Hot Wheels: Beat That!

There's really not a lot to be said about Hot Wheels: Beat That! This was a game purchased for one of my kids, who likes playing with Hot Wheels cars, when my wife found it on sale at Toys 'R' Us.

It's a very simple game. Controls are a little loose, but it's not too difficult to stay on course, and in general, in cases when you are blown off course or into a hazard, you are returned to the track quickly. You pick up weapons by driving through rings, and fire them off with a touch of a button. The weapons are fairly simple and traditional, ranging from a missile to a mine to a smokescreen, with a few more interesting weapons, like a shocker, a parachute that slows your target down for a time, and an EMP that destroys the weapons your opponents may be carrying.

Game types include the traditional races to the more goal-oriented "destroy X opponents in Y seconds". Each race, in addition to giving you points (or "flames") for earning first, second, or third place, also gives you two secondary goals, like use a weapon so many times during the race or simply obtain and use a power weapon. The secondary goals also earn you an extra "flame", and the accumulated number of flames unlock more races and better cars from the garage.

Multiplayer is all local, and can be played as a race with (or without) AI, or in a combat mode, where you score points by hitting your opponent with a weapon. Unfortunately, the cars and arenas in multiplayer are unlocked by playing single player, which limits the fun friends and family can have just jumping in to play this game until a single person does the work to unlock everything. (I really hate this requirement.)

The environments vary from a bedroom to an attic to other around-the-house locations. Race tracks include standard Hot Wheels tracks (although wider to allow three or four cars to race side-by-side), household elements (like plastic cups, with the bottom removed, to act as a short tunnel), and the fantastic (puddles of radioactive goo). The raceways can get busy and hard to see at times, however there tend to be a decent supply of arrows guiding you along the correct path at any given time.

All in all, it's not a bad game. The game play is very simple, something that's almost better suited for an arcade game than a retail release. It is worthy of note that, of all the games the kids got for Christmas, this one seems to be spending the majority of the time in the Xbox. It's simple, arcade-style fun.

Nice game you're downloading; shame if something were to happen to it...

I've ranted against the move from physical to downloadable distribution before. It's still a subject that I get very passionate about. I've avoided blogging about it, though, because otherwise I'd turn this into one big "SAVE THE DISCS" blog, and I'd much rather talk about games than stupid stupid marketing decisions, but I came across something that really got my blood boiling again.

This Ars Technica article describes an experience attempting to buy the infamously-DRM-riddled game Spore in downloadable form. In a nutshell, when you purchase and download the game, they maintain a record of this transaction and allow you to redownload the game for reinstallation at any time — for six months. You are given the option to extend this "protection" interval to two years for the price of $6.99. After that (with no option to backup the installation files to a CD), it is gone forever.

As the author points out, this means if you intend on getting a new computer beyond two years from the date of the game's purchase, or if your hard drive ever crashes and needs replacing, you're out of luck as far as the game is concerned.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Digital distribution has never been about customers' "convenience"; it is and has always been about control — seizing control of the distribution, sale, and after-sale. They eliminate manufacturers and shippers and the money paid to them, they eliminate retailers and their cut of the profits, and they eliminate the customers' ability to re-sell their used games on any market. They also eliminate borrowing and renting from the equation (unless people start getting in the habit of lending out their whole PC). Every player of the game must play an individually-purchased copy, with 100% of the profits coming right back to the publisher/distributor (with the savings passed on to their executives' bonuses). Any additional restrictions that might cause a person to have to pay for the same game twice is just icing on that cake.

Banjo Kazooie

As an encouragement for preordering Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, one could get a free download code for the original Banjo Kazooie for Xbox Live Arcade. This is essentially a port of the old Nintendo 64 game, except the graphic engine has been retooled to take advantage of higher-definition screens and widescreen aspect ratios. The characters are still rather low in the polygon count, but as comparison videos reveal, the result is much sharper and cleaner than one would get simply hooking up an N64 to a modern TV.

This deal was a no-brainer to me. I figured a couple cartoony platforming characters would make a good upcoming Christmas gift for the kids, especially with the game retailing at $40; but when they added the free download for the $15 arcade game, that clinched the deal.

