arne360

Back in early December, the Xbox 360 dashboard update brought with it some extra things to flesh out your Gamercard — the ability to enter your name, location and a short bio — as part of an enhanced online profile. So I figured I’d make the most of it, only to find out that my current city of residence contains “a word or phrase that isn’t allowed.” Perplexing as I don’t exactly live in a disputed territory in the Sea of Japan.

So, fellow Santa Monica residents, perhaps Microsoft knows something we don’t: Los Angeles is set to annex a neighboring city yet again. Of course, I’m kidding, and this is just a minor, yet amusing, situation — I’m going to guess that “Santa” is the likely culprit here for the many holiday and religious uses it could have.

As a result, I settled on a slightly more accurate location to reside: in ur xboxs, steelin ur gamerscores

In the absence of any real update, I present to you the Xbox Live Status Advisory System chart. Courtesy of Keyser Soze on NeoGAF.

Over on GameSetWatch, Simon caught something interesting during what might be one of his many games of Boom Boom Rocket — a familiar building. In his post, Simon says that the building happens to be facsimile of the 30 St. Mary Axe building in London. He points out that the, according to the Wikipedia article he and I both linked to, this isn’t the first time the building was used in a video game, having made an appearance in The Getaway 2: Black Monday for the PlayStation 2.

The only thing missing from the post was a screenshot of the building in the rhythm game developed by Bizarre Creations, so, finding his post interesting, I decided to oblige. I got credited more than I should have — I really didn’t go beyond the call of duty, I just wanted to contribute to what I found to be an interesting article. At least with 30 St. Mary Axe and the genre Boom Boom Rocket resides in, Bizarre Creations doesn’t have to worry about answering to a higher power.

Considering the vehicle which bears his name can barely contain the 651 horsepower and 458 ft-lb of torque generated by the 6.0 liter V12 engine, I think Mr. Ferrari may have been onto something.

Since I don’t think many of us are ever come close to experiencing the effect of those kinds of forces in a car, we’re just going to have to live vicariously — probably through a racing/driving sim. Oh yes… and I can’t wait. In six days I’ll finally be able to pretend I know how to drive cars at speed in Forza Motorsport 2 and now that it’s oh-so-close, the waiting is absolute torture.

May 29. Mark the date.

See you online and prepare to (not) get smoked by yours truly in my Audi RS4 with custom livery.

Earlier this week, with all the announcements, melt-downs and general craziness on NeoGAF, things felt like an episode of The Twlight Zone. Sort of. I was being a smartass on NeoGAF in a bunch of different threads being sarcastic and joking around. Things were crazy, so what else could I do. All logic and reason had escaped from the board temporarily for a couple of days. On some thread I was being sarcastic about shifting my fake programming work from some backwards compatibility title to working on, also fake, theme decks for the Xbox Live Arcade version of Uno. I said that I was working on theme decks based on Perfect Dark Zero and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

What’s funny is that doing a theme deck on the latter probably wouldn’t be too bad an idea. I think m0dus figured this out because he whipped me up this great fake “screenshot” of what the Uno theme deck (and table) would look like. Pretty awesome work.

I think it’s something Konami should look into…

I’ve been sort of “conversing” with Tastsumi-san, who runs the Japanese Xbox.com webmaster and community blog, for a while now. We’ve mentioned to each other that we should play a game — a retail or Xbox Live Arcade title — one day so we could “meet.” We haven’t gotten around to it yet, the least of not is the language barrier. I can’t speak for Tatsumi-san, but my Japanese is non-existent and Xbox Live games being voice chat based isn’t helping me much either.

Instead, I noticed one night he was online playing Viva Piñata and I got an idea that I would send him a piñata via the in-game post office. I bought a Kittyfloss from Paper Pets and I think gave the him (or her) a flower and a scarf and, with some help, named it Tama — which is apparently a very common pet name in Japan. I sent it to Tatsumi-san one evening. Some time later I got the tip to check my post office in the game. I got a crate back! I cracked it open and Tatsumi-san sent me a Pretztail and the name was in the Japanese charater set. This was great! I feel weirdly attached to this unique Pretztail in my garden. Some piñata better not ever try to eat it.

It was really nice of him and so in return I sent him a Doenut that I named “Haruko” which means something like “the child born of the spring.” I felt it was a timely name. I hope he likes it too.

A video of the special Pretztail in my graden is below.

Video: Viva Piñata - 「あつまれ！ピニャータ」 - Japanese Pretztail

(You need a Windows Live ID to log in to MSN Soapbox for a short time it seems.)

A couple of weeks ago, new add-on packs to Lumines Live! were released on Xbox Live Arcade. And I bought them. They were cheap, so it doesn’t matter. I bought the Xbox 360 version of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s critically acclaimed (yes, I used those words) puzzler when it came out and everybody was crying foul over microtransactions — specifically the full cost of the game and the way the game was broken up into different downloads. Anyhow, I was drawn back into trying out Lumines Live! with these new packs, especially since I had failed horribly to even be passable at it when the game originally released.

I still don’t get it. I can’t do well in this game to save my life. I can’t seem to grasp the logic behind thinking ahead to make the blocks disappear correctly. I can’t seem to think ahead like I could in, say, Tetris or Dr. Mario — two other puzzlers where you knew what the next or next few blocks would be shaped like. I downloaded several of the top time attack replays and I’m totally astounded. I want to understand (and like) this game, but I just don’t get it. Someone show me the path. Please.