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Actually we really don't see it as a threat. When you talk about a threat, we actually see a couple of things. First of all, when you look at the digital download space, 95 percent of the games taht are downloaded today are on the PC side, the majority of which are casual. About 2 percent of the entire console market is downloaded today, and that's a growing rate that's slightly less than the actual boxed product on video games. So the console market really today consists of what we call microtransactions, where you add the extra maps, where you add the extra pieces. So there's very little of the full game downloaded that is actually taking place on the console side.

What we see is that the games are incredibly complex, and with the complexity - and espe

cially with the investment that they actually have as well both in terms of time and money - we actually see that there is an increased need for someone to explain the game.

• Downloads in, Blu-ray out in the near future
  
• Downloads to replace traditional media within 10 years?
• Microsoft official reflects on digital distribution

Actually we really don't see it as a threat. When you talk about a threat, we actually see a couple of things. First of all, when you look at the digital download space, 95 percent of the games taht are downloaded today are on the PC side, the majority of which are casual. About 2 percent of the entire console market is downloaded today, and that's a growing rate that's slightly less than the actual boxed product on video games. So the console market really today consists of what we call microtransactions, where you add the extra maps, where you add the extra pieces. So there's very little of the full game downloaded that is actually taking place on the console side.

What we see is that the games are incredibly complex, and with the complexity - and espe

cially with the investment that they actually have as well both in terms of time and money - we actually see that there is an increased need for someone to explain the game.

• Downloads in, Blu-ray out in the near future
  
• Downloads to replace traditional media within 10 years?
• Microsoft official reflects on digital distribution

Actually we really don't see it as a threat. When you talk about a threat, we actually see a couple of things. First of all, when you look at the digital download space, 95 percent of the games taht are downloaded today are on the PC side, the majority of which are casual. About 2 percent of the entire console market is downloaded today, and that's a growing rate that's slightly less than the actual boxed product on video games. So the console market really today consists of what we call microtransactions, where you add the extra maps, where you add the extra pieces. So there's very little of the full game downloaded that is actually taking place on the console side.

What we see is that the games are incredibly complex, and with the complexity - and espe

cially with the investment that they actually have as well both in terms of time and money - we actually see that there is an increased need for someone to explain the game.

• Downloads in, Blu-ray out in the near future
  
• Downloads to replace traditional media within 10 years?
• Microsoft official reflects on digital distribution

Not only is today Friday, but it’s also Black Friday (which marks the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season in the United States). Many determined bargain hunters grudgingly wake up before the sun breaks the horizon in order to participate in the ultimate hectic shopping experience. For others, the deeply discounted offerings are not nearly enough of a temptation to leave the incomparable comfort of their warm bed. I would definitely be in the latter group so while I hit the snooze button one more time, please enjoy captioning another Halo 3 screenshot (after recapping last week’s entertaining answers of course!).

• “All the other guys on the team laughed when they replaced Jimmy’s vaseline with gasoline.” (TheRenewedValor)
• “Wow, Grif, that’s gonna blow Caboose’s ‘lighting a fart’ trick out the water at the Christmas party!” (MK28)
• “I think he has the term “fire in the hole!” a bit backwards.” (A Shaky Shotgun)
• “After holding the flashlight between his legs, the Spartan proceeded to use shadow puppets to recreate the Battle for Reach.” (Surrender)
• “When Blue came looking for water every one thought he just ate something really spicy. Red knew better.” (retinence)
• “In retrospect corpse-humping an incineration kill is a VERY BAD IDEA…” (sleepymarine)
• “It was when his armor turned red and fire started shooting from his body that Joe decided it was time to find a better-fitting suit that didn’t chafe so much.” (Trace)

I must say, I don’t think any amount of anti-chafing cream will help that problem! Besides, if you’re anything like me chafing is the least of your worries today. I know I’m still recovering from the overindulgence of yesterday which brings me to this next image. It is my opinion that this Spartan clearly had a bit too much to eat at last night’s Thanksgiving dinner (much like I did!) but what is your witty caption for this rather unique screenshot?