I never played the original Banjo Kazooie on the Nintendo 64 (my brother didn't even get an N64 in the house until after I left for college), so these characters were all new to me. The game is a faithful reproduction of the N64 game, though. In fact, when I got stuck in a couple places and found myself looking for help on the internet, it was a walkthrough of the N64 version that led me to the missing pieces.

Overall, I'd have to say it was a fairly enjoyable game. It is a very simple platforming adventure, with very old-school goals, like "collect all the notes". And it has some of those frustrating elements that older games still used, like the concept of "lives". (Or have we just gotten spoiled by being able to endlessly fail and retry?) There are certainly some frustrating elements, such as twitchy camera control and narrow ledges at great heights that are awfully unforgiving of missteps caused by twitchy camera control. And I never did quite get the hang of the "beak bomb" maneuver. But there were some really classy tricks, too, like the way the music seamlessly changed styles as you walked from one region to another or dove underwater.

I played a little of the Nuts & Bolts demo, and one thing I noticed was that it was really light on character orientation. I don't know if it was removed from the demo or if it's not in the game at all, but it does make me wonder a bit if it's not in Nuts & Bolts at all. Nuts & Bolts (from the demo; haven't played the full game yet) focuses on the vehicles you can build and drive. (In fact, in-game loading text recommends getting Banjo Kazooie from XBLA for classic platforming.) But things that had me fairly confused in the Nuts & Bolts demo (like the mechanics of swimming) became clear when they were introduced while playing Banjo Kazooie. It makes me wonder if Banjo Kazooie isn't just a handy prequel to Nuts & Bolts, but is rather a prerequisite. Time will tell when it comes time for that game to come up in the post-Christmas rotation.…

Left 4 Dead

I'm not really into the whole "survival-horror" genre. The classic Stephen King movies, Friday the 13^th, etc. aren't my kind of thing. I even passed up on the critically-acclaimed game Bioshock, because I played the demo and it kind of creeped me out. So I already had some trepidations about Left 4 Dead when the demo reached Xbox Live Marketplace. However, since the demo was out there, I was willing to give it a try.

This game is very definitely a member of the survival-horror genre. It takes place after some kind of disease has turned most of humanity into killer zombies, referred to as "infected". (Apparently. The game doesn't waste time with silly things like "backstory".) You play as a group of four people who are the only non-infected people in the area, and your goal is to get out.

It is set up to resemble your classic horror movie. You select one of four "episodes", which determines the setting in which you'll play. As you start the episode, you're greeted with a movie poster about the episode. (The game even has a setting for the amount of film grain effect, giving you control of how much movie experience you want.) Each episode is divided into a series of "chapters". The goal is simple: battle your way from one "safe house" to the next. (Each safe house marks the end of a chapter, there being five chapters per episode.) The end of the episode involves summoning a rescue and making a final stand against waves of infected until the rescue vehicle arrives to carry your party to safety.

Game play is ridiculously simple: shoot (just about) anything that moves. The game is controlled by what they call the "director", which decides what to throw at you when. In this way, the game, despite being in the same environment with the same basic play every time, rarely plays exactly the same way twice. One playthrough, you may encounter a horde of zombies in a certain parking deck. The next time, that same parking deck may be eerily quiet. Yet a third time, you may find a "tank" that rips your group apart.

The thing that makes this game very different is the emphasis on teamwork. Certainly, in most games, you can do much better if you work together, but in Left 4 Dead, it is a requirement. Not only does the system reward you for team play, but there are zombie attacks that will incapacitate one of your party that require a second player to save him.

I played through the demo with a couple other Geezer Gamers, and I very quickly saw the appeal. Communication and teamwork in a very fast-paced (unlike traditional zombies, the Left 4 Dead infected move very quickly) and simple setup. Even then, I wasn't sure I had room in my budget for a new game, but when I happened to be the lucky recipient of a Target gift card at a corporate trade show, I decided to use the funds to pick it up.

It has indeed been as much fun as the demo, and more. The campaign can be played solo or co-op — there are always four players, with computer AI managing any players a human does not currently control; and the AI actually does a decent job of sticking with you, watching your back, and rescuing you from incapacitating zombie attacks.

