McWilliams’ World

Okay, I admit it. I simply played King Kong to get the easy 1000 gamerscore points. One of my boy’s friend left his copy of King Kong here and since I had time this weekend, thought I’d plop it in and rack up the points. Took me a little over 5hrs to complete.

But I’ll admit, it was a pretty fun game. It wasn’t overly complicated or frustrating. You pretty much followed the plot of the movie so there wasn’t the need for looting, upgrading items, etc.. It was just simply play through the movie. Most of the puzzles involved finding handles to turn cranks that opened doors, clearing brush with fire to get at certain areas, and having Kong move obstacles out of doorway (man there are a lot of doors in the jungle!). Not too hard. Sometimes they changed some of the puzzles up by adding a waterfall that would extinguish your burning stick – so you had to find another way (usually by throwing it to the next section and running to get it). Occasionally you get to play as Kong and smash the crap out of stuff like villagers, T-Rexes, and other smaller dinos. And yes Kong still dies – so it’s very anticlimactic.

The game is dark (as in the amount of light), however that’s how I’d expect the jungle to be. It does add to the atmosphere. As for graphics, nothing to write home about but I did like the brontosauruses and the Kong fight sequences.

Overall a fun game but I’d have felt cheated out of $60 to complete it in about 5hrs with virtually no replay value. It’s been out long enough and if you have a friend that still has a copy – 1000 gamerscore points can be yours in short order.

I’ve been playing around with streaming DVD movies to my Xbox 360. The challenge is finding a decent, simple DVD converter that’ll give great quality as well as small file sizes. I would be great to have all my movies accessible from a menu without having to find a disc. I could potentially eliminate the need for a DVD player (almost).

I’ve tried almost 10 different converters. DVD Fab and DVDShrink are my main apps to get the DVD to the hard drive, but you still need something to convert it to a format that the Xbox 360 and either the Zune software or Media Center recognize.

I think I found my answer in HandBrake. Fairly simple to use. Has presets for the most common applications – especially Xbox 360. Just select what you’re format your aiming for and let it go. In about an hour or two, you’ll have about a 1.5gb movie file ready to stream to your Xbox. I wish there was something faster. If you know of a free, simple solution that’s fast, let me know.

I tested out one movie last night and it look really good. I don’t think I could have told the difference between the actual DVD and the streamed copy.

I network my 360′s wirelessly over 802.1g, so occasionally I had a few hiccups – but I think that may have been from my system chewing on converting a few other movies. If it becomes problematic I may consider running a cable to go direct – but that involves getting into the attic to drop the line, etc… not sure I want to do that.

Where does the 500gb hard drive come into play? I’ve been patiently waiting for hard drives to come down in price and ideally I would have liked to pick a 500gb external for $50 I don’t think it would have happened, so I managed to pick one up for about $73 through Staples.com. Based on a tip from FatWallet.com I found a Maxtor 500gb external drive for $95. I bought a $25 off $75 coupon code for about $1 and BANG! $75. Not bad.

I currently have a 160gb external that I built for about $20 but that’s starting to run low on space with the amount of music I’ve been scarfing up lately so I need some extra headroom if I’m going to start dumping movies. 500gb should tide me over.

Okay… I have a bit of buyers remorse.

A week or two back I bought Ninja Gaiden 2, and since I saved $10 when I picked it up (Best Buy was slow to get me my on-line order in the store), I also bought Lost Planet: Colonies. I teetered between the two versions, but decided to go with Colonies since it was newer.

Later I find out that the two version are completely different in the way of achievements. I started playing through the single player game and after clearing the first few missions and not getting achievements, I started digging around the inter-web and found that Colonies is more geared toward the on-line portion – to an extent. I have no real desire to play through the game multiple times on different difficulty levels or really jump on-line just to get a few gamer points – I don’t have the time.

So my dilemma is this:

• Do a find someone to do a straight up-and-down-trade - My Colonies for your Extreme Condition?
• Do I post it on Goozex.com (get 700 points for Colonies and then get Extreme Condition for 500)?
• Do I use it to trade in at GameCrazy or GameStop?
• Buck up and deal with it?

Thoughts? Wanna trade?

[UPDATE 06.19.08]

I ended up trading LP:C in at GameCrazy last night and getting my Halo 3 disc buffed (stupid 360 drive – maps wouldn’t load – nice ring around the outer edge). I managed to get an extra 20% on my trade in so I actually ended up with some store credit after the swap. So now I can start earning normal achievements in Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.

I did contemplate going the Goozex route but didn’t want to wait.

I spent this past Monday through Wednesday in Chicago for work. We were meeting with Microsoft to talk over our SharePoint 2007 implementation. Let me just say that there was a lot of walking, very expensive meals (mmmm, fillet minion), and no free internet at the $350/night hotel. That’s the long and short of it.

The best part (beside the food)? We got certificates to buy stuff from the MS employee store at employee discounts. Even though we had a one time limit of $200, I only spent about $80 (including shipping). But managed to pick up two 512mb memory units for the 360 ($20/each), Lost Odyssey ($25), and Viva Piñata: Party Animals ($10). There really wasn’t much else that I wanted there.

I’m done spending my $500 gift card. I need to save it for the rest of the year’s games.

I made a small killing at Target tonight. Nothing special but managed to get about $50 worth of Xbox stuff for $15. There’s a crazy Target coupon thread over at CheapAssGamer.com where you can get $10 off Xbox 360 software – no limit- one coupon per item and a $5 off $25 toy coupon that is also stackable (1 per purchase). Beware though, the $10 coupon expires 6/9 – so get in while you can.

Since my local Target had virtual crap for games, I ended up with Thrillville -$20 (kids wanted it), Mortal Combat Ultimate – $10, and 1600 MS Points – $20; all for $15 after $35 worth of coupons. I plan on making a run to Appleton’s Target to see if I can score any more stuff. I’m thinking Timeshift, some more points and maybe Dark Sector. We’ll see.

Best of all… didn’t cost me a dime. I had about $13 on Target gift cards, so I only used about $2 of my $500 gift card. Sweet!

[UPDATE: 6.8]

I hit my Appleton, WI Target last night and managed to pickup Lego’s Indiana Jones ($50) and Timeshift ($20) for $45. It’s like I got Timeshift for free and saved $5 on Indiana. Total bill was $70 – $5 – $10 – $10 = $45.

Last night while gleefully playing Ninja Gaiden 2, I passed the 12,000 GamerScore threshold. My Xbox blogged about it as well. I’m getting pretty close to taking over Chill Penquin‘s gamerscore of 12,391 - of which I’ve been traking via 360voice.com. With all the new games I’ve been picking up, it won’t be long.

Just pre-ordered Ninja Gaiden 2 at BestBuy.com. Cost? $0.00. Okay, I had gift cards and b-day money. Actually I used $8 of my $500 gift card to cover the difference. I also got a free “wall skin” along with it plus free shipping.

Can’t wait to get it.

[UPDATE: 6.4.08]

Lucky me. I scored $10 off NG2 at Best Buy because the couldn’t get my product to me in 1min. Pretty sweet. So I since I saved $10 I picked up Lost Planet - Colonies Edition (also had a 10% off coupon). So I made out pretty good.

Next on the list: Unreal Tournament 3.

Just recieved my $500 American Express gift card from TrustedRewards.com today and just scored a great deal on Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Limited Edition from Amazon.com for $29.99! It wasn’t on my list of “must get with gift card” but I couldn’t pass up this deal. Maybe some of my buds will do some co-op with me.

First major strike will be Ninja Gaiden 2 which comes out June 3. Can’t wait!