Islandgamers Blog

Micron announced the current fastest SSD drive on the market. The RealSSD C300 boasts a SATA 6GB/s interface and read/write speeds of  375/225MB/s . To give you some idea of the comparions, the leading SSD Competitor only managed 260/105 MB/s .

You may ask whether you can really appreciate that speed difference in practical usage, and the answer is yes. Yes you certainly will notice that difference.

In fact, purchasing an SSD drive for your otherwise average PC is the single most effective update you can possibly make on your PC. The SSD drive will totally change the way you work and play, making everyday tasks on your computer much quicker and improving your overall experience tremendously.

take a look at the comparison movie here:

Micron Innovations Blog.

Robert Bowling of Infinity Ward twittered that patch 1.06 is currently in certification at Microsoft and Sony and include the long awaited Javelin exploit fix.

1.06 for the PS3 and Xbox360 will include the Javelin fix,care package glitch fix, and various fixes for areas where players could get stuck in the game’s geometry.

The approach from Microsoft and Sony to this couldn’t have been more different. Microsoft almost immediately moved to ban several Xbox Live players who were found to be using the in-game glitch, which was as a result of Infinity Ward’s programming mistakes and oversight.

Sony took a very hands off approach and decided it was up to Infinity Ward themselves to issue a fix for the issue.They didn’t ban anyone.

The demo of the long awaited, and much hyped Bayonetta action game is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace and over the Playstation Network.

Bayonetta is a sexy, violence filled third person action adventure game in which the heroine shoots bullets from her heels and summons explosive attacks with her hair. Yeah, you know you have to see what this one is about!

You can download a demo of the hack and slash title Fairytale Fights from the Xbox Live Marketplace now. The game looks like fun, if you’re into mindlessly hacking away at a variety of cute opponents. It’s a bit amusing that it only lasts for 90 seconds..it makes you wonder at what point the developers think you’d get bored of the gameplay!

The PS3 is due to get the demo on the Playstation Network by the 10th of December.

Microsoft announced that Xbox 360 owners can now add Pets to their avatars in Xbox Live.
The Xbox Live Avatar system has steadily expanded the number of props and clothing options that can be used to showoff your own unique style. Most of the top tier games release backgrounds, helmets and other paraphernalia for use with your avatars, and we can’t wait to see what cool pets will be released. We’ve heard that there may even be a Chocobo to celebrate Final Fantasy XIII being released in March 2010!

In what could be a shot across the bows of Steam and Impulse, Microsoft has announced that its Games for Windows Live platform will soon allow games to be downloaded.
That means that Microsoft is getting into the Digital game distribution business on the PC, a space which has been dominated by Valve’s Steam platform by a wide margin in the past.
Should Valve be worried? Given that the consumer response to Games for Windows has been lukewarm in the past, we don’t think so. If, however, Microsoft offers Digital Distribution to developers and publishers that would be using it’s Games for Windows platform anyway, these developers and publishers may decide to forgo Steam or Impulse distribution plans. We’ll keep you informed on how this all turns out!

Forza 3 may have started a trend with developers. The game shipped on two DVDs, and apparently Mass Effect 2 for the PC and the Xbox 360 will ship on two DVDs as well. Hopefully we will have the option to install the additional content from the second DVD onto the Xbox 360’s hard drive. PC Gamers are accustomed to swapping discs during an install, the pleasure may be new for 360 owners however.

Bioware’s community manager Chris Priestly assures gamers that there will only be one swap of discs necessary so that it does not affect gameplay.

Activision has announced that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was played by more than 8 million people in the first week of its release.

That’s right kids, more people played Modern Warfare 2 than there are soldiers in China’s army (2.3 million soldiers).

Regardless of what you might think about the game, those are some incredible stats!

Earlier this week we heard reports that windows pcs were exhibiting a black screen that prevented the user from accessing the Desktop. Security firm PrevX initially stated, much to Microsoft’s displeasure, that the error was caused by a Microsoft Security Update.

It seems that new information has determined that the error exists, and it is not caused by Microsoft’s Security updates but instead by various types of Malware.

PrevX had this to say on their blog:

“Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we’ve done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor.

We have not analyzed further whether a change occurred in the OS interpretation of this or other registry values. In any case, we believe there are significant benefits in the OS using the length of the value as recommended by the SysInternals article.

We have always strongly recommended keeping Windows and all other software up-to-date to reduce the window for exploitation by new threats. We’ll keep you updated with further progress if we find anything new.

We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar.”

Microsoft also responded to the incident:

“We’ve conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security updates we released through Windows Update in November. That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don’t believe the updates are related to the “black screen” behavior described in these reports.”

The problem seems to be caused by users who’s machines are infected with Malware such as Daonol

So it seems that a thorough cleaning of our systems is in order again. We recommend doing a pass with one of the top tier antivirus packages as well as Malware Bytes free scanner.

Let us know in the comments if you fell victim to this problem, and if so what you did to solve it.