I ranted about it last week, and have spent more time since on Xbox LIVE in order to gauge whether it’s worth my money. I still think it’s priced too highly for what you get, but I do think I’ll go ahead and buy a subscription to the service once my trial finishes up.

A lot of the problems about my rant haven’t changed, but I’ve had some better experiences. I do think the need for stats (covered in more detail in the earlier post) is up there — I’d love a timeline of my achievements and breakdowns of how poorly I play online, and by game.

The worst (and best) thing about the service is the people, and providing negative feedback to someone doesn’t mean you won’t seem them again (I’ve seen people on a day after I marked them as “don’t play with this again”) but if you find a good group of people it can be brilliant.

I still say that every game must have dedicated servers (otherwise all I’m really paying for is a matchmaking/social service, and I already have facebook, twitter, et al) to eliminate poor quality home connections from lagging.

Finally, I should be able to nominate two profiles (or three, or four) on my account that can use the Gold subscription, with the condition being that the service only allows one to be logged in at once. This would be especially good for familes — if you have two kids and a parent with accounts it’d cost you $250-300 a year in subscription fees alone. “Nickel and diming” at it’s worst. I know it’s Microsoft, but c’mon, seriously? It’s almost as bad as the charge to change the gamertag!

So, conclusions:

• I’m going to give them a year
• I want detailed stats (or at least an API so I can get to them myself)!
• Why don’t games have dedicated servers (and why aren’t there areas for age groups, so I can get away from those annoying teens)?
• Let me have multiple profiles on the one Gold account!

With my Christmas present for 2008 — an Xbox 360 — came a one-month trial membership to Xbox LIVE. The intention of the trial is, of course, meant to encourage you to continue using the subscription-based service once the trial is over. The price is certainly not high, around $75-90 a year depending on if you shop around, but coming from a background of only having paid PC games online (which — besides games such as World of Warcraft — are usually free) means I am more critical of such a service.

My first impressions are not as high as my original expectations. I’ve played probably 10-12 hours of games online, as well as using the Gold service but not for multiplayer much more than that. Though it may be the games I am playing, both the multiplayer and other online service seems like it’s missing out on a whole lot of sophistication. I’m one for stats, so a while back when playing Battlefield 2, the ability to see my stats on sites such as bf2s.com was awesome. I could see my (admittedly pathetic) statistics such as playtimes, accuracy, preferred weapon, favourite level, score rates and much, much (much!) more.

Why I don’t have access to these sorts of statistics is beyond me. I should be able to see, at a minimum:

• When I signed up to the service
• How many hours I’ve spent playing games (broken down by single player, co-op and other multiplayer)
• A history of my last week, month, year’s sessions
• My average time between achievements (which means achieving certain things in-game, such as finishing a level without dying)
• An easily-viewable list of all my achievements
• Who I’ve played with most

The above should be the absolute minimum starting point for stats and it should be available online in graph form as well. Instead, you get a very limited screen (alternatively, if you sign into MSN you might get a slightly-less limited screen) of information. Wouldn’t it be great if I could see the last few matches I’d played online and see the players so I could provide reputation scores a lot faster? While we’re at it, why can’t I see my previous reputation scores (and I wonder if you can override them). If graphed, I could see that I provide more negative feedback on weekends, for instance. I’d have no problem with people seeing at least some of these stats (which I should be able to show and hide as I want). Since I work with this sort of stuff regularly I don’t see why it would be difficult to implement.

The reputation system doesn’t seem too work well, either — particularly since one of the games I’ve been playing doesn’t seem to have a lot of people online. The reputation system is difficult to input positive or negative feedback, and it’s too simplistic. Also, I’ve never seen anyone with a negative reputation and a number of people with the highest scoring reputation have simply been jerks.

Nor does the “TrueSkill” skill matching system seem to work as advertised (maybe I’ve not played enough to have a proper baseline?). I’ve been in games where I was hopelessly outclassed — why is this? If I have the lowest ranking in a game and am pitted against people with the highest rankings, surely something’s not right.

