Hekate180 - It was like that when I got here !

Xbox.com | Summer of Arcade

*Purchase all 5 Summer of Arcade games: Limbo, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Castlevania Harmony of Despair, & Monday Night Combat before August 31, 2010 11:59pm EST, and receive 1200 Microsoft® Points — FREE!

(Or, purchase at least 3 Summer of Arcade titles and receive 400 Microsoft Points for FREE!) Limit one (1) gift per person: either 400 Points or 1200 Points. To qualify for your gift, you must purchase the games from Xbox LIVE Arcade using your Xbox LIVE account, by August 31, 2010 11:59 EST.

The free Points will be deposited automatically into your Xbox LIVE account after the end of the promotion period. Please allow 4 weeks for delivery — on or around September 30, 2010. Offer available Worldwide in all Xbox LIVE countries except Korea, while supplies last, is non-transferable, not redeemable for cash, and cannot be combined with any other rebate or offer.

Taxes, if any, are the sole responsibility of the recipient. For Xbox LIVE Terms of Use and system requirements, see www.xbox.com/live. Offer provided by: Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052.

via www.xbox.com

follow the link below for Video and previews

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/events/summerofarcade/default.htm#

Do Retro game geeks dream of electrical sheep.......

I remember when I was young back when trees used to be black and white........

Game graphics used to be basic at best, usually as they actually where written in basic and running on a tape machine, (YES YES I am old and crusty).

But the immersion I used to feel in those games was total, when people dream of what VR would be like if it was perfect thats how some of us old gamers actually saw it and immersed we couldn't help it, it just happened.

I remember the old Star Wars Vector game, when I got into that sit down cabinet I would slide that 10 pence piece into the slot and listen as it rattled through the cavity of the mystical machine PRAYING it wouldn't get stuck or come back out the reject slot.

KACHING thud BEEEEP as the coin hit the magic vault in the belly of the beast resting atop the other 10 Pence pieces still warm and sweaty from young excited palms of my nerd peers.

Taking a deep breath I hold the control yoke in my left hand and hit the start grasping as fast as I could on with both hands in case Luke left me behind at the rebel base with the Bothans who history had shown didn't fare to well when left alone.

The single line graphics in one colour come on the screen, "RED 5 Standing by" I say, someone snigger's but I don't hear it everyone else is signing off "Red 3, Red 2" here we all go.

Its intense I battle my way to the death star as asterisks shaped missiles come at me, It can only go up down left and right but not in my head.

I miss a missile, as I barrel roll the laser beam slices in-between the wings of my xwing scorching the paint work.

I am in the trench I fight my way down to the end, my palms are sweaty my trigger finger hurts.... "ITS THE SHAFT......" I did it I blew the death star someone snigger's as I yehaa I don't hear it though.

I breath out and come back to the room unaware as I have been, reality comes back the arcade probably smelled funny but to me it always smelled of wonder, they used to have a distinct smell of coins and cigarettes and teenagers who have been out playing a little too long.

To me though the arcade smell wasn't any of those things, the arcade smelled of wonder and freedom from everything for a short glorious moment until the money ran out and I would be reduced to a onlooker status.

It was never the same watching some guy play, hey it was cool but you grok what I mean right ?

All this occurs to me as I just finished playing Red Baron on Microsoft's game room which used the same engine, I just played for a long time and I was back in that place again the Bi-Plane was real as was the wind in my hair thats actually just the small fan on the PC desk.

It also occurred to me that in the last couple of years I have not played certain games more than a couple of hours I own as the "Graphics Are Awful" so what the heck is it then.

Obviously Im not that shallow ( I hope anyway) the story's are just as good...... wait on the older games the story wasn't included at all on most arcade games.

The story was mine my imagination, what did I see, who was the hero and why was he delivering newspapers on a bike in such an obviously deranged neighbourhood (paperboy arcade game).

So has our expectation of the story now spoilt us but in the degree that we don't expect, the story's are so amazing and involving... okay okay not all of the.

