Category Archives: Xbox

Editorials, Games, Impressions, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

E3 Thoughts

13/05/2006 Olly 2 Comments

Nothing mind-blowing from any of the big three, then. Some impressive stuff, to be sure, and some things better than others, but no clear advantages for this console war. My biggest thought so far has been “OMG!”:

This is probably going to be a long post…

First the conferences. I stayed up late to watch the Sony one live and, like most people seemed to, came away disappointed after all the hyperbole. Only three games really struck me – Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Virtua Fighter 5 – and the rest seemed spectacularly unspectacular. Tekken 6 didn’t even look as good as DOA4, and Resistance looked like a browner Call of Duty, for example. I was impressed with the very cool Eye of Judgement demo and the aforementioned three games, but then…$600. It’s not even a generation ahead of the 360 but is $200 more? No thanks.

There is a $500 unit, but who wants that? You lose the HDMI (so none of the advertised 1080p, ever), memory card slots, and wi-fi. At least if you buy a Core 360 you can buy the things to take it up to the premium one at a later date, but with the PS3 you’re stuck with the crippled one. I’m not going to get started on the “amazing innovation” (their words) of the motion sensitive controller but suffice to say that Nintendo must have been pissed.

What made me laugh was listening to Radio 1 the next day which is usually the home of PlayStation fanboy chavs and the opinions that were called in were universally negative. They even said that the consensus seemed to be that they’d “copied Microsoft and Nintendo and slapped a massive price tag on it.” Continue reading E3 Thoughts →

Games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

Live From E3

08/05/2006 Olly 1 Comment

Maybe that title’s a bit misleading because I’m not actually at the event on which I’m writing as I was last time I used that syntax, but this time it’s a far more clever Xbox Live pun.

The Internet has made E3 much more of a public event than it used to be when we had to rely on magazine coverage the next month which made audacious (though ineffectual in the following example) stunts like the Saturn launch possible, but from what I’ve seen so far Microsoft should be commended for opening it up more than I’ve seen before. We’ve always relied on third-parties for coverage but this is the first time that I can remember a console manufacturer providing fast access to new show content themselves. Certainly the first time it’s come direct to the console.

Microsoft’s conference isn’t until tomorrow but already Live subscribers (most of them, if my friends list is any indication) have a dozen or so HD trailers to download and a demo of Test Drive Unlimited. The demo is nothing special and Sonic The Hedgehog is the only trailer which struck me immediately, but with any luck we’ll be able to download trailers for the likes of Halo 3 and Gears of War tomorrow, and we already know that we’re getting demos of Lost Planet and Moto GP 06 over the next couple of days. Not to mention that Live Gold is free for the duration of the show and that some of the trailers aren’t even on IGN or GameSpot.

Admittedly some of the stuff is eliciting disinterested reactions, but being able to watch this stuff in HD with 5.1 sound on your own TV instead of a Quicktime window is a nice boon. How much it’s going to do depends a lot on what Sony shows in a bit under three hours, but I hope for Sony’s sake that it looks better than this.

Games, PC games, Xbox

Hot Potion of Healing

04/05/2006 Olly Leave a comment

I’ve just seen the news that Oblivion has been re-rated by the ESRB to change the rating from its previous T to the more adult M. I’m surprised because although the game does have violence, there’s little in the way of excessive gore and I’ve seen far worse in T-rated games as most enemies in this game just fall down and die. The more interesting factor in the decision to rescind the T rating is this one:

partial nudity in the PC version of the game can be created by modders

Besides the fact that I have no problem with a 15-year-old seeing a “partially nude (topless) female” (how many of them haven’t?), I’d hoped that the ESRB had learnt something after the backlash surrounding Hot Coffee. Apparently not. I think I’m right in saying that almost any game can have its art assets hacked by a modder and made nude (or anything else) but that’s besides the point. As with San Andreas, this content wasn’t intended to be seen. Can you really hold them to blame when someone else modifies their code from its original state?

The assertion that they should is absurd, especially when they took steps to make it inaccessible in the first place. It’s funny to me that many of those who decry mod content and blame the developer for it are often the same ones who bang the drum of not holding gun manufacturers responsible when someone decides to play a “murder simulator” for real. I’m not saying that they should (the ethics of the gun industry is something that I’m not touching here), but that double standards such as that completely undermine the argument.

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, Xbox

Those Who Forget The Past…

01/05/2006 Olly Leave a comment

Here’s a conundrum: You want to buy a movie from twenty years ago so you pop down to HMV or go online and chances are it’s there in perfect DVD quality for less than a tenner, yours to own forever and ever. With music and books it’s even easier, with titles published hundreds of years ago readily available. So what happens when you want to play a game released ten or fifteen years ago?

As far as I can see you only really have a handful of options, none of which are ideal. You can hope that it’s available in a retro compilation or an updated port on a newer system, but even then you’re likely to be paying as much as or a little under the price of a new release for it. If I want to buy the original Castlevania (1986) in its GBA port form, for example, I’m looking at paying as much as it costs for a PS2 Platinum release from a year ago.

