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About Me
Community Manager for Tomopop.com.
Random gaming facts about Haxan
Legitimately beat Mike Tyson and went through Another World Circuit undefeated.
Beat the original Contra without dying. Twice.
Can land the damn plane in Top Gun and can also refuel in midair.
Can't beat Ghost & Goblins without the level select code and has never lied about it.
Thinks Friday the 13th is a great game even if the physics, controls and weapons are garbage.
Mario Paint caused him to buy a Super Nintendo and largely leave his Sega Genesis behind. He has played it more than most video games and wore down the mouse pad so that the grid only shows around the corners.
Has beaten Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers on the SNES on the hardest difficulty without losing a single round. Multiple times.
Is still friends with the girl who worked at a local game store and sold him Street Fighter II nearly 17 years ago.
Beat Final Fantasy 2 in a weekend when he was a kid, yet can't get through a role-playing game these days if his life depended on it.
Has never beaten Final Fantasy VII.
Prefers pads to sticks.
Likes the N64 controller.
Prefers the Duke to the S-controller.
Doesn't think that Super Mario 64 is all that great.
Got an Xbox mostly for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And thinks it's a damn good game. Really.
Swore he would never buy a Game Boy Advanced SP, but immediately broke down once the NES edition came out. (And regarding the NES Classics series, true in-store dialogue: "Dude, are you serious?! They seriously expect people to pay 20 dollars a piece for games they can just downlo...Ooh! Zelda!")
Really liked the first Halo. (Well, there goes my dtoid cred.)
Can rock out Dynamite Rave in Dance Dance Revolution like it's nobody's business.
Played the hell out of Animal Crossing: Wild World and hid that fact from nobody.
Stomped Brad Nicholson at Street Fighter IV, but had to resort to the cheapest of tactics in order to do so. ;)
Thinks you're really, really, really smart. And pretty.
Top ten favorite games (in no particular order):
The Legend of Zelda (NES)
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out (NES)
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64)
Phantom 2040 (SNES)
Street Fighter II (any version)
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (PS2)
Final Fantasy 3/6 (SNES)
Ico (PS2)
Sin and Punishment (N64)
Picross (DS)
(NVGR)
I love drawing, though I realize that I'm not very good. I figured early on that drawing my own header art would help my blogs stand out. Thanks to Destructoid, and to the scanner that Carollelogram got me for my birthday last year, I feel like I've developed a unique style that's distinctly my own.
Outside of games I've got a DVD collection that is exploding out of a 5'x6' shelf (over 400 titles). So suffice it to say that I love movies. I'm a huge horror fan and I host an annual Dusk Till Dawn Horror Movie Marathon nearly every October. My top ten favorite films in order are as follows:
1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cativo, 1966)
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
3. Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954)
4. The City of Lost Children (La Citι des enfants perdus, 1995)
5. The Apartment (1960)
6. Strings (2004)
7. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
8. The Big Lebowski (1998)
9. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
10. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Music-wise, my top 3 bands are The Pixies, The Velvet Underground and Radiohead. I listen to damn near every genre of music (except modern country. I yearn for the days of Hank Williams, Sr. and Tammy Wynette). Hit random on my mp3 player and you'll get everything from darkwave to hip hop to 80's synthpop. I karaoke pretty regularly. I can't sing, but I surround myself with people who can. Still, you've not experienced all there is in life until you've seen me proper butcher True by Spandau Ballet.
Then, as for the literary interests, my love lies with pulp detective novels of the thirties and forties. Raymond Chandler is simply the greatest ever. And Dashiell Hammett is just fantastic. Lately, I've been reading through Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles at Carollelogram's recommendation. Two books in and I have to say they're astonishing.
If you do the Twitter thing, Haxan1 is my handle should you want to follow me.
Feel free to friend me to your console of choice should you ever want to play a game of Street Fighter. Just be sure to let me know that you're from Destructoid and you'll get the royal treatment.
