If you are having this problem, the best advice I can give you is to not follow the common advice from everyone else. That means:

• Don’t open your XBOX up, get rid of the XCLAMPS, and replace it with bolts that put an unknown level of pressure on the fragile processors.
• Don’t put a towel around your XBOX and overheat it. The XBOX shuts off at a specific temperature anyway. What the heat actually does is bend your motherboard. Bending the board causes damage to the tracings inside.
• Don’t use a hot air gun because it’s difficult to focus the heat onto the chip.

Instead, use a service that specialises in repairing XBOX 360s. They will reflow the solder on the chip for you, and you won’t have the problem again.

Type XBOX 360 reflow service into eBay and you’ll see many services that do this for a nominal fee. A completely broken XBOX is much more expensive to replace than using a reflow service. Take my advice with no salt!

While we’re talking about it, I’d like to point out that the PacMan game relies on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No Adobe Flash used here. A great example of just what can be done with open technologies. I hope it encourages other developers to make use of these tools.

Players of the game came online to play it one day only to find that it had been discontinued. Why was it discontinued? I speculate that it was likely because it was not bringing in profits, so it only makes sense that Zynga cut it. However, some warning would have been nice as it would have shown loyalty from Zynga to its customers.

Space Wars was in essence another clone of Mafia Wars – the basic concept game that has been cloned across 50% of Zynga’s arsenal of games.

Zynga also recently released a Plane into FarmVille, that flies above your farm and makes your crops grow INSTANTLY! However, the charge for this can be extortionate depending on the current state of your crops. And of course, you have to have real money to do it.

In my opinion, Zynga does not produce games of a high quality, and it won’t take much for another company to come along and push them out of the playing field. I found Google’s PacMan more addictive myself.

Manage asteroids, dig ores, sell the ores for money, construct ships and missiles, destroy your neighbours. It’s all part of the game that is, Fragile Allegiance.

There is just something about this game that always keeps me interested. I go back every year and become addicted all over again. In fact, I love it so much, that I’ve been working on a Facebook game that takes some of its elements of game play directly from this.

Author: Gremlin Interactive
Year: 1996
Download: fragile.iso

Author: Sid Meier
Year: 1991
Download: civilization-1.zip

If you like this, you might also like Freeciv.

Alien races swarm to Earth and abduct people, build bases, and terrorise cities. It is your job to defend the Earth by scouting for alien ships, researching alien technology and eventually going to the source of the alien invasion and battling the Mother Brain.

It will provide endless hours of fun, and will have you flailing your arms as your men give in to alien mind control games.

You’ll most likely need DOSBOX to run this game, unless you have an old 486DX laying about.

Author: Mythos Games
Year: 1996
Download: ufo-enemy-unknown.zip

Great resources for this game:

• UFOpaedia.org

In its day, Monkey Island boasted an environment of rich graphics and well balanced game play.

Guybrush Threepwood is a young man aspiring to be a pirate. At first, he must complete three trials to prove his worth as a pirate. Then he must find a crew. Then, with his crew, he must set sail for Monkey Island – wherever it may be! On his journey he will encounter three headed monkeys, cannibals, mushrooms and love – sort of.

One of the advantages of this game is its parallelism. If you can’t complete one part of the game, there’s usually another part you can concentrate on until you’re ready.

Monkey Island is a great game that will keep you on your toes, and you can probably find it pretty cheap these days.