Pot calling the Kettle "Racist"

Just a quick update: I got my first vocal idiot complaining about my choice of gamerpic tonight, during a ranked game of Catan. He said, and I quote in entirety:

McCain is a racist! He's going against a black man! Obvious racist!

Yes, obvious, I suppose, if you only look at the color of the candidates' skins.

I'm not sure if the correct action, then, is to let Obama run uncontested because he is black; or if it's just that a white man isn't allowed to run, and the Republicans are required to pick a black candidate just because the Democrats did.

But I didn't bother to ask. Something tells me that such a question would've exceeded this individual's mental capacity.

Xbox Politics

An interesting joint project has MTV's "Rock the Vote" releasing some promotional material over Xbox Live. Apparently, by downloading a gamer picture, you can indicate your desire to register to vote, and Microsoft will provide a way to register. I'm not sure how the logistics of this will all work out, and to be honest, I don't necessarily care, since I've already registered. I've always been a little dubious about the whole "Rock the Vote" campaign anyway. Sure, it promotes awareness and participation in the political process, but it doesn't seem to do much to make people take it seriously.

But anyway, part of the promotion included gamerpics of the frontrunners for the two major political parties: McCain and Obama. Without getting into political details (this is a gaming blog, after all), between the two, I support McCain over Obama. However, I don't choose to identify myself as McCain, so I didn't see the need to download the picture and make it my own. Besides, I know when it comes to identifying people online, I see the gamerpic as part of that identity recognition, and I didn't want to "confuse" other people by changing mine. And, admittedly, another part of the decision was a concern for how the unrestrained masses of Xbox Live would react to a political statement with which I'm sure a non-insignificant number don't agree. (After all, there are two topics that are almost always dangerous on the internet: politics and religion.)

However, after a discussion on GeezerGamers.com, and after noticing people on my friends list downloading these candidate pictures, I decided not only would it be fine, but it might actually be an interesting experiment to see what happens. So, I downloaded the McCain picture and set it as my public-facing gamerpic. (Because I didn't want to include friends in this "experiment", and out of respect for those who may identify me by my BugBash picture, I left my friends-facing picture the same.)

Last night was my first night in Xbox Live matchmaking with my new gamerpic. I decided on Catan, both because of the high-visibility of gamerpics in the game and the fact that I still need the "accumulate x points" achievements.

It's difficult to say what reaction it provoked, if any. The first game I played, one player dropped out immediately, leaving a computer to fill the seat. Even though there was an AI to pick on, and I was behind for much of the game (with the AI and one human battling for the lead), both other humans seemed to take great joy in hitting me with the robber. This didn't last the entire game, though, and, ironically, I was able to come back from behind and win that game.

Right after that game, I ended up in another ranked match with fellow Geezer AylaAtHeart, and we played through that game without any noticeable incident. I did check my reputation during that game to see if the previous gamers left any feedback, but it seemed unchanged.

Ayla and I played, and then we spent some time attempting to coordinate getting into a ranked match with another Geezer, bifercatur. During that process, I did end up having to back out of two games that attempted to start. (I mention this because this kind of behavior is something that, by itself, could be worthy of bad feedback.) We did eventually get into a game, and then we played one more after that which Ayla couldn't get into.

I didn't notice any disproportionately mean play (except for some good-natured ribbing from Ayla and bifer, which I'm reasonably sure was not gamerpic-related since they would see my BugBash pic). I did have more than one string of bad luck, but that was due to bad dice rolls, not players. All in all, for expecting fire and brimstone spewing from my headset, it was fairly anti-climactic.

Although my 360 Blog did report a drop in rep yesterday. I'll have to check that out.

I'll add new posts with this label if anything interesting happens, but for the moment, it doesn't seem that political statements on Xbox Live matter all that much.

Fable and Fable II Pub Games

With Fable II coming out this year, I decided to finally finish Fable. I got it as part of an Ebay auction when I had to replace my old Xbox. It's a pretty good game. The only real glaring issues I had were with camera control (can't look "up" or "down", just rotate around you and zoom in or out on you), target lock (I rarely used it except when trying to shoot my bow or magic from afar, and in the final battle it kept locking on to the minions instead of the main boss), the enemies that would multi-hit faster than my character (may have been a function of me using a slower weapon, although it was described as "light"), and that my character would occasionally swing in the wrong direction (which might have been helped if I used target lock, except when fighting groups of enemies, I didn't want to target a single enemy).

