|
managers and distributors. Faceplates seem to be about as popular as a bastard on Father's day, at least here in Australia. I picked up two new "orange swirly thing" faceplates today for $AUS3.50 each at K-Mart, for example. I've even put aside some "Limited Edition Project Gotham Racing 3" faceplates you could (theoretically, heh heh) only get with a preorder of PGR3 in order to pay for the college educations of the children I'll most likely never have.
The controllers are wireless right out of the box, which is nice (although you can also get wired controllers separately, which are about as in demand as condoms in the Vatican. If you're familiar with the original XB controllers, the 360 ones are very similar in design, although a little lighter, fortunately.
High Definition
I'm now a part of the HD gaming generation - well, 480p, anyway, as your trusted columnist doesn't have a whizzbang mega ultra enormous 1080p behemoth TV just quite yet. If you don't know what the difference between 480p, 720i and 1080p is, here's a handy guide:
- The "p" stands for "Does my penis look small in these pants?".
- The "i" stands for "Is it just me, or am I the most awesome person in this room? Did I mention how high resolution my TV is?"
- 480 - Stuff looks pretty good on my television, better than it used to, although I have to screw around with the brightness and colours a bit to get it right.
- 720 - You just walked into the store and picked whatever was in the middle price range, thinking it'd be "good enough", right? Sucker.
- 1080 - Watching pornography in HD now makes you want to start a plastic surgery school and a series of skin care clinics across Southern California.
A general rule of thumb for buying a HD TV is that if you can afford it, it isn't good enough to suit your purposes.
A Series Of Tubes
A major selling point of the 360 console is the expanded functionality of Xbox Live. As well as being able to play games you've bought multiplayer over the internet, you can download themes for your console's interface, gamer pictures that are displayed in your profile (you can set up a gamer tag and have the "achievements" you get in each game displayed against it, as well as setting preferences for people you wish to play with or avoid, making complaints or recommendations to affect people's "rep" online and more), clips of games and related info, and most significantly demos of new games, additional content for existing games and Xbox Live Arcade.
Being able to download demos, provided you have bandwidth to spare, as some demos are upwards of 1Gb, is a great advantage. Instead of blowing $AUS16 and change on the Official Xbox Magazine, I can just set a number of demos to download in the background and use that 16 on beer and hookers. I'm sure the official magazine itself is a lovely read, I've flipped through a couple issues in the bathroom myself, but $16 is a good amount towards buying a new game. Not as good as it would be in the US or Europe, but still.
Downloadable content is a whole host of interesting stuff - free and at a cost - from additional cars to buy in dealerships inside Test Drive Unlimited, to additional game modes for Bomberman Live to entire expansions for Oblivion. Each game you play will have a link direct to its downloadable content, otherwise you can simply browse the store and see what you can get. Some content initially has a cost and then becomes free after time, or at least reduces in cost.
| |
 |
|
Xbox Live Arcade is another cool feature - it has a number of original games, remakes of arcade and console games and more. For example, for 400 points you can get Dig Dug, but with HD scaled graphics, online play, leaderboards and achievements. The Virtual Console on Wii might be more all encompassing and more "true" to the
|
original versions for the purists, but for games on both XBLA and VC, the XBLA version will invariably be the better deal. I for one enjoyed the heck out of Bomberman Live, even if my friend in Finland repeatedly beat the crap out of me in "Zombie" mode. Should I mention that Bomberman Live, which works out to about $AUS12 or so, is about 50 times more fun and better featured than Bomberman Act Zero, an utterly misguided attempt at modernising the Bomberman design and concept, and is a full price disc game? (Well, I only paid $AUS25, but I am the king of bargains and bad games).
In the US, there's all sorts of video content that's downloadable, like movies and television, but next to nothing's available in PAL territories just yet, so I can't really comment.
The Message Not The Medium
How about the games? I've only had the beast a couple weeks, and thus haven't played too much, but I have a modest collection of games brewing, and can give opinions of depth, significance and magnitude on a few of them. I've just chosen not to, and instead bang out a few short wanky paragraphs about some in order to get this article done before the Editor of Collector Times flies down here and kicks my foreign ass for taking so long.
