Last Ever Joypod...

So, if you've been on BXB today then no doubt you've seen that Joypod 9 is our last ever Joypod. And if you've downloaded it then you'll know why.

Basically, there's another Joypod. It's about gaming and has someone called Michael in it. When we discovered this we get a little bit freaked out but some stuff suddenly started to make sence. I'd been getting these really odd e-mails which you can see below:

Hi Elmo,

Hope all is well. I can't believe the next show is going to be the last Joypod. I would just like to congratulate you on one of the finest gaming podcasts out there. Listening to the final show is going to be very hard for me and will be like watching the final episode of 'Keeping up appearances' in which IMO didn't feel like it was the right time to end such a timeless classic. The episode where a bee commits suicide during a recording will be a memory that will live on in my memory forever. Never will future encounters with bees be the same again, ever. You came from no where yet have achieved so much with this podcast and for that you must be so proud. So I wish you luck in the future and hope that you one day are lucky enough to get the break you deserve making a living from Joypod.

Will you ever return?

regards,

Adam Capone

And:

Hi guys,

Just listened to Joypod 4! Fantastic stuff, laugh out loud funny!! The best
gaming podcast around, without a doubt.

Elmo, see you online later (you slag)

love

sladie x

And finally:

Hey guys!

Just listened to the podcast today. What the hell was going on? Why did you put that version of my song on at the end? I really don't appreciate that at all!

Anyways, great guns from bath. Had a wicked time. Shame Michael couldn't make it due to being skint/shit at riding bikes, but ho hum.

The advert midway through for stan's t-shirts though. LOLLAGE! Michael. I always knew you were a massive geek too! 70% Geek!!! LOLED STICKS! Will be crashing your pods like mad when you come down to London for jolly ups.

Take it easy

CJ.

To be honest, I thought they were either coming to the wrong address, or just really elaborate spam and just decided to ignore them except for the one from Sladie which I thought was genuine and replied!

So, while preparing to do Podcast 9 the other night we were messing around on Google and happened to stumble across this page: Michael and Elmo's Podcast further investigation led us to another forum, where the "other joypod" people were discussing our Podcast.

The madness starts here on www.rllmukforum.com at post 469.

If you read the thread from then on you'll see myself, Spike, Slicker and Hallben all turn up and start talking to Michael and Elmo about their Joypod and inviting the guys onto our show.

So, that's why there's no more Joypods. Because we're going to rename our podcasts because someone else got their first and it featured a whole bunch of very weird coincidences. Also, check out episode 4 of their Joypod, as they talk about the 'other Joypod' about 23 minutes in. Great stuff.

So, moving forward we'll be having a new name for the Podcast and we'll be inviting Michael and Elmo to join us and talk about gaming. For the time being, you can enjoy our last Joypod featuring dedicated discussion about UbiDays 2007 as well as a Q&A featuring Jade Raymond, the sexy Producer on Assassins Creed.

Embargo My Ass...Part 2

As I stated in my previous post, I've now found out exactly what the crack was with the 5pm Embargo on UbiDays.

Chris Easton kindly explained that there was a slight communication mix up and that while the press conference stuff wasn't embargoed, hence Eurogamer publishing, the stuff from the second day was.

As I said to Chris, I appriciate that these things happen and that I'm grateful for being invited and for the effort Chris put in to get me there. Sadly, that doesn't change the fact that my preparations for getting the announcements out on BXB almost Live were totally screwed up and any chance of being first with the news had been lost.

Other than the fact I really shouldn't call people from Eurogamer "tossers" or risk becoming their office whipping boy, I'm not sure what other learnings I can take from this incident. Don't believe everything you're told? Knew that one already. Never presume anything? Knew that one too. Don't trust people? That's just harsh. Maybe it's double check everything...

So, to Tom and Ellie, I apologise and thanks for reading my blog!

So, swiftly moving on. We've just published our Splinter Cell:Conviction Preview. I thought it looked awesome!

Embargo My Ass...

Well, I've barely had chance to blog since my return from UbiDays as I've been really busy writing stuff about the event for BXB as well as making full use of the press pack!

We have a thread on BXB which is acting as a content link dump which you can view by clicking here. I also seriously recommend checking out our Naruto Preview here! We'll have more content coming from UbiDays soon and I'll be blogging in more detail tomorrow and Monday so stick around!

Ok, so these press events are always interesting learning curves for myself and this time I learnt something new. Eurogamer are tossers. It's pretty simple really. Myself and the selection of smaller fansites that were kindly invited to the event (thanks to the hard work for Ubi's Chris Easton) were told that everything we saw was embargoed until 5pm on Wednesday 23rd of May.

We all groaned a little but accepted it because everyone at the event was under the same embargo. Of course, it didn't stick. Look here, Eurogamer's sister site Gamesindustry.biz posted the Beowolf announcement literally minutes after it was revealed. Breaking the embargo.