Is it that the story is so included now that we don't use our imagination when playing to the degree we fixate on the little things like some guys head looks terrible or the walls are all bumpy (no I am not those guys).

Maybe we have just been spoilt, but if thats so how come I just spent an hour playing retro games and had the time of my life yet the same guy - me - has put games on the shelf as they look terrible.

I still get that immersion, Bioware games are the worst for it  I am so involved and invested in that character even when Its a replay and even when I know what happens at certain parts of the company's games I am actually emotional moved and feel myself tears welling up.

"WHAT THE HECK ANDY" its a pixel not the dog, But it shows the immersion is possible with story and kick ass graphics.

I actually shed a single tear at the end of Dragon Age for my female rogue who made a big sacrifice, time to hand in that man card I guess.

Man I miss that kid in the Star Wars booth, I wish I spent more time with him doing things like that and less time letting him sulk or do listen to records.

He did give me one gift though that kid, he gave me the gift to totally drop into a book I am reading like its a movie unaware I am reading until I close the final page and am suddenly aware "That didn't just happen".

Good for you Red 5

A guru named Coyote.

Coyote is one of the people who posts over on http://www.mycodedontstink.com/solutions/index.php

Every now and then over there a gem will show up in the desert, the other day he posted this which in my mind is a fantastic story.

Source -

This thread is just me talking about why I'm weird. Or how I'm weird. Whatever. I like being weird, it was a conscious decision when I was 13 or so, to never try to hide it.

I'll start with the story of Fyl.

When I was 15, I ran track. Someone, I forget who, told me their worst fear was being thrown up on. So on the bus to a track meet one day, I pulled a can of Parmesan cheese out of my backpack and made a vomit sound while spraying powdered cheese all over her. I had cut out an extra eye on the lid to make it look like a little face. Hey, I was fifteen. She was appropriately angry.

I ripped the lid off the can and, for totally unremembered reasons, named him Fyl. For some reason everyone around me, including my friend Stacy (a guy), decided that they would take Fyl away from me. By force. So they piled on me. I fought like hell but in the end, Stacy ended up with Fyl. He told me that getting Fyl back would take me years of atonement. Years.

So I had Fyl, my little plastic buddy, for around half an hour. I became resolved to get him back. How long could it take?

Twenty years.

Not kidding. Twenty years. I never forgot. It was a battle of wills, and I have one hell of a will. But Stacy did too. We were fifteen. That year, Stacy set up a Machiavellian quest, carefully planned out, with terribly convoluted clues that I had to follow. He left clues in our fledgling computer system at school, he left clues in the most frightening assholes in our school's lockers, he set the bar really high. I tracked them all, finally ended up way out in the woods behind our school at night digging with a shovel. I found a cigar box with a note inside that said 'Fyl has stepped out for a break, better luck next time.'

The next year, the same.

When I was 18, I was snail-mailed a small slice of plastic with a classic multi-font ransom note. It was Fyl's fucking EAR.

The next year... yup. He couldn't figure out how I could follow all the clues, but I apparently couldn't figure out that THERE WOULD BE NO CLOSURE. The clues got wildly abstract and hard. I never stopped looking.

One day at school I saw Fyl tied to our trophy cabinet with a bike chain running through his mouth and a kryptonite lock holding it closed. No way to get him without cutting his mouth open. I snuck out of school to find boltcutters that could handle the lock but nothing worked. At night I broke into school to expend some serious effort on getting that chain cut, but after a few hours I had to give up. The next day he was gone again.

When we were in our early twenties, Stacy and I were roommates for a couple of years. He knew I combed the apartment when he was away, that I looked goddamn everywhere. It was simply understood. Fyl wasn't anywhere. He was hidden with effort. Someone wouldn't hide a pristine diamond as well as Stacy hid that goddamn piece of plastic.

When I was 24, I was mailed a series of black and white photos titled 'The Many Deaths of Fyl'. There was a picture of Fyl floating in a toilet, with a hand reaching out for the flusher. Fyl on a plate covered with ketchup. Fyl in a fat guy's buttcrack. Fyl next to a rolled up dollar bill with a pile of cocaine next to him. An angry dog with Fyl in his mouth. Fyl being dropped off a building, etc etc.

