So it's finally happened, my Xbox 360 has died. It happened fortunately the day after I finished Dragon Age 2. Well I say fortunately, it would have done me a favor dieing before I even opened the game's box.

Anyway, after 4 years of service- my 360 finally died with an E71 error. I decided now would be a good excuse to justify purchasing a PS3, given there's an ungodly amount of exclusive titles and the sheer nostalgia ride of playing all my old Playstation One games on it. What surprises me, is how expensive the machine is; it must rank near on Macbook Pro/Intel Q6600 processor level of retaining value despite being years old.

I personally don't trust second hand consoles due to the amount of people I know who take in barely functioning machines in hope the clerk won't intensively test the machine enough to encounter any intermittent issues. The most annoying thing is every time that's happened, they've gotten away with it. I assume this is why they seed the losses onto game trade-ins, in which they profit higher than pharmacy companies, often with pre owned games costing around or the same as a brand new copy of the game does; at least the brand new games don't have snapped boxes with CD scratches so deep, a blind person would think it's braille.

So anyway, after shopping around I managed to order a moderately priced 320GB one in hope of storing all my games on there keeping the machine cool. What I didn't know was only a handful of games have this option and so far I haven't seen the option to install a game, it appears to just do it on it's own accord; well that was a great investment.

Now lets check the Playstation One store...Spyro? No. Tombi? No. Ridge Racer? No. Silent Hill? No. Kingsley's Adventure!? No. Pandemonium!!!? No. WTF is going on!? They've got shit games like Cool boarders, but nothing like Roadrash, Deathtrap dungeon or Croc? What is seriously wrong with this world.

Apparently so long as you have the original PS1 game disk it should work fine. However, when I looked into it there's quite a lot of people saying most PS1 games on the PS3 suffer from glitches. Again, what a great investment.

Still, the idea that all the controllers are wireless but charged via USB is cool...

And so after all that, I've bought a PS1, Battle Arena Tohshinden, here I come.

This week I played Crysis 2. Read about it here. *SPOILER* I didn't like it.

So last week there was riots in England. A few people died, many were arrested and many more cleared JD Sports. So what have we as a country learned from this entire experience?

The latest essay from BigDistraction is available here for your viewing. This one is drifting off from my usual essay subjects. This one is about serialized television programming. Fun Fact: According to Wordpress, it was also the most popular of my posts on the site. (4x the usual amount of post views) Which makes me think someone was testing their ReloadEvery extension for FIrefox and my post just so happened to be the lab-rat. 

Greetings to everyone still reading! Following what I said: Here is the following month's Big Distraction post.

So this week was my birthday. Quite a lot of people see their birthday as some magic occasion where it's suddenly all about them for the day. Personally, I don't see the appeal. This year I wanted to try something new and we decided to go to a Latin restaurant. I asked what they recommended and went for a Cuban sandwich. When it arrived I came to the realization that it was an over glorified ham and cheese toastie served on a wooden board as opposed to a plate.

Upon leaving- I felt as though I had been cheated out of £8.50. Especially since I could easily make at least 20 ham and cheese toasties for that price. Not that me or my friends would want 20 toasties, but that price is taking the piss. I should open up a sandwich shop, slap "Cuban" on the front of it and increase the price by £6.00. In-fact, I'm off to test this theory on Theme Park.

This week as promised, the Alan Wake review is up. You can find it in the merged Essays/Reviews section.

Nothing much has really happened this week. I was sent Homefront which I don't think even deserves the brief 122 words I'm going to describe it in here:

Has it really been this long? Damn, I still remember when this site was nothing more than a host for Deity.

Imagine my suprise when I recieved this in my inbox earlier:

Thank you to everyone whose voted for me!

Now it's phase 2, If you vote for me again First Fantasy could become Indie Game of the Year 2010! [Also 1000$ and a distrabution deal]

Give a cynical guy a gift at christmas, the gift of Indie Game of the Year 2010. [Also 1000$ and a distrabution deal]

- Jack

P.S Here's one of my reviews from BigDistraction.

This week I decided to give Linux a go. I decided to choose Ubuntu despite my friend who insisted Debian was the best. God my life is so dull at the moment, let's write about something more exciting.