The game suggests you can choose between good and evil. However, I found that it seemed very easy to get on villagers' bad graces without even trying, and difficult to correct mistakes. Towards the end, I had managed to build up a fairly "good" reputation, which happened quite slowly. Women (and some men) would fall in love with me just walking into the room. It was rather amusing. Then, I had a choice of three quests. One was to rescue a bandit spy. That one seemed fishy, so I passed it by. Two involved a bandit execution. One was to free the bandit being executed, and one was to stop the bandits from freeing the one being executed. I thought that the game designers would determine that stopping a killing was the lesser evil, so I chose that option.

Apparently, that was the wrong choice. But here's where it gets very annoying. My stats said I was still positively aligned. I even saw the halo and butterflies around me when I stood still. Yet my face had become darkened, and now villagers cowered in fear. My (in-game) wife wanted nothing to do with me. Even when I tried picking up a simple escort mission, the traveller refused to follow me, instead trembling in fear and running away.

I didn't get any more quests to undo the damage, and even wandering around killing bandits (which did give me "good" points) didn't change anything. I was quite annoyed with the whole thing at that point and just went on with the main quest to finish the game.

Maybe there's some moral point to that, like it's easier to be evil than good or that people believe the worst — but it was a rather disappointing twist to an otherwise good game. The main story (which hopefully didn't change with my errant quest), at least, was interesting.

Moving on. Fable II comes out this fall. As in Fable, you will be able to earn gold by playing games in pubs. To make things interesting, though, the pub games can be downloaded separately as an Xbox Live Arcade title. These games can be played outside of Fable II, and the gold earned in those games is "real" gold earned in the "real" game.

Personally, I think they should be giving away the Pub Games for free as a promotional tool for Fable II. They only "sort of" are — if you pre-order Fable II, you can get a code to download the Pub Games for free. Which I did.

Right away, there's a huge difference in the games between Fable and the Fable II Pub Games. Fable had several games across Albion, and some of them were actually based on skill rather than chance. The Pub Games, of which there are only three, are almost all chance.

The first, Fortune Tower, is a type of card game. Cards are dealt, and you are given the opportunity to collect money based on the total value of cards in a row, or take a chance that the next row dealt will be a better value — the risk being that a card that matches a card from the previous row can end the round and lose your complete bet. I would argue this game takes the most thought, as you have to constantly weigh the risk against the potential reward and decide whether to "press your luck or pass". Still, it is quite possible to completely lose your bet with a deal of only six cards, and while it would seem the odds of this happening should be quite small, it happens with alarming frequency. Fortunately, a small glitch in this particular game allows you to bet the minimum but get credit for betting the maximum, minimizing the risk and maximizing the rewards. As long as this glitch goes unpatched, this game can actually be used to consistently make money.

The second game, Keystone, is essentially roulette, except instead of a spinning wheel, you bet on the outcome of three dice. The third, Spinnerbox, is nothing more than a slot machine, where gameplay consists of pressing the A button.

These games can be extremely frustrating, primarily because you really have no control over the situation. Indeed, the achievements aren't based on doing anything, but on the random chance that something just happens. Example: The "No Stone Unturned" achievement is earned in Keystone when a 3 or 18 is rolled as the first roll in a game. For an hour and a half, I played the first roll of Keystone, cashing out and restarting when the roll failed to come up 3 or 18. It never did.

The tournaments are especially bad, in that it seems the computer opponents are especially favored by Lady Luck. Many times, I have watched helplessly as my minor successes are leapfrogged by the major successes of the AI players. I lost count of how many times I'd win gold and yet drop two or more places in the leaderboard for the tournament, because my winnings were a pittance compared to my opponents'.

If nothing else, this game is a strong reminder of why I don't gamble in real life.

I just hope I can get those final achievements, so I can spend the rest of my time earning gold before Fable II is released...

A step in the right direction

I saw a piece of encouraging news today. WhatTheyPlay.com is reporting that Gears of War 2 will have filter settings for language and violence, so that gamers will be able to turn off the excessive gore and the foul language.

While some bloggers choose to laugh this off as childish or silly, I personally applaud this move. Finally, some choice is being given back to gamers to control the kind of experience they want to have (and expose their families to).

I'm certainly not naïve to think that it turns an 'M'-rated game into a 'T', but at least it gets rid of the over-the-top violence and language that so completely turned me off of Gears 1 with just two minutes of game video.

And as I believe I mentioned before, it's not just about my kids. My kids don't get to play 'M'-rated games — the console is in the family room, so we can monitor its usage, and we use parental controls to help enforce this rule. Also, as a rule, I don't play 'M'-rated games until they've gone to bed. So if it were just about them, the content of an 'M'-rated game wouldn't matter one way or another. It does matter, however, for the simple reason that I just don't like it. Period. So being able to turn some of it off is very appealing.

Does this mean I will run out and put a preorder down for Gears 2 and join the throng that will be battling locusts on "Emergence Day 2"? Eh, no. It's still a pretty violent game. I need to see what these gore settings reduce. If the main character is still running around with a chainsaw graphically ripping bodies in half, even without blood splattering over the screen, will I be comfortable with that?

