I decided to check out the demo on the XBOX Live Marketplace for Sonic the Hedgehog. It was a 350MB download. That was good news since I had less that 1GB free on my XBOX 360 hard drive.

I thought my XBOX 360 had locked up once I loaded the game. I was stuck at a black screen for about 20 seconds. During that time, the controller was not responsive. That had me cringing. The last time that happened, I was out $130 and had to send my XBOX 360 back to Microsoft.

Once in the game, I noticed a slick UI. The loading screen and splash screens looked vivid and crisp in 720p.

I hopped into the first level and noticed the graphics. They were last-gen HD in my opinion. They looked good, as good as Sonic has ever looked, but these graphics aren’t pushing the 360. Still, it was great playing Sonic on a Microsoft console.

It’s been a huge news day for XBOX fanboys. The meat? Microsoft announces new HALO titles available exclusively for the XBOX 360.

HALO Wars is the next big real-time strategy game from Ensemble Studios, creators of Age of Empires. Designed exclusively for the Xbox 360, “Halo Wars” allows you to take charge of the human UNSC armies and see the Halo universe from a totally new perspective. It is being developed by Ensemble Studios. Go check out the HALO Wars website at http://halowars.com.

Peter Jackson was on hand at X06 to announce that he and Fran Walsh are creating two new interactive HALO series for the XBOX 360 and XBOX Live Arcade. It’s a brand new game based on the HALO intellectual property. For now, the will be little details about the type of game this series will be. Here’s hoping it’s a MMORPG.

Also, it appears the HD-DVD player for the XBOX 360 is going to be $200 in the US. That’s not a bad price and much lower that I thought it would be. But still, I’ve got to be convinced that I need one.

Head on over to XBOX.com for more details.

I swung by Wal-Mart on the way home hoping to find the XBOX Live Vision Camera accessory for my XBOX 360. Target didn’t have any in stock the day before. Sure enough, WallyWorld had at least four for $39. The kit came with an extra headset, 1-month of XBOX Live Gold (claim code), and UNO (claim code). I added the 1-month to my existing XBOX Live Gold Membership. I’m currently good through Jan 2008. I headed home to check this thing out.

Hooking up the USB camera was easy. I just plugged the camera into one of the front USB ports on the XBOX 360 and I was ready to go. No installation. No setup was necessary. This camera will also work with Windows XP and Windows Vista.

At the Tokyo Game Conference Microsoft announced their HD-DVD addon drive will be available in Japan on November 17th for about $200US. That's a killer price for an HD-DVD player. Here's hoping that we'll see that price here in the US.

However, I had to wonder why I would want to have that device. We don't watch many DVD's since we've got a new RAVE Movie Theatre, Comcast's VoD library, and an HD-DVR recording all kinds of content.

Will game developers start shipping their games on HD-DVD discs instead of DVD's? I think in time they will.

Microsoft just announced that a software update is headed toward your XBOX 360. The update will allow for 1080p video playback. The software update will allow non-1080p content to be upscaled to 1080p. Although no games currently are designed for 1080p, gaming at 1080p will happen in the future. Game developers can now start making games for 1080p playback. Unfortunately, I doubt that Bungie has Halo 3 ready for 1080p.

Most HDTV’s won’t do 1080p. However, 1080p sets are now hitting the market at near the same price at 1080i and 720p sets.

Some weird stuff happened today in Texas Hold 'Em for XBOX Live Arcade. I was delt a pair of 10 of clubs several times in a row. Read: I had two 10's of clubs in my pocket. Not only that, but twice I was delt only one card and it was...guess what...the 10 of clubs.

In all, it was a terrible gaming experience for me. I waited near 35 minutes to play the game and I never got to play. I joined up and had to wait 7 hands before I could play. At a full table with people making a lot of bets, this took 15-20 minutes before I was even allowed to play. With one hand left to go before I could play, someone quit out. This, for some reason, set me back. I now had to wait 3 more hands.

Microsoft have released the Zune. Is it an iPod-killer? Or is it something else? I'll write back after I get one. The final price: $229.99.

Lot's of Zune info here: http://www.zuneinsider.com/

As I wrote over at halo2pc.org, Windows Vista RC1 is not available to all nubs. Read the instructions and get to testing - with caution. I've been on the beta a while and, well, I've had some problems. Be careful.

The Yahoo! mail beta is open to the public today. If you are a Yahoo! mail user, I recommend this upgrade. It offers much of the same functionality as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. This isn't a Gmail-killer, but it is a huge advancement for webmail. Gmail and other services will no doubt feel the pressure and improve their AJAXiness.

I've been on the beta for several months and really like it over the old HTML/static Y! mail. Give it a try and don't forget to right-click.

Go to: Yahoo! mail

The new cooked Gamers website is live at http://cookedgamers.net. The look is mostly stable. I'm adding more features by the week. Watch out for new CPL videos from synide (once he gets finished encoding them).

Microsoft got a new XBOX 360 Core system back to me today. I sent my old system off on August 31 to a repair station in Texas. Today, 14 days later, I have a different XBOX 360 core system to game with. I plugged in my old XBOX 360 harddrive, ran through a few setup screens, and was online and gaming in less than a few minutes. In all it cost me $130 plus 800 Microsoft Points (because I couldn't download the free version of Texas Hold 'Em while the box was broken). Oh well. Such is life.

By the way, I find it odd that I've got to redownload the Halo 2 Bonus Maps to play them even though they are already stored on my XBOX 360 harddrive.

Thanks goodness I installed a spam filter on cookedgamers.net when I had the chance. I have to admit I haven't touched the backed of that site in quite a while. After doing some upgrades to the Drupal-powered site and preparing it for a relaunch, I noticed that I had a lot of comment spam in my database. Nearly 60,000 pieces of spam.

So, I went into my SQL database and ran

delete from comments where status = '1'

which resulted in:

Deleted rows: 56779 (Query took 4.2604 sec)

The cG.net comments database table went from being 85MB to 320KB in filesize after the deletion and optimization.

Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for the XBOX Live Vision Camera and they’ve got two pretty sweet deals:

$33 - camera + headset + UNO (full) and TotemBall (full) + 1 mo. XBL gold
$60 – camera + headset + UNO (full), TotemBall (full), Robotron (full) + 200 MS points + 12 mo. XBL gold

Looks like my Windows Mobile 5.0 device is going to be getting some more lurve. XBOX Live is headed to Windows Mobile.

Scoop 1: http://msmobiles.com/news.php/5538.html
Scoop 2: http://mobilitytoday.com/news/xbox_live_smartphone_exclusive.html

You can bet the Zune will have this feature installed in it. This news plus EVDO being installed in the area means that I am one step closed to plugging into the matrix.