A very nice feature is that it supports complete drop-in, drop-out co-op. If you set it up as such, you can play a campaign and allow your friends to drop in and take control of one of the other survivors at any time. And, if the player leaves, the AI will take control immediately. What's very nice is that the AI will take temporary control — if a player pauses his session for any reason, the game will continue, but his player will be under AI control. It's not only nice in that it keeps the game flowing when life gets in the way for one person, but it's absolutely essential for the game play, because players must stick together and play together to survive, and one player being away from their controller at a crucial moment could literally mean the difference between life and death.

The versus mode is played by choosing from one of the two episodes available (identical to the four campaign episodes — oddly enough, only half of those are playable in the versus mode). One side starts as the survivors, and one side starts as the infected. The survivor players play through a chapter normally, and the infected players spawn as one of the "specialized" infected types (the type is selected randomly each spawn). Points are awarded for how far the survivors get, plus bonus points if they reach the safe house, how much health they had when they got there, and a couple other factors. Then, the sides switch and the chapter is replayed. Each of the other chapters in the episode are then played in turn, twice each. At the end of the match, the points are totaled and a winning side is declared.

Because each chapter is played twice, a versus match can end up being very long. With the switching back and forth, though, you don't notice the time. You just have to be aware that there's a bit of a commitment going into it.

One very compelling feature is the "commentary" mode. In this mode, text bubbles are scattered throughout the level. Walk up to one and activate it, and you'll hear an audio clip from game developers, producers, managers, artists, etc. about various elements in the game, sometimes with models appearing or the camera taken out of your control to illustrate the topic. It is something like a self-guided, walking audio tour of the game. It's truly fascinating. And to let you focus on the tour, in this mode, zombies will completely ignore your character. (Achievements are of course disabled.)

For being a genre I normally avoid, I'm certainly having a lot of fun playing Left 4 Dead with my fellow Geezers. My only concern is, because of its focus on team play, that it could potentially die quickly should the world move on to the next big game. (There are already some nights where the L4D ranks are a little slim compared to those playing Halo 3 or Gears 2.) In the meantime, though, I'm loving it.

Demos are like what now?

Gears of War lead designer "CliffyB" a while ago defended his decision not to release a demo for Gears 2 by telling GamePro:

A beta is like hooking up with a girl just to say, "yeah, I f*cked her." I know that sounds crude, but it's the honest-to-God truth. Once you play a beta, you can check it off your list -- you can say, "yeah, I played it." Then you might not feel motivated to get that initial cherry popping from the proper, final game.

Honestly, we could make a demo, but Gears of War 2 wouldn't be out until February of 2009 [if we did]. That stuff takes times to put together.

Certainly not unexpected coming from this overgrown fratboy.

Hey, "Cliffy", here's another "honest-to-God" perspective for you: demos are like the first date, the time where you meet somebody, get to know them, and decide if it's the kind of person you want to bring home with you and spend some quality time with.

Not everyone's first date is the same as "going all the way", and there's still plenty of magic to be had when you get the full game home, unwrap the disc (with any luck, not slicing your hand in the process of getting that vacuum-wrapped cellophane off), and play the full campaign or all the multiplayer modes for the first time.

Left 4 Dead gave me a demo. I didn't think I would like it, since I normally don't fall for that genre. I played the demo one night. Just one. I now own the game and am loving it. Mirror's Edge gave me a demo. It's just a short training mission. I played it over and over again until I finally bought it for myself for Christmas.

See how that works?

So go ahead and disparage the concept of a demo. Go ahead and whine about how it would be "too hard" or take "too long" to make one. It'll just be $60 I won't be spending — to extend the metaphor — to bring a girl home to bed without having even met her just because you say she's a good lay.

See, that would be "cheap sex".

A Kingdom for Keflings

I used to play a lot of Warlords Battlecry on the PC years ago. I would spend a great deal of time building my cities and armies, often taking hours to complete levels that could conceivably be done in 15 minutes if I would stop building and start fighting. I did at one point play Warcraft III, and I was rather amazed at how it could do so well. The characters were about ten times the size, but they were almost cartoon-like compared to Warlords Battlecry, and the number of unit types and playable sides were pathetic in comparison. I was completely unimpressed, and when I later learned that they were going to create an entire world based on this game, I was dumbfounded. "Who would actually spend time here?" I wondered, bemused. "There's no way something like this will sell."

