Playstation Move…And Other Motion Sensing Gaming

On 03.11.10, In Video Games, By AC Slater

Yesterday at the GDC Sony gave a more in depth demo of their motion sensing controller dubbed Playstation Move. Basically it’s a rip off of the Wii controllers with large glowing balls on top. Now I don’t really care for this type of gaming, sure the Wii was kind of cool when it first came out, but how many of you actually still play your wii? *chirp* *chirp*… Count me amongst those that bought a Wii when it first came out, played it for a month and then went back to real gaming on my Xbox 360, PS3 or PC. As much as I feel there needs to be some sort of new breakthrough as far as how we control and interact with game systems these days, I don’t think that these motion sensing controller wands are the way to go. And honestly I don’t think Microsoft’s Project Natal is necessarily the way to go either. I just don’t think motion sensing controllers of any sort, whether it has a wand or not, is going to get the hardcore gamers to put down the normal controllers that they are used to.

For one, based on demos of the Playstation Move and my experience with the Wii, there’s not the same sense of accuracy with a motion sensing wand that there is with a controller. I tried to play Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and just found myself getting a wicked headache due to the fact that my screen was constantly flashing red from getting shot at. Maybe I’m just bad at utilizing this type of input controller for a first person shooter, but it seems more of a distraction and annoyance to have to point and aim a controller at the screen to get your gun to aim… not to mention way too tiring. There’s no way I could sit there for hours and play a Wii game like I can with a normal Xbox controller, and this is going to be the same for Sony’s Playstation Move.

Didn’t Sony revamp their Dual Shock controller with motion sensing capabilities (or at least accelerometers) once they realized what Nintendo was doing with the Wii? How well did that work out? How many games out there actually utilize the accelerometers in the six axis controllers? I can think of one, Lair, and from what a co-worker has told me, it’s a little hard to control and there’s no way to turn off the movement control and just use the thumb sticks.

There’s also a problem with lag in these games, the Wii seems to handle it pretty well and is actually fairly responsive, but it’s still there. And now from what I’m reading and what I caught on G4 yesterday regarding Playstation Move, there is quite a bit of lag between when you perform the actions and when your character on screen reacts. This would totally kill the immersion into the game for me. The brief demo I caught on G4 yesterday, before going to dinner, was some fighting game that resembled something like Final Fight (I don’t know any recent fighting games, not a fan), but obviously a bit more updated. The movements that the guy demoing the game did were fairly accurately performed by the character on the screen, but about 1/2 second after the guy did them himself. That seems like a whole lot of lag, and while it could have just been lag from the fact that it was a camera recording a TV I still feel like there is going to be some lag in games like that.

I don’t know, overall I’m not a huge fan of this “motion sensing” gaming revolution that Nintendo started, but I am kind of curious to see where it will lead. I know there’s got to be a different way for people to interact with gaming systems, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. Maybe Microsoft’s Project Natal will come out and blow everyone away, but again from the articles I’ve been reading lag seems to be a bit of a problem, so we’ll see.

What are your thoughts on all of this motion sensing that is making it’s way into modern gaming? Do you feel like these companies are abandoning their roots and their original fanbase to try to cater to the more casual gamer? Obviously it’s a business so if they can round those people up and get them to buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 they are going to, but do you really see this as the next revolution in gaming? I mean the Wii has been out for years now and most people that I talk to don’t even play theirs anymore unless they are having a party or something, otherwise it sits and collects dust…. like mine.

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Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 Patch For Care Package Glitch

On 02.12.10, In Video Games, By AC Slater

The Xbox 360 patch for Modern Warfare 2 rolled out this morning to the cheers of many. Finally after weeks of having to deal with idiots who don’t know how to play the game, we get a fix for the unlimited care package glitches that have been plaguing the online system. The reason the patch took longer on the 360 is because while the initial patch was waiting for Microsoft approval, another version of the care package glitch was discovered so Infinity Ward pulled the patch back and updated it to include a fix for that latest glitch. So hopefully this will no longer be an issue, but you never know what people with too much time on their hands will find.

Here’s everything that the patch fixes:

  • Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades sprint speed normalized.
  • Fix for “infinite care package” exploit.
  • Sentry Guns: Improved placement detection, preventing cases of Sentry Guns inside geometry.
  • Model 1887: Bling using Akimbo and FMJ combination now has same range and damage as non-Bling Model 1887’s.
  • Fixes to prevent various XP hacks (including the prevention of negative XP)

So there you have it. Hopefully this will fix a good amount of the complaints for a while and lead to more balanced games again.

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Modern Warfare 2 Getting Yet Another Patch

On 12.21.09, In Video Games, By AC Slater

For those of you with a PS3 the newest title update for Modern Warfare 2 is already live, but those of us with an Xbox 360 will have to wait for Microsoft to put the patch through their testing (ugh). Robert Bowling aka FourZeroTwo updated his Twitter account the other day to let everyone know a little about what’s going into this latest patch.

  • Re-balancing of the 1887 Akimbo Shotguns
  • Fix for Prestige Hack
  • Fix for Private Match Glitch

For those of you that aren’t familiar with what these things mean I’ll give you a quick rundown. The 1887 Shotguns seem to have a ridiculous range and are quite powerful, especially when using them Akimbo (1 in each hand). So thankfully it looks like Infinity Ward will be re-balancing this gun so that it can’t shoot halfway across the map and maybe won’t be as powerful. I obviously don’t know exactly what they re-balanced, but anything is better than nothing I guess.

The prestige hack was a hack that allowed you to download a file off the internet and put it on a memory card (or the hard drive) and use that to somehow get your character to 10th prestige level almost instantly. It really doesn’t change the game at all other than give you some different call signs/titles and an extra class spot, but it was a problem anyways so they fixed it.

