Ranting Kenya

Again, I haven’t played the co-op over Xbox Live (patch forthcoming). But here are my thoughts of playing multiplayer, and single player.

It’s awesome and fun.

I have beaten the game once now with one character by myself, and also got played the whole game (minus completing the final battle) with two other players locally. The game is just fun. The art style is bright and engaging, the game play is just what it should be for a brawler like this, and it IS a good value for the money. I mean really, $15 for the number of hours of enjoyment I’ve already had has been totally worth it.

One thing I noticed that was really well done in the game are the levels. You get different environments frequently. You don’t usually play in any one locale for much more than 5 minutes. The result is a constant sense of accomplishment. It also allows you to play sections over again if you want to level up.

I don’t want to say too much, because I enjoyed discovering things in the game greatly, and I feel that everyone should at least check out the trial version.

I know I could use all the strategy I can get. This game plays different than the original.

In my last post, I mentioned a new feature for the Xbox 360. Soon, Xbox 360s everywhere will have the ability to download a game from a game disc onto the hard drive. This is a fantastic feature that I will use a lot. I’m probably more excited about this than any game they could’ve announced. Obviously there are many advantages:

• When you pack your 360 and head for the cabin, or go camping, or a friends house, you can have all your games without all the extra baggage. Personally I have 13 games for 360 now, and taking that many discs around everywhere is quite a task.
• Moving your 360 around the house is now far more convenient.
• Taking your hard drive to your friends house and having all of your games would be awesome.
• Xbox Live Arcade probably first made me realize that I wanted this feature. Wireless controllers that turn on the console are great, but getting up to change the game disc breaks the whole “wireless” illusion/advantage. This fixes this now. Now I don’t have to get up from the couch.
• Hopefully cross game invites from friends will be much smoother now.
• Faster load times should benefit everything accross the board (since a hard drive is faster than an optical drive). I’m really hoping this will kill the texture popping issues that many games have (especially the Unreal Engine 3 based games).
• Quieter game operation. I don’t know what it is, but my 360 Elite has the loudest disc drive of any 360 I have encountered. Not having that thing spinning will help on those late night gaming sessions.

But I Still Have Some Questions

So, more details are now needed.

1. When will the dashboard update with this enhancement be available?
2. There must be some kind of DRM? What’s the deal with it?
3. What stops me from renting all the games from blockbuster and putting them on my console?
4. Will the game downloaded from the disc onto the hard drive share the already created game saves?
5. If I copy a game to my hard drive, then sell the disc to someone else, does my downloaded copy still work?
6. If I rent a game from Blockbuster, can I copy them to the hard drive aswell?
7. And what about purchasing used games from Electronics Boutique?

How Did We Not See This Coming?

Microsoft has done a lot of things in the last few years that is really pushing digital distribution, getting away from the office desk and into the living room and making the 360 the “do everything” box.

When the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war was raging on, maybe people speculated that MS wasn’t putting either drive in the actual Xbox because they were skipping that whole generation of content. Bill Gates even said it would be the last physical format. He didn’t say that Microsoft would be starting the next big thing so soon.

They have their Xbox Live Marketplace which allows people to download movies and game content from the internet to their consoles. Sure, games demos, live arcade games and movies are all find and good, but this is a much bigger deal to me as a gamer

Although these games will have to come in disc form first, having the games available on the hard drive will become an absolute necessity. Imagine now the next generation Xbox. I would bet, that every game will be available for download. It has been talked about before as the future, and this is a big step in that direction.

It now appears that the whole “Xbox Originals” program is really just a test bed for a far greater product. Xbox originals allows 360 owners to download select original xbox games to the console’s hard drive and play them from there

Throw in the digitally distributed XNA creators club games, the xbox live community, windows media center streaming and downloadable movies and you have a really compelling box in your living room. Then you add in their newly announced Netflix deal (please make it available to Canadians), and it’s a no brainer.

It also seems that this new 360 with the 60GB hard drive was basically announced so even the cheapest of the 360 gamers can enjoy this ability.

Updated

After writing this post, many sources are reporting that the game will have to be in the drive for the downloaded games to work. To that I say, FAIL. MS, I understand you don’t want crazy game copying. However, you’ve never been afraid to DRM the hell out of everything. In this case, you should’ve come up with some kind of DRM solution so I DON’T HAVE TO HAVE THE DISC IN THE DRIVE. You just about came up with the best feature ever. So close, but still so so far. Funny how that little tidbit wasn’t on Major Nelson’s post. Seriously, game performance better skyrocket, otherwise why would I bother doing this?

There’s been a number of rumors re-surfacing in the last couple days about Blu-Ray drives coming to the Xbox 360. Microsoft said a few weeks ago after HD-DVD officially died that they weren’t talking with Sony about it. What that really means is “we’re thinking about it, and as of this moment we haven’t contacted anyone.” So are they going to do it? I think so.

I don’t think there’s any question that the future of the DVD/Blu-Ray is limited by digital downloads. We’re already seeing a number of services available that provide just this service. Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace, iTunes Store/Apple TV, and the VooDoo box are a few. Plus you can watch so much online for free now straight from the internet browser. And of course, there’s still Video on Demand (VOD). VOD could be a real competitor if they’d just fix the quality issue.

