Xbox 360
Why I didn’t download the Halo 3 beta
I love Halo. I love Halo 2, despite the rubbish ending. Only Deus Ex has wasted more of my life (somebody remake it and hurry up - the DX Source project seems to have ground to a halt), and I’m genuinely excited about Halo 3. But I didn’t download the Halo 3 beta, despite owning Crackdown and therefore being eligible. The reason? Multiplayer.
I hate multiplayer gaming, because I’m rubbish at games. And that’s becoming a bad thing, because publishers see multiplayer as the future. The latest release for the Xbox, Shadowrun, is largely (entirely?) multiplayer, and more and more console game reviews say things to the effect of “the single player mode is crap and even a monkey could finish it in less than four seconds”. I ain’t paying fifty quid for that, which means that of the few console games that come out, even fewer of them are of any use to me.
Now, I’m not ashamed of my rubbishness. However, it does mean multiplayer is a complete waste of time for me. No matter where or when I connect, the same thing always happens. Go! Bang! Dead! Shite! Go! Bang! Dead! Shite!
The difference between my skill level and everybody else’s is just too big. You could put me in a multiplayer game where I’m armed with rocket launchers and everybody else has nothing but grated cheese to defend themselves, and I’d still be fromaged to death within three seconds.
I briefly thought that playing similarly rubbish gamers might be the answer, but it isn’t. Imagine the scene: a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland (that’ll be every game, then). Player one commandeers an all-terrain vehicle and drives it over his own head, East 17-style. Player two wanders into a cupboard and can’t find his way back out. Player three strolls off a cliff while trying to remember which button jumps and which one reloads. Player four sits down and has a nervous breakdown. And player five turns out to be a skilled gamer slumming it, and within three seconds I’ve been cheesed to death.
Today I am mostly hating my Xbox 360
I stumbled upon the critically-acclaimed Psychonauts in a branch of Game the other day. I’ve been looking for it for ages without success, and I know that although it’s an Xbox game, my 360 will run it. Better still, it was four pounds. Four pounds!
Game in, dashboard says there’s an update, update installs, system restarts… can’t play the game. I have the wrong cable. The game needs PAL-50 and the cable doesn’t support that.
Balls! Giant dangly balls on toast!
This has happened before - Half-Life 2 springs to mind - and it’s one of those little details that makes the difference between console love and console hate. I don’t even know whether I still have a cable that’d let me play the game, and if I do I can’t be arsed looking for it. So today I have console hate.
Earth Defence Force 2017: fun, if you like that sort of thing. And I do
If you fancy some big dumb fun on the Xbox 360, Earth Defence Force 2017’s worth a punt (it’s going for £18 on Amazon). It’s essentially Space Invaders given the FPS treatment, and if you turn off the voice acting and music it’s an utter hoot. Particularly when you fire at a big bug with your rocket launcher, miss completely and realise that every single building in the city is destructible. So far I’ve killed about three aliens, four hundred and thirty skyscrapers, six bridges and a thousand trees. Heh heh heh.
The trailer’s on Play.com, but don’t let its soundtrack fool you: the music in the game itself is bloody awful.
Games: too expensive for impulse buys
Mr Biffo’s column in the new issue of EDGE (it’s not online, sorry) raises the thorny issue of game prices among other things, and he makes some good points - the gaming industry is right that films get income from the cinema before they hit DVD and games obviously don’t, but the industry doesn’t tend to mention that even the biggest, shiniest, most expensive game has a budget that wouldn’t cover the catering bill on a typical movie - that sort of thing, but I think he’s hit the nail on the head when he suggests that at £50, games are too expensive to take a punt on.
I’m currently loving Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (it’s very Japanese, and I mean that in a good way) but I swithered before buying it - the demo didn’t put across the sheer nuttiness of it, and if I hadn’t read EDGE’s fairly glowing review I probably wouldn’t have bought it at all. I’ve got Rainbow Six Vegas waiting for when I finally finish LP, and that’s it.
I’ve spent ages looking at other titles but again and again, the price puts me off. At £40 to £50 I’m not willing to take a risk on a game I’m not sure I’ll even like, either because it’s terrible (Perfect Dark Zero), tedious (the 360 version of Far Cry) or just something I’m not into (Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter).
