So I've been finding, on the 360, that the games I enjoy most are not the top-shelf, expensive, mega-games for the 360 like Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Mass Effect, and the like. No, what I enjoy have been many of the XBox Live Arcade offerings. Sometimes, the simpler, the better.
Titles like Aegis Wing, Bomberman Live, Pinball FX, and Arkadian Warriors have me playing and loving video games again like I did when I was young and owned a NES and a Genesis. These are wonderfully fun games, are relatively cheap, and have one thing in common: They don't try too hard in any way, shape or form.
I'm finding too often that most game publishers believe that with the current generation of games, that it means that they have to put as many things into the game experience as possible for it to be something people will like. Unfortunately, for me, this goes wrong in two ways. One, people actually *DO* expect their games to be everything. Two, that means that for me, the games are usually just overly-convoluted pieces of headache inducing garbage.
Thankfully, the XBLA is just sitting there full of excellent, simpler games for me to feast on. And occasionally, one of the bigger, more convoluted games will be something that tickles my fancy. Like NHL08.. or the Grand Theft Auto series... or Burnout... or Oblivion.
However, all you hardcore gamers can keep your over-indulged First Person Shooters or crazy ass uber-RPGs like Mass Effect.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
It's been awhile.
Haven't been gaming as much as usual this month, so posts about the 360 are going to be few and far between. However, I do have something to talk about today.
What I want to talk about is this 'compensation' we're being given for the XBox Live outages that occured (and, according to many people, continue to occur with some regularity, although I have my doubts that any continuing issues are related to the outages through the holidays in any way) through the holiday season. This compensation has finally been announced and is now available for download in the form of one Undertow, an independantly developed game on XBox Live Arcade.
Now, while I like the fact that XBox is giving us something for free when they actually didn't have to give anyone anything at all... the fact that they've gone about it in the way that they have smacks of pure disrespect for everyone involved. Let me explain:
#1 - The free game offer is a game that was decided upon by the XBox brass. Not the users. This not only leads to bitterness from a user-base that was already incredibly bitter to begin with, but leads to a lot more paperwork, man hours, and customer service disruption from those people that had already bought the game to begin with. This is because if you have the game already, you can phone support and they'll refund your points. *HUH*!?!? Wow, way to keep costs down there boneheads.
#2 - The game is disgustingly bad. Out of all the XBox Live Arcade games available, they offered one of the worst I have ever played. It has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Bad voice acting, ridiculously repetitive play, inconsistent difficulty levels, horrendously bad AI, and, worst of all for my money, ridiculously tiny player characters that are almost unseeable on a giant HDTV. "Here's your free game... it's a bad one!" Thanks MS!
#3 - MS is only offering this game for free for *five days*. Combine that with the fact that there is almost *no* official announcements about it, and you have a recipe for more disaster in the making. By no official announcements, I mean there isn't *any* notice that it's for free or as compensation for down-time or anything of that nature on XBox Live itself. I haven't checked XBox.com, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's nothing there either. Thank goodness for gaming news sites.
#4 - XBox Live has once again gone apeshit because of the people trying to mass download Undertow. Here's a hint people... don't bother. It's not worth it. At all.
So yah. I've maintained quite a bit of patience and good-humor about this whole thing so far, but I'm telling you right now.. that is starting to end. This is another typical debacle and even I'm starting to get tired of it all. Thankfully, I don't buy things in order to feel the need to have everything PERFECT OMG!, so I'll continue to sit back and play games I enjoy and enjoy the system for what it does do well. It's just that Microsoft had a fantastic chance to really show what they were made of here... but alas. All they did was show people what they were *really* made of.
What I want to talk about is this 'compensation' we're being given for the XBox Live outages that occured (and, according to many people, continue to occur with some regularity, although I have my doubts that any continuing issues are related to the outages through the holidays in any way) through the holiday season. This compensation has finally been announced and is now available for download in the form of one Undertow, an independantly developed game on XBox Live Arcade.
Now, while I like the fact that XBox is giving us something for free when they actually didn't have to give anyone anything at all... the fact that they've gone about it in the way that they have smacks of pure disrespect for everyone involved. Let me explain:
#1 - The free game offer is a game that was decided upon by the XBox brass. Not the users. This not only leads to bitterness from a user-base that was already incredibly bitter to begin with, but leads to a lot more paperwork, man hours, and customer service disruption from those people that had already bought the game to begin with. This is because if you have the game already, you can phone support and they'll refund your points. *HUH*!?!? Wow, way to keep costs down there boneheads.
