Post by hornet on Dec 6, 2007 11:32:45 GMT
So. Last weekend the Family Horn took another large step into the next generation (current generation?) and picked up an Xbox 360 as a joint Christmas present for the boys and myself.
For your edification and education, here are my first impressions. Of it.
The good:
The front-end just works. It’s pretty simple, pretty intuitive and does pretty much everything you want it to with a minimum of fuss. Possibly a first for Microsoft.
The wireless controller is excellent, iffy D-pad aside. The thumb-sticks are a step up from the DualShock’s – more comfortably placed, and just feel a bit better in use. The two analogue triggers are great, too, particularly for anything featuring driving. I think I might have a new favourite gamepad.
(Incidentally, what is it with console manufacturers and compound words? Xbox. PlayStation. DualShock. Wiimote. What’s wrong with a bloody hyphen? Or even – whisper it – a sodding SPACE?)
I really, really like the ability to play my own music in-game. Especially now I seem to have gotten the EggBox to recognise my network drive and don’t need to rip any more CDs to the tidgy 20GB HDD. And, when you’re playing your music outside of a game the visualiser is excellently trippy, almost to the point of hypnosis. When it’s on, I keep expecting Will Ferrell to pop up at the bottom of the screen and shriek “Obey my dog! And KILL THE PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA!” Anyway. Playing the Ace Combat demo to the Top Gun soundtrack was several different shades of awesome.
Which reminds me. The ability to get demos off of Xbox Live is brilliant. And the EggBox handles it in a pretty groovy way, too – you tell it what you want to download and it just gets on with it in the background while you’re going about your day. Compared to the Wii, which a) takes forever to download anything and b) won’t let you do anything else while you’re downloading, it’s a big step up.
Comes with a component lead as standard. A little thing, but it’s more than the Wii managed. No digital audio lead, but you can’t have everything.
The bad:
It’s very noisy when reading game disks or DVDs – about as loud as my PC, particularly on startup, when it sounds like a Harrier jump-jet taking off. This isn’t a problem when you’re playing games, which usually have enough ambient noise to easily drown the racket out, but I could see it being massively annoying watching any movies that weren’t directed by Michael Bay. Luckily, we’ve got a DVD player and a media streamer for that so, you know.
No wireless networking out of the box, and there don’t appear to be any cheap 3rd-party alternatives to the official, ludicrously expensive WiFi dongle. “Luckily”, thanks to BT’s ineptitude, we’ve just had reason to move our router from the bedroom down into the front hallway, so ten squid’s worth of Ethernet cable got the job done.
Xbox Live is a nice service, and you can get most of what I’m interested in it for – demos, patches, cheap little retro and arcade games – for nothing. But access to online multiplayer and the groovy online leaderboards for Live Arcade is £35-40 a year depending on where you buy it from. I’m really not sure I’d use it enough to make that investment worthwhile. But I’ve a horrible feeling that I’m going to end up thinking “well, it’s only £3 a month” and splashing the cash. Because I’m weak and a fool. There’s a lot of overpriced tat in Marketplace as well, but hey – it’s not like you’re being forced to buy it.
The games:
Halo 3
Pretty as hell. I haven’t played a lot of it, though, and it seems to assume you played Halo 2, chucking you quite brutally in media res with very little in the way of explanation. Basically, it seems to be Halo. But another one. Of it. Everything that was right with Halo is still right here – the combat’s still a decent laugh and surprisingly tactical, there are some nice set-pieces, it’s a good slice of fast-moving run-and-gunnery – but the weapons still feel a bit weedy and are generally hard to tell apart. The Halo series has never been massively my thing, but the boys like it. Good value at £0, though.
Forza Motorsport 2
Gran Turismo, but more so. I’ve spent more time with the car paint designer than I have with the actual racing to this point, but that’s largely because the car paint designer is awesome. Another freebie with the console, so I’m not complaining.
