Category Archives: Xbox

Games, Tech, Xbox

Is Microsoft Retarded!?

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The Xbox 360 Elite has been announced, and it’s not a limited edition heralding an enhanced premium system as was rumoured. So now there’s three SKUs and the price has essentially been increased?

I was looking forward to buying a white 360 with HDMI when it was released, especially if it had the new 65nm chips and revised chipset (hopefully with revised reliability). I’ll be able to buy an HDMI-equipped 360, but that’s as good as it gets. Also good on them for including HDMI and component cables in the box, which is much better than composite. *cough*

What we get is a third SKU for $80 more than the retail price. Since people seem to price the 360 at $400 and the PS3 at $600, despite cheaper models being available, this is effectively a price hike that takes a chunk out of their nice $200 price cushion on the competition. And they don’t have the HD movie playback which may be of debatable value but is something you may as well have for $20 more.

No 65nm processors means that unless they’ve done a motherboard revision for the addition of HDMI the motherboards are still going to be warp-prone and unreliable. At least those three red lights will look nice against the black finish, right?

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a 360 without extortionate hard drive prices. $180 for 120GB is insane, as on NewEgg they sell a 160GB 2.5″ SATA hard drive for $120, or a 100GB one for $81. That’s one expensive enclosure that they put them in. A 2.5″ external 120GB drive costs $94.

I’ve almost got my head in my hands here. A limited edition before the standard premium (oxymoron?) got the HDMI port made sense, this just doesn’t. Fingers crossed that they’ll pick up the ball again when the 65nm chips get integrated.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

GRAW 1.5. Uh…I mean…2

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I was a bit reluctant to pay full price for this, given that it was getting criticism for being more of a mission pack and reviews have mentioned a short campaign. But at the same time, I loved the first GRAW and played a ton of multiplayer as well, and if they only criticism of the single player was the length (no mention of horrible difficulty spikes, dodgy checkpoint spacing, stingy health system, and at least one horrible bug) then it was a fairly sure thing that I’d get on with it.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

What ultimately sold me, though, was that the achievements were all nice, round numbers. I still resent the first one for leaving me with a deformed gamerscore thanks to the weird numbers for finishing the co-op campaign. Only fives and tens here!

GRAW was one of the first games that really looked like you were playing it on a next-gen console but, like PGR3, going back to it isn’t especially kind to the memories. GRAW 2 makes it look much worse. The explosions, in particular, are gorgeous; some of the best in any game that I’ve seen. There’s a moment on the very first mission when you plant C4 in a cave and get to see the smoke and debris blown out through the cave entrances when it detonates. It’s a fairly incidental effect but it looks amazing.

Ubisoft has ground down those rough edges, particularly with regard to the frustration factor. There are fewer moments of drawn out battles without checkpoints, the new medic gives you a health boost without having to struggle to the next ammo box, the enhanced Cross Com (complete with full screen feeds) allows you to command your team and support vehicles accurately when they’re out of view, and your chaingun on the Black Hawk doesn’t overheat within seconds. Now I’m playing the game on the hardest difficulty and finding it challenging rather than infuriating.

Continue reading GRAW 1.5. Uh…I mean…2 →

Editorials, Games, Impressions, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

I Don’t Get Home

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another ambivalent post about a Sony product.

Home (or ‘Second Home’ as it perhaps should be called) is an interesting concept and, as a game in its own right, would probably end up being similar to Animal Crossing. What I don’t get is all the comment going on about how it’s a killer app, combining the best of Xbox Live and the Wii/Mii service.

What I understand is that it’s something akin to Second Life, in which you create your likeness and have your little home, which you can decorate and play around in as you see fit. You get trophies from games that you can place in your trophy cabinet and you can invite people into your apartment to look at your stuff. Other than that, I don’t think I’d be over-simplifying things to say that it’s a GUI for the existing online service.

That’s my problem. For all the flash it’s still an online system that’s missing the fundamental features of Xbox Live. No unified friends list, no cross-title messaging or invites, etc. It unifies the system in that you can meet up with friends in Home and head over to the Motorstorm track or whatever, but that sounds like a pain in the arse next to just starting up a game and inviting your friends from a menu. When I want to start up Word, there’s a reason why I simply click it in the dock rather than come out of my virtual house and run to the Office (see what I did there?) down the virtual street.

In that sense it seems like a smokescreen for the holes in the online infrastructure. It pisses all over the Wii’s system – such as it is – and pretty much already does what we expect the eventual Animal Crossing Wii to do (minus fucking friend codes) and more, but we have a higher benchmark than that. This seems like more of an anti-Nintendo measure for Sony than anything to do with Microsoft, which I suppose might make more sense at the moment given relative sales.

LittleBigPlanet, on the other hand, looks beautiful. That was a decent announcement.

Games, Xbox

Orb Huntin’

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Free Runner

By now I’ve put countless hours into Crackdown and have been very nearly driven utterly mad by the search for agility orbs. I managed to find 499 of the 500 with very little problem, and then spent literally hours every day combing the city for that last one, the Moby-Dick to my Ahab, which continued to elude me.