Yeah. Anyway….

I think the best way to describe A Kingdom for Keflings is, it is very much like Warcraft III (not World of…), but without the "War". You are, pretty much as the title implies, building a kingdom for a race of people called "keflings". You direct the keflings to go and get resources (lumber from trees, rock from quarries, etc.) and bring them back to the workshops. Once these workshops have enough resources stored, you can have them build building parts. Put certain building parts together on the ground in a certain configuration, and you'll have a new building. Of course, to know what parts build what buildings, you have blueprints; and to make things easier, when you have a blueprint selected, the ground will be highlighted where parts need to be placed to complete the selected building.

Instead of a "big metal hand in the sky" for directing the keflings and arranging building parts, though, you play as a giant, someone about four or five times the size of a kefling who walks among them. You can select from one of a few predefined giants, or you can play as your Xii. Ooh, exuberance. It's nice to be able to bring in your predefined avatar; probably even more interesting to play co-op with a friend's personalized Xii as well, but I haven't tried that yet. Probably an irritation about being a giant instead of a disembodied hand is that you are subject to the terrain, in that you can't move through buildings or trees — however, I have yet to be completely prevented from going anywhere, so it's more conjecture than anything. The huge advantage is, you can get involved in the game. If, for instance, you're waiting for more rocks before you can build the final piece to your building, instead of waiting for your keflings to mine it, you can go and mine it yourself (and, being a giant, more quickly and efficiently, too).

Occasionally, the mayor will get your attention and give you quests. So far, these have been really trivial tasks — build so many buildings, stock so many of such-and-such resource in the workshop. The rewards are little things, like love from the keflings ("love" is an item that is used to "activate" a house, bringing more keflings into your kingdom) or items that let you, as the giant, do bigger and better things (move faster, lift more resources at a time, etc.).

Constructing buildings unlocks blueprints for more buildings in a sort of "tech tree". For instance, building the stone cutter's shack, which lets you turn lumps of rock resource into a cut stone resource, unlocks blueprints for buildings whose parts are made of things including cut stone. It's kept fairly simple; in general, if you look at your list of blueprints and keep building the buildings at the bottom of the "tree", you can be pretty sure that it'll unlock the next building, and you'll have what you need to build it (or at least start collecting the resources for it).

It's a very casual game. There are no time limits, no enemies to attack or be attacked by, not even a natural disaster or disease to worry about. All you do is build, build, build. The game does a good job of hand-holding for the first few minutes and gradually letting go. The only real frustration I have is trying to remember, when I'm in the workshop, how many of each part I've already built and how many remain for the building I'm working on (as all parts in the current blueprint are highlighted, it's not a question of which, just how many). And when that's the only frustration (make a mistake and over-build, and you simply have to punch the part until it breaks down, then take the resources back to the workshop and try again), I think it can be said that this is a fairly low-stress game.

All in all, I think it's a pretty good casual game, and being the first Arcade game developed with Xii support (but not the only to support them; when the NXE launched, Uno and a few other games were immediately updated so you could play with Xiis in place of gamerpics), it makes a good entry for their "new and casual" theme Microsoft seems to be targeting with this whole New Xbox Experience.

Experiencing a new Xbox

I got the opportunity to upgrade to the "New Xbox Experience" a few days early. I haven't been entirely certain about this new dashboard, but I figured if I wasn't going to have a choice, I'd rather get in on it sooner than later. At the very least, maybe I could avoid the mass clogging of teh intartubez when everyone else tries to download it at once on the official release day.

I suppose we could start at the beginning, or the first thing that you have to do when you boot up the NXE and sign in, and that is create an Avatar. Are they just copying the Wii's Miis? The resemblance is undeniable (which is why I've dubbed this Xbox verson of the Mii a "Xii"). You are creating a cartoon-like humanoid with an oversized head that represents "you" (or whatever image you wish to project as a gamer). They are much more refined-looking than the Playmobil-like eggheads, though. I did get a chance to create Miis when I visited my mother, and this time around, I felt more like I was creating an actual character and less like I was creating a plastic toy. The customization options are at once more and less flexible than the Miis. You do have a range of face parts to pick from, however you can not fine tune their rotation, position, or dimensions as you can on the Wii. However, you also get to pick clothes for your Xii, something that on a Mii is limited to just shirt color.

