Joyous News X 20!

Hats off to Microsoft, for all the grumbling attached to to any procedure where a bit of tech has to be shipped off to its maker for repair they've actually done a pretty good job in tersm of allowing for the poor consumer to check the progress of repair on the Xbox website.

Perhaps this rather rosy opinion is influenced by the news I received from said website this morning - that my Xbox is being shiped back to me! I assume this means that the RROD has been exorcised but time will tell there. In any event, the stopwatch has reachd the two-week mark, so Microsoft are only half-way through the 28-day absolute deadline. That's pretty good. It also means I'm going to have to get my Halo 3 back *rubs hands*.

Use-ability

The period of enforced X-box abstinence continues and my latest attempt to ease the pain took the form of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for DS. I'm only a little way into the game so far, but have seen a startlingly comprehensive approach to all of the features of the Nintendo handheld. I've had to blow out flams, shout to get someone's attention, plot a ship's course using the touch -pad and - best of all so far - draw out the path of a boomerang's throw.

A sea-change in modes of interface has been the big selling point of the current generation of Nintendo consoles, and it is where this is most fully realised that the accompanying games have been most successful. As it stands perhaps only Zelda and Nintendogs have made this work on DS, and while other games (Animal Crossing, Mario KArt, Phoenix Wright) have been big, these two really stand out as full experiences.

Anyway, it's great and I just wanted to say that.

Silver linings

Discovered some plus points of temporarily losing my 360. First the chance to be selfless and generous by lending my currently unused xbox games to Mark. Secondly the chance to play these games on Mark's own Xbox and DESTROY all-comers in a succession of Halo 3 Slayer matches. Truly was a thing of beauty.

Thrilling up-to-the-minute Xbox repair news

Well, according to the UPS website my red-ringed Xbox arrived at Microsoft's repair centre yesterday. The clock is therefore ticking, with Tuesday 13 November the deadline for my console's return, if the terms of the repair deal are anything to go by. Was slightly unnerved when the UPS worker immediately guessed that I was sending off an Xbox though - feel there may well be a backlog.

In an attempt to brighten up my Halo-less world I stole some PS2 games from Mark's household. Specifically Killzone and Ace Combat: the Belkan Wars. The less said about Sony's supposed "Halo-Killer" from several years ago the better, but Ace Combat I've found strangely compelling. I played the demo for the forthcoming 360 release and this seems little different. The graphics are high-standard for the PS2, but the rest of it is a little bland. The gameplay is stripped down arcadey dog-fighting but at jet-fighter speed which basically means zipping around and hoping for a missile lock. This makes for a rather uniform experience. The plot is odd, with an attempt to realise a fictional world and contemporary war in rather OTT Japanese game style. However, saying all that it's fun in a limited sort of way.Perhaps it just represents a change from all the FPS stuff I've been playing recently but at the moment I'm enjoying it.

Consider it done

Had a pleasantly Blue Peter-ish time of it yesterday as I bundled up my defunct Xbox into a cocoon of bubble wrap and old copies of the Guardian and wedged it into a box which was then itself sealed in about a roll of packing tape. I just hope they can get it out at the other end.

Dropping the parcel off also went worryingly smoothly. I had printed out the UPS form sent by Microsoft and the receipt and simply handed it over (with more than a hint of naive optimism) at the counter in Tottenham Court Road's Easyeverything internet place.

Fingers crossed from here on out, and also an inevitable gaming drought. Tried to get back into Mario Strikers Football last night but still pole-axed by grief. Any not much more to do than wait and see.

Inevitablility

Well, finally summoned up the courage to turn my Xbox on last night, and after 15 fruitless minutes attempting to get a picture to appear on my TV was finally rewarded with... the red ring of death.

This did not come as much o a surprise (see below), and in some ways as a relief, as it means I may get to properly play Halo 3 soon. That said I'm not a natural optimist, and any process involving both the postage of large, bulky items AND reliance on a major corporation fills me with ennui.

Musn't grumble though, at least it's not the dead end that the death of my Xbox original was. Anyway, for therapeutic reasons have decided to record the return process as it happens.

STEP 1: Registering the fault.Actually pretty painless. Because it's now standard policy thre's an online check-in process (which even excess for non-warrantied repairs if you've got to pay) all run through the Xbox website. Spookily Microsoft knew my 360 was out of normal warranty on the basis of my serial number, even though I don't remember registering it to begin with. Also a brief text explanation of how the fault came about was required. This gave me the chance to vent about Halo 3's murderous attack on my console, so I felt better about that.

REceived the confirmation email over night. This gives me shipping labels and drop-off instructions. It's all being done through UPS thank Christ.

One remaining problem is what, exactly, I have to send back. Basically I'm very reluctant to risk losing all the data on my hard drive, so really don't want to include that in the package.

Making FrienDS

I "enjoyed" the hospitality of First Great Western on two occasions over the weekend, and on both occasions noticed people on PSPs - something I'd never seen before on a train journey. I've also noticed a lot of people with DSs on the tube recently - most playing Brain Age judging by the way they're holding the consoles.

This is not just an attempt to show my interest in the most facile details of the world around me, but also to say that portable gaming appears to be taking off in a serious way in the UK. The question that follows for me is how long until a sense of communal portable gaming arises, if at all?

