Tag: xbox+360

Halo 3 Countdown

Not long until I get my grubby little paws on Halo 3 (some already have it). A new video released by Bungie today called Cinema Paradiso highlights the features outside a normal FPS that should keep me coming back to Halo time and time again. The Forge is a map editor that allows the placement of weapons, vehicles, spawn points, turrets and objects to be user controlled. It looks amazing although could take some time to get to grips with.

More impressive is the game replay, film creation and photo creation tools. Call of Duty 4 has a death camera that shows where you got shot from. Halo 3 takes it one step further allowing you to review the entire game, see exactly how you were owned in a game and then save and upload your best bits for other gamers to see. I’d talked about something similar during Halo 2 and it’s great to see something along those lines finally come out.

This video also highlights some great multiplayer action – the hammer looks amazing. Just as well I’ve got a few days off to enjoy the new game.

Old School

As if the deluge of new games wasn’t enough, how do you fancy some old school shoot-em up action? First up is Geometry Wars:Waves. Looks good although the only downside is that you can’t buy this as a separate arcade title – you need to buy PGR4. Is that really a downside?

The other shooters are some console classics from yesteryear – Ikaruga and Rez. Rez can be best described via YouTube. Ikaruga is best described as too fecking hard and that’s not according to Wikipedia. Good to see some more recent classics hitting Live Arcade. Just need a release dat for Sensible Soccer now.

Forza Designs Update

Couple of belters have been gifted to me in the last few days.

Foe Real Designs

Another Foe Real car and in my opinion the best yet. Photo’s don’t do it justice – it looks amazing in game. The second car looks superb too…

Hunderbolt

The text is great and coupled with a Rangers badge on the bonnet, what more could you wish for. Cheers David (aka Wee Piglet on Xbox Live). Ricky – this car could be yours!!

Gaming Costs

It’s been covered loads of times before, but releasing one car for Forza2 at the cost of 50 gamerpoints sounds expensive. Taking today’s Amazon prices that’s 43p for one car. If Sony applied that pricing model, and the rumours of 1000 cars in GT5 but only 300 included in first purchase are true, that’s an extra £300 to own the full game. Madness. Of course no one is forcing you to buy the content, and the likelihood is that you’ll buy only a few select cars, but the micro transaction gaming market is only heading in one direction and it’s not a cheap one.

Game Quickies

In no particular order…

  • Heavenly Sword demo was released today. It’s quite possibly the largest (almost a gig) shortest (lasts less than 10 minutes) demo I’ve played but afterwards I pre-ordered the game so I guess the demo worked for Sony. The graphics were stunning and this looks like something the 360 could struggle matching. Game on. I know there was some bad press about the gameplay being short (12 hours from memory) but I’d rather have a corking 12 hours than a spun out 30 hour game that I don’t complete.
  • Bomberman is superb on the 360 and well worth 800 points.
  • Played the Moto GP demo on the 360. What was once THE game on Xbox Live is now a shadow of it’s former self. Talk about milking an original format and regurgitating each year, this is little more than a bug fix from last years release.
  • GTA IV – only complete experience on the 360 according to Rockstar themselves. Made me grin thinking back to the exclusives that the PS2 had for so long. Not any more.
  • Had a large room on GRAW2 last night – blind siege with > 6 players is sooooo much more fun
  • Another firmware update on the PS3 – Sony are developing aggresively for the PS3 now and ar catching up fas on the 360. Music playback and X bar available in game for firmware v2.0?
  • Forza Leagues is going well and we have over 30 members with little or no advertising. Biggest issue has been lag within Forza. We struggle to get anyone to host a stable room with more that 6 players which is very limiting. It frustrates that the console model for online gaming is still mostly peer to peer which limits the amount of players you can realistically play with at any one time. I would quite gladly pay extra for server based gaming if it allowed 16, 24, 32 player gaming while limiting lag. I would love Sony to do more with server support in the hope it would encourage Microsoft to move in that direction as well.
  • Resident Evil 5 – another game that looks amazing!
  • The Metal gear Solid gameplay video was very impressive. Some nice touches, great humour and a graphics engine that looked up there with the best around. There was also a nice array of weapons. If Sony have lost exclusivity on this one they will be kicking themselves.

