Why your XBox 360 sucks

Alright, so it’s only fair that I pick on the giant of the 3. The XBox 360. Since November 22, 2005 the XBox 360 has been a powerhouse of a console. They are currently the top selling console on the market. That might change now that the PS3 has the same $299 price point. Although, Microsoft could reduce their prices to retaliate. After all, the XBox 360 is a cheap piece of crap. Here’s why:

1. The Red Ring of Death

When a console has been out for 4 years like this one has, it’s hard to believe that such a “good product” (based on sales and fanoyism) can be such a piece of shit. How come they started shipping a product that wasn’t ready? The PS3 doesn’t have this problem and it’s got more horsepower under the hood! The statistics don’t lie. Look at this:

A new survey published in Game Informer’s print edition indicates the Xbox 360 failure rate has climbed to a shocking 54.2%. The magazine surveyed nearly 5000 readers, asking them about their experience dealing with broken consoles. 

Here are their findings:

Console failure rate
Xbox 360 – 54.2% 
Playstation 3 – 10.6% 
Wii – 6.8%

Read more stats here: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/101/1014486p1.html

2. The Controller

Most 360 fanboys will argue this one to the death during a console debate. The controller for the 360 is garbage. It’s bulky, too heavy, and in all honesty, not much different than the original XBox controller. Take a look for yourself:

It’s not that much of a difference. I know the controller for the PS3 hasn’t changed in forever, but that’s because PS3 fanboys don’t care. They like the controller. ALL 360 people admit to the first controller sucking. It doesn’t look like much has changed. Also, no sixaxis :P

3. Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD

OH SNAP! This one is gonna haunt 360 fanboys forever. The XBox 360 got owned in the HD Format war. The 360 doesn’t even come installed with HD-DVD. You had to buy it as a peripheral. This makes it cost the same as the PS3 and the resolution wasn’t that great on HD-DVD and it failed anyways. If you bought this add-on, you would have shelled out money for nothing.

Because I don’t wanna write a summary for everything, here’s a list of other reasons why the 360 sucks:

• Most 360 exclusives are on PC!
• You have to buy a Wi-Fi adaptor (Wii and PS3 come installed)
• You have to buy an inter cooler (The 360 heats up quickly)
• You have to pay for LIVE
• It’s more expensive after adding everything to it that it should have
• It has an extremely large power supply
• It has a disc tray. WTF! No one uses those anymore!
• The XBox 360 has a locked hard drive, unlike that of the PS3
• Halo is outdated!

The boys over at Microsoft should have put more time and thought into their console like Nintendo and Sony did, instead of trying to get their console out before everyone else, because it clearly is garbage. Now that you know that, and hopefully it’s not too late, you have no reason to waste your money! You’ve been warned.

Play This Game: Trials HD

Trials HD is a new XBox arcade game in which you ride a motorcycle through various obstacle courses and try to finish as quick as possible, with as few faults (retries) as possible, and/or perhaps even just try to finish the course. I mention the last one because this game is hard, REALLY hard.

It’s really rare for me to like games that are extremely difficult as most of the time for me gaming should be fun and relaxing and to say that Trials HD is challenging would be an understatement. You get 500 faults (or tries from a checkpoint and checkpoints are not spread that far apart) and a maximum of 30 minutes to get through a level (where a flawless time might be something along the lines of 1 minute) and you do hit those limits on some levels. But I guess what makes that palatable is that the difficulty ramps up quite gradually. Tracks are sorted into beginner, easy, medium, hard, and extreme. And for extra challenge there are medals for each track (where gold is a quick flawless run) so that adds more levels of difficulty and more replayabilty. It doesn’t really get extremely difficult until hard but medium will start giving you a bit of a challenge on some levels.

The good thing is leaderboard replays. If you’re having trouble with a certain track, you can go to the leaderboard replay of that level and it not only shows someone doing it but also graphically shows the button presses and analog stick movements that the person is doing. The only thing I wish is that you’d be able to jump into the replays while in the level (you can only watch them while not playing a level), then you could come up to a hard obstacle that kicks your ass and immediately go into the replay and see how it’s done. But that might ruin a bit of the challenge.

