Too much faith in Microsoft

Over the past weekend and up to today, I've been reading up on the ASP.NET MVC framework and trying it out using Visual Studio 2008 at work, and marvelling at how nice it is, how nice the tools are, and how together Microsoft are about development compared with their attitudes just a few years ago.

It used to be a case of "do things our way or not at all!", but now it's "do things the proper way, here are some tools to help make it easier!"

After a long time battling with certain other technologies to try and do things in a well structured way [sideways glance at php], where you have to jump through firey hoops to get things done in a way that can best be described as a compromised and roundabout way of intending to do things properly, it's just... beautiful.

I feel like... I've been building houses out of toothpicks, and all of a sudden I get to design and build skyscrapers where they just get a crane and pick up entire staircases and slot them in. Y'know?

So I come home, have some dinner, talk on the phone, switch on my Xbox 360 and... hmm. I seem to have one of these. So I start swapping round AV cables... but later notice that because the red flashing lights were so bright, I had not noticed that only three of them were flashing, which means it's one of these.

So I went to the website, tried filling in a form to get it repaired... the website is a bit clunky and the area I live in isn't in the drop-down menu of counties so I am forced to select "England". That goes to an error page, which gives me some phone numbers.

"Oh..." I thought to myself. "I have been showing too much faith in Microsoft! There must be a god sitting somewhere on a cloud going 'see, you have been getting far too enthusiastic about Microsoft things today! I will show you the painful truth of how bad their systems are!'"

The phone number gives me an automatic machine to talk to, encouraging me to use the website. Argh!

Eventually I got to talk to a woman. She was so nice and friendly, and I had no trouble at all! I read out the serial number and some details, and she said the console was going to be repaired under warranty, and that they will pay to have it shipped to them, repaired and sent back, via UPS as a courier service. All for free. With a turnaround of probably 2 - 3 weeks. Plus they'd give me a new 90 day warranty and a month's gold Xbox live subscription as a bonus. I thanked her a lot and told her I was very impressed, and she was just really nice to talk to.

I am actually glad I got the infamous RROD error rather than the 4 light "your AV cable is broken" error, because I get it fixed for free rather than having to buy a new cable!

What can I say? My faith was tested and already it has been restored! XD

Fable 2 - review and thoughts

I played Fable 2 to completion last week. It's the latest game from UK-based Lionhead Studios, and I bought it before Christmas (it was fairly cheap) but waited for a patch to be released before playing because I had heard that it was really buggy. I guess that must have been a major factor driving down its popularity and the price, because even second hand copies of the game now sell for 1/3 more than I paid for a brand new copy before the patch came out. Even now it's been patched, I noticed it is still somewhat buggy...

"You mean like Dungeon Keeper 2?" my brother replied, when I mentioned that to him. "Funny you should mention that..." - you know, I don't even think he was aware of the fact that one of the founders of Bullfrog Productions - Peter Molyneux - created Dungeon Keeper, and later went on to found Lionhead Studios... ah, that man still hasn't learned the importance of quality assurance... yes, it's still a bit buggy, even though it's all patched up. The golden trail that guides you around the maps kept vanishing, and I got stuck in the scenery and had to reload a few times....

I didn't play the first Fable game for Xbox, though I have a copy somewhere... all I had heard is that it's an RPG with strong emphasis on good and evil; you choose what to do in various situations in the game and the game changes accordingly.

I heard that Fable 2 was more of an update than a sequel, that you now had a dog with you and could get married. I also discovered that people who do not listen to the hype about these games said by Peter Molyneux - the head of Lionhead Studios - tend to be a lot happier with his games than people who hang on what he says, because the games never turn out to have the freedom and features he talks about.

So, I avoided the hype and this is all I knew:

Buggy game, RPG, moral decisions, short, gets overall good reviews.

So I started it on Sunday, and finished it on Friday, having maxed out my character's stats completely, become max level in two jobs (blacksmith and bartending), bought every property I could, done almost every optional quest that was available, and having more money than I could possibly spend. (I had enough money for the mansion costing a million, with plenty of change left over. And in real life, I work full time Monday to Friday - I was only playing on evenings. So yeah, when they say short, they mean really very short indeed, for an RPG.

