21st Century Digital Boy

Just a quick one here. OnLive is a “Microconsole(TM)” system – you get a little widget that you attach to your TV and play games that run and render on OnLive’s servers, then stream the video and audio to yours. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? If only it would plausibly work.

Two of the issues I can see tie in to a statement printed in the June 2009 issue of EDGE:

“It’s claimed that a 1.5Mbps connection will be good enough for standard definition, while a 5Mbps connection is required for a high-definition output.”

This sounds plausible enough to me – although proper HD-encoded video frequently runs at 15Mbps or even 25Mbps, but even at 1.5/5Mbps this results in two problems.

Firstly, it means that unless you’ve got an internet connection that can reliably deliver 5Mbps, you’ll be playing in Youtube-o-vision. Yay.

Secondly, it means that if you play even on “standard resolution”, at least in Britain your internet provider’s Fair Use Policy is going to go medieval on you. BT’s standard 1Mbps DSL connection has a FUP of 1GB a month; I’m on Eclipse which run at 5, 10 or 20 for the various price plans. Let’s do a little math: 1.5Mbps equals 0.1875 megabytes a second, which equals 11.25 megabytes a minute. To fill 1GB, this takes about 88 minutes. So for every gigabyte on your monthly Fair Use Policy, you can play for about one and a half hours before you hit the limit. That’s seven and a half hours of OnLive a month on my connection if I don’t do anything else on the internet.

Moreover and unrelatedly to the bandwidth numbers, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of input lag. While sub-100ms latency is standard on modern broadband connections, this still means that there will be a significant and noticable delay between what you do on your OnLive system and your actions actually showing up on your screen (since that information has to make the trip from your end to OnLive’s servers and back to your TV). While OnLive keep jabbering on about “Low Latency Video”, this is just how the internet works, so unless they’ve somehow invented a better internet or better physics, this is how it’s going to be.

Here’s a neat little demonstration of input lag. Only goes to 80ms, on average internet connections you can expect that and slightly more.

Dear Microsoft,

Why is the Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility list full of shit? I recently bought Guilty Gear XX again because it’s listed as compatible on the EU list, yet when I try to play it on any of the multiple 360s I have access to, I am prompted to install a compatibility update, after which there’s just a message saying that “This original Xbox game is not supported”.

As it turns out, Silent Hill 2 (which I was considering buying a moment ago) is apparently in a similarly odd state:

• Silent Hill 2: Dreams²⁺⁷

² Currently the North American versions of these games are the only ones supported as backward compatible titles on Xbox 360.

⁷ Currently the EMEA/ANZ versions of these games are the only ones supported as backward compatible titles on Xbox 360.

EMEA/ANZ being “Europe, Middle East and Africa / Australia and New Zealand”. Note the decidedly unambiguous use of “only” in both and the application of both to SH2 resulting in a similarly unambiguous clusterfuck. Judging by a bit of research on the Almighty Internet, it seems that the NA version of the game is not region free and won’t run at all on European consoles, while the EMEA version will work fine except for the fact that there’s no video.

What the hell, guys?

Yours,

Outie

Why does my Xbox 360 not allow me to remove my old credit card from the list of payment options? It expired almost half a year ago, and both my 360 and Xbox Live know this.
Furthermore, why does my 360 even allow me to select this credit card for buying stuff with on the Marketplace?
And, most importantly, why does it insist on selecting this credit card BY DEFAULT every time I want to buy something?

Yours,

Outie

Update 2009-03-14: While it is possible to remove credit cards from the My Account section on xbox.com, this also failed for me. The reason for this apparently was that I bought my last 12-month Gold membership with it about a year ago. I assume – I HOPE – that Xbox Live would have noticed that the card is no longer valid and switched to the new card once the current membership expires. After manually re-selecting 12 Months Gold from the Membership Level menu on Xbox.com > My Account and “paying” for it with my new card (which will only happen once the current membership expires), I could remove the old card from my account.

So I bought Tomb Raider: Anniversary recently. On the Wii. After they heard about that, friends of mine mentioned that Eurogamer slagged it very bad. I was worried for a bit, until I actually played the game.

(continue reading…)

QTTabBar (XP, Vista) is a freeware addon for Windows Explorer which adds tabs, a quick search bar, a drop-down menu for navigating subdirectories, preview tooltips for various image formats, a customisable application launcher and god knows what else. Really, really nice little thing. The only thing I don’t quite like is that there’s no option to have its toolbar display small icons and text labels (or text labels at all). Other than that, it’s nice and quick and offers some really nice options to improve Explorer’s handling.