Just going through the tracks is not the only thing to do in the game. There’s also tournaments which are groups of levels that must be done together without being able to restart from the beginning; getting good medals in these is extremely challenging because usually to get gold in a track it’s on about my hundredth restart of that level but to get gold in a tournament I’d have to do it first time through. Another section of the game is the skill games which are like mingames; there are skill games in which you have to crash and break as many bones as possible, or ride doing a wheelie as far as possible. Finally, there’s a track creator. I’ve not tried this out much so I won’t talk about it and I’ve also not played any custom tracks because it seems as if you can only share tracks among your friends which I wish wasn’t the case.

Trials HD is epitome of a simple to pick up, difficult to master game and this is due to the controls. The main controls are only really gas, brake and lean. But the other buttons you’ll be using quite a bit due to the game’s difficulty are the buttons to bailout, restart at beginning of level and go back to last checkpoint.

I’ve been playing this game quite a bit over the past few days and while I doubt I’ll ever finish it, I still feel it was completely worth it. Trials HD is available on the XBox arcade marketplace. If you don’t have an XBox there are also a couple PC games if you want to check it out.

PS3 Slim Announced!

Unless you’re living under a rock, you will have by now already found out about the PS3 Slim. If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself.

Apparently, this new PS3 will be sold for $100 less for a new price point of $299.99 (USD). This is great for people who are in the market for a PS3, but shitty news for people like me who already own one.

According to Engadget:

“The buttons in the front are now physical and actually “click” in to function. The PS logo above the disc drive does not rotate for vertical use, and yes, the hard drive is swappable — as you can see from the pictures, there’s a screw on the bottom, hidden by a panel, that lets you take off part of the front for access. We’ve also lined it up against our standard, fatty PS3, and we gotta say, it’s noticeably lighter.”

Also, it will have a 120 GBHard drive, a Duel Shock Controller (The original PS3 only came with a six-axis controller), and HDMI support. It sounds better than my current PS3! I only got the 40 GB hard drive!

Surely, this can’t be as good as the older model. Game developers have been screaming at Sony to reduce the price of the console so they could sell more games. The current price of a blank Blu-Ray disc is around $8, depending where you get it from. They’re definitely not cheap. It sounds to me like Sony may have skimped on the hardware. This may help them sell more consoles in the short term, but may be bad for them in the long term. The PS3 packs a lot of heat, and is definately better than an XBox 360 or a Wii (Don’t get me started on the Wii). Will the same be true for the PS3 Slim? I say no, but I guess only time will tell. I just don’t wanna see any Blue Rings of Death. This is supposed to be PS3’s year!

• http://www.pcworld.com/article/170368/ps3_slim_for_300_in_kmart_sears_ads.html/
• http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/18/playstation-3-slim-unboxing-and-hands-on/

Where’s the ‘Fuck This Game’ Button? Or why I only played ‘Dead Space’ for 10 minutes.

I know I’m a bit late on Dead Space which was released late last year but I finally got it from my by the mail game rental service GameAccess.ca so earlier I decided to pop it into my PlayStation 3 to give it a shot. Fast forward to me, 10 minutes later, hitting in frustration the eject button and muttering to myself, “I’m not going to fucking deal with this right now.”

It starts off with a “cutscene” that supposed to give you a sense of awe, wonder, and excitement but only made me think, “Ok, get on with it.” This is the first thing I refuse to deal with any more: Unskippable cutscenes. If I, as a player, don’t give a shit about the story then don’t try to force me to give a shit about the story or else I’ll just ending up hating the game more.

Once you get up and running you start getting the standard tutorials; how to walk, how to run, etc. I didn’t play for very long so as you might expect my largest gripe is with the controls. Movement controls are pretty standard except that “Run” is L2+L (Whenever I write two buttons with a plus, it means they are supposed to be pressed at the same time). Oh look, the first deviation from what could be considered normal controls. I’m not saying that I’m against change because if there’s no change then there’s no possibility for improvement. I’m saying that I’m against changing something for the worse. In most games, “Run” is L3 (clicking the L button down) which is really fucking convenient since you’re already touching the L button to move. Why the fuck would they change something so basic to require pressing another button and complicating the controls?

One of the next little tutorial windows that pop up is the one that informs you how to open the map, objectives, and the inventory. It seemed like normal stuff until i saw the command to open the objectives screen: Select+R3. Are you fucking kidding me? Another two-button command to do something that is usually done in one, or you could even put the objectives in another screen (which I believe they are accessible through the inventory). Again, why would they set up the controls like this. Maybe they put all the controller buttons in a bag and picked out a random two for some of their controls, “Ok, how will the players access the objectives: [picks name of first button out of bag] Ooo, Select. [picks name of second button out of bag] Ok, R3. Whatever, we can set the controls as anything as long as we put them in a tutorial at the beginning…What’s that word mean, ‘Intuitive’? Fuck you, Gary, trying to bring logic and sense into this…DON’T QUESTION THE BAG METHOD!”