Author: TANGO8888

Capcom shoots down Bionic Commando, new Street Fighters on Wii originally appeared on Nintendo Wii Fanboy on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 09:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pizza Grease Memories

During my formative gaming years of the early- to mid-1980s, I spent much of my free time at the local Straw Hat pizza parlor. Located less than 10 minutes from my house by bike, Straw Hat featured a special area of the establishment that was dedicated to arcade games. Crammed with the hottest new cabinets, Straw Hat’s makeshift arcade drew a menagerie of gamers from the local area, each with pockets full of quarters and one goal in mind: high scores.

Straw Hat’s arcade games not only attracted nerdy little kids like me, but it was also a hangout for some of the seedier teenagers and adults from the surrounding neighborhoods. Hyperactive, long-haired, pimple-faced rockers with faded Ratt t-shirts, 30-something go-nowheres still living at home and getting an allowance from their mothers, and burned-out stoners zoning out and forgetting where they are at and what they are doing are but a sampling of Straw Hat’s rogues gallery of gamers.

I quickly discovered the optimal times to visit Straw Hat during which I could steer clear of the shadier patrons. Still, there were those few unavoidable times when I’d end up playing shoulder to shoulder with some pretty questionable fellows.

I’m still filled with fear when I think back to being yelled at by one particularly fierce Gauntlet player. I wasn’t necessarily appreciative of the swearing that was blasted in my direction and in my honor, but at least I picked up a few choice combinations of curse words that I’d never heard before.

No matter whom it was that frequented Straw Hat on any given day, there was nary a person immune to allure of being able to permanently make a mark of their gaming prowess by scoring enough points to enter their initials on a game’s high score screen. There were a handful of diehard Straw Hat regulars who continually jostled for the number one position, proudly putting their initials on display.

And, on the other side of the token, there were jokers who took the golden opportunity to perform electronic graffiti by entering their initials as FUK, DIK, ASS, or any other number of clever three-letter profanities. I only managed to claw my way to the bottom of the high score charts on a few rare occasions, but it still was enough to make me feel like I was riding on air as I peddled my bike back home.

A Lack of Belonging

My allowance wasn’t hefty enough to warrant Straw Hat gaming as often as I’d have liked, so a great deal of gaming during that period of my life was at home. Even there, high scores mattered to me, and provided a significant way for my sister Sara and me to engage in some healthy sibling rivalry (save for hurt feelings or even a punch in the shoulder from time to time). Being 8 years younger than my sister meant I didn’t get to stay up as late as she was able to, and it always seemed to be while I was asleep that my top scores were bested.

These were the days of the Atari 2600 (at least in my house—we weren’t lucky enough to upgrade from that until after the NES era!), and since the game cartridges didn’t provide an option to save scores, I often would argue the validity of Sara’s alleged accomplishments, but my mom would always chime in as the neutral observer, verifying my sister’s prowess. Sadly, Sara passed away a few years ago, but our epic battles for high scores make up some of my favorite gaming memories of all time.

It wasn’t long after this period in my life that scores began to lose meaning in many games. I recall Super Mario Bros. as the first game in which I realized that the score didn’t really have any value toward the overall experience of navigating the levels. Case in point: each coin you collect results in your score increasing by 100 points.

However, these points in and of themselves don’t provide much benefit to the player. Instead, it’s the amount of coins gathered that holds the true value, with an extra life being awarded every each time 100 coins are collected. Thus, collecting coins has a purpose, but the score assigned to them actually does not. Needless to say, as much as I’ve always loved playing Super Mario Bros., I don’t think I ever once put much thought into how high my score was.

Though some gamers may argue that score does matter in games like Super Mario Bros., to me it just seems like an unnecessary carryover from previous game design paradigms. In other words, I believe the reason so many developers continued to include scores in games whose design didn’t necessarily require them was because, quite frankly, that was what had always been done. As a result, countless games continued to incorporate score tallies that didn’t seem to have any purpose other than just to exist for the sake of being there.