Ideally, a demo would help me make this decision, but as before, "CliffyB" doesn't think his game needs a demo to sell. (Apparently not to the masses, just to me. :shrug: ) I'll have to wait until I see some hands-on gameplay videos and see what the swear-less, gore-less experience turns out to be, and if it's for me.

But this ability to turn off the excessive junk that doesn't affect game play is a very good thing.

While I would of course prefer the stuff not be there to begin with (Halo never went close to "over the top", nor did Call of Duty, and they both did just fine), I hope future developers that find the need to add language and gore, also have the sense to add the option to turn it off. Gamers like me certainly appreciate it.

Home is where the heart is

Just because I'm an Xbox fanboy doesn't mean I automatically assume anything on other consoles is junk. I take a good, hard look at the pros and cons of each feature, and then I declare it junk. ;)

I've been interested to see where the PlayStation Home feature will go (besides pushed back further and further to an unspecified date in the future). I think it's an interesting idea, trying to capitalize on the popularity of things like Second Life. But just how useful is it? If it were available today on a console that I owned, would I be dying to spend time there? Or would I just see it as getting in the way of my games?

I noticed an article on The Escapist by Susan Arendt, who was treated to a tour of Home at E3 2008. Her conclusion? "I still don't get [it]." From what she described, Home centers around these sponsor-themed areas, which seem to be focused on driving advertising to the players. It does provide a way to meet up with people, play mini-games, get together to launch full games, and so forth. Although personal spaces have been talked about before, Ms. Arendt doesn't mention it in her article. Whether they're still there or not, her report seems to indicate that the focus is on advertising-themed areas. And it all seemed open.

I have to agree with her assessment about "not getting it". I'm not sure it'd be somewhere I'd want to "hang out", either. As it is, I get plenty of "hanging out" in the in-game lobbies of Halo or Call of Duty between games — which is, after all, why I have a game console in the first place, to play games.

So anyway, I just finished a long night of Halo, jumping around from party to party of Geezers, occasionally playing by myself until I found an open party of Geezers, musing about my friends list and how it's filling up again with some new GG members, when suddenly it occurred to me. I suddenly realized exactly what Home should be.

Home should be filled with community-driven sites (houses, buildings, bars, whatever the paradigm is). Perhaps these sites could have memberships, to control the population and protect against "griefers" — how sites are created, who owns them, and who could control who is and is not a member would have to be worked out somehow. Then these spaces would have people who share more than just a passing interest in a particular brand name; they'd have a sense of community, and want to hang out there. Advertising space could still be sold, but it could be open to ads that cater to a much broader demographic than just the "Uncharted Theme House". Give these communities some control over how their house is run, and they'll be more than glad to hang out there.

From my world view: I don't spend a lot of time on the Xbox.com corporate page; I spend my time socializing on the GeezerGamers.com forum. How useful it would be if I could log on to my console, wander into the "Geezer Gamers" house, see who's playing what and who's hanging out waiting to play, and go from there. And if there were bulletin boards where schedules could be posted, or tournament information specific to the house, with an integrated web site for when I wasn't in front of my console...

I think Sony has it backwards. Home shouldn't be advertiser-driven; it should be community-driven.

Of course, now my big hope is that Microsoft sees this, steals the Home idea from Sony and flips it right-way-around for the 360, because that's the console I own. ;)

Crosswords on a console?

Released to Xbox Live Arcade this last week was Coffeetime Crosswords. Because Arcade games have a trial option, I downloaded this to see how it would work. I usually love that feature of Xbox Live Arcade, because it gives me the chance to try out games that I would never risk my hard earned cash on. In this case, though, I'll make an exception. I wish I never even had a chance to try this one.

I already had some doubts about how a crossword puzzle would work with a controller, but it seriously seemed like they tried to make the interface as clumsy as possible.

A few things were done right. You can use the stick to move around the puzzle, or press the triggers to jump from word to word sequentially, and a quick tap of X switches between across and down. Then a tap of A (I think it was A) brings up the letter input wheel.

"Ah ha", I thought. "This is like Shadowrun. Or even that Buku Sudoku game. I just push the stick in the direction of the letter on the wheel I want and..." Bzzt. Wrong. Pushing the stick, you see, moves you around the puzzle. To input letters, you have to use the bumpers to cycle around the wheel until you get to the letter you want, and select it. Only half the letters are visible at a time, so you either cycle around to the "switch" option to switch it from A-M and N-Z, or you press and hold both bumpers for a second or two.

