8 hours on an Xbox 360

By Vermouth

Let it never be said that Microsoft can’t throw a good party. Tuesday they flew me and 9 other gamers from various forums up to New York City, gave us a stay in a wonderful 400 dollar per night hotel room, and then gave us some hands on time with the Xbox 360 with several games, as well as a look at some of the system’s features.

So what follows is a litany of the good, the bad, and the stuff that makes the brow furrow.

The Good

Condemned—There were a few things at the show that everyone in my group were quite impressed with. One of these was Condemned, which was my favorite game of the show, without much doubt. This was a first person survival Horror title that was just very scary to play through. With the 5.1 surround sound they had stuff going on all around you. Creepy stuff about murders in a dive of an apartment and then it being attacked by drug junkies who go freaking nuts. This was a very scary game to play and it really impressed as the move to first person improved the immersion of a Survival Horror game. You don’t have to deal with lousy aim or shifty cameras, but you’re not blowing through monsters 10 at a time either, as it’s not that kind of deal like the Suffering or some such.

Kameo-I wasn’t expecting so much as Rare’s efforts on the Xbox kinda sucked but this was a whole lot of fun. This was the game they started us all off with and it was very charmingly designed. You play as a fairy that can transform into other stuff and this mechanic is really quite fun as you change into different things to solve different problems. The stuff we were shown had a good degree of variety to it and based on about 5 levels of play it’s not going to be a collection fest like some other Rare platformers.

Oblivion—I got to play the introduction to Oblivion and it was pretty good, creating my character and escaping to get into the game’s main quest. The graphics are quite good although the facial animation could’ve used some work. The characters customization is as flexible as I’ve seen as I created a Redguard and Khajiitt in my two play sessions at this one. One note of concern was the controls which had the slightest bit of stutter to them but the people from Bethesda seemed to know what I was getting at and assured me that they had people working around the clock to fix it. They also told me some funny stories about the AI in the game and assured me that they’re really trying to make a more memorable story in Oblivion than Elder Scrolls has had before, without loosing that non-linear gameplay in the process.

Xbox Live Arcade— This was the real surprise of the show, at least to me. I didn’t even expect to play around with this after the features lecture but I wandered by the TV and they had the guy there who was the lead on Arcade. He was talking about his vision for arcade and downloadable games and I asked if they were working with any Indie Publishers like Garage games and he told me, “they had a Garage Games game planned for launch” and that they really wanted to bring indie games to consoles. Then I asked about distribution and pricing as these were my beefs with the current Live Arcade and he thought much as I did - that this generation’s Live Arcade really won’t hold a candle for what he’s working on in Arcade 2.0 as this generation’s was too expensive, too difficult etc. Furthermore you’re gonna be able to get Arcade games as a demo and try them out before you buy them, just downloaded through Live. This would all be meaningless unless people are actually going to want to play 360 Arcade games, and after playing several of them I have to say that they’re very fun to play. I tried out Mutant Storm, Geometry Wars, Marble Blast and a Platformer I think was named Kip (but don’t quote me) and all 4 of them were quite fun and challenging to play. While stuff like this may not replace proper 50 dollar type games they’re fun to play and can be good for short bursts or longer sittings as they’re addicting and challenging. I wrote not too long ago that nobody is doing much of anything to help people get business outside retail, and it looks like Microsoft is trying to find a way for some games to come to the consumer without needing retail shelf space battles.

The Controller—I was thrilled by the controller. It’s by far the best controller I’ve put my hands on. The sticks are back as they were so they’ll be nice and taut for playing First Person Shooters but they’ve done some nice things with the button layout.

Live Improvements -They were citing some interesting things about Xbox Live, that were coming up. The first of these is they claim to have really improved the feedback system, so if you play with some jackal you can send a complaint about them and the system will try to make it so that if you’re playing in a match made game, then you won’t see that person too often. The other thing I really was happy to hear is that you’re going to be able to download playable demos of games.

Call of Duty 2-CoD2 was just like the PC demo which, given the disaster that was CoD Finest Hour, I thought that was a good thing. The fire fights were pretty darn intense and converted to the 360 controller very nicely. This also was the most finished game on display as the lead designer was there and he said it’s finished just waiting on the hardware to be ready to go. They let us play this one single player and split screen and it was a bunch of fun; albeit a lot like CoD1.

The Disappointing

Perfect Dark Zero—This just in folks, PDZ is not going to be the 360’s Halo. I’m a huge fan of that series but playing this game I never really felt wowed by anything. The graphics were really disappointing, everything is ridiculously shiny for one thing, it just looks weird because of this. Half-Life 2 on a midrange PC looks a lot better. It’s a nice step versus Halo 2 but it’s incremental and it didn’t really surpass the best a PC has to offer. There may be some hope for the multiplayer but the single player stuff just left me with sense of wondering what went wrong.

