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One of the most exciting aspects of having a networked gaming service like Xbox Live with many enthusiastic gamers is the emergence of public beta testing programs for games. We've seen betas for Shadowrun, Halo 3, COD 4 in the past, and new beta...
On one hand I really like the convenience of digital content delivery through the Xbox Live Marketplace. A few button presses, and you have a new game available to play.
On the other hand, I am a big fan of Cheap Ass Gamer - a site that revolves around finding deals, steals, and all sorts of discounts. People discuss weekly retailer ads, post coupons, point to online sales and discounts, and generally talk about combining all these resources to make sure you get great deals on games. It's a fun "game" to play in real life, and the site has saved me a ton of money over the years. In fact, I hardly ever buy any game at its full retail price without at least getting some sort of freebie incentive. However, that habit hits a brick wall when it comes to purchasing content on the Marketplace.
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This screen clip is both hilarious and disturbing, because it was actually real at one point during the Great Christmas Xbox Live outage of 2007. I am not going to reopen the discussion of why that outage happened or how it was handled - that's all been beaten to death, repeatedly.
However, during that troubled period there was one thing that really worried me. Seemingly because the Xbox 360's dashboard is so closely linked to the service, when Xbox Live was broken, so was the console.
Signing in took forever, bringing up the various dashboard blades was massively delayed, and in general the whole console was acting flaky for weeks. Given the 360's already tarnished hardware reliability reputation, I - along with many other gamers - was seriously worried that my console was dying.
This console flakiness just worsened the already pretty unhappy service situation, because not only were gamers unable to play online, but even doing anything offline was an awful experience. At one point it was so bad that I was contemplating just yanking the network cable, but ended up just not using the console during much of that period.
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Every so often I get jealous of a specific game or feature that PS3 fans can enjoy. One of those games is Warhawk, a seemingly fun downloadable title that also demonstrates one thing that the PS3 currently has but the Xbox 360 does not: the availability of large original downloadable games.
The Xbox Live Marketplace offers original games, but just within the smaller Arcade size limits. There are also large pieces of new content like the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, and later this year GTA IV's expansion pieces. Then there were temporary large "games": the online beta programs for Halo 3, Shadowrun, and COD4. Finally, you can now download full copies of last-gen Xbox games. However, none of these channels of the Marketplace currently allow for something like Warhawk.
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Every so often, when Cindy Lou Grue would post on the Gamerscore Blog (by the way, is she still even on the team?), I would get a little shocked because she would remind me that Microsoft's MSN Games casual game portal still exists. The other bloggers would be going on about their gamerscores, friends lists, multiplayer experiences, and Cindy's posts would always feel oddly "disconnected".
That makes you wonder why exactly Microsoft isn't doing something, anything, to somehow integrate the casual portal into the rest of its gaming network. They even have a section of of MSN games for Vista - the perfect example of "games for Windows" - and yet none of those integrates with the Live network. I'm not even asking for them to be distributed through a PC marketplace (well, sure, eventually, but anything at all would be a start), but why aren't those games part of the Games for Windows Live program? Some of them even have counterparts available on Xbox Live Arcade, so it just seems weird to see them as completely isolated experiences.
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So let's say that we can actually save an extended gamer profile and all of our console settings onto a memory unit or hard drive. But then the Xbox 360 overheats and explodes, and there go all the hard-earned game saves and console tweaks. Where's the backup plan?
The real question is: where is the online backup plan? Xbox Live is one big network service in the cloud, which already stores a ton of information for each user. So why doesn't each Xbox Live account - the paying ones at the very least - have an "online memory card" that can hold a gamer profile, console settings, and game saves?
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Microsoft's big trump card in terms of competing with Nintendo and especially Sony is Xbox Live. In 2008, in order to combat Sony's recently improving luck, Microsoft will have to make some drastic improvements to their online service, so as to remind people that they still have something special that nobody else has.
The two basic ways of accomplishing this are introducing a host of massive improvements and making online play free. The latter really needs to happen this year, and not even primarily because Sony lets their gamers play for free.