Once we moved out and weren't roommates, his devotion to keeping me from finding it didn't decrease. Stacy, if you're reading this? You know I broke into all your apartments. I learned how to pick locks, dammit. You taught me a lot of useful skills by accident.

Sooner or later, though, people get lazy. Barely, barely lazy, but any lack of vigilance? I was waiting for it.

I got Fyl back when I was 36 years old. Thirty, goddamn, six.



I never glued his ear back on, but I carry him everywhere now. He's always in my pocket, I never show or explain him to people until now.

I just need to know where he is at all times. All times.

A little later he added this gem.

You ain't seen nothing about weird yet, boy

So like around age 20, I found this thing. I was kinda a wild child, and this new obsession saved me money and body abuse to spend some time geeking out on at least one thing. Plus my mind was racing with the possibilities of this weird new thing:

The Internet.

MUDs. They bored me. I played the first TinyMUD and talked regularly with JimA about the future of that there Net. No Inter yet. But MUDs? n e sw n kill octorobot kill octorobot kill octorobot take shovel, zzzzz.

Then the MUSHs started, and this weird social part came in. People actually talked to each other. And things were more free-form, letting people randomly build intriguing stuff without any real limits. MUSH stands for 'Multi User Shared Hallucination', which me and my friend coined after the fact. It stuck.

The 3rd MUSH in existence, out of thousands upon thousands, and the only one to survive (from 1990 to, oh, today) was TinyTIM. It was the strangest thing on the Internet for a looooooong time. Kinda like Slackers in being community-built, but we had a continual river of new, ornery and occasionally outright hostile visitors. There's many people from there I remain RL friends with, and my Facebook is ridden with them. But there are many, many more I hope to never see again.

I played a character named Coyote. In MUSHes back then, the big secret to running a successful game was to very carefully set up an authority system. I am the superadmin, these 3 are the grand-admins, then these 17 are the administrators, these 12 are the sub-admins and those 24 people are the supercitizen ranks and BLAH BLAH BLAH

We had 7 people who were totally in control and a few hundred users who were encouraged to enjoy themselves and don't worry about that management shit. And we called ourselves 'wizards' because yay! Magic! Wizards could do anything. Godmode for a MUSH. For all the good that does you.

Naturally, the wizards fought like hell with each other. For years. But we endured while the carefully planned how-to-avoid-political-strife systems crashed and burned around us. More than any other game, though, we were forced nightly to prepare to battle an astounding barrage of spambots, DNS attacks, dbhackers, trolls, sexual predators and, yes, even furries. And we tracked IP addresses across continents, we made many late night phonecalls to the parents of people who needed to be removed from our virtual existence, we had much more than one phonecall with a regional sheriff, DA, and (for three of us) a nice conversation with the FBI. Plus, serious dude, Furries. Oh god so many.

I shall brag a little bit about my tedious Internet cred: I was goddamn infamous across the MUSH spectrum. On a game where an admin with godmode would decide to teach me a lesson? People would line up to watch. I knew every single bug, every trick, every weakness anything on those games had. I knew serious MUSH judo. When I ran into the other big league menaces, our reps would have already been established and we were so goddamn careful around each other. I also purposefully operated as an agent... kinda embarrassed to even say it... okay fine, Agent of chaos. There was far, far too much bureaucratic shit going on in our little Internet games and I actively got in the way of it. And throughout it all, I tracked the early Internet predators with an all-out passion.

One day a total unknown named Hcobb came out of nowhere and cut a swath arcross all existing games. Week after week admins of games would tell me about his wave of mutilation. Destroyed dbs, injection attacks, and the bug/and or/esoteric hacks I was known for. But this guy skipped my experience-stage and just figured this shit out off the top of his head. Hcobb. Scary smart.

So naturally he and I went head to head across the MUSHiverse, and fuck if he didn't kick my ass. He's probably sitting in an office in Redmond now with a mansion, cause his juju was mindblowing. But I almost had him a couple of times. After pretty much trashing existence, he send me a PM that said "u were hard" and then vanished forever.

