Mark G.
E-Mail: mark@altgn.com
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Web Page: http://gummibearheads.com
Registered Since: 2007-09-19 02:23:07
Profile: Mark is a video game addicted geek from Philly. He hopes that one day all the children from all of the worlds will have all the maps they need so that they are smarter. He also likes turtles...and calculators.
Posts by peeweejd:
- You download some kind of premium content from the marketplace. It could be an Xbox Live Arcade game, some downloadable content such as a song pack for Rock Band or a map pack for Halo 3 or it could be something stupid like a theme or gamerpic.
- After you download it, any profiles on your 360 are free to use it (as it should be). But there is a big asterix here that I’ll get into a little later.
- Xbox Live is not working (like is the case the past few weeks)
- Your internet connection is down, or you take your 360 somewhere with no internet.
- Another profile on your 360 (like a roommate or your kids) wants to have a theme on that you paid for without having to log you in.
- Save the file
- Open up the file in a text editor like notepad (right click: open with)
- Find the 4 lines that look like this:
input id="token_0" maxlength="4" name="token_0[]" size="4" tabindex="1" type="text" value="XXXX" - replace the “XXXX” parts with 4 digit chunks of your token and save the file
- Go to guitarhero.com and log into your account.
- In a new browser window (or tab) open up the gh3.html file and start clicking
- Big Team Battle matches are now 16-player affairs.
- In the Team Slayer playlist, the appearance of Shotty Snipers has been greatly reduced.
- Now, when players veto Shotty Snipers, the game that results from the veto will not be Shotty Snipers.
- In one-sided VIP matches, the attacking team will now see a waypoint for the VIP they are hunting.
- In Lone Wolves, Slayer gametypes will appear more frequently.
- He picked fights with the internet geeks we all relate to.
- He makes really bad movies.
- He’s German (or German sounding at least). I don’t have anything against Germans, but the accent makes it hard to convey compassion.
Xbox 360’s Downloadable Content Licensing System Sucks
January 3rd, 2008DRM sucks especially the way Microsoft chose to handle it on the 360. Here is why. For the uninitiated it works like this:
So behind the scenes the 360 secretly ties the content you just purchased to the purchasing gamertag as well as the console it was first downloaded to. If you happen to switch 360s for some reason (red ring of death or any other of the bujillion ways 360s die) you can swap your hard drive onto your new (refurbished) 360 and still use your maps, songs, themes right? Kinda.
You can still use your stuff but now the profile that “purchased” the content needs to be signed into Xbox Live. I guess they do this to prove that you didn’t steal the content (guilty until proven innocent). That’s normally not a problem unless:
The bad thing about this is that you are not usually aware of this problem until it happens: you want to play an Arcade game in your hotel room, live is down and you want to play some local split screen halo with your buddies on that new foundry map you made. Since your 360 cannot prove you are innocent, you can only play the “demo” version of the arcade game and Halo 3 will not recognize the foundry map you downloaded for Halo 3.
If you have switched 360s and want to test this, unplug your network wire and see for yourself. Go look at the list of Arcade games you purchased and note which ones reverted back to “demo versions”. Try to play a game using those cool Forza 2 cars you bought or the extra missions for GRAW.
I’ve heard horrific tales of users trying to straighten this out with Xbox tech support people who don’t understand the problem. And when you get someone who does understand the problem they tell you your out of luck. And if you are patient enough to deal with them, you can eventually get the problem “fixed” with a crappy workaround: they refund all of your points and you get the pleasure of “re-buying” all of the content using a 2nd gamertag, but from what I hear this process can take months and months.
Microsoft needs to fix this.
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IGN Moving Further In Wrong Direction?
December 4th, 2007Most of the AltGN regulars here already know the answer to this, but here is more evidence and one assholes opinion.