Virtua Tennis 3
Winner of the No One Knows In Guitar Hero Award for the most brutal difficulty spike since No One Knows in Guitar Hero. One minute you’re barely conceding a point as you blast all and sundry off the court. Then you get your rank up to about 200th in the world, and all hell breaks loose. Luckily, there’s loads to do while you’re making up the sudden skeelz gap – the minigames that up your player’s stats are, almost without exception, massively good fun – my favourites are the one where you’re serving giant tennis balls at giant tenpins, and the Space Invaders-esque affair where you have to take out tennis ball-spitting robots as they advance slowly down the court. There are also some really ill-advised “player interaction” cutscenes, which do nothing except freak you out with the hideous zombie player models. To be honest, it’s really just Virtua Tennis 2 with tarted-up graphics, but that’s fine because Virtua Tennis 2 was, no pun intended, ace.
Earth Defence Force 2017
Giant ants are invading Earth. You have a gun. That’s it for the plot. And the gameplay. The graphics are a combination of decidedly ropy (your mincing, stiff-limbed character) and the brain-buggeringly spectacular (Death Star-sized motherships hovering low over a fully destructible city as a swarm of ants the size of National Express coaches bear down on you). It’s a silly, budget, B-movie of a game and has become our two-player co-op of choice.
Crackdown
There are just tons of things wrong with Crackdown. It’s Grand Theft Also, but lacking its progenitor’s anarchic sense of fun and fantastic soundtrack. In theory, I like the notion that the fact that your future-cop’s skill progression is slowed down by slaying other police or innocent civilians, so that you’re discouraged from being too cavalier whilst not actually being prevented from going on GTA-style kill-crazy rampages. In practice, way too often your fellow peace officers have the self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming who’s just lost his job and come home to find his wife in bed with two other lemmings. Plus, they’re really, really touchy, repeatedly turning on me for no obviously good reason. There are stunt markers scattered around the city a la GTA, but they don’t seem to be terribly logically placed and usually involve you having to stop and build ramps in order to launch your vehicle through them, which is a bit (ie, a lot) of a chore. And the vehicle handling’s a bit leaden, to boot. When you’re doing race missions that have you trying to pass through a series of checkpoints before the timer runs out, the game doesn’t disable the icons that depict the start of other race missions. These icons are almost indistinguishable from the checkpoints you’re hunting for, making it infuriatingly easy to get yourself led off the garden path. There are loads of guns to use, but absolutely no reason to equip anything other than about five of them – the heavy machine gun, the sniper rifle, the grenade launcher and the two missile launchers. There’s a massively annoying bloke who keeps shouting hints / encouragement / chastisement / random crap at you every two fucking minutes that barely ever has any connection to what you’re doing at that moment and who, so far as I can tell, can’t be fucking turned off. It badly – BADLY – needs a “centre camera” button.
It’s comfortably the most fun I’ve had playing any game this year that didn’t come out of an orange box.
Here’s what makes Crackdown great – you’re not just a future cop. You’re a genetically engineered, super-strong, super-tough, super-fast, super-agile future cop and you’ve been set loose in a massive 3D playground. The relentless po-facedness of the storyline and gameworld is spiced up considerably by the giggling glee that you can craft for yourself – leaping into the midst of a gaggle of gang members and hitting the ground so hard they’re all knocked off their feet, then picking up their own car and beating them to death with it. Kicking an armoured truck down the road like a football. Watching one grenade set off a chain reaction of boom that sends a dozen enemies spiralling through the air – brilliantly, a lot of the gang lieutenants in this game seem to have chosen to set up base in Explosive Barrel Storage Depots. But most of all, clambering up skyscrapers then bouncing crazy distances from rooftop to rooftop in a joyful scavenger hunt for Agility Orbs (which make you run faster and jump further) ten storeys above the pavement, with the gorgeous neon city spread out below you, turning the game into the funnest 3D platformer I’ve played since Beyond Good And Evil.
How a game can be this badly put together in so many ways and so brilliantly designed in two or three key aspects boggles the mind.
-
All in all, then, I’m a bit more impressed with the FunSquare SuperPlus than I expected to be. It’s a really polished bit of kit, slightly annoying noise issue aside, and it’s been around long enough now that you can pick up some excellent games at reasonable prices – VT3, EDF2017 and Crackdown set us back a total of £50, and all three have been a hit with both the boys and myself. On balance, I still probably recommend the Wii over it for most people, though – the little fella practically oozes charm, and while its library doesn’t seem as extensive its good games (Wii Sports, Zelda, Resident Evil 4, Excite Truck) are really, REALLY good.
