Do They Really Have Room to Gloat

I wonder why it is the people most likely to teabag in multiplayer, first person shooter games also tend to be the ones with the lowest scores? I mean, any time I've seen some tool do the lame videogame version of teabagging, it's usually someone who's score is in the bottom third of the current match. I guess they have to celebrate the few victories they get, somehow.

Kinect: One Man's (First) Experience

A long-time friend of mine gave me a Kinect controller for my Xbox as a late Christmas/early birthday present. I didn't get a chance to start playing with it the first day. I guess I have to turn my geek-card in, since I didn't drop my "life" to start messing with it. Then again, having a "life" probably made me forfeit my geek-card long ago.

At any rate, it didn't languish too long - only about thirty-six hours. I couldn't get to it yesterday, when I got home from work, because I was beat and we were going out for the evening, later. I only got chance enough to take it out of its shipping box and place the whole Kinect package/box in my television case before I staggered upstairs for a several-hour nap. After the nap, we got ready to go out, then were gone until around 03:00. I had a Flyers game in Philly that I needed to head out of town for, first thing in the morning, so, I went up to our iceox bedroom and sacked out. After my alarm went off, I staggered downstairs and looked at the still sealed carton. It glared at me as I readied myself for the day's travel and mocked me as I headed out the door. It was still looming in its box when I returned.

Finally, around 22:00, after playing with the pups upon returning home, I set about getting the device set up. I gotta admit, it's a bit nifty. Being able to control my system with my voice and waves of my hands gives kind of a Jedi feeling.That said, it's still very much a new product. It shows signs of being rather cool, but still lacks a lot.

It comes with a video chat functionality. Unfortunately, since it doesn't (yet?) link to services like Skype, you can only video chat with other Kinect owners. There aren't a lot of them right now - at least, not in my circle of friends. So, this isn't likely to be a useful feature any time soon.

While the device is pretty good at figuring out that there's more than one person in the room, it seems to be confused by pets. In fairness, pets are confused by interactions with the Kinect. My cats seem convinced that my waving about is an invitation to them to come be petted. Cats suddenly appearing in what the Kinect sees as control points (my hands) causes the Kinect to sort of lose track of things.

The Kinect also offers voice-control of Xbox functions. Unfortunately, that control isn't well-integrated into the Xbox modules I like to use. Probably doesn't help that the initial Kinect code release doesn't seem to support much more than the most rudimentary of commands. Right now, it's kind of like the dumbest pet you've ever owned or encountered, only dumber. If it were a pet, you'd have to put a hockey helmet on it.Hopefully, as the product matures and code updates come out, it will receive a larger repertoire of spoken commands. For now, the appeal of the voice commands wears off quickly.

At any rate, I ran it through its setup paces and even played some of the games that the device came with. The games are reminiscent of the Wii Fit stuff, without the worry that you'll destroy a controller-board. The Kinect wants a fair amount of motion-space. My living room is barely big enough. I had to move our ottoman out of the way to complete the setup (otherwise, it would eclipse the Kinect's view of my lower legs, causing the Kinect to render my body-position as kneeling in mid-air). While our living room isn't huge, it isn't as small or furniture-restricted as that of many of my friends. So, bear your gaming area's geometry in mind when considering the purchase.

After playing with it a bit, it started to creep me out, a bit. The Kinect has glowing red and green LEDs on the front. When it's active, it puts a little thumbnail of what it "sees" in a little window on your screen. Combine the cold, dead look of the LEDs and the realization that you're being watched, heard and recognized, and you get kind of a 1984/2001 feeling. I gotta think that, as/if these things proliferate, advertisers and hackers alike will want to make use of the Kinects' capabilities. Yeah, you get a nifty gaming interface, but, you realize that you're starting to sell yet another part of your life to "the machine". While the Wii only has a motion sensor bar, the Kinect has eyes and ears and, for the sake of entertainment, you're potentially making yourself observable, each and every time you turn it on.

Oh well...

