Namco Museum Virtual Arcade

It may seem a little odd that I'm releasing reviews to games when I can't play games, but actually, this down time is a perfect opportunity to finish up a couple posts that have been neglected while I was playing instead of writing.

According to Wikipedia, Namco has released 17 different compilations under the name Namco Museum. The one for the 360 is the Namco Museum Virtual Arcade. It consists of 34 games, divided into two sections. One is the "Arcade" section, which consists of full versions of nine games available on the Xbox Live Arcade. The other is the "Museum" section, which consists of various arcade and other release games.

Achievement junkies may at first be disappointed to find that there are no achievements for the Museum games at all. However, considering there are 9 Arcade games with the standard 200 points apiece, that does mean this disc has 1800 achievable^* points on it, which is quite a deal for a single disc. It's also worth noting that, to purchase these titles on the Xbox Live Arcade separately, it would cost $60's worth in Microsoft Points, while this collection (which includes 25 other games) retails for half that (and dropping).

^*Note that "achievable" is used here in more of a theoretical sense; some of these are fairly easy, but some are pretty darn hard.

The classic games are nostalgic and extremely frustrating. Many of these games come from the arcade, which was designed to eat quarters as quickly as possible. Additionally, the 360's analog stick and substandard D-pad were not made for precision, four-direction control, and the games do little to compensate for this. For example, when you push right on the analog stick, you rarely push directly right, but often have some slight Y-component in your direction. The game seems just as interested in your 2% down as it is in your 100% right, and you may find your New Rally-X car taking a sudden turn south when you want it to go east.

Another minor flaw is that the older games don't identify their soundtracks to the system. While one could argue that part of the reason for playing these games is to relive the arcade experience, music and all, when you're playing a game over and over again trying to get that last achievement, the 8-bit music can start to grate, and being unable to mute them or replace them with your own is a bit irritating.

One mitigating factor to the arcade games is that they all seem to be "enhanced" with the ability to start at the last level you completed. There is also some limited ability to tweak the settings to give you more lives per "quarter" or to adjust the rate at which extra lives are awarded. It may not seem like much in a generation where health is something you recover by hiding for a few seconds and lives are essentially infinite, but to someone who grew up with these games, it's entirely expected and in-context.

One thing I found rather disappointing were the "Arrangement" games in the Museum. The Namco Museum release for the original Xbox, which we have (and, fortunately, is compatible with the 360), has Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga Arrangement, which feature two-players-at-once play and are a lot of fun. The versions on this disc are not the same, as they only allow for a single player at a time. In fact, they are almost completely different games, not just graphically, but in game play as well.

Included in this collection are some newer releases, too. Pac-Man Championship Edition, while probably not quite worthy of making videogame history, is really a lot of fun. I suppose I can pat myself on the back for nailing all 200 achievement points with surprisingly little effort. Galaga Legions, on the other hand, is quite a different beast. A quick summary of my gameplay would be "oh crap I can't see what's going on where are all these enemies coming from what's that thing how do I kill it shoot shoot oh wait, did I die?" So, a lot like Geometry Wars — actually, if you took Geometry Wars and re-skinned it with Galaga designs and sounds, and added copious helpings of blur and light bloom, you'd just about have Galaga Legions. About as stingy with the achievement points, too. Good for a laugh. ;)

Still, for a value collection, it does live up to its name. There's quite a sampling of games, mostly old with a few new ones thrown in. In fact, as I alluded to before, if you were to buy just the Pac-Man C.E. and Galaga Legions games off of Xbox Live Marketplace, you would already match the current open-market retail cost of this entire disc-based collection. Plus, you can trade, loan, borrow, or re-sell this version, and if you end up playing on a different console for whatever reason and you can't connect to Live to authenticate your Gamertag and licenses, you can still play these games. What a concept.

