The Psychotic Monkey » halo-3

Red lights at night, can’t finish the fight…

The Monkey — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 06:37:38 +0000

…red lights in the morning, hardware warning. So as you can probably tell from the title, the dreaded red ring of death has struck down my XBox 360. Of course, when you have a launch day console that hasn’t failed in 21 months, you know it will fail sometime. But why oh why did this failure have to coincide with the launch of Halo 3? My still-shrinkwrapped copy of the game is sat next to the space where my console should be, and what a sad sight it makes!

I’d had the warning signs. A couple of weeks ago I found that Tiger Woods was starting to freeze sporadically. But it only happened maybe 3 or 4 times in total. And then this week brought the dreaded red lights. And then the disbelief. The feeling that says “it’ll be alright. I’ll just turn it off and back on and everything will work.”. If only it were true. Some advice I can offer about arranging the repair though. Don’t, whatever you do, try and organise it through the XBox Support website. I did this, and when I rang up to query where my packing label was to send the console back, was told “oh you should have rung us, the website doesn’t really work” (not the easiest thing to make out in broken english!). Great. Thanks for that. Perhaps, rather than telling that to your customers, you should be telling this to the website team so they can fix it?

So UPS have been and taken my console away to the repair centre, and I now have 4 weeks without my XBox. Very annoying. I guess it’ll give me some time to get some levelling done in Lord of the Rings Online instead, and when the console comes back, finish the fight I most certainly will…

Halo 3 viral campaign starts

The Monkey — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:44:24 +0000

Or at least that’s the rumours. Apparently it all kicked off over the weekend with people out on the streets of New York, London, and other major cities handing out flyers for a group called the Society of the Ancients. Some have commented that this was just your usual “we are not alone group” until one sharp-eyed person spotted the symbol on their t-shirts. Then this website cropped up – The Society of the Ancients. If you dig around enough you’ll find a link to a countdown clock (here) which appears to be indicating the release of more information at around 2am on Thursday June 21st. Has anyone seen anything else (there is supposed to be an email doing the rounds as well which is quite vague, but does include the mysterious symbol)? If so, leave details in the comments…

Halo 3 Beta dated

The Monkey — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:41:33 +0000

So the date that Master Chief fans all over the world have been waiting for. The “release” date for the Halo 3 multiplayer Beta has finally been announced. The public version of the beta will be available for download from the XBox Live Marketplace starting May 16th and the beta servers will be open until June 7th. As has already been well publicised, there are 3 ways into the beta, although if you aren’t already playing the beta, the only way you can get in now is via the free beta invite that is included with Crackdown. No word yet on whether the rumours on the internet are true and that there will be achievements included with the beta, but here’s hoping…