Xbox 360

I love Firefly. Today I learned that Bungie does too. I was playing some Halo this evening and heard a yell that sounded so familiar. One of the marines fighting along side me screamed “Here’s Vera!” as he went into gun down some Covenant Brutes. This was just excellent in my mind. Bungie included a Firefly reference. It really showed their attention to detail on the marines AI this time around. The marines in Halo 3 are actually useful and for once their voice acting mid-battle is well done. Extremely well done actually. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but something about the voice acting for the marines in Halo 3 always felt so right for the game. It just fit the whole fighting to the end mentality of Halo 3 and its storyline that revolves around finishing the fight and protecting what’s left of earth. But there wasn’t any reason I could point to in order to explain why I felt it fit so well. Then the flood gates opened… (pun intended. lol)

After I was done playing, I decided to do a Google search and see if anyone noticed the Vera comment. Apparently someone had. Then I found a second. But this second one mentions more. What? That UNSC Sergeant Reynolds is… Nathan Fillion?! Brilliant! I don’t remember noticing his voice, but there was a Sergeant Reynolds mentioned several times during the “Tsavo Highway” and “The Storm” missions, specifically in the Battle of Voi section. I had to investigate more. It turns out that not only did that “Here’s Vera!” sound like Jayne, it was actually Adam Baldwin. Alan Tudyk (Wash) is somewhere in the game too, but I’ve yet to recognize him. Someone on livejournal actually took a screenshot of the voice acting screen in the credits that shows the former Serenity crew members.

As if I needed more reasons to love Halo 3!

I finally got a chance to get a few rounds of Halo 3 in tonight. Was it everything I hoped? Yeah, definitely. There’s so much in it, it’s unbelievable. Bungie’s website for stats tracking goes beyond obsessive. Forge and Theater allow for players to train themselves to incredible levels. Mostly, I can’t wait to go at legendary with Dan. We’re idiots for doing legendary first, but we like it hard. And it will be… very very very hard.

Since I’m rambling, it’s obvious that I love the game even though I’ve played very little so far. But that’s not the main point of the post. As you can see by the title, I have way too many great games to play. But I can’t complain. It’s better than not enough great games to play. Currently, I’m still working on completing Guitar Hero 2 and Bioshock. Plus there’s a few arcade games I need to complete, like Band of Bugs, Catan, Carcassonne and Bomberman Live. Now I have Halo 3 as well. Then there’s Guitar Hero 3, Half Life: Orange Box and Puzzle Quest coming in October followed by Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect in November. Plus, IGN claims that Beautiful Katamari is coming in October and Army of Two in November, though those aren’t likely to make it out by then. Of those, I think I’m looking forward to Mass Effect most. And now I read some really good reviews of Eternal Sonata. I love those good ol’ traditional turn-based japanese-style RPGs and Eternal Sonata certainly looks like a good one. I haven’t had a good one since Xenosaga in 2003 (no, the Kingdom Hearts series doesn’t count, it’s neither a traditional RPG nor turn-based).

I love fall because it’s the best season for video games. Winter is pretty good too because that’s the time I catch up on my game playing.

As far as I know, efforts to hack the Xbox 360 have been mostly foiled by the hardware and software protection onboard (though, yes, I know that certain models with certain drives and at a certain update can be hacked, in this article I will refer to widespread hacks, like the original Xbox has). Why bring this up? I was looking at the Xbox website today and heard about how those who don’t hook their Xbox up to the internet can download updates on their computer, burn them to a CD/DVD and load them into the Xbox with that.

This sounds like an excellent attack vector for Xbox hackers. One small bug in the code for authenicity verification of the software could allow unsigned code to be loaded. Another possibility is that the encryption used on the downloaded files could be broken and their format reverse engineered. This would let you put things on the Xbox and it wouldn’t know the difference between something from Microsoft and something from elsewhere.

This sounds like a fun possibility to me. If only I had the time to devote to such a thing. Oh well, I know there’s people nerdier than me that will do it. Here’s hoping homebrew software on the 360 takes off soon!