I was originally ambivalent about the Xii. I was amused with Miis, but I didn't really become too attached to them. They were fun to create, but they were just toys. And yet, after booting up the new dashboard for the first time and spending 20 minutes or so creating this little "mini-me", creating a little person to go with the identity behind the gamercard that defines "CyberKnight", I was rather surprised with how attached I was to the little guy. So much so, in fact, that I was disappointed to find out how little he means to the New Xbox Experience.

You see, he only appears in one place: "My Xbox". And he's only there to present your motto when you go past your stats panel. That's it. If you elect to take a picture of him to use as your gamerpic, then that static image of him will appear in various places, too; but the full, animated character, for all his hype and all the rants and raves about him, just doesn't take that big a role.

Now, this is just the beginning. Actually, it's less than that; this is before the beginning. When the NXE officially launches, there are supposed to be four Xbox Live Arcade games that will be retrofit to support Xiis, plus the new retail Scene It? Box Office Smash and arcade Kingdom for Keflings games will support them. But, I'm not sure I want to have to boot up a game of Uno or buy a specific game to spend time with my Xii. And I'm not so sure I want games to start defaulting to using Xiis as character models. They'd be out of place on the stage in Rock Band, I think. They definitely wouldn't be appropriate in Call of Duty, and I'm reasonably sure we don't want to start putting Xiis in COG battle gear to fight locusts in Gears of War. I think a little more proliferation around the dashboard is in order. I'm not saying he has to keep popping up like Clippy ("It looks like you're trying to browse the Marketplace. Can I help?"), but having him show up somewhere besides just the one place would be nice, especially since I spent so much time putting him together.

Avatar created, you now go to the dashboard. It is, of course, very different. I'm sure you've seen pictures, so I won't bother describing it in detail. One thing I did notice when the new system was first demonstrated back at E3 was that not everything was on the screen at once. For example, in the old dashboard, you could see all five blades. You knew Marketplace was to the far left, Xbox Live was next, Games was to its right, Media was beside that, and System was at the far right. However, looking at the main level menu, you can't see everything. You only see four or five entries. And they expanded it, so there are more entries. When you're on an entry, how do you know which way to go to get to the one you want? Without just "knowing" that the My Xbox channel is at the bottom of the menu, you could potentially be scrolling up and down, not knowing if you were getting closer or further from it. (I've seen the extremely non-computer-literate try to navigate a menu when they have no point of reference. They will go back and forth like a ship lost at sea, rather than taking the more logical approach of going all the way one direction, and only when all options are exhausted trying the other way.) It appears they mitigated that a bit by making the menu loop, so you could keep going in one direction and eventually circle through everything, but it's still a little disorienting when you don't have a good point of reference.

The panels within a channel are just as bad. In the demo, the presenter went to the My Xbox channel four or five times, and I never saw his gamercard. I was starting to wonder where it went… until he happened to move left. When you scroll to the right (as apparently he had done off-camera once), items disappear off the left, and there's no indication that something is out there. This was mitigated a bit, too, before I got my hands on it, because whenever you enter a channel, you always are placed at the leftmost panel.

The panels have the same problem of not showing everything, though. Because the panels are so large, only three or four appear on the screen at a time. My Xbox has seven entries (that I can think of off the top of my head). For a new user, if you told them to find the System settings, this could be very difficult. Why? First, they'd have to go to My Xbox. Then, they'd have to scroll all the way to the right to get to the System panel. It doesn't sound hard, but consider that you can't see the System panel when you get to My Xbox. How would a new user know that it's there? They may end up going through each channel and having to scroll all the way to the right (and back, for fear of missing something) until they find the panel they want. Compare this to finding something on the old Blades, like, say, network settings: you see all five blades, and figure "System" is probably the best candidate. (Or maybe you don't make that assumption, and you have to page through each blade.) Once you get to the purple System blade, you can see right there, on the list of menu items, the "Network Settings" entry.

In many ways, it reminds me a lot of my first experiences with Vista. It's a lot of flash and a lot of show, but trying to dig in and find something is very difficult until you finally "just know" where it is. Except that Vista has a search function to help you find things.