Long story short I still like the Internet. And it's mine. Okay also yours.

creativecommons Response to ASCAP’s deceptive claims

This disgusted me, the guys at creativecommons do amazing sometimes thankless work.

The most annoying thing about all this is how uninformed and random the deceptive claims are, if you  havent donated to creativecommons so far do so please.

http://creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons

• Donate

Response to ASCAP’s deceptive claims

Eric Steuer, June 30th, 2010

Last week, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely claiming that we work to undermine copyright.*

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses. Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should absolutely not use CC licenses.

Many musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys, Youssou N’Dour, Tone, Curt Smith, David Byrne, Radiohead, Yunyu, Kristin Hersh, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public. These musicians aren’t looking to stop making money from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That’s how we first heard about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a donation to Creative Commons.

If you are similarly angered by ASCAP’s deceptive tactics, I’m hoping that you can help us by donating to Creative Commons – and sending a message – at this critical time. We don’t have lobbyists on the payroll, but with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and consumers alike.

Sincerely,
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons

* For background on ASCAP’s anti-Creative Commons fundraising campaign, see Boing Boing, Techdirt, ZeroPaid, and Wired.

Mario Marathon fundraiser for Child's Play Charity.

I am reaching out to all my readers to go to http://www.mariomarathon.com/

Mario Marathon is an annual fan run fundraiser for Child's Play Charity. Child's Play provides toys, games and books to patients of children's hospitals worldwide.

The multi day internet event, broadcast live online, attracts an audience from around the world to watch as the team plays through twenty five years of Super Mario Brothers video games.

Now in its third year, the event has attracted over 300,000 viewers, and raised nearly $45,000 for Child's Play.

For more information checkout our Frequently Asked Questions

There are over 800 levels across the nine Mario games chosen for the Mario Marathon 3. Your donations determine how many of those levels the team will complete.

The order the games will be played is listed below. For details on the exact levels and donation goals check the Level Checklist.

So far -

Total Donations:	$23,473.71
$ To Next Level:	$130.06
Levels Unlocked:	618 of 809

For now instead of donating to site please visit them and donate

Are You Going to Finish Strong?

http://www.maniacworld.com/are-you-going-to-finish-strong.html

Kind of gives you some perspective doesnt it on the stupid things we all get stressed over, I cannot watch this without crying,

So emotional, when people at work or on live or from microsoft ask me how I keep so positive with all the brain leison crud and blindness etc.

and I say "Hey there is always someone worse than you" this is what I actually mean.

Things i have actually been told by nurses not to do

As I spend quite a bit of time in and out of stoke, heart and multiple sclerosis wards filled with very old people I tend to get bored.

When I am bored I start looking for ways to amuse myself, this usually leads to an addition to the list that I actually have with the nurses at my local hospital.

(all these are things i have actually been told by nurses not to do)

1 Wear that shirt certain funny geek/web comic shirts when wandering around hospital.

2 Put a pebble under my tongue during a head scan so it shows up and baffles the nurses.

3 Put medical instruments up my nose.

4 Sing along to "barbie girl" even though its on my hospital radio headset at 10 PM on the geriatric and stroke ward.

5 Put blood pressure machine bandages anywhere but around my arm

6 When in the big tube for an MRI scan as the tray goes in and locks into position yell " MARINE READY FOR COMBAT DROP SIR, EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL GOING DOWN".

7 Hide under my bed when its blood test time for a laugh.

7a (When found under bed have two wooden tongue depressors in a crucifix and say "back creature of the night".

8 Ask if i can have my coffee irish on the stroke/heart attack ward.

9 When being wheeled anywhere in hospital on bed from now on i am not sit up and sing the magic carpet song from Aladdin with my arms out while being wheeled past visitors and informing the nurses that its my magic carpet as i found it first.

10 Not to buy hospital bed TV time then turn TV round on saturday so all old men on ward can watch horse racing and start getting excited and raising voices.

