If this is the future, I'll stay in the past

Microsoft's been doing a sort of "fire sale" lately by slashing prices on digital games and content. I can only speculate on the motivation, but I wouldn't doubt it's probably a combination of two, maybe three things: (1) getting people to use up their Microsoft Points before they convert everyone to cash; (2) encouraging people to buy stuff digitally, to get people more comfortable with the idea while they continue to figure out how to get rid of the physical media; and maybe (3) to make people believe the narrative that an all-digital, no-used future will result in lower prices.

In any case, I have taken advantage of some of these. I have a decent balance of Microsoft Points gathered through searching on Bing, so I don't mind using some of my "free money" on these throwaway games (and by "throwaway", I mean that once I'm done with them, I might as well virtually throw them away, because I can't do anything else with them).

But one purchase in particular only served to highlight why an all-digital world still has its problems.

I purchased the game Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, on sale for the bargain price of $5/400 MSP. But when I tried to download it, it would get to the 10% mark and then fail with the disappointingly-terse message, "Can't download C&C Red Alert 3". I tried several times, on both Xboxes in my house (the main one everyone plays on, and the one with the defective DVD drive that I keep in the office as a media streamer and XBLA console), with the same result every time. I had purchased two other full games, plus downloaded a beta and re-downloaded another XBLA game (Happy Wars had an update that required deleting and re-downloading), all without error, but yet this one game still refused to download.

I checked the Xbox Support forums and added my experience to a post I found from way back in December '12 with the same problem. Then I took to Twitter to chat with @XboxSupport. They took me down the standard script of checking everything on my side: unplug the hard drive and try downloading to a USB stick, deleting and re-downloading my profile, clearing the hard drive cache, rebooting my networking equipment, connecting my console directly to the cable modem to bypass the rest of my network, sacrificing small rodents, and sprinkling holy water on the network cable. Their final suggestion was to try a different network.

Now, I don't know about you, but an internet connection isn't something I can just swap out at-will. On a daily basis, I'm on two different broadband networks: my home ISP, and my work. I don't imagine many places of business would look too kindly at an employee bringing a game console to work with them, and I haven't been with my current employer long enough to want to risk finding out. I could conceivably ask neighbors to borrow their network, though with the virtual monopoly the big ISPs tend to have, it's a good bet even if I found someone willing, they'd probably have the same ISP anyway. Either way, the thought of having to pull my console out of the entertainment center and unthread all the cables just so I can download a single game wasn't very appealing.

One suggestion that came up in the forums from another user was to tether the Xbox to a smartphone and use that. I suppose it's fortunate that: (1) we joined the smartphone generation in recent years, (2) and that we pay for tethering (so that my wife can use her tablet without having to buy it a dedicated cellular connection), (3) and that my wireless provider doesn't implement ridiculous bandwidth caps and overage charges, (4) and that I can get a strong enough signal in my house to actually use cellular internet (many people in my neck of the woods have such issues, and I usually end up connecting my phone to my Wi-Fi because the cell signal is pretty poor), (5) and that I was unable to repair the Xbox now in the office and had to buy a newer "slim" model for the family room, with its built-in Wi-Fi adapter; because I was actually in a position to try that. If any one of these conditions weren't met, I'd be out of luck.

It does, in fact, work; and all one has to do is resume the download to get from 10% to 11% complete, then disconnect and reconnect to one's broadband connection to finish the remaining 89%.

But it does raise a few questions. Is it not enough that I'm expected to have an internet connection to use digital content, but I should have two, just in case one for some reason isn't compatible with some piece of content? Also, shouldn't Microsoft be invested in making sure I get my content, regardless of what ISP I'm on, if I'm trying to give them my money? (In other words, why am I and others being asked to jump through these hoops to get what we paid for?) And, how easy would it be to get a refund if I was completely unable to get the content (despite the fact that their purchase page says "there are no refunds"), or would I just be out that money?

