Microsoft: Update Breaks Compatible Hardware

Microsoft will be updating the Xbox 360 with a bunch of social network abilities, but also a contrived and controversial update to block out unlicensed storage devices that will pretty much limit you to the over-priced hard drives and memory cards Microsoft sells.

Lame. Sony and Nintendo both have always allowed 3rd parties to create cheaper, albeit probably less stable hardware for their consoles. Most of the time they are probably 100% reliable. But when you look at the Xbox's failure rate, maybe they should stick to harddrives and let other companies make the Xbox.

Microsoft Thinks We're Made of Money

...because with the new Xbox Live update, you can buy your cartoon avatar a Star Wars lightsaber to play with for 400 MS points. $6 damn dollars!

E3: The Big Three Wrap Up

Now that Nintendo and Sony have their E3 press conferences over and done with, I'd like to take a stab at evaluating the whole deal.

In short: Microsoft has a nice handful big hits returning, Nintendo plays it safe and fixes their WiiMote and Sony floods the shelves with titles. Microsoft and Sony pull up chairs to Nintendo's motion control table. Nintendo focuses on WiiMotion plus. Microsoft gets more social with Facebook/Twitter support. Sony grossly overcharges for the PSP Go.

Microsoft is coming back this year with sequels their biggest titles. Halo: ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, Dirt 2 and Forza 3 are all on my to-do list. I wasn't excited about them going into the motion capturing camera to control games. When it's your main control scheme, like Nintendo, developers have to make it work to sell games, but when it's an add-on, your developers are going to phone in the coding and muck it up. Microsoft might get one or two wide-audience titles in that hard-core gamers pick up for fun, but I don't see it getting much more play than that. And I could care less about Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM support. I'm actually going to tell myself not to use them because of how ridiculous it is to use a home entertainment center for those. It's exactly why I never use the Opera browser on my Wii.

Nintendo is fixing their Wiimote controller with the clip on WiiMotion Plus, finally bringing one-to-one movement to their controller instead of counting on gestures to control games. Tennis and golfing games are going to get a great benefit from this new tech, as well as all the swashbuckling sword lovers out there. I do plan on getting Wii Sports Resort and possibly Red Steel 2. Also, the four player New Super Mario Brothers Wii and Metroid: Other M have peaked my Nintendoing interests as well. Personally, the WiiMotion Plus should be a free upgrade or only add $10 to the price of the games it's bundled with. We'll see how that goes when the games come out.

Sony I'm a little rough on. I don't own a PS3 or a PSP, so I have to approach all their products as if I'm looking to buy a game + a $300 system. That's really hard to do when you have a library of unfinished 360 and Wii and DS games at your disposal. The franchises that I used to love from Sony are replaced from equally good 360 games, and if they aren't exclusive titles, then I REALLY don't care about Sony. I do, however, like to read about the new Gran Turismo and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus follow-up, The Last Guardian. I'm sorry Sony, your just not in the cards for me this generation. Neither is your $250 PSP Go. I'd rather have a 16GB iPod Touch. But you slap in some decent support for media (without requiring Windows!) and a nice app store and I might have to get my people to call your people (read: My wife and my bank account).

Another Xbox 360?

Here's my thinking: $140+ mileage check from work + $30 = new, redesigned Xbox 360.

Then, sell my 360 when I get it back on eBay.

Am I so wrong?

Too bad. It's done.

I hate this generation!

(inserted by Justin, to lighten the mood in here!)

I remember being a kid in the early 80’s when the NES was at its peak. There was hundreds of game that came out every year. If you liked sports games you would buy Bases Loaded, Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Ice Hockey, etc. If it was racing, action, role-play games you had plenty to choose from. You would talk you parents into buying it for you or renting it. So you would open the box on the way home and salivate over the instruction book. Most games gave you a instruction book with a storyline that would set up the action that you would face for the rest of that afternoon, and into the night till you went to sleep.

Fifteen percent of the games made you feel like it was well spent time when you were done with it. The majority left you thinking, “Well it wasn’t great, but I was having fun playing a video game. And that makes it worthwhile”. Then you’re left with roughly ten percent that were just dreadful. You would rather be stuck at home sick watching your moms’ soaps than play that junk. (And let’s face it we have all played hooky to stay home and play games. Hell, I still do it now!)

You didn’t critique these games. You either liked them and they went to the front of your game drawer, or you didn’t and they collected dust in they back. At least until trading games became popular. Then Nintendo Power came out and it would let you know what was slated to come out soon. They didn’t do reviews, (of course because it was an in house project) you would get tips and codes.

