About the only time where Just Cause 2's vehicle physics work against you is when it has the chance to create an even BETTER awesome car crash, such as street vehicles going off road, or anything trying to get a grip on icy surfaces. God, I lose it when that sportscar goes off the sand dune. Just lose it.

The thing is, I want this game to take itself seriously while all this crap is happening. Oh, sure, this would be hilarious if it was all set to a Dukes of Hazzard banjo accompaniment. But, like giggling in study hall, it's even funnier when you beach a cigarette boat, parachute onto the dock and karate kick a bad guy and try to keep a straight face throughout.

Vehicular Stunts Developer Diary [GameTrailers]

Still, with the site being so crowded, you might just be able to wiggle your way in their and snag one before they're all gone. Kotakuite Richie Rich managed to, and he's downloading the beta as we speak, so if all else fails you can live vicariously through him. Good luck! What do you mean this is even more traffic? We're helping!

Eurogamer Little Big Planet Key Giveaway [Eurogamer.net]

"You will be aware from the description of the product on PlayStation Store that some variation in functionality from the original PSone version is to be anticipated," the publisher wrote.

"However there appear to be more significant technical issues."

Aw-man, I just found out one more thing the seemingly innocuous 1.11 Playstation 3 firmware update does: It causes my console to lock-up when I try to go in and modify the Music settings.

Whenever I click on that particular item I get a message saying:

Setting information is corrupted. Press the X button to repair and restore default settings.

I can't be 100 percent sure, but I don't believe it was doing that prior to the patch. When I press the X button it restarts the system, but if I go back in to try and tinker with my music settings I get the same message. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have an impact on anything but my ability to tweak music settings.

Has anyone else experienced this? Brian Crecente

I was involved in a Hit and run Car accident. My truck rolled 3 or 4 times. During the course of the rolling my xbox 360 Premium was thrown out of the vehicle. I didnt get knocked out and Im alive. When I got out of the vehicle I saw my beloved 360 and harddrive not to mention some of my games strewn along the road with other items of mine. I walked over and picked up the 360. Face plate not to be found. 360 had a tire mark on it. It had been ran over.

Seems the poster only suffered minor injuries to his elbow, Xbox 360, and his grammar. Check out the forum post for pics of the totalled truck and the now deformed console. Looks like that 360 can really take a beating (just not a software update).

Thanks, Mr. Poon! Michael McWhertor

My Xbox 360 Survivied a rollover accident, and being ran over

id Software's John Carmack says he's out of the private space race.

Pixel, the rocket make with his company Armadillo Aerospace, tipped over anc crashed shortly after its second attempt at take-off. This is the second time the rocket has crashed, and Carmack says it will be the last.

"Pixel is probably not going to fly again," Carmack said in a post-crash interview. "It's down for the count."

Maybe he can get back to games that crash now. Brian Crecente

Carmack's Rocket Crashes [Aus Gamer]

Hot? Def, but how much is gameplay and how much is trailer fluff? If this is really how MotorStorm is going to look when I'm playing it on the Playstation 3 I can't friggin wait. Brian Crecente

We broke the news yesterday of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office issuing a subpoenea to Take-Two as part of a grand jury investigation into Hot Coffee Gate. Today, investors showed their unhappiness, with the company's stock plummeting nearly 20 percent since yesterday's close.

According to this chart, while the stock opened at a dismal 9.85 a share, it has already rebounded to a still dismal 10.36. There's also a HUGE spike in volume. The three month average is 1.7 million or so, and today's volume has already hit 8.2 million.

Say it with me. Buy, Sell, Buy, Sell! Brian Crecente

Take-Two [Yahoo Finance]

Gamasutra is reporting that the ex-Gizmondo chief's crimes include drunk driving (the cops don't believe his "Mysterious German Man Named Dietrich Was Driving" defense), embezzlement, grand theft and possession of a gun by a felon. The last three charges are all fall-out from the revelation that Erikkson had illegally imported the Ferrari he had crashed.

Eriksson's bail has been set at five million dollars and he's facing 14 years in Sing-Sing. We wonder if the federal government will get involved next: there was something fishy about those "Homeland Security" guys who showed up minutes after the crash to tamper with the evidence.

We'll continue to keep you posted about the legal situation of gaming's favorite drunk driving Swedish meatball.