If this had happened with a physical disc, where the disc was damaged and unable to "deliver" the game bits to the console, I would just have to go to the store and let them swap it with a working one. (It's happened to me before, when my mail-order copy of Halo 3 got scratched up in transit.) For troubleshooting, maybe they'd try playing it on a second console, which they'd have right there in the store. I wouldn't expect to have to go through as many hoops to try and get a working copy in my home.

What a difference a week makes

I've been meaning to write up a new blog post for a while now, once the news had settled down a bit. However, it seems that every week has brought something new, that "settling down" isn't going to happen just yet.

In our last episode, Microsoft's plan was to make your games tied to you and your console (much like Xbox Live Arcade games are today); require your Xbox One to check in via the internet once every 24 hours in order to play games; allow for the reselling of games through "participating retailers" (though publishers would have the option to enable or disable this feature from any game, or to insert their own fees); and allow you to give your game to anyone on your friends list, who has been on your friends list for at least 30 days, but that game could not then be re-given to anyone else. Loaning a game (i.e., the temporary transfer of ownership with the expectation of its return) would not be possible at launch (with a promise that they'd "look into it").

Not only were they layering restriction upon restriction on the console, their arrogance about the whole deal was inexcusable. When asked about the connectivity requirements and how it would affect people without internet, specifically military personnel, Xbox chief Don Mattrick responded by telling people to just get a 360. Not long after Adam Orth was unceremoniously dumped from Microsoft for telling a friend on Twitter to just "deal with it", out came the official statements saying pretty much the same thing.

Major Nelson, what many consider to be (or who should be) the PR voice of Xbox, was either in denial about the whole thing, confused, or just plain lying himself. When interviewed about questions found on Reddit, he was first asked about what would happen when the service went dark for the Xbox One. He said that it was too early to talk about the end of the generation when it hasn't even started yet, and that we should let the system get out there first. (Pass it so we can see what's in it?) Although the interviewer said that was a fair point, I must disagree; I'd rather know up front what's going to happen with something before I buy it, rather than commit my hard-earned dollars only to find it taken away from me with no recourse. He also said that it's not how the system was designed, which is a blatant falsehood — the system was very much designed so that it could not play any games if it could not communicate with Microsoft's servers; and if those services are shut down, it will not be able to communicate, therefore it will not be able to play games. Could they update the system when the time comes so that it would no longer need to check in with services that won't be there? Sure. But there's no reason to believe that they would, and prior history (when the Xbox Live service was shut down for the original Xbox, taking with it all access to all DLC, paid or not) suggests that they would not.

However, the one silver lining to all of this was the promise of an all new "family plan", where you could designate 10 individual accounts as a family (whether they're related to you or not), and those people could access your game library at any time — you'd always have full access, and one of your "family" at a time could play games from your library. Many people were very excited about this feature, talking about how they would be able to share games with friends all over the country, and how they could ultimately save money on games by buying one copy to share.

It's that last bit that had me really uncertain about this feature and how well it would work in real life. Everything Microsoft had revealed so far had been geared to the exact opposite of this promise, forcing people to buy more games rather than less, and keeping people from sharing games around. It didn't pass the "too good to be true" test. Maybe it's just me being bitter and jaded, but something about telling Bethesda that they'd only be selling a tenth of their copies of the next Elder Scrolls game (since each person would be able to share it with up to 10 of their friends, and the lack of multiplayer would fail to encourage the need to purchase multiple copies for multiple simultaneous play) didn't seem like something that would be implemented without publishers screaming "foul". A completely unsubstantiated rumor suggested the hidden "gotcha" would be that the "sharing" would only limit your friends to a time-limited demo of the game. This seems completely unnecessary (there are already demos of many games available without having to go through this "sharing" hoop), but my gut instinct tells me this may be closer to the actual reality.

But then, that all changed.

After another week went by and continued gamer rage led to lackluster preorder sales of the One, Microsoft issued a new press release to say that they were rolling back restrictions and policies to mirror what they are on the 360 today. Disc-based games could be played, shared, traded, loaned, resold, and everything else, just like they can today. And, just like today, even though they are installed to the hard drive, they will require the disc to be in the tray. Digital versions will still be available day one, with all the pros and cons that come with them.

And that day, I placed my pre-order for the console.