Years ago the insider service was really a service. Bandwidth was expensive and smaller websites could not afford bujillions of jiggabytes of bandwidth to host thousands of high resolution screenshots and videos that us rabid gamers craved. So IGN decided to create this “insider” service and put all the goodies behind a $20/year paywall. At the time (2001 or so) it was reasonable to me so I subscribed. As the years passed, many competing websites popped up that offered these screenshots and videos for free and insider became less and less valuable to me. At the end I kept my subscription just for the message boards, but they sucked so bad I quit.
So that brings us to today. I got an e-mail from them asking me to participate in a survey about insider. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell them what I thought. One question really stuck out to me:
Assume for a minute there was a new paid IGN subscription service, through which you could have access to special website features some 3 months before they are available to all users on the site.
17. Using a 5-point scale, where 5 means “Extremely Interested” and 1 means “Not interested at all”, how interested would you be in subscribing to such a paid service in the next 12 months?
Wow. In today’s day and age are they really thinking about putting more of their content behind a paywall and keeping it there for 3 months?
I understand that they want to make money and all, and people dont work for “Laffs” but jeez. In my opinion IGN is the most irrelevant gaming site out there. Everything they publish is available somewhere else (usually its faster, better or more accurate in my opinion).
This situation makes me think of a beached whale. A once majestic beast that is stuck rotting and dying in public view and there is nothing anyone can do except prolong the agony or put it out of it’s misery.
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GH3: 5star Raining Blood On Drums
November 14th, 2007This guy created a custom guitar hero controller out of an electronic drum set. Watch him get 5 stars on Raining Blood on EXPERT after the break.
“Fix” For The Broken guitarhero.com Link System
November 5th, 2007This isn’t really a fix per se but more of a hack but it worked for me so I thought I would share.
The way you link your scores on guitarhero.com sucks ass. You have to type some long 16 digit code into 4 different boxes and hope it links (which it hardly ever does). I was sick of typing that code in so I decided to do something about it.
I stripped the HTML form out of their site and hardwired my code into it so all I have to do is click the button. Here is how to do it yourself.
I put the file up on my website: http://gummibearheads.com/alt/gh3.html
It worked for me and I hope it works for you.
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Hewlett Packard HP35S Scientific Calculator
October 30th, 2007Serious nerd alert. You “cool” geeks out there may want to avert your eyes from this one.
My trusty HP48G graphing calculator has been broken for the past year or so (the power button doesn’t work unless you slap it). I bought that baby back in 1993 while I was in college (Mechanical Engineering). I really really liked that calculator. I have tried to use cheapo regular calculators, but the HP ones use this entry method called RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) and ones that use normal algebraic entry fuck me up. On top of that, most cheapo calculators don’t have “Stacks” like the HP models do. Stacks are the way the calculator remembers the last few numbers you used automagically.
So I went looking for a new calculator. Read the rest of this entry “
Portal In Real Life
October 18th, 2007So that portal game that comes on orange box is pretty cool. So cool in fact that someone made a web based flash version. Someone also hacked the portal gun into the PC version of Half Life 2 (video). When I played the game I kept thinking how fun it would be to have that gun in real life. Imagine the possibilities.
Now thanks to google and youtube, you wont have to imagine.
I think someone already invented the real life portal gun :O Thanks to youtube, I found video evidence of it.
I submit the following as evidence:
if I got my hands on this weapon of hilarity, fat people everywhere would be teh d00med!
read on for more evidence… Read the rest of this entry “
I’m In Your Obstacle Course Stealing Your Nuts
October 17th, 2007YouTube - Squirrel on a Impossible Reggae Mission
If the squirrels can do that obstacle course, certainly we can teach them how to play WOW. Then we could have an army of squirrel gold farmers and we could undercut the Chinese and RUEL TEH INTERNET!
ps: Be sure to watch all of it so you don’t miss the “I’m in your vending machine stealing your Baby Ruth” surprise ending. That makes my squirrel gold farmers plan even better because their “reward” could be to go steal candy from the vending machines! I’m so smart I scare myself.
pps: squirrels >>>>> seagulls.
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2/3 Dentists Agree: Wii Collects Dust
October 16th, 2007I don’t have a Wii. I haven’t had a reason to buy one. Everyone I know IRL that has a Wii keeps telling me how fun tennis and bowling are and they are right. Problem is there is nothing else for the Wii that interests me.
