Ben Walters InfoPath MVP : Xbox 360

Games missing from XBLA that I wish were there

Ben Walters — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:03:31 GMT

Tonight a friend and I headed out to see the new Star Trek film at Hoyts in Melbourne. While we waited for the film to start we got to talking/reminiscing about some of the games we spent our youth playing. Some where between our recount of Grim Fandango...(read more)

My Xbox is back online

Ben Walters — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:40:50 GMT

Since moving house a week or so ago I've been faced with a dilemma do I connect my Xbox to the Internet via wireless or do I attempt to run a pretty blue cable around the perimeter of the room and hard wire into the router located in my study. Well after some deliberation (and approval from the wife) I decided to get an Xbox 360 wireless adapter. Only problem was once I got home I found I couldn't connect to my router, after an hours worth of "please hold Mr Walters while I check my resources" from customer support I decided to ping out for some help from my fellow MVP's. Luckily Phil Webster came to my rescue, turns out that my Linksys WAG325N will only allow my Xbox 360 Wireless adapter to connect if the router is running the original firmware version of 1.006 (keeping in mind that the current firmware revision is 1.012) so after a quick downgrade of my firmware version I'm now back online!

Just waiting now for Linksys to fix their firmware issues

Why do early adopters get screwed over all the time?

Ben Walters — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:09:02 GMT

Ok so before you read this you should know that I'm one of the biggest advocates of Microsoft technology. I'm always the first to jump into a verbal bout over the Xbox 360 to Playstation 3 debate but at the moment my commitment is feeling a little shaky.

You see today marks the 3rd time my Xbox 360 has RROD'd on me. So while I would usually be sitting down making my way through Lost Odyssey I've had some time to think.

See I was at the front of the line 2 years ago at my local EB games when XBox 360 was launched in Australia and was home within 10 minutes setting up my new console like an excited boy on Christmas morning.

Of course after I had come back down to earth and made it back to work I was quick to promote Microsoft's new console to anyone that asked (and everyone that didn't) so essentially I become one of Microsoft's greatest marketing resources a word of mouth that wouldn't shut up.

This all went along fine and then MS announced the Xbox 360 Elite, little more expensive but included a 120 GB HDD and HDMI port. I could live with that as MS provided me the ability to pick up a 120GB drive anyway and as for the HDMI port well I couldn't use it at the time anyway so it didn't bother me too much.

Then MS started fitting HDMI ports on all consoles and to rub salt into the wound tacks on a price drop. Now I have no problem with the price drop that's something that's bound to happen sooner or latter.

The HDMI port however means that any one of my friends who goes and buy's an Xbox today will get more value for money and a better built console than someone who supported the console when it was first released. This wouldn't bother me so much if MS offered some type of upgrade program e.g. trade in your old console with $50 and we'll give you the new one or some way to get the new features fitted to the old console.

However MS didn't offer any such upgrade offer and here I'm stuck with a console that for the 3rd time in 3 years has died on me and the best MS have to offer is a repair job after repair job to tide me over until my Xbox is out of the extended RROD warranty period and they try and sting me $130 each time the console dies.

So to close I put one warning out there Microsoft, be wary of breeding a SP1 mentality amongst your gaming community the first couple of months of a new console release are key to it's success or failure. As it stands come the next round of console releases I will be asking myself "Should I buy now or should I wait a couple of months until they get it right?"

My XBox made it home for Christmas!!!!

Ben Walters — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 01:33:36 GMT

As you may recall I recently posted that my XBox had decided this whole Christmas thing was just too hard and packed it in.

I'm happy to announce that the Microsoft Support team far exceeded my expectations and my repaired XBox returned yesterday just over a week after I sent it off.

So after brief dashboard update I put Mass Effect back in and it ran like a charm, the drive is still pretty noisy when it spins up but if that's the worst of it I can live with that.

Props to MS Customer support for getting back and gaming before my Christmas break

XBox not feeling so well leading up to Christmas

Ben Walters — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:49:39 GMT

Usually my evening routine includes some time unwinding with some time on my Xbox, last night however my Xbox decided that wasn't going to happen. Officially my Xbox won't read any discs that are placed in the drive. So like a good little consumer I called the support line and booked my console in for repair. The only issue is with sending a console back to a repair office this close to Christmas I don't think it's going to make it back home for the holiday season.

