Recently in Observations Category

March 9 saw, at least for me, one of the most anticipated video game releases this spring: Torchlight, for Xbox Live Arcade. It is a surprisingly well-crafted action RPG featuring tons of fun monster slaughter.

March 10 saw, at least for me, one of the most anticipated video game releases this spring: Dragon Age II. It is a surprisingly well-crafted action RPG featuring tons… of… fun… monster slaughter. Wait a second, where did I hear this before?

We live in a rather strange era where social networks seem to be on the rise, but where nobody seems to know how to properly build one yet.

Years ago, before the hubbub about Web 2.0 stuff, we had people thinking of how to make money out of the websites - and this invariably meant that no money was made out of the websites, because you can’t make money out of nonexistant websites. Now, we have websites, but development is still hampered by people who want to figure out how to make money out of the situation.

Sometimes, you just can’t make money off of core functionality. And this is the annoying truth behind social networking. This is not a problem in itself, because you can make money out of other things. The problem is when people say “we can’t make money out of that” and refuse to build the core functionality to begin with.

This is almost like having a power company refusing to sell electricity because they’re still busy figuring out how to profit from selling wiring services. The real power companies wouldn’t worry about wiring; they get profit from selling power to the consumers. They don’t need to care about who wires the houses as long as they’re wired according to the standards.

The new version of Xbox 360 dashboard is here. The new graphical style is fairly good, and the only thing I was really psyched out - the new voice chat codec - turned out to be a good improvement. Instead of completely garbled speech, I can make out individual sentences sometimes. Solid improvement, there. Now all Microsoft needs to do is to teach people to speak clearer and understand that incoherent roaring sometimes doesn't take the point across. But that's hardly Microsoft's worry.

However, what really baffles me is that the overall design of the other parts of the Xbox 360 UI haven't changed. They actually took a few steps back.

I think Wii's user interface gets one rather important issue seriously: Important things in the user interface should be right at hand, while the less important things should be buried in logical and comprehensive menus. Xbox 360 dashboard, by comparison, seems to assume things are good as long as they're found somewhere, in somewhat related place. Grouping things that are related sounds good, but that's not the same thing as making often used things easily available.

When using Xbox 360 dashboard, you think in terms of what goals you're aiming for, what group of actions the action you're going to do is in. The next step is that your brain develops a pattern and you no longer look at the menus: "To get to the cheevos, hit up, right, A, then keep pressing right...."

User account management group is a good example. Why do most people use that group most of the time? Maybe change their avatar or theme, or see their achievements. So adding a new entry in the first damn menu in the lists that says "Change Gamertag" isn't very helpful; there's already a bunch of entries I don't use regularly in this menu, and adding one more just doesn't help the situation. Sure, people change their gamertags all the time. Like, every day. They definitely need that function much more often than viewing their achievements. Rrrrrright. Before you can browse to your achievements, they added account management as a new freaking page along with online safety. That's three pages you need to flip through before you get to your achievements, as opposed to one general menu. Online Safety isn't even something you need to muck with often; I imagine most people pick their settings and they're done with it for life.

Which leads to an interesting conclusion: Things aren't quite as customisable as you imagine they should be. I like looking at the achievements more than I like twiddling with my online safety settings - I guess I should be able to move the online safety settings out of view so I can get to the achievements easier.

The lack of customisation is almost laughable in My Community. They added a new entry called "Video Kinect" right on the beginning. Kinect isn't out yet. After that, you get to avatar store, Facebook, Halo Waypoint, Twitter and Game Room. It's hilarious because that's just about the exact opposite order of frequency what I actually use; I don't use Facebook and use the avatar store somewhat rarely, but I use Halo Waypoint and Game Room, and Twitter to some extent. Why can't those three bubble to the top, because I actually use those things more?

In conclusion: Stuff is still broken, and adding more stuff in the problematic areas is exactly the opposite of what should be done to fix things. But thank you, Microsoft, for the new voice codec. Voice chat might actually be usable one day.

Time to blow some dust off this blog!

The most recent huge game that I beat is, unsurprisingly, Halo: Reach. I've got only one big gripe with the campaign, and it's kind of annoying because it made me realise most of the other games suck.

The problem is this: In most games, the noses of the enemies point directly at you. In Halo: Reach, the noses of the enemies can also point at the squadmates, unless you're closer to the enemies than they, in which case the noses of the enemies point directly at you.