Maybe it's not so elite after all

I got home yesterday, and my kids are playing the Xbox. My son puts in Hot Wheels Beat That, and after the opening video plays and the title page appears, he says, "Why is the Xbox all fuzzy?" Indeed, the picture looked like it was coming over a bad analog broadcast over a pair of misaligned rabbit ears antennae (anyone remember those?). My older son comments how it looks just like the Xiis are displaying on the dashboard, all snowy and semi-transparent, and my wife says it must be some new feature of the dashboard.

Oh, it's a new "feature", all right, I think. Failure in rendering of 3D elements, where 2D elements such as videos and most of the dashboard are fine? Yeah, I've seen this before, right before Xbox #2 started booting up with an E74 error.

My kids play for a while. Most of the game is fine, but the signs with arrows guiding their Hot Wheels cars around the track show the same "snowy" overlay. And when they are finally done and quit to the dashboard, sure enough, the Xii is standing there, fuzzy and see-through, like a hologram on the fritz. I cycle the power, expecting to see a multilingual error message and a single red light. To my surprise, the box actually boots, although the boot animation shows some fuzziness in places. I then power down the box, and we go to have dinner.

Once the kids are in bed, I power on the Xbox, only slightly hopeful that maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to break the shrinkwrap off my Father's Day gift and play Ghostbusters, even if things are slightly "snowy". Alas, it was not meant to be. The lower right quadrant light was flashing red, and the screen displayed "System error, Contact Xbox Customer Support" in various languages, with E 74" displayed prominently at the bottom. Removed the hard drive, tried rebooting — of course, no dice.

I then took the hard drive up to my office and hooked it up to my PC using an X360USB adapter to back up as much data as I could, just in case. I didn't get as much as I would've liked, considering I started late (it took me some time to find a version of Xplorer360 that would read a 120GB drive), I didn't have a lot of free space on my desktop (I still have some home movie files I need to burn on DVD taking up hard drive space), I couldn't easily pick and choose what to back up (the 360 doesn't use easily-recognizable filenames), and I couldn't just select everything and let it fly (not only did I not have enough space, but Xplorer360 copies everything to your system temp directory first, which is on my undersized C: drive, before moving it to your target destination; I couldn't just copy everything to my data drive directly). I ended up just copying the profiles and calling it good before I fell asleep in my chair.

I then took the hard drive back to the 360 and turned it on, just for kicks. It powered on, and oddly enough, everything looked fine. It was after midnight, so I didn't want to start playing at that point, but I took some time to copy all profiles to a memory card and what save games I could (some games don't let you without logging on to the game, and some games don't let you even then). When I was done, I noticed my Xii was looking snowy and transparent again, so the moment truly was fleeting.

This is my fourth failure, and will be my second time going through Microsoft repair, as soon as I can make time to get it done. I suppose it's a good thing I haven't been able to use the license transfer tool to move all my licenses to this console.

Pre-Natal

One of the big darlings of this year's E3 was Microsoft's new motion-sensing and voice-activated technology, code-named Natal. And since this is the 21^st century and any idiot with a blog can post their opinion on anything whatsoever, here is this idiot's opinion on Project Natal.

It's a gimmick.

Granted, it's a very cool piece of tech. The ability to track a person's body in three-dimensional space is very cool. And from what I've read, it does compensate beautifully for low light (and even for someone walking in the camera's field of view trying to "distract" it) beautifully.

But is it really "the future of gaming"? Is it really the end of the controller as we know it?

The idea of motion-controlled gaming isn't new, obviously. The Wii has been doing this for a couple years now. And obviously, it's a pretty marketable gimmick — they've sold a few hundred billion of these things. However, the thing I've noticed is, everyone I know who has one, doesn't use it. It's the modern equivalent of a board game — it sits on the shelf collecting dust, except for the couple times a month (or less) that company comes over, when you dust it off and gather around and play. Granted, you have a lot of fun playing; but at the end of the night, it gets put back on the shelf, never to be seen or heard from again until the next party.

