Point-and-Click Escape Games are Great!

Point-and-click games are the ones in which you find yourself in a room or place, and have to go around looking for items or clues that will help you unlock doors or solve a chain of puzzles that would ultimately lead to your escape. I really enjoy them, and wanted to post a couple of resources that I've been using to find these games.

CTV's Kris Abel used to point one out every No Escape Friday. It looks like this isn't an active focus for him anymore, but it remains a great place to browse. Once in a while, he would also post a game that might not be filed under the 'escape' category but is still enjoyable, such as the recent Ugly American - Citizen Ugly.

Jay is Games is another great resource. On top of listing games, this site also hosts walkthroughs, which you can consult when you're really stuck in a game.

Try one... you might like it!

New cars and track in Forza Motorsport 2

New cars and the Road America track were just made available to download in Forza Motorsport 2. It's cool to be able to purchase and download new content through Xbox Live, but I think I'm not going to be able to keep track of just how much money I've put into this game soon! :-)

One of the new cars is the 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, which I attempted to drift for fun:



I like this shot because it shows a curved trail of smoke on top of the trail of rubber!

Accessing Digital Media from the Xbox 360

Is your Xbox 360 hooked up to the biggest TV and the best audio system in the house? If so, you might want to browse the videos, pictures, and music stored on your other computer. I thought you have to run Windows Media Center for this to be possible, but it turns out you can just run something called TVersity.

Install it, then use the provided user interface to pick which files/folders are available for browsing.

Once you get this running, how will your Xbox 360 know that it's there? The Xbox 360 looks for a media server broadcasting its presence on the network. For this to work:

• The Xbox 360 and your computer have to be 'on the same network'. I don't know exactly what this means (same subnet?), but basically, if both of these are going through the same router, you're ok.
• The computer's firewall needs to allow this new type of network traffic. On Windows XP, these are called Exceptions. There're two exceptions:
  • uPnP Framework (TCP 2869 and UDP 1900) - this entry's probably already there but might not be enabled yet
  • TVersity Media Server (TCP 41952) - you have to add this port yourself

At this point, you should be able to browse media through the Xbox 360 Dashboard menus. Instead of picking Console, pick Computer. If all is well, you should then see something like 'TVersity on XXX', where XXX is the identity/name of your computer.

Good luck!

Finally Purchased a Xbox 360

Recently, my friends executed their evil ploy of giving me a video game for a game system which I don't own. The game was Forza Motorsport 2. I played the original so much on the original Xbox that I just had to play this one, so I finally bought a Xbox 360 last night.

I hooked it up to my LCD TV and found that the TV was capable of doing 1080i, which looks very nice. Love the wireless controller (you should've seen the mess of cables when there're four of us playing Halo 2 with headset splitters!). Not sure why the 20 GB hard drive came with half the capacity already used up, but whatever (apparently, there's space reserved for emulators and CD databases).



Forza Motorsport 2 has been great so far! You can "feel" and hear the tires as you speed through the turns. There is now a 'photo mode' where you pause the scene and can freely place a camera to take a shot of the action. To get that photo onto your computer though, you have to go through a two-step process:

1. Upload the photo from the game.
2. On your computer, download the photo from the website (by signing in with your Live ID).

The picture above is an example. It's one of me attempting to drift my first career car (1990 RX-7) through a corner. Whee!

BlockBuster Not Renting Out New Gaming Systems

While renting a couple of movies from BlockBuster, I asked the clerk when the Nintendo Wii would be available for rental. He told me that because many people don't treat rental systems well, BlockBuster is not going to make the new generation of systems (I guess that means Wii, PS3, Xbox 360) available for rental.

This is bad news for me. As gaming systems get more expensive, renting a system would be a great way to do a test-drive before making a big investment. That's how I decided to get a PlayStation way back when (rented the system and Final Fantasy VII from BlockBuster).

What does that mean? I guess you better make sure you have friends who are willing to splurge on new systems when they come out! :-)