Explain Yourself! Number Two

Note: Did you know that I make a podcast? It's true! I work with the good people of Hardcore Gaming 101 to produce the Top 47,858 Games of All Time Podcast, a fool's endeavor where we use a very strict science (think Giant Bomb's own Ranking of Fighters) to rank the games that YOU nominate! Wanna see the results? Check out bit.ly/47kgames and subscribe to the show by searching for Hardcore Gaming 101 in your favorite podcast service!

The collection continues to morph, and I continue to make poor fiscal decisions around the management of said. Let's dive right in, shall we?

I bought, attempted to resurrect, and recycled an Xbox

As part of my work for HG101, I play games. I also have a little walking money and when we were asked to have a gander at Dead or Alive 3 for the mysterious black slab of a console that I had never owned growing up, I decided to nominate myself as "the guy on the team that will look at OG Xbox games". So I bought one of these suckers for about $45 with a copy of Burnout 3, because I am a man of taste, and have since built up a little collection of games. The only problem with this device is that it is a literal OG Xbox: manufactured in mid-2001 in Hungary, it includes active cooling via a tiny fan on the GPU and a famously assy DVD drive manufactured by Thompson. That fan isn't loud and whiny enough to be heard, frankly, by the rest of the noise this fucking truck makes while idling (spinning a DVD drive and an IDE hard drive while expelling hot air out the arse), but the DVD drive will occasionally decide to stop reading a disk mid-session.

(For a fairly in depth dive into the various revisions of Xbox hardware, check out this Racketboy thread I've got bookmarked for future reference)

So, I took a gamble and bought an untested Xbox on eBay for $20 and shipping, with a serial that indicated it was made in 2003. That would give it a Samsung DVD drive in most cases, and upon opening the device I was stoked to find precisely that. Unfortunately, that DVD drive seems to have been DOA. I cleaned all contacts, swapped drives between devices, and what error codes were generated all indicated that the drive was a wash. So, I paid north of $20 for a big black brick. Straight to electronic recycling for this experiment. I'll probably do another dive, but first I want to finish my sweet car mangling game. Turns out that was one of the games where the saves were hardware locked, as EA and Microsoft were concerned with save game fuckery on Xbox Live. Projects!

I traded in some multiplatform games with the intent to upgrade

The GameCube is rad as hell, and mine currently resides in my bedroom between a SNES and an N64. There are a grip of games exclusive to that platform, and there are cases where multiplatform games wound up being flat out better on that little purple lunchpail than its competitors. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King seems to not have been one such case, suffering from a fairly typical case of audio compression compared to its competitors. As such, I sent this one to my friendly local game shop down the way. It's not like I'm wanting for games to play at this point anyway, and even a particularly good licensed title such as this may be had for a song at this point. Eventually I will wind up picking this up for the Xbox in my living room and conning either my partner or my nerdy as hell housemate to coop our way through this one, but the former is punching away at Final Fantasy VIII and the latter continues to muck around with the Souls series. I've heard there are even some games coming out in 2017 that might be worth playing...

Under similar circumstances, I have also dispensed with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the PS2. I remember picking this one up quite vividly on one of my annual trips home for the holidays in 2010. I also dimly remember the amount of praise the game received upon launch, and catching a glimmer of what made the game special despite the muted visual treatment it received in being ported to the less capable PlayStation 2. Not only does the Xbox version support better 3D models and lighting throughout, but it also includes the original Prince of Persia and Prince of Persia 2 as bonus content. That's three pretty ding dang good games bundled onto a disc that is as common and cheap as dirt, which is why I picked this one up again only a few days after trading it. Of all of the old, non-HG101 related titles I have kicking around my living room right now, this is probably at the top of the list once the inexorable march of time piles up and I complete Burnout 3, the Best Game of the Generation.

I'd write more, but the next update might be the last one for a while. My gaming time has been laser focused for the last several days on a major franchise installment of recent note, and I'll probably write at length about that...next time! XOXOXOX