The first day I started the game, I went through the first bit of story, and then when I got to the first city (Bowerstone), I went and got a job and played the minigame to max it out and make a load of money, bought myself some new clothes, used some "expressions" on the locals, and some fell in love with me. I then married a nice lady ("Holly The Traveller"), bought a house for ourselves, had sex with my new wife, then got up and went to buy some nice furniture... ... ... ... ...then realised, hey! This wasn't supposed to be The Sims or Animal Crossing, this was supposed to be an RPG! >_< So I started to get on with the story.

The game felt like a Sims game with an RPG tacked on for a long time after that.

It's definitely a quirky game. I like quirky games. It's funny - there's a lot of hilarious dialogue in there, it does have this strong current of morality in it too... one that is... quirky and hiliarous.

Eating meat pies or drinking alcoholic drinks are considered immoral acts and will also make you fat, which decreases your attractiveness. Eating tofu will make you holy. Eating celery will make you thin, and there is no such thing as "too thin". Running hundreds of miles won't help make you thin at all!

Also, if you ever get "killed" in battle, you don't really die but you get a scar on your body, which permanently counts against your attractiveness. People in town also find "good" people attractive and will fall in love with them simply because of their heroicness. As attractiveness and morality seem so tightly linked, and the message seems to be "play well, be good, eat well, or the penalty is you'll get ugly!", are we then to think that vanity is a very "good" trait? It really seems like it, and the game forces you to make a decision about that later on. >:)

If you have a lover and if you're married, people will think you're more moral if you sleep together. No matter what gender you or your partner is. I noticed that putting a moustache or beard onto my female character would give her a +crossdressing stat, though wearing men's clothing didn't (?!), and neither that, nor having sex with someone of the same gender, affect morality. This is all "about right", I'd say, though I know my mother for one would disagree (to put it lightly)...

The relationships in the game worked strangely, though. It was as though there was a grand idea, but no-one really knew how to make it work right. As I became more famous and wealthier and "good", people would keep falling in love with me even though I hadn't met them, or in some cases, even gone to the city where they live. Now, I know that's kind of how things work with celebrities, except that there is no-one in the world who will dislike you if you're famous enough and that's just really un-individualistic and makes them seem more like some kind of hive mind. The generic "attractiveness" stat doesn't help either; everyone thinks you're attractive when you're an 8 foot tall muscle-bound woman with glowing blue skin and wearing upper-class clothes and purple / green eye makeup (really really not my idea of attractiveness) - there's no sense of individual preference in finding a partner beyond mere gender.

Also, all the townsfolk were all a little bit over-familiar (NB: this is understatement!), routinely following me everywhere around town, including following me to my bedroom when I've just beckoned my wife and she's said "I can't wait to rip your clothes off!". I mean, can't they take a hint? There's a huge crowd of people following me up the stairs! At the same time, they generally don't like it if you give their spouse or child anything (e.g. if they asked for an autograph). Except my wife who was always happy to see me flirting with anyone. What a warped sense of jealousy and voyeurism they have!

My wife... it became difficult to regard her as anything other than a generic clone by the end, when everyone was throwing themselves at me. When I was gone for 10 years and came back, the shopkeepers were all "Glad to have you back", and "oh am I glad to see you!" and it was nice to be back, and know I'd been missed. My wife... just wanted sex same as usual, as if my being away for a decade had had no impact on her, apart from making her a little hornier.

It was far too easy to level up and max out my character's stats. First of all, you can buy potions which act as experience points and if you buy a lot of property that's like having infinite money. Then with "The Crucible" (no, they don't play snooker there) where you can fight and get up to 5x experience bonuses. Combine the 5x bonus and the potions, and... By my 2nd time through I had maxxed out my strength stat, and by my 3rd I had maxxed out my will stat and most of my spells. Not that I really used most of them anyway.

By the end of the game, even though it was a short game I was glad to see the back of it because there seemed so little left to do that it had become boring. The characters in the storyline were all amusing, but the other characters in the game had completely lost their diversity and had become shallow. There was no feeling of challenge left, just repetitive tasks (though the treasure hunt quest broke it up for a bit).

The choices at the end of the game are supposed to leave you with a heavy heart, I think. For me, the choice was simple.