The one advantage that people were actually excited about, however, is also gone. The new family plan (which was not going to be available at launch anyway) is no longer considered a part of the plan. This has made a lot of people quite upset (especially those who claimed the DRM policies were acceptable to them). Honestly, I can't say I blame them. If you believe that it was going to be as good as they claimed, then that's a huge benefit thrown out with the rest of the bath water. Personally, I suspect they got rid of it just to make people upset enough to want everything back (though it could be something much more mundane as not being able to separate the functions out of the code doing everything else).

What's truly frustrating is the people arguing for the DRM to block used games, using the same old tired arguments about "used games killing the industry". It's at least a little comforting, though, to see articles like these from Destructoid and Wired explaining why those arguments aren't just wrong, but reveal other problems in the industry. Not to mention comments like this, posted by Solstice01 on my Facebook page:

I borrowed a game I had vaguely heard of from a friend that was getting pretty good reviews from people I knew. I played it over the weekend and ended up buying it used from Game Stop. This was years ago. The game was a obscure title called "Halo: Combat Evolved." Since buying that used game (that the developer didn't make a dime of mine on), I bought Halo 2 brand new, Halo 3 brand new, Halo Reach brand new, all the DLC for Halo 3 and Halo Reach, as well as key chains, megablock sets (because why would I ever NOT buy Lego?) Long story short, renting/borrowing/used games do not kill the market, they enhance it and give players exposure to many titles they would never normally play. It's the BEST advertising.

And now, it's been revealed that Xbox head Don Mattrick is leaving Microsoft to become the new CEO at Zynga. Is this a result of the backlash around the Xbox One? Is his departure something long-planned, and his flippant attitude during the launch a result of "short-timer syndrome"? (A little confusion around who would lead Xbox next, makes me question just how well-known and pre-planned this was.) We can only guess. My hope is that someone more gamer-friendly will take the helm. Or perhaps there will be more cross-platform possibilities by bringing Xbox and Windows under one roof.

Maybe we'll find out in another week.

What color is the sky in Redmond?

So, yes, I'm not entirely pleased with the new Xbox One, particularly in that they are locking all games to your ID and console, much like Xbox Live Arcade games today. One truly amazing thing, though, is how deluded they are in thinking there's absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Exhibit A: Xbox One pre-owned plans 'consistent with way the world works'

Let's analyze the words of Microsoft VP Phil Harrison and see just how life is different from Bizzaro Microsoft world compared to the one we all live in.

The exec said Microsoft "will always take a customer centric view" on the subject and pointed out that the planned measure will not prevent players from sharing retail games with their own household or when visiting friends.

Anything that limits the customer without giving something back is, by definition, not "customer centric". As for the sharing, we'll see how much more limited this is.

"Our plans are very consistent with the way the world works today, which is if I buy a disc I can install it on my machine, I can play it and anyone associated with my machine can play it as well," Harrison told CVG.

Mostly true (though, taking XBLA titles as an example, there are some complications if you have to replace your hardware).

"I can give that disc to somebody else - maybe my son who has his own Xbox One somewhere else in the house - and he can install and play it on his machine…"

Again, taking XBLA as an example, this did not seem exactly true. As was the case with my son and Minecraft, I could not let him play a game I bought on a console in the house besides the one I bought it on. We even share a Live Gold Family plan, but that's not good enough. Since Microsoft stopped selling the family plan, it seemed like it would never be good enough. However, new news breaking overnight (and pointed out to me today) suggests that it may actually become possible for family members to share a Gold account, and all content purchased by it, even while maintaining separate accounts. So there may be a "save" for them here. And, to be honest, this would be the majority of my personal use cases that would have been blocked by the possibility of blocking everything considered a "used game".

"I can come to your house with that disc, I can install it on your machine and we can play it and while I'm with you we can have all of the capabilities of that game. The moment I go home and notionally take that disc with me, you no longer have the ability to play that game. But the 'bits' are on your hard drive, so if you want to play that game you can buy it - you can go to the online store, buy it and it's instantly unlocked and playable on your machine. All of the privileges I just described in my house would now apply in yours as well."