For a service touted as having consistency, getting into an online game isn’t consistent at all. Some games I am required to select a host, some automatically choose one for me. Where one was chosen, I connected and was subsequently disconnected because I had not downloaded additional content. Surely I should not connect at all in the first place? Afterwards, the game’s main screen reloaded and I had to wait for it to load, then the multiplayer menu to load. Why?

It gets worse: most of the games do not provide dedicated servers, meaning individual players act as hosts. This is poor because those hosts always have advantages over the other players, and often their home Internet connections are not sufficient to support many players. If so many PC games have free dedicated servers (which anyone can download and run — ISPs often run them and it provides a more reliable connection and a more level playing field), what am I paying for, exactly? I can’t even change my username without having to pony up almost $15!

Even though there are a lot of negatives, there are some good points in there. If I’m playing a game, and a friend notices I’m playing they can invite me to play. Better still, friends on MSN can send me messages while I’m playing (which you can turn off, if you don’t want to be bugged). The voice chat in all games is a great feature too, even though more often than not it turns into an insult-fest. Turning individual users off isn’t too tough.

Being able to have an identity which carries from game-to-game, and not having to worry about signing up individually for each game is great and it would be nice to see guilds, communities or permanent groups in the service other than having to create a party each time you play.

At this stage I am not convinced the service is worth my money. I’ll keep playing while my trial continues to see if I’ve missed the point but I think it needs the following features implemented before I become further interested — particularly if I’m being charged:

• Dedicated servers for each game
• A consistent and specific (i.e. not requiring me to virtually load the game again) interface for multiplayer games — the current one just isn’t good enough
• More interaction with the service via the web
• Recording of stats and pretty graphs (even if I have to opt-in as with Flickr)
• It’d be nice to see a mode similar to Wii’s WiiConnect24 which could flash if friends are online, even when the console is off, though I doubt the current hardware is capable
  

This seems a pretty scathing review of a service I haven’t used comprehensively, and I think the only way to know for sure is to try more games, ones with larger numbers of players. Regardless, the points above don’t exist on the service in it’s current incarnation. For a paid service, Xbox LIVE doesn’t seem to offer a whole lot of benefit over simply buying the PC version of the same game and playing it online for free. Having a list of friends online is about it, which can be easily resolved with an IM client on the PC side.

It’s funny, every fourth year everyone suddenly seems to become a sports fan. OK, maybe not everyone, but certainly people seem to discuss sport a great deal more than usual during this time.

I rarely watch Olympic events but do make an exception for sports I might watch anyway. The exception to my exception so far has been brief but has included the table tennis final (mostly because it’s the Chinese Olympics, and China was in it, and it was on after something I was already watching) as well as the tennis final.

Other sports I’ve watched, and watch every now and then include boxing and cycling. Track and field, gymnastics and the even more obscure “sports” (dressage, I’m looking at you) are right out.

For me, though, the Olympics has really been another football (futbol, soccer, whatever) World Cup. The aforementioned viewing comes to maybe a couple of hours but I’ve watched at least three or four football matches. Mens, womens, whatever.

This evening, Argentina and Brazil play in a semi-final with the winner playing one of Nigeria and Belgium (who are playing this very moment; I suspect Nigeria will win). The Argentina/Brazil match will be, I expect, the highlight of tournament and probably more interesting than the likely Argentina/Nigeria final which will probably result in Argentina winning (again).

So, bring on the 2012 British Olympics World Cup!

RTS (Real Time Strategy) games were once one of my most favoured genres. I’ve never been close to the top tier of players, and was often quite handily beaten in most LAN events. I still enjoyed the games, but I think more for the city-building and was the sort of player that “turtles” (builds large defensive structures rather than being on the offensive).

I was quite excited to hear that Starcraft 2 is in development and due out later this year, but I can’t help but think I won’t really enjoy it. The last few RTS games I’ve played have been almost exactly the same as the others, with minor changes cosmetic such as character units and setting. The missions are usually quite similar and generic, and the whole thing gets pretty old, pretty fast.