#2 - The game is disgustingly bad. Out of all the XBox Live Arcade games available, they offered one of the worst I have ever played. It has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Bad voice acting, ridiculously repetitive play, inconsistent difficulty levels, horrendously bad AI, and, worst of all for my money, ridiculously tiny player characters that are almost unseeable on a giant HDTV. "Here's your free game... it's a bad one!" Thanks MS!
#3 - MS is only offering this game for free for *five days*. Combine that with the fact that there is almost *no* official announcements about it, and you have a recipe for more disaster in the making. By no official announcements, I mean there isn't *any* notice that it's for free or as compensation for down-time or anything of that nature on XBox Live itself. I haven't checked XBox.com, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's nothing there either. Thank goodness for gaming news sites.
#4 - XBox Live has once again gone apeshit because of the people trying to mass download Undertow. Here's a hint people... don't bother. It's not worth it. At all.
So yah. I've maintained quite a bit of patience and good-humor about this whole thing so far, but I'm telling you right now.. that is starting to end. This is another typical debacle and even I'm starting to get tired of it all. Thankfully, I don't buy things in order to feel the need to have everything PERFECT OMG!, so I'll continue to sit back and play games I enjoy and enjoy the system for what it does do well. It's just that Microsoft had a fantastic chance to really show what they were made of here... but alas. All they did was show people what they were *really* made of.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
...and another week gone.
Time is flying by, and I somehow managed to go for almost a whole week without posting anything. Not that there has been much to post. I've been following Kotaku, a gaming website, for quite some time now. It's a great source of subjective journalism, rumors, and just plain fun. Check it out (if anyone is actually reading this that is!) if you enjoy gaming and gaming news and rumors and the like.
On the 360 front, most of my time has been spent in front of BioShock which I rented a few nights back. I played the demo pretty quickly after purchasing the system, but wasn't enormously impressed, so never really gave it a second thought. However, on reading a few things and seeing how many people really enjoyed it, I decided to give it a decent try through. Well, I just have to say one thing up front. "Popular" doesn't always mean "Great". Alright, I got that out of my system.
While Bioshock *is* a very atmospheric game, and at times quite beautiful (especially in a retro type of way), I find that it leans a little too heavily on the usually same ol' same ol' aspects of most shooters. The Plasmid angle is a little different, but not overly so. It's interesting to try and find ways to creatively use your plasmids and weapons (and environment) together for the best effect... but most of the time the action just happens so quickly that I find myself just relying on simple ol' shoot-em-up. The enemies never seem to be around any of the environmental hazards that would make creativity work so well.. or perhaps I'm just not good enough with creative thinking to make it work. Either way, I have so far found most of the combat aspect of the game severely lacking and quite a drudgery.
Having said that.. I find that I just keep playing it if only to see "what's next", especially in terms of scenery and what-not. The graphical and design nature of the game relies very heavily on steampunk, but in a manner that doesn't seem *too* steampunk, if that makes any sense. It's almost futuristic in a sense, but you never really lose the feeling that you really are stuck way back in the '50s. The one aspect of the game that truly shines.
However, I'm still only either just under half-way through, or just *at* half-way through, so I can't really comment on the game as a *whole*.. just what my experience has been so far, and so far, I'm finding that it's just another First-Person Shooter with a few creative bents that is beautiful to look at. I guess that's a mark of Next Generation gaming.
On a more positive gaming note, tonight I spent some time playing Aegis Wing (A free XBLA download -- side scrolling shooter) online with 3 other people. Now *that* was some fun. Some great, old school, multi-player fun. With all the focus and attention on trying to make games that are *everything*, it's great to see that one can still have a blast with games that only try to be one thing. A good time. That, my friends, is what gaming is *really* about.
On the 360 front, most of my time has been spent in front of BioShock which I rented a few nights back. I played the demo pretty quickly after purchasing the system, but wasn't enormously impressed, so never really gave it a second thought. However, on reading a few things and seeing how many people really enjoyed it, I decided to give it a decent try through. Well, I just have to say one thing up front. "Popular" doesn't always mean "Great". Alright, I got that out of my system.
While Bioshock *is* a very atmospheric game, and at times quite beautiful (especially in a retro type of way), I find that it leans a little too heavily on the usually same ol' same ol' aspects of most shooters. The Plasmid angle is a little different, but not overly so. It's interesting to try and find ways to creatively use your plasmids and weapons (and environment) together for the best effect... but most of the time the action just happens so quickly that I find myself just relying on simple ol' shoot-em-up. The enemies never seem to be around any of the environmental hazards that would make creativity work so well.. or perhaps I'm just not good enough with creative thinking to make it work. Either way, I have so far found most of the combat aspect of the game severely lacking and quite a drudgery.
