Well, the Red Lights of Death finally paid a visit  :-(

When I picked my copy of Halo 3 at Costco, I didn't noticed that the package was in French.  When I realized that at home, I said no problem, all the Xbox games have every languages right into the DVD and the game switches language depending on the Xbox language setting.  Right?  Right for many games but not for Halo 3.  The menus were in English but I was shocked to hear Cortana speaking French in the game intro.  I tried to find a way to change the language in the game settings to no good.  If you buy a French copy of Halo 3, you're stuck to French and this is true for all the languages that the game is localized to.  I would have liked a clearer labeling explaining this fact on the box.  Anyway...

Allez Maître Chef, bottez le cul de ces Covenants!

Found this on the 2K forums via Gamespot:

Problem:

After playing the game for a long time (on the Xbox 360 only), the game begins to "hitch" or "pause" slightly every 10-15 seconds. The problem does not go away if you restore a savegame, start a new game, or reboot the Xbox 360.

Solution/Workaround:

This seems to be a problem with the hard drive caching system on in the Xbox 360 system software, and we are working with Microsoft to identify a solution for this issue. We have confirmed that the hitching goes away if you clear the hard drive cache.

To clear the hard drive cache, you must hold down both the RB and LB gamepad buttons while the game is starting. This must be done IMMEDIATELY after the console is rebooted (or the game is launched from the dashboard) and the buttons must only be released AFTER the red 2K Games logo appears.

NOTE: do not attempt to clear the hard drive cache by holding the "A" button during loading. While that works for Oblivion, Bioshock uses different button combination to clear the cache, and holding "A" will not work.

I downloaded the Carcassonne demo on Xbox 360 Live Arcade last week and just after a few minutes with the game, I purchased the full version.  This is an addictive game based on a German board game.  The goal is build roads and buildings using a set numbers of tiles.  The bigger the roads and building you build, the more points you get.  It's a refreshing change from your typical FPS 

I bought this:

and this:

And I look like this:

But my wife said no to this:

I was at BestBuy and saw some kids having fun with Guitar Hero 2 on the Xbox 360 and I finally gave in and bought it  I must say that the whole thing looks silly but it is soooooooooooooooooooooo fun.  Honestly, it's been a while since I had so much fun playing a videogame.  The concept is quite simple: a song is playing and colored notes appear on screen.  You must "play" the notes with the colored buttons on the guitar controller while strumming.  Sounds easy?  It is not.  Sounds silly?  Yeah but it's so fun.

So Étienne Tremblay bought a new graphic card to play the new Splinter Cell game only to find out that it was less performant then the one he had.  So he had to return the newly purchased card and buy a better one.  In the meantime, I bought Lost Planet, popped the DVD in my 360 and enjoyed right away a cool game with awesome graphics and the best smoke explosions in any game so far.

At yesterday GUVSM meeting, Etienne Tremblay discussed my blog entry about me not understanding PC gamers.  He told me that over the wekend he installed the lastest Splinter Cell game only to find out that it didn't worked on his PC because it needed shader 3 or something like like that.  So he went and bought a $200 graphic card.  Well that was exactly my point.  On my 360, the latest Splinter Cell game didn't required any hardware upgrades 

He also told us about his first Wii experience playing the Rayman game.  It was just hilarious seeing him mimic the games moves.  I must say that Nintendo nailed it with this new controller experience.  The fun is back in gaming.

I changed my 360 setup over the weekend and I moved the console from the living room to my office.  I purchased the VGA cable and hooked the console to a 17" LCD computer monitor.  Wow!  The picture quality is just outstanding.  I just can't understand people who buy $300-400 hi end video cards when they can buy a 360 for the same price.

The cable comes with an RCA to mini plug adapter + a female/male VGA adpater if you have the wrong connector on your monitor or your VGA extension cable.  You can also hook a digital audio cable.

Supported VGA resolutions are:
640 x 480
848 x 480
1024 x 768
1280 x 720 (equivalent to 720p)
1280 x 768
1280 x 1024
1360 x 768

The Xbox wireless headset came out recently and I tought I would give it a try.  The first thing you have to do is associate the headset with a wireless controller.  Well after 30 minutes, I just couldn't make them work together.  Basically, the controller would occupy slot #1 on the 360 ring of light and the headset would occupy slot #2.  I scanned the forums on Xbox.com and found that many many people had the same problem.  Some of them went and bought new wireless controllers and they were able to make them work with the headset.  Not very happy with this solution, I went and bought a new wireless controller and bingo, I was able to associate the headset with the controller.  So I fired up Gears of Wars to test the headset.  At first, I tought I was playing with total jerks because no one were answering or talking to me so I plugged back my wired headset and things were back to normal.   So I went back to the Xbox.com forums to find out that many people had the same problem: the output of the wireless headset is so low in some games that no one can hear you!

DOT NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF CRAP!

I got the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player for Christmas.  I watched a couple of HD movies and yes, the image quality is a lot better then standard DVD however, I can't say that the difference is astonishing.  The real difference is in the details.  This is maybe because I have a tube TV instead of an LCD one; don't know.  The biggest difference is watching regular TV after watching an HD movie.  Yark!  I have Videotron standard digital cable and the quality is so bad because they over compress the signal.

The price is right ($200 + King Kong for a limited time) if you already have a 360.  One drawback I found so far is the fact that the 360 is a noisy beast compared to a standard player.  I don't know if the regular HD players are noisy (or even the PS3) so I can't compare.  The other one is that the studios assume that we all have a 50"+ TV because sometimes, it's hard to read the menus (Superman Returns) on my 32" TV, the fonts being so tiny.

http://www.xbox.com/en-CA/Hardware/x/xbox360hddvdplayer/default.htm

Here's the Team Xbox review:
http://hardware.teamxbox.com/reviews/xbox-360/68/Xbox-360-HD-DVD-Player/p1/

Hi-Def Digest provides info and reviews on HD movies:
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/