"Well, that's awfully inconvenient," I thought. "Fortunately, I have a chatpad attached to my controller with a full keyboard. I'll just use that to type the letters I want." Bzzt, wrong again. The chatpad is completely not supported. Nothing happens when you type letters.

The time required to enter the answer for "a Hawaiian feast", the short word "LUAU" (which requires flipping the letter wheel back and forth for each letter) — that alone was enough to make me delete this game with prejudice.

I don't think a user interface has ever before made me quite so angry so quickly. I quite nearly felt insulted.

Even if they added keyboard or chatpad support, I'm still not convinced that a console is the best place for a crossword puzzle. Buku Sudoku was, by contrast, pretty well done (although it did expose the flaw in my controller, in that it doesn't recenter itself from a slight drift left — apparently a common problem, and a big issue in navigating the sudoku board), but I still wouldn't play that on a 360 when I have a PC. Even the most basic of freeware is easier to use when you have a full keyboard and mouse. Achievements and Xbox Live can't make up for that.

Wii could care less

My aunt spends a lot of time entertaining her grandkids, so she has a lot of toys at her house, and sometimes she buys (or successfully talks my mother into buying) toys she finds especially "neat" or "fun" for my mother. So while we were visiting my mom and aunt, my kids and I got to spend some time playing with the console whose name I still can't use without my inner child giggling hysterically: the Wii.

My 8-year-old son is at that stage where he wants anything, just because it is remotely "neat" or "fun" or well-advertised on TV. (Case in point: he was trying to convince us how much our lives would be improved by a certain kitchen gadget after he stayed up after his bedtime watching an infomercial the other night.) So when he says he wants one, I have to take this recommendation with a heavy dose of salt. Now, it is true that my boys are spending quite a bit of time playing it, but considering it's really the only thing they have to do while my wife and I help my mother get some of her home improvement projects done while we're here, it's pretty much the default activity.

I suppose it should be noted that my mother is not a gamer, by any stretch of the imagination. So it should come as no surprise that the only games we have available are Wii Sports and Wii Play, and by her own admission, the only reason she has Wii Play is because she wanted a second controller, and for the same price, Wii Play is a controller and a game.

So, what is my general impression of the system and these two games?

Eh.

There just wasn't anything really exciting. I started to understand comments like "two GameCubes duct-taped together". Actually, I'm more reminded of that scene in Back to the Future 2, where the kids deride the arcade cabinet as being a "baby's toy". Although I did see one instance of what other people have witnessed: my mom, the non-gamer, did actually play, enjoy, and win a game of bowling against me and my son.

The system doesn't really draw me to it, though. I don't want to go and play it, and when I do, the moment is really fleeting. I don't get immersed in the gaming experience like I do playing a 360 game.

As far as the major gimmick, the "Wiimote", I didn't care for it. There is definitely something to be said for a literal "point and click", especially when it comes to aiming. But some things were more difficult. If that sensor bar wasn't right at the front edge of the TV, or if someone walked in front of it, it was rather useless. Not to mention jittery. Although on the one hand, it felt like I had more "instant" control over where I was aiming, on the other hand, it felt like I lacked precision, as I couldn't hold the stupid thing steady with a tripod. And that doesn't even get into trying to maintain precision while using the rest of the buttons (re: the tank game, where one must aim with the Wiimote while moving one's tank with the cross pad and firing with the trigger).

Motion sensing was a little better, although somewhat frustrating. I don't know if it was a function of the game or the Wiimote itself, but it seemed that small movements wouldn't register correctly, so I had to exaggerate. Also, movements had to be "set up". Case in point: I couldn't take a couple practice swings in golf in rapid succession; I had to pull my arms back, pause, wait for my Mii to wind up, and then make my swing. Also, as far as golf was concerned, I had to swing the Wiimote in an arc that was perfectly perpendicular to the ground. If I didn't bend directly over it, thus having my arc at any kind of non-90° angle, it either wouldn't register the swing, or would be extremely unpredictable in the strength it did register (instead of just rather unpredictable, which it was most of the time — why could I make the same practice swing 5 times, have it register at one strength, and make the same swing a sixth time, and have it register at something completely different?).

Although there is something to be said for actually swinging like a bat or tennis racket, those motions — and more especially the motions for bowling, pitching, and golfing — are very tiring (at least for an old guy like me — not so much for my kids at that age).

Unfortunately, neither my mom's nor my aunt's systems are connected to the internet, so I was unable to investigate how that works, which is a shame. How much is missing from the "dashboard"?

I'm sure that this experience is directly related to the discs I had available. What would I think of the Wii in the home of a gamer, where it is well-fed with a healthy diet of new, varied, immersive games, connected to a stable lifeline of internet connectivity?

I don't know, but what I did see, compared with what I already have with the 360, made it really hard for me to care.