At any rate, if they ever fully realize the gaming potential and mature the gesture and voice interfaces, it should be pretty cool (imagine in-game fights if you're playing NHL 2K games over Xbox Live!). If Microsoft gets smart and partners with Skype (and/or others), it will be a nifty communication device to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family. For now, it's going to be a "yay, I have one" affair, but will probably only be used, briefly, each time there's a new code update (i.e., to see "what can it do, now?"). Guess I'll also have to test it with each new game I get to see what it's useful for. I'm guessing for most legacy games, it will simply remove the need to have my headset when I want to trash-talk during online gaming (and, I'll have to figure out how to mute that in unobvious ways).

 

Banned??

WTF Xbox Live? Banned due to too much quitting? You keep disconnecting from me. Assholes.

Where's Your Tent

Nothing to remind you of childhood summertimes quite like playing Halo: Reach online. Every so often, you get games filled with freaking campers (somedays, I swear it feels like I'm at a damned Boy Scouts jamboree). Awesome.

XBox Math

Today, on Reach, one of the daily achievement bonuses was based on getting 100 kills in online multiplayer matchmaking. No big deal. Even at my low kill-rate in that game mode (about 1.2 kills/minute), it's an easily achievable goal.

Well, I thought it was easy until I noticed that my achievement counts weren't incrementing at the same rate as my in-game kill rates. Basically, it was incrementing at a "kills-2" rate. So, if I scored 18 kills in a game, I only got credited 16 kills towards my daily achievement bonus.

WTF is up with that??

Merging of Ideas

If I could make one improvement to the Halo franchise, it would be to import the chainsaw-gun from Gears of War. I loves me some Halo, but, dayum: that chainsaw gun from Gears of War was wicked-violent.

Resisting Temptation

Its hard not to scream "IM THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH" when hammering away on Juggernaut in Halo's rumblepit mode.

Poorly Executed Code Push

So, today, Microsoft released the new XBox update. Unlike prior updates, they provided no update grace period. If you didn't install the update, you couldn't use any of your Live services.

Now, back when Live was pretty much exclusively about playing multiplayer games online, this kind of thing would be merely annoying, but otherwise not too much of a problem. Nowadays, where services like Zune music and video, Last.FM, NetFlix Streaming, Twitter, FaceBook, etc. all rely on being able to log into XBox live, you're kinda SOL if the service is unavailable to you.

There's also a LOT more people using the services in late 2010 than there were several years ago. So, if you're going to demand people upgrade, you need to ensure that they can upgrade in an easy, timely manner.

Microsoft utterly failed to do this. From the time I got home from work until I was able to get a successful download, it took me over 90 minutes. Now, this was 90 minutes of attempting to connect and download. Unfortunately, the XBox update method doesn't allow you to simply queue-up an update request, walk away, and let things happen unattended. No. You have to make the request, wait for the request to succeed or fail, then acknowledge the next action.

Because of the way they pushed the code, they had MILLIONS of people all trying to upgrade at once. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't use anything like BitTorrent to distribute updates, nor do they seem to use their "cloud" services to spin-up additional update servers to meet the sudden demand-spike (or, if they do, their "cloud" services are utterly sucktackular - even if they don't, you assume that they do, and it makes their "cloud" services offering look horrible, one way or the other). That means that, each time you request the update, it's a crapshoot on whether it will succeed. So, if you lose that crap-shoot, you can either immediately try again or come back sometime later and make another attempt.

Back when XBox live was just a gaming service, coming back later was the normal choice. Now that it's a control-center type of service, coming back later means that a lot of things you might want to use are not available. So, you have to try again ...and again, and again and again... All because their update utility wasn't designed with queuing features.

Seriously, Microsoft, this whole thing was a debacle. It makes you look like amateurs - both in your gaming service and in other things you do. You might want to rethink how you do future code-rolls.

Cheating?

What's up with the duplicate player names on multi-player matchmaking in Halo: Reach online?? Something about it that just doesn't "smell right". It may be nothing, but something makes me assume that people are cheating. It's always a tad disheartening when you notice that, of the 16 people on a game roster, there's only three "real" gamer tags (your own, plus two and all their clones). WTF.

Oh well: I always go in and submit an "avoid" review when I see them. Even if they aren't, strictly, cheating, I don't like playing games with people like that.

I'm Lagging the Game?

