Thursdaily Update

Not a fan of the small legs with the big feet

This week saw the end of my XBLA tear, after wrapping up Doritos Crash Course 2 on Monday I decided that it's time to move back to some retail titles. I've spent over three months pretty much purely working through my XBLA games backlog and I managed to complete a whole heap of titles, some I thought I would never complete. The huge XBLA titles list I had to scroll through to find a game on my Xbox 360 Harddrive has shrunk to a fairly manageable level and while I still have a decent amount of XBLA titles to play through I've also got a big amount of discs stacked up waiting to be played. Titles that I'm actually very excited to get to, the rest of the Assassin's Creed series and LA Noire to name a few.

However the last quarter of a year slaving away on XBLA titles and the almost a month that was dedicated to Bionic Commando: Rearmed has me thinking that I'll start this journey by going through and beating a couple of what looks to be the easiest and quickest retail games I own. I'm not a big Gamerscore guy, but my Gamerscore growth has really slowed down with these XBLA titles so let's see if I can't boost it a bit quickly before getting stuck into some more lengthy grinds. This started with a recent acquisition of mine; TMNT.

I had all these and more. I think I was probably close to
owning them all. Even as a child I was into completing/collecting
everything in a set.

I saw TMNT for sale for $7 in the store last Monday and I could feel the TMNT fan in me from years back wanting to check it out. Then I felt the Gamerscore whore in me shout out for what I knew to be easy points and it was too much to resist. As I mentioned above I'm not much of a Gamerscore guy, my point total comes from playing the games I really want to play and trying to complete them, not grinding through games I don't have a legitimate interest in just for the points. This was the case with TMNT, and I enjoyed spending yesterday bulldozing my way through the game. It's nothing new or fancy, just a plain brawler that has the TMNT trappings, but that was good enough for me. I Still remember being 7 and playing with a vast TMNT collection of toys I had amassed, good times.

After wrapping up the last couple of achievements in TMNT earlier today I decided to turn to another game, this one had been in my collection for a while now, years maybe. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust hasn't made a great impression so far, it's super plain and the objectives so far have been enough to nearly put me to sleep. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is another game I picked up really cheap for the sole reason of me being fascinated with the Exploitation genre. I find great amusement in this genre, with it's camp and supposed titillation. I doubt even 12 year old boys wouldn't find this stuff enticing, but yet it still gets made and it still sells well enough to warrant more. I decided a while ago that I would try to play any and all games I feel fall in this genre. Leisure Suit Larry is the next step of this undertaking.

So far it's been a bit of a bore, with bad jokes and bad missions involving nothing except moving to the next marker on your mini-map. I've probably played less than an hour total but hope to put some time in over the next few days and wrap it up quickly. That about wraps up everything that's been happening on my side of the Xbox but let's talk quickly about the major gaming event that's about to kick off.

I know it wasn't the most popular game, but I could go for
another Brutal Legend and I'm not even a rock guy

E3 is starting real soon, tonight if you count Konami's press conference, and I'll be watching and soaking as much of it in as I possibly can. I plan to watch most, if not all, press conferences live and a lot of next weeks blogs will be filled with any thoughts that pop up in relation to that. There will still be the game talk but to be honest I'm not sure how much time will be used where. I'm really excited to see Microsoft's conference to see if they can make good on their promises to wow the gamers back into their favor. If some of the games that have been leaked are there it could be amazing. Tomorrow I think I'll post one more Xbox One centered post with predictions and my views on how things will actually work as opposed to the internet currently thinks they do and then come conference time it will be fun to see if I'm right or wrong. That's all for now, next update will be an E3 one! See you then.

Xbox One: Installs and Always Online

With E3 only a week away I thought it pertinent to talk some more about the Xbox One. I've already talked in depth about the reveal itself and what I thought Microsoft is actually trying to accomplish with the strategy it seems to be using so far. Since the reveal there has been uproar, confusion and now the internet has returned to a relative calm again, but I'm sure the waters will become turbulent again in just a few days. Before that happens I think I'll recap some information and my thoughts on the issues that got everyone riled up in the first place.

No need to worry about scratched discs anymore

Firstly lets start on a positive, or at least I see it that way; mandatory game installs. If you didn't know Xbox One will force you to install any game you want to play. Personally I already install whatever game I want to play to my HDD, this results in quicker loads and better texture streaming just for exercising a couple of minutes of patience once. If this process is now guaranteed and all users will be forced into this practice then developers can take advantage of this and improve the graphical fidelity of their games by coding them with this increased data transfer speed in mind. In what I thought to be a surprising move Microsoft will also use this install  to make your games playable without the need for you to have your disc in drive. Now it's not a big thing to get up off your ass and switch a game disc, but things for the end user have now been simplified again. This results in a new problem however, one publishers have been struggling with for years on the PC - authentication. Now obviously they don't want someone to buy the game, install it and then just pass the disc around to their friends - giving everyone access to a game one person bought. This leads us to one of the things the internet seems to be really down on - always online.

Use that Ethernet port, or the inbuilt wireless, just get it connected. It's not really that big of a deal.

Much ado was made about the Xbox One's supposed need to be always online. To me this is a non issue, my Xbox 360 is always online, as would most serious gamers I would think. I think this is just the way of the future, more and more devices will be always online, not less, and when a huge part of a devices feature set is online then it more than makes sense to try and incentivise this. Your PC is always online, your phone is always online, your laptop and iPad; they all offer services that require a connection. The internet is slowly becoming new technologies life stream. The Xbox One will offer a huge amount of online functionality, not the least of which is multiplayer gaming but add to this the new achievement systems (more on that in another blog entry), augmented TV, internet browsing, background updating and (if the hype is to be believed) cloud computing then online is pretty much mandatory anyway.

