If you want to check out my avatar, check out my 360Voice blog here. Thy guys at 360voice.com are really doing a great job churning out the new features.

I’ve stated before, the family has been having a blast with the new Xbox dashboard. The kids love messing with their avatars, I’ve taken advantage of the Netflix streaming, and I really like the full dashboard available from the guide button.

You’re going to love the NXE when it hits’ your box on the 19th.

[UPDATE] Looks like the Xbox folks are rolling it out to everyone else that signed up for the beta… have fun!

Sweet!

I’ll be sure to test out streaming from Netflix too! Unfortunately I just don’t have the HDD space to install games to my 20gb hdd (thanks a lot Rock Band!) . I’ve been looking around for deals on a 120gb upgrade… but that’s not in my plans at the moment.

I’m just excited to get in early and try out the new dashboard!

Right now I think I have around 50 movies dumped at around 1.5gb to 2.5gb each on my new Maxtor 500gb external drive. We’ve watched a few movies over the last few days and they played over my 802.1g wireless network without hiccup. The movies looked as good as the DVD version without the need to find a disc and put it in the player. Very cool.

Converting, as stated before, is lengthy. I’m guessing I’m able to convert probably 6 8 movies a day – I’m going to for quality rather than size (although size is a concern). So HandBrake has been chewing away, non-stop for the last week or two.

The tools I’m using? DVDFab 5 (to rip the movie to my hdd), HandBrake to convert to an MP4 movie and the Zune software to stream to the Xbox 360. I’d use Windows Media Center but the way I have my wireless network setup – Media Center won’t work plus I don’t think MC will stream H.264 MP4 (correct me if I’m wrong).

Some wishes I have:

• The ability to embed DVD cover art. Right now, all that is displayed is a frame from the movie. I’ve read reports that MP3Tag can do this but I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so. It’d be nice if HandBrake handled this or someone turns me onto a good tool that does it.
• Parental Controls or the ability to tag movies as to their rating via the Xbox/Zune. Right now all movies are available to view from the menu. It’s not like I have a ton of inappropriate movies for my kids, but there are some movies I’d rather my kids not watch. Coupling a rating system with the Xbox 360′s parental controls would be nice.
• Much faster encoding. But once it’s done, I guess I won’t have to do it again.
• Sightly better interface for HandBrake. It still has a lot of exposed advanced features that I’d rather not see and have that stuff tucked away under an “Advanced” button/tab or something.

Storage may not be an issue either. Although I think 500gb should be enough to hold my most viewed movies, I managed to score another 500gb drive (for a total of 1 terabyte for those not good with math) free via www.externaldriveoffer.com/. You just sign up for a Discover credit card, get approved and activate it by making a purchase, balance transfer or cash advance and they’ll ship you the drive (6-10 weeks after activation). I’m patient. I can wait. I waited nearly a year for $1000 gift card, I can wait a few weeks for a hard drive.

So far I’m very pleased with the results and the extra flexibility. After the Xbox 360′s fall update I’m strongly considering signing up for Netflix and being able to stream unlimited movies through my Xbox and get DVD’s for about $9/mo.

I returned about 20min before midnight and the line was considerably longer than it was when I left. Only this time I was behind the most annoying bunch of young college kids talking about being drunk every night (one tag-along was drunk), and a good amount of folk were smoking like chimneys (even outside, being in close proximity to a smoker sucks!). They were giggling, laughing, and really saying nothing. How annoying. Just shut up, face forward and wait like the rest of us.

Aside from that there were a good chuck of people picking up the ridiculously priced Legendary Pack ($130). Oh it has the game, a Master Chief helmet, 4 bonus disks, etc… but $130? I’ll stick with the Collector’s edition (which by the way, both disks were loose in the case with some very fine scratches as reported – the hub does not lock the disk in place very well).

Once I got home with my copy,  I logged on and saw that all of my friends (that were on-line) were playing Halo 3. I started up, played around with the settings a bit, and jumped into the campaign. The graphics are great in Halo 3. This isn’t Gears. Is it next gen? Oh yeah. I think it looks great. If you want more Gears… wait for Gears 2 - I’m sick of the comparisons.

I will say that it feels different after playing the stop-n-pop games like Gears, Vegas or GRAW. You get used to ducking behind cover, sticking there and peering out to pop of your foes. Halo is, for the most part, wide open, here I am run and gun. Sure you can stand behind a rock, duck around a corner to catch your breath but you’re really exposed.

I gleaned that from about 20min of gameplay (I had to stop – I’m too old to stay up that late).

