Artless Gamer

Game Boy Advanced

While looking for new material for our blog in hopes of fooling Google into thinking that we’re actually a quality site with regular updates I stumbled over something awesome.

Yes, follow that link. The grand hand-held hero of portable gaming, Nintendo’s Game Boy, has made it into the Strong National Museum of Play and has taken its rightful place in the Toy Hall of Fame. Apparently, that’s quite an accomplishment. I wonder why Masters of the Universe aren’t there, yet.

Quoted from the Hall of Fame entry:

No video-game platform did more to put gamers “on the go” than Nintendo Game Boy. And go they did—bringing their gaming experience to school, to summer camp, and to the back seat of the family automobile. Over the past two decades, Game Boy has become synonymous with portable gaming fun.

We’d like to congratulate Nintendo on this 1000 point achievement and hope that other ingenious contraptions of endless gaming fun will join its ranks in good time. I still don’t see the Commodore 64 there. Does that even qualify as a toy? The Bicycle has made it into the Hall of Fame and that isn’t purely a toy, either.

What does the Future hold for the Toy Hall of Fame? Looking at the sales numbers of the Nintendo DS, it looks like Nintendo may have another one of their products join that list in about 12 to 15 years. Let’s just hope the PSP Go won’t make it there. What an awful piece of junk.

Popularity: 42% [?]

ZOMG. So much memory.

As many have already heard, Microsoft is going to ban the use of unauthorized memory cards with the release of the upcoming Dashboard update. This update will introduce some features such as Twitter, Facebook and LastFM support amongst some other useless addons that will keep me from playing games and instead lurking on Twitter.

I can understand the general panic about this change as even myself have had some issues with save game backups and the lack of readily available official memory units. I have opted not to use any unauthorized hardware and have simply abandoned my old save games that were on my RRoDed Xbox 360.

I can deal with it. At least it gives me a good reason to play all these wonderful games again. What worried me most, though was whether I would be able to still plug in a regular HDD to watch movies.

Good news, then. People in the update preview program have already reported that hacked USB HDDs are still working after the update. To me this means that regular USB drives are still accepted by the Xbox and I can still watch my movies. I hate streaming.

TLDR?

USB HDDs still work after the new XBL update that will ban all unauthorized storage devices.

Popularity: 68% [?]

We’re live and soon you’ll find all the little useful things you won’t find on the manufacturer’s pages.

Popularity: 86% [?]