Now, my impressions may be skewed by my sample set. The people I know are either "hardcore" gamers (i.e. people who grew up on consoles, who play racers or shooters as a hobby, who have a line item in their budget for games, etc.) or non-gamers (people who don't even spend time playing Peggle in a browser; for whom videogames aren't even an afterthought, but so far beyond thought as to cause them to mistake their game console for a toaster on occasion; but they have a Wii because their family or friends convinced them or it was legally required in their district). I know very few of the in-betweens (the "casual" gamers, those that do spend hours on end playing Peggle from their MySpace pages), and none well enough to know what their console gaming habits might be. These may be the ones who play the Wii day in and day out that I'm missing.

Even so, it really doesn't change the fact that it's my opinion, and my gaming style and habits, and that a Wii doesn't exactly fit.

So what is Natal doing that's different? Well, the biggest difference is, there's no controller. Instead of tracking a single point in space that you're holding, Natal is going to track all of you. So, no remotes flying off their straps, no controllers (theoretically) to lose, and no issues with batteries going dead in the middle of a game or having to calibrate or align with a sensor bar.

So is this going to be good for gaming? Well, as someone who's purchased the Live Vision camera, I haven't seen how. The camera came with a download of Totemball, which you play by moving your arms up and down to control the speed of your left and right side — move forward by raising both arms, turn right by raising your left arm and lowering your right, etc. Assuming for a moment that Natal eliminates the issues with the camera not always tracking your hands properly (and from all reports, it does quite well), playing a game like this is exhausting. There's a reason Totemball has an achievement called "Fit Player" that is described as "Play a level for 20 minutes without resting (or your arms falling off)."

Plus, it just can't possibly work to completely replace a controller. While the marketing video shows an interesting demo of a skateboarding kid doing tricks in front of the camera and having that translated into the game, I'm picturing playing Tony Hawk, where the moves you could do in the game included flipping upside down and doing one-armed handstands. Does that mean if you aren't atheletic enough to do a headstand, you won't be able to play the game? And how is this going to extend to things like Halo or Call of Duty that involves a lot of running and jumping around? Or Street Fighter or Dead or Alive, where your character's fighting moves include acrobatic flips and jumps and unrealistic manoeuvers like turning upside-down and spinning, using your legs like a heliopter to fly across the screen?

What about navigation? Wouldn't it be cool to page through movie and game listings by waving your hand? Again, I think it's going to be more tiring to go through pages of items by crossing your hand back and forth across your body, as opposed to the current method of pressing a button on a controller — a controller which has buttons for moving a single item at a time (the D-pad), moving a page at a time (the bumpers), and to move continuously with minimal effort (holding a button down). While there is a convenience factor to not needing to keep track of a controller or remote, it's much more effort to use for any length of time.

To have the option to interact with the machine without a controller in a pinch, however, is very appealing. I definitely like the idea of being able to use a free hand if I misplace the remote, or if the remote is out of reach and I'm otherwise incapacitated (either due to injury, pure laziness, or feeding/rocking a newborn baby). But that's only if it works, if the convenience of this "backup plan" isn't outweighed by the frustration and fatigue brought on by having to do repeated, exaggerated gestures to positively signal my intent.

Basically, it comes down to throw, or the amount of movement you need to push in order to trigger a reaction in the game. The camera is good, but it cannot rival the millimeters required to depress a button. Scale that movement difference up to hundreds or thousands of repetitions a night, and you can see how tired you'll get how quickly. For that matter, one of the reasons I don't spend as much time with the 360 racing wheel in racing games and just use the controller is because of the throw issue. To make a hard right turn, the difference between turning a wheel ¾ of a turn and pushing a stick an inch to the right is substantial.

And I'm still not convinced it's going to be 100% perfect. To move several pages of items from left to right, you're going to have to pass your hand from the left to the right multiple times, and in between each pass, you need to bring your hand from the right back to the left. Is the camera going to be able to determine the difference between a movement back to the left preparatory to another pass to the right, versus a deliberate movement to the left to push the list backwards?