11 See 10 especially not on the heart attack/stroke ward.

If your a gamer, nerd, geek or love awesome read this W00tstock UK

The below content is taken from the site - http://canhazw00tstockukplz.blogspot.com/

With the permission of the author, if you live in the uk and you want this you need to visit the link above and use the DEMAND IT widget.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

First Steps

What's the plan?

Updated: As of June 16th 2010, the w00tcount for the UK is 79, up 27 from yesterday.

New post below: Retweet.

Demand w00tstock. The current UK locations with Eventful Demands are shown in the sidebar. Please let me know if I've missed one!

Please be sensible and choose just one Demand.

Tell your friends about w00tstock.

Show them the videos

Buy (and listen to) Messrs. Paul and Storm's music.

Buy (and read) Mr. Wil Wheaton's books.

Watch (and enjoy) Mr. Adam Savage's show, MythBusters.

Share all of the above with your friends. Get them hooked!

The first sign-up drive starts Friday 18th June at 6pm BST until Sunday 20th June at 6pm BST. The goal? Increase the Eventful Demand It counts. Choose an existing Demand or make a new one. Get people interested enough to Demand It. Show the guys that the UK wants w00tstock. If they know the demand is there, one day the stars will align. One day.

Posted by David at 19:51 0 comments

Retweet

It started like any other Wednesday. Tea. Coding. Questionable Content, xkcd, Abstruse Goose and Penny Arcade. Coffee. Coding. Lunch. WWdN, Slashdot, The Register. Coffee. TweetDeck whiled the day away in one of the Spaces. Coffee. Coding. Coffee. It was during this particular coffee break that I noticed the tweet.

I have a #w00tstock search set up and, while nursing the coffee, I saw the following:

"@wilw How about a #w00tstock UK? We're missing out over here in Blighty."(http://twitter.com/d_olsen/statuses/16307322419)

I put my mug down and tapped a reply:

"@d_olsen have a look at http://tinyurl.com/2btlrl5. Trying to get some interest going :-) #w00tstock"

Two retweets followed (thanks @kwmurphy and @d_olsen!).

"OK," I thought. "There's some interest here. Cool."

Then...

"Dear UK: the #w00tstock organization is listening. http://tinyurl.com/2btlrl5 (thx @kwmurphy and @dkplewis)"
(http://twitter.com/paulandstorm/statuses/16309664987)

Yup. Paul or Storm. It is, as they say, ON.

A quick reply via twitter generated 27 new Eventful demands, so I'm hoping the sign-up drive will add a few more. Let's see if we can make some noise!

I'll post some ideas for the drive tomorrow morning. If you want to help spread the word, please get in touch.

Posted by David at 19:45 0 comments

Monday, 14 June 2010

The Reply

Time wandered lazily by. Work slammed me, I wrote alliteration-laced prose for Wil and John Scalzi's Unicorn-Pegasus-Kitten fan-fic competition and attended @media 2010 in London. The idea curled up in a warm corner of my mind and had a bit of a doze. I checked the inbox regularly. Just the usual stuff. I would nod sagely and go back to creating D&D 4E characters, because that's the way I roll.

The idea stretched, yawned and scratched itself. I felt it moving around and gave it a quick prod, to make sure it was still active. Metaphorically sucking on a bitten finger (which is incidentally the name of my Annie Lennox cover band), I decided to try the email address on the w00tstock site. Very shortly, I had a reply.

(Note to self, organise yourself *before* you start writing a post, that way you don't have to wait a day before you can continue)

Mr. Paul of Messrs. Paul and Storm took the time to write back. To whit:

"It's not so much about getting a particular number (though certainly the more, the better); an eventual UK w00tstock tour is definitely something we'd love to do.

It's more about aligning all our schedules such that we can take the time needed to do such a tour; that's the hard part.

So a sign-up drive will certainly be helpful in spurring us on, but it's not like we'll hit some magic number and then decide to do it."

The idea stretched, trying out wobbly legs, getting its balance. Of all the possible replies, this was a good balance between hope and reality. I wasn't expecting "dig out the extension cables and the lawn chairs, we'll be right there", but there was a bit of me dreading "yeah, nice idea, but too expensive, it'd never work".

