I have moved my blog here:

http://maxlimitz.blogspot.com/

I'm not a writer, so I'm not promising to post even every month, but I thought I would keep my blog posts in the same place instead of posting the same messages to every gaming site that has a blogging feature. I also have a page on Twitter, which is used for short blog posts:

http://twitter.com/maxlimitz

PlayStation Home (Open Beta) was released on December 11, 2008. It contains avatars, clothes, 3D world, games (e.g. chess and bowling), video screens and video theaters, shopping center, etc. Now Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 all have avatars. If you compare the avatar systems, Wii has the most simple avatars and PS3 most realistic. In Wii and Xbox 360 you can use avatars in games that support avatars. You can view some avatar samples for all those three consoles on my home page.

The New Xbox Experience (NXE) was launched on November 19th, 2008. Is it better or worse than the previous Dashboard? Well, there are more things to consider than one. For example, it's not just a new Dashboard version. In addition to the new Dashboard you can for example choose downloadable content via the Internet using a web browser on a computer on the xbox.com website for your Gamertag and start downloading the content when you turn on your Xbox 360 console. The NXE has avatars which you can see on your Dashboard but also on your xbox.com Gamertag profile and you can also show your avatar on your website (if supported by the website you are using). The good or bad side with avatars is that at least the default ones look cute and if you are not in to that kind of thing, then you just have to live with it. Also, the NXE takes so much megabytes that a 64 MB Memory Unit is not enough anymore, so you can't play with your Xbox 360 online anymore as happened to one of my game friends, so now he can't use his Xbox Live Gold account and I think he should get some sort of refund for the time he can't use his console. And I should get a refund for all the old themes I have bought as I can't see the images from top to bottom because of some kind of floor under the avatar. I happen to like usability, efficiency and speed. But the Marketplace works much slower than before, because for example for every game the console first downloads screenshots, game description, and content descriptions. Because I like to manually choose when and what I want to download, this considerably slows me down. All I would like to see is the "All Downloads" button for a game and then select what I want to download. Or better yet, just a list (without any pictures) for all the latest content, so I could choose what to download. One of new features in NXE is that you can copy your game disc to your hard drive (you still need your game disc to be able to use your game), but the biggest hard drive I know available is only the official 120 GB hard drive and because one game usually has approximately 6 GB of data and I already had game content including maps worth of 13 GB I can only install about 16 games when I leave some room for new game maps. So, the Marketplace looks better but it's no longer usable and you lose money if you already don't have a hard drive or big enough memory unit because you have to buy one and you can't play online anymore without one. I don't like these kind of updates as this is something Microsoft didn't warn the users beforehand, so when they were deciding which game console to purchase they could have calculated how much it will cost to use an Xbox 360 compared to other game consoles. I don't mind getting the old Dashboard back, but I do like installing games to my hard drive even though my Xbox 360 is still too loud compared to my PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

I finished LEGO Batman: The Videogame today. Because of a bug I can't finish the Wayne Manor bonus mission, so I didn't complete the game 100 %, but that's fine by me as this isn't the first bug I have encountered in games. It took me about 44 hours according to the game save file, which you can find from the Memory section of your Xbox 360 console. I'm sure LEGO Batman has the same game engine but maybe with some minor modifications as LEGO Star Wars games, but I was curious to see the problem solving puzzles. This is a quality game for many reasons and I will mention only a few of them. The playability and graphics are fine, but the music got annoying for me quite soon so I turned it off. It has Story Mode and Free Play mode where you can "own" the enemies with invincibility and stuff like that once you have found enough power bricks from different missions. You can make your own custom LEGO characters. The game has nice and easy puzzles although I did have to check a game guide to complete the game. It has cheats, which I didn't try as the game is so easy. All in all, it was a great experience.

Xbox Live had global problems on November 14-17, 2008. Here in Finland I was disconnected from Xbox Live in about few minutes each time I had signed in to Xbox Live. I couldn't see the pictures in gamer profiles correctly and that includes the gamer picture, game icon and achievement pics. I could only read the first few words of any private message. Xbox Live has had problems before, so nothing new here, but usually Xbox Live has been totally down when it has been having problems. Maybe some of us will get an Xbox Live Arcade game for free as has happened at least once before because of Live problems. Now "Xbox.com is currently down for maintenance" if you try to visit the main xbox.com page. That's probably because of the "New Xbox Experience" where you should be able to use an avatar with your Xbox 360 console and there should be some other new stuff also.

It took me and my game friend approximately 20 hours in 7 days to finnish Saints Row 2 co-operational campaign. We both started with totally new game characters as people on some forums have said you can't get the co-op campaign achievements otherwise because of bugs in the game. You can view a picture of my game calendar for the first week from my web page and also the game report on my Finnish blog (account for the website needed).

It seems like Tom Clancy's EndWar isn't for everyone. My Finnish accent seems to cause major problems for the speech recognition system already in the training process so that I can't get into action in the Xbox 360 demo. Here's my discussion in the EndWar forum and here's how I sound like.