Having said that.. I find that I just keep playing it if only to see "what's next", especially in terms of scenery and what-not. The graphical and design nature of the game relies very heavily on steampunk, but in a manner that doesn't seem *too* steampunk, if that makes any sense. It's almost futuristic in a sense, but you never really lose the feeling that you really are stuck way back in the '50s. The one aspect of the game that truly shines.
However, I'm still only either just under half-way through, or just *at* half-way through, so I can't really comment on the game as a *whole*.. just what my experience has been so far, and so far, I'm finding that it's just another First-Person Shooter with a few creative bents that is beautiful to look at. I guess that's a mark of Next Generation gaming.
On a more positive gaming note, tonight I spent some time playing Aegis Wing (A free XBLA download -- side scrolling shooter) online with 3 other people. Now *that* was some fun. Some great, old school, multi-player fun. With all the focus and attention on trying to make games that are *everything*, it's great to see that one can still have a blast with games that only try to be one thing. A good time. That, my friends, is what gaming is *really* about.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Just a small note.
Microsoft's Bill Gates held his final keynote speech at this years CES a short time ago. You can find links to it Here, and Here.
Not much to talk about on the XBox 360 front, but one thing that stands out, as a Canadian 360 gamer, is that once again we're getting the shaft when it comes to XBox Live Marketplace content. We get pretty much *no* television content whatsoever, while the U.S. gets more added to it as they announced that Disney Channel and MGM were being added. No addressing the Canadian content whatsoever, and I feel a little peeved at that. Yah, we *finally* got movie downloads, but what horrible downloads... 3 or 4 good movies out of the 30 that were there at launch, and the list is down to 28 the last I checked, which means we lost a couple already with no new content.
Now, while I understand there's probably some kind of licensing issues, or CRTC issues, or some other kind of red-tape bullshit, I think that if we -- as Canadians -- are paying as much as, if not more than, U.S. users for a service, we should have access to similar levels of service and content as the U.S. users.
However, I guess that's just an ongoing sacrifice for living in a country as great as Canada. I certainly wouldn't move myself to Seattle just so I could download Hannah Montana. Actually.. not being able to download Hannah Montana is a great part of *being* Canadian now that I think about it.
Not much to talk about on the XBox 360 front, but one thing that stands out, as a Canadian 360 gamer, is that once again we're getting the shaft when it comes to XBox Live Marketplace content. We get pretty much *no* television content whatsoever, while the U.S. gets more added to it as they announced that Disney Channel and MGM were being added. No addressing the Canadian content whatsoever, and I feel a little peeved at that. Yah, we *finally* got movie downloads, but what horrible downloads... 3 or 4 good movies out of the 30 that were there at launch, and the list is down to 28 the last I checked, which means we lost a couple already with no new content.
Now, while I understand there's probably some kind of licensing issues, or CRTC issues, or some other kind of red-tape bullshit, I think that if we -- as Canadians -- are paying as much as, if not more than, U.S. users for a service, we should have access to similar levels of service and content as the U.S. users.
However, I guess that's just an ongoing sacrifice for living in a country as great as Canada. I certainly wouldn't move myself to Seattle just so I could download Hannah Montana. Actually.. not being able to download Hannah Montana is a great part of *being* Canadian now that I think about it.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Time to switch gears.
So I thought I'd switch it up here and get off the little XBox Live not working properly ranting stuff and give a little run down on my XBox 360, the games I have, and what I like about it.
I own the Halo 3 Edition XBox 360, which I picked up because EBGames was sold out of premium editions. (and Elite systems too.) One of the things that sold me on the Halo 3 edition, even though it's a pretty ugly green color, is the fact that it has an HDMI port. It also came with a headset and a play and charge kit, and those two things have been pretty essential. So it was a pretty good decision all told, although I still hate the green. (But the metallic orange is cool! I love orange).
I currently own the following titles:
- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
- Burnout: Revenge
- NHL08
- Beautiful Katamari
- Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy
As you can see, I have this thing for games with colons in the titles. Interesting.
Titles that I have rented include, but are not limited to:
- Mass Effect
- Conan
- Lost Planet
- Halo 3
XBLA titles that I own:
- Zuma
- Bomberman Live
- Carcassone
- Aegis Wing
I really want to get Arkadian Warriors.
I haven't yet picked up any accessories, but have a few on my radar I'd like. The messenger keyboard, an intercooler, and an extra gamepad are musts.
