Andy Wood

This month’ XBOX Magazine has a write up on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

MUA’s overarching story screams “comic-book crossover event”: classic mega-villian Doctor Doom and cohorts have formed a new Masters of Evil, and Doom’s goal is to steal the power of Odin (Thor’s father, and the almights Zeus figure in Norse mythology). The quest to stop him will take your heroes from a sky-soaring S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier to the depts of atlantis — and even across the galaxy to the Skrull homeworld, where you’ll battle giant cosmic-baddie Galactus!

They got to view several of the levels in the recent demo and were delighted that the Xbox 360 version already showed off high-res textures and real-time shadowing, although the lower-res xbox version looked pretty good in its own right. Raven has “spent a lot of time reworking the network code to alleviate the [multiplayer compatibility] problems which was in X-Men Legends II - which was to hear, as MUA will offer a new competitive co-op mode where players can compare stats (knockouts, combo and more) at the end of each zone.

And the best of all? Each player hero will have a seperate story mission where they’ll relive a key comic-book batter or moment like Elektra facing off with Bullseye or how about Blade versus Dracula?

No SG-1 Team? No O’Niell? No Carter? .. You get my point, it would seem that from season 8 to season 9 there was a reorg that we didn’t know about which is why. The ninth season starts with a slow build up, introducing the new characters and their new enemy, the Ori, who are fundamentally like the former Goa’uld but far more god-like in their abilities.

Cameron Mitchell, the new leader of SG-1 brought in to replace O’Neill has some backstory introduced in the first couple of episodes. Vala, however is a love her or hate her character, depending on the viewers reaction to here interaction with Daniel Jackson.

There is a new general in town, Hank Landry, seems to have settled in well and has a nice companionship with Walter Harriman, the stargate dialler guy. He seems to be a bit harder than General Hammond was during his time on the show.

This season is a restart for the series, things were really starting to drag along and this Ori was really starting to get on my nerves, but the pace really started to pick up when the SG-1 team needed to located Merlin’ weapon which is suppose to take out the Ori. Needless to say, mid July cannot get her any quicker.

Editors Note: It is very true, that the Sci-Fi channel is showing the season 9 episodes again, but they are spread out and they would not have completed before season 10 got here.

What will one do you ask? I used the Internet, Bittorent, WinAvi, a HTPC and my Xbox 360 to get caught up. What?

Step 1: - Get the Episodes needed
I aquired recorded episodes of season 9 via Bittorent using µTorrent. This whole time may vary but it was 20 episodes and it took about 4 or 5 days to get all of the files. (which were all recorded from the Sci-Fi channel)

Step 2: - Watch Season 9
For most, watching mpegs or avis on the computer might be okay, but I wanted to watch them on my TV. I dont have a capture card, so my only other option was to burn the to DVD, which would have worked but would have been time consuming and I just didn’t want to go through all of that time and hassle. I then decided to use my Xbox 360 via a PC that I have Media Center XP installed.

Step 3: - Converting files and relaxing in front of the TV
By using WinAvi, I was able to convert the avis and the mpegs to wmv files, made these available on a direction on my media center pc. I then fired up my Xbox 360, got it talking to my HTPC and I was watching Stargate SG-1 Season 9 on my TV. (whew!)

If you have a home network and the above items, it is pretty darn simple. The only downside is what I had to buy WinAvi otherwise there is a nag screen that doesn’t go away, so this whole process costed me $30, but there are other software packages that will do it for free, I just wanted to do it quickly and when as less hassle as possible.