Here's where he leaves the real world for a bit. Or, at least, part of it. The part where I go home, but leave my disc behind at my friend's house. What happens today, in the real world? He gets to play the game, without paying anyone any money! What happens in Microsoft fantasy world? They have to pay Microsoft full retail price to play the game I bought.

"Retail are very important partners to us and we've had a series of high level meetings with our retail partners around the world in the last few weeks, in advance of today," the exec added. "So our retail partners were disclosed of our plans and have been part of our process and planning for some time."

You know why retail partners are so excited about this? Well, first, my friend can't play the game I bought without buying his own. He does have the option of paying Microsoft for the privilege, but if he's smart, he'll prefer to go to some other retail store that actually competes on prices instead of using the retail price in their fantasy world. Retailers love this, because Microsoft is forcing people to buy more games, and their pricing history will drive people to other retailers.

He goes on to essentially confirm that the Xbox would "phone home" periodically, even if the "period" has not been defined yet, and then saying, basically, "deal with it", by asserting it's no big deal:

"I think it is pretty rare of an outage of local internet connectivity to be more than a few seconds or minutes, so I don't expect it will ever impact on somebody's ability to use the system."

The last time my internet was down was for four hours until my issues were resolved. And that doesn't even begin to address people who take their Xboxes on vacations, or the military having them on tour.

---

There are three fixes that, I think, could mitigate most of the used game issues:

1. Allow sharing games within a household. If the report of the new family plan is true, this would be pretty much solved. I don't much care if it restricts you to playing one copy of the game at one time, because that's how the real world works today (if I want to play something on two boxes at the same time, I need two copies), just as long as I don't have to do anything intrusive or annoying to "get permission" to play that one copy on one Xbox vs. another, on a different account.
2. Allow loaning or trading games. Loaning could actually be made very simple by allowing me to designate another user the rights to my disc key. Example: I take my disc to my friend's house. We install it on his Xbox (with my account, which identifies the installation as valid with my credentials). I leave, but he wants to keep playing. I log on to Xbox.com and say, "I am loaning my copy of this game to my friend." The Xbox servers then allow him (when signed in to his account) to play his copy of the game, and disallows me from playing mine. When I decide I want the game back, I just log in and say "take back", and his installation is automatically deactivated while mine is reactivated. Not only would this be very convenient, but it would protect against those scumbag friends you can never seem to get your stuff back from.
3. Allow selling games. If I want to sell my game, I just need to make sure I sell the disc along with the unique authentication key I had to use to install it. (Third-party resellers like Play N Trade would just have to check to make sure they get the key with the disc.) As soon as the next person installs the game with that key, my copy is automatically invalidated. (While requiring me to log on to Xbox.com and relinquish my key sounds good, you know there would be scumbags that would install the game and return it to GameStop and never deactivate the key themselves.)

It would solve most of the use cases, I think, even if it did still leave the annoyance of having your rights tied up by Microsoft's authentication servers, with the threat of changing or taking those rights away from you at any time.

Of course, it also leaves open the question of what happens in the far future, if the authentication servers will always be required, and what happens when Microsoft discontinues support for the Xbox One after the Xbox Two has launched.

They need to do something, though, because as it stands now, they won't have me as a customer. Especially with statements like this:

"If you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards," [Don Mattrick] told the Wall Street Journal. (via Joystiq)

Tell that to my kids, who still play original Xbox games from time to time; or to those who spent hundreds of dollars on Rock Band content that is about to become unusable. Or just those of us who are playing libraries of dozens to hundreds of games today that don't want to limit themselves to 15 come this holiday season.

The Xbox One: Initial thoughts, not altogether positive

The new Xbox has been revealed at a big event on Microsoft's campus in Redmond. It will be called the "Xbox One", coming out later this year.

