The second one died, of course, about another 6 months from the first.  I’d left it dead on the floor for a number of months, swearing I would call Microsoft tomorrow, ultimately never getting around to it.  I finally decided I would just get another, newer Xbox 360, just so I could have two, get a newer 60gb drive, and be sure that I wasn’t going to get a warranty repair unit with the same internal architecture as the first two.  The newer Xbox 360s have some substantial internal changes that supposedly make them less susceptible to the RRoD.

So, then it was just a matter of getting my saved game data from one drive to the other…

Initially, I just used the original 20gb drive on the newer 360, but the new dashboard feature of copying a game to the 360 hard drive for faster load times meant that I was going to need more space, and fast.

I’d bought an XSATA kit from Datel about a year ago after my Forza 2 profile got corrupted.  I thought maybe there was some way to recover the saved data (which I had spent about 15 hours on), but ultimately it proved to be a futile attempt. 

I figured I could make some use of it now, though, and use it to copy the saved games on my 20gb hard drive to the new 60gb unit.  The first problem I ran into, though: the original Xplorer 360 program that came with the Datel kit only recognized the original 20gb Xbox 360 hard drives, and not the newer 60gb and 120gb drives.  That is to say: it recognized the 60gb drive, but it didn’t display any of the contents of Partition 3, where all of the saved game data is supposed to be stored.  So I was able to back up the original drive, but not able to restore any of the data to the 60gb drive.

It took a little searching, but I finally found a more recent release of Xplorer 360 (right on the place I should’ve been looking in the first place) on Datel’s website.  Datel renamed the program, from Xplorer 360 to Xport 360, which made it a bit harder to find.  The current version of Xport is 1.12, and was released on October 27th, 2008.  So, without further ado, here are the steps for transferring your saved games from a 20gb drive to a 60gb drive:

1.) Connect the 20gb drive to the XSATA (or if you’re using the Datel Xport, connect the drive to the Xport unit), connect the USB connection to your PC (and install the drivers if necessary) and back up the original 20gb drive with Xport 360.  This will create a full 20gb .bin image on your local hard drive, so be sure you have enough space before proceeding.

2.) If you want to move only selected content and saved games from the original drive, open the image you created with Xport and expand Partition 3.  Under the folder "Content", you’ll find a list of sub-folders.  Each of the sub-folders is a profile.  The one with all zeros is the downloaded content directory.  In my case, I wanted only the saved games from a few select profiles, so I copied over the ones that I cared about.

3.) Connect the newer 60gb drive to the XSATA unit and load Xport 360 again.  Drag and drop the original profiles that you expanded on your local hard drive back onto the 60gb drive under Partition 3, and place them in the same Content folder.

4.) Re-connect the 60gb drive to your Xbox 360, boot up and make sure that everything copied correctly.

I kept the 20gb backup image (and compressed it) just in case I need to recover a saved game in the future, or in case there was something else I wanted to pull from the old drive.  This method is also good in general if you want to periodically back up your Xbox hard drive (in case of catastrophic Xbox 360 drive failure).

Note: I don’t recommend buying into the story that you can re-use other people’s saved games to gain achievement points.  Microsoft caught on to that scheme really early on, and started banning people from Xbox Live who were caught doing it.  And besides, that’s flat out cheating.  What good are achievement points if you didn’t really earn them by playing through the game?

According to the article:

Investigators allege the pair made $10,000 a month by managing an illegal offshore video sharing website with 400,000 international members, including thousands of "VIPs" who paid up to $10 a month for access to direct downloadable media.

It is alleged the men facilitated the transfer of more than 10,000 terabytes of information, equivalent to 14.3 million copies of videos and television programs.

I think the article misrepresents the true number of individual TV shows and movies that were actually pirated by the two men.  If the total transferred data amounted to 10,000 terabytes, it could’ve only been a few hundred videos transferred to several thousand peers.  If the pair were only making about $10,000 a month for $10/month service fees, they probably only had around 1,000 subscribers.

The trading of videos online will likely subside once more fairly priced and legitimate services are available that allow consumers to download or stream videos legally. 

My personal favorite at the moment is Netflix Instant.  If you’re an Xbox Gold subscriber, and you have a Netflix account – even one that only allows one DVD out at a time – you can watch Netflix Instant direct from your Xbox.  The video quality is fantastic, there’s a growing selection of current movies and TV shows, and the great thing is that it’s all legal.

Why else would members of this site be willing to pay $10 a month to download all the movies and TV shows?

Review:

The Saints Row series is a clone of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto.  Nonetheless, THQ did a great job making a fun game with the first Saints Row, and Saints Row 2 is a complete re-build of the entire game.

The first Saints Row was pretty glitch-y.  You’d be driving along in a car, minding your own business, and the car would hit a curb and fly into the air several thousand feet.  Or worse, the game would just lock up entirely.  Saints Row 2 is much more stable.  There are still a few glitches, but none really detract from the overall playability.

