Top Gun Freebie on GH3, Weekend F1 Silverstone.

I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this weekend. This will be the first time in a month that I actually have a whole weekend to myself. All three previous weekends have been taken up by work.

Today is Independance day in the US. Let’s hope that alien spaceship with it’s big laser can take out George W. Bush properly this time. Wouldn’t the world be so lucky.

Remember the film Top Gun, that cheesy movie from the 80’s with Maverick, Goose, Cougar and Iceman and of course the very sexy Charlie played by Kelly Mcgillis?

or do you remember the catchy theme tune (anthem) that was played every time Maverick did something stupid like ‘a fly past‘ which Commander Mike "Viper" Metcalf gave strict instructions not to do.

Do you remember it? - Well if you don’t, then fear not as I know someone who can hum it for you (Hey James, is it ok if I give out your mobile number 07955 555 555).
Anyway, because it’s a holiday today for some reason XBOX 360 have released the Top Gun Theme tune for free to all Guitar Hero III fans. James and I have downloaded it already, and it’s pretty awesome. I just wish I was sitting in that cockpit, but playing a guitar and flying would be a problem. I’ve completed it with five stars already on Medium difficulty. It was a little tricky in the middle, but the rest is easy.  

Still on the topic of Guitar Hero, I bought the Aerosmith pack. It’s very cool, although there are only 41 songs, and most of them are not their main hits, which is a shame. The best songs for me is ‘Livin on the edge and Love in elevator‘. It is a lot easier that Guitar Hero III for some reason or other, although that is a bad thing, because it gives one a chance to tackle some of the harder levels.

Moving on… this weekend is action packed although if you can call Wimbledon in the rain action packed, then there is clearly something wrong with you. The Andrew Murray game the other day was exciting, but I can’t imagine another game like that this weekend.

There is also Formula 1 at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix (for how much longer Damon Hill)?

My money is on Kimi and Ferrari to hopefully ditch the bad luck and show the rest of the pack just how fast they are. Lets hope Massa doesn’t steal his thunder again and we can only hope and pray that the arrogant **** of an idiot in Mclaren only crashes himself and no one else. (Perhaps Lewis should swap places with his Daddy… although they are both accident prone). I read somewhere that they were on a yacht recently or in a race of some sorts and their yacht crashed into another boat before the race even begun. 

Saw an interesting article on the Idiot over at PaddyPower.com about his decision to live in Switzerland. It’s quite funny, you should read it.

Damn, I see Coulthard is planning to retire soon. That is a shame. Pity Button is doing the same. He has no future where he is at the moment.

Please note: My comments on this site are purely my thoughts and feelings and since it’s my website, if you don’t like what you read, then you can quite easily go else where.

Guitar Hero vs Rock Band Compatibility Test.

So it turns out if you own Guitar Hero 3 and want to play Rock Band solo, there is no need to fork out for the expensive game and guitar, because you can use your ‘Les Paul’ from Guitar Hero 3 in the Rock Band game, but alas, if you are a Rock Band player, your luck is out if you think you can use your ‘Stratocaster’ in Guitar Hero 3…

Suckers who bought that game first!!!!

And contrary to most peoples belief, Guitar Hero 3 is an absolutely awesome game!

If you want to see the rest of the compatibility test, then head over to Joystiq for the full test.

Life boils down to 2 choices.

I know this topic is already covered over at Guinnespig.net, so I decided to add a different spin to it, especially if one doesn’t have either of what was discussed on their site. Apple iPod or Nokia N95 Sony Playstation 3 or Microsoft Xbox 360

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

Now here’s a game that I could play for hours. I’ve waited for months in order to make a saving, while everyone has raved about this game. On the weekend I was in Zavvi (the old Virgin mega stores - apparently Richard Branson sold his shares so the company rebranded). Anyway, I saw the wireless plastic guitar and game all in one box, and thought I must have that game, and I have absolutely no regret, in buying it. We (my lovely wife) and I have been playing it non stop. It’s that good. Image from EuroGamer. Click the link for an excellent review. There is no point me telling you something that is already covered in their review. They give it a 9 out of 10, and I would pretty much agree. It’s excellent and highly addictive. Just a pity I had to go to bed.

Wow! - Synology now supports NFS.

I recently upgraded my Synology Diskstation (DS-106e) with the latest firmware 0518, and unbelievably my XBOX360 is now recognizing all my music, photos and video under it’s media (blue) blade. Up until now, this has been a major frustration in my book, since it’s never worked. So well done to Synology!

It’s all because they now have NFS service support. OK, you have to run a few commands on your NAS to get it working, but it’s prety simple.

The weekend of fun and games.

I downloaded Windows Vista RC1 (beta) last week, and decided to install it over the weekend. The installation went "surprisingly" well with no hicups. The operating system found all the correct driver and everything works. Well almost everything. My McAfee Anti-Virus didn’t want to work. It says it’s "not compatible".  Great!, I just hope McAfee realize this in their next update. Below is a screen shot of my desktop. It really looks good. I like the widget bar on the side, especially since you can have the latest RSS news feeds and a slide show of photos. It even picked up my village where I stay and shows the weather.

I have already hooked up the media centre to my Xbox 360, as it’s got full media extender functionality built in and I can say it works really well. My current media extender does not work correctly with the Xbox 360 and I have to load 3rd party software to transcode the video files to the Xbox 360. Vista does it for you, which is quite impressive. One thing I have noticed is that Vista is memory hungry and having 512MB of RAM is ok, it works, but it’s a bit sluggish. My test machine has 512MB. 1GB would be more ideal, and if you’ve got more than that, then you will not have a problem.  So it’s upgrade time (shhhhh don’t tell Mrs. B).

Talking XBOX 360, we have been playing Table Tennis. This game is very addictive. I made the biggest mistake and showed my wife the game, thinking she would take one look at it, and think "not her thing". Another mistake was to tell her that she would be crap at it, because it has a lot of buttons. We played the first game, and she was totally useless, and I thought (ha!), here is a game I could win at. Then she did the tutorial and after that I never won another game. (frustration).

The moral of the story: Don’t show your partner the game in the first place, that way you’ll never know how crap you really are.

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