Ex-Gizmondo Exec Eriksson Charged In Ferrari Crash [Gamasutra]

A former Activision game tester was out at the Game Developers Conference last week and decided to try and "break" the PS3 prototype they had sitting on the expo floor. He decided to target the fish demo that was running on the machines. After a bit of fooling around he managed to get the frame rate to drop to an abysmal .30. Success!

I'm guessing this video is going to get played more than the Gizmondo ever was. Zing!

Gizmondo Crash Video [LA Times]

It looks like someone may have figured out what happened to a batch of those early Xbox 360s to make them lock-up and overheat. A German modder took apart two Xbox 360s and found that during assembly someone forgot to remove the protective layer of foil from the GPU heatsink's heat transfer pad.

In other words instead of cooling, the heatsink was likely acting like a frying pan.

On the left a close-up of the protective layer/foil on top of the heat transfer pad. On the right the protective foil has been removed and placed next to the heat pad. This protective layer is probably placed by the manufacturer of the heatsink and is used to protect the heat transfer pad from dust, but should normally be removed just prior installing the heatsink on the GPU. The way it's installed now by MS the GPU chip makes contact with the protection foil instead of the heat transfer pad. This can of course cause cooling issues for the graphics chip as for optimal cooling performance there should just be a thin layer of thermal pad between the GPU chip and heatsink.

That matches up with the report we received shortly after launch that a huge batch of Xbox 360s were recalled internally. In other words, they found something wrong and never shipped them out to stores, and a global shortage happened. And now a little video in German.

Xbox 360 Overheating Caused by Protective Foil [Xbox-Scene, thanks Major]

FFS why do microsoft force us to update.

my xbox was fine until the march update now it freezes up after 10 mins of gameplay

why cant they just leave it alone they should have held off releasing this piece of junk until it was ready.

anyway off to ebay i go and sell my 360 i cant be arsed with this forced updates its nothing but trouble

I'll see if I can raise some sort of official answer from my channels and update later today.

Update: Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb was kind enough to respond to my annoying bleatings about this. He says that while the crashes appear to be coincidental, team Xbox is investigating to be sure.

Update Crashing Xbox 360 [Xbox Forums]

It looks like Xbox.com is down. Last I checked, going to the site brought up a Server is Unavailable message. It says the web server may be too busy to accept my request. I've also received a few emails about this.

I hopped onto Live real quickly too verify that it wasn't effecting gameplay and it doesn't appear to be.

Curious.

I've had it lock up a total of four times now: Once on Gun, twice on Perfect Dark Zero and once on Quake 4. Every time it locked up I was bringing up the dashboard in the middle of a game.

Also, remember Microsoft has acknowledged that some of their 360s have problems and they are dealing with them. So stop sending emails saying it's all made up, because it isn t.

I've also received a number of emails from people who say that their 360s lock up for a variety of reasons. The chief reason appears to again be bringing up your dashboard in the middle of a game. Usually rebooting solves this problem, but of course no one wants to keep doing that.

A couple of readers have emailed that certain games are problematic. Madden and Amped seem to be chief among the game complained about, with at least two readers saying they can't get through a complete game of football without a lock-up.

Last time I checked the survey we are conducting showed that a little more than a quarter of Xbox 360 owners have had a crash. That's amazingly high, if it can be believed.

The question really isn't if there's a problem with the 360, the question is how wide spread is it and is it a hardware or software problem.

I personally don't think my lock-ups have anything to do with heat. Two of the lock-ups occurred within five minutes of turning my system on. I think it's a software issue. I think, and remember this comes from someone who knows little about hands-on programming, that this is an issue of the game software interacting with the 360's operating system. I have a feeling that the two occasional hit a bump in the road.

If this is the case I assume Microsoft could easily release a software update through Live. While this could be an easy fix, it might not be one Msoft is too happy to make.

The problem is Microsoft has spent four years trying to convince people that the Xbox isn't a computer and now they may have to release a patch for their 360, something that may remind some of nearly every release of Windows.

I received a frightening email this morning from a guy who claims he was a beta tester for the 360.

The extensive email outlines a slew of launch issues and ways to crash your 360. I'm hoping to God this guy isn't on the up and up, but I have a feeling he is, especially since I've experienced some of the problems he outlined and have had emails from people who experienced other issues.

