Well the time is drawing close where the sequel to the much-revered action game Ninja Gaiden on the XBox is about to be released.

Personally I can't wait. I beat the first game all the way through and given the reputation of how hard the game was, I was kinda happy when I completed it (it really was rock hard in places). And before anyone asks, no, this wasn't the 'Black' version which was a little easier by way of the Ninja Dog difficulty. This was the original, "I'm going to own you" version. And it did that...on a great many occasions!

From initial reviews it seems to be more of the same but more fluid and more body parts :-P. However what concerns me a little is some of the feedback that certain bosses and battles now rely upon luck in some situations. In the original,  the 'fighting' engine was a thing of beauty itself and once you'd mastered the numerous combos, any failing was your's alone. If luck now comes into it in a heavy degree, I'll be slightly disappointed.

I've also managed to track down when the Demo is finally released onto XBox live for people to get a taster. Most of web (and Xbox.com as well) have always reported that a demo would be available in May. Given there's only one day left, I think we can safely say it's not going to happen. According to Talking About Games, the demo's coming on June 3rd (which is the release date in the USA). Europe get's the game on the 6th June so it's quite probable we'll get the demo at the same time as well.

At last, after I'm sure an immense weight of customer feedback and complaints (me included), Microsoft have announced they are releasing a tool in June that will allow you to consolidate all of your licenses for the software/media you've downloaded onto one Console.

This tool is absolutely required as anyone will tell you who's experienced the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RRoD).

All content when downloaded is currently locked to the combination of the console, the hard disk AND the Xbox Live GamerTag. This means once you receive back your 'new' Xbox after a repair, any content downloaded will NOT be playable unless you're connected to Xbox Live.

Even worse, for any other accounts also on that console (your children's for example) they will also not be able to play that content at all in most cases. In some cases, as in Arcade games, 'you' need to sign in first to unlock the content for whoever wants to play it.

This is totally inconvenient, a real pain and in almost all cases , incredibly restrictive on the content you've legally purchased. For example, my daughter has just gotten hooked on Oblivion. I literally lived this game a year or so back and clocked up an embarrassingly large number of hours on it. I also bought a number of add-on modules to it (including grabbing a few of the modules when they were offered free).

My daughter only gets to 'see' the most recent of modules that I downloaded (the Fighter's Stronghold when it was initially released). This is because this is the only module that was downloaded onto this console (I'm now on my FOURTH 360 believe it or not). All others that I rightfully purchased and downloaded were initially downloaded onto one of my previous consoles so she doesn't see them at all.

Hopefully, once this tool is available, I can, from reading the interview, re-register all of my downloaded content onto my most recent 360 (sure it won't be the last though...) and Maggie (my daughter) should, the next time she opens up Oblivion, be able to see all manner of new fun things to do...

About time is all I can say...

The interview in Next Generation detailing this is available here.

I had my hotmail account hacked this week whilst I was staying over in Limerick on Workshops.

I thought it was a little strange when I received at my Dell email, an obvious Spam message but from 'me' (and it was from me as well as the email address was my hotmail account).

However, given I was then at an offsite, I thought nothing else of it and continued to carry on with work. Until a colleague at work mentioned he'd also received an email from me...

I then got a voice mail from Paul (http://www.phammond.com) saying he believed I'd been hacked as everyone we both knew also received emails and even worse, a mutual friend of ours was apparently TALKING to the hacker on MSN Messenger as he was signed in as me...and it clearly wasn't me online as some of the responses were questionable.

Have just logged into Hotmail (after Paul kindly changed my password whilst I was unavailable) and I did indeed send an email titled "hello" to a GREAT many people. So I apologise to literally everyone I know who received an email from me.

Intriguingly, it appears I was also 'selected' to send to all 'S' emails as there's a number of "sent" emails that was for everyone who's address started with 'S', all of which I don't recognise.

Thankfully the damage probably wasn't as bad is it could have been as Paul acted swiftly to change my password for me (Thanks again Paul!). However it's still highly annoying as I'm now receiving hundreds of postmaster emails for the email addresses that are no longer valid. It's also made me incredibly angry as somehow I was hacked and I don't fully know how.

I've now set about reviewing my password 'policy' and am currently revising all of my online accounts to have a far stronger password (as yes I know, my standard password wasn't exactly strong and had been used for probably far too long).

A copy of the offending email is below and I want to clarify I'm not advocating ANYTHING to do with their shop: -

Dear friend
   we are the CYGJW company .Here is our website www.cygjw.com. we mainly sell electrical product .such as digital  cameras,mobile,LCD TV,xbox, Laptops,DV,Mp4, GPS, and so on.All items come with 12months international warranty . If you want  to buy something ,please contact us freely ,we will serve you wholeheartedly.
MSN   :  cygjw@hotmail.com
E-mail:  cygjw@cygjw.com

Although I'm a fan of Vista's SideBar, there's not *that* many gadgets that I regard as unable to live without.

However, Donavon West has just released what must be the most useful gadget for users of Windows Home Server.

His ShareMaster gadget (now compatible with x64 versions of Vista without the WHS Connector S/W installed as well) is a dream.

The gadget simply shows 6 icons that represent the main shares exposed by WHS like so: -

Clicking the icon obviously opens an explorer window at that location, but the real beauty is simply the ability to drag a file/folder onto the icon to copy it to that WHS location.

This saves a huge amount of time (open windows, mouse clicks etc) when managing the content between your workstations and the WHS.

It has become a standard gadget now on all of my vista machines.

Check out the gadget at

http://www.homeserverhacks.com/2008/04/sharemaster-for-home-server-gadget.html