Both Nintendo and Sony have built wireless networking into their respecitve consoles as a basic feature and - given the charge which is usually levied on public wifi connections and the massive handicap of the DS's friend code system - the main applicability of this is in LAN gaming. Clearly the first step for this is gaming with friends, but the possiblity of pick-up games with strangers while on a train, or sitting in an airport is intriguing. However, at present it remains intriguing, without practical implementation, simply because the element of human interaction remains. This is not meant to sound stupid or facetious. The fact is, as a 28 year old man, walking up to someone and asking if they want to play video games is embarrassing. What is more a lengthy conversation is required to establish what games are shared and which can be networked wirelessly. This is all before the game gets going in situations where only a short playing window may be available.

The ideal solution would be some sort of system where people can choose to broacast a variant of Microsoft's gamer card to anyone within wireless range listing multiplayer games available and giving anyone interested the option of sending a message/invite to the broadcasting gamer.

Of course, the worry over grooming would intrude on any attempt to do this, as illogical as such a worry is in circumstances without voice chat or messaging facilities, but until something like this exists, the potential of next-gen portable gaming will never be fully realised.

Mind you, it looks like more fundamental challenges to wi-fi gaming may be on the horizon.

Last legs

My 360 has lasted pretty well but after a whole slew of Halo 3 related problems I can't help but feel that the writing is on the wall. Having been stung by the dire battery life of ipod gens one and two (though - touch wood - currently things are ok on that count)as well as my first xbox which upped and red-ringed on me there's a sense of weary inevitability about the disposability of electronics.

My NES still works, until last year I was the proud owner of a monstrous (but fully functional) ten-year old TV, even my PS2 - now clocking in at around its 5th anniversary - still runs San Andreas and Bully. However so important had an ipod become to me that, by the time of its demise, I just had to suck it up and buy a new one. This was the time before affordable and reasonably simple battery replacement, but nonetheless Apple's business model relies on regular upgrades - touch wheel to colour screen to video to touch screen and so on. It's not too much of a leap to make a link to limted battery life.

Objectionable as this approach is, it is - at least - understandable. The whole 360 issue is more puzzling. Microsoft are still a good few months off even announcing the next Xbox (720?)yet are suffering hardware failure on a grand scale. It is difficult to imagine even the most optimistic marketing manager would think that disappointed 360 owners, having suffered the RRoD, would go out and buy the latest premium model (in this case the Elite).

No, the natural expectation is for something akin to a NES, PS2, DVD player or TV. Something which lasts until a new, more advanced model comes out. It is then upt o the individual consumer whether he wants the upgrade. The other extreme to the Apple model of inbuilt obselescence is well represented by Sony. If you want a PS2 you can buy one (you could even buy a PS1 until comparatively recently). Alternatively you can shell out for a PS3 (whether you'd want to or not is another matter. In either case you're buying something that will - broadly speaking - continue to work.

That Xbox as a product is on a par with the Sony model but seems to embody the Apple model in practice is patently wrong, and probably due to defective manufacturing. Even in this case, however, it is baffling how such a hige problem could have been allowed to slip through the testing process.

I appreciate that this debate is at least a year old now, but the imminent death of my own 360 makes it something I can't help but think about. In any case it's amazing that - in such circumstances - Microsoft can sustain such an enthusiastic fanbase.

Bourne Again

Cheap tabloid pun, but I really couldn't resist, given both the brilliance of the film, and the (tangential) link with a minor collapse of my blog's architecture which led to an enforced template reboot.

Bourne 3 is good not for any reason of variation but because it does the same as its predecessors, only more so. Ultimatum represents a point where a formula has been perfected (some deluded fools see the same thing with Goldfinger). Unlike Bond, this is a formula of style rather than content. There's a sense of variety across the three Bournes in terms of plot (as well as a continuity absent from Bond) but all of them dance to the same frantic beat of fast editing, shaky camera-work and washed out filmstock.

Bond never quite had this, indeed no Bond director ever had a 'style' unless one counts Lewis Gilbert's propensity to shoot the same film three times (You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker - beautiful foreign spy, mankind directly threatened, climactic battle in enemies gargantuan lair).

It's also interesting as perhaps the most left-wing action series ever. Even Doug Liman (who went on to the profoundly thoughtless Mr and Mrs Smith) cast the CIA as bad guys in a way limited more to the paranoia thrillers of the seventies than contemporary cinema. When villains in mainstream film appear from within institution, usually the institution itself is sound with only a few bad apples blamed for any evil behaviour. By the final reel they've come to a sticky end and the institution is thus purged.

The common thread throughout Bourne has been a melancholy distrust for monolithic agencies, both that they trained Bourne originally and then that they try to rub him out by any means necessary. The second movie is perhaps the weakest in that respect as "bad apples" Brian Cox and Chris Cooper are purged from the institutional memory of the CIA by upstanding Pamela Landley. However Ultimatum is in open revolt against an entire philosophy of government - the "any means necessary" approach of the Bush administration - a philosophy which takes the most drastic action on a whim and without any degree of oversight.

The institution is the villain in Bourne, whether by its attempts to silence a rogue agent in Identity, by its capacity for corruption in Supremacy or by the combination of a broad and vague remit to fight terror with byzantine internal politics in Ultimatum. Some one-off paranoia thrillers have taken this as their central motif, some action films have touched on it in sub plots (Predator, Die Hard) but Bourne takes it as its whole purpose - what if an agent of a profoundly amoral institution suddenly woke up to his role?