NBA Live 2006- I’m a huge fan of sports games and basketball games most of all, so needless to say I spent a bunch of time with this one and it was pretty unimpressive. For one thing the default camera is a pain in the ass to use as it’s designed to show off the outrageously good graphics not to let you play good fundemental basketball, particularly when it comes to defense. Further this game is perhaps even more arcacdey than previous entries in the series which were too arcadey for my tastes. Precision passing and shutdown defense are rather difficult to achieve even more so than in the past. On the positive side this may have been the best game at the show in terms of visuals. The game looked dead gorgeous and at a distance you might wonder if it’s a broadcast. I mean it just looks really good.

Need For Speed Most Wanted—This one may turn out OK because it’s got a wonderful sense of speed, beautiful graphics and some good tracks to show but as of right now I couldn’t give it a recommendation as the controls are really crap compared to Burnout or Ridge Racer on the PSP. If they can fix that it could be quite good but it was hard to have fun on it now because I was sliding all over the place in a game that’s supposed to be an arcade racer.

The stuff I can’t decide on yet

King Kong- looks insanely good and appears to have the same gameplay I enjoyed in the PC demo with better graphics and sound. Because I was only allowed to watch while someone from MGS played, I didn’t actually get to play this one, but it looks really good.

DOA 4—It’s like DOA Ultimate with a few new characters. I played about 20 bouts of this in a row but frankly I still only wanted to play my favorites from that game, Kasumi, Ayane and Hitomi, only playing different characters because we went random character and level selection. Gameplay wise it’s still simple fighting game with really great graphics. In some ways the game’s graphics should probably be disappointing because it wasn’t such of a big step on DOA 2 Ultimate, only because that game looked ridiculously good to begin with.

Project Gotham Racing 3—This was a really nice version of Project Gotham. I’d seen a lot of footage for this game so I wasn’t at all surprised by it’s beautiful graphics as I’d seen them pretty often. What took me a bit by surprise was that it controlled pretty nicely. I wasn’t so hot at the first two, I slid out too much to win consistently but using automatic transmission I had no trouble getting in the top 3 on some 8 player System Link Races with midrange cars. It was a curious decision to go for even more exotic cars in PGR 3. They said that the motto in choosing cars was that life begins at 170 mph and if a car couldn’t reach that speed it was ineligible for consideration in the roster. This led to lots of Ferrari’s and Lamborghini’s but not so many Ford’s and Chevy’s. If you enjoyed the first two you’ll probably like this a lot. It’s also got a whole bunch of new Live features letting you watch what your friends are doing as well as the best in the world.

Media Connectivity—Well this is a sort of Doctor Jekyll-Mr. Hyde sort of thing. They had Nano’s there so they could show off the ability of the 360 to pull music off of another device and this worked really nicely while I was plying PGR. Being the owner of an iPod and a PSP this peaked my interest, so I hunted down some answers on how well this will work. On the plus side it’ll play AACs, or MP3s that are encoded from a CD by iTunes or any other player or WMAs of course, but sadly it won’t play Atrac’s or DRM protected AACs purchased on the only compatible stores for the PSP and iPod. This really may not be Microsoft’s fault - it may be Sony’s and Apple’s - but it’s really not so nice given that I have hundreds of purchased songs on my iPod. All in all this was pretty good.

On the downside is the video player functionality which was somewhat hamstrung if you don’t have Media Center PC. It took me forever to get them pinned down on this issue but with a standard XP box you’ll not be able to get your video onto your 360 which was really disappointing as I’d love to have a set top box to watch Diggnation or On the Spot on a TV. I know that not many people are watching legal downloaded video compared to bit torrenting TV and movies and they don’t want to encourage piracy but this seems really unfortunate.

Wrap up

Frankly I need to start my wrap up by thanking Microsoft for giving me such an opportunity. Not only getting to play around with the 360, but sending me to New York for the first time which allowed me to do a very short bit of sight seeing around midtown, which was a wonderful experience. I realize that they were trying to buy votes effectively—in that I go back and talk about this thing and I convince people to buy their system but well frankly they didn’t pay me enough to be anything but honest. The 10 of us were pretty strategically chosen it seemed from across various forums Gamespy, Xbox365, Nintendo, Playstation and yeah we all liked Xbox but any of us would have taken offense at being called a fanboy. But I tell you this is my honest opinion, and if you don’t believe me you won’t be able to be convinced of it anyways. They threw a great party, had a bunch of mainstream press at this event, I beat the stuffing out of one guy from MTV.com in NBA Live, and I met Peter Moore who struck me as pretty affable. Is it worth buying at launch? Well the consensus amongst the 8 of us on the van was that if you’ve got the money you won’t be let down but it won’t hurt to wait a little while too. For my part I’ll probably get one late this year, after launch or early next year as I was impressed enough by the games on display to warrant a 360 leapfrogging a video card on my to-buy list. I’ll answer any questions on the stuff that I can.

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