No, the real reason why online gaming on Xbox Live needs to become gratis is the one segment of the gaming populace that Microsoft still doesn't seem to be able to snag: the casuals. The thing with online gaming is that it has become completely commoditized. Even simple little flash games offer leaderboards, gamer profiles, and sometimes actual online play. Then you have even more fleshed out online efforts like EA's Battlefield Heroes. Most (non-MMO) PC games have had free online multiplayer components for years. And, of course, both Sony and Nintendo allow free online play on both their home consoles and portables.
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When I first set up my Wii, I really fell in love with a quirky little feature that made me hopeful that Nintendo might actually have some sort of viable plan for an online service. Those hopes were later dashed by a constant barrage of friend-code inconveniences, but I still adore that little feature. I am talking about that exciting blue glow that I sometimes see when I come down in the morning, and immediately think that something exciting must be going on in Wii-land. (Of course, unlike the early days of the console when the glow indicated nifty new features, nowadays it tells me to go judge Mii contests, which then leads to me voting in weird surveys, and the whole thing just feels like a chore.)
This functionality is made possible by the Wii's ability to stay in a connected standby mode, and still communicate with the aptly-named WiiConnect 24 service. The Xbox 360 launched with one not quite exciting standby mode: powered off and charging devices over USB. Sometime after the Wii made me jealous of quietly connected messaging, Microsoft added another mode: the low-power background download state.
That made me excited that the hardware was actually capable of such a power state (I feared it was not) and hopeful that one day they could take that feature to its logical conclusion: a Wii-like full-time standby mode where the console is constantly connected to Xbox Live.
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As I already mentioned a few days ago, previewing gamer pictures and themes on the Xbox Live Marketplace isn't exactly a shining example of user friendly interfaces. Part of that problem is that there is no easy way to look at the plethora of Marketplace content on your computer when you are away from the console.
It's not that people aren't trying to fix this in different ways. For a while there was a site called Dashboard Themes which let you preview and comment on the various dashboard themes in the Marketplace. Unfortunately, it has since gone under due to a lack of resources. Individual content suppliers like Disruptive Publishers maintain their own preview sites, but they don't cover all the content. Microsoft also has a Marketplace section of Xbox.com, but that site isn't the easiest to navigate, and it also doesn't always include all the latest content that is available on the console.
What Microsoft really needs to do is launch a complete interface to the Marketplace which can be accessed through a browser on a computer.
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As the Arcade section of the Xbox 360 Dashboard slowly matured, it sprouted some pretty neat features that tied into the Xbox Live community. For instance, you could see leaderboards for your friends - outside of the game. You could also quickly send a message to a friend, telling them about the game or a feature of it, just by selecting a recipient and a message template. The new Games Library can even show you friends who are playing online right now. All those are good ideas that reinforce the fact that you are connected to a large network of other gamers, a number of whom you somehow know.
The last dashboard update also brought us the somewhat controversial Friends of Friends feature, which made a lot of secretive gamers scramble to change their settings, and restrict the traversal of their friends lists. These little touches show that Microsoft is embracing scary contemporary trends like Facebook and social networking features that seem to pervade every popular product these days. Fair enough. You've got 10 million users, so why not link them together and make the network more social. At the same time, there is one place where this type of social integration would make perfect sense, yet it it's present at the moment: the Xbox Live Marketplace.
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Of the big three hardware makers, Microsoft is the only one getting spanked in the mobile integration area. Sony has the PSP acting as a remote window into a PS3 partner. Nintendo offers some games that include gameplay integration between the Wii and a DS. Microsoft...has no mobile gaming device, so I guess I shouldn't really complain about a lack of integration, right? Wrong!
Look, I understand that the Zune itself will probably never be a gaming device. That it would be very difficult to come out and try to compete with Sony and especially Nintendo in the handheld gaming market. All that is fine and good.
However, almost two years ago Microsoft announced its Live Anywhere vision - a vision that so far hasn't extended past the PC and the Games for Windows Live initiative. At the same time, about a year and a half ago, Microsoft demonstrated a Windows Mobile client. It seemed to work pretty well. Didn't Microsoft promise? Come on, there are pictures of the thing!
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