Super Smash Bros
• Soul Calibur 2

So there we have it, I’m playing some retro PC games and some GameCube games.  I’d be playing stuff like Crysis (my laptop handled it reasonably well) but I traded it in after it started crashing.  Quite a lot.  I was going to wait for the patch but meeeeeeeeh.  It was a bit over-rated wasn’t it?  Unlike the GameCube…

Well, I’ve finally become one of you.  By that I mean I have suffered at the hands of the shoddy customer service that Microsoft provides.  Not only was the person who replied to my email rude enough to not bother to read my original message, they then didn’t bother to include the phone number so that I could get in touch with Microsoft directly.  What do I think of this?  Well, I think as a customer I deserve better, as I have a now-broken Xbox 360 with 3 red lights.  It definitely puzzles me why they call it the red ring of death though.  I mean it’s not a ring is it?

A common problem has befallen me – I am of course talking about the death of my Xbox360.  Whilst many people complained about the ‘Red Rings of Death’ when their 360 went wrong, I never suffered any of that even though my console was getting on a bit.  When there was a huge press release about Microsoft increasing the warranty to three years on the Xbox 360, I thought ‘I don’t need that; mine has crashed twice since I got it’.

All that has sadly changed since buying Ninja Gaiden 2 for my Xbox 360.  It was only about 3-4 weeks ago that I got it, but pretty much into the first week of playing it would start to crash.  Not much, then more frequently, and now it has become pretty much unplayable (apart from, bizarrely, Xbox Live Arcade games).  So, my Xbox 360 is now pretty much a rather heavy paperweight.

As I mentioned before though, I don’t get any Red Rings of Death on my games console.  What I get is (at times at least) a weird bleep, and then the machine freezes.  A quick Google search reveals approximately 1,300,000 results for ‘Xbox 360 freezing’ so I’m not the only person to have this problem.  A quick look at YouTube videos seems to suggest that the main board has gone.

That’s just great – given that went on my laptop not that long ago.  They just don’t make things like they used to.  I remember the amount of times my SNES fell off the desk.  Did that stop?  Nope, not ever.  It’s probably still going in an old people’s home somewhere.

What’s the plan then?  Well, I guess I’m not going to do much gaming for a while.  I’m still really annoyed as I was enjoying Ninja Gaiden 2 – I think I’m going to write to Microsoft and complain – the Xbox 360 has seemingly put lots of really fine scratches all over the disc too.  Whether this will affect the machine (or make the game unplayable if Microsoft fixes it) remains to be seen.  I will of course keep you informed.