So, to summarize, Super Mario Bros. is but one example of a game in which the score has little bearing on the overall experience. Does having a higher score make the process of guiding Mario through the levels significantly more thrilling? I don’t believe so. For me, the beauty of playing Super Mario Bros. is in clearing what are truly unprecedented platforming challenges rather than concentrating on the score I amass doing so.

Relocation and Evolution

Naturally, over time, scores began to disappear from many games altogether. Or, in other cases, they evolved into something else. In a game like Phantasy Star Online, for instance, your score is essentially the experience points you gain from slaying monsters, and the leveling up of your character is the reward you get for “scoring” well in the game.

That’s not to say that score-based games ceased to exist, but I believe they became much more niche or simply fell into a few specific categories. Puzzle games, for example, are an excellent showcase of games in which score continued to matter. When I received a Gameboy for Christmas in 1989, I didn’t care much about my score in Super Mario Land, but I sure was preoccupied with the number of lines I could clear in Tetris. “Shmups” also became safe havens for score fiends, with some shooters incorporating scoring systems so intricate that sometimes I’d think I needed a mathematics degree to interpret them.

But even though high scores continued to hold importance in some games, the decline of arcades meant most gaming was taking place in people’s homes, with bragging rights often being limited to the small circle of one’s family and friends. Sometimes game magazines would publish reader-submitted high scores, and fans would send in photographs of their television screens to validate their rankings.

I was never good enough to go to that extreme, but I still took the time to enter my initials into any game I ranked highly in, sometimes even getting saucy and putting in something a little inappropriate just to make myself chuckle. However, since I had very few friends or family members who were into gaming, high score rosters were important to me mostly for personal vanity and nothing more.

The Return of the Score

For better or worse, there’s no denying that the Internet has truly revolutionized global information transmittal. It’s pretty incredible and more than a little frightening to realize that information can be exchanged at such a rapid and widespread rate. Anyone who has had nude photos unwontedly spread online can attest to this fact.

In terms of gaming, I believe the Internet revitalized a sense of community that had long since disappeared since the heydays of arcades. Of course, the interconnecting of gamers has also brought with it some pretty vulgar aspects, namely unsavory characters who take every opportunity to question your sexuality, insult your mother, and call you every racial slur in the book. But looking beyond these negative factors and even beyond positive cooperative play, gaming’s intermingling with the Internet has allowed for something that I consider truly wonderful to arise: online leaderboards.

Though it can be disheartening to realize that my global rankings in many games are embarrassingly low, what makes online leaderboards most alluring is seeing how you rank against your friends. In that sense, the spirit of competition is back and stronger than ever, and whenever I play a game that supports online leaderboards, I’m always anxious to see how I stack up against my friends. Discovering that one my pals has bested my score since the last time I’d played is often enough to spark a fire under me to reclaim my position above them.

Granted, most popular modern games still don’t support traditional scores. What would be the point of keeping track of score in a point-and-click adventure game like Sam & Max, for example? But the advent of global competition via the Internet and online ranking boards has definitely had an impact on the creation of a greater number of score-based games. A quick glance at the types of games available on Xbox Live, Playstation Network, or WiiWare will reassure any gamer that competition via scores is not only alive and well, but in some ways it’s perhaps even healthier than it’s ever been.

In fact, scores are so healthy that an entirely new type of score—namely, the Xbox 360’s gamerscore—has been cultivated in the past few years. In this case it’s not necessarily one’s score for any particular game that matters as much as the cumulative score obtained from meeting certain criteria for the various games played on the system.

Far too many players go out of their way to play games they’d probably be better off not wasting their time on just to snag points for their gamerscores. I shudder to think how many relationships have broken up because gamers have chosen raising their gamerscores over spending time with their significant others!

And even for gamers like my brother-in-law Thomas who have yet to fully embrace the Internet as a way to play and connect with other gamers, the quest for high scores is a way in which he’s been able to bond with his son Mario.