Halo 3 Launch

Ben Walters — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:00:09 GMT

Last night I attended the midnight launch of Halo 3. Finally after 3 years the story will be completed. Once more I was the first in line and at roughly 12:15 I was back in my study unwrapping my fancy new Spartan helmet.

So far the game is brilliant, graphics (although not on the level of a Gears of War or Bioshock) are a big step up from Halo 2.

Well it's back to the fight for me, check out the pics below of cool limited edition packaging (by far the best limited edition I've seen for a game yet)

Weekly Recap

Ben Walters — Sat, 19 May 2007 06:36:00 GMT

What a week it has been from Monday to Wednesday I was presenting at the Asia Pacific SharePoint conference. This was a great event with lots of speaker from all over the globe. Ian Palangio from Microsoft and I presented 2 sessions both on InfoPath, the first was more of a what's new in the zoo type session showing off some of the outlook integration and web enabled form functionality of InfoPath. The second was focused on extending your forms with managed code and also using your forms in an external facing website using the asp form viewer control. Personally what made this event so good (other than the content) was that there was a good mix of both technical people who wanted to know the finer details of SharePoint, and non-technical people who were purely there to see what SharePoint had to offer them.

Once I made it back to Melbourne I was greeted by my Xbox 360, yearning to download the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta. Sadly however this had to wait until Thursday night due to some issues at Bungie's end. I did however manage to download it and I have to say this game is shaping up to be the greatest FPS of all time. Aside from the expected non-stop killing action the environments are simply amazing. Little things like realism of the water simply blows me away (actually it was AJAX311 that blew me away but the water looked so pretty during the whole ordeal).Finally on Friday my repaired O2 Atom was returned to me. While in the states my phone decided it was no longer going to charge so upon returning to Oz I promptly sent it off to the service centre to get repaired. Well after around 3 months and a lot of bad service I finally have my Atom back. Plus it has a new screen and upgraded firmware. So now I have no excuse again for being late to meetings Well I'm off now to finish setting up my SharePoint play server.

Guitar Hero 2 Rocks!!!

Ben Walters — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:54:00 GMT

Just over a week ago I made it to the big 25! For some that will conjure up old memories long forgotten for others it will help them remember how young they really are.

So why no post about this event, because of this

This is one of the 4 Xbox games I received for my birthday and has been consuming my every waking moment outside of work until now. In the times when my fingers were too sore and cramped I've been playing Rainbow 6 Vegas, TMNT and Crackdown. Much like my friend Dave I have to admit I have a slight addiction to my little white box and all the entertainment it has to offer and with that little nugget of self realization out of the way back to Guitar Hero.

So as I've said Guitar Hero rocks! This is one of those games that can be enjoyed by the hardcore gamer who has to beat the expert level just because they can and also the person who finds gaming just plain boring. This is what makes this game so good anyone can pick it up and within minutes be rocking out to a classic like Sweet Child O Mine or cruising along to Message in a Bottle, even my wife (who has threatened to sell my Xbox on a number of occasions) loves to pick up the axe.

So why have I spent so much time hammering away at this little beauty? Basically the game is broken up into 4 levels Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert each level increase means more notes and more complex combination of notes to make the song sound right. Making your way through the easy set of songs should be pretty breezy for most seasoned gamers however once you hit the higher levels you really start to feel the pinch as the notes come flying at you down the fret board.

To date I've managed to complete Easy and Medium but have been finding that I don't quite have the finger dexterity to nail the hard or expert settings (even with all those years of real guitar playing behind me!)

So with my verbal diarrhoea of praise for Guitar Hero out of the way I'll sign off until next time

Rock on!

Brute Upgrades in Halo 3

Ben Walters — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:10:00 GMT

So we all know that Halo 3 is on the way, and we know that bungie has a whole heap of new features up its sleeve. One of which was that we thought we would be able to play as the brutes (this however was squashed pretty quick by our friends at bungie) They did however release a video detailing some of the new Brutish features.If you want to check out this video I would suggest heading over to Joystiq to check it out There were however a couple of other little tid bits I noticed while watching this video

Brutes can now rip your arms off !!!!
You can now dual wield power swords!!!!

I took some screen shots as best I could but if you really want to check it out I would suggest watching the original video in the link earlier.

I know you can see that these are not final renderings of the actual action, and we all know that features get cut from games before the goes gold i.e. the quad bike from Halo 2, but if these do get included it should make getting killed by a Brute much more entertaining and on the flip side killing a Brute much more fun.