Despite being an obvious clone of Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row 2 offers a lot of unique and actually fun side-missions, unlike the pointless and half-finished side missions of Grand Theft Auto IV.  My favorite: mayhem.  Go to a specific district and blow stuff up as fast as you can (with unlimited ammo).  Definitely a good stress buster!

Tips:

- Yes, there are cheat codes for this game.  But if you’re playing the Xbox 360 version, the cheats disable the ability for you to earn achievement points, plus the game is actually pretty easy if you just play straight through it, so don’t bother with the cheat codes.

- Stop a taxi and write down the number on the side of the car.  Enter it into your mobile phone at least once so that you can call a taxi.  It saves a bunch of time to take a taxi across town instead of having to drive yourself. (Note: taxi’s aren’t available during most missions, though.)

- Spend the money you earn early and often on clothing and accessories.  These increase your style ranking, and that increases the amount of respect you earn for side-missions.  Once you earn enough respect (x60), you’ll have infinite respect, allowing you to retry the main story missions and strongholds without having to drain your respect meter.

- Buy the stores in the neighborhoods you control.  They earn you extra money that you can collect at your hideout.  Also, play all the stronghold missions as soon as they become available.  This allows you to quickly extend the number of stores and neighborhoods earning you cash.

- The old car entry glitch from the original Saints Row still exists: jump on top of any car and press Y to enter the car immediately without having to throw the passenger out.

- Complete Snatch Level 6 (Downtown) in order to unlock the unlimited SMG ammo reward.  This will make all the missions much easier.  You can complete Snatch much easier if you hijack an FBI Bear vehicle.  It can carry 4 passengers (including the driver), it has a top-mounted machine gun, and it’s nearly indestructible.  To obtain an FBI Bear, raise your wanted level to 5 stars and look for the huge vehicles with the FBI lettering on the side.  Jump in and toss it into your garage to keep it for later.

According to Microsoft:

Strong game sales rounded out a historic Black Friday for Xbox 360, with record-paced software sales continuing for key Microsoft titles, such as “Gears of War 2,” “Fable II,” and “Lips.” Xbox 360 continues to have the highest game attach rate of any console at 8.1 games per console.

“We entered into the Black Friday sales period with cautious optimism, knowing that dollar for dollar, Xbox 360 offers more social entertainment value than any other console on the market,” said Don Mattrick, senior vice president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “Record Black Friday sales in the U.S., coupled with our existing global install base of 25 million and an online community of more than 14 million Xbox LIVE members, have laid the groundwork for continued global sales momentum in 2009.”

Considering that, according to Forbes, Microsoft just about breaks even with sales of its Xbox 360 console, the high attach rate for games and millions of Xbox Live subscribers is key to Microsoft making any money from the Xbox platform.

Meanwhile, in the same article by Forbes, Nintendo is rolling in money from the success of the Wii, making $6 on each console sold, and selling more of its own game titles than any other platform.

I never played the original Midnight Club Racing for the PS2, but I did play Need for Speed:  Underground on the original XBOX.  Anyone that’s played NFSU will recognize the similarities right away.  I’m not sure which came first, the original Midnight Club or NFSU, but it seems to me that NFSU was the blueprint for Midnight Club LA.

This game is really hard, even by racing standards.  I’m a big fan of racing games, and it was pretty challenging even for me.  The most annoying part is that it’s really easy to go off course, and once  you’ve gone too far off course, you just have to re-start the race.  That gets old pretty fast.

The best part of the game is the car editing.  If you don’t like car editing, and you hate races that are hard to beat, then you’ll probably hate this game.

Tips:

- Buying faster cars and adding performance parts just puts you in different brackets.  It’s not exactly easy to just go buy a fast car and race.  You’ll always end up on the line with cars that are just about as fast as yours because they’re in the same class.  Try to keep your performance level at the top of whatever class you want to race in (I usually use B-Class, for example), and try to max out acceleration.  Don’t worry about speed or handling.

- It’s worth it to go through and find the hidden barrels (map) in the game.  Finding the hidden barrels will allow you to enable cheats from the settings menu.  The cheats themselves are actually worthless: you can’t gain cash or rep, or progress your career.  However,  if you find 50, you can get the “No Police” cheat, which is useful in case you either need to escape the police after a race or if you need to travel all the way across the map to start a race and don’t want to get hassled.

- To level-up easier, and get cash fast, the best tip is to wait until one of your friends calls you to start a race that you determine.  Accept the race (make sure your cheats are off first!) and use the Ordered Race map called Welcome to Hollywood.  Select the “Easiest” level and you should be able to win just about every time in about 45 to 60 seconds.  As long as you keep selecting “Race Again” at the end of the race, you can keep repeating the race.  This is the fastest way to gain cash in the game.