Missus Raroo and I purchased Link’s Crossbow Training as a gift for Thomas on his birthday this past year, and he and Mario still regularly play the game, gleefully aiming to beat other other’s top scores. I can only imagine how obsessed Thomas will become with attaining top scores once he finally enters the addictive world of online leaderboards, not to mention learning what a gamerscore is.

My son Kazuo is still too young to play video games, let alone understand what high scores are. But I have a feeling that sooner rather than later he’ll become hooked on games, and I’m looking forward to the day he furiously works to beat Daddy’s top marks.

Scores may not have relevance in all games released these days, but I’m glad their importance still exists and, with the ever-growing increase in gamers using the Internet, they’ll no doubt continue to gain even more value to players. That said, high score rosters filled with names like MastaGangsta, xxSephiroth987xx, or WhiteBoi420 just don’t have the same silly allure as those containing initials like FUK, DIK, and ASS!

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

Downloading the update and installing it only takes 5 or 6 minutes. This is one advantage that Microsoft has over Sony, faster downloads and updates. It took 3 or 4 times as long to update LBP (which I also got yesterday, but that is for another post) to version 1.03 than it took to completely change my Xbox dashboard. Sony, you really need to fix that. Anyway, after the download and install is complete I was then required to select a virtual me. Yes, avatars are mandatory now. Is that a bad thing? No, I actually had a bit of fun selecting my avatar from the 8 standard choices, then customizing it to my liking. The change features tab has 9 choices in customizing your virtual dude (or dudette). You have the option to adjust your hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, face (facial features such as moles and freckles and facial hair are selected here), chin, mouth, and skin color and body (height and weight are adjusted here). Plenty of options for everyone.

Is that all you can do to your avatar? Nope, you can also select what clothes you want him or her to wear. There are 8 options for adjusting your avatars appearance here. You can choose what top, headwear, makeup (eye shadow and lip color), bottoms, head accessories (glasses and earrings), dress up (a white morning suit and a tan formal suit are here), shoes, and body accessories (wristwear, rings, gloves). The last option is the ability to save and name that special outfit that you just made. From here you get to take your gamer picture. You can zoom in or out, turn your avatar to the left or right, move his or her head around, and take whatever picture that you like. You want to take a picture of the top of your head? Feel free. How about the back? That’s OK, too. You can preview the picture and then save if you like it. If you are done messing around with the digital you, you can either start over (if you are break mirrors ugly, you may want to take this option) or save and exit. After saving your avatar he does a little fist pump and a little jig. Now, onto the meat of the update, the dashboard itself.

My first impression of the NXE? I like it. The old dashboard just didn’t do it for me. It felt like a step backward on a machine trying to be a step ahead. I never had an original Xbox, but the blades felt like they would have been more appropriate on that machine, not a next gen console. This update changes that for me, it looks cleaner, is easier to navigate, and seems to be organized a lot better then it was. I know some people will disagree with me for saying this, but the NXE has a similar setup to the XMB. Turn the XMB 90 degrees clockwise, use phrases instead of icons on the up/down portion of the bar and use tiles with descriptions and picures on them instead of the option choices for the left/right bar and you have the NXE. Look, I will be honest here, I think the XMB succeeded where the blades failed because of simplicity. The XMB was uncluttered with too much unneeded information and advertisements that the blades were littered with. Having an NXE that takes a few cues from the XMB is not a bad thing, and I applaud Microsoft for realizing it.

Starting out on the new dashboard you have several choices that are called channels. It starts with the Spotlight channel and goes to the My Xbox channel, Game Marketplace channel, Video Marketplace channel, Friends channel, Inside Xbox channel, the Events channel, and finally, the Welcome channel (this channel can be set to hide if you don’t want it). I can’t stress enough how clean and uncluttered the new system is. Finding the channel I want is as easy as pushing the left stick up or down. When you hit the channel that you want, say the My Xbox channel, you will see additional tiles appear to the right of the main one. Again, using the left stick, you can move left or right to select which subchannel that you want. If you want to see your achievements for example (and who wouldn’t?) select the My Xbox channel. From there you will see (if your profile is signed in) your avatar standing there in front of the second tile. Select that subchannel, then move to the right. From there you will see that each game you have played will have it’s very own tile, and on these tiles, you will see all the acheivements for that game.