All I can say is that I look forward to years of enjoyment (as long as my Xbox doesn’t die) from playing Halo 3.

A while back my boys’ 360 went down with the RRoD and it was taken care of – although I had to pay for shipping.

Today I’m playing Rainbow Six: Vegas and  it locked up on me several times. After the last time it locked up – I powered off and back on and I was greeted by the RRoD. I wasn’t too happy. Powered off, unplugged, replugged, powered on – same thing, rinse repeat and she fired up. Played a bit, locked up and went back down.

Now I’m trying to call Xbox support and it states that they can’t take my call and to try again later. Lovely.

Now I’m not dissing MS here or the Xbox. I love my Xbox. It’s an electronic device and they are all subject to issues. But this issue isn’t so random. It’s rampant and I’m glad MS is at least taking ownership of it and taking care of their customers. I’m not happy about it happening or having to be without it for a few weeks, but luckily I have a spare system to play (I don’t think my boys will mind).

So for us, both Xbox 360′s experienced a RRoD (2 out of 2). Not a good track record – but it’s still the best game platform on the planet. Just not the best timing.

[UPDATE: 5:47pm]

After trying for close to 5hrs to get through to Xbox customer support, I made it through by accidentally going down the Original Xbox path via the voice prompts. I’ll be getting a coffin (aka: box to ship my Xbox back) in about 3-5 biz days and the rep stated about 3-4 weeks to get my console back (which may be repaired or replaced).

I started doing some research today and found a suggestion that if you clone the mac-address of the bridge on your Xbox, it may just work.

So, I grabbed the mac-address of my first bridge, applied it to the alternate mac-address on my 360 and did the same for the other box and tested it out: IT WORKS! Hallelujah! Very slick. No more need for a 100 foot cable strung though the house!

All-in-all I got nearly $110 bucks for everything so I was able to order Guitar Hero III (software only) and Naruto and still had $8 left over.

Aside from a semi-failing DVD drive that I replaced for about $16 about 2 years back, that console was one of my best purchases. We’ve had so much fun with it over the past 5 years. I originally bought it used for about $135 when it was still selling for $300 I think – a steal in it’s own right. But now that we have two 360′s in the house, we only held on to the original for the few games we had that weren’t backwards compatible on the 360, but even that became a non issue. It was time to move on. Goodbye old friend.

Major Nelson has the details.

I’ve been waiting for this a while now. It was to be release a few weeks back but apparently the initial download caused some gamers to loose or corrupt save files. So they yanked it a retooled it.

Finally available, you’ll be able to play as villains: Doom, Magneto, Sabertooth, and Venom. As heroes you can play as: Hulk (yeah!!!), Cyclops, Nighcrawler, and Hawkeye.

The packs come separately for 500 MS Points each or in a money saving double pack for 800 MS Points (about $10). I’ll be getting the double pack.

Seeing that I won’t be downloading any Guitar Hero 2 tracks any time soon, this is a no brainer of a purchase for me.

Major Nelson has all the details and conversation.

What’s available? 3 song packs with 3 songs each (and none of the packs are all that great). Each song pack will set you back a cool 500 Microsoft Points which equates to $6.25. Quite steep for 3 songs. If you got all 3 packs (9 songs) we’re nearing $20. Considering if ALL GH1 songs were available, it’d nearly run you $100!

I’m guessing one or two things are at play here: RedOctane/Activision is either experimenting with pricing, seeing where we as gamers baulk or getting greedy or MS is flexing some muscle with publishers forcing them to price their content at certain levels. I don’t like the second theory. I’d like to believe MS is leaving all content and pricing up to the publishers. That was the promise, right? But apparently there are rumors floating around alluding to the fact that MS is doing the opposite. Gears of War makers are also saying that they’ve been wanting to give away a few maps for a while but MS is forcing them to put a price on them as to get gamers into the mindset of paying for additional content. Not good.

Now, I haven’t bought much off Xbox Live Marketplace (other than a few arcade titles). I don’t mind paying for content and I love the fact that we can download additional items for our games but I also know a good value when I see it – and this isn’t one of them.

I’m passing until someone gets their greedy hands out of my wallet.

Next on my list is to buy the 2 year extended warranty for it. I have it on our downstairs 360 and I need to get this one covered as well.

[Update:3.16.07]

Received my 360 back this morning via UPS and all is well. Different unit, probably a refurb. I will be calling MS to get the 2yr Warranty on this one as well; and keeping the the shipping box.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things worked out. Thanks MS!