There's also voice control and recognition. I'm not nearly as confident in this technology as I am in the motion control. My experience with Microsoft's voice recognition has been dubious at best. Will it be perfect by the time Natal is released? I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Facial recognition is another feature that is demonstrated in the video. A person walks up to the console, and Natal recognizes the user and signs them in. This, too, sounds neat, but it makes me wonder how this will work in our family of 5½. Whose face will it scan and log in when we're all sitting in our little family room?

That brings up another concern I have, thinking of my family in particular. How does it constrain input to the correct user? When you have boys who want to cause problems for each other, how do you tell Natal to ignore user A and not user B? It must be possible, as one of the E3 articles I read commented on the presenter walking in front of the reviewer on purpose to demonstrate that Natal, once "locked on" to a player, would focus on that player and ignore the distractions. But how do you tell it who is what?

I freely admit that a lot of this boils down to uncertainty in a real-world environment. "Wait and see," some might say, "and you'll see just how well it works." And that is true. One thing my wife and I agreed on as we watched the videos was that our kids are going to love this. I imagine I'll be getting this close to launch, as long as it's not too expensive. (Priced too high, and I'll be waiting for the software support and peer reviews in other homes first.) At this early preview stage, though, I'd have to say I'm "cautiously pessimistic".

At least they're reading the headlines

About two months ago, I wrote a blog post about someone whose son was conned into giving up his Live credentials in the empty promise of getting Halo 3's Recon armor. The title of this post was I'll give you Recon if you give me your password, and in the post, I describe how the lure of an in-game treasure is used to swindle a poor gullible soul out of his gamertag and email account. I then say the first rule of security is, "you never, ever give out your password to anybody, no matter how legitimate they claim to be."

Imagine my surprise when I found this message in my Xbox Live inbox this week:

my email addres and password is email <redacted>@yahoo.com password <redacted>666 send me recon buddy

This appears to be a brand new user. The only games on his gamercard are Guitar Hero II and Halo 3, with his first achievement unlocked on 25 May. At the rate he's going, though, I fear he may not have his account much longer.

I like that my blog is getting read, but it'd be nice if, you know, people would read past the title.

Disney's Bolt

Disney's Bolt is based on the movie of the same name. The movie (according to Wikipedia's summary — I haven't watched it yet) is the story of a dog that plays a superhero in a TV show, who is accidentally mailed across country and must make his way back to Hollywood.

Rather than playing out the plot of the movie, instead the developers chose to dive deeper into the TV show fantasy world. You play as both Bolt the super-dog (with his TV show superpowers intact), and as Penny, his owner and the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, as they try to rescue said scientist from the evil super villain.

The gameplay alternates between Penny, who uses sneak and stealth, and Bolt, who pounces on bad guys in a much-simplified hack-n-slash style.

The game is fairly simple. As Bolt, the majority of your play is attacking enemies by jumping up and pressing X and/or Y to attack, repeatedly. Once you hit an enemy enough, a "B" button icon floats over their head, and if you attack with the B button, you will grab onto them and can then press any of the four buttons to do a "finishing move".

As you progress, you'll come across enemies that are resistant to the basic attacks, and you'll have to use one of Bolt's "special powers" to stun or weaken them first. Most of the time, your first encounter with each of these will have a single instance of that enemy and plenty of on-screen tips to help you learn how to defeat them (although one particularly frustrating segment on a train introduced a frisbee-wielding maniac that seemed unstoppable, with no on-screen tips, until I happened to catch a random loading screen tip that gave me a much-needed suggestion for dodging and returning his discs).

The difficulty ramps up by throwing more and tougher enemies at you at a time, which makes the game simple, but rather repetitive.

Penny's segments are much more low-key. With no health bar, one attack means a restart. She has the ability to go invisible, giving her the power of a "sneak attack", and if she is caught, a quick-time-event button press comes to her rescue. Fighting and avoiding enemies is the minority of her tasks, though; she must spend more of her time navigating the terrain. Finding where to go is made easier by an "enhanced vision" mode, which highlights "interesting" paths in yellow.