The idea tried a couple of steps, just to see what would happen.

Posted by David at 23:25 0 comments

The Question

The discussions following Wil's blog post continued with another commenter, who'd done a fair amount of work researching what a UK w00tstock would entail. For my part, I decided to drop an email to Messrs. Paul and Storm through their Contact Us form, as they'd toured with Mr. Jonathan Coulton last year and might have an idea about the numbers and logisitics required to get w00tstock to the UK.

The idea was in motion.

Posted by David at 23:16 0 comments

The Idea

They always start the same way. Someone says something, someone else chimes in, another four or six-pence worth gets added into the pot and before you know it (and usually without expecting it), you get smacked upside the head by an idea.

This idea was no different. There was already an idle concept of "it'd be really cool to have a w00tstock in the UK perhaps they could call it 'w00tstock en-GB' no that's really silly still it'd be fun and I wouldn't be thinking up ways to spend all that money to fly to the US", but when Mr. Wil Wheaton posted on his blog ("In a lot of ways, for me, W00tstock felt like finally finding a home base."), it got me. Right between the eyes. You can still see the mark.

There was some discussion about getting a show in the UK. I suggested we'd need 300 people and a venue. Wil replied with an estimate of at least double that. That left me with a worry that the w00tstock atmosphere might suffer if the audience numbers had to be larger than for US shows. I went to bed determined to see what people thought.

Posted by David at 23:10 1 comments

Introduction

What on earth is "w00tstock"?!?

To put it simply, w00tstock is awesome. Three-ish hours of the very best entertainment that geek culture can provide, courtesy of Mr. Adam Savage, Mr. Wil Wheaton and Messrs. Paul and Storm, and a selection of special guests. Previous shows have included musical interludes from Miss Molly Lewis, Mr. MC Frontalot and Miss Felicia Day, Mr. Sandeep Parikh and Mr. Jeff Lewis from The Guild.

Here's what Mr. Storm of Messrs. Paul and Storm says about w00tstock.

OK, sounds fun. What's it like?

I haven't been lucky enough to go to a show yet. Which is sort of the point of this blog. Anyway, have a look at the w00tstock Flickr photosets, check out some audience videos on YouTube and subscribe to the official YouTube channel. That should give you a feeling for the level of epicness achieved during the three-ish hours. Special attention must be drawn to the w00tstock 2.2 Chicago show, where the 3 minute-or-so "Captain's Wife's Lament" took the cast 35 minutes to perform!

Yes!! I want w00tstock!! What's next?

First, we need an audience to spur on the w00tstock guys. All you need to do is go to w00tstock's Eventful page and add a demand or use the Eventful widget on the right-hand side of the page to demand a London show. After you've added your voice, spread the word far and wide!

A Game Room King is crowned.

So a while ago I was approached by a gamer on xbox live by the name of MSQ Ganner he was starting a goom room level war and wanted to know if I could help spread the word.

Quicker than Pac Man with a ghost right behind him I headed over to the guys at http://twitter.com/LIVEGameRoom   and let them know.

They where quite enthusiastic about the idea as well and put it up on the twitterverse as follows.

"Forum members start a friendly GR lvl war, love it! - RT @hekate180: (competition) who will be the king of game room - http://bit.ly/9ZTTQC"

It also got picked up by some of the other retro sites as well much to MSQ Ganners suprise

As he says "wow...this is really getting further than i thought it would wich is nice to advertise GR and let gamers enjoy the games we all grew up with ".

http://www.xblagameroom.com/2010/05/23/game-room-levels-war-on-xbox-forums/

Anyway why am I rambling on like some kind of tom fool I hear you ask, Well  --- DRUM ROLL brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

We have a winner.

"MSQ Ganner"Ladies and Gentlemen
I proudly present you the Game Room King Bomb Jack DK for being officially the first "Gamer" to attain level 40 thus unlocking every Themes "the old fashioned way".