None of us realised until Luke from Play TM came down from his hotel room on the second day of the event and told us Eurogamer had broken the embargo. Nexus.net's Nick Haywood was on the phone to his news reporter in the UK and told him to publish, I wasn't far behind.

Of course, we were over 12 hours late and on the internet, that might as well be a millenium. Apparently, Ubisoft were quite miffed at Eurogamer for doing so but thanks to the 1.2 million people that visit the site, they wouldn't dare do anything and risk losing Eurogamers coverage.

Me. If I'd have broken the embargo. I'd have probably never been supported again and for a site the size of BXB, that's very very bad news.

Perhaps in an ideal world, people will stick to rules and give us newbies a fighting chance. Then again, you could argue that Eurogamer breaking the embargo is what being a journalist is all about.

UbiDays Paris 2007

Well, I'm all set. I've packed my bags with interesting and useful things like shampoo, a toothbrush, at least two pens, some chewing gun and a spare video camera battery so I don't have another drama like Codemasters.

The plan is simple. Eat some fajitas in a minute. Go to bed after Heroes. Get up, drive to Loughborough Station, grab a train to St Pancras, tube to Waterloo and then the Eurostar to Paris. Should be good fun.

I'll be keeping in contact with the team back home to keep BXB's front page updated with fresh and exciting news as it breaks meaning you'll get all the news from the event as soon as it happens.

I hope to do a little sight seeing as well and want to go up the Eiffel as well as visit the Louvre and pretend to be in The Davinci Code for a while. Of course, I'll be getting hands on experience with games from Ubisoft including Assassin's Creed which I'm very excited about seeing.

So, my advice, get sat down in front of BXB for the next few days as we'll have so much exclusive content coming!

If I get a chance, I'll blog from Paris!

Perfect Night In...

Front and Pegg's Perfect Night In was on a week ago today. It was pretty funny and both myself and Ash remarked that it was stunningly similar to what we do when we "hang out" at his house in the evening.

(I seriously can't think of a better term than "hang out")

One thing that was very odd about Front and Pegg's show was that they didn't include anything on video games. They're clearly influenced by them, look at the episode of Spaced with the footage of Resident Evil and Tekken cut into it and used as part of the story.

I'd like to know why they didn't include video games. Channel 4 not thinking gaming is mainstream enough?

Anyway, the show has inspired myself and Ash to film our own 'Perfect Night In' which will cover our tastes and inspirations in movies, TV shows and video games.

We won't be filming for a while because I'm going to Paris on Tuesday for UbiDays but it should be a lot of fun producing something for the BXB Community.

Assault

Wow, what a rather dramatic end to an otherwise normal day at work. I feel like I'm living this weird parallel life to a certain someone who's name shall not be mentioned on my blog.

I'd just clocked out and headed to Provisions to see if a friend Nathan was going out in Ashby tonight. As I rounded the corner, I saw a guy I vaguley know attacking Nathan. He was going "chest to chest", Devvo style, before turning around and walking away. (and kicking over a pile of cardboard).

I was like: WTF?! I turned to ask Nathan what had happened when a customer asked for Hummous. I looked at Nathan and he asked me to help the customer so I took him to the hummous and walked back to ask Nathan what was wrong, and he said the guy had headbutted him.

Myself, Nathan's Manager and Nathan all went in persuit of the guy but lost him in the car park, he seemed to disappear into thin air!

Now, I've got to admit to feeling a bit stupid about taking the customer to the hummous when someone had just been assaulted in the store but Nathan hadn't told me because he was a bit stunned by it all. It was too late to go after the guy.

I've got to leave a statement in the incident book at work and the Police may want a statement as well. But seriously, who the hell thinks head butting someone in a busy supermarket is a good idea. Dickhead!

Sorry, I don't have any exciting pictures to illustrate this incident.

Heroes Theme

Had to wait till I got paid. I've been walking the fine line between being in my overdraft and not for the past two weeks but now that I have...NEW HEROES THEME!

Here's a quick video I took of it...


It's awesome. It's got Claire, Peter Petrelli's death at the high school, Hiro fighting the T-Rex and the stunning/evil Niki/Jessica combination. I love Heroes. It's like my replacement for Battlestar Galactica at the minute and I just can't get enough.

I've not been downloading it via torrents but just watching it on Sci-Fi so I'm behind all the people on BXB and can't go into the Heroes thread for fear of massive spoilers.

There's also some cool gamer pictures, one of which you can see in my gamercard on the right. Well worth the points and actually a bit cooler than the BSG one I have.

Anyway, travel has been confirmed for Paris. I'm getting the Eurostar from London Waterloo around midday. Cannot wait!

Beta Late Than Never...

