I stumbled upon the critically-acclaimed Psychonauts in a branch of Game the other day. I’ve been looking for it for ages without success, and I know that although it’s an Xbox game, my 360 will run it. Better still, it was four pounds. Four pounds!
Game in, dashboard says there’s an update, update installs, system restarts… can’t play the game. I have the wrong cable. The game needs PAL-50 and the cable doesn’t support that.
Balls! Giant dangly balls on toast!
This has happened before – Half-Life 2 springs to mind – and it’s one of those little details that makes the difference between console love and console hate. I don’t even know whether I still have a cable that’d let me play the game, and if I do I can’t be arsed looking for it. So today I have console hate.
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0 responses to “Today I am mostly hating my Xbox 360”
I have had things like that happen. That’s why I stick to PC gaming…
(The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is my current favourite)
I dunno, PC gaming can be a pain too. Assuming you’ve got the right system requirements then it’s fun with display drivers, then you discover that STALKER runs like a pig on your ridiculously overpowered system. And murphy’s law says you’ll hit the windows key at tense moments by accident.
I generally do like my Xbox, other than the noise. And the pal-50 issues with backwards compatibility. And the noise. And the paucity of games. And the noise.
In this instance it isn’t really Microsoft’s fault. VGA doesn’t support PAL-50 and there was no need (at the time) for games to support PAL-60.
I had to look paucity up.
Surely it can’t be that difficult to do a patch that’d solve the problem? (not a tech, don’t know the answer, hence the question)
From what I understand there is too big a link between PAL-50/60 and framerate so you would have to partially rewrite the game to change it to PAL-60. You can’t change the VGA output to carry PAL-50 as the TV wouldn’t accept it.
The problem exists in reverse with some games. All 360 games have to display in PAL-60 but some TVs can’t display it but there is no requirement for PAL-50.
The easiest solution – since it is non-HD would be to use a normal scart/composite connection. Do you have a compatible cable or do I have it?
“WHAT?”
“I SAID, YOUR XBOX IS A TAD NOISY!”
“WHAT?”
Almost all the noise from the 360 comes from the DVD drive spinning. (Try it – run a demo of a major game and it is really quiet.) A later release of the console had a different drive and was really quiet. Then they released the elite and, for some odd reason, put the same noisy drive back in.
Is the drive user-replaceable? The noise from it really gets on my nerves.
I really don’t know.