Xbox 360 – More thoughts

Okay, so I’ve been living with my 360 for a little while now and was able to pick-up a hard disk and a headset from Kmart while in the USA (they’re a little scarce here in the UK at the moment).

Backwards compatibility

Now I have a hard-disk I can play my old Xbox games (it died a while back). I gave Buffy: Chaos Bleeds a shot and it seemed okay apart from the unexplained slow-downs in some parts. Alas it seems about half my collection isn’t supported -Outrun 2, Shenmue 2, Buffy (original), Soul Calibur 2 and Headhunter: Redemption. I can however play KOTOR, NFSU2 and Fable apparently.

All these games are now supported, thanks guys!

Gamer cards

The gamer card system is pretty cool, mine is shown here;

Basically everybody you play against on-line has something like this and you can see what games they have and what achievements they have met. You can also review a user if they were good or bad which affects whether the live system will put you with them again. If a number of people review you good or bad, it affects your star rating with 5 stars being an all-round nice guy I gather.

Dashboard

The dashboard that I found so cool to start with is leading to a number of annoyances. The first is content management — it can be confusing to locate items you have downloaded or if you just want to delete/transfer stuff between hard disk and memory card. Basically it could do with two lists — what’s available to download and what you have on your disk — each with a filter of content types (music/video/games).

Another major niggle is the downloading which seems to occasionally abort mid-download with no automatic retry and also the fact that it ties your whole 360 up while downloading something. Rumor has it that background downloading has an outside chance of turning up on the next dashboard update.

Xbox Live Arcade

The live arcade consists of small downloadable games you can buy for “credits” which cost real money. By using credits MS think you won’t notice how much you spend? Anyway, I’ve tried a few…

Gauntlet

One of my childhood favorites marginally enhanced to improve the text readability and allow 4 player on-line gaming. This should be good fun but it is marred by a few issues. The first is the multi player game suffers major lag problems. Secondly you only get 700 health points per level — hard work when constantly teamed with people who don’t know what they’re doing. The final issue is that diagonals and avoiding objects are trickier unless my memory is rose tinted.

Quite why the developers chose to do Gauntlet and not the superior Gauntlet 2 I’m not sure. With Gauntlet one of the top sellers on arcade at the moment no doubt we’ll see the sequel soon.

Hexic HD

This game came pre-installed on the hard disk and is very similar to Bejewelled 2 in that you have various colored pieces that need to touch to explode and be replaced by more pieces. They are both kinda fun but rather slow to get going and the only on-line interaction is a leader board and achievements. There is no head to head mode — a missed opportunity indeed.

Voice communication

The headset is quite comfortable although covers one ear effectively killing off your stereo/5.1/7.1 surround systems in one clean swipe. It’ll no doubt be putting a drain on the battery in the wireless controller too.

Speech quality is variable. In PGR3 I’m normally paired with other Brits — often northern guys who laugh for the duration although not always at my PGR3 skills. Gauntlet on the other hand seems to consist of broken speech with young American boys and possibly girls — it’s hard to tell the difference.

[)amien