Words that will give some people little solace as they expected, no DEMANDED, they get the Halo 3 Beta today at 1pm via Crackdown.
It didn't happen. Apparently, it'll be made available 10pm EST which means people in the UK will be able to download it in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

On the other hand, winners of the BXB Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta Competition have already got their codes along with all other XCN site winners and they're very chuffed about it and so am I. Of course, my concern was that the XCN simply wouldn't deliver the codes despite their assurances that they would.

That would have been a painful scenario for all involved.

Preparation for Paris are going well, but annoyingly, I don't know which games I'll be seeing at UbiDays so I can't prepare as much as I'd like.

Bonjour Paris!

Awesome. Just when I thought working on BXB couldn't get anymore rewarding, I've been invited to UbiDays in Paris.


Check out www.ubidays.com for more!

Basically, it's two days of playing on Ubisoft titles that will be released for the next 12 months. I'll be heading out to Paris on the Eurostar a week tomorrow along with a few of the usual suspects including Barrie from ConsoleMonster!

I thought Barcelona and X06 was awesome, but this seems even better! It's just a shame I'm going to the worlds most romantic city with a load of 'geeks' and not, say, Keeley Hazell.

Anyway, there's a few things that I need to tell you about. Firstly, we've just announced our Halo 3 Beta Tournament which is obviously close to the hearts of the community as we're al ready getting entrants and people throwing their advice into the organising mixing pot.

We'll also be announcing BXB's 2007 Community Day very very soon.

Halo 3 Beta

So, I got my code through from MS PR for the Halo 3 Beta.

Thanks for that MS PR, as I wasn't expecting to get one due to the whole "being dropped by XCN" thing.

I've been playing on it all morning and it's fantastically fantastic!

That is all.

MVP

Lisa from Xboxgamezone just grabbed me and asked what an MVP was...

Made me laugh because she's just been nominated for the MVP award! So, congratulations to Lisa and I'm green with envy! I can't think of anyone who deserves the award more...

Oh, I've done a bit of "blagging" and landed myself a spot on the closed World in Conflict Beta. My Mum was well impressed.

Spring Update...

Check out the front page of BXB, can you see the story about the release of the spring update?

No? Why? Because there isn't any actual news about it yet. The Spring Update is due this week and everyone is going nuts waiting for it. It's amazing just how many sites are publishing stories about it not being here, it almost being here, it might be here tomorrow and one even though it wasn't until June thanks to a cock up by IGN.

Chaps, this isn't news. We all know it isn't here yet and we all know it's going to be this week. Instead of just writing worthless words on the subject, just relax, play a little Guitar Hero 2 and wait for it to come along in its own time.

Oh, I heard it'll be out on Thursday.

Spider-Man 3 (movie review) *spoilers*

I actually went to see Spider-Man 3 yesterday, but I've been too busy writing a hands on preview of Overlord and a couple of other things to sit down and put my thoughts down about the movie.

Firstly, let me say that I preferred Spider-Man 2 to Spider-Man due to it being a generally better film. Better acting, better effects and more impressive finale that wasn't spoilt by any terror attacks.

I'm not a huge fan of Spider-Man 3. The bits that should be good are, like the geneisis of Sandman and Venom and the bad ass four way battle at the end between Spidey/Goblin and Venom/Sandman. I was well impressed with how cool it looked when Goblin flamed Sandman and his glass arm shattered. I was even more chuffed when you saw a flash of Eddie Brock's rib cage as he lept back into the symbiote.

Sadly, they seemed to have marred these great bits with a whole lot of pointless rubbish including a whole worthless sequence of Peter Parker turning into an Emo John Travolta. It was embarrasing. That whole scene could have been done in a much darker, simpler way without the need for the pointing or dance routines.

Another big problem, I felt, was that the plot was really choppy. I got really frustrated with it constantly switching between the various plots and sub-plots that were being played out and never really giving us an satisfying chunk of action until the end.

Finally, I feel the baddies weren't good enough. Thomas Haden Church's Flint Marko has an expression set in stone, never mind sand. I know he's perfectly cabable of acting better because he was funny in Sideways. While the CG for the Sandman was absolutely amazing, the actor didn't do the charatcer any justice. The same goes for Venom. A brilliantly realised CG character (that could have been a bit bigger) but lacking a great actor to portray him. Topher Grace just wasn't twisted enough.

Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina both portrayed The Green Goblin and Dr Oc perfectly in the previous two movies and having these top quality actors playing the bad guys is one reason why the previous two movies are better than the third.

I also really began to resent the "family fun" sections like when J. Jonah Jameson bought the camera off the little girl during the awesome end fight. I just wanted to see the awesome end fight.

Kirsten Dunst I've never found particularly convincing as MJ and you can't even get away with saying she's an unconventional beauty. While Toby Maguire was good as the increasingly self obsessed Spider-Man. Just a shame he had to start dancing.

