PixlBit

Sunday was setup new Xbox 360s day. I got a new R2D2 console and gave my friend my old Xbox 360 Slim who used it to replace his Halo 3 Edition Xbox 360 with the broken drive. Then we had to go through the transfer of data, purchases and licenses. This went well except for one vital hiccup.

I realized that to transfer data from my old Xbox 360 Slim to the R2D2 one would require a $20 transfer cable, but I remembered "E" on Major Nelson's podcast talking about downloading your gamer tag to the new console and then going to Download History and redownloading everything. But what about game saves, I thought. I might lose them by doing that, so I thought of a solution. I moved all my game saves to the Cloud on my old Xbox 360. This worked perfectly. My Cloud saves were still there when I checked on my R2D2 console. Then I did a License Transfer so that all my purchases are associated with my new console. That took a short second or two. Everything was fine, so I handed off my old Xbox 360 Slim to my friend.

He started a data transfer with the transfer cable that he had with his older Xbox 360; the one with the side mounted hard drive (this older transfer cable doesn't have the port for the slim hard drives, so I couldn't use it). His transfer of 100 GB took probably three hours. Then he couldn't remember his password for his gamertag. He had auto sign in on for years. He tried to change it but it didn't work. He went to live chat with someone on the Xbox.com web site and they ended up telling him it would take 30 days to resolve. 

While this was going on, I played the tutorial levels for AirMech Arena, a top down view free-to-play RTS that reminded me strongly of Halo Wars. I had trouble taking a base in the tutorial. They say: create four soldiers and place them outside the walls of the enemy base. So I did, and they got slaughtered. I tried different combos of soldier types and dropping more soldiers, but nothing worked. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I ended up rage quiting, although, I think I'll go back to it because the alure of a free-to-play RTS is too strong in me to resist.

Then I played the tutorial levels for Warface. This is a modern military FPS that is also free-to-play. It seemed just fine, although, it wouldn't let me play the tutorial missions for Medic and Engineer for some reason. 

Both AirMech Arena and Warface have online co-op and I hope to play both of them that way once my friend has his account figured out. 

Having more solo time on my hands, my friend deciding to call someone at Xbox first thing Monday morning, I played some Weapon Shop de Omasse on my 3DS and then did a few missions in EDF 2025 solo. EDF 2025 is not the same solo. Well, it's the same, but not half the fun as when you play co-op. 

So that was my Sunday, funday, not-really-fun-day. Just write this down kids. Always remember your password and don't use auto sign in. It's gauranteed to make you forget your password and have to go through all these security hoops of fire to fix things.