The reveal announcement demonstrated some of the new capabilities of the new system. It has the ability to watch live TV, respond to very natural voice commands, instantly switch between tasks (like flipping back and forth between a game, TV, and/or web browsing), and even "snap" two applications side-by-side (much like Windows 8 "metro" apps), with the demo of watching Star Trek on most of the screen with IE on the right quarter browsing for tickets for the next Star Trek movie. It also showed how you could view an on-screen guide, much like a modern digital cable or satellite box. Also included was watching a sporting event on ESPN, and having a notification come up when a player scored that added points to your fantasy sports league (although as a background app or simply as part of the new ESPN app, it wasn't clear).

They then made a brief run-down of the system specs on the console (nothing surprising), the controller ("40 design innovations", basically coming down to "pretty much the same, just some things a little better"), and the new Kinect (which appears to be very much improved over the original).

Then, there was an announcement about Microsoft's cash cow, Halo: Stephen Spielberg is directing a live-action TV series. Not quite the Halo movie we've been hoping for, but still a pretty good deal.

As expected and previously announced, there wasn't a huge focus on games at this event — that has been promised for E3 next month. They did announce that there were fifteen first-party games due in the first year, 8 of which from new IPs. The games they did show included a new one from Max Payne and Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment, a new Forza title, and the previously-announced Call of Duty: Ghosts, the last of which being a somewhat more detailed talk about all of the new tech that the Xbox One makes possible in making a much more visually-appealing game (including comparing screens and models from Modern Warfare 3 to Ghosts). Unfortunately, no real game play was shown — although they did claim we were watching videos rendered by the game engine, they were all cutscenes. While they could be real-time rendered cutscenes instead of in-game video, it would be hard to stand behind that claim.

Ultimately, it looked cool, but nothing groundbreaking. We cut the cable cord nearly five years ago, so the Xbox One's ability to watch and control live TV from your cable feed is completely useless to me. The upgraded controller could be nice (although not a reason to buy a new system). The upgraded Kinect is impressive, though again it's not something I currently use that often even when it's marginally convenient (it's still faster to shut down the 360 using the controller or the freaking power button on the box than it is to navigate the menus by voice, and much faster than trying to use gestures). And while snapping apps side-by-side is convenient, it's hardly necessary when I have a smartphone and laptop within relatively easy reach, and the SmartGlass apps that make those devices useful, even if they're not "integrated" in the same box.

What worries — and even angers — me, is the information that's coming from off-stage. This is what we've found out from the press interviewing Microsoft executives and representatives:

• The Xbox One may require an internet connection at least as often as once every 24 hours
• The console will support larger friends lists (up to 1,000) and external storage
• The hard drive is built-in to the console and cannot be removed or upgraded by the user
• Game discs transferred to another user will require some kind of transaction with Microsoft before the content is playable

Keep in mind this is now Microsoft officials responding to questions, not rumors from "unnamed" or "inside" sources.

The internet connection requirement (if true; the person making the statement didn't sound entirely sure, though it does give the impression some requirement exists) is annoying and disappointing. The last time we had a sustained internet outage, one of my kids was annoyed that he couldn't play his browser-based game on his laptop, but my younger kids were happily playing on the 360. This seems to question whether that scenario will be possible with the Xbox One.

The larger friends list is long overdue, though I do hope it comes with some management features — I want more friends, but I want to be able to categorize them somehow. External storage is pretty standard, though there hasn't been any clarification whether it is limited like it is on the 360 (you can only have 32GB of any device usable at a time). This only slightly mitigates the next point, that the internal 500GB hard drive cannot be replaced. Either they have high confidence in their hard drive's failure rate, or they just don't care. I would have liked to see the PlayStation 3 option finally implemented (put in any hard drive you want) rather than a repeat of the 360 option (buy only these limited-sized, "official" hard drives at over-inflated prices), but this just seems like a giant step backwards (the original Xbox — which I can now no longer refer to as the Xbox 1, so thanks for that — had the same fixed hard drive feature).

The game disc transference makes me the most angry. What they have said so far, is this: when you buy a game, you must install the contents to the hard drive (once games start using all 50GB of a Blu-ray disc, that 500GB storage space is going to disappear quickly), and that disc becomes locked to your ID. If you take the disc to a friend's house, you can use that disc and install the game on their hard drive and play it with your ID for free. But, they cannot play it on their ID unless they pay a "fee" (which has been explained as the retail cost of the game) to "unlock" it.