So… yeah.
For your edification and education, here are my first impressions. Of it.
The good:
The front-end just works. It’s pretty simple, pretty intuitive and does pretty much everything you want it to with a minimum of fuss. Possibly a first for Microsoft.
The wireless controller is excellent, iffy D-pad aside. The thumb-sticks are a step up from the DualShock’s – more comfortably placed, and just feel a bit better in use. The two analogue triggers are great, too, particularly for anything featuring driving. I think I might have a new favourite gamepad.
(Incidentally, what is it with console manufacturers and compound words? Xbox. PlayStation. DualShock. Wiimote. What’s wrong with a bloody hyphen? Or even – whisper it – a sodding SPACE?)
I really, really like the ability to play my own music in-game. Especially now I seem to have gotten the EggBox to recognise my network drive and don’t need to rip any more CDs to the tidgy 20GB HDD. And, when you’re playing your music outside of a game the visualiser is excellently trippy, almost to the point of hypnosis. When it’s on, I keep expecting Will Ferrell to pop up at the bottom of the screen and shriek “Obey my dog! And KILL THE PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA!” Anyway. Playing the Ace Combat demo to the Top Gun soundtrack was several different shades of awesome.
Which reminds me. The ability to get demos off of Xbox Live is brilliant. And the EggBox handles it in a pretty groovy way, too – you tell it what you want to download and it just gets on with it in the background while you’re going about your day. Compared to the Wii, which a) takes forever to download anything and b) won’t let you do anything else while you’re downloading, it’s a big step up.
Comes with a component lead as standard. A little thing, but it’s more than the Wii managed. No digital audio lead, but you can’t have everything.
The bad:
It’s very noisy when reading game disks or DVDs – about as loud as my PC, particularly on startup, when it sounds like a Harrier jump-jet taking off. This isn’t a problem when you’re playing games, which usually have enough ambient noise to easily drown the racket out, but I could see it being massively annoying watching any movies that weren’t directed by Michael Bay. Luckily, we’ve got a DVD player and a media streamer for that so, you know.
No wireless networking out of the box, and there don’t appear to be any cheap 3rd-party alternatives to the official, ludicrously expensive WiFi dongle. “Luckily”, thanks to BT’s ineptitude, we’ve just had reason to move our router from the bedroom down into the front hallway, so ten squid’s worth of Ethernet cable got the job done.
Xbox Live is a nice service, and you can get most of what I’m interested in it for – demos, patches, cheap little retro and arcade games – for nothing. But access to online multiplayer and the groovy online leaderboards for Live Arcade is £35-40 a year depending on where you buy it from. I’m really not sure I’d use it enough to make that investment worthwhile. But I’ve a horrible feeling that I’m going to end up thinking “well, it’s only £3 a month” and splashing the cash. Because I’m weak and a fool. There’s a lot of overpriced tat in Marketplace as well, but hey – it’s not like you’re being forced to buy it.
The games:
Halo 3
Pretty as hell. I haven’t played a lot of it, though, and it seems to assume you played Halo 2, chucking you quite brutally in media res with very little in the way of explanation. Basically, it seems to be Halo. But another one. Of it. Everything that was right with Halo is still right here – the combat’s still a decent laugh and surprisingly tactical, there are some nice set-pieces, it’s a good slice of fast-moving run-and-gunnery – but the weapons still feel a bit weedy and are generally hard to tell apart. The Halo series has never been massively my thing, but the boys like it. Good value at £0, though.
Forza Motorsport 2
Gran Turismo, but more so. I’ve spent more time with the car paint designer than I have with the actual racing to this point, but that’s largely because the car paint designer is awesome. Another freebie with the console, so I’m not complaining.