I hate people the think their professional video game reviewers.

Now everywhere you turn around everyone has written a review. Everyone nit picks a game and forgets why we play games to start with. Is it fun? No, people worry if the lighting was a little too dark, the shadows are bad, the AI was lazy, and god forbid, the game was short.

Let me give you some examples of where the fun factor is more imortant the HD'ability. Madden looks better than it ever has, plays great but, it is the NFL (No Fun League). There is no real sense of impact with tackles. No subtle celebrations. Where did the injuries go? Ace Combat 4 is a beautiful presentation. We don’t need the storyline. We need a fun dog fighting experience, not monotonous bombing runs and drawn out, looping dog fights. Far Cry might have the best environment in a FPS. But there are only so many times you can enjoy the same mission they give you. GTA4 is a great idea, but there is the repetitive thing again. The Forza series looks and feels great. How many laps do you want to take on that same track, woo hoo! Assasins Creed, great story but the game could have been half as long and it would have been a better experience. All of them looked pretty, but missed the fun factor throughout the game.

On the other hand CoD4 has a short single player story but the online multiplayer is great. They got it right with the audio/visual to make you feel the experience. GOW 1&2 has an awesome single player game, but the online is glitchy. Crackdown may not be the most beautiful game but the entire game is on point. Mercenaries 2 is fun, glitchy and a little ugly but fun.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Now that you have that in your skull here is my other issue.

I was playing a nice quiet game of Hardcore Team Deathmatch on CoD4 when I was rudely interrupted.

My phone rings and it’s one of my best friends. “Hey man, can you do me a favor? If your not to deep in a game. Can you pop in Mercenaries 2?” Now I stopped what I was doing for what I was doing, and for what? He wanted the viral achievement that I had so he could have 50 gamer points.

I hate Microsoft, I hate Sony. I hate Achievement Points and Multiplayer Challenges. It has made them money, because the dumb monkeys have been sucked in to this gimmick.

People play games just to get those achievements and do not return to enjoy the fun in it. For example my friends and I played Horde on GOW 2. We completed the 50th wave and had a blast doing so. But now I can’t anyone to do it again. Now that the achievement was accomplished they are done with that game.

You know where I think Cod4 got it right. The Achievements where all single player, and the Challenges for multiplayer are not attached to the achievements at all. The Multiplayer Challenges that open items in multiplayer are related to kills and headshots, not some outrageous happenstance situation. The happenstance situation were just extras for fun to see if you could it it. (they don't give you anything)

Other than trying to find the orbs in Crackdown I have never tried to complete any Achievements just for the sake of getting them all done. I just have fun, play the game, and get my Achievements along the way.

I’m not an Achievement Whore, just a Gamer!

E3: Microsoft

Well it's finally that time of year for E3, the formerly Electronic Entertainment Expo known as the E3 Media and Business Summit.

Today is Microsoft's day, unveiling tons of new stuff for the 360. Here are some personal surprises and things I'm really looking forward to now.

• Rock Band 2 gets 80 tracks, 20 free future songs. Rock Band 1 content can be transferred for "under $5" (should be for free, IMO).
• Xbox Live gets avatars (Microsoft's version of Nintendo Miis) and new Dashboard redesign/overhaul, group chats.
• Portal: Still Alive internet game coming to XBox Live Arcade.
• Neflix downloads coming "at no additional cost"
• Resident Evil 5 pushed back to March. Booo.

They mentioned a bunch of other stuff, but I'm not Kotaku.com or Joystiq. I only write about stuff that interests me.

UPDATE: Here's some more info on that Dashboard update this fall. They're also allowing you to copy games to the harddrive to play without spinning up the loud disk drive, Live Marketplace content can be browsed from the web and waiting for you when you get home and launching games from the Guide button on the controller.

Broken Controller: I Almost Forgot

Seriously, I almost forgot that I sent Microsoft a broken 360 controller. Routing around my desk I found my packing slip from October 11. So, then I realized I haven't heard anything from them since it got to their shop.

Where the hell is my controller MS?

It Pays to Register

...and have your console break twice, a controller go bad, etc, etc.

But for all the trouble it was to register my console, Microsoft is giving out about $8 worth of free downloadable games in the form of Joust and Robotron on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Now honestly, this isn't a big deal to me since I have working copies of the Atari 2600 versions of the games, but it would be interesting to play 8-bit graphic (16-bit arcade graphics??) games redone in high definition.

Thanks Microsoft. Now what do I get for waiting on the phone with your outsourced tech support for hours and being without your product for literally months while my 360 sat in your Texas warehouse "misplaced"?

