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Starbound571

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#1 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
Hi, I'm interested in getting Perfect Dark Zero after reading a few reviews that it was one of the nicer 360 launch titles. Unfortunately, I can't find any good, reputable retailer that still has the original version. Price isn't an issue, but if a retailer has it for in-store pickup and it's local to New York City, it's a plus. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!
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Starbound571

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#2 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
Oops. Wrong person asked. That's why I was asking the thread creator about the duration of the loading times. I have an Xbox 360 Elite that I've recently bought and my cousin is interested in getting an Xbox 360 Thing is, he doesn't need to play online and he wants to save bucks by buying the Arcade pack yet he's worried that having no HDD would mean longer loading times during gameplay.Chris_Farmer
DURING gameplay? Definitely not, I can tell you that now, since the 360 stores the game's data in temporary internal memory. It never writes this information to a hard drive or memory unit. The only time anything is written to or read from a hard drive or memory unit on an Xbox is: Auto-save in games, if the option is there in the game. You saving a game manually. You create, edit, move or delete a gamer profile. You download from Xbox Live Marketplace. You open any media that is stored on the device. (Like music, if you're just using this to play games, it's likely you won't run into this problem.) You otherwise edit, move, copy, or delete anything in the "memory" section underneath the "system" blade. Formatting a memory unit or hard drive also has the same effect. Some Xbox games (Dead Rising, Saints Row come to mind) ask you before you load up a game to select a storage device from a list. Anything you have plugged into your Xbox that could be considered storage will be automatically detected. Most games, if not all, require that you have a gamer profile, so it will also check to see that you have one on the device that it can use. If it can't find one, it will ask you to create it. In short, think of the memory unit as a PS2 memory card. It doesn't have a bearing on game load-up times. Now think of the Xbox hard drives as a memory card, but a more persistent one. As I said before, the difference in reading/writing to a memory unit versus a hard drive would be so negligible that if you're playing a game and just need to load up a game save, you will never even notice a difference. Hope this helps, even though I've had no experience with a memory unit.
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Starbound571

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#3 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
Is it true that having a hard drive cuts down on load times?Chris_Farmer
I could not tell you for sure, as I've never used a memory unit versus a hard drive. If you mean the general load-up of game data straight from the game itself, like textures and the game world, then no, I don't forsee a possible difference between having a hard drive and not having one. If you mean calling up data from the memory unit, then I would imagine yes, but it would be a negligible difference.
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#4 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
Is the hard drive reallythatimportant (apart from the online crap)?Chris_Farmer
It's not incredibly important, unless you hate switching out memory units all the time. But if I'm not mistaken, most game saves are anywhere from 500KB-4MB in size, so a memory unit isn't half bad, but if you get a memory unit and have a large collection of games I would recommend getting the 512MB memory unit instead of the 64MB. If you don't mind deleting old saves once in a while, the 64MB might be the better, and possibly cheaper choice. Edit: The "official" prices (On http://www.xbox.com) of the 64MB and 512MB is $39.99 for the 64MB, and $49.99 for the 512MB. If it were me I would just go for the 512, the 64 seems like you get pretty shafted as far as storage->price ratio. Or if you're skeptical, you COULD get away with buying a hard drive, even if it's the lowest end model possible, and still store ALL of your game saves on it.
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#5 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
Perhaps it's just my setup, but I have a 360 Elite with an HDMI connection, and it can upconvert DVD movies without an issue. At least there doesn't APPEAR to be an issue, the image fills the screen and works normally. Unless you have a substantial HD DVD collection and regularly watch movies on your 360, I would not recommend buying the HD DVD add-on, as recent events in the format war have caused a lot of strife for HD DVD owners.
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#6 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
*SPOILERS* First off for that level, until you get to the bunkers beyond there, keep The Darkness manifested as it seems once you get out of the trenches and into the field, light will not drain your darkness energy. As for that thing, you have to go around it. There should be a walkway to the right of it if you look directly at it. It's a matter of timing, but once it drops it's attack, make a break for it around it. If you should happen to get hit, the darkness shield should keep you safe. This worked for me at least on easy, I've yet to try the game on a harder difficulty. One other thing to note: Once you round that (living?) statue, there are going to be a few more soldiers around the bend. As you may have noticed already, killing them normally doesn't work. You get a darkness power that will fix that soon enough after this, however in the meantime, to kill them off permanently, shoot them (Or use darkness powers to defeat them) and once they are on the ground and not moving, devour their hearts. (Which you should be doing for every enemy you kill up to this point, as darkness level 5 as soon as possible helps a LOT.)
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Starbound571