Essentially, this makes all games subject to the same restrictions as Xbox Live Arcade games and DLC — the original purchaser can play it anywhere, but they cannot share, trade, or sell it to anyone else (except anyone on the purchaser's original console, at least in the case of the 360). And we already know how I feel about that. It places unnecessary restrictions on the content that can even prevent family members in the same house from using content. And now they want to do that for all games, including the ones on disc. Essentially, the "install from disc" step becomes identical to the "download from Microsoft's servers" step.

Even if you accept that and consider letting multiple people install from one disc instead of the internet, where each additional person just pays Microsoft to unlock it, consider Microsoft's idea of "retail price" does not actually mean "what you pay in a retail store" (unless you include Microsoft's own physical stores, where game prices seem to follow the same resistance to change as they do in their Arcade).

Oh, Microsoft is promising that they have designed some way to actually trade games. If you believe this, then at best it will be a simple license transfer tool that lets you move the license with the physical disc you intend to sell/give/trade/etc. Or maybe it will be as simple as letting them have your original registration key, which, once they use, will inactivate your copy on your Xbox One. (Could be most friendly to third-party resellers like Play N Trade, who could just insist games you bring in for trade include the registration code.) Worse, they will require some payment for the privilege. At worst, their "more details to share later" will be as meaningful as "we're working on making the 360 backwards-compatible with all original Xbox games".

Funny, the 360 was "designed" to be able to play traded and resold games, too. I like how that works better.

This week, my son decided he wanted to find a copy of Star Wars: Battlefront II for the original Xbox. See, his cousin had loaned him his copy while he was staying here, and he played it and loved it. But you can't buy the game new anymore, so he's searching for a used copy. It's not easy, considering the game is long out of date, and major resellers aren't carrying games for that system anymore. But once he does find a copy, he is all but guaranteed that he'll be able to play it on our original Xbox (and the 360, where it happens to be compatible). Now I have serious questions as to whether that will still be the case for the Xbox One, either when it is the "current generation" or when it has been long past its "end of support" life.

The journey of 100,000 points starts with the first bleep-bloop

I unlocked my first achievement on the Xbox 360 way back on April 7^th, 2006. Since then, I have earned a total of 89,950 Gamerscore from over 4,600 achievements across 258 games. That averages out to about 35 points per day. It also puts me pretty close to the six-digit level. While it is certainly not going to win me any awards, as there are people far beyond my number, I would still consider it something of an accomplishment.

I've therefore decided to set myself a goal. I want to reach 100,000 Gamerscore by the end of this year.

When I first decided on this goal a few days ago, I thought I was pretty close to 90,000, and with 10 months left after this one, 1,000 points a month seemed like a pretty attainable goal. So, today, I decided to make sure I started March off at 90,000, to give myself a nice, round number to track against.

Imagine my dismay when I noticed that I was over 500 points away from my starting line.

I decided to play a lot of Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing Transformed, since I hadn't earned anything from that one yet, and I hoped it would be liberal with giving out some of the early achievements. After playing most of the afternoon, I did manage to unlock half of the achievements, but my haul was only 345 points.

Worn out from hours of racing, I decided to slow things down a bit by picking up my Skylanders Giants campaign. I unlocked a few more story-related achievements along with a couple random objective achievements I stumbled upon here and there, and that's what got me to within 50 points before it was time to put the kids to bed.

I do have one potential stumbling block to my quest. Most of my prime game time comes after the little kids are in bed, when I claim the Xbox to myself and make the older boys find something else to do. However, I've committed to playing through the entire Halo campaign with my oldest son (about to turn thirteen), in chronological order according to the story. We've only just tonight started Halo 2, so we still have almost all of that plus ODST and Halos 3 and 4. Since I already have all of the achievements from all Halo games, I won't be making any achievement progress while we're on our campaign run.

It won't be a cakewalk, and I'm sure it will involve scheduling more than one achievement-hunting session via TrueAchievements, but the goal is set. The wheels are in motion. Let's see how well I do.