Hmmm??

But I guess this is an extension of their buyer program, where if you bought a console between certain dates (not the early adopters), you got to fill out a form for the codes. Now they're just throwing the games out to anyone?

Xbox Live Diamond Card

I recently got my Xbox Live Diamond card in the mail. It's a free (but you have to ask for it) discount card to tons of places online. You have to have an Xbox Live Gold account to be eligible (a $50 a year subscription) so I thought it would have some decent benefits.

Movie tickets are one of the discounted items. Perfect for seeing Transformers tomorrow. Too bad it costs $8 to ship to $7.50 tickets.

The Arts category was completely empty.

There were lots of Services like oil changes and home security alarms. But that's boring.

The Mall had every offer under the sun that you see in mall pagodas.

Restaurants had only fast food. And 3 out of 11 that we have. One I might eat at if in a pinch (Hardees).

A lot of the Travel coupons were like things you could get through the fax machine at work. Good deals. Just nothing gamer related.

And finally the Neighborhood deals. Harrisonburg and the surrounding suburbs had zero deals. Charlottesville either. Richmond did, but all the deals were made up of coupons that were already available above.

It's really disappointing that there wasn't anything that stood out for gamers. If there was, the online only deals meant that you had to pay shipping, usually the 6-10% that the coupon saved you in the first place.

I waited a year to get this card from Microsoft. Guess I should have seen this coming from the big MS.

Digital Distribution: Kill Games More Slowly

Back in the heyday of the SNES and Genesis, you either purchased or rented a game and knew if it sucked in the first 10 minutes of inserting the cartridge and flipping the power on. It was cut and dry.

Today we live in the age of digital distribution. We still, for the most part, buy games from a store, but now gamers are fancy to updates, add-ons, and bug fixes. This is like when value meals were first created at McDonald's. You think your getting more, but really your just getting crap.

Gears of War is the best example of crap delivered to you online. The retail game was excellent. It was the Big Mac of games for the Xbox 360. It sold billions and billions of copies. I played it through, beginning to end, three times (damn that online Achievement system!). The problem was that the online game wasn't quite perfect. People found ways to cheat, exploit and generally ruin a perfect game.

This is where digital distribution kicks in. Epic Games knew they would be able to fix anything wrong with the game after it sold 10⁴³ copies. They tested the game I'm sure. But no one can possibly see how a game will be manipulated in the hands of Cheeto-powdered fingers hopped up on Mountain Dew.

Now getting it's second dose of content Thursday, June 18th. More Achievements and a fix to the way you run. Come on. The way you run? Yeah. Actually it's a fix to the first fix. A fix that the game didn't even need. Doesn't that seem like something that should have been covered well before the game was released. That's like tweaking the formula for Coke. Or re-releasing Star Wars with scenes that, back while shooting, weren't possible.

Gears of War is going to continue to stay in it's case. Why? Because the developers over-handled their product. They couldn't leave "pretty damn good" alone.

You know who should do some over-handling? Microsoft. It's broke. Fix it.

Crackdown for Halo 3 beta?

I'm thinking yes.

I just watched one of the preview trailers for Crackdown over at IGN. I think this game is what Superman Returns should have been, minus the flying of course.

But check it out for yourself and see if you think it's worth it to get into a crowded Halo Live beta.

Right now it's a tie between Crackdown and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.

The Return: Xbox 360

So there it was, a small white non-descript box on my front porch. The day had finally come. Two months of waiting was finally over.

I dropped the box on the floor like a child with a new Transformer on Christmas day. I ripped off the tape with a smirk on my face and envisioned what I knew was in the box being in my hands in a matter of seconds.

I plugged the 360 up to it's cable umbilical cords and pressed the "Play Xbox 360" on my Logitech remote. The familiar sounds and colors were all there.

I slapped on my new Christmas present Halo 3 face plate picked up the controller. I wondered through the new Live updates and downloaded the game demos I'd missed over the past two months. It's going to take a long time to get reaquainted. It's serial number is different, so says the paper that accompanied it in the box. A new 360...a better 360 than the one I had before.

Tomorrow is Gears of War multi-player co-op over Live. Hardcore. It's Test Drive Unlimited. It's LEGO Star Wars II.

Comfort has set in. Sleep will come a little quicker tonight.

The Anticipation

It's almost too much to handle. It's been two days shy of two months without the little white beast. Microsoft, UPS and I finally got it straight and they even delivered it back to me a day early. A bit of positive Karma never hurt anyone.

Right?