The excellent European board game Ticket to Ride is coming to the Xbox 360 today. The game will feature local and online multiplayer. At 800 points the game seems like a must-buy. I hope they will release the other countries/games as expansions.

Thanks to Arsian and 360 gaming buddy Agreschn for the reminder.

Microsoft responded to the availability issues of online service Xbox Live! by offering a free game to their customers. I had originally hoped that they would offer users a 800 Microsoft Point credit towards any game(s) they wanted, but Microsoft announced that they were giving away Undertow instead. I downloaded the Undertow demo when it first came out, and I played it for about five minutes before quitting. Oh well, any free game is better than no free game, right?

Undertow will be available for free until Sunday, January 27th. Ars Technica is reporting that Xbox Live! is already suffering from mass downloads, so you may have to be patient.

I buy a lot of stuff, and sometimes my highest hopes turn out to be the biggest disappointments. I’ve evaluated the things I’ve purchased last year, with an eye to what I use on a regular basis that Gibberish readers may use often as well. Sure, I “use” my Keltec PF-9 every day when I carry it, but most of you don’t have carry permits and its appeal is not as universal as this year’s winner. Here’s a look back at the best and worst gadgets covered on Gibberish in 2007.
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I posted about my Rock Band drum troubles earlier in the week. The good news is that EA was super quick about sending me a new drum kit: second day air at their expense. The bad news is that the new drum set still has the same problems as my old one. I guess I could have gotten another “bad rev,” but I am not going to bother with returning this set. I still have all of the original packaging and will take the whole game back to Target at some point this weekend for a refund.

Oh well … that really sucks, but I have plenty of other 360 games to play.

I was super excited when I opened my Rock Band: Special Edition box. The box was huge — weighing in at almost thirty pounds — and jammed to the gills with fun stuff like a drum kit, microphone, and a wired guitar. I put everything together and played a few songs on the guitar before settling down at the drums.

I was stoked at first, but the longer I played Rock Band, the more disappointed I became.
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From today until Friday, you can download the Xbox 360 version of Carcassonne for FREE. I think most of my friends already have this, but if you don’t, please please download it! It’s fun, and I could always use some more folks to play with online.

One of the best things about the Xbox 360 is the Live! service. The free “Silver” level allows you to do a lot, like send and receive voice/text messages, buy and play games via the Xbox Live Arcade, and try out demo versions of games before you buy. One thing the Silver level does not allow you to do is play games online with other people. For that, you need the “Gold” level of service, and that runs you $50USD a year. I spent almost $500 when I got my Elite and one game, and the last thing I wanted to do was shell out another $50 for online play.

There had to be a cheaper way to get access to Live!, wasn’t there? I started snooping around on the Internet, and here are two easy ways to get a year’s worth of Live! Gold for less than retail. You can upgrade online immediately via your 360 for $50.00 a year with a credit card. You can also buy subscription cards (think pre-paid mobile phones) from various vendors, including Best Buy, Target, and so on.

However, not all vendors are charging the same amount, and there are a few deals to be had.
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I was intrigued when I first saw pictures of the Xbox 360 controller chat pad. It’s a little keyboard that snaps onto the bottom of a 360 controller. The form factor looked really cool, and who wants to thumbstick around a virtual keyboard when you have to type shit in? Better yet, the chat pad was only $30. Inexpensive enough for a Gibberish experiment. I went to Best Buy and picked one up two days after it launched in September.
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Almost a year and a half ago I wrote about an underground Battlestar Galactica PC game based off of the Freespace 2 engine. A demo for Beyond the Red Line was released, but work is still spotty on the ambitious independent project. In the meantime, Sierra Online has announced that an official BSG game for the PC and Xbox 360 is set for release on October 24, 2007. The game will feature single- and multi-player modes. The single-player part of the game will feature ten missions from the television series. The multi-player component is your typical deathmatch, team deathmatch modes, with a “domination” game that I didn’t completely grok at first glance. Unfortunately absent is multi-player co-op of the single-player missions.

It really irks me that publishers focus so much on online player vs player. There aren’t enough co-op games out there, and BSG would have been an obvious choice. I might have considered spending the 800 Microsoft Points ($10USD) for the game on XBLA, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it to me to just play ten missions.

This isn’t going to be news to anyone who owns an Xbox 360 already, but since I’m a recent 360 owner you’re going to read about it anyway. 360voice takes each player’s publicly viewable gamer card and turns it into a blog. You can not only see what your friends played most recently (which the 360 default gamer card already shows), but allows you to observe gaming and achievement habits over time. It also displays my longest consecutive gaming streak — seven days — as well as how I rank against other gamers. As you can see from my activity I’ve been playing a lot of Xbox Live Arcade games, such as Catan and Aegis Wing. I’ve also been playing a lot of Lost Planet, one of my current rentals from GameFly.

Here’s a particularly gushing entry:

We played games yesterday… No really… I have proof! DrFaulken might have told you otherwise, but we really did. 865 points of total gamerscore means we are teh awes0me! That is an increase of 30 points over last time! He played LOST PLANET, Catan acquiring 1 achievement, Aegis Wing finishing 2 achievements, and then it felt like he threw my controller and I was like, TAKE IT EASY SHEESH and we stopped.

I am not sure if my 360’s blog will be of any long term interest, but for now it’s an interesting way for me to reflect on what I’ve been playing. I didn’t think I was playing so much Forza 2 until I saw it was ranked #1 amongst all of the games so far. I wish there was an easier way to compare my gaming history against my friends; that’s one big advantage the native Microsoft implementation has over 360voice. For now, I enjoy reading my 360 pine away for me to play with it.