I might be in the minority but I remember seeing the film Titanic in the cinema when it came out and after it bored me for a few hours, it sickened and angered me as I watched the ship going down and all I could do was feel grief about the hundreds of innocent people dying; they had put so much hope into this journey, felt so much joy in getting to travel on this ship, and now were dying horribly in freezing seawater... whole families, parents and children, if not all the family, then you had children seeing their father give up his place for them to live on. And yet, the sickening thing was that I - the audience - was being asked, no, ordered, by the director, to care about this poxy couple and their piddling little holiday romance. Like that's anything compared to the great tragedy which has unfolded!

So bearing that in mind, if you have played to the end of Fable 2, you will know which of the options I chose. Yes I understand that it is to give the ending of the game a memorable bittersweetness, but due to one character being strongly tied in with a game mechanic, it's closed off some of the things I could have done in the post-game, and that is really annoying. I can't choose the ending I feel is right for my character and the world, and continue properly.

I don't think I like this game enough to buy the downloadable content. I was thinking the game was really short so the add-on probably isn't that substantial or value for money. I was getting a bit bored by the end anyway.

Thoughts on Xbox Live Arcade

General thoughts about Xbox Live Arcade.

In some ways I really like it, in other ways I really don't.

Things I like
I like that I can download game trailers and demos and trial versions onto my Xbox 360 hard drive for free.

I like that certain games available to buy are old games where buying the original version of the game for whatever platform would now cost far more than what they're asking, due to scarcity of the game (e.g. Triggerheart Exelica for Dreamcast costs about £60 for the Japanese import game on ebay, but is only 800 points = about £6.80 on XBLA... though changes are it doesn't have "story mode", and has HDTV support...)

I like that it queues things up for download, pauses the download when it needs to, and you can set it to carry on downloading while the rest of the console is switched off too (though my guess is that it uses about the same amount of power as being fully switched on).

I like the convenience of loading games from the hard drive, not having to look for discs.

Things I don't like
I don't like the way buying Microsoft points with a credit card leaves your card on the Xbox 360 by default (I mentioned this a few times in earlier posts).

I don't like the way that games are often advertised as the full game, just like the original, but they're often missing crucial parts of the game (e.g. "Story mode" in Soul Calibur and Triggerheart Exelica...)

I don't like separately priced "downloadable content" for games - the way that game publishers now charge you for most of a game when it's released, then you can buy more of the game (and avatars and wallpapers to use on XBLA) for Microsoft Points afterwards. "Beautiful Katamari" was especially terrible for this!

I don't like the way that the price is fixed for a game with Microsoft Points under XBLA and the price never comes down.

e.g. A normal game comes out on a console, the RRP is £50. After a week it's £40. After a month it's £30. After a year you'll find 2nd hand copies in the "4 for £20" section in your local high-street video-games shops, and about the same price on ebay.

That's my favourite time to buy games, when they're cheap as chips. When you have a game on XBLA, the price never drops. So you have a situation where supposedly budget releases of little downloadable games are more expensive than popular high-budget games like "Mass Effect" or "Bioshock" or "Blue Dragon" on the high street.

I bought two compilation disks from ebay of XBLA games - the one that comes with the "Arcade" version of the console, and one called "Live Unplugged". Buying them like this on disk, the games work out as about £2 each which is far closer to what they're worth.

Some examples of how contemporary price cuts compare to XBLA prices... You can buy "Doom" on XBLA for 400 points (about £3.40), or you can buy "Doom 3" for Xbox in any high-street videogames store in a "4 for £10" offer, which includes "Ultimate Doom" and "Doom 2" - for £2.50. Doom 3 was originally priced at about 20 times more than it is worth now, but now that game packaged with the original Doom as a bonus is cheaper than just Doom on its own on XBLA.

You need another game to get the most out of your "4 for £10" offer? I suggest "Midway Arcade Classics", which includes "Defender" (400 points), "Gauntlet" (400 points), Joust (400 points), Paperboy (400 points), Robotron: 2084 (400 points), Smash TV (400 points), and Root Beer Tapper (400 points). So... 2800 points, that's, oh... £23.80 for games you can buy on a compilation disk for £2.50 in shops.



