Category Archives: Xbox

DVD & Blu-ray, Impressions, Movies & TV, Tech, Xbox

360 HD DVD Impressions

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Xbox 360 with HD DVD Drive

If you thought getting hold of an Xbox 360 late last year was difficult, you should try finding one of the HD DVD drives. The shop where I had my original order didn’t get any and, according to my friend who owns it, Gem (the main UK Microsoft distributor for indies) only had a couple of dozen for the whole country. Gameplay told me that they couldn’t supply my preorder until, after much ado, it turned out that they could.

Obviously an external drive isn’t the most elegant way to play HD DVD but what this does is make an excellent stopgap until the standalones come down in price a bit. How many HD movie players are there for £130 again?

It’s admittedly a bit disingenuous to say that this is an HD DVD player for £130 when you need a £200 machine to run it, but a quick calculation tells me that £130 + £200 = £330, which is significantly less than the £400+ for the standalone HD players or the PS3. It comes with the remote (usually £20 on its own) and the King Kong HD DVD (£14.99 on Play), and when you look at the aggressive pre-Christmas bundling going on with 360 consoles I don’t think it’s a bad deal.

Pricing aside, the most important thing is how well this works. The answer is pretty well. Not perfect, although it does represent excellent value for money and the quality is very high. It’s certainly the best way to play HD movies without breaking the bank. Continue reading 360 HD DVD Impressions →

DVD & Blu-ray, Life, Movies & TV, Tech, Xbox

HD DVD Hunting

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‘Tis a sad day when you have to jump through more hoops to get a new accessory than you did the console itself, but that’s exactly the experience that I’ve had today while hunting for the 360 HD DVD drive, which neither my friend’s shop (there were around 20 in the whole country for independent shops, according to the distributor) nor Gameplay could supply me with for launch day. I doubt I was alone in this experience, so here’s my day.

I’d heard that a good number of PC World stores would be getting a handful of units each for general sale. Got up bright and early at 8am this morning so that I could be at PC World in Poole, the biggest around, for when it opened at 9. I asked in there and they said they were expecting a few but they haven’t turned up, and they might be in their delivery later that day. Went home via the Christchurch branch (the other side of town) but they weren’t getting any, checking every place that might have had them (Tesco, Currys, Comet, etc) on the way. No joy.

Then I had to go to uni so I checked PC World in Southampton while I was there, along with Gamestation, two branches of Game, Virgin, HMV, and CEX. Nothing.

On the way home I detoured over to Poole again to see if their delivery had arrived. Nope. Maybe Monday, they said. By then I was resigned to getting an import on Tuesday, obviously at a premium but not as unreasonable as the current eBay prices, so I went to cancel my unfulfilled Gameplay order which still said “Ordered” since I’d missed out on the initial shipment. Went through their cancellation process and then noticed – after I’d cancelled it, mind – that it had changed to “Being Picked”.

I rang them up to see if that was accurate and, if it was, to see if I could cancel my cancellation. The guy there informed me that they’d managed to get a few more units and mine had been shipped out this morning via courier, so I should get it on Monday.

A happy ending, then. Now I think I need to lie down…

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Whatever Happened to Plug and Play?

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Remember when a new console had to be connected to power, connected to the TV, and that was it? Those were the days…

With all of the big three espousing network connectivity and, to wildly differing extents, higher resolutions, will those days ever come back? Getting the full experience from a games console is no longer a case of picking up a SCART cable along with the new hardware. As well as needing an expensive TV, just setting it up relies on an intimate knowledge of your TV’s supported inputs and resolutions as well as the favoured sound formats of your audio setup. I’m a technical masochist and so actually like fiddling with settings, but I doubt the average person does. We all must have cringed at friends with nice widescreen TVs but with their DVD player set to 4:3.

Networking is just as bad, requiring either a wired network within range of the console or a headfirst dive into the world of wireless networking – encryption protocols, DHCP servers, MAC filters, SSIDs, keys, and other such fun – to get what can be the main thrust of the hardware in the case of the 360.