It's gone down in history as the biggest movie/fastest selling/biggest grossing/most people in cinema at one time ever type thing but the critics are not amused and neither is this blogger.

Codemasters Videos

As promised, below you'll find four videos I took at Codemasters on Friday, sorry about the poor quality, I got them using my camera phone as our video camera went a bit mental on us.

First up is some footage of Colin McRae DiRT, the game is visually very impressive and the cars handle very nicely.



Next we have some footage of BXB's Reviews Editor playing DiRT online using the Force Feedback Steering wheel with me as a back seat driver. The FF feels great on DiRT and I'm really tempted to buy one now!



And finally we have Overlord. I'm really looking forward to this game now as I was really impressed with the work the development team have done. It's got a very unique game play style and visually I couldn't fault it. Great stuff.



We'll be publishing Hands On Previews of all three titles on BXB over the next week and also a Q&A with the Overlord developers!

Top Five Funny Things at Codemasters

Ho har! Went to Codemasters yesterday to play on DiRT, SWOS and Overlord. Which was nice and had a lovely day and now feel no urges to name drop.

They gave us a nice tour around the studios that was quite interesting, but not really why I was there. It was cool seeing the insides of the how a developer works but I was more interested in playing Overlord. But I guess that's all part and parcel of the PR guys giving us a positive day.

As Andy pointed out, the reason why we'll be giving Codemasters some very positive coverage from the event is not because of all the nice things they did for us, but because they actually showed some good quality titles.

We'll have previews up on BXB shortly and all three of the games were certainly impresssive with Overlord winning the day for me personally due to the cool game play. I think Andy was won over by SWOS and DiRT just rocked hard.

Anyway, onto the main topic of this entry:

The BXB Top Five Funny Things We Saw in Codemasters...

1) A man relaxing in a room full of comfy chairs reading the 'We hate Sony because they slaughtered a goat' Daily Mail. How I laughed.
2) A very large amount of cookery books stacked up on some tables.
3) Ade from MSxboxWorld doing a great American Tourist impression with his fancy HD Camera, even filming us walking down stairs.
4)An unamed member of the Codemaster's team being caught on video saying less than positive things about another major publisher.
5) The DiRT development team enjoying Guitar Hero 2 on their lunch break.

While probably the most awkward moment was being stuck in a soundproof room with the XCN Manager "Aceybongos" and not having anything to say at all. Nothing. *bites fist*

Anyhoo, we had some technical issues on the day and the video camera gave in so I had to film some of the games on my phone which didn't lead to the best quality videos, which is a real shame. I'll post them later anyway.

Branching Out...

Not content with our amazing range of features over the last few weeks including the cool GH2 Guide, our Jopypod and the Community Awards, we're also deversifying into Gardening!

Check out Episode 1 of the BXB Garden Time presented by myself!



Awesome!

Pinch and a Punch...

It's the first of May and if you're not too busy dancing around a May Pole (something I dreaded at school) then you can read our latest thrilling traffic and stats press release from BXB.

Tuesday May 1st, Leicester, UK: Britxbox.co.uk, one of the UK's leading Xbox and Xbox 360 sites has announced traffic figures for the month of April 2007.

Britxbox.co.uk received a total of 59,593 unique hits which is a 2.6 per cent increase compared to March 2007. April also saw a total of 598,523 page views with a daily average of unique hits reaching 1986.

Ashley Allen, Director of Britxbox.co.uk commented: “We chose to start using Google Analytics to track of figures as we believe it's important to provide publishers, developers and partners with traffic stats that are independently gathered and can be trusted.

“In light of this we've decided to allow third party access to our Google Analytics account which will allow the recipents of this press release the opportunity to verify our figures themselves.

“We're proud of our achievements at BXB and have absolutely nothing to hide. The question we're asking publishers, developers and partners to consider is why aren't all of BXB's competitor sites as open and honest about their traffic figures as we are?

“Checking our stats for yourself could not be any easier. All you have to do is reply to this e-mail requesting the login details and we'll send them over to you straight away.”

[Ends]

If you'd like any more information on Britxbox.co.uk or would like to get involved with any of the initiatives we're currently running please contact Michael Rossell on mike@britxbox.co.uk.

Taking the step to open our books to publishers, developers and partners is certainly a risky move for anyone as it gives them total access to our traffic stats and could royally bite us in the ass.

But lying about traffic figures is as common on the internet as porn and everyone does it. Everyone. Frankly, I don't trust any of the traffic figures I'm shown unless they're independently gathered and I see the account for myself. It's not really a dramatic criticism of the state of the internet, just a rather unfortunate truth.

So, now, if you wish to check out our traffic figures and have a legitimate reason to do so, then you can.