Supreme Commander was the last such game I installed, and although I haven’t played it a great deal, I just can’t find myself getting excited by what seems to be a “been there, done that” experience. The whole strategy in these sorts of games seems to lie in finding the fastest way to crank out as many units as possible. There doesn’t ever seem to be a huge amount of tactics involved.

Sure, you can make two or three groups of units and send them off in different directions to pincer the enemy in multiple fronts, but once the units are together the AI is not particularly intelligent and micromanaging each unit seems more a chore than interesting part of the game.

One game I did play and enjoy a while back is Company of Heroes (I haven’t gotten into the second yet, but plan to) as even though it’s an RTS it was focused on missions with smaller units and less on churning out as many units in as short a time as possible. This is, I think, the direction that the games need to take (even though it is a well-done rehash of the Commandos games).

Starcraft 2, on the other hand, will be a massive, micromanaging clickfest. And it will sell millions. Mostly because I’m not the intended target audience (one, I’m not Korean and two I’m obviously not a hardcore RTS gamer). I’d really like to see more RTS games with no or limited bases with a focus on different style of gaming. What? I’m not sure, anything I could think of has probably been thought up before and already failed. I just think the current style of game needs to evolve. Shooters have; RPGs have. Why not RTS?

Since I don’t post nearly enough on this site, I thought I might discuss my opinions on Assassin’s Creed, which I’ve been playing for the last week or so. The game came out on Xbox 360 and PS3 last year, but just came out for PC.

Being a PC gamer (not primarily but still regularly) I was at first surprised to see no options for resolution (least that I could find); as I’m using a 1920×1200 LCD and the game ran with a slight letterbox at 1920×1080, this isn’t a big deal. The other strange thing is that I was unable to set anti-aliasing options despite my rig being more than capable of handling such options — it was there, just greyed out.  Admittedly I only played the DirectX 10 version so DirectX 9 may support this; I didn’t even think til now to check!

But onto the story: Set during in the first crusade (12th century), and simultaneously in a future but undisclosed time, you play a character who has been “sent” back in time to relive the life of an Assassin using a device called an ‘Animus’, similar to the plug-in chairs in the Matrix series of movies. But that part of the story is wasted on me — though clearly one of a multi-part series, it’s useless in at least the first game. That’s not really important. What’s important in the game’s context is that you’re there to perform nine assassinations on major targets (loosely based on real-life figures at the time).

And now onto the game: Before you perform each assassination, you must gather intelligence on the person’s whereabouts, situation and a likely strike point. The setup is similar to a Need For Speed game: you perform a number of small tasks (in Need For Speed they are race types — drag racing, drifting, point-to-point, etc; in Assassin’s Creed they are obviously different — eavesdropping, pickpocketing, assassinating guards, destroying merchant stalls) and then move on to the major target.

A lot has been spoken of the repetitive nature of the investigations you perform, and I agree: they do become repetitive. Especially the less-interesting ones such as eavesdropping or pickpocketing. Because the game allows you to roam anywhere (except for a daft decision which puts large walls in parts of the city to stop you entering ahead of time) you can make of it what you will. Some of the most enjoyable experiences were when things went wrong.

For example, I was tasked to kill 3 guards without being found out. I killed the first two and as I hunted for the third ran around a corner hastily and bumped into another guard; instantly the guard gave chase. Soon after I had more than a dozen guards chasing me over the town’s rooftops. I stopped on the sloping roof of a church to fight, but was quickly surrounded — the fighting is simple, but can be quite fun (and luckily the guards only attack one at a time); I killed off a few but decided to run. I grabbed a guard, shoved him into a couple which fell off the roof as I bolted in the other direction with only a few left.

It’s the moments like these that really make the game. When it works, it’s as exciting as all hell. When you complete an assassination you still have to escape, but all the guards are on alert. My favourite assassination had me chasing the target through the city streets and when I finally caught up to him I jumped on his back and managed to complete my mission in front of a number of guards (and large crowd of people) who instantly gave chase. Brilliant.