B Day

No, not the Beyonce album.

Not even a low-mounted plumbing fixture or type of sink intended for washing the external genitalia and the anus.

It’s Bomberman day on Xbox Live. David & Ricky D – I expect to see you online at least once this week for a session! To other 360 owners – get this! 8 player online. It can’t possibly fail*

*Obviously it can go wrong and online could suck salty balls and be one of the worst lag fests known to man. The recent Bomberman games have been awful as well, but I’ve kept the faith and hopefully this will be the reward. However, for old time’s sake ….you can’t go wrong, can you?

Forza Leagues

Over the last three weeks I’ve been beavering away on a new website which is finally ready to roll – www.forzaleagues.com. For the last few years I’ve gamed with a great but dwindling bunch of guys known as The Lickers. We’ve ended up with a core group enjoying mostly racing and first person shooters but we have a problem – no site to run leagues and a habit of starting a league but never finishing it.

So myself and Cheesy (fellow Lick) decided to try and do something about it, hence Forza Leagues. The website allows us to easily run multiple leagues and seasons for Forza 2. It should make the admin part as easy as possible and give us some nice stats along the way. It also allows us to attract 360 users from other forums and websites to join our leagues or form their own using the software we’ve developed.

forzaleagues.com

Now when I say we’ve developed the software it’s really all down to one guy – Graeme (he asked me not to link to his homepage). So it’s a big thank you for the coding you’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks. Everyone’s feedback so far has been really positive. I also need to thank Robert (Foe Real) who’s logo work in Forza is superb and can be seen above. Soon we’ll all be riding using his designs.

forzaleagues.com

Longer term we hope to add more games, leagues, ladders and team tournaments but for the moment, to get us started, we’re focussing on Forza 2 only. We’re looking for clean racers to join up and take part. Don’t worry about fast times as there will be leagues to cater for all abilities. The important thing is that you race fairly and don’t abuse your fellow gamers. If that sounds like you and you enjoy Forza 2 then feel free to register with Forza Leagues and at least give it a go. Hope to see you there.

Finally

Microsoft have come clean and admitted they have reliability issues with the Xbox 360. They are setting aside over $1 billion to extend warranties to three years (flashing red lights) for 360 owners and also compensate those that have had their consoles repaired since launch. This is good news and well overdue. With failure rates of only 1% rumoured on the PS3 and more and more bad press surrounding 360 reliability there wasn’t really any other course of action.

Shame it wasn’t done sooner though.

Achilles Heel

The 360 is a fine console with excellent games, great online community and a fine multi-media machine. However it’s failure rate is atrocious yet Microsoft have always denied there is a big issue with returns. Now comes news that the UK repairs team is receiving 1500 – 2500 per day according to this article published on 360 Gamer.

1500-2500 per day in the UK alone

That sounds really high but tie’s up with my own findings. I game regularly with a group of guys and almost all of them have had at least one 360 fail. Two of the group are onto their 5th 360. That’s five machines in less than 20 months. If it happened to one guy only you would put it down to bad luck but not two. I’ve also had mine fail, Shakeel’s has just gone, Graham’s on his third and as already said most of the guys have had theirs fail two. If it’s not the red ring of light it’s scratched disks, which is definitely caused by the 360 as the guys that I know it’s happened too haven’t even removed the disk from the machine for two weeks. It started to fail and on inspecting the disk concentric scratches were clearly visible.

These problems have now transferred to the 360 Elite which was Microsoft’s chance to address the issues which look to have been sadly missed. A couple of folk I know are now thinking it’s time to ditch the 360 and move to PS3 despite that platforms lack of current games – at least it seems more reliable. Time to come clean Microsoft. Early adopters deserve better than this. Consumers deserve better than this. You no longer have a monopoly when it comes to HD games and a busy online console community and gamers are becoming tired of the failure’s.