My friends over at XBLRadio have released episode 54 of their podcast.  I was away this weekend so I asked one of the other great staff members of 3fs to do the friendspot spot.  So make sure you head on over, check out Ant on the Friendspot Spot - and let him know how he did

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

NEWS:

• The newest trend in music downloading; Pay what you want!

CONSOLE CRIMES:

• Apple gets sued for price dropping.  This may make Wal-Mart rethink their “Falling-Prices” campaign.

GAME NEWS:

• The Wii recasts a new fishing sim. Perhaps they are angling for a new kind of gamer. Hope they can TACKLE it.

GAME REVIEWS:   

• The Orange Box: Rusty Ranchero gives us the scoop on Valve’s Half Life Bundle. Is 5 games enough to justify the transition to the 360? Or is Portal enough of a selling point? 
• Hour of Victory vs. Medal of Honor Airborne: Carpal once again tries to “Save Ryan’s Privates” as he enlists for two terms of active duty. Which one will he re-enlist for? 
• Drawn to Life (DS): Alex gets creative with KID PIX as he draws a conclusion on why this DS title is worth picking up.

PLUS: 

• The 360 FriendSpot SPOT 
• Useless Tips
• The Marketplace Minute. 

head on over to XBLRadio to check it out

Play and Win Shooter / Gears of War

Well I finally got an achievement last night during my Gears of War session last night. It was one of the pretty simple achievements - Mix it Up - where you just need to be on the winning team of the 3 different game types. It was also brought to my attention that even though I thought I was going to get a 100 kills with a [insert weapon here] achievement, that there is not one for shotgun kills - which was what most all my achievements were based on, and the one I assumed was going to rack me another achievement, so that wasn’t very wise of me I would say. Thanks to Antediluvia for bringing this to light. This concludes the dates that you can recieve an entry in the Play & Win Shooter Contest, and I believe I should get an entry for each of the 3 days . . . winning is a long shot - but it doesn’t hurt to try (and those prizes are pretty smooth).

Shadowrun Beta

I recently recieved my beta invitation to Shadowrun, but haven’t dedicated a ton of time to it as of yet. Of course in the invitation the NDA was restated that not much else can be said except “Yes, I am playing the beta”. So until the NDA is lifted dont expect to hear a ton more about that. You can keep track of my play time on the game in my Live Eye Profile as you can see at the moment I have only played about an hour or so. Over at 360friendspot we have about 62 current live eye members in the beta and being tracked by our tool, you can see an overview of those users at the Shadow Run Beta Profile Page

360Friendspot / LiveEye

Speaking of 360friendspot and The Live Eye, last night I spent a good amount of time updating some queries after seeing a bunch of sleeping records in the SQL Activity Monitor. This was a hope that what might be causing the slowness or hanging of the site was related to SQL table locks - since I was definately getting time out errors and transactions were hanging out here sleeping. If that resolves, or at least partially resolves the performance issues - I am going to be extremely pleased, but also upset that I didnt find it sooner. I am sure there are more things to optimize - but maybe I am at least going in the right direction at this point.

Crackdown All Nighter, and Rumors

Finally - Happy St Patricks day, and look for an update from my all nighter activities at a later date. Achievements and random video goodness will most likely come of it. There is A rumor posted in my comments about this all nighter being a time that they release some new content or the final 100 points - no clue what that user based it on - but I am all for it!

Well I am writing another recap of my gaming - mostly because I feel like I should keep blogging about something and most of the time I just dont keep up with xbox news enough to actually post about that here. My reviews and guides have died down - I will be writing up something in that regards soon I hope.

Last night was a marathon gaming night. I started the night with some Heavy Weapon, first some multiplayer with Heavy Weapon session i gained a couple achievements:

Then I switched gears and played some Gears of War . First I played some of Act 3 on co-op with Antediluvia. After he left for bed I played a couple rounds of versus, and then it was time to switch games again.

Then was about 30 minutes of Enchanted Arms which ended with me forgetting to save, and finding a battle I couldn’t win, so I am in the same place I was before that. Time to change games.

I haven’t given much time to Progect Gotham Racing 3, I still have it from gamefly but I just seem to put it below many of the other games I am playing right now. I picked up a couple of the achievements, all of which were the ones that dont really take any actual gaming effort.

yeah they could have actually spent some time and came up with different pictures, heh.

I ended the night with about 10 minutes of roboblitz, and I was beat so i went to sleep. It was a 4 hour session of straight gaming, more then I usually play thats for sure.