That second solo in Green Grass & High Tides is a killer.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, Aaron has put together a list of all of the Rock Band songs available as MP3s through Amazon.

On Sunday morning, I started the Xbox back up and the same grinding noises were there. Knowing that the customer support guy would have me swap out a few discs to make sure it wasn’t limited to Halo 3, I threw in a different disc. The tray immediately ejected. I tried it with several others, and the 360 kept on spitting them back out immediately. It was time to call customer support.

Mohammed was nice, though he stumbled over his script in a few places. He had me try to close the drive tray without a disc in it, and it stayed shut. I put Halo 3 back in, and this time it didn’t spit it back out, so that was good. It did make some grinding noises, and chirped and buzzed like last time my optical drive died. The game didn’t start up and the Xbox dashboard said “Unreadable disc.” Three other discs had the same result.

Says Mohammed, “You’re still under warranty. Do you want me to submit a repair order?”

“Please do,” I replied.

So, I’ll get a return box in 5 to 7 business days and then get a working Xbox back within three weeks. I’m hoping I’ll get one with the new chipset or at least the latest model optical drives. In the meantime, I guess I’ll have time to work on my novel.

I hope it works. There hasn’t been a Wii in stock while I was testing. I guess we’ll see what happens. I realize by publicizing this feed it may reduce the Wii buying chances a bit, but, hey, I’m a nice guy.

So, if you want to try it out, here it is:

Wii Status Feed

Technorati tags: wii nintendo

I am a recovering Everquest addict. I played for about 2 years as a Wood Elf Rogue before I hung up my digital dagger and chain mail. I’ve been clean for almost 2 years now. I know what kind of a hold that kind of game can have on me. Why, then, would I try out Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? Good question. I was visiting my in-laws over the holidays and my brother-in-law had a World of Warcraft account and his friend was able to hook me up with a guest account that came with the Collector’s Edition he had purchased. It gave me 10 days worth of free playtime, so I installed it on my PowerBook.

I rolled up a Dwarvin Hunter and shot through the early levels pretty quickly, completing a great number of extermination and body part collection tasks for the dwarves in my home village. Soon I was able to tame my own pet, so charmed a bear, named him Bjorn, and we were off to kill countless kobolds, gnolls and bandits. Before my free time expired, I visited two large and beautifully rendered cities (Ironforge and Stormwind), flew on the backs of griffins, rode a seemingly anachronistic subway and performed many good deeds for the citizens of the Alliance. Then time ran out, and I could no longer log in.

The presence of so many fairly easily completed quests that helped your character advance quickly was a very refreshing change from my Everquest days. There are many, many quests that you can find and complete within a reasonable amount of time (at least in the early levels). I could almost see myself being pulled in to another quasi-addiction. “Just 3 more kills and this quest is done! And after that, I just have to collect 2 more red bandanas to complete another! Ooh, and after that I’ll almost be to the next level. I might as well keep playing until then.” The presence of so many little goals can compel a player to keep on going, just a little more time than they had planned.

Luckily, I have a powerful anti-addiction force in my life: my wife. She doesn’t like me playing the game more that she thinks I should be playing it. Oh, she’ll let me keep playing, but at the same time she’ll give me That Look. I don’t like That Look. That’s a good thing, I think, since I could keep playing such a game much longer than I should, keeping me from doing other, more constructive things.

After my guess pass time was up, I decided I’d buy a retail box and upgrade my account to a real one, even with The Look. We were at Target, picking up some cat food, so I went over to the electronics department. They were sold out of World of Warcraft. We also had to go to the mall, so I stopped at the video game store. They were sold out of World of Warcraft. I went out the next day; Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA and the PX were all sold out of World of Warcraft. Amazon.com had a ship time of 1 to 2 weeks. Blizzard themselves were sold out. It looks like I’ll have to wait a while before resuming my play.

After the game is is publicly available again, I’m not sure I’ll actually go out and buy it. My addiction was still rather weak when I was forced to quit, and the intervening time will give my system plenty of time to flush the toxins. Blizzard needs to have the product available when a newly-made junky finishes up their free trial—any drug dealer knows that.