Anyway, many have speculated that Microsoft won’t do a Blu-Ray (BR) drive because they want people to move to the download model. This is about half true in my mind. Yes, absolutely, they want people to do digital delivery. However, the Xbox division main goal is to sell Xbox 360 consoles and Xbox 360 games. Would adding a BR drive (either internal or as an add-on à la HD-DVD drive) be an added incentive to buy Xbox 360 consoles? I believe so. Many people bought a PS3 solely as a BR player. The PS3 continues to be one of the best and most flexible BR players available.

However, should Microsoft make such a drive available, it would surely sell at least as well as the HD-DVD drive did. All those early adopters are bound to jump on it since the format war is over. True, Sony would benefit from licensing fees, but at least Microsoft would get a cut on the players. It’s also another bullet point on the Xbox 360 box (BR capability), which would eliminate the major difference between PS3 and Xbox 360.

Plus, you can look at Microsoft’s track record with the Xbox 360. They’ve bowed to the community’s pressure on multiple occasions. The HD-DVD drive was in a way, bowing to consumer pressure. As was when Microsoft released Xbox 360 consoles with HDMI ports (their story before hand was that nobody needed HDMI). And perhaps less due to consumer pressure and more media pressure, the warranty extension to 3 years for all the red ringed consoles. Is there any reason to believe Microsoft won’t flinch and release an external BR drive? I don’t think so. The only reason in my mind that Microsoft hasn’t said there will be BR drives for the 360 is they may be waiting for the cost of the drives to get low enough to be able to offer an external drive at the $199 price point.

This is certainly not a new complaint/request, but I really feel like I should voice it as well.

NHL 08 is probably the best hockey video game of all time. It plays like hockey, it looks like hockey, and it’s so much fun. The stick control actually does put the user in control of what happens.

However, taking this game online is barely satisfactory because once you are playing it is excellent to play. However, trying to get into a game is a major frustration, especially the first time.

The very first time you go online with it, it wants you to read what feels like 300 documents. And it wants you to create an EA account. Why? I have an Xbox live account, that should be enough. Strangely, once you do that, you never see any of that stuff again. So at least that’s a one-off.

Next, if you select “Quick ranked play”, or one of the other “quick” games, it checks for rosters (and asks you if that’s ok). If there are new rosters then it downloads them (but again, asks you if that’s ok first). But it seems like you’ve already joined game while it’s doing this. So about 90% of the time, your opponent leaves the game because there’s seemingly nobody there. So then you must re-start your search.

No big deal right? Wrong. It seems like if does that whole “checking for rosters” for every single game you play (or at least until sombody doesn’t quit on you). So annoying. EA, fix it.

The other thing that should be included in NHL 09 (and indeed every multiplayer Xbox game) is the party system. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s the system that Halo 2 pioneered on Xbox live. It’s currently used in Halo 2, Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4. I don’t think there are any others.

The party system allows you to essentially create a custom lobby for you and your friends, and that party goes and plays game together all the time.

This would be ideal in NHL 09 (and indeed all games) since I frequently want to just play with one friend. Why do I have to do that whole stupid lobby system. The lobby system works on PC, but I think it’s usefulness on consoles is pretty lame.

Also, with a party system, then you and your friend could more easily take on another opponent together. Then you can eliminate all those other options for finding a match. There could be ranked, unranked, and maybe a “large-group” option. No more lobbies, no more confusion.

EA’s got the money to make their online games flawless. There’s really no excuse for not having a party system.

P.S. Can we have monthly roster updates? I mean seriously.

I’m not sure when or what it was, but some time back I stopped following news about Assassin’s Creed. I saw the screenshots and I saw the demos at the conventions. It looked good. But there was something about it that just seemed to me like it would never happen the way they were presenting it. It was similar to many games, but different enough that it was still doing something new.

Anyway, I forgot about it. Which was easy since there’s Halo 3, COD 4, Mass Effect, Bioshock, NHL 08, and The Orange Box. I could easily save myself a few bucks and not buy it. But Best Buy had a deal. COD 4 and Assassin’s Creed bundled together for $90. I re-checked the reviews of Assassin’s Creed, and decided it was worth the money.

I admit, the game started a bit slow, but that didn’t last too long.

At first, I played it how I would play any similar game. I found guys, and button mashed to kill them. It was fun, but no big deal really. Then the game forced me to change my tactics. It forced me to play like an assassin. Hiding in plain sight, attacking targets unknowingly.

Now the game is so awesome. It’s open-world-like, but not overly. And there’s even spots where the graphics and the scale made me say wow out loud. Remember the first time you played Halo and the environment’s scale really jumped out at you? Same thing, when I saw Jerusalem from a nearby cliff.

My character now has counter attacks that make me jump out of my seat. There’s a lot of them too, they don’t feel like scripted actions yet. They kinda feel like moves out of a Kung-Fu movie.

Basically, everyone needs to give this game a shot. It’s BETTER than you think it is.