Bioshock
| |
 |
Absolutely fantastic in any and every way. The atmosphere, the setting, the voice acting, the plot, the gameplay, the flexible nature of the upgrades, the exploration element, it's just .. wow. I'd say more about it, but there's been so much press and so much hype, it's not really worth it. Just take my word for it that Bioshock really is a great game, well worth getting for yourself. I buy a lot of games and rarely complete them at all, yet Bioshock I bought on a Thursday and had it completed by the Sunday. I'm dying to play through it again on a higher difficulty, but I've got a mountain of untested PS2 games sitting there that deserve at least a quick go before being shelved for good.
|
Space Giraffe
|
Space Giraffe is the latest game by Jeff Minter, a rather legendary developer - have you ever heard of Attack of the Mutant Camels? Tempest 3000? - and it's available on Xbox Live Arcade. It's certainly been a contentious game, with mixed opinions out there. I think the problem is that people aren't actually playing the bloody game properly before they decide on their opinion. On an incredibly superficial level, it looks like a Tempest clone, but if you actually play through the tutorial, have a
|
 |
|
few goes yourself and learn how to play it properly, it's completely something else. Playing Space Giraffe as if it was Tempest will get you no score and no particular pleasure. It's most certainly not for the timid - you're going to need to put in at least a modicum of effort to get to grips with - but once you do, it's incredibly addictive. Some gorgeous, trippy visuals certainly help matters (and can hinder them too, but that's what sound cues are for). I heartily recommend the game, especially at its lower price than most Live original content, but you should probably get the trial game, play through the tutorial a few times, and see what you think. Don't give up on it after 30 seconds, trust me.
|
Racing for Home
|
Racing games are a popular genre on any system, and out of the dozen or so games I have for 360 so far, three of them are in the genre.
|
| |
 |
Project Gotham Racing 3 is an excellent advance on the series started with "Metropolis Street Racer" on Sega Dreamcast and "Project Gotham Racing" 1 and 2 on the original Xbox. PGR3 is an attempt at more of a realistic racing simulation without going to the extent of, say, a Formula one game. There's still room for shenanigans, with kudos points earned for long skids and airtime and the like, but you're also rewarded for smooth driving lines and decent driving. The kudos points system is used for unlocking more features, and to measure your worth as a player, as a driver and as a person in general.
|
|
Ridge Racer 6 is namco's latest entry in the long running series - Ridge Racer was a launch title for PlayStation 1, Ridge Racer 5 was a launch title for PlayStation 2, you get the idea. Ridge Racer has at its heart always been about relatively simple arcade action, and personally I've felt that the franchise has gotten away from that for the last few games. It's telling that only two games in the series came out for PlayStation 2 (R: Racing and Ridge Racer V) after the four releases on PlayStation 1 (1, Revolution, Rage and Type IV). The good news for 6 is that it not only recaptures the magic of the original game, but
|
|
 |
|
looks gorgeous while doing so. There's an absolute avalanche of things to do - the world includes a couple hundred races to fully complete the game - and there's online racing as well. Well worth a try if you're a fan of arcadey racing - particularly if you liked the recent OutRun 2 arcade game, as the handling does seem to be a little bit borrowed from it, but who's counting?
|
| |
 |
Test Drive Unlimited is far more of a sandbox style game, in that you've got all of a Hawaiian island to drive around, looking for events to enter, earning money, buying cars and real estate. It's quite involved, I've barely started to play it, truth be told. I did find it a little easy to get stuck in ditches once or twice, but I blame that on my inexperience, not the game.
|
The Bad News
|
What grinds my gears about the 360?
- The sound quality on the headset is a bit on the ordinary side. Ever made an international call on a land line in 1982? Yeah, kinda like that.
- 8 year old Spanish kids singing in their wacky language at the top of their lungs all through a Call of Duty 4 beta match while some British guy says "Shit in my mouth!" every time he's shot. Surely the chance at an experience like this is enough for you to want to go online.
- Paying for Xbox Live access. If you want to play games online, as well as buying the games and paying for the broadband connection, you have to subscribe to "Gold". You can get at the demos and marketplace stuff for free still, though, as well as recording your achievements against your gamer tag.
- Syncing the headset and the controllers was a bit of a nightmare, but keep in mind that I am about as technically adept as a caveman (and half as environmentally conscious), and I got my wireless headset second hand, too, so no manual.
- PAL territories still have to pay a lot for games, particularly in Australia. An example . . . Wartech Senko No Ronde is anywhere between $AUS70 and $AUS110 here in Australia, but could no doubt be had for between $10-20 in Canada or the US, and probably around 10-15 pounds in England.
- Only some games are region free - there's information on the net, but be very careful about importing. Modding your firmware on the console will get you banned from Live entirely, so that's not really an option.
|
|