OK, so here's the list, by category:

Games
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
Described as the most problematic of the launch titles, the Micromole says you can nearly always cause a crash with a well-timed pause. Early in the game, in Beverly Hills he believes, you come across a
tagger guy doing graffiti. Go and talk to that guy one time, wait until he disappears and shows up in another part of town. If you pause the game right after you hit the button to talk to the tagger, the game will crash every time.

I've also received reports of the game not booting or the soundtrack skipping, though I've never experienced this.

Madden 2006 The game has problems playing on Live, according to the Mole and some consoles and hard drive configurations would not download roster updates correctly for the footballer.

Halo Try this game of profile hide-and-seek. Create a profile with the hard drive attached. During gameplay remove the hard drive and the 360 will reboot. Reattach the hard drive again and the system will reboot for a third time. Look for your profile saved onto Hard Drive, it will often disappear.

Hardware
Guide Button Try pushing the big silver button during a game's load screen, this can cause your system to lock-up. Try it during Project Gotham Racing 3 and see what happens.

DVD Drive Unrecognized DVDs should display a message that says the disc is unrecognized, but often doesn't.

Moving your 360 during gameplay may lead to the scratching of discs.

Playing of console horizontally is not advised and could lead to scratching of discs.

Live The number of classic games you have downloaded will not always correspond to the number your 360 says. Also "Zuma"
may be listed twice for some reason.

Backwards compatibility The top 20 sellers for the Xbox were supposed to work without any problems but several games, including a Tom Clancy title had some major problems. (I do remember reports of Splinter Cell disappearing from the BC list shortly after it went up on Xbox.com.) The Mole goes on to say that "virtually everything they said is a lie" about BC.

Here's what we need from you: Try and test out as many of these rumors as you feel comfortable testing. Don't do anything you think will mess up your 360. Anything you find out about the rumors email to us and we'll keep track and update on this page.

This should make many folks happy. Some dude over at GameSpot Forums kept seeing his 360 crash every 20 minutes. He was able to pin-point the cause and saw that the Xbox's huge, hot battery was to blame. His overheating solution? Suspending the huge battery brick from a string. But, he even found an easier way: put the power supply on the edge of a cardboard box. He's been playing straight for hours straight with no probs. Likewise, this seems to be working for other gamers and might save you that call to Microsoft. Still, the fact that people are resorting to MacGyver-like tactics to enjoy their brand new consoles is totally annoying.

Full Report Here [GameSpot] Thanks Jean-Francois!

It s been an exciting console launch, to say the least.

Word of possible sell-outs led to at least one mini-riot and another armed robbery.

In Elkton, Maryland a crowd of about 300 shoppers waiting outside a Wal-Mart went a little crazy after being told that the store would not be using a number system, but just a who ever gets to the electronic s department first system.

That s when all hell broke loose, one costumer told AP.

Some customers were knocked down and trampled, but no one was seriously injured.

It took ten cops to restore order and the store decided to cancel the sale.

Then in the Cleaveland-area a man was followed home from his local Gamestop by two men. When he got home the men pulled guns and demanded the 360 he just purchased. The man gave up the console and the duo fled.

The best part of this story is that the TV channel didn t show his face and gave him a fake name: Mario.
Delicious and likely unintentional irony.

Aside from the occasional violence, the other thing the 360 launch sparked was a bit of crashitis.

We ve received emails from a half-dozen readers saying their console crashed on various games and even my retail unit has locked up on me three times. (Once during Gun and twice during marathon sessions of Perfect Dark Zero.) I m not sure if this is an online issue, hardware issue, game issue or heat issue.

But it s a big enough problem for the Associated Press, the Washington Post and ABC World News to all do stories on it.

The AP story quotes a Microsoft spokeswoman saying that they have received a few isolated reports but that it was a very, very small fraction of units sold.

Anyone with problems should call 800-4MY-Xbox.

Don't adjust yer monitor. Kotaku reader Jason dropped word that he's got a freshly squeezed 360 lemon. With the brand spankin' new console, Project Gotham Racing 3 single player crashed three times in a row. That's with all the default settings. Cat's not been able to finish one track without the game crashing. Literally. Man, either this is one buggy disc or we're lookin' at a giant recall here.

More Pics Here [Flickr] Thanks Jason!