A little further in the game you get your first gun and, you guessed it, they fucked up and complicated the gun controls as well. I’m fine with the new standard of L1 to aim and R1 to fire but then I saw the command for reload: L1+X, yup, another two buttons at the same time command. I have to be Aiming to reload? “Oh man, my gun is empty, I have to reload it so I guess I’ll hold it up like I’m going to shoot it first in order to reload instead of just fucking reloading it.” Why the fuck are there two buttons to fucking reload? You know, most games can do it in one. Some games I can even flick the controller to reload; yup, that’d be reloading with no buttons so why the fuck are you making me press two? I’m aware that this is part Sci-fi, part Survival Horror, maybe to make it even scarier they decided to make the controls so complicated you wouldn’t be able to remember when you’re being attacked by monsters how to control the fucking game.

Then comes a part where you get this nifty little stasis device which slows objects and enemies down. This is the part I said fuck it. I picked up the stasis device and it looks at quick glance to just be another weapon so I close the tutorial but then the weapon isn’t in my inventory, and I can’t select it. So of course I try to look for the tutorial again to see what I missed, and yes this was totally my fault but I was already frustrated with the game at this point but I couldn’t find the tutorial. I thought, “Oh, something must’ve bugged, I’ll just quit out of the game and restart and I’ll be at a checkpoint.” I do this and find that there was no checkpoint, the game hadn’t fucking saved and so I click new game thinking, nay hoping, “Well, it’ll probably be able to tell I’ve at least put the game in before, maybe that annoying opening cutscene will be skippable this time.” And yes, of course it wasn’t skippable this time so I said, “I’m not going to fucking deal with this right now” and ejected the game.

I then Googled the problem to see if it was a bug or I missed something and found out that I had missed something. I really should’ve learned from the first few tutorials to read those fuckers carefully because I found out that with my current gun equipped I was supposed to press L1+Square to fire the stasis gun. I should have known, it’s so fucking intuitive that way. Of course, I’d be able to fire something completely different when aiming my current gun. Makes total fucking sense, just like all the other controls.

Full Disclosure: In the process of writing this I did put the game back in just so I could write down the exact controls that pissed me off and I didn’t get much farther in the game: I made it 20 minutes this time before saying fuck this game. I did find out another thing that pissed me off: save stations. If you’re game doesn’t have autosave and/or checkpoints then fuck you. When I want to turn off a game, I don’t want to have to run around to find a fucking save point, I want to quit out of the game and then come back to it later at a relatively close location to where I had been before.

Play This Game: Battlefield Heroes

In my first post recommending a game I wanted to talk about a game I’ve been playing almost all day and am currently obsessed with: Battlefield Heroes. It is a free shooter with stylized cartoonish graphics and MMO-style classes and leveling.

Yes, I said free. That is the main draw for me since it is absolutely free although it is ad supported and you can spend money on enhancements for your character like experience boosts, and aesthetic changes. Want a snazzy new hat for a month? Just spend a little less than $5. Luckily I don’t give a shit about hats or shirts or boots so the only thing I’d ever consider spending money on is the XP or valour boosts. But even then I’m cheap.

I mentioned above XP so yes, there is leveling up and gaining new abilities along the lines of any MMO. There are also classes like in MMOs as well. I’ve been mainly playing the Soldier which is all around offensive but also has healing abilities. I’ve also tried the Commando which is the sneaky/sniper class and will eventually try the lots of health and big guns class the Gunner.

The graphics are, as mentioned above, cartoonish. They are most easily compared to Team Fortress 2 but they have a look of their own. This also means they can scale very well so I’m sure the game will be able to run on a wide variety of computers from very powerful to, well, shitboxes.

I do have some complaints so far though. Games are rather hit or miss in terms of lag and connection; sometimes you’ll connect and everything will be gravy wile other times the connection is choppy as all hell. Also, there are vehicles in the game but I’ve barely been able to use them outside of the tutorial and even in the tutorial the plane was an absolute bitch to control.

But how much can I really expect from a free game? I’ve certainly got my money’s worth with how much I’ve played it today and plan on continuing to play it.