At the time of writing this, I think the most popular consoles bought from the shops (I have no statistics in front of me) are Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. I happen to own them all and have been playing with them all, so here's my opinion. This blog post only scratches the surface and is very short about the cons and pros of the consoles as "short" is my style anyway. Yep, I admit it, I'm not a professional writer. And I'm not a fan of any console, I only see them as tools for having fun. I'm sure many disagree with this blog post as I have seen various web pages and forum topics comparing those three consoles. Anyway, in my opinion, Xbox 360 is the best of these three for many reasons.

An Xbox 360 user has a friends list which shows what people are doing and you can send them messages or invite them to play a game (PS3 also has a friends list, but it's slow to use in my opinion, Wii's friends list can't used be during games). An Xbox 360 profile shows which games someone owns and gives a rough picture how good or long someone has played the game (PS3 now has trophies which is kind of an equivalent to achievements, Wii has no such thing). Xbox 360 has the best games (PS3 also has for example COD4 and GTAIV but it has no UNO and other Xbox Live Arcade games, Wii's games seem to cost approximately the same as X360 and PS3 games here in Finland so why would you buy Wii games with worse graphics). Xbox 360 has the best controllers and headsets (PS3 controller sucks and you can only buy third party headsets and the one I have for PS3 takes the sound too far away, Wii controllers are OK and innovative). You can buy game content money cards also known as Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 without a credit card (but for PS3 in Finland you can't buy budget games or game content without a credit card as far as I know and I don't trust in credit cards as even Finnish credit cards have been cracked or something like that, Wii has Nintendo Points cards). Xbox 360 has nice graphics and sounds and you can use for example a VGA or HDMI cable for graphics depending which console version you have (PS3 graphics and sounds are fine also, the best Wii can do with graphics is using a component cable for graphics). With Xbox 360 you can listen to music from a CD, your Xbox 360 hard drive, iPod or from your computer if you happen to have the Windows Media Center in Windows XP, but I don't have it and I don't know about the later editions of Windows (with PS3 you can also listen to music from a CD, from the PS3 hard drive and from your computer if you allow sharing in Windows Media Player and your other Windows settings are correct, with Wii I haven't found a way listen to music). With Xbox 360 you can watch DVD movies (which also possible with PS3, but not with Wii). All three consoles have some things in common, for example you can download free demos and videos to all of them.

There are some good things about PS3 and Wii also. Xbox 360 malfunctions a lot and scratches the game discs, but not for all people. My first console had the red ring of death approximately in a year and was replaced for another Xbox 360, which had the red ring of death in a few hours I started using it, so I now have my third Xbox 360 which scratched my COD4 and GTAIV discs, so my third Xbox 360 has been in repair twice already this year. The reason why I also have PS3 and Wii is that I'm kind of addicted to playing online and I don't want to reward Microsoft by buying a second Xbox 360 in case my main Xbox 360 stops working again and I also wanted to see in real life what's it like to own different game consoles and will my opinion change in time about the fact which of them is the best one and that opinion hasn't changed. PS3 and Wii are much more quiet than Xbox 360. Wii is the smallest of the three consoles. With PS3 you can watch Blu-Ray movies (which have approximately the same quality as HD DVD movies) in addition to normal DVD movies (for Xbox 360 you need to buy an external HD DVD player, but unfortunately the support for HD DVD format has been stopped by major companies and I haven't heard about an external Blu-Ray drive for Xbox 360). I have also been able to record Finnish television programs and convert them into MPEG-2 format and transfer them to PS3 and then watch them (With Xbox 360 I haven't been able to transfer and watch Finnish television programs in MPEG-2 format). PS3 and Wii can be used with a wireless network without any additional equipment, but with my core Xbox 360 I would need to buy an additional device for that, but as it is my main game console I have connected it with an Ethernet wire to my DSL modem (sometimes I also use a router when I have connected more than one machine to the Internet at the same time, but that's another thing). With PS3 you can install another operating system and I'm using PSUbuntu, but I don't use it much. With Wii controller you can wave it in the air or aim at enemies, but at least my hands get tired and I need to stand up (if I need a workout I can go e.g. out or to a gym or swimming hall). PS3 and Wii both have a web browser. Wii has Channels and in the beginning I used the Weather, News and Voting channels daily and then I got bored with them. Wii has avatars called Miis, but I don't need them (Xbox 360 is going to get its own avatars in about three weeks from now).

So, that's it. Those were some of the reasons why I think Xbox 360 is the best of the three consoles at the moment. Feel free to comment, I'm sure we disagree or agree totally or partially. :)

This is my first blog posting on this website. Let's see how things get going... I own an Xbox 360 console and I have joined a few gaming sites before this one. I discuss mostly at the xbox.com forums in English, but my mother language is Finnish, so I also visit for example the tilt.tv pages sometimes. You can see my X360 setup at my homepage http://max.limitz.googlepages.com/ dedicated to some screenshots about my Xbox 360 games.