Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Crackdown: So Many Orbs…

23/02/2007 Olly 4 Comments

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:

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.

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

My 360: 2nd December 2005 – 9th February 2007

10/02/2007 Olly 4 Comments

Stranger by the roadside, do not smile
When you see this grave, though it is only a 360’s,
My master wept when I died, and his own hand
Laid me in earth and wrote these lines on my tomb.

It was a matter of time, but my 360 has finally joined the millions of others that have croaked as what must be one of the most unreliable consoles ever made. And since it’s costing me £83 for a new one I’m going to be more than mildly annoyed if the rumoured HDMI version appears imminently.

After the early faults appeared I enjoyed a week of play without issue, both on Psychonauts and assorted 360 games. Then, last night, it froze in the Crackdown demo and again when playing COD2. Restarts brought the dreaded three lights, so now I’m just biting the bullet and getting it replaced. That has to be better than constantly playing in fear of the inevitable failure.

Since I’m going to be without a 360 for at least a week now, the bright side is that I’m going to use the time to work through some of my PS2 and DS backlog. I intend to finally finish Ico and God of War, and then crack on with Hotel Dusk, Dawn of Sorrow (still haven’t finished it), and Phoenix Wright 2. Every cloud…

Games, Life, Xbox

I Am Win!

11/01/2007 Olly 2 Comments

Halo 3

I can’t remember the last time I won anything, but I’m thoroughly chuffed with this (clue: it’s under ‘N’). Saves me spending £40 on Crackdown for a while, at least. Unless it turns out to be good, in which case I’ll buy it anyway and have two beta keys.

I used to win stuff all the time, and now maybe it’s only because I enter competitions for stuff that I can’t really buy without a massive overdraft (Premiership tickets and wall-sized televisions, for example) but as far as I can remember the last time I won anything was an advance copy of Batman Forever on VHS in 1995. Maybe that was why I stopped entering competitions…

Regardless, I don’t have to buy a game that I don’t really want, and I’m guaranteed to be playing lots and lots of Halo 3 multiplayer (surely the only game that will ever prise us away from COD2 multi?) in a couple of months. Right when my dissertation is due…

Shit…

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Oblivion First Impressions

24/03/2006 Olly 4 Comments

I couldn’t let a 360 game as big as this go by without giving some impressions now, could I? Just as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind hit the Xbox a few months after launch, the sequel does the same thing to the 360 in an infinitely bigger way. Bigger in every way, in fact. So big that I’m just giving some first impressions since I can’t hope to capture it with only a few hours of play.

The first thing I need to say is that I didn’t like Morrowind at all. I tried it, but after a couple of hours I could tell that it wasn’t the sort of thing I was up for pouring hour upon hour into. I honestly can’t remember why since it was so long ago, but whatever it was Oblivion hasn’t suffered from the same thing so far. It’s much the same in that it opens slightly slowly – this time with a slog through a dungeon – but once you get into the spectacular overworld the sense of awe is up there with when I first played Shenmue.

It’s kind of strange in that it’s a very deep and customisable RPG that plays somewhat like an FPS crossed with an MMORPG, but it works in making the combat feel involved and allowing the player to feel a part of the adventure. I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with that feeling in any RPG of finding a new and bustling town to explore, and I spent most of the time in Oblivion experiencing that. I don’t want to spoil the early story, but suffice it to say that there’s a fairly early moment which goes up there with that infamous scene of Sephiroth in Nibelheim for me, and overall I’m certainly enjoying it as much as can be hoped with a swords and sorcery RPG. As much as I like Lord of the Rings I’m not often too big on playing it.

I’m going to be writing something slightly more in-depth for a first impressions feature over on Pro-G early next week, so keep an eye out for that.

Impressions

Connect360

10/02/2006 Olly 2 Comments

We Mac users have had the short end of the stick to a certain extent with the Xbox 360, since all that lovely Media Center functionality requires Windows XP or Windows Media Center. No more! The lovely folks at Nullriver who brought us PSPWare have just released the first version of Connect360, which lets you stream MP3s and JPGs from your iTunes and iPhoto libraries to the 360. That’s the same stuff that Windows XP can do, and hopefully future versions will add transcoding of AACs and maybe even video streaming.

I tried it out and it certainly seems to do everything that it promises. I booted up the 360 and it immediately found my iBook over the network, and I could look at all of my photos in their full HD glory on my TV. Music worked similarly well although like they say AACs, both protected and otherwise, don’t work yet. Now we just need it to stream video (I’d kill to be able to watch 720p H.264 on the 360) and we’ll be set.

It’s in beta at the moment so you can get it with free updates for life for $10. Not a bad deal…

General

Final Fantasy XI 360 Beta

12/01/2006 Olly Leave a comment

Just a heads up that the new Official UK Xbox 360 Magazine is out with the free copy of the FFXI beta which you can play for as long as the beta period lasts (they say in the magazine that they expect at least three months). This is where I’d normally be giving impressions, but you have to install the game to the hard drive and it tells me I still have 34 minutes left…

In other news I have an update on my TV. Novatech now show it to be out of stock and wouldn’t get back to me when I emailed them to see if I’d ordered it before they’d run out, so I cancelled and found that Futurehome have it in stock and for a similar price so I went ahead and ordered from them. Thankfully I have all of next week off so I know what I’ll be doing.