The game applies to more XBLA games that are re-releases of old games - there's usually a cheaper compilation out or another remake that ends up being cheaper if you just wait patiently.

See how this all pans out? How it works against the way that high-street videogame pricing typically works, to the player's disadvantage? It feels like another method that a games distributor is using to keep prices artificially high, though I suppose it technically isn't. If XBLA games dropped in price the same way that normal games drop in price, I'd be far more inclined to buy games. I'd feel like it was a bargain, a good deal.

You can "beat" the system a little bit, by buying pre-paid Microsoft Points online from Amazon or whoever, as they sometimes undercut the RRP of those cards by a pound or two, but that's generally the best discount you can hope for.

I also don't like the way licensing works. If a friend is visiting you, and they want to play a game they bought on XBLA, they can download it onto the hard-drive of your Xbox 360, but will only have full game access on their own account - you can't play it with them unless you go to their house and play it on their Xbox 360. Or, you buy a copy. That's not very social.

I've also wanted to play some games multiplayer with a friend in my house, but it turns out that multiplayer is only supported on the game if my friend and I each play on our own Xbox 360s in our own houses, via the Internet through two Xbox Live Arcade Gold Membership accounts. Two people sitting next to each other in front of one console can't have fun playing the same game, oh no! That also makes for very un-social gaming! >_<

My new Xbox 360 (4)

I've owned my Xbox 360 since the 2nd of this month, including one week when I've been away on holiday and haven't touched it, and already... I've been on the phone to Microsoft support twice today to arrange repairs under warranty. I'm quite disappointed - I didn't even get to see the famous "Red Ring Of Death". What's happened is that the console refuses to read games or DVDs. It gave me an error message last night - a disc read error, asking me to open the tray and remove any dust... so I opened the tray, took a look at the disc which was absolutely immaculate, pristine, brand new and super nice and shiny - not a speck of dust. I shrugged and put the disc back into the tray and got on with my game. It was a compilation disc of games, so I guess it didn't need to read very much, so I didn't have any problems for hours until I stopped playing.

After that, it wouldn't read any discs. I put in a disc, it says "reading" .... and then instead of the name of the game, it says "open tray". It doesn't recognise discs. I tried a whole pile of different games, nothing would work.

So I went to bed, and in the morning tried to ring the support line. They're only open 9am to 5pm so I spent some time jotting down the serial number ready. When I got through, I was through to a woman with an Indian accent. I have a cold so I suppose I must have been hard to understand. I ended up repeating myself an awful lot, and the line kept cutting out and beeping so she was hard to understand, too.

We went through all sorts of things, I explained the problem a few times, told her what I could see... registered the console with the serial number... for some reason she kept asking me if the time and date were right on the console - which are automatically updated when it's connected to the internet, but the internal battery is dead so the clock is wrong otherwise - went through the menu to "console settings" -> "startup" -> "disc" but now it won't let me change whether to start on the dashboard or DVD, it just goes backwards to the previous page on the menu. (?)

At her request I tried a DVD and an audio CD - the DVD failed, but the CD works (it even grabbed the track listing which quite impressed me, since it was an import Utena soundtrack). She asked me if the console was too hot. I said yes, it's hot but how hot is too hot? She asked if it was too hot. I said it's hot, you could use it as a hand-dryer. She asked me if there was ventilation, I said it's sitting there on its own, nowhere near anything else, and that it's a smokeless environment, there shouldn't be a problem with the air. She said maybe I should switch it off and let it cool down for a few hours. I told her it had stopped working since the night before and that I had left it switched off overnight and it still wouldn't work. She suggested I switch the machine off and remove the hard drive like that would make a difference. It didn't.

She eventually got me off the line by saying that she couldn't go any further with this until we had ascertained whether the problem was with the console or the discs, and she claimed that the only way to do this was for me to re-try the pile of games and DVDs out on another console to see whether it was an issue with the games or the console. I told her that my games had all been working, and I'd tried them before, everything had been in perfect working order right up until last night. I told her that my console is under a month old and that my games are brand new and the discs are completely unscratched. She wouldn't accept that. She insisted that I try my games out on another console, gave me a reference number and would not discuss the matter any further.