Oh yeah, there's probably a perfectly rational in-universe explanation. The Covenant really hates the Spartans and knows you're a high-priority target that must be stopped at all costs. But that's still a pretty lame explanation for the fact that you're basically still trapped in a great big shooting gallery. In every game ever, you're trapped in a great big shooting gallery.

I'm trying to be a modest guy. I don't want the enemies to think I'm the most dangerous threat to them ever. Just a boring old soldier. Don't mind me. You know, think tactically. There's a big-ass tank behind me, that thing kills people. Warthogs are pretty damn deadly because the machine guns never run out of ammo. Nuke them instead. I just have a crappy assault rifle that can almost kill an enemy if I fire three magazines.

So I'm sort of asking the game designers to make a little bit more convincing AI. I tend to notice that the enemies think too much about me, when they clearly should have much pressing concerns.

I'm desperately trying to get back to blogging rut... so here's some observations on the Halo: Reach beta.

I'm usually not into demos, especially if we're talking about demos that eat up a gigabyte of disk space. But this is not a PC game, and I had bunch of free space on the Xbox 360 anyway. I had actually waited a long time to get this demo, and it has so far been just as awesome as I suspected.

Only thing is that it makes me post weird crap in screenshot filenames.
"MASTUR CEEFS FR1ST SNIEP EVAR" - yes, Arby 'n' the Chief is just this awesome.
"A PORTHOLE SNIEP rofl" - I swear, this thing is doing a number on my spelling abilities. That, or the game needs less Powerhouse. Less portholes = less rofls.
"OMG BEST SNIEP EVER" - I can actually snipe a person from across this tiny room and make them fall face down on the floor! I must be the best Halo player ever! It is decided, I shall make a montage or something.

Another thing is that the playlists have so far had too much of game modes that I've seen in Halo 3, and the new game modes appear too rarely. Dammit, I hope there'll be more Elite stuff and Invasion and Headhunter and perhaps even "if your feet touch the ground you're dead, so keep using those jetpacks". Team Slayer is still awesome, but it'd be sweet to see more of these new modes. If you have to test old modes, at least put in Grifball.

Also, there are a few minor irritating deficiencies that I'm concerned about. I expected a lot more based on the multiplayer trailer, and these deficiencies are very blatant.

Allow me to illustrate.

Here's some facts that I noted on my gaming.

• I played somewhat less games on GameCube once I got Animal Crossing.
• I played somewhat less games on DS once I got Animal Crossing: Wild World.
• I played somewhat less games on Wii once I got Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City.
  

And now, I'll just say that I've played less Halo games when Halo Waypoint came out.

Now, I'm not saying that Animal Crossing series is that bad. (Complete waste of time, granted, but not really awful, and heck, video games are supposed to be about wasting time.) I sort of like Halo Waypoint too. (Not as kickass as Halopedia, but still.)

It's still weird. I'm kind of paralysed by the fact that games can turn into mundane existence. It's as if I really need some hook to go on - like the music collection or the statue in Animal Crossing, after which I sort of quit playing those games. I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion like a "mundane" game, and have over 100 hours in the clock, yet I'm not bored - there's actually stuff to do in the game.

Bleh, I guess I just needed to ramble about something in a beautiful Saturday morning. =)

I got my Xbox 360 in December 30, 2008, and it's now February 1, 2009 - when my Xbox Live Gold trial was supposed to run out (but didn't, because I obviously renewed it =).So, (puny) 460 gamer points later, it's a good time to ramble a little bit on how a self-professed Nintendo geek has so far survived in the Microsoft world.

The short answer, of course, is that while it has been a little bit bumpy ride, in the end, I'm very happy.

The last few days have been quite interesting. The end of the year is the time of cheap games, for starters.

My new year's celebrations were held this time in Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. This game seems quite interesting so far, though I have to say the game doesn't hit me like the previous parts did. Wasting time is starting to feel like wasting time!

Aside of that, I have, right at hand, a brand new system that was, to say the least, quite WTFy to get (to abuse innocent commas). It seems that this generation of consoles is really full of weird acquisitionary WTFs!

So here I am, a new owner of an XBox 360. I figured that simply having a Wii won't cut it, and a serious gamer needs two next-gen consoles: Wii gets amazing interesting games and XBox 360 will get many of the remaining massive multiplatform megahits, since Wii doesn't necessarily have the marbles to run the bigger titles. Oh, to get Soul Calibur IV! Oh, to get a smooth-running TES4: Oblivion!