Penny also occasionally comes across computer terminals, that she "hacks" in a minigame very reminiscent of a few Xbox Live Arcade shooters — left stick moves, right stick fires. Move and destroy everything in a 2D playing field, without getting destroyed yourself, and the terminal is hacked.

It's a very simple game, with very easy to learn controls. Some platforming parts can get frustrating, as can some of Bolt's fighting sequences when the game just wears you down with the repetitive flow of stronger enemies. There is, however, very little consequence for failure, as the game simply restarts (often fairly close to where you were), and you try, try again.

It's also a fairly long game. For a movie tie-in, there's an extraordinary amount of original content (probably having to do with the fact that it's not trying to recreate the movie). There are lots of environments, and the cutscenes and in-game voice acting are pretty well done. The game is fairly well polished. Although there are some areas that are difficult to get through due to questionable environment structure, the game is completely playable with almost no game-breaking bugs or even destructive camera controls. (My son did seem to come across one moment where Bolt somehow got into one of Penny's mission areas, where the only way out was to "suicide", but the game recovered gracefully on the restart.)

Achievement-wise, most of them are straightforward, pretty much unlocking themselves as you play the game. The "Max out health/power/gadget bars" require finding and collecting all the upgrade items along the way — most of those are easy to spot, but if you're not using a walkthrough, it's easy to miss one or two. And there are a couple others that, while they may not be entirely self-evident, are easy enough with either a little planning or a simple guide.

All things considered, it's really not a bad game. It may not be terribly exciting, as the bulk of it is fairly repetitive, but at least it doesn't feel like your typical "movie-to-game" game.

What's in a profile?

I haven't had a lot of game-related news lately. Unfortunately, I have a son in the hospital, and the time where I would normally be at home playing games, I'm instead in the hospital room keeping watch over him until he gets better. However, I did get an opportunity to conduct a bit of game-related research, so I figured I might as well share.

He was recently moved into a room that happens to be equipped with an Xbox 360 (this is truly one of the finer children's hospitals), so to make his stay more comfortable, when I packed my bag for my overnight stay, I included some of his favorite 360 games and my memory card, to which I moved his gamer profile. It's a little thing, but I thought being able to sign in with his own gamertag might give him a little taste of home that he might appreciate.

The 360 is, unsurprisingly, not connected to the internet, nor does it have a hard drive attached. (The chrome DVD tray suggests that it has been purposefully removed.) I happened to get here a little late, just as he was falling asleep, which meant I could play around a bit with the 360 myself.

I booted it up, and the first thing I noticed was that it had the old blade interface. I didn't realize how much I missed it. It was so quick, so straightforward, and so familiar, even after all this time. I felt like I was looking at the "pure" dashboard again, not some clumsy façade designed to hide the "real" system from me. It was like going from Vista to XP.

The next thing I did was sign in. On the list of profiles I have on my memory card, a couple have as their gamer picture, a shot of their Xii. I was a little surprised to see this Xii picture on the "sign in" list in a non-Xii-enabled dashboard, but what is a gamer picture but a little bitmap? There's no real difference between that and any other bitmap you might download from Xbox Live for your gamer picture, and that is stored in your profile.

I knew, too, that achievement progress must be stored in the profile somewhere. Once, when I was after a certain achievement ("Knockout King" from Big Bumpin'), I was getting desperate to know how close I was getting. (My issue, as I would discover later, was that the achievement text was incorrectly written, and so when I thought I was doing the right thing to get closer to the goal, I really wasn't.) So I used a tool that let me access the 360 hard drive from a PC and dumped my profile data file to my PC's hard drive. I did this on two consecutive nights and attempted to find the bits that changed, to see where my progress might be stored and attempt to decipher how close I was getting. I never did find that out, but I did notice that the text of the achievement was in my profile. (Several times, in fact; probably a function of whatever database format they use for storage.)