Anyway, something nobody on earth would really care about, but I wanted to get it down for posterity. I'll update when I get new stuffs.
I own the Halo 3 Edition XBox 360, which I picked up because EBGames was sold out of premium editions. (and Elite systems too.) One of the things that sold me on the Halo 3 edition, even though it's a pretty ugly green color, is the fact that it has an HDMI port. It also came with a headset and a play and charge kit, and those two things have been pretty essential. So it was a pretty good decision all told, although I still hate the green. (But the metallic orange is cool! I love orange).
I currently own the following titles:
- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
- Burnout: Revenge
- NHL08
- Beautiful Katamari
- Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy
As you can see, I have this thing for games with colons in the titles. Interesting.
Titles that I have rented include, but are not limited to:
- Mass Effect
- Conan
- Lost Planet
- Halo 3
XBLA titles that I own:
- Zuma
- Bomberman Live
- Carcassone
- Aegis Wing
I really want to get Arkadian Warriors.
I haven't yet picked up any accessories, but have a few on my radar I'd like. The messenger keyboard, an intercooler, and an extra gamepad are musts.
Anyway, something nobody on earth would really care about, but I wanted to get it down for posterity. I'll update when I get new stuffs.
The Saga Continues...
According to Live Support , XBox Live will once again be experiencing issues. Mainly with "billing related" issues, but also including matchmaking et al.
So no, it's definitely *not* fixed, and definitely still having problems, and ay yi yi it's getting harder by the day to not go completely insanely bitter about it.
It's not like this is a *free* service. (Well, it is if you're a silver member, but in that case, you don't get to actually play games online.. you can just download stuff and have friends lists). I'm paying about $7 a month to sit there and watch my system sit there while Live loads for 3 minutes, not give me the ability to stay connected to games, and not let me download premium content. Actually, that last bit isn't too disturbing, since they generally charge too much for it anyway. Coooonssssuuummmmerrrr Whore.
It's unfortunate that this blog has to start off on such a negative note. I was going to start doing some game write-ups, but I'm a bit soured on that right now. I know the XBox Live team is working around the clock, but ... TWO WEEKS PEOPLE... totally and absolutely unacceptable. Screw your "free arcade game download", this needs to be renumerated with added on Live account time.
*EDIT* XBox Live's Major Nelson is also having issues with his blogsite, after having new hardware installed for the server. One has to imagine if this is the kind of hardware that Live is using, *no wonder*. I mean, honestly.
So no, it's definitely *not* fixed, and definitely still having problems, and ay yi yi it's getting harder by the day to not go completely insanely bitter about it.
It's not like this is a *free* service. (Well, it is if you're a silver member, but in that case, you don't get to actually play games online.. you can just download stuff and have friends lists). I'm paying about $7 a month to sit there and watch my system sit there while Live loads for 3 minutes, not give me the ability to stay connected to games, and not let me download premium content. Actually, that last bit isn't too disturbing, since they generally charge too much for it anyway. Coooonssssuuummmmerrrr Whore.
It's unfortunate that this blog has to start off on such a negative note. I was going to start doing some game write-ups, but I'm a bit soured on that right now. I know the XBox Live team is working around the clock, but ... TWO WEEKS PEOPLE... totally and absolutely unacceptable. Screw your "free arcade game download", this needs to be renumerated with added on Live account time.
*EDIT* XBox Live's Major Nelson is also having issues with his blogsite, after having new hardware installed for the server. One has to imagine if this is the kind of hardware that Live is using, *no wonder*. I mean, honestly.
aLive Recovery
So Live recovered enough for me to enjoy a rousing game of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance with a friend online. We continued our campaign from where we last left it, just entering Asgard after defeating Mephisto. Asgard is one of my favorite levels of the game, but we started pretty late and by the time we were half-way through saving Balder (or whatever), my eyes were watering and I'd had enough... so we saved it for another day.
I must say, I really can't wait for a sequel to Ultimate Alliance. Something truly next gen in the same kind of genre. It's one of the better games out there (on all the systems), and makes for hours and hours of pure, mindless, bad-guy bashing fun.
Highly recommended... especially if you have some kind of OCD!
Bedtime now though. More 360 another day.
I must say, I really can't wait for a sequel to Ultimate Alliance. Something truly next gen in the same kind of genre. It's one of the better games out there (on all the systems), and makes for hours and hours of pure, mindless, bad-guy bashing fun.
Highly recommended... especially if you have some kind of OCD!
Bedtime now though. More 360 another day.
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