I could jump on eBay and buy the necessary kit to play the original, and a quick browse turned up a working boxed NES/Mario Bros 3 bundle for £20 and an unboxed copy of the game set to end in a couple of days for 99p. Very reasonable, but it’s hardly an immediate fix and requires another box to sit under the TV. The morally nebulous route would be to fire up an emulator and just download it. It works and it’s convenient, but it’s of course illegal and hardly as tactile as the real thing. The collector in me frowns on the idea.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Some of the greatest and most seminal games of all time are essentially lost, either forgotten or held hostage in cellophane prisons by dealers with their inflated prices. I really think we need some way to play the history of our hobby and while things like the virtual console for the Revolution (I’m not using the silly name) and Microsoft’s Live Arcade are a good start (when was the last time Joust, Smash TV, and Street Fighter II were anticipated releases?), we need to find a way to make them accessible to the mainstream.

Increasing backwards compatibility with new consoles is a start, but it doesn’t help when most big stores like GAME make finding anything older than six months and not from EA a chore. Maybe digital distribution is the only way, or are those who forget the past doomed never to experience it?

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Oblivion First Impressions

24/03/2006 Olly 4 Comments

I couldn’t let a 360 game as big as this go by without giving some impressions now, could I? Just as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind hit the Xbox a few months after launch, the sequel does the same thing to the 360 in an infinitely bigger way. Bigger in every way, in fact. So big that I’m just giving some first impressions since I can’t hope to capture it with only a few hours of play.

The first thing I need to say is that I didn’t like Morrowind at all. I tried it, but after a couple of hours I could tell that it wasn’t the sort of thing I was up for pouring hour upon hour into. I honestly can’t remember why since it was so long ago, but whatever it was Oblivion hasn’t suffered from the same thing so far. It’s much the same in that it opens slightly slowly – this time with a slog through a dungeon – but once you get into the spectacular overworld the sense of awe is up there with when I first played Shenmue.

It’s kind of strange in that it’s a very deep and customisable RPG that plays somewhat like an FPS crossed with an MMORPG, but it works in making the combat feel involved and allowing the player to feel a part of the adventure. I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with that feeling in any RPG of finding a new and bustling town to explore, and I spent most of the time in Oblivion experiencing that. I don’t want to spoil the early story, but suffice it to say that there’s a fairly early moment which goes up there with that infamous scene of Sephiroth in Nibelheim for me, and overall I’m certainly enjoying it as much as can be hoped with a swords and sorcery RPG. As much as I like Lord of the Rings I’m not often too big on playing it.

I’m going to be writing something slightly more in-depth for a first impressions feature over on Pro-G early next week, so keep an eye out for that.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Burnout Revenge 360

18/03/2006 Olly Leave a comment

£50 for a six month old PS2/Xbox game is a bit of a joke to be fair, but I never bought Burnout Revenge on an older console and I traded in that Perfect Dark shite for it, so it was a bit more bearable. While it’s debatable whether or not it’s worth getting otherwise for the moderate graphical update (that’s not so much anything against the 360 version as a big endorsement of the graphical prowess of the Xbox one), what you have here is a rollicking game that’s huge fun in online multiplayer.

The graphics first of all, since I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t played a Burnout. The update is a lot less cynical than, for example, the 360 port of NFS Most Wanted, and actually puts the hardware to pretty good use. On an HDTV the game looks absolutely fantastic – 60fps (almost) all the way, blindingly fast, sparks flying everywhere, and it all means that the spectacular crashes that the series is known for can look painfully real. The sound is just as impressive, giving great positional audio through a 5.1 system as well as tons of bass that helps out during boosting and crashing. The weak link is probably the music which is mostly pop-punk-rock crap, but admittedly it suits the fast but fairly brainless action well.

World Tour mode provides a decent amount of gameplay and enough variety to make it worthwhile, but in my opinion it’s over Xbox Live that this comes into its own. PGR3 was great with friends, but this is an absolute riot where, best of all, you won’t be accused of cheating if you “accidentally” happen to nudge someone into a tunnel wall. It’s encouraged, and with rivalries saved persistently so that the game will warn you if you end up racing against someone you took out months ago it becomes delightfully competitive against people you play regularly.

Just to take the sheen off it, there seems to be an annoying bug with joining online games that can be frustrating. More than once with different hosts I’ve tried to play with a group of friends and at least one of us has been constantly kicked without explanation several times before managing to connect for any length of time. Once they’re in it’s usually fine, but it’s still a major annoyance and I remember similar issues with Burnout 3 on Xbox Live when I bought that.

Bugs aside, this makes me want to see how the inevitable Burnout built from the ground up on the next-gen machines is going to look, because for what is supposed to be a relatively simple port this almost looks like a whole new game. Criterion’s mastery of Renderware apparently translates very well. Whether or not it’s worth the money depends on whether or not you played it last September, but it’s still as great a game as ever.