What about the user? As always the internet is prone to assumptions and great exaggeration while seemingly refusing to use any critical thinking. Something an exec says gets taken verbatim and applied as a blanket statement over everything. That brings me to what seems to be the widely accepted fact that you'll need to be online at least once every 24 hours otherwise your Xbox One might as well be a big black brick. This comes from a comment that was made in regards to how the Xbox One verifies ownership of games. To make sure you and you're friend aren't both playing the same game, your Xbox One needs to report to a server. Say you don't have internet for whatever reason, or you're away from internet access and you just want to play some single player you're stuffed right? Well I don't know what's officially been said but there seems to be an easy answer here; if you aren't able to be authenticated online you must have the disc in your drive to be able to play it. Easy right? That's the way your Xbox works right now, and this is the exact way DRM is managed on the Xbox 360 right now. That's right, your Xbox 360 has DRM and the way it's managed is widely accepted and is fairly reasonable.

When you download something on the Xbox 360, you get a license for the console you downloaded it on, and the profile you downloaded it with. This lets any user play the game on the original console, and it lets you go to a friends house and play the game there if you bring your profile. If you're being nefarious about it you could have a friend come over, buy a game with their account on your console giving you access when they leave, and then they go home and redownload it on their own console and their profile license would let them play it aswell. Lets think about how this would work with the Xbox One. You install the game onto your console, if it's online you can play without a disc, this is your profile license. It gets authenticated online and you're good to go. If you aren't online you must have the disc in, this would physically authenticate that you own a copy of the game this would be the console license. As you can see this is very similar to the way your Xbox 360 works now. This could also lead to a situation where two people or profiles could use one copy of a game to both have the ability to play it and I think that's where the problems arise. Microsoft obviously doesn't want this to become the norm, with two people basically buying half the games and sharing. They want them both to buy all the games, this is why they are sticking with their story so far and claiming online authentication is mandatory.

There will obviously be a way to play games while the system is offline, you'd be crazy to think otherwise. Microsoft doesn't want to alienate their customers and run the risk of losing sales. They are working on a way to reveal this while hiding the fact two people can share a game, with the caveat of one person having to be offline. By convincing everyone that they have to be online they lower the chances of people being able to share a game like this, they will then reveal a way that people can play offline and spin it in a way that won't immediately make people think they can share a copy of a game. Of course this is my theory, and I have no concrete evidence yet, but I'm putting it in writing now to be either proved wrong, or to point back at it in the future with a bit I told you so.

Again E3 is just around the corner and there are a few more Xbox One speculations I'd like to address and speculate on myself so expect Xbox One ramblings over the coming couple of weeks. That's it for this post, let me know what you think and leave a comment below. See you guys later.

Tuesdaily Update

OK?

It's been a while since I did a Tuesdaily Update but here it is. We had WA Day yesterday here in Western Australia, so I took the day off from my super stressful job writing this blog. I have it hard over here, I know. I spent that time and most of the weekend busting through a couple of games and have some new completions to show for it. It's refreshing to have not just one but two completions to talk about as it's been nothing but writing about progress in Bionic Commando: Rearmed for so long.

The first completion which took nearly all weekend was Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 which is a complete cake walk compared to the original. I've had some people tell me that it wasn't as good as the original but I found it just as good, maybe even better. Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 had more levels and gameplay features to play around with with less than half of the frustration found in the original. I'm not sure if that's at least in part because I knew what to expect in terms of gameplay and strategies or just that the level of difficulty was lower. I don't mind hard games, I like a challenge as much as the next guy, but I just found Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 much more enjoyable.

Usually I'm a big proponent of any and all facial hair but the
Mo on ol' Spence just ain't sitting right with me

On Friday I noted that I was about halfway through the first play-through (which was on Normal). I ended up finishing that run then going back through all the levels again grabbing all the lives, power ups and secrets to put me in the best possible position to beat the game on Hard. Once that was done Saturday saw me run through all the levels again without jumping which unlocks the "Billy Hoyle" achievement. I then started my fourth run-through of the game in co-operative with myself. It was a bit unwieldy, with me not being able to see where I was going sometimes but come early Sunday I was done. Diving straight into Hard mode on my fifth play-through I was done in no time. Hard mode didn't put up a fight, with me finishing levels in the quickest times I had done them yet. So after five play-throughs spaced across a few days Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 has been completed and is not something to be feared like you should the original Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

I could go some Doritos right about now!

Monday was a new day and as I scrolled through my XBLA collection looking in equal parts amazement and pride as how I've been working my way through and completing a lot of them I decided to get stuck into Doritos Crash Course 2. I really liked the original Crash Course so I was excited to see what this one could offer and I'm pleased to say it improves in some ways while still offering a fun and challenging game to play through. I ended up playing it all Monday, practically completing it in one or two sittings. The only thing I had left to do when I finally went to bed in the early hours of this morning was to grind out some more bonus objectives. This is easily done on the third level in the jungle and after spending another 45 minutes with it this morning I've managed to close the lid on another game, that is until the DLC gets released.

That's all that's happened so far today, right now I'm staring down the next game to add to my growing pile of conquests, but you'll have to check back Thursday for more on that. In all honesty I've been a bit lazy lately in just about all areas of my life, including this blog, so I'm trying to pull myself out of that and hopefully there'll be some more posts popping up but that's all for this one. Leave a comment if you've got something you'd like to say and I'll see you laters.