Spontaneous Monotony

I just got an email in from Gamespy offering places in the Xbox 360 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s only open to people who have a Gamespy Founders Club or IGN Insider subscription (there were public keys, but those have been given out already), those  who meet that requirement (and have an Xbox Live Gold account obviously) can follow the link for a beta 360 experience. Unlike the Call of Duty 4 beta, there’s no waiting time (the CoD4 one was a good idea, but the errors that led to people not being sent keys turned into a fiasco) - as soon as you fill out the form, you get your key onscreen.

The beta itself starts on the 25th of March - there’s no indication as to whether this means the usual Xbox Live launch time of 9am, or 12:01 GMT, or 12:01 Pacific Time, or whatever.

PS: Sorry for the atrocious pun,  couldn’t resist

When one of their longtime editors was fired after giving a prime advertiser’s game a mediocre review score, fans deserted Gamespot in droves. Now there’s been another screwup - not on the same scale, but still showing the complete lack of professionalism at the site critics christened ‘ca$hwh0re’. Lost Odyssey, which coincidentally does not have any advertising on Gamespot, was slaughtered in their review for ‘loading times exceeding 60 seconds’ (I paraphrase).

Now that the game’s out (in the US at least) many users are posting on Gamespot’s forums pointing out that the loading times are perfectly fine - about 10 seconds being the longest, typical of any 360 game. Gamespot have claimed that the discs Microsoft gave them are different from the retail copies, but to be honest that in itself is stunningly poor form on Gamespot’s part. They should have made sure that the game had begun pressing for retail distribution - and that their copy was retail equivalent - before they even wrote the damn thing.

The Xbox Originals program is currently one of the most hotly-debated topics among Xbox 360 owners. Some see it as a valuable way of getting hold of new games that you simply can’t get anymore. Others see them as overpriced (£10.20) re-releases of old games that you can get cheaper in your nearest game shop’s second hand bin. Personally I have never bought second hand products, and since I got the 120Gb hard drive upgrade for Christmas I’ve been itching to find something substantial to put on it. In a manner more typical of public transport, two somethings substantial have turned up at once.

Monday will see the release of Ninja Gaiden Black (what other games would call a ‘Deluxe Edition’ - NG plus its addons) and Sid Meier’s Pirates! for the usual Xbox Originals price of £10.20 (1200 monopolist points). Decisions, decisions - although in a world which contains Assassin’s Creed I suspect that Pirates might win. Especially since the 360 is still stuck in the 1995 one-at-a-time downloading method. Seriously Microsoft, my Asus Eee (which, beautiful machine though it is, is not going to win any awards for power) can download multiple files simultaneously, so please get your fingers out and bring the 360’s downloader into this decade before it finishes!

 Source: 1up.com

According to various sites, Valve have released a second update for Orange Box on the 360, and this one is aimed at Team Fortress 2. The fixes are:

• Reduced network bandwidth usage in multiplayer (so fewer lagspikes hopefully)
• Improved overall game performance (ditto)
• Arranged search results to favour preferred host conditions (so no more having to scroll down to find one with maximum signal strength)
• Improved searching for ranked games (this has been one of the big problems - often the server browser would tell you there were no ranked games available, something Orange Box’s player numbers show to be patently untrue)
• Fixed a problem with the game falsely reporting ‘not enough space’ on the 120gb Elite hard drives

Apparently though, those who have the update say it doesn’t seem to fix the annoying bug that causes the game to freeze and take the 360 with it (requiring a turnoff). Hopefully Valve can sort that one out before too long

Crackdown has overcome initial skepticism to become a Grand Theft Auto clone that has everything a comic book lover could want - cel-shaded graphics, superpowers, and very little ‘fluff’ to get in the way of the core gameplay (no ridiculous ambulance minigame required to get 100% completion here).

When Crackdown was released, very little attention was paid to it as a game. Aside from the fact that it was another GTA clone on a console which already had Saints Row and Just Cause, it was the delivery vehicle for the far more anticipated Halo 3 beta. Thousands of fanboys dutifully went out and paid £40 for a game they had no intention of playing just for the ‘privilege’ of acting as unpaid beta testers for Microsoft.

This in mind, prior to release many people were expecting Crackdown to be a real lemon. The logic being that the fanboys would buy any game that the Halo 3 beta was bundle with, and that Microsoft would exploit this in order to shift copies of an underwhelming game. (more…)