The first big WTF moment was the package contents. You know the stereotype: "Nintendo is for kids, the $alternateconsoleoftheday is for Real Men." Well damn! If they want to enforce that stereotype, maybe they should pick the pack-in titles with a bit more care.


This was all the game store had. I may eventually try these games. Eventually.

Back to the two-platform approach for a bit. While on the holidays, I was joking to my sister that maybe they should make hardcore gamer bags that would carry both Wii and XBox 360. But when I saw the unpacked console, I had a very distinct sinking feeling. I had been under the impression that XBox 360 was going to be smaller and sleeker than its predecessor, but never in my life I could have anticipated how - pardon for not coming up with a more apt description - f*ng huge this thing is. F*ng metal chassis. F*ng huge connectors at the end of the cables. F*ng gigantic "please insert the plug in a power outlet fed by a medium-sized nuclear reactor" power supply (and I thought Wii's big power supply was a minus). I'm afraid no bag on this Earth can possibly carry this thing. (Or maybe I'll use my iron-reinforced camping backbag on my next holiday trip...)

Then, the connections. My eyebrows rose when I saw that Wii only supported WLAN out of box, but so far, this has worked pretty well practically. Thus, my eyebrows rose even further when I saw XBox 360 supported Ethernet out of box, but not WLAN! ...and came with an Ethernet cable that was way too short for my use. The store had 5 m cables, which were probably adequate but could be too short, so I got the next, longer one - a 10 m cable. Sold pre-knotted. Yay.

But aside of these little quirks, I've so far enjoyed XBox 360. I picked up BioShock, and aside of a few promo shots and a gigantic bunch of playing Thief and a nearly encyclopaedic knowledge of System Shock 2 (well, as encyclopaedic as anyone can have after about half a hour of playing...), I had no idea what to expect. A very pleasant and positive surprise indeed! I got Soulcalibur IV for pretty cheap, waltzed in the Xbox Live, was surprised by the somewhat low quality of the voice chat (but I suppose it's much better than no voice chat at all!), was amused by the fact that the first voice chat comment that I could make sense of from another player was something along the lines of "this lag is killing me", and pwn't the first match I could actually play in. (SC2 experience probably helps.)

Speaking of BioShock, I've long been a big sceptic of dual-stick controls - I've been a mouse-and-keyboard (or lock-on-the-target or lock-and-wiimote-zap, in case of Metroid Primes) kind of a guy. Now, it seems to me that the system doesn't entirely suck. As a gigantic Metroid fan, I obviously grabbed Halo 3, and was again somewhat positively surprised. A couple of pages of manual and one page of backstory explanation doesn't really help me a whole lot, but who cares, I got the basic idea pretty fast - just shoot whatever's trying to shoot you and run to the next room. ...and I ran out of ammo and it autosaved and basically I needed to grab weapons from a room with giant load of enemies and dodge and shoot and die a lot. Damn, if they want me to save the world, they should at least invest in some freaking energy guns! Oh well, I guess this will turn much more fun in time!

(A bit of a lull, and back to our ordinary scheduled blogging... more backlogged stuff coming soonish?)

Yesterday, I had was commenting on a rather ridiculous video and said a carefully weighed opinion. In case the video disappears, it's basically Chris-chan's ode to Playstation 3, a "life enchancement device" as he affectionately calls it. In case the video disappears, here's what I said:

I have had an occasional tendency to go in obsessive fanboy mode, but after this, I'll never ever feel bad afterwards - because I've never had even the slightest inclination to call my favourite things "life enhancement devices". My life's not ipso facto any better after pwning Mogenar today, dammit...

Well, actually, that Mogenar thing... that Mogenar thing...  I think it's pretty much safe to say that games are just something that you buy to get more challenges and intellectual stimulation. They don't enhance your life; they make it harder and more interesting.

And Mogenar, if anything, is exactly the sort of thing that makes your life a hell.

So, for the last few months, I've enjoyed Wii as a... um, new platform for playing GameCube games. Then, I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was ultimately just improved Melee and the Serious Players could just stick to GC controller.

And this week's new highlights for me: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Both will need more rambling in due time, but here's some rambling on the topic of Controlling The Games. Of course, I was a little bit sceptical about how these much-raved-about Wii controls really work in real life, but my fears have subsided.