Let me quote myself on this to explain:

Loading times, I know the loading between levels is probably THIS long, just to make sure you don’t get many loading screens on checkpoints, but holy cow, this game takes AGES to load. Why was this better on the first Xbox, where games were just buffered to the harddrive? Why not bring an option like the Playstation (by far a worse machine than the Xbox) has, “copy game to harddrive”.

It seems they have listened to my blog post (let me have my ego please) and announced a whole bunch of new features for the 360. One of the features they announced was the “copy game to harddrive” feature! Woohoo, would Halo3 finally be playable?

The also redesigned the dashboard itself, which is a relief, because the blade system currently is too complex. Banners everywhere, 20 ways to get to the ‘Game Videos’ section. The images I found on Kotaku are look very sweet!

Check the out here:

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I just reached the city Voi in the game, I don’t think I am that far yet, but I must say there are a couple of things that bug me in this game.

• The controls… please, there is something wrong with them. I can’t really pinpoint what it is, but after a couple of hours play, I still can’t find the right button sometimes.
• Getting stuck with those damn vehicles. I have been stuck with vehicles between all kinds of stuff. From pretty small rock to crashed cars. That really sucks.
• Loading times, I know the loading between levels is probably THIS long, just to make sure you don’t get many loading screens on checkpoints, but holy cow, this game takes AGES to load. Why was this better on the first Xbox, where games were just buffered to the harddrive? Why not bring an option like the Playstation (by far a worse machine than the Xbox) has, “copy game to harddrive”.
• Weapon clutter when trying to pick stuff up. When a lot of bad guys die, there are loads of weapons on the ground. When I try to grab a new weapon, but it’s somewhere where a couple of guys died, it takes me a couple of tries to get the weapon I need. VERY annoying in the middle of battle.

The gameplay is not much different than Halo 2, which wasn’t one of my favorite games, so I probably won’t finish this game. It’s just not worth my time.

Call of Duty 4 is the newest game in the Call of Duty series and it really rocks! When playing in multi-player, you have loads of extra’s, challenges, perks and weapons to unlock.

I gathered some information about these things, just to make a clear list of stuff that is unlockable. I hope you will find this information useful. Also, because the post was getting really long, I splitted the info onto multiple pages, to make it easier to read.

Page 1: Main page
Page 2: Ranks and unlockables
Page 3: Weapon Challenges
Page 4: Bootcamp Challenges
Page 5: Operations Challenges
Page 6: Killer Challenges
Page 7: Humiliation Challenges
Page 8: Elite Challenges
Page 9: Golden Guns
Page 10: Multiplayer Maps (New!)

Edit: I editted the pages so they would include the Elite Challenges… dumb ass thing was that I had them all along, posted under the Humiliation Challenges.

Edit (July 3rd 2008) So, today I finally had time to update the Call of Duty lists.

I added a new page, showing the maps in multiplayer. You can go to that page, by clicking here or by just clicking the banner on top of this page and click page 10.

Next to work I got a couple of projects that keep me busy at home too. There’s computer stuff:

Getting my server to run fluintly on MacOS-X
Because that stupid HyperV kept crashing on me lately, I got the idea to actually install MacOS-X on my server, to see how it performs. My server is a pretty hefty beast, running a nice Quadcore Q9450 CPU and 12 GB of RAM. I got it installed yesterday and it seems pretty stable, accept some ‘minor’ issues (will post that later on).

If you want to read more of my wining, click ‘more’….

Silverlight
As I am always trying to learn new techniques, I tried the Silverlight 2.0 beta and I want to develop a nice replacement site for my daughters’ websites. At the moment both my daughters have a website, but I want to integrate that in a nice new Silverlight based website.

Grand Theft Auto IV
I only had time to play 5 to 10 minutes of play since I got this game. It looks pretty nice, but I wonder if it will interest me as much as its predecessor.

Call of Duty 4
Even less play time on this game the last month or so. I downloaded the new map-pack, but I didn’t even play those maps yet.

Next to computer stuff, there’s also more…real-life work to do:

Tidy up my garden
I need to do loads of stuff in my garden. Move the sandbox-play-thing of my oldest daughter (not as easy as it sounds). I want to extend my garden to actually use the last 4 meters of it, because it is a waste of space at the moment and I also want to put up a terrace-roof over half my terrace, but again… too little time, to much work.

Some small jobs in the house
You know, paint some fences, do some floor maintenance, etc etc.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/31043.html

It seems that XNA GS 2.0 could not handle the virtual adapters installed on my development system. I deinstalled VMWare and all was fine!

If you want to know what my problem was, read it here.

I tried several different keys just to make sure I got the whole key right (altough I was reading the key from a 720P screen, I must say the I character is pretty confusing ).

It first says it will be testing the connectivity between the Xbox and my Windows PC, but after that it will prompt the following error message :

Initiated search on the local subnet for your Xbox 360 using the connection key you typed.

No response from your Xbox 360 (depl0yXbox). Please make sure you typed the connection key exactly as it appears on the Xbox 360 console, that the Xbox 360 console is properly connected to your local subnet, and that the Xbox 360 console is waiting for a connection at the “XNA Game Studio Connect” screen.

The machine is on the same network as my Windows PC, the IP’s are ending on .100 and .101. The subnet masks are also the same, I double checked, but they were both served from a DHCP server, so that should never be the problem.

My Windows machine has it’s firewall disabled, and has no other firewall or anti-virus software installed that should get in it’s way.

Also, I have installed XNA 2.0 for Visual Studio 2005 Professional. My VS 2005 is running with SP1.
Next to VS 2005 SP1, I also have Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite running on this PC.
My PC is running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 in the English language.
I tried connecting using wireless and also through a cabled network but that didn’t work either.

There are some rumours (well not really rumours anymore, because they are confirmed by MS), that once you install XNA on the harddrive of your Xbox, you cannot use XNA from your harddrive on another Xbox. The harddrive on my Xbox360 is from my original ‘bought at launch’ Xbox360. My Xbox has been replaced once and after it was replaced, I also sold it without the harddrive.

I got a new Xbox and attached my old harddrive to this Xbox, without formatting it on my new Xbox. However I did only install XNA GSC on this Xbox yesterday and that was for the first time ever on this harddrive.

I wonder if I am the only one with this problem… anyone out there also got this problem?