And then there was firmware. The risk of completely killing your hardware aside, it’s more than slightly annoying to find yourself unable to play a PSP game because it has a mandatory firmware upgrade on the disc and your machine doesn’t have enough battery power to let you flash it. So much for ease of use there. Since its release the PS3 has had two firmware updates weighing in at nearly 100MB each, which is no quick and painless download on a 2Mb connection with a bandwidth limit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the stories of firmware updates killing 360s and Wiis, as well. Don’t even get me started on game patching and modern developers’ inability to notice players randomly disconnecting from online games.

Necessary evils though these may be if we want these new experiences, surely someone out there can come up with some kind of standards. Why not make TVs that can tell your devices what resolution they want? Why not test your bloody games before you ask us to pay for them?

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

More Hours in the Day, Please

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One of my favourite arguments for why emulation is usually a bad thing is that, when you have a few gigs of SNES games, you don’t appreciate them and never get to give them your full attention. I can’t say I enjoyed spending £60-70 per game, but at least I’d play the hell out of them and enjoy them all.

What I’m discovering now that I can afford to buy more than a handful of games each year is that I’m having the same problem. I mentioned back in October how hard it was going to be to buy everything I wanted and, having bought a good chunk of them (seven, according to a quick count), I’m now finding that it’s just as hard to do them all justice.

Okami sits abandoned at the 20-hour mark, I rushed my way through Call of Duty 3, I’ve barely scratched the surface of F.E.A.R., fifteen songs through Guitar Hero II, maybe a couple of hours into GTA: Vice City Stories, ran through Splinter Cell once (unusual, given my track record with the series), and I’m lagging behind the rest of my friends list on Gears of War. Thank God I don’t have to juggle the PS3 and Wii at the same time. Anyone else having trouble with too much of a good thing?

I guess I’ll have a nice backlog to work on in the slow summer months, but then I’ll be too busy complaining that there are no new releases to play any of this old stuff.

Just chalk this up as another reason to stagger releases throughout the year.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Call of Doody?

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I really don’t understand 1UP’s review of Call of Duty 3. 6.5 isn’t a bad score but generally qualifies as “above average”, which this game really isn’t. COD2 is arguably still the best game on the 360 and, while COD3 doesn’t mess with the formula too much, it looks great, sounds astounding, and gives the multiplayer an overhaul.

OK, so it’s possibly more like COD2.5, but an expanded version of an excellent game is still an excellent game. It currently averages out on Game Rankings to 86% at the moment which seems fair next to the low 90’s that COD2 was getting.

I don’t know…I enjoy 1UP – especially their podcast and The 1UP Show – but it seems like they sometimes try to be controversial and edgy for the sake of it. It’s not unusual for their reviews to differ dramatically from IGN and GameSpot, who used to be renowned for overrating and underrating respectively. Just the other day I was completely thrown off by the negativity in Dan Hsu’s Gears of War review, in which they eventually gave it…a perfect ten.

The last section of that review possibly justified it and the fact that it became the centrepiece of the 360 fanboy argument against the impending PS3 and Wii definitely helped their ad revenue, but surely a fantastic game with some niggling flaws is a 9 on anybody’s scale? Maybe I’ll change my tune when I finally play it next week.

DVD & Blu-ray, Movies & TV, Tech, Xbox

A Toe in the HD-Pond

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Look what I got in the post yesterday!

My First HD DVDs

Yes, there’s a few weeks before the Xbox 360’s HD DVD drive comes out to say hello but I wanted to get these purchases out of the way before I’m buried under a deluge of new games. Serenity is an obvious choice and when I first saw HD DVD I was blown away by the video quality in The Last Samurai. Batman Begins is on the way across the Atlantic as we speak (can’t wait to see those beautiful glaciers in HD), and when you add in King Kong I’ve got a nice early library.

I won’t comment on the mental health implications of buying discs that I currently have no way of playing. Surely I’m not the only one who’s done it? In any case there’s a format war to be won this time and I’ve done my part to ensure victory for the HD DVD format. Take that, Blu-Ray!