When I say every game I mean every game is shown. If you’ve played Spongebob just to pad your gamerscore, a tile will show up. Played a last gen Barbie game recently, yep, it’ll be there too. On each tile you will see the title of the game, a couple of bars on the right side (signifying the gamerscore and the number of achievements unlocked from that title), date last played and all the achievements available for that game shown below. I love gaming, but I’m obviously not a gamerscore whore as my tiles show. I don’t have any of the titles know for score padding and even have a pretty good amount of locked achievements from the games that I have played. Maybe I’ll get to those in the future. The bottom line is that with this new system all your information for a specific title is available with just one glance. Instead of having to drill down into a couple of menu options, it’s all in plain sight for everyone to see.

Now, the big question. How is the marketplace handled on the NXE? Is it still a pain to try and find that title that you want? Starting off, there are two ways to get to the Marketplace channel. The first is using the main channel options by scrolling up or down to get to the Game or Video Marketplace channels. The second way is to push the Y button while on the Spotlight channel to go directly to the Game Marketplace channel. From here you have the option of selecting All Games, Arcade, Game Add-ons, Community Games, Xbox Originals, Themes and Gamer Pictures, Game Demos, and Game Videos. All of the previous options have 3 main selection tiles asocciated with them. You can select from a New Arrivals, Most Popular, or Browse tiles. These options are pretty self explanatory and basic, no need to go into detail. Now, let me walk you through something that I found interesting. Say, you see that Xbox Originals has just added GTA: San Adreas. Hit the A button on that tile and it takes you to another section with 5 tiles in it. The first shows the price and purchase options, pretty much the same as the old dashboard did. The next title over is the featured downloads tile, not much interesting here. The next tile over is where the new stuff starts. Images and screenshots, about damn time. Now, you can finally see what you are getting before you buy it, granted, not such a big deal with the original titles, but very welcome with gamer pics and themes. The next tile shows some basic information and features that the game has. Finally, the last tile has a full description of the game. What I like about this tile that was fixed from the old dash is that you can scroll the description up and down instead of waiting for it to do it automatically. New features, I love it.

Here’s something else new, Community Games. As the description on the NXE says “user-created indie games that are not reviewed by ratings boards.” So, some fruit off of the XNA tree has arrived. These are independently developed games that are being sold for 200-400 Microsoft points. These games follow the same basic description format as all the other titles do on the Marketplace, to include a full description and screenshots. There is one difference though. Since these titles are not reviewed by the ESRB they do not have a rating attached to them, enter you and me. These titles are reviewed instead by the community. They are rated from a 0 to 3 scale (0 being none) on violence, sex and mature content. This way little Timmy’s mom knows what he should and should not play, just as she would with traditional games. There are only 16 Community Games right now, but expect that number to grow in the next few months.

I think that covers all the basics, oh wait. I forgot about the new harddrive install option. How could I let that slip my mind. This is one feature that I have been really interested in. My main question is not about load times (I really couldn’t care less about that) but whether or not the 360’s loud disc drive will be silenced by this addition. Let’s try it out, shall we? My choice of game to install first is Fallout 3. A decently sized game to start things out. After you insert the disc, go to the My Xbox channel and hit the Y button. This will bring you to a tile with a couple of options on it. One of these options is install to hard drive. After selecting that option the installation begins. Installing the game itself took about 10 minutes to do, not so bad, after all, it’ll be worth it if I could actually hear the game while playing it. Now the verdict. The 360 is indeed quiet while playing the game after the install. I started up Fallout 3 to hear…nothing at all.

OK, now I’m completely sold on this NXE thing. There are some great additions to the old formula that make the 360 easier to use and better looking too. I haven’t spent any real time with this yet, so I can’t say that everything is perfect. I just haven’t ran into any problems yet.

Change Is Nigh

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