Blogs I writed:
Reviews
Virtual Console Review- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Review- Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop
Front Page
Other Worlds Than These: The citizens of the land of Termina
Community spotlight: Haxan goes above and beyond for the community
Monthly Musings
Instant Replay: Street Fighter II
The Start of the Affair: Solomon's Key
Editorials and assorted articles
Does the Wii have RROD-type issues of its own?
Okay, Nintendo. I guess that we can be friends again.
Niero, do you have any idea what in the lobster milkshake you have done?! (dtoid 3rd anniversary post)
10 things you might not have known about Haxan (but really only 8)
Why Destructoid is awesome: Nilcam is the greatest edition (I honestly can't give Nilcam enough props for this.)
Christmas shopping: Non-gaming, priest dad-style
Bad Dye Job: A Darius Pickman Story
"Congraturation" RetroforceGO!
Nintendon't what?! Now you tell me just what the %#@$ Nintendon't do!
Neat stuff I played a bit part in
The Destructoid children's alphabet book
http://profiles.us.playstation.com/playstation/psn/visit/profiles/Haxan
Gamer Profile
3DS friend code:
Steam:
Battle:
PSN: Haxan
Mii: 8490 3559 2301 7665
Gamertag: haxan1
Steam:
Battle:
PSN: Haxan
Mii: 8490 3559 2301 7665
Gamertag: haxan1
Following (28)
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Roughly a month ago, my Wii started acting very odd. While popping in Resident Evil 4 for the first time in ages I was greeted with flickering green pixels bouning across my screen. It wasn't too widespread, just isolated to a single ares on the back of Leon's coat. I assumed that it probably wasn't a big deal, maybe a dirty laser lens. I'd have to remember to take a look at it. When I did finally get around to searching for a fix, I found what turns out to be quite a widespread problem. One which is showing up on message boards all across the internet. It's apparently most noticeable in games with heavy 3D rendering like Resident Evil 4 and Call of Duty 3. What I've learned from all of these internet searches is that it seems to be a problem with the Graphics Processing Unit overheating. Perhaps Microsoft doesn't have a patent on widespread overheating consoles. 
Image courtesy of skesslerster's post on Fixya.com. In every thread I've come across, the blame seems to be placed on WiiConnect24 being turned on. The theory is that when the system is placed in standby mode, the console isn't completely off and is still generating heat. The problem is that the fan isn't running to help dissipate that heat, and can cook the GPU over time. This seems to be a problem that has been going on since launch, with people giving instances of this problem as far back as early 2007. The strange thing is that it isn't just a few examples here or there. A google search of the following terms will bring up pages of results: Wii green pixels Resident Evil 4. They're all across the message boards, yet there's never been a story on a single gaming site. So, it's obviously not as widespread as the Red Rings of Death, nor gaining that level of notoriety, but still a significant problem.. Running a lot of tests on various tvs, with different cables, and using the same RE4 disc on different Wiis, I've determined that it is an issue that rests squarely on my Wii. On a high def display it is completely obvious. But on a standard def tv with composite cables, it's hardly noticeable. I wonder if that is the reason why this issue hasn't made news. Maybe it's that most people who are affected aren't realizing that there's even a problem. There's even YouTube videos like this one about the issue. Lucky for most of these people in these threads, their Wii's were under warranty. Mine wasn't so lucky. It's going to run me $85. Still, now that I'm liking my Wii again, I need to get it fixed. Yesterday, I called up customer support. I could tell the support person was annoyed with all of my questions. I wanted to know what the cause of the issue was and how I could prevent it from happening again myself, or for my little brother on his Wii. I got zero information aside from being told that sometimes electronics break down and need to be replaced. WiiConnect24 is perfectly safe, I was told. To me it seems like an odd explanation. The system is only a couple years old. Some of the instances I've read about happened after just a couple months. Compare that to my GameCube that's been played like mad for 10 years. I guess I'm not at all satisfied with that answer. I'm emailing Nintendo today to see if they can tell me more (the customer support person said that every one there has the same information when I asked if I could speak to anybody else, perhaps someone who does the repairs). I'm hoping that I'll have more information to give back to you before too long. In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea to turn off WiiConnect24 just to be safe. You'll still get all of your messages once you turn your Wii on. Granted, I think I will miss that slow fading blue light that I get every so often.
