• 10Jul 08

  New Gaming Rig

  (newegg wish lists are acting weird)
  
  * Mobo: Asus P5N72-T Premium
  * CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
  * RAM: Corsair Dominator 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
  * Video: XFX GeForce GTX280 XXX Edition (GX280NZDDU)
  * Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional
  * PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower 1,000W
  * HDD: WD Caviar 500GB 7200 RPM (2 in RAID 1)
  * Optical: Asus DVD Burner with LightScribe
  * Optical: Asus DVD-ROM
  * CPU Cooler: Rosewill RCX-Z775-EX
  * Case: Antec 900
  * Fan Speed Controller: Zalman MFC1 Plus-B 6 Channel
  * OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit
  • Posted Jul 10, 2008 11:02 am PT
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• 9Mar 08

  Games: To Buy List

  2008
  08.29.2008: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (PC)
  09.07.2008: Spore (PC)
  09:16:2008: Crysis Warhead (PC)
  09.16.2008: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (360)
  09.XX.2008: X3: Terran Conflict (PC)
  10.14.2008: Saints Row 2 (360)
  10.21.2008: Fable 2 (360) - preordered
  10.28.2008: Fallout 3 (PC)
  11.07.2008: Gears 2 (360)
  Q3 2008: Civ IV: Colonization (PC)
  Q4 2008: Splinter Cell: Conviction (360)
  
  2009
  03.13.2009: Resident Evil 5 (360)
  Q1 2009: Dragon Age: Origins (PC)
  • Posted Mar 9, 2008 8:33 am PT
  • Category: Games
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• 13Nov 06

  My Xbox 360 Dashboard Update Suggestions

  Group gamerpics. When changing your gamerpic all of the available pics are shown separately. Group them together in the same fashion as when you view them from the System blade so you can pick the group and then view the gamerpics it contains.
  
  Improve the low battery warning on the controller. The ring of light starts to spin entirely too soon. An hour of warning would suffice, when the battery is still half charged is way too much. That much warning totally defeats the purpose.
  
  Additional boot options. Press A to boot to the dashboard, press Y to boot to the disc. After 5 seconds it defaults to the setting in the system blade.
  
  Dynamic Blades. Example: if I'm downloading stuff from the Marketplace a Downloads Blade gets created for easy access to those downloads. It remains until I remove it or clear all of the recently downloaded items from it.
  
  Improved use of controller buttons on the dashboard. The controller has a lot of buttons that are not being utilized when on the dashboard. Being able to map these to functions or to shortcuts to various areas or items would be sweet.
  
  Right stick scrolls text. Okay, I'm interested in this item on the Marketplace, but in order to read more I have to wait for the text to scroll and then read at the slow scrolling speed. Let us use the right stick to scroll the text at our own pace.
  
  SCREENSHOTS! We should be able to take screenshots from ALL games and have them save to the 360 hard drive, or preferrably, to a designated folder on our PC's where we could do with them what we wish. Taking a picture of our TV's with a digital camera is not anywhere near "next gen" folks.
  
  Improved previews. I'm not buying anything I can't preview from the 360. Why not allow us to download the item and preview it on our systems for a predetermined time period, like 15 minutes or an hour, after which they expire in the same way movies rented from the video store do.
  
  More visualization and screensaver options. I'd buy a new version of each if there were some available (as long as they had a nice preview!). For example, I'd like to have the Plenoptic Vox visualization from Windows Media Player. How about a screensaver that turns my TV into an HD fishtank? Picture slide shows? Something. This is definately an untapped market here.
  
  Notifications and screen text included in themes. Why not include the notification pop-ups and dashboard text in the visual style of a theme? Plus, add a few more designs for each that we could choose to use at our discretion. The ability to mix and match items from different themes would be cool too.
  
  More internet connection information. I would love to know what the transfer rate is on my Marketplace downloads. An internet connection and network speed test would be great as well. Perhaps make the internet test limited to once a day or week to prevent abuse.
  
  Preferred content notifications. I'd like the ability to select certain games or other Marketplace items and receive text messages of new content specific to the items I tagged.
  
  Open ended menus. Scrolling past the bottom should bring me to the top and scrolling past the top should bring me to the bottom. Some menus are like this, some aren't. They all should be no matter what menu it is.
  
  Improved auto sign-in options. I would like to see options for signing into my profile and for signing into Live separated. I would like to be able to set an option as to whether or not starting a game signs me in to Live. Also, auto sign-in to Live doesn't work if your wireless network does not broadcast it's SSID unless you start a game.
  
  Additional download complete notification. If a download is large enough, like game demos, I often begin the download and then watch TV while waiting. It would be nice to see the Ring of Light used as a visual notification that a download is complete.
  
  Improved disc tray functionality. The eject button graphic is already on the dashboard so lets put it to use: I would like to be able to open the disc tray from the dashboard even if there is a disc in the drive. I would also like to be able to close the disc tray with a disc in the drive without launching the disc.
  
  Sort Marketplace download order. I ordered a movie from the Video Store and then went to the Game Store and downloaded a demo and a couple of Arcade trials. I would like the ability to reorder the downloads on the Active Downloads menu so, in this example, I could move the movie download to the bottom so I wouldn't have to wait for it before getting my demo and trials.
  
  RF Media Remote. The current media remote is IR, which requires line-of-sight to work. The controllers are RF, which do not have that requirement. I would much prefer an RF media remote that would give me the ability to control the media player from anywhere, such as skipping tracks from the kitchen table when I'm playing cards.
  
  Album art. I'd like the 360 to display the album art for my music collection in much the same way WMP or iTunes does it.
  
  More control over our hard drives. For example, I'd like the option to remove all the backward compatibility software and use that space for something I might actually use. Also, why do people have to remove ALL their music? Why can't they remove just the album/artist/track they want to remove?
  
  Improved matchmaking. Age is an important factor people use to determine who they like to spend their free time with. It's not discrimination, it's the fact that people are likely to have more in common with their peers. I'd like the option to be able to filter out who I game with on XBL by setting an age range that is acceptable to me.
  
  Dashboard gamercard improvements. I'd like to see the dashboard gamercard show the last five games we've played just like it does on xbox.com. Have it behave in a similar fashion as well, with being able to click on each of the five games to view information on that game or on our gamerpic to view our profile.
  
  Virtual keyboard improvements. Add Home and End keys. If you've ever tried entering in any length of text into the bio field of your profile I'm sure you've come to the conclusion that the move cursor left/right buttons are inadequate. Also, the option to switch between the current key layout and a QWERTY layout would be most welcome.
  
  Hard drive backup. Now that we can network our consoles with our computers why not code a little something that will let us backup our console hard drives to our computers? This will become especially important in the age of digitally distributed content. For example, if I delete Shivering Isles from my console but decide at a later date to play it again and go looking for it on the Marketplace and it's not there... what then? Had I backed it up to my computer I wouldn't need to rely entirely on someone else for continued access to the content I've paid for.
  • Posted Nov 13, 2006 10:06 am PT
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