I spent far more time than I'd like to admit in troubleshooting this issue so I figured I'd at least blog it. Symptoms: When you run the "network connection test" on the Xbox it consistently succeeds. When you try to connect to Xbox Live, either to sign in with your profile or do a "Recover Gamertag," it fails and tells you to go run the network connection test. Let me tell you how frustrating this behavior is. The connection test says fine, but when you try to connect it says it can't - go run the test?! ...

Now that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is out, I've had some folks asking when I was getting it. I'm not. At least, not yet. Why not? I'm a single-player campaign guy. I like the stories that go along with those campaigns. I like being able to pick it up in the 17 minutes I have between getting home from work and the arrival of my wife and daughter, which indicates it's time to get back to work around the house. I also like co-op play. Borderlands was really spectacular for this. Modern Warfare 2...

I finally got a chance to crack open Battlefield 3 this weekend. I like it... to a point. I've played through what I believe to be about half of the single-player campaign. The graphics and sound are really well done and the gameplay is reasonably engaging. I'm enjoying the story so far and the variety of missions is enough to keep me interested. There are two things about the single-player missions that detract from my experience: The lights are too light and the darks are too dark. When you're in a daytime mission, the...

This... this made my week.

We pre-ordered ourselves a Kinect and it arrived yesterday. After spending a single evening with it, here's what I've arrived at. Setup is reasonably easy. I have an original Xbox 360 and not one of the snazzy new Xbox 360 S models, so I have it connected with a USB cable and a separate power adapter. The Kinect proper is sitting just below the TV on the TV stand. Power on, magic happens, run through a couple of calibration screens, and you're done. To get the Kinect's attention, you wave to it. This doesn't sound hard, but you...

My Xbox 360 profile was on a 512MB memory unit and with the USB flash drive update to the system, I figured it was time to move on up. Xbox 360 has some sort of "test" it runs USB drives through to determine if the drive "meets recommendations" or is "below recommended performance." If it's below the recommended performance, you'll supposedly get degraded experiences in loading/saving games, reading your profile information from the drive, etc. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 storage page really doesn't tell you which drives work other than their Xbox 360 branded drives. To that end, I tried a couple...

Two nights ago I did the full network reset again after having more trouble with Netflix streaming. That's the second time in a week, and even after I reset it, things didn't really get better. Then I had an epiphany and tested it out... and I think I'm onto something. When you get online with the Xbox 360, it's usually like this: Turn on Xbox 360. Sign in with profile. Dashboard refreshes and you're logged in. About 10 seconds later an alert pops up telling you how many friends...

Over my holiday break I spent some time playing Grand Theft Auto 4: Episodes from Liberty City. I'm not quite finished with it, but I've gotten far enough that I have an opinion. Let me give you a frame of reference so you understand where I'm coming from. I'm a huge Grand Theft Auto fan. Whenever a new Grand Theft Auto comes out, I take a whole week off work and dedicate the entire week just to playing the game. I get the expensive edition with all the bells and whistles. I finished GTA4 with 100%...

I ended up getting a copy of Zuma's Revenge, the sequel to the original game that sucked both Jenn and I in so bad on PC and, later, on Xbox Live Arcade. The premise of the original game is that you're a little frog who sits in the middle of the screen. A line of colored balls scrolls in from off-screen along a path. As they scroll in, you can spit additional balls into the line to form chains of three or more, making them disappear. If the line gets too long, you lose. Here's a screen from the...

I blogged a while ago (in my drum comparison entry) that I'd never gotten 100% on a song playing the drums in Rock Band, even on easy difficulty, and I generally play on medium or hard. It was like my own personal Curse of the Bambino going on - no matter what I did, I'd always miss one note. Maybe it was a stupid mistake on my part, maybe it was a double-hit registered, but whatever the reason, never did I get 100%. The curse has been broken! Last night I got 100% on the No Doubt song "Hella Good" on medium...

I've been considering upgrading my hard drive from my 20GB drive to something larger in the potentially near future because I'm starting to get somewhat low on free space and, while I have a spare 20GB drive, switching drives isn't teh hawesome. I was worried about the licensing issues - like whether or not the licenses would transfer from the old drive to the new one, since the DRM on Xbox Live has been the bane of my very existence - but my friend Alex has done the transfer process and it sounds like it came off without a hitch. I...

I got my Ion Drum Rocker drum set delivered yesterday and set it up last night. It occurred to me after I'd played with it for a while in Rock Band 2 that I'd finally gotten a chance to play with all of the various gaming drum kits - the Ion, the standard Rock Band, and the Guitar Hero World Tour - and I should probably post a decent comparison since I'd not seen such a thing out there. For reference, and so you know where I'm coming from: I was in drama in high school, not band,...

I finally wore out my original Rock Band drums last night: The shadow I circled in the picture above is actually a big dent in the pad. The underlying plastic is broken and the only thing holding it together is the rubber liner on top of the pad. Lame. I'm seriously considering picking up the Ion Drum Rocker as a replacement since I've heard nothing but good about it, but I've also heard I should try out the new Guitar Hero: World Tour drum kit first. I have a party I'm going to in a couple of weeks where I'll have a...

Finally completed Grand Theft Auto 4 100% this morning! Pretty stoked about that. Turns out the last bits I had to do, as I suspected, was to take my friends out to do all the activities. I also got the "Walk Free" achievement this morning - escaping a four-star wanted level alive. Secret to that one is to land a helicopter in the embassy and get out (instant four-star wanted level), then fly the helicopter to a secluded beach in the north where there's a boat. Get in the boat and just avoid the other boats, which isn't too hard. Might try for...

I love playing Rock Band, and when I get the chance to play, I usually play drums. I've seen this kit from Ion in some of the game magazines and on web sites, but I finally found the official site for it: the Drum Rocker kit from Ion. It's an actual drum kit from a real drum manufacturer that has a controller box you can swap for either control by Xbox 360 or an Alesis DM5 module, making it useful in an actual drum kit capacity. Not just for gaming anymore! Admittedly, I play on medium difficulty. I'm no expert by any means. But...