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#7 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts

Spartan Laser!!!-Halo 3 (How can you people say Plasma grenades/rifles. Nothing is better than lasering people who think they are safe from harm. Its even better when you catch those people in vehicles who think they got away from trouble only to be lasered from miles away.)Nocturnal15

I say plasma rifle because I'm comfortable with one, and I almost never log onto Xbox Live anymore due to an access issue I cannot seem to fix on my end. The Spartan Laser is very nice in my opinion, but only if the target is a slow mover, or a stationary one, of which there aren't many in the campaign. Plasma rifle on the other hand has more use in the campaigns as several of the enemies have shields and plasma weaponry cuts right through them. Then if you're on easy or normal difficulty, maybe even heroic if you think you can pull it off, you can tap them on the head and they'll keel over and die. I agree though it's not very useful against certain enemies later on in the game, and neither is it that great in online play against much more intelligent enemies, but you have to admit, the "oh... *Boom*" factor of a plasma grenade never gets old when you manage to stick them. :D MP5 would've been my choice for CoD4 as well, as it really IS a gun you can run circles around your enemy with even while aiming down the sights, and it's even better with the suppressor attachment. It's a sad thing it wasn't used or seen as often in the campaign. The game seemed to want you to use an M4A1 variant all the time, or pick up an enemy's AK-47.
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#8 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
this happened w/ my ps2 controller. it was because the analog stick got stuck so it was a little left when it should be straight.patsfan4liferjn
Same here, and I started noticing this with my wireless 360 controller very recently, except it was stick drifting off to the right, on the right stick. I think it's just the nature of analog controllers after a while, once they're broken in for a while you need either calibration programs to correct them, rotate the sticks clockwise/counter-clockwise a few times before playing, or just simply get a new one. I can't count how many PS2 controllers I went through for this, but I still love my PS2 anyway.
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#9 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts
I don't know about best weapons, but favorite weapons, now that's a different story: Plasma Rifle (Especially when you have dual plasma rifles.) - Halo CE/2/3 Katana - Dead Rising GDHC .50 (Looks like a Desert Eagle.) - Saints Row Riot Shotgun - The Darkness Grenade Launcher (Once you get the right rounds for this gun, it's great.) - Bioshock Short Blade - Assassin's Creed Snub Pistol (Just fun to have around if playing Casual or Hardcore, not that great on Insane difficulty.) - Gears of War Dragunov - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Virtually any pistol - Mass Effect Once in a while I'll use different weapons than these, but pistols I find work best for my style of play mostly, at least until the harder areas of the game when I either: A. Don't have a choice for weapon, or B. The weapon isn't efficient enough for the task needed to be conducted.
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#10 Starbound571
Member since 2007 • 374 Posts

Thanks for the replies. Lots of nice input here.

I had read about chip stacking as well, but at least to me, the concept would have to be somewhere at LEAST 30-40 years down the line from now - then again, they're already pushing the envelope I would think in terms of how small/fast they can make things.

The reason why I asked all this is because I'm looking back at old and new tech, and actually seeing this law in effect - I have stored away a 4GB Samsung drive from ages ago, like maybe about 8-9 years. It's only been near a decade, but Samsung actually managed to make the world's smallest hard drive. What's even got me even more dumbstruck is that it's literally 300x (Rough estimation) smaller than the IDE hard disk I have stored away, and double the space as well. I see it getting smaller in this case. There's probably no comparison between the two since the mini-drive obviously isn't made for desktop PCs, but it is the same company, the same kind of tech.

I'm also seeing this trend with video cards, but it's in REVERSE. Until recently, I had an Nvidia GeForce 6800 in my PC, but upgraded (With the help of some very nice people on these forums, they know who they are. ;)) to GeForce 8800GT. Measuring the cards side by side, the 8800GT is roughly about 2-3" lengthier inside the case than the 6800 was. The connector pins for the card didn't get smaller or bigger, but I'm sure the card's board is WAY bigger.

Again putting cost to manufacture aside, tech getting bigger seems to defy Moore's law, unless the law doesn't specifically state that tech can't get bigger. If it can't, then like everyone is saying: It's going to hit a wall in the future. That's what I was looking to clarify.

Thanks again for the responses - but now my head hurts from thinking about all this. :? I think I'm going to go lie down now.

Edit: Another note about chip stacking: Actually, it could be just 10 years, but this is only because manufacturers would be under pressure, due to the consumer popularization of technology ever since the mid 90s. At least that's the way I see it.

(Also edited for grammatical/spelling mistakes.)