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I finally have an Xbox 360. I ordered the Elite Edition online and it came yesterday, which was a day earlier than expected. John said that the UPS man dropped the package down pretty hard, which makes me nervous. In a separate package came the second wireless controller that I had also ordered online.

John and I hooked it up last night. We tinkered with the settings and then put in Eternal Sonata. Just a few minutes into the opening movie, the 360 turned itself off/died/whatever. Three of the four lights in the ring of light turned red. The manual says that signifies an internal error. I hit the power button and nothing happened. I figured that I had the dreaded red ring of death that I keep hearing about. I had heard this mentioned so many times and assumed that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I don’t think I had the system on for even 20 minutes before this happened. I was kind of annoyed that all of the planning and excitement was ruined because of a defective product and possibly a careless UPS man. I disconnected everything because I thought I would have to send it to Microsoft for repair.

After watching the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica (frakkin awesome!), I left my roommates to the TV and decided to call Microsoft to get the repair process started. The guy asked me if I had done any troubleshooting. I said no. The manual only said to call Microsoft and I didn’t think to look online. He asked me what the color of the light on the power supply was after the ring lit up and I didn’t know. I decided to call back when I could be back in front of the console and do whatever troubleshooting he told me to do. A little later I went and plugged the console back in and hit the power button and THERE WERE NO RED LIGHTS. Woohoo!!! I reconnected the audio and video cables and we played Eternal Sonata late into the night.

I’m hoping that everything is okay now. My biggest complaint about it so far is that the console is loud, but I can live with that. It gets pretty hot, but it is pretty well ventilated and I may buy a cooling device that I saw online. Eternal Sonata is a fun game and we’ll probably be playing it a lot this weekend. I hope to get signed up on Xbox Live sometime today.

Starkville got its own GameStop in the summer of 2004 while I was in Ohio. When I returned I was so surprised to find out that one had been built. After living in this town for 7 years, it finally had a real video game store. I’ve spent so much money there since it opened. A lot of times I go just to browse and kill time.

Now it seems like the store is going to shit. There’s a new manager and many new employees. These new employees seem unprofessional at times. I’m sure they’re not all bad, but the ones that have stood out are. It seems like when you’re ringing up customers, you shouldn’t stop to answer your cell phone. Your cell phone probably shouldn’t be out there to begin with. Back before things started changing there, one of the employees asked me if I wanted to apply for the open manager position because I was in that store so much and he thought that customers make the best managers. Maybe I should have considered that.

John and I went there a few nights ago and the guys behind the counter were loudly joking and laughing the whole time. They never said a word to us the whole time we were in there. Of course you should have fun on your job, but you shouldn’t disturb or overlook the customers while you’re doing it. On Tuesday I went to buy the copy of Eternal Sonata plus the bonus item that I had reserved. The person that rang me up didn’t know how to perform some of the tasks she needed to do, even though I’m pretty she’s been working there for a while. They didn’t know that they had strategy guides for it. I already knew that they had copies because I had looked it up online earlier. I asked them if I was supposed to be getting a bonus item for pre-ordering the game with them. I figured that if they didn’t have any I was going to just forget about it. They looked around confused and said that they didn’t know what I was talking about. I finally helped them out by telling them it was supposed to be a face plate for the 360 and they finally found it.

I don’t even like going in there anymore and when I do the visits are usually short. After I buy the last game that I have reserved there (Halo 3), I think I may be done with GameStop for a while. I’ll have to either order games online or go to Wal-Mart or Sam Goody to find games. Too bad.

I have once again gotten to the urge to play an MMORPG. This time I’m looking into free MMORPGs. Free is good and I won’t feel guilty about paying a monthly fee when I go a long time without playing the game. I was hoping for something with pretty low system requirements so that install it on my laptop as well, but that’s not a requirement.

The ones I’ve decide to take a look at so far are:

• Flyff
• Dungeon Runners
• 2Moons

Any suggestions?

John and I recently finished out second play through of Gladius. I wrote a lot about it after we finished it the first time. I liked the game a lot more this time around than I did the first. Although we spent more hours on it, it seemed like we went through those hours much faster. We played through a different character’s story, but I don’t think that’s made much of a difference. It’s definitely worth playing if you like strategy RPGs. I wish they would make a sequel.

I’ve really been enjoying listening to a CD set by Pearl Jam called Live at the Gorge 05/06. I love Pearl Jam and they are a great live band, so I knew I had to have it. It’s 7 CDs long and is a recording of 3 concerts they did at the Gorge Amphitheatre in September 2005 and July 2006. I think that these shows were bookends on all the touring they did from 2005 to 2006. Since I bought the set from the Ten Club’s website, I got a limited edition postcard set.

