I received my XBox 360 on Saturday morning, and Riley helped me open it. He wasn’t very helpful with setting it up, but I did manage to get the thing hooked to my TV without too much difficulty. I guess you might want to know how it is.
Well, my initial impression is “eh” with a few “oh, that’s neat"s sprinkled in.
Let me clarify a bit. The 360 is a very slick console. I suppose that it’s just me being jaded by new technology releases that makes me not get really excited about these things any more. I suppose that it might have been more exciting had I some friends that cared at all about the XBox. Nevertheless, I’ll mention some things about the 360 that stood out for me.
First of all, Live is always on. I mean, you can turn it off, but why would you? The features that it offers are some of the coolest that I’ve seen a console do. If you’re buying an XBox, then Live is one of the reasons you should be doing it.
There is a big X button on the controller that lets you access a fly-out menu at any time, even during a game. You can see your gamer profile there via a “gamercard”. A feature here that interests me is the “acheivements” that you can earn. As you complete goals in your game, you are awarded points. These show up in your profile. I will attempt to place my gamercard here:
What’s really neat about the Live features is that they all happen inside the game. So as you make and acheivement, a bubble pops up at the bottom of the screen telling you so. When you review your Live profile, it shows you not only the points you’ve earned, but the task that earned it. I imagine that in a racing game like Burnout you will receive Live points for all of the things you receive points for in-game. I wonder how they reconcile all of the games against each other.
One thing that I was very happy to find that the XBox supported was a home-network connection to a Windows XP (not just Media Center) system for music playback. You need to install some software on that PC to make it work. Actually, I couldn’t get it to work with what little I tried, but I suspect that has more to do with my network/router/firewalls than it does with the ugly software Microsoft provides on their XBox website.
Also, while I’m speaking of the XBox site, I’ll mention that it generally works with Firefox, but there are some pages, like the support pages, that don’t look quite right. I suppose this is to be expected, but it’s just another example to point at of poor multi-browser support.
So, onward to the games…
I suppose that I should have signed up for one of the many games you can download (yes, you can download games and movies to your hard drive via the Live connection) so that I would have more to write about than Kameo, but so far, that’s all I’ve played.
Kameo is a weird game and its controls are irksome. Yes, I’ve gotten used to them, but they’re a pain to learn and I still slip up now and then.
Basically, you are an elf princess with the ability to shapeshift. You change forms by pushing one of the four colored buttons on the top of the controller, ABXY. All of the actions you can perform as that form are activated by the shoulder buttons. Sometimes you can interact with people or things by pressing A, which is usually the button you press to return to your normal form as Kameo.
Controlling the beasts you turn into is a pain. I realize that it’s part of the game that the controls operate the way they do, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. For instance, one of the forms is a giant rolling armadillo thing. When she’s not rolling at high-speed, she walks around on these stumpy legs that take forever to change her direction. When changing abruptly to walk South while faving North, this form spins slowly around in place on its little stump legs.
More aggravating is the Ash form - a small red dragon - that will not aim in the direction that I attempt to point him no matter what I try. I mean, in one stage I attempted to use his fire breath to ignite a lantern as part of the stage requirements, and died several times due to incoming cannon fire simply because I could not aim him properly.
You can tell they tried to take advantage of some of the more impressive specs of the 360. There are some scenes where little flying things swarm all over the place. Often, too many things to see what’s going on. In other scenes, trolls and elves fight in skirmishes in which you can partake, and there are sometimes hundreds of individual characters moving on the screen at the same time.
The water effects are also pretty neat.
I guess my real disappointment - for lack of a better word - is that I don’t see a lot here to ooh and ahh over. Sure, you can tell that the graphics are a little better and the system is doing a bit more. But does that really enhance the game? Some of the best games ever made were not so extraordinarily complex or graphically expansive. I would really just like a good game.
Those who would suggest that a racing game like Project Gotham is “good” can about-face and search out OGN or one of the other fanboy networks. What the 360 really needs is a few games that make the PS2 good even though it’s fairly behind in technical capability. Games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, or Katamari Damanci are good. More games like Prince of Persia, Fable, and Psychonauts (Please - A sequel for Psychonauts!) would also be good. I’m just preturbed by the idea that sports, racing, and first-person shooters are all the XBox could be any good at.
Don’t bother me with traditional consol RPGs, either - they all kind of suck. The Baldur’s Gates games for XBox were a couple of the worst games I’ve ever played. Not only is the “plot” linear, but the character progression is linear too. (You’ll be level X at this point in the game because you’ve killed Y monsters, and they know that and what powers you will have.) Killing endless creatures does not imply “Role playing”, in spite of what console game developers would have you believe.
In that vein, I’m disappointed that this launch game doesn’t really leave me saying, “Wow, the 360 is super-cool!” I’m sure that it is but this game isn’t doing it for me.
Well, I hear that Target is selling games ahead of launch, so maybe I’ll stop by there and see what (if anything) they have. Otherwise, tomorrow is the day.
A side note - I keep going in that EB Games store by BJ’s, and I need to stop that. I’m not sure what the vibe is that I’m getting from them, but it’s not a good one. I’ve been sold games on the assurance that, “yeah, it’s good, I love it,” that have pretty much sucked. They also never had a very high opinion of the XBox - it’s like buying a Honda and then taking your car in for service and having them ridicule you for buying the Civic instead of the Accord.
Yesterday when I asked if they had any other XBox 360 games or accessories, they said no and then asked with whom I preordered my 360. I told them I already had mine and they all stared at me blankly. I could tell that they were trying to decide whether to call me a liar or a fool outright. I said I won the Mountain Dew contest and they all shoved their noses back into their Gameboy SPs without a word.
I need to take my business elsewhere.
This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.
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<dc :title>My XBox 360 Review</dc>
<dc :date>2005</dc>
<dc :description>A review of the XBox 360 and Kameo based on my pre-release obtained from the Every 10 Minutes contest offered by Mountain Dew.</dc>
<dc :creator><agent><dc :title>Owen Winkler</dc></agent></dc>
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