That what happened couple days ago when I came home from army. I got the damn Red Ring or RRoD (Red Ring of Death) like many of you call it. I still have a month left in army so I don't really need the console rigth now which is good since it might take a while until I get it back from the warranty repair.

I have had my xbox for over a year now so I'm not really surprised it failed on me now. I'm not sure when Mircosoft updated the hardware but I was quite sure it didn't have the more heat resistant parts in it.

I'm currently playing a bit of Aion: The Tower of Eternity on my free time. They just opened the servers for Open Beta and the game is feeling quite good. Not sure if I will start playing it after the 1 free month I get for purchasing the game, though. Need to think about it more when the beta is over.

I still haven't really used to the idea of paying for MMO games. When the WoW was released I wasn't too into MMOs. Later, around a year after the Guild Wars was released, I thought it might be a good idea to try. I liked the idea of being able to play it once in a while when I felt like some RPG action instead of feeling to play the game over others just because I constantly pay for it and want to get most out of my money.

I played Guild Wars for for some time but felt like the PvE was too shallow because of the low level cap. I never ended up playing with a PvP character for some reason, maybe I was just so used to story modes of other games before GW.

Next I tried quite many other free MMO games, the ones which use micro transactions to make income. I never felt like buying anything for those since the game enhancements didn't feel enhancing enough or the game wasn't good enough to make me feel like I'd want to support the game up-keeper.

Later after I bought my Xbox 360 I thought to try Final Fantasy XI just for fun. It was the first MMO I paid for and the first with a subscription. It seemed nice since it was relatavely new and different because of the console controls. btw, you can use an usb keyboard on Xbox to write in the game. FF XI was really hard to start, first of all after I created my character and entered the world for the first time I had a instant feeling of being lost and had no idea what to do first in the town. The game totally lacked a tutorial and markers on map to point where to go. I played the game 1,5 months in total, mostly because I found a nice link shell (=kinda like a guild) to chat in with other people. The reason why I ended the game so early was that you can't really solo after the few first levels and it didn't really help that you need to have the party members in the same level range +-2 levels if your own so everyone could get most out of the party. Note: They fixed this just after I decided to quit the game so it's not that restrictiong anymore.

Next I went back to 2Moons one of the free MMO games I played before Final Fantasy. Actually this time it was the European server of the game instead of the US one, the game is known as Dekaron outside US. I played it around 3 months and got to twice higher level this time since I knew so much about the game and leveling was a somewhat faster because of that. I used to like it a lot back then and paid a tenner for some discounted items such as pet, autofishing enabling exp rune and some event items which let the player to do some event quests.

And now around 10 months later, after I gave up on MMOs because I had something better to do before gowing to army, there is this new AION. I'm really interested to see what the game brings with it and more than anything I'm interested to see if it will be enough to make it worth the subscription.

Oh btw, I got the aluminium MacBook around 6 months ago. Really big upgrade compared to my quite old Table-top PC. Windows with BootCamp is great addition to the OS X which works for everything else but games.

That's about it this time, bye for now ^__^

I missed almost an hour of the show but I'm still quite satisfied with the stuff I saw.

I'm quite stunned how many new features 360 is gonna have with all of those last.fm, twitter and facebook stuff. It's also gonna be great to be able to rent some movies here in Finland (the current thing isn't available over here).

The real time motion capture stuff looked nice also, though I kinda hate those casual Wii games so I'm not that excited about it really, hehe. I think Sports and Extreme Sports games will really benefit that feature if it works well enough. As long as the motions won't lag too far behind.

Oh and I've been waiting quite long time to see more of Alan Wake and was really satisfied with the short demo they showed, Remedy is a local game house after all ^^. Oh yeah and Metal Gear should be quite cool also, not a fan really but the games are definitely worth a play.

Gonna add some more impressions when I check the rest of the press conference ^^

Yeah, so I've been in navy for the last 4 weeks. It's so lame that every man needs to do military service for 6-12 months here in Finland. Looks like I will be staying there for 9 months, not sure about that yet. But anyway, it is eating pretty much all my free time outside weekends. This is damn hard to get used to but guess I have to live with it...

I think my old DS Lite looks much better. I bought it on my trip to China few months ago.

There is a crystal case on it so it won't get scratched and I wouldn't even think of using my DS without screen protectors.

Just call it a live demo or something instead of marathon. I missed the whole animal crossing 'marathon' GS made. I was sure that I can see the end of it when I come back home and watch the beginning later, the main reason I'm pissed is not being able to chat about the footage while watching.

If they would have called it a live demo, or something which doesn't make people think something that's many hours long*, I would have been able to change my plans a bit to see part of it live.

I also would have liked to get the emblem since I'm still somewhat preferring Nintendo over other game companies. (In the lack of more "hard core" games and other must buy titles on Wii I needed to get 360** .) I still really like those great Game Cube era styled less casual releases of Nintendo outside the "Wii [stuff]" games.

*around 3 hours or more

**this was at the time when they revealed Wii Music and had their worst E3 press event ever, I finally realized that the casual market was going to be in way too dominant part of Nintendo at least during the next year or few. I got 360 to keep me entartained enough.