It therefore came as little surprise to see that I could pull up "Achievements" and see the achievements I had earned. Although it might come as a bit of a shock to see that you can pull up every achievement, earned or not, for every game you've ever played. Included in that is the achievements' pictures. (The drawing speed was just in the range of perceptibility; I noticed games that used the same picture for multiple achievements, those achievements' pictures would "pop" on the screen at the same time instead of being drawn individually, which would suggest that achievements that share a picture might only have to store that picture once.)

It's probably worth noting that arcade trials that I had deleted from my profile in the NXE, did not show up here. Although this ability to "hide" 0-point arcade games from your gaming history is a new feature to the NXE, apparently it was implemented in such a way that hides it from the old dashboard as well. Maybe someday I'll do another data dump and see if the data's still there, just hidden; but from what I can tell, I would guess it's really not.

Without testing, I already know, too, that games can use the profile for some storage, besides just achievement details. Whether they are limited as to how much data they can store in the profile, and to how much, I don't know. But, for instance, I know that one of those Burger King games lets you create a custom racing outfit, and when you do, no game data file is saved. (The other that lets you customize a racer does use a separate data file. Whether the racer is stored in that data file, and why one uses a file and one uses the profile, I couldn't begin to guess.) I also know, when I go visit my friend Solstice01 and take my profile on my memory card, my Halo Spartan is wearing the same armor permutation he wears at home.

I would guess that my Xii is also in that profile somewhere, with the clothes he's wearing, his hairstyle, his glasses, and his wedding ring. The old dashboard of course couldn't show that to me, so that's just a guess, but there's no reason to think otherwise.

So that's pretty much what I've found. I thought it was kind of interesting. It does make me wonder just how large a profile file can get, with data from every game ever played stored in there. And with developers free to use that all-important file for storage, it makes me a little nervous as to how prone it might be to corruption. There doesn't seem to be any way to trim it, either, since game history is something that only grows and cannot be changed (0-score XBLA games notwithstanding).

But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Microsoft has plenty of experience coming from the Windows Registry in maintaining an all-important, monolithic database file, keeping it free from corruption and error, that I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong…

Yeah, we're in trouble.

You want how much for that?

Nearly a year ago, in my rant on digital downloads, I mentioned that part of my fear would be that, with the single entity in total control of the market, there would be no market pressure to decrease prices, and as such, prices would not decay over time.

It's time to throw another example onto the stack. After having borrowed Samurai Warriors 2 from FireMedic a year ago, I finally got a copy of my own (my kids still play and love this game). I managed to find a copy on eBay for a very reasonable $5.50 — a quick search just a moment ago show the prices tend to range from about $15 and up for new, sealed copies, and two "Like New" going for $17 and $30. Doesn't seem like an unreasonable price for a game released in September of 2006. Mass Effect, for reference, became a Platinum Hits release at $20 at the beginning of this year, and it was released in November of '07.

On 16 April of last year, the Live Marketplace launched the Xtreme Legends add-on. It adds a few extra characters and stories, but its price was a little steep at 2400 Microsoft Points — $30 for those playing along at home. I'm not sure how much the original game was going for at that time, but my guess is, being almost a year and a half after its release, it wasn't anywhere near a full $60.

If you've followed the link to the Xtreme Legends content above, you'll see that it is, at the time of this writing, still on Marketplace at its original $30 price tag. You can currently get a new, sealed copy of the game for half that cost. You can get new, sealed copies of better-selling, more recent games for less than that cost.

It only proves my point that downloadable content does not depreciate.

An apologist might point to the current "Deal of the Week" promotion (where they offer a piece of DLC for a deal each week this summer) as a counter-example. I say, it means nothing. For one thing, the "Deal of the Week" is for Gold members only, so it's partially subsidized by Live membership fees. For another, this price drop is temporary — in each case, the price goes back up to its original cost after the week is over. And for a third, the sale item is generally one of their more popular items, rather than a slower-selling item for which a price drop would really benefit.

I don't know if the person selling me this game bought the DLC or not, but of course it doesn't matter, because as we all know, you can't resell DLC, either.