But then, when all hope had faded, I saw a green glow in the distance. That turned out to be a neon sign. This happened many, many times. At this point I was ready to snap the disc in half and use it to make a shiny hat while I dribble down myself.

Altogether, I reckon I’ve put in at least eight hours since “finishing” the game, spent searching for the last couple of agility orbs and grabbing any hidden ones that I found along the way. I had very little problem up until the last one, with even the 499th not posing too much of a problem. The last one, though? Ugh…

Until now!

Sod’s law prevails, and it turned out to be on a bowling alley sign around the corner from the starting point on La Mugre. You could literally hit it with a grenade from the bit where you emerge from the agency tunnel into a firefight between the police and Los Muertos. Now I can sleep without dreaming about the fucking things which, sadly, is not a joke. Here ends what is both the most satisfying and most excruciating achievement ever, uh, achieved.

My 500th agility orb, as George (Bean05) looks on

Best. Game. Ever.

Anyone in the UK remember what they were doing ten years ago today?

Editorials, Games, PlayStation, Xbox

That Back Compat Thing

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Talk about setting one up. Even so, I’m going to start by playing a bit of a devil’s advocate by saying that the news doesn’t affect my desire to own a PS3. I still won’t be buying one next month. That’s my cheap shot out of the way.

Honestly, I think backwards compatibility is overrated. I was always going to have to keep my PS2 around since it’s chipped and my PS2 collection takes in games from all three major regions, and I think I’ve played a grand total of five Xbox games on my 360 since last year. Two of those for more than a few minutes, or for more than just to check out how they looked in HD. Aside from a bit of FFVII last summer, it’s similarly underused on my PS2. Others might find it more important, as I know plenty of people who only want one box under their TV and don’t want to chuck out some of their favourite games. Not to mention the appeal of seeing what PS1 games you can find for a couple of quid each in Gamestation.

What’s irksome about the whole issue is the way in which they’re going about it. I’ve made it clear how I feel about the price, as have countless others, and this just makes things worse. We’re now paying more for a late, lesser piece of hardware? Sony had already twisted the knife in the wound; now they’re pouring salt onto it. The fact that this all comes out weeks from launch with preorders (mysteriously not sold out anywhere yet) in full swing is just low. That’s pissing on you while you’re down and still crying about how much the salt hurt.

This is where the obligatory Kutaragi quote comes in:

“PS3 will feature backwards compatibility with PS and PS2 games from day one. I’m emphasising this because, from what I hear, there are some platforms that haven’t been able to completely do this. It’s costly in terms of hardware, but we’d rather invest firmly on compatibility from the beginning, rather than to have issues later on.”

I hear there are two platforms that haven’t been able to completely do this, Ken.

I don’t think anyone would really object to them switching to software emulation to save hardware costs when their emulator is mature, but why do we have to, essentially, pay extra to beta test this feature? Why not keep the EE/GS chip in there for the machine to fall back on if the emulator doesn’t support the game? And, more pertinently from a European perspective, why not roll this out worldwide if you’re going to do it? Why just us?

Fuck them. I’m going to sit back and wait for the next of the weekly PR disasters.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Crackdown: So Many Orbs…

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Xbox Live’s achievements can vary in quality of implementation, from the most perfunctory bookmarks of progress (King Kong), to the outrageous (finishing Smash TV without dying; 10,000 online kills in Gears), with very few doing what I think is the best thing these can do, in rewarding you for doing those unessential little quests that you take up as a personal challenge.

Climbing the tallest building in the game with your bare hands qualifies – think of the people who managed to scale the temple in Shadow of the Colossus – and this probably qualifies as my favourite achievement yet:

King of the world!

It’s a long climb that takes a bit of planning and lateral thinking, and the reward (10 points aside) is an absolutely spectacular showpiece of the strength of this engine. It’s seriously impressive; a huge draw distance and solid framerate, without the usual caveat of obviously decreased detail. Then, to top it off, there’s another achievement for jumping from the roof and landing in a small pool at the base of the tower. Brilliant stuff. I hope other devs are taking notes.

That sums up what I think of Crackdown so far. I played about seven hours yesterday, running through the first gang on my own and then again in online co-op (every game should have this after Crackdown and Gears), and just messing around with piles of cars and a grenade launcher. Oh, and spending an inordinate amount of time hunting for those agility orbs (250-odd so far, and about 55 hidden ones). God, the orbs! So many! Argh!

The game has been criticised for length, and it did only take me about three hours to finish off the Los Muertos kingpin and all six generals. A third of the main campaign, basically. And that includes several digressions in order to relieve nearby rooftops of their agility orbs. This isn’t a long game, to be sure, but the point isn’t simply to finish it, just as it was with GTA. Those who I’ve spoken to who are as into it as I am spend far more time fucking around, and I’ve enjoyed it for the lack of structure rather than in spite of it.

After the hundreds of free-roaming crime-infested cities that we’ve played around in since Liberty City in 2001, all either po-faced and taking themselves far too seriously or failing to capture the wit of Rockstar’s games, Crackdown is a breath of fresh air. I want to say that GTA IV has a lot to live up to, but that’s going to do its own thing and do it well, as it has over the last few years. Spider-Man 3, however, is going to need to be really special.