She did ask me if I had any other questions, so I asked about the other enquiry I had made, a week and a half ago, about removing the credit card details from my xbox, so that if the console is stolen no-one can commit fraud and buy points with my credit card. She went "let me tell you this!" and told me something about the details sticking around until the next billing cycle (whenever that may be), and that the last 4 digits of a card will be shown in the dashboard but they cannot be used.

Grr, Microsoft. Always doing half a job and leaving a huge mess and expecting the user to be happy with it.

At that point I could tell she was really really annoyed with me, she was all snappy and I knew she wanted to get rid of me, so I hung up. I felt really quite angry with her. So I decided to give it a rest for a few hours.

I am sorry to make a post here in which I feel angry. I didn't intend for this blog to be a venting ground, but this is what happened.

I rang back after 4pm, quoted my reference number to the woman on the phone (who also had an Indian accent), and she spent a while reading the details of the case. I told her that it was definitely a problem with the console and not the discs, and she said she would set up a repair ticket for me ("please bear with me, the system is very slow"). She asked if I would like a shipping label by email or by post, saying that by email would be faster and more convenient, and I said that by post would be faster and more convenient because I don't own a printer. She seemed alright with that. Again, I waited. She apologised for making me wait, saying that the system had just crashed. Again, I waited. She was coughing and making uncomfortable throat noises quite often. I felt quite sorry for her, as working in a call centre is the worst place for a person with a sore throat! She told me that the delivery and collection would be done by UPS, it would be taken for repair and should be returned within 2-3 weeks and there would be no charge as the console is under warranty.

That's just as well. If they had dared to charge me money for repairing a console that stopped working in under a month, I would have been so angry!

She told me that before returning the console, I should remove any custom faceplates and the hard drive and any other peripherals and accessories. And asked me to patiently wait.

I could hear a man shouting in the background behind her. Not just plain yelling, but perhaps angrily demanding something? I wondered if I should ask if everything was alright. More people were coughing in the background.

Eventually, she told me that the system had returned with an error, and gave me a reference number to ring back with tomorrow. [sigh] She asked me if there were any other issues I'd like to discuss, and I let her go. This phone call had lasted over 30 minutes and there had probably been under 5 minutes of talking! Such a long wait, so much apologising!

So... I'll be sending my nice new console in for repair very soon. I hope they are good to it, and that my console is all nice and shiny when it comes back. I've heard that sometimes people get replacements when they're sent in for repair, and I'm dreading that I might get my nice shiny new broken console replaced by a tatty old nasty 2nd-hand refurbished only-just-working console. :(

Well, at least in the meantime, the only thing that is broken is the DVD drive so I can play Space Giraffe off the hard drive... ^_^

My new Xbox 360 (3)

Well, I've owned this machine for over a week, so I thought I'd post an update on my thoughts.

I'm surprised at how into the Xbox 360 I am. People go on about these big testosterone-fuelled games for the system, people-killing soldier games and things, which isn't my thing, but I've found games that I like - both the games you can buy in shops on shelves, and the ones that are available to download - full games and trials and demos. There's so much simple fun stuff on live arcade and having the games on the hard drive is very convenient.



That's a photo of my collection of Xbox 360 games so far. I also have a copy of the RPG "Lost Odyssey" coming in the post, and own 4 Xbox Live Arcade games - Space Giraffe, and three games that came free with my MadCatz joystick - Time Pilot, Frogger and Astro Pop.

(Astro Pop is a rip-off of Magical Drop in endless mode, the biggest real difference is that the player can sometimes use a special move. It's made by Popcap games)

I haven't played half those games. Hey, I haven't even played half of the old Xbox games either! (I own some FPS for Xbox just because I feel I ought to give the genre a go again... but it's low on my priority list)

My thoughts on High Definition gaming - I've plugged my Xbox into my super-nice monitor (I had to buy a new cable to do that), and now games look.... well, as good as PC games in 1280 x 1024 resolution. Considering that my normal desktop I use for windows is an effortless 1600 x 1200, I don't consider high definition very high. It means I can see more detail though, everything does look very nice, and for some games it means I can now read the on-screen text, whereas it was impossible to do so on normal TV-sized resolution (e.g. the instructions on how-to-play in the demo of Triggerheart Exelica).