Building the Dawn

Towards the end of 2012, my wife was casually flipping through a Toys R Us catalog during dinner, when she says, "Boy, that's expensive."
I look across the table and see a longish, greyish object. "What is that, an aircraft carrier?"
She says, "It has over 2,000 pieces."
"A Lego aircraft carrier?"
"No, one of the Mega Blocks Halo sets."
My eyebrows start to climb up off of my face as realization sets in. "Is that the Forward Unto Dawn?!" I say, grabbing the catalog from her.

With all the Christmas shopping done, there wasn't extra money for another big present, but now that I've put the Christmas money in the bank, I saw my opportunity and ordered it.

Tuesday, my wife informed me that a very large box was waiting for me in the living room. I had heard that it was large, but I wasn't expecting a box large enough to ship a small child in.

No, seriously.

The box was deceptively large, though. There was ample packing material (upon which the kids had fun stomping and popping) protecting the contents. The actual box was much smaller — although still pretty large in its own right.

The box itself is pretty well designed. It includes a built-in handle, and the lid has side flaps that tuck back in to the box neatly. The inside lid has a graphic reminiscent of the Halo 4 "Wake Up, John" trailer, and inside, under a cardboard insert that holds the very heavy and very thick manual, are four boxes with UNSC graphics that contain the pieces.

Each of the boxes contains a card that shows what pieces are contained in that box. Theoretically, this would help if you decided to open all the bags and keep them contained in the boxes while you build.

From personal experience, it is worth the time and effort to sort each piece by type and color. Not only does it make it easier to find each individual piece, but it helps to ensure from the start that, yes, you actually do have all of the pieces included. I've had several sets that have been missing a piece or two (or one of the wrong color — I think I still have a Warthog build that has a bright purple piece from a Ghost, because there was one green piece missing and one purple extra), and by counting all the pieces first, I can get on Mega Bloks's website right away and order the missing pieces. (To their credit, this was more of a problem early on and has only gotten better with recent builds.) Unfortunately, the cards for each box didn't show how many of each piece there were. For that, I had to go to the back pages of the instruction manual; and since that had the pieces sorted by size, not by box, it meant there was no convenient way to break down the counting and sorting.

Sorting over 2800 pieces is no easy task. After the first hour, I wasn't quite finished with the first box (which contained mostly small pieces), and after the 45 minutes it took for the second box, I started to get that panicked feeling that I had gotten into something that was over my head. Fortunately, the final two boxes had mostly larger pieces, which meant fewer of them, so the sorting went a little faster. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, all pieces were sorted and counted, and every single one had at least as many as the instructions said should be there.

All pieces present and accounted for

And then I used the very big shipping box to block off this part of the basement, covered the basement door with a bed sheet to discourage kids and pets from wandering downstairs, and went to bed.

The second day, I began the building process. The manual is laid out in four stages. The first stage is primarily for building the core structure of the back half of the ship (the section where Master Chief and Cortana are left at the end of Halo 3). The second stage involves building the roof and side details for that section. The third and fourth stages repeat this process for the front half of the ship.

Again, I couldn't help but think it would've been nice if each stage corresponded to one of the four boxes, which would have contained the pieces required for that stage. I might have been able to build it at a desk instead of sprawled out across the basement floor. But alas, there was no easy way out of the fact that this is one monolithic model.

Detail of Chief and Cortana

Section 1

The first stage took a good three hours of my Wednesday night. Fortunately, I was able to finish this stage before I couldn't stay awake any longer. This section does include Master Chief's cryo pod and the special mini Cortana figure on the lighted pedestal. The build also included some "broken ship" details at the front, including disconnected hoses and pieces that seem to jut out into nowhere.

Section 2 built the roof of the rear section, including the Dawn's bridge. It kind of makes it obvious that the Dawn is not to the same scale as the rest of the models (there's no way the Pelican model would fit in it for deployment, for example), but that's rather to be expected; something approaching same-scale size would probably require its own garage to build — and display and store — it in.