So, I've been using XBox Live, lately, to rack up points on Halo: Reach (overall, I prefer to play online firefights). Most of the time, it's a pretty good experience with good, solid, stable, speedy servers. Other days... It's occasionally choppy and laggy.

Today, for the most part, it's been pretty good. I had one game where there were four of us playing. Ever so often the game would lock up and one player in the list would be shown as having a bad connection to the server (it was the same player, each time).

A couple games later, I was matched up on a map with just one other person. The game was kinda herky-jerky. The other guy starts whining about how laggy the game is. Starts whining that I'm causing the lagginess and that he's never had a laggy game before. Eventually, the tool quits out (presumably out of frustration). I was able to tell pretty much exactly when he quit - not because the quit notification but because the game pretty much immediately smoothed out.

Here's the deal: I have Verizon's FiOS with the 25/15 package. I'm not hurting for bandwidth. After the game ended, I went to my laptop and pulled up SpeedTest.Net:

So, I'm not getting the full download speed. But I'm getting more than my sold-level of upload bandwidth. In either case, I've got better than 15Mbps in each direction: this is more than enough to support online multi-play on XBox Live. Combine this with the server speeding up after bitchboy-bailed and it seems fairly obvious who the source of the lag was.

Stuck in My Head

Too much gruntpocalypse on Halo: Reach leaves you shouting "SHAZOOK! SHAZOOK!"

Splatter-Fest

The car chase scene in Surrogates is the only good part of the movie... It's like something out of Grand Theft Auto.

I Can Do But Not Watch.

First-person shooters (FPS) are about my favorite class of games. I can play them for hours, enjoying the shear mindlessness of the activity. I can play them alone or in some kind of split-screen mode.

Oddly, if I have to watch someone else play, I get motion-sickness almost immediately. Don't know whether it's because a lot of the people I see play don't play particularly smoothly or if it's the lack of control of the action I'm focusing on that causes it.

Unfortunate Similarity

I've mentioned this many times, online, but don't recall whether I have on this particular blog: I have epilepsy. Seizures are both a frightening and interesting experience. I mean, they're an experience that, if you knew that you could limit them to when you wanted them, might make an interesting alternative to getting high. Unfortunately, their occurrence is random and rarely happen at times that are anything close to when you'd actually appreciate one (e.g., you'd not want one while driving or operating heavy machinery, at work or other public activities).

At any rate, sometimes, when I play Halo online, I get stuck with a really laggy server. The herky-jerkiness of it creates a distortion of the normal reality/experience of the game. Sometimes, it's almost reminiscent of the fractured reality one experiences while having a seizure.

XBox Live

Ok, so, I deactivated my FaceBook account (sorta wonder how long they leave it re-activatable). As a result, I'm sorta out of contact with a number of people, again. Then again, I don't have to worry about how my various random musings are being interpreted - well, other than when some people forget that not everything is about them or that not every statement has any real value beyond comic-relief. But, I digress...

At any rate, buddy of mine (former roommate and best man at my wedding) recently got Halo: Reach. We've kinda drifted apart ...life does that. I'd previously tried helping him wire his house for Ethernet so he could get online and we could start playing games again (figured, gametime was easier that sorting out busy family, work and social schedules). Alas, his XBox wasn't in the part of the house we wired. It was in his man-cave, not in the living room with the big TV and the network drop.

Argh.

So, when he told me he got Reach, I asked if he was planning to get his XBox hooked up. He hemmed and hawed, so, I informed him "you're getting your Christmas present early" and got him a WiFi adapter and XBox Live Gold membership for his system.

Finally he's online and we were able to game. Now he just needs to get a headset!

Buy New or Upgrade?

Cool: I can spend more to upgrade my current Xbox to the new Kinnect Bundle specs than I would buying the bundle.

Well, that's not quite accurate. For the Xbox 360 Kinnect bundle, the pre-order price is $299. To upgrade my Xbox 360's hard drive and add a Kinnect controller (?), it would only cost me $250. For $49, I get a console that's not a year-plus old, though.

Gaming Styles

I've played first-person shooters and third-person shooters. Don't recall ever playing second-person shooters.