Part of the problem is that there are some truly terrible games out there. That’s not just a matter of taste - while I don’t get GR:AW, I can see why others love it - but of plain truth. I give you Sonic The Hedgehog on the Xbox 360 which, according to the gaming press and the entire internet, would be an atrocity at £5 but is a threat to the very fabric of humanity at £50. A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes or any intelligent games magazine shows that there are many, many more.
There are options, though. If I lived nearer a GAME shop (and I’m assuming they still do their “if it’s shit, bring it back” exchange thing) I might take more risks, but I don’t so I don’t.
Pre-owned games would be another option, or at least they would be if the games shops weren’t so greedy (Pre-owned! £39.99! Bastards!).
Trade-ins would be good if the difference between the original price and the trade-in (or the trade-in and the mark-up when it goes back on the shelf) wasn’t so big. And there’s always eBay, or there would be if my account wasn’t still suspended due to an eBay cock-up. Oh, and eBay prices reflect reviews, so if a game comes out and everyone thinks it’s crap then you’ll be lucky to sell it for 2p.
The problem with all of those solutions is that they don’t bring in any more money for the game publishers. When someone buys a new game at £50 and then trades it in or eBays it, and I buy the pre-owned copy, and play it, and trade it in or eBay it, and someone else buys that, and… three, four or more people are playing the game but only one person’s generating cash for the publishers. When I exchange a full-price game because it sucks, I get a full refund and buy something else, so I’ve played two games but only paid for one.
I know some of you are gamers; what do you think is the right price point for a game? £50? £40? £20? Would lower prices encourage you to take more risks? Should we be allowed by law to punish the people who knowingly sell us bad games, with RRP determining just how much punishment we’re allowed to dish out?
Things what I have bought and are good
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak!
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for the Xbox 360. Fun!
- On The Wealth of Nations, by PJ O’Rourke. Witty!
Microsoft brings IPTV to Xbox 360, Apple fans’ wait is nearly over
Annual tech trade show CES is underway, and Microsoft’s keynote announced a few new goodies: a new Ultimate Extra for Vista that delivers full-motion desktop backgrounds, interoperability between Xbox Live and Vista, and more interestingly a TV service for the Xbox 360. US launch this summer but other than that there’s sod-all information. Price? International availability? Partners? Your guess is as good as mine.
Meanwhile Apple-watchers are wetting themselves with excitement over the content of Steve Jobs’ keynote tomorrow. Expect more on iTV, lots on Leopard and maybe even the iPod phone. I sincerely hope Jobs *does* announce an iPod phone tomorrow, because the sheer volume of ineptly photoshopped fakes floating around online is beginning to do my head in.
Update:
More on Xbox telly via Eurogamer.net:
IPTV, meanwhile, set to launch at Christmas, will allow you to watch TV on Xbox 360 while chatting to friends, and to play on Xbox Live while recording a TV programme in the background, among other things. Microsoft promises “instant channel zapping, a rich and responsive user interface, video on demand with branded video-on-demand storefronts, digital video recording and high-definition television”.
Its press literature says that commercial and trial deployments are under way with 16 companies, “including five of the world’s largest service providers in 14 countries on four continents”. Those “scale commercial deployments” include ones with BT Group in the UK, Deutsche Telekom in Germany, T-Online in France and Swisscom in Switzerland. AT&T is working with Microsoft in the US.
Gears of War “quite successful”
1 million copies sold in two weeks. Bloody hell.
Quick game review: Gears of War (Xbox 360)
Worth buying an Xbox for.
Incidentally, if you’re in the US it seems that Amazon will be flogging 1,000 Xbox 360s for just $100 each this week. The story’s already hit Digg.com, though, so it’s going to be seriously oversubscribed.
PS3: selling below cost while Xboxes make money?
An interesting piece from Business2.com, via UK Resistance:
Sony (SNE) will lose $241.35 on every PlayStation 3 game console it sells at $599, and $306.85 on every console it sells with a smaller hard drive at $499, according to an analysis of the component costs conducted by iSuppli, a research firm…. but this time around, Microsoft will make $75.70 on every Xbox 360 it sells… so while Microsoft won’t need to sell a set number of games to cover its build costs, Sony will need to sell five to seven.
Progress, of sorts
From digg:
One of the awesome details mentioned was that while most shooting games has players and enemies heads with two or three critical points on the head, Call of Duty 4 has 16, which will let gamers be able to blow off pieces of the enemy’s face one at a time.