There are a lot of pieces all over the side of the Dawn. As I was building it, I had to wonder, quite frequently, if the designer at some point just started putting random pieces just because it looked cool.

The wings were surprisingly difficult to attach. The bottom half is topped with a series of angled pieces that give it its shape, but trying to push two large plates into each other at an angle to secure them was a challenge — as was trying to push the wing into its locked position on the side of the ship without putting pressure on that angle. I had to reattach each wing a few times before I got it right.

The back quarter looks a bit like its own spaceship

The back half with roof and sides 

Section 2 was short enough that I was able to get a jump start on Section 3 before bed. By the end of Thursday night, the larger structural pieces of Section 3 (the main body of the front half of the ship) were in place.

I did come across two missing pieces when I was finishing Section 2 and building Section 3. I'm confident that I counted all the pieces, but I found I was missing a black claw-shaped piece and a dark grey grate-like piece. The claw piece, I was able to substitute a dark grey one in its place (even knowing it's there, it's very difficult to see anything amiss — see if you can spot it on one of the turret guns). The grate was a little harder to deal with. I had an extra black grate, but the difference would've been noticeable; a dark grey "ridged" piece from my stash of spare parts matched the color well enough, and even though it looks a little peculiar, it's not bad. I had the basement room blocked off, but I suspect either my wife may have brushed it accidentally going back to the storage area, or the cat wandered through and it snagged her hair. Or maybe my count was, in fact, off. Still, that would be my only piece problem, and out of 2800, two ain't bad.

Friday night started with the completion of Section 3. This section includes the weapon storage locker and the MAC cannon area. The front was definitely the more interesting section to build. The front is split into a top and bottom half, and the top half has a lot of pieces with studs on both sides that allowed for other pieces to hang, inverted, into the middle space. A couple clear plastic bricks hold the halves apart to give it some structural integrity.

Section 3 complete

Section 3 in front of Sections 1 & 2

A couple things were working in my favor for a timely completion of this build. One, my head start on Section 3 from Thursday night meant I was finished and ready to start Section 4 sooner. Two, with three sections done, the number of piles I had to scan through was rapidly decreasing.

One section to go, and not many pieces left

Section 4 went relatively quickly, especially since there were much fewer pieces to search through, and I was getting better at remembering which piles had which pieces after two previous days of searching through them. There were no further missing pieces, and after maybe an hour, Section 4 was done.

Attaching the back half to the front was quite easy. The builds were made to mesh together, only requiring removing the "broken hoses" from the back half before sliding them together with a satisfying click.

The roof covering the back sections is removed extremely easily, so it's no problem to pose characters and get shots like this:

It is about three feet long and quite heavy. I cleaned off a place in my office for its display. Unfortunately, it's right next to the Covenant Seraph, which makes the Seraph pretty darn huge for scale comparison.

Imagine the size of the cruiser that Seraph launched from

The final appearance of the Forward Unto Dawn is based on its appearance in Halo 4. It is quite different than Halo 3, where it had a more boxy appearance, a more pronounced gap between the front "jaws", and a very prominent cargo bay on the underside.

Probably took me about 8 hours of building time (not counting the 2½ hours sorting and counting pieces), and it was well worth the effort. This will probably be the biggest model in my collection, until Mega Bloks gets around to doing an in-scale version of the Mammoth, the Scarab, or heaven help me the Infinity (which holds multiple frigates like the Forward Unto Dawn in its launch bay).

A couple things I learned while building this model. One, if you're making an instruction manual for something like this and some of your pieces are black, use a color other than a slightly different black to outline it. There were many steps that used similar black pieces, and only by shining a flashlight directly on the manual could I make out the details that told me exactly which piece went where. And two, when you're nearly 40 years old, crawling around on the floor looking for building blocks is extremely tiring and makes for very sore aches and pains the next day.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #104

EPISODE 104

Join CyberKnight and the Geezer Gamers as we talk about all things gaming. From the Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii, to upcoming consoles like the Wii U and Ouya, to announcements and rumors of the Durango and the Orbis. Put the kids to bed and be a part of the show!

—CyberKnight

And previous episodes at GeezerMedia.net.