In other news, I recently bought the Naki Ultimate Fighting Stick off eBay since this seems to be the only not completely shit arcade stick available for the Xbox. It boasts an impressive feature set by working with both the Xbox and PS2, having vibration motors and even two analogue “trackballs” that can be used as analog sticks on both consoles. It’s also wireless, running on a mere three AAA batteries.

Fighting Game Nerds over on the shoryuken.com forums stated that the buttons and stick on this thing were terrible, which worried me a bit – and, as it turns out, they weren’t quite wrong. The stick has a fairly large range of movement and the buttons feel a bit mushy, but it’s decent enough if you’re not an uber precision/speed geek. What bothers me the most is that the buttons don’t click as nicely as the ones on most other sticks. That aside, the above-linked thread also mentions that the parts can apparently be replaced with proper arcade-grade gear with not too much effort if you’re so inclined.

Aside from the buttons being somewhat spongy, the only things that bother me slightly are that the shoulder trigger buttons don’t work if the thing is connected to the Xbox (which is forgivable, considering that the triggers on the Xbox gamepad are fully analog) and that the plastic cover on the case hole for the stick is loose. This seems to be common practice though, but something that I consider a minor annoyance. There’s no input lag of note on either the PS or the Xbox, and the general feel and layout of the stick works quite well.

In general, I’m quite happy with this as a 30 quid purchase (including shipping). Being able to play Guilty Gear on my Xbox with a proper arcade stick = yes, and having a second stick around for the Playstation (I already own the official PS1 arcade stick by Asciiware) in case it’s necessary is also a nice thing.

Caption

So it seems that most companies were not aware that the new dashboard update for the 360 would bring a revamped Marketplace, including Genre texts for the Games section. I’d seen Amped 3 saying “Sell Text” before, but… well, see for yourself.

So I’ve (re-)discovered a clone of my favourite shmup EVAR not too long ago and figured I should share the love. This game is EXCELLENT. WELL DONE. ACE. KILLER.

Typhoon 2001, being a clone of Tempest 2000 (that being an excellent remake of the 1981 arcade game Tempest by the similarly-excellent Jeff Minter) is about Shooting Stuff That Comes At You Really Really Fast. The game setting consists of a web of corridors floating in Bizarro Space, with starfields that form beautifully symmetric patterns and distant layers of… something. Your blaster, also known as The Claw, is stuck to the upper end of the Web, and Stuff Comes At You Really Really Fast from the other one. That is all the story this game has, and all the story it needs. (continue reading…)

Endangered Gamer (via clockwork, Kotaku): god, I’m laughing so hard at this. The invisible coin blocks are sheer and utter brilliance.

Sort of relatedly, this.

Right, I’m getting sick of shit like this:

“Germans Cut Suicide Bombers From C&C3″ ZOMG CENSORSHIP!!!1

No. No, no, NO. For fuck’s sake, NO. Games aren’t censored by “the Germans” or “the government” in Germany. There are no laws that require the removal of stuff like that. None. At all. (continue reading…)

This is fairly old by now, and I’ve been throwing it around on IRC and IM for a while myself, but I keep finding myself coming back to it, watching it, and grinning like an idiot. It’s just so supremely, beautifully, deliciously evil.

1up reports (emphasis mine):

According to the Famitsu inteview with Kazunori Yamauchi, Gran Turismo HD will have two SKUs on the PS3. One of these games will ship with no cars, all of them will be purchased via microtransactions.

The other, Gran Turismo HD: Premium, will ship with two courses and 30 cars, with an additional 30 cars and an additional two courses online at a later date.

[...]

A complete copy of the game will cost gamers somewhere between $426.50 and $975, and that’s without factoring in whatever Sony decides to charge for the menus (since that’s all you’ll get with GT HD: Classic).

Thought Bethesda had balls for their downloadable Oblivion content stunt? Think again.

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE

WHY :-(

edited because Konami redid their website and now require registering to view screenshots ffs

So I finally finished Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay last Friday. I can only echo the sentiments that so many others have already voiced – it’s a refreshing change from the rule in that it’s a movie tie-in game that’s actually pretty fucking good. On the other hand, it doesn’t really have much to do with any of the movies, but is rather just an episode in The Misadventures of Richard B. Riddick – then again, this holds true for the rest of the franchise as well. The actual plot of the game is rather short and thinly spread, and in retrospect most of the things that happen between the introductory parts and the endgame feel like filler material. Funny enough, they don’t do it while you’re playing, or at least not nearly as much. (continue reading…)