Congratulations to you my good Sire,you truly are THE GAMEROOM KING

Full details and proof of this achievment being recorded can be found here.

http://forums.xbox.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=32917361

So let us take a moment and speak to the man himself.

1 - So you where the winner of the Gameroom Level war competition on the forums then, how do you feel about that my Leige.

Right now I feel fine, but when I reached level 40, I was pretty tired, since I'd been playing for nearly 15 hours straight with just a 2 hours break. I knew my closest rival, Peridot Weapon, was close behind, so I didn't want to take any chances.

However, it was nothing compared to how I felt when I reached 1000/1000 achievement points as the first. I guess I'd been playing for nearly 48 hours straight with just 5 hours of sleep. My right eye was red and dripping with water :-) When Game Room was launched, I decided to be the first to reach 1000 gamerpoints, so I had to put some effort into it.

2 - How much game time do you think it took you to finally crack this level and challenge rating.

I cannot know for certain, but I guess I've spent at least 200 hours reaching level 40, and Game Room is by far the Xbox 360 game I've spent the most time with. I don't even have a controller with autofire, so all the time spender-medals I did actively which hasn't always been entertaining.

3 - So do you own every Title in GameRoom then or did you skip some, do you have a favorite/or one you really didnt like playing.

No no no, I didn't buy the baseball game! To reach level 40, I had to buy the rest though, since there are still a couple of medals which I haven't been able to reach gold in. These are Millipede (Survival), Space Duel (Point Buster), Stampede (Point Buster) and Video Hustler (Point Buster/Survival).

Until Exed Exes or Bomb Jack are released for Game Room, my favourite game must still be Scramble, which I was also the first to conquer (200 of 200 gamerpoints) in the XBLA-version. I've played that game since it was released in 1981 and know it very well. I'm still trying to reach the maximum score of 999.990 but I guess I have to focus on that game in particular, rather than playing every game possible. Among the arcade games, my favourites also include Strategy X, Shao-Lin's Road, Super Cobra and Tutankham.

Furthermore, I've had a few positive surprises regarding the Atari 2600 games, since I never played that machine before. I guess it wasn't a big hit in Denmark, where the Commodore 64 ruled in the 80s. Especially Demons to Diamonds, Keystone Kapers, Spider Fighter and Stampede are all great games.

Of course, there are titles I never would have bought if it wasn't for the medals. These include the Intellivision games Basketball, Boxing, Football and Soccer.

4 - If you had to give one Top Tip for one game in GameRoom which game and whats the Tip.

For me, the best way of improving your game, is to watch the top scorers replay. I've learned a lot of tricks by doing so. E.g. to focus on the bonus cars in "Road Fighter" or using the "crash the enemies" power-up in Finalizer.

5 - Are you planning your next conquest then on GameRoom or is another title eating your social life.

I think I'll take it easy on the Game Room from now on, although I'm eagerly participating in Peridot Weapon's "Summer of CARP" tournament at http://peridot-weapon.livejournal.com/

Furthermore, I'll try to beat some of VeeRays hiscores. He's truly a great allround player with a lot of Top 20 hiscores.

6 - Which score or Medal are you most proud of.

Possibly the Asteroids Deluxe Survival Gold Medal (6 minutes) which was one of the last medals I got before reaching level 40, after many attempts.

7 - Any final Words or a quote.

I think there's a great community behind Game Room - even outside xbox.com's official forum, and I'd like to thank all those who make a difference.

I will be looking into getting some kind of prize organised for Bomb Jack DK rest assured in the next month.

the guild season three, recapped ... and auto-tuned (contains spoilers) - WWdN: In Exile

Memories of the Futurecast Episode Fourteen: DataloreMemories of the Futurecast Episode 13: The [Worst | Best]. Episode. Ever.Memories of the Futurecast Episode Twelve: The Big GoodbyeMemories of the Futurecast Episode Eleven: HavenMemories of the Futurecast Episode Ten: Hide and Q

via wilwheaton.typepad.com

Best Auto-tune ever, even Sheldon would approve.
Well maybe not approve but I mean....

Look its good okay.