Part of it is down to how wonderful my monitor is, I'm sure. ^_^ Hooray for the Samsung Syncmaster XL20! (I think I need to tweak the colour settings again, though...). It looks nicer than any HDTV I've ever had and there's no lag or weird side effects like you often see on LCD monitors. It's just perfect, doesn't get in the way of a good gaming experience. ^_^

The Xbox 360 is definitely more powerful than any PC I've ever owned or seen, so the extra detail it's possible to show is well utilised.

My thoughts on the interfaces. Well, I think that the Xbox marketplace interface, and the Xbox live website are both horrible to navigate properly. The game genre categorisation system is not useful, and if you know the name of a game but not the genre it's categorised as and want to find it, you pretty much have to browse all games and find it yourself. e.g. I want to find this "Pinball FX" game for a demo? What's that under? ...eventually I find it, and it's under "bar games". I didn't even know what that genre meant! Games categorised under the venue in which they were played - e.g. bar or arcade - aren't very helpful to describe the content of a game, or its gameplay. At least, I think so.



The Xbox website is flaky and hard to navigate. Half of it is in flash, so I can't open new tabs to read game descriptions or easily go back to read other ones.

The network for the console and website is also slow, even when I allow it full use of my internet connection. Browsing lists means loading up text and icons separately, and it takes ages, not letting me go further in the list until the current page has loaded all its icons and stuff I just want to skip past.

It's all just really badly thought out and annoying to use.

I also don't know how to remove my credit card details from my profile. I don't want it there! It's not safe! I'm automatically logged in just by switching on my console - so the card details are under that. If the console were stolen or whatever, that would leave it open for abuse. I'm busy playing games, I don't want my card tied to the account. But I bought some Microsoft points (to buy Space Giraffe and some Katamari levels), and the card details have been stored there ever since. T_T

The games are pretty fun, though.

My new Xbox 360 (2)

Well, I played on my new console for the remainder of the evening.

My adventures in xboxing so far have won me 40 Gamerscore points from 5 achievements. The MadCatz USB joystick is actually pretty nice.

I played some Dynasty Warriors Gundam, then Dead Or Alive 4, then Blue Dragon, and finally I explored what's taking up nearly 10GB on my hard drive and found a bunch of adverts, videos, and a puzzle game called Hexic HD. So I tried that too.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam is a very friendly kind of DW game, it's nice to be able to rocket power your way round a map in a hurry, and it's clear what to do and where to go. I only played through the first two stages of Amuro's official story route.

Dead or Alive 4 seems faster than any other DOA game I've seen. It's pretty, but all the others from the 2nd one onwards have been, too. ^_^ I only played through the story mode with 2 characters - Hayate and Ayane; I like those two. ^_^ Every time I encounter Bayman, he beats me so easily! I need to learn to counter effectively! The credits weren't in the booklet, and I didn't see them for completing story mode... :/

Blue Dragon - I only started it, though it was already about time for me to go to bed. The direction is good from what I've seen - it feels like a children's adventure film. It feels cinematic. It lets you run around during the opening credits if you're feeling hyperactive, which is cute. Akira Toriyama's character designs have been brought to life in a really nice way - I don't think I've ever seen his work brought to 3D in as nice a way as this, before. The first monsters we encountered were "poo snakes", which are like Dr Slump poo with arms and legs and a snake head, holding a spear. XD The music is top quality Nobuo Uematsu, I just stood around in some scenes to listen for a bit before moving on. So far, it reminds me most of the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack, really nice. As I said, it was already past bedtime, so I only got to the 2nd save point and quit. I might buy myself a copy of the soundtrack...

Hexic HD is a really really boring puzzle game. No sense of urgency, very difficult to get into a game-over situation... after a while I just got bored and waited for an opportunity to get Game Over, and quit. I'd somehow locked 3 achievements on it already, though. :D

I think I will need to call customer support tonight -

* The wireless controller does nothing but flash at me. :/
* The clock goes back to 2005 after I switched it off and slept overnight. :/

I found the power supply to the router this morning! The xbox autodetects an IP address, but can't get to a DNS lookup... I think I need to sort out my network. :(