I’m always worried about giving too much away, so I’m not going to say much about Stardust. We went to see it over the weekend and I had lots of fun. Michelle Pfeifer looks pretty good for her age. Witches, magic, action, adventure, special effects, humor, and a gay pirate are all so much fun. I think I want to see it again.

Lately, I’ve been watching:

• Eureka (very good)
• Damages (very good)
• Kyle XY (good)
• The 4400 (very good)
• Flash Gordon (bad-ish)

I played Excite Truck on the Wii for a little while last week. I don’t like racing games that much because I’m not very good at them. The thing I liked the most about this game is the ability to use a custom soundtrack. Actually that may be the only thing I liked. I loaded up a bunch of songs on my SanDisk card in anticipation of playing this game. Racing to The Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Pearl Jam, and even Mariah Carey made me keep playing after I probably would have normally stopped. I hope there are more games with the custom soundtrack option on the way.

It’s been fun playing the Xbox lately. I’m being reminded of just how great a machine it was. I just wish it had better controllers and more RPGs.

I may go back to the plan I had a while back of playing the remaining few Xbox games that I want to and then retiring my Xbox for an Xbox 360. If all Xbox games worked on the Xbox 360 and there were more great games already out on the Xbox 360 then I probably wouldn’t wait. I went to Amazon.com to try to estimate how much it would cost.

It seems like there are going to be a lot of interesting games coming out on this system within the next few months, so now seems like a great time to buy one.

On Friday night John and I beat Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria for the PS2. We only had to fight the last boss, but had stopped to work on one of the sidequests. VP2 is an RPG from Square-Enix that came out last year.

The graphics are gorgeous and I was happy to see these graphics on the PS2. Some of the cut scenes were a little too long for me, it was ok. One of the reasons I wanted to try this games was that it has a 2-player co-op mode. You push one of 4 buttons on the controller to make one of the 4 players attack. Once it’s time to attack, you’re really just mashing buttons until your turn ends. Turns are usually over pretty quickly. If more than one person is playing, you can divide the party members up among the players. The first player controls the movement of the party in battle, handles the skills and equipment, performs all the in-battle menu tasks, etc. I was usually player 2 in this game, so I spent most of the game waiting for those brief periods where I got to mash the triangle and circle buttons like crazy so that I could attack the target. I got really impatient at times, but I stayed with it.

There’s not a lot in the way of sidequests. Clearing the Seraphic Gate (the reason we stalled) was the one that took the longest. We may be continuing on or going back to one of the previous save games to go through the Gate again. Yes, there are season to complete it more than once. I’m glad we played the game. It was well worth the time.

On a side note, my roommates got me a glow–in-the-dark protective glove for my Wiimote. Now I’ll always be able to find the first-player Wiimote.

The 4th of July was another lazy day this year, but it was still a lot of fun.

I slept late. When I got up I watched some more Jericho and read Fast Food Nation a little.

My roommate John and I finished the story mode of Rayman Raving Rabbids on the Wii. My opinion of it hasn’t changed – it’s fun, especially if you’re playing with others. We also played Super Mario Bros. 2, Justice League Heroes, and Mario Party 8.

I didn’t eat as much as I normally do on the 4th, but that could be a good thing.

My roommate and I played through Justice League Heroes on the Xbox. It was a lot of fun and a nice change of pace. It’s a lot like X-Men Legends except that you’re using Justice League characters and you can only use 2 characters at a time in this game. JLH doesn’t have the puzzles that you usually find in RPGs and I thought that was cool. There are times where you have to quickly entire an onscreen sequence of buttons to open doors, but that’s not too back. A lot of the time you don’t get to choose which characters you take in the battle, but that wasn’t a big deal. You can unlock more characters and alternate costumes as you progress through the game.

It’s definitely not on same level as X-Men Legends, but I still enjoyed it. I estimate that it took us about 11 hours to complete it.

A little while ago I finished The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on the Xbox. I started on this one a couple of years ago and got a pretty good portion of it done, but of course I didn’t finish it. I had been planning on getting back to it for a while, but I was dreading it because I remember that I was stuck on 1 level in each of the 3 paths you take. Well, I managed to get past those levels even though it took me a few tries.

Overall, it’s a pretty good game though annoyingly difficult in some parts. The graphics are good and many of the actors from the movies did the voices. I don’t mind that it veered from the story. I was really annoyed by the camera angles. They made playing the game a lot more difficult than it should have been. A few times I thought the War of the Ring was going to be lost solely because of bad camera angles. Another drawback is that checkpoints are spaced way too far apart. There were a few times when I died and almost decided that it wasn’t worth going back through that section of the level over again. Like in the previous game, there are bonus levels to unlock after you beat the game. Those bonus levels are very difficult and after playing through them I am more than ready to be done with the game.