[Famitsu President] Hamamura noted that the Wii hasn’t seen a second big hit at the level of Wii Sports, and cited figures that suggest 67% of Wii owners haven’t used the system of late.
Now, my opinion is that of a hardcore gamer. A hardcore gamer that likes to blow stuff up and drive fast and rip off amazing guitar solos in my underwear. I’m not really good at it all, but thats besides the point. The point is I don’t think I’m the target audience for what Wii has to offer, so my opinions may be off.
I do see some people on the message boards here (phat, kum letters) that NEEDED to have Wii and have since sold it (or at least tried to) due to lack of use. Also, the IRL people I know with a Wii mostly have kids. The parents don’t like Wii and some uninformed amongst them are asking me when Halo comes out for Wii (n00bs lol). What does this all mean? I think lots of people are realizing that they spent $300 for a bowling game that also plays some other bad games and tells you the weather.
/troll
Found via Joystiq
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Finally, A Good Use For Gamecube Games?
October 11th, 2007
Some creative person who OBVIOUSLY doesnt use game systems for games (since he has a PS3 and Gamecube) finally got some fun out of the system.
He drilled a bunch of holes and cut a bunch of pieces and inserted a bunch of things onto the weak spot for massive cooling and his PS3 run cooler thanks to the magic of “Liquid Emotion Engine Cooling 4-D!1!!”
And what did he use for bushing to prevent the jagged edges of the PS3 case from nicking his precious hoses? Gamecube game discs. Yup, thats a double kill folks.
Link with more pictures of this masterpiece of backyard engineering || Found at Joystiq
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You Have To Be A REAL Geek To Laugh At This
October 10th, 2007xkcd > all
In my opinion, this comic ranks up there with the one that put him on the geeky-webcomic-about-uber-nerdy-stuff map. sudo make me a sandwich. Brilliant. Any respectable geek needs to have his feed in their rss reader.
Read on for a similar story from my days on the ign boards.
Read the rest of this entry “
Halo 3 Matchmaking Update - Shotty Snipers FTL
October 9th, 2007I guess even Bungie is sick of playing shotty snipers.
They updated matchmaking and here are the highlights:
This is a good thing because all too often you’d veto a shotty snipers game and get another shotty sniper game after it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
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Uwe Boll Is Not A Tool
October 9th, 2007
I’ve always thought that Uwe Boll was a tool. Reasons?
But lately I think I may have been too harsh on the poor guy. Sure, Uwe is a trained amateur boxer and chose to fight Lowtax and a bunch of other geeks. But really, what was so wrong with that? He was having a little fun with some of his most harsh critics. He was kind enough to let people try to kick his ass.
And his movies are bad. At least the guy tries to make movies for us geeks. I mean, he’s no Spielberg or Lucas, but at the same time, Steve and George arent making movies about video games right?
And he is German with a weird name that sounds like some weird species of Himalayan Yak. Thats not his fault though, we have his parents to blame for that. At least he’s kind enough to help us pronounce his name properly. When was the last time a species of Yak did that? Thats right, never.
So maybe we should all cut him a little slack eh? Oooo-vah for president in ‘08!
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Holy Snack Food Batman!
September 28th, 2007
That must be the holy grail of french fries. Its an entire potato, spiral cut and deep fried and then finished with a dusting of powdered cheese sold on the streets of Korea. Now we all know why Korean Starcraft players are so good.
Just imagine the sheer volume of ketchup/cheeze whiz/gravy that monster could hold when swabbed in a bucket of comdiment. I think that is the perfect gaming snack because it comes on a stick. Perfect for one handed snacking while you play weeble wobble bowling on your wii (just don’t accidentally launch it into your plasma tv because cheez whiz stains).
I wonder what Homer Simpson would have to say about that. Probably “mmmmmm spiral cust deep fried potato on a stick *drool*”
Tornado Potato! (found on Boing Boing)
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