Virtua Tennis 3
Winner of the No One Knows In Guitar Hero Award for the most brutal difficulty spike since No One Knows in Guitar Hero. One minute you’re barely conceding a point as you blast all and sundry off the court. Then you get your rank up to about 200th in the world, and all hell breaks loose. Luckily, there’s loads to do while you’re making up the sudden skeelz gap – the minigames that up your player’s stats are, almost without exception, massively good fun – my favourites are the one where you’re serving giant tennis balls at giant tenpins, and the Space Invaders-esque affair where you have to take out tennis ball-spitting robots as they advance slowly down the court. There are also some really ill-advised “player interaction” cutscenes, which do nothing except freak you out with the hideous zombie player models. To be honest, it’s really just Virtua Tennis 2 with tarted-up graphics, but that’s fine because Virtua Tennis 2 was, no pun intended, ace.
Earth Defence Force 2017
Giant ants are invading Earth. You have a gun. That’s it for the plot. And the gameplay. The graphics are a combination of decidedly ropy (your mincing, stiff-limbed character) and the brain-buggeringly spectacular (Death Star-sized motherships hovering low over a fully destructible city as a swarm of ants the size of National Express coaches bear down on you). It’s a silly, budget, B-movie of a game and has become our two-player co-op of choice.
Crackdown
There are just tons of things wrong with Crackdown. It’s Grand Theft Also, but lacking its progenitor’s anarchic sense of fun and fantastic soundtrack. In theory, I like the notion that the fact that your future-cop’s skill progression is slowed down by slaying other police or innocent civilians, so that you’re discouraged from being too cavalier whilst not actually being prevented from going on GTA-style kill-crazy rampages. In practice, way too often your fellow peace officers have the self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming who’s just lost his job and come home to find his wife in bed with two other lemmings. Plus, they’re really, really touchy, repeatedly turning on me for no obviously good reason. There are stunt markers scattered around the city a la GTA, but they don’t seem to be terribly logically placed and usually involve you having to stop and build ramps in order to launch your vehicle through them, which is a bit (ie, a lot) of a chore. And the vehicle handling’s a bit leaden, to boot. When you’re doing race missions that have you trying to pass through a series of checkpoints before the timer runs out, the game doesn’t disable the icons that depict the start of other race missions. These icons are almost indistinguishable from the checkpoints you’re hunting for, making it infuriatingly easy to get yourself led off the garden path. There are loads of guns to use, but absolutely no reason to equip anything other than about five of them – the heavy machine gun, the sniper rifle, the grenade launcher and the two missile launchers. There’s a massively annoying bloke who keeps shouting hints / encouragement / chastisement / random crap at you every two fucking minutes that barely ever has any connection to what you’re doing at that moment and who, so far as I can tell, can’t be fucking turned off. It badly – BADLY – needs a “centre camera” button.
It’s comfortably the most fun I’ve had playing any game this year that didn’t come out of an orange box.
Here’s what makes Crackdown great – you’re not just a future cop. You’re a genetically engineered, super-strong, super-tough, super-fast, super-agile future cop and you’ve been set loose in a massive 3D playground. The relentless po-facedness of the storyline and gameworld is spiced up considerably by the giggling glee that you can craft for yourself – leaping into the midst of a gaggle of gang members and hitting the ground so hard they’re all knocked off their feet, then picking up their own car and beating them to death with it. Kicking an armoured truck down the road like a football. Watching one grenade set off a chain reaction of boom that sends a dozen enemies spiralling through the air – brilliantly, a lot of the gang lieutenants in this game seem to have chosen to set up base in Explosive Barrel Storage Depots. But most of all, clambering up skyscrapers then bouncing crazy distances from rooftop to rooftop in a joyful scavenger hunt for Agility Orbs (which make you run faster and jump further) ten storeys above the pavement, with the gorgeous neon city spread out below you, turning the game into the funnest 3D platformer I’ve played since Beyond Good And Evil.
How a game can be this badly put together in so many ways and so brilliantly designed in two or three key aspects boggles the mind.
-
All in all, then, I’m a bit more impressed with the FunSquare SuperPlus than I expected to be. It’s a really polished bit of kit, slightly annoying noise issue aside, and it’s been around long enough now that you can pick up some excellent games at reasonable prices – VT3, EDF2017 and Crackdown set us back a total of £50, and all three have been a hit with both the boys and myself. On balance, I still probably recommend the Wii over it for most people, though – the little fella practically oozes charm, and while its library doesn’t seem as extensive its good games (Wii Sports, Zelda, Resident Evil 4, Excite Truck) are really, REALLY good.
So… yeah.