Because it’s an open sandbox, you can tackle things however you wish. I had to escape a city — and when they’re finally unlocked, the cities are big, you can run for ages without hitting the walls; the viewing distance when up high is also amazing, you can see the whole city as well as the massive crowds of people therein — in one of the later missions, but the city entrance was guarded. From a safe point on a roof I assassinated a guard which drew the attention of the other guards. Jumping to a building closer to the exit I then jumped across the beams above the unaware guards before dropping to the ground, stealing a horse and making my escape. If I’d wanted I could have instead joined a group of monks and used them as cover to pass the guards unnoticed.

Sure there are a ton of faults — falling in water is instant death, and there’s a level set in docklands which requires you to jump from ship-to-ship to find a target; the guards are as good as climbing or jumping from roof-to-roof as you; the guards forget what you looked like even though they were chasing you two seconds ago; having to ride a horse between towns is uninteresting and time consuming — but the stuff that’s done right was most certainly enough to keep my interest and to be honest I wish there were to the game (or at least optional sidequests that aren’t “kill templars” or “find flags” — boring) because I wanted to continue playing when the credits rolled.

I usually hate stealth games (or stealth sections in games) with a passion, mostly because they are “instant fail”. That is, if you get found out you have to start again. Assassin’s Creed however, works because you can stuff up and it lets you get out of it. That said, trying some missions over and over is a bit silly. As is the fact that to perform most of the assassinations you have to be out in the open in front of dozens of people or guards. So, even though I despise stealth games I found myself wanting more stealth options in this one.

There are almost as many faults in the game as there are great moments that it’s easy to see why people were divided on it’s initial release. There’s an incredible, amazing, enjoyable, exciting game in there and it’s let down by some dumb or lazy decisions. I’ll certainly be interested to see when the second one is released.

I know this was long, and many of you don’t care, but that’s what blogs are for, right?

Right, so Justine has a new job; this new job means she’ll be travelling into the city via train instead of driving.  After a little bit of “umming” and “ahhing” we decided to get an iPod Nano (8GB).

I like iPods, from a hardware point of view.  They’re small, nicely designed, feel pretty robust and are extremely easy to use.  However, that’s about where it ends.  Being forced to use iTunes just so I can put music on my device is silly.  Ford may as well tell me I can only use Caltex Premium in my car.  I’m planning on using YamiPod anyway since it sounds like it’ll work how I want it, but first I need to sync once with iTunes.

I’ve never used an iPod from an owner’s point of view — I’ve listened to them, I’ve helped people install iTunes and have helped people sync their units when they weren’t syncing.  However, I’ve never had the whole end-to-end iPod experience, until now that is.

We ordered the unit on Wednesday morning, and it managed to arrive here all the way from Shenzen, China in under 48-hours.  Pretty good so far.  I picked up the unit from our mail room on the way out from work today.  While driving home (when stopped at lights!), I opened the box — about the size of 3 or 4 DVD cases — and inside was a tiny little case about the size of a packet of cigarettes.

The case opened easily and though the iPod was wedged inside tightly, I notice the diagram indicating that I bend the plastic to get it out.  I did and it worked.

I’m surprised at the diminutive size of the unit, it’s tiny!  No wonder, since it’s just flash storage.  Still, it’s light and looks nice.  The engraving on the back (”If you can dream it, you can do it” — ’twas Justine’s choice to put this Walt Disney quote on the back) looks quite reasonable too.

Right, so I get home and unpack everything.  I configure all the settings to my liking (no doubt Justine will change them, since it’s her iPod) and plug it into the computer.  Why didn’t Apple simply make it a USB “B” cable like almost every other device I have?  Now I have to take care of this cable — which probably costs an arm and a leg to replace — instead of simply using a cable available for fifty cents anywhere.  Oh well, it’ll stay in the one place anyway, I bet.

I can’t find a setting on the iPod to make it just a “data storage” device simply allowing me to transfer files across.  Also, it seems that no software was provided.  I suppose I’ll download it… 75MB?!  Oh well here we go.  Why not include a 128MB USB stick in the box, they’re ludicrously cheap now.  I guess I’ll install iTunes… on my work laptop.