Speaking of finding things, let's move on to the Marketplace channels. Instead of viewing text lists of titles, you now see cover art or movie posters. Graphically, this is much more interesting, however it does present an interesting problem. See, covers are not uniform. They are drawn in a variety of styles, with varying artwork or pictures. The titles, too, are in different places, styles, fonts, and sizes. If you don't recognize a movie or game by its cover, it can sometimes be a challenge to find the title, especially on a picture of the cover on the screen. Selecting a panel does often show a one-line text description below, but it is in a small, white font against a pale background, which is not easy to read on my 34" 1080i screen.

Also, browsing through game videos isn't terribly efficient. Go to the game video section, and you may see a few panels, all showing the same game's cover art. Without paging through each one in turn to read the pop-up text, you can't tell which Call of Duty video you're looking at.

There is a new Friends channel, which is where you can see your friends' Xiis (the only place, as far as I can tell). It's very graphic, showing each friend standing beside some structure, shack, or pile of stuff (which, as far as I can tell, is pretty meaningless, except it's based on the dashboard theme you've selected) and a picture of the game they're playing. Presumably, if your friends are in a party, you'll see them grouped together — I haven't seen that as of yet. Unfortunately, it's not terribly useful. You can only see the friend's name when you select them. (Parties, if the preview videos I've seen are still accurate, are worse, as the names are displayed one at a time for a couple seconds each, meaning you can't tell who's in a party with a glance.) And you can only see three or four friends at a time. It's all pretty much eye candy.

Fortunately, the old friends list still exists. The Guide button has been completely revamped to bring up what approximates the old Blades interface. The initial screen in the Guide is more compact, with fewer features presented at once, but it now has blades of its own to the right and left to view more functions. For all my complaints about the dashboard being hard to navigate and see things, the Guide is very familiar and much easier and more streamlined. I'm still getting used to the layout, as not everything is where I expect it to be, but it's a lot easier to flip the blades back and forth to find things. It is also very responsive, displaying and reacting to button presses much faster than the old blades ever did.

About my only real complaint so far with the Guide is that it is in the center of the screen, and when it appears it fades the background process (dashboard or game) very dark, making it very hard to see what's going on back there. This makes it very difficult if you're comparing information from the Guide to the game (like, say, comparing your friends list to your current Halo 3 party to see who's missing), or if you're waiting on something in the game and need to be able to see the game to know when it's time to close the Guide and get back to it.

Well, that, and I'm not too crazy about the color scheme, but that's purely aesthetic.

My favorite feature, though, is being able to install games to the hard drive. I tested this with two games so far: Fable II and Chromehounds. Other sites have already compared loading times for many games, including Fable II, and have documented the decrease. It's often just a few seconds off of a half-minute of time, not much to write about. It is quieter and supposedly decreases wear on the DVD drive, which are bonuses. However, what isn't mentioned as much is the "short loads" — the DVD accesses that occur while the game is playing. You can hear it in things like Fable II when you enter a new area. After the "long load", you are in the new town, and you can start walking almost immediately. However, some things will not have loaded yet. Sometimes people will be invisible until their character models are loaded, or the glowing trail hasn't been drawn yet as it's pulling more information from the DVD (you can hear quite a lot of access of the drive during this time). Quite often, this DVD access will cause a drop in frame rate. Also, when you hit the start button to bring up the menu, the DVD drive spins for a moment, resulting in a slight pause before the menu appears. With the game loaded to the hard drive, the majority of these delays are just gone; and when there is a lot of loading, the frame rate drop isn't there. Chromehounds benefited greatly as well, as not only were long loads noticeably reduced, but short loads (which were often depicted in the game with a spinning "Loading" icon) were almost too short to be seen. I suppose for this, I can be more thankful for the "opportunity" I had to upgrade to an Elite earlier this year.

Like it or not, the New Xbox Experience is coming. I'm not entirely sure I like the new dashboard. They seem to have sacrificed function for style, and I'm not sure that's not going to end up being simply confusing in the end once they get past the "wow, neat" factor and actually try to use the thing. The new Guide, though, is quite useful, and installing things to the hard drive (if you have the space) is a huge bonus.