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.

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

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.

I’ve played to about halfway through the Egypt episode now, and I’m afraid I’ll have to be a dick and disagree with Mrs. Gibson’s rather controversial statements such as

As for the Wii version… I never thought it would come to this, but here we are: I’d rather play Angel of Darkness.

or

The shooting in TRA Wii just doesn’t work. The remote is ridiculously sensitive; the blue dot on the screen jiggles nervously even when your hand is absolutely still.

I’ll have to agree on the point that the cursor does jiggle a fair lot – however, for all I can tell the wiimote is no more sensitive than in any other game. The difference, and a very noticable one at first, is that the cursor movement isn’t “smoothed out”. You know what I mean – most Wii games smooth the movement of the cursor to prevent the “jiggling” that Ellie describes. TRA doesn’t, which feels weird at first, but I’ve actually come to like it, possibly even better than the heavy smoothing most Wii games (Mario Galaxy, for example) apply – if only because the cursor doesn’t feel “laggy” this way.

Either way, I honestly don’t see where this causes problems with the game, since there is a rather heavy aiming assistance for everything involving the cursor. If you lock on to an enemy or target, the camera will (usually) keep them on the screen, leaving you with the task of dodging their attacks and pointing the cursor within a rough 10cm distance of them so you can hit them. The same holds true for shooting targets, with the exception that those don’t move around.

Now I haven’t played the 360 or PS2 versions of TRA, but I have honestly not had any problems at all with the controls in the Wii version. Nor the camera, for that matter – the camera can be turned with the cursor when holding C (the upper nunchuck button). Much like the lack of cursor smoothing, this feels a bit odd at first but works surprisingly well, giving you full control over the camera on a console that doesn’t have a secondary analog stick to control it with. Moreover, if you hold C and Z on the nunchuck, you get freelook AND target highlighting, which is excellent for scanning your surroundings for stuff to shoot. Aside from enemies sometimes passing behind objects and the camera not turning quite fast enough to keep up with them when they run past you, I have yet to experience any of the camera issues described in the Eurogamer review. Much like in Legend, the camera pretty much always helpfully turns to show you where you’re supposed to go next.

They ruined [the T-Rex battle] in the first versions of Anniversary with the bright lighting and the boring cut-scene and the Quick Time Event nonsense… It’s the same in the Wii version, except instead of pressing buttons you wave the remote and Nunchuk as directed. It feels silly.

I’ll actually go and say that unlike Ellie, I really like the gimmicky added Wii controls – such as having to tilt the wiimote backwards to pull levers or holding the nunchuck and wiimote facing each other and pulling them down to pull levers with handles, or having an “off hand” grappling hook activate with a flick of the nunhuck – thus not requiring you to move your fingers to another button in mid-jump. The rhythmic button pressing from Legend is also back in slightly modified shape. Instead of mashing A, you flick the nunchuck back and forth to speed up climbing, swimming or shimmying – a motion that long-term fans of the series should have little problem making while gaming.

What, did you think I could write about a Tomb Raider game without making a joke like that?

My main gripe with the “added” “puzzles” in the Wii version is that their implementation is rather… hamfisted. It’s the same two basic puzzles (a Lights Out!-style switch puzzle and a Connect-The-Gears puzzle), which would be fine if they hadn’t just done three variants/default setups on each and put the clue/item needed to solve them right bloody next to the puzzle itself. A bit more effort with this would have gone a fairly long way – just simply spreading the gears to pick up out a bit further, or moving the hint two rooms ahead instead of mounting it conveniently next to the puzzle mechanism, just, you know, things to make it seem less like they just carved out a niche and dropped Puzzle Prefab #2 into it in their level editor.

The graphics are as good as those in the PS2 game, though there’s a disgraceful amount of frame-dropping going on.

Again, an issue I can’t really say I noticed. I haven’t played the PS2 version so I can’t make adequate comparisons about the graphics, but I don’t really notice any significant slowdowns. The game doesn’t run at 60fps, but the framerate has been almost exclusively solidly playable for me so far. The only point where I did experience notable slowdowns was the Damocles chamber. I don’t quite see why, since there’s not an incredible amount of detail here, but I’m going to guess that it’s the sheer size of the room that makes the Wii sweat a bit.

All in all, I can only summarise that while the “problems” described in the Eurogamer review are indeed all present and in the game, I feel that their impact on the game is heavily exaggerated (if I’d even consider them to be a problem at all). Despite what the review says, I feel that the Wii version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, too, is an excellent re-imagining of an excellent game, and it’s refreshing to see a multiplatform game actually have some differences on a platform that’s different from others without completely redesigning it. It could’ve done with a bit more work put into the added puzzles, but doesn’t suffer too much.

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.

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.

You can move around the top and shoot down the corridors of said web to prevent Stuff that’s moving up the corridors from Getting To You And Splattering Your Entrails All Over The Freaking Place. There’s a small(ish) but nasty set of enemies, a few basic standard shmup powerups, many funky colours, a kickass pumping soundtrack… and this.

You are now officially boned.

The no-contest nastiest enemy among what the game throws at you are Pulsars. Yellow, lightning-shaped things that move very quickly and will periodically turn the corridor they’re on into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. Moreover, if you don’t dispatch of the bastard quickly enough, it will reach the upper end of the Web and turn THAT into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. At least the other enemies have the courtesy of just stumbling around the rim trying to chase you down – not so the pulsars. Instant Doom.

I loved Tempest 2000 with all my heart, but was a bit disappointed about it never having received a good clone or remake – and, to be frank, this very one was confusing, completely overloaded on visuals, slow as molasses and generally barely playable at all just about a year or one and a half ago. Massive props to the author for taking it and making this brilliant little piece of freegaming out of it. Just like in Tempest 2000, the graphics manage to be trippy and colourful, but never obscuring what’s going on in the game. Particularly the game’s recreation of T2000′s “particle displays”, which constructs text messages such as scoring numbers and PULSAR WARNING! out of separate dots, is quite brilliant and helps a lot – the concept allows for nice-looking graphical displays that you can still see through, without the need for annoying and boring solid-colour transparency.

So, yeah, if you like arcadey shoot’em’ups, you want to play this. And chances are that you will love it.

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.