I need administrative priveleges just to install *iTunes*?  Software I buy for work that costs thousands of dollars and installs device drivers all over the place doesn’t do this.  Whatever, it’s a non-issue since I know the password anyway.  Here we go, iTunes is installing.

“You cannot install iTunes as a newer version of Quicktime is already installed.”  Huh?  No one said anything about iTunes, and why can’t the newest version of iTunes work with the newest version of Quicktime I already have installed?  Fine, I’ll uninstall Quicktime, I never use it anyway, although I suppose I now will since iTunes needs it.  Here we go (again), iTunes is (again) installing.

Success!  iTunes is on.  Bugger restarting.  Time to run it for the first time.  “Configuring… Please wait.”  Shouldn’t any configuration have happened when, say, it was installing?  Especially if it has to do it once the first time I run it.

Uh, oh, I’m going to miss my hairdresser’s appointment, this is taking a lot longer than I expected…

…OK, now my hair’s shorter but I still don’t have a working iPod.  Time to see where I was at.

“iTunes Setup Assistant”  I guess installing, then configuring, means that it wasn’t setup.  Maybe it’s different for each user so I’ll give it a break this time.  “Find Music”  No thanks, I know where they are.  No thanks again, I’ll organise my music the way *I* want it, not Apple.  No thanks yet again, I already have music, that’s why I bought an iPod.  By the way, can I use my iPod yet?

Alright, I can see iTunes.  Does this mean I can listen to music on the device that’s not the computer?  Guess not.  No thanks, I don’t want a mini store.  What’s that in the background?  Windows is telling me my hardware is ready to use, but the iPod still doesn’t have any music on it for me to listen to.

Wait, iTunes has changed again.  I don’t want to register, license agreement?  Haven’t I already answered “Yes” to two of those so far?  Cancel.  Wait again, I see iPod in Windows Explorer, maybe this means I can put music files on it after all!  Oh, no.  There’s an “iPod_Control” folder, and within that a “Music” folder, but there’s a bunch of “F00″ type folders.  I might be able to delete them but nothing has told me what to do yet.  I guess I’d better leave that alone for now.

I’ll try dragging a song onto iTunes to import it, since YamiPod tells me I just need to have one song on it anyway.  Muse, you’re the lucky first.  Ahh, there it is in iTunes.  And I can play it.  Now, how to get it onto the iPod?  Right-click?  No.  All, there’s a “Sync” option under “File”.  But it’s disabled.  What do I have to do to get that enabled?  The iPod says it’s Connected.  Maybe it already copied across?  I can’t use the “Eject” button that the manual told me to, so I’ll just unplug it.

Nope, still no music.  Let’s plug it back in then, maybe I can get that setup screen that was on before back.  OK, fine, I agree to whatever I agree to.  It’s just my work laptop, anyway.  Why do you need my phone number?  Are you planning to call me?  Oh well, we’re hardly home anyway and it’s the home number.

Stop forcing me to use the iTunes store.  “Skip this step.”  Right, I get to name it.  Time to shine, self, think up a snazzy name she’ll think is funny and love you forever.  Diamonds might be forever but a cool name on an electronic device, I’ll be set for eternity.  Even better, it’s appearing as a “Device”.

Let’s copy that one song across now, and sync it.  Now the eject button is working.  Hurrah, it’s only taken almost two hours (with a haircut in the middle, I feel like I shouldn’t have stopped for that haircut) but I can listen to this one song.  But I’m not finished here, oh no, I want lots of songs!

How do I get to see it again in iTunes?  OK fine, I’ll disconnect and reconnect the cable.  Which means I have to unplug the headphone.  That’s annoying but I doubt we’ll be listening to it much in this manner.  Ah ha, there it is again.

You know, this is not as bad as I expected.  I really thought I would have to sync, watch all my files disappear or be renamed and make a pact with the Devil to get this to run smoothly.  It’s not so bad considering I can just use iTunes to copy the files across without even needing the library.  I still loathe iTunes and don’t really like the iPod interface, but it’s not mine.