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Living the dream since March 16, 2006
Living the dream since March 16, 2006
About three months ago it just didn't power on. Nothing I would do unplugging all cables and plugging them back did anything. I even prayed to the dark gaming lords and tried offering a sacrificial virgin, I thought of kidnapping Ron Burgundy, but nothing.
Dismayed I was about to wrap it up and get it replaced and forgot to for a week and when I was about to, I plugged it up once more. Powered up with no more troubles sine and thus ends my Wii tales of woe.
Perhaps Ron should be worried...
That's a problem, though. I'd say don't keep your Wii in standby mode often--there was about a four-month period where mine was off.
I have a friend who went through the exact same sequence of events (betcha ya didn't think that Ron Burgundy was so popular). He eventually found out afterward what the deal was. It apparently has something to do with an internal circuit breaker. I can't remember exactly what did the trick. Maybe it was leaving it unplugged for a while. But it eventually flipped back into the proper position and worked again.
Even though it is a rumor, I leave WiiConnect 24 always off now with my replaced system. This may have been the cause or not, but I don't need my system always on. If I need a download, I will manually do it. With WiiConnect 24 off, I have not have a problem yet, but I can't tell you if this was the solution or a motherboard revision that I do not know off.
However, the turnaround time was less than 1 week so don't worry about being without the Wii for long. However, the system I have now freaks out when you put a new game disc in! The system freezes when you go to the game loading screen, but after manually restarting the system everything is good. After that restart, I don't have the problem until I put another game disc in. Still have not figured that one out though. However, no problem with graphics anymore!
Hope my experience helps out!
I'll tell him to check his warranty.
also "que carajo estas haciendo aqui? largate cabron"
@Haxan -- Yeah, this has been a longstanding issue. The only reason I knew about it was because of other weird problems I had beforehand that were unrelated. My Wii had a point where it froze during SSBB while trying to connect online...I tried turning it off, had to manually unplug the Wii and wait and turn it back on, then found that I could no longer connect to my router afterwards. I eventually fixed the issue (I honestly don't remember how), but as I was reading about similar problems, I noticed the WiiConnect24 heat-up issue you mentioned.
Just in case you're ever curious...
http://www.wiierror.com/
I've had the WiiConnect24 on ever since with *knockonwood* no problem.
I know I've had WiiConnect24 and Standby Connection on ever since the system launched -- Almost literally. I always have it plugged in and on, and I've never had an issue.
After reading this, though, I've disabled both of those things.
But I'm guessing that they aren't going to say anything that doesn't involve PR speak.
Hopefully it wont affect me since most of the time my Wii is shut off at the mains. (we have 2 plugs and 4 games consoles!) Still, it sucks for those afflicted..
When we moved, we bought a new (much larger) entertainment center, and the only place to put my consoles was inside the cabinets in the bottom section. I also needed to do this since, at the time, my daughter was just beginning to crawl and get into everything, and my son, while he knew not to touch my electronics, would occasionally grab a controller and pretend he was playing a game. With the cabinet doors open, all of my consoles (360, PS2, and Wii) are perfectly fine, in terms of airflow. There's enough space around them.
Sorry for the long background, but here's what I was getting at.
After about a week of not using the Wii, I opened up the cabinet where it resides and noticed it was a bit warm. Actually, it was pretty damn warm. My 360 and PS2 are in a different cabinet, and just to make sure nothing else was warming the Wii's area up, I opened that one.
Nope, everything was fine.
I felt around the Wii, and man, that thing was pretty damn warm. Almost as much as if I had been playing it for an hour or so. Booting up a game, it was being a little sluggish; it took about 30-45 seconds from the game channel to the intro for Excite Truck.
After that, I turned off WiiConnect. No reason to have it on...I'll just get my updates when I power it on.