And finally the private game glitch where you could basically glitch into a private game with a bunch of other people and gain all sorts of experience points in ridiculous games (like Ground War on Rust). It was kinda fun to play one game the first time it happened to me, but like the javelin glitch it just became extremely annoying after it happened more than once.

So there you have it, hopefully MS will get it together and push this fix through the certification process so we can all go back to enjoying the game the way it was meant to be enjoyed (even though these things really don’t bother me too much, shotgun thing is a little annoying).

Update 12/22: Robert Bowling tweeted out that the patch should start going live to Xbox 360 users starting around 2 AM on 12/23.

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Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM on Xbox 360 – Why?

On 11.19.09, In Music, Technology, Video Games, By AC Slater

Microsoft rolled out the latest little update to the Xbox 360/Xbox Live service this week in the form of a couple applications. You can now access your Facebook, Twitter and Last.FM accounts via the Xbox 360 dashboard. Now I understand that Microsoft is trying to bring all aspects of social media onto their platform and make them easily accessible by it’s users, but why? The only one that makes any sense to have the Xbox 360 is last.FM and I think it’s great that they’ve added support for it, but what am I going to do with Facebook and Twitter on my Xbox?

To be perfectly honest I have not tried out the Last.FM application yet, but just in theory alone it sounds like a perfect match for the 360. It gives you the ability to stream all sorts of music through your TV. Last.FM is a great service that I use on my computer all the time and I think people will use it quite a bit when entertaining guests, etc. However, Facebook and Twitter seem absolutely pointless to use on the 360. Both applications are extremely basic and I can’t see myself ever using them again. I installed them the other day just to test out and see what sort of features they were offering, maybe Twitter would tweet out what game I was playing or what achievement I just received or maybe Facebook would update my status with the same information, but as far as I can tell they don’t do anything really.

The Twitter application is about as basic as you can get, picture what the Twitter.com homepage was when it first started out. It’s basically the updates from all of the people you are following and then a box where you can enter what you are doing, oh and you can access the Twitter trends. That’s it. I don’t know about most people, but I follow a lot of random people that I don’t always want to read about which is why I like TweetDeck and it’s ability to separate people into different groups for easier reading, not so much here. It’s just one long list of updates from all of the people you follow and it only fits about 10 updates per screen. I don’t know, maybe there was a demand for this, but I personally think it’s pointless and will never take the time to log back into it ever again.

Now let’s talk about Facebook. Again, why on the Xbox 360? It makes no sense! The interface is clumsy, it uses the same tile structure that the dashboard itself uses and it barely displays anything on the screen at one time. Maybe I didn’t dive into it enough, but from what I gathered in the few minutes I played around with it, I will never be logging in to it again unless it can do something like show me my Facebook friends that also have Xbox Live and what their gamertag is or something. I know it asked me when I logged in for the first time if I wanted to display my gamertag somewhere within Facebook, I said yes, but I have no idea where it’s displaying it. Maybe this is a feature and I just didn’t take the time to find it, or maybe my friends have the same feelings as me and find Facebook on the Xbox pointless and didn’t even bother logging in.

So are people actually using the Xbox 360 for Facebook and Twitter? I don’t know how many people have a keyboard or the chatpad hooked up to their 360 (not me), but it takes a damn long time to type anything using the on screen keyboard even if it is only 140 characters. So I don’t know, are you guys using this? Did you try it out at least? Am I missing the point of all this? Do the apps have the ability to update my Twitter with games I’m playing? Someone please tell me what I’m missing here, why would Microsoft waste their time doing this?

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Microsoft Banning More Modded Xbox 360’s With Leak of Modern Warfare 2

On 11.02.09, In Video Games, By AC Slater

This should be common sense by now to those that have a modded Xbox 360 console, but there are are still idiots out there that think that they can get away with playing a game that’s not even out yet, on xbox live and not get banned. I understand that there are stealth patches and all sorts of other ways to make it so Microsoft can’t tell you’re playing a burnt game, but guess what, if you play a game online it attaches itself to your Gamertag whether it’s patched or not, therefore Microsoft can see that you’re playing it. So despite the fact that you took all necessary precautions in hiding the fact that you’re playing a burnt game, you can still be banned for playing a leaked game if your console is signed in to xbox live… oh yeah, you don’t have to actually play the game online either. As soon as you put the game in, if you are signed in to xbox live at all, the game shows up on your gamertag thus Microsoft can tell you are playing it even if you’re not playing multiplayer matches.

If you want to play a pre-release game and not have your console banned, disconnect from Xbox live completely and don’t sign in until the game is released. If you get achievements while offline, as soon as you sign on to xbox live it will send those achievements to the system, thus showing that you played a game you shouldn’t have. This isn’t a huge deal if the game is already out, but if Modern Warfare 2 starts showing up attached to your Gamertag and the game isn’t even out yet MS is going to get a little suspicious.

Now I’m not saying that everyone is going to get banned for playing these games, but Modern Warfare 2 leaked a couple days ago and Microsoft has already started banning people. I’m not saying that they were playing MW2, but this is a pattern with Microsoft, they did it with Halo 3 and other high profile releases so just be smart if you’re playing a game that doesn’t come out for a week.

And this leak is why all of this new information about MW2 is starting to come out like the nuke at the 25 kill streak level and other stuff which I’m not going to post, you can find that elsewhere.

Update 11/11/09: I just wanted to touch on a few things I’ve read over the past couple days and after looking at the logs of how people found this post, I wanted to touch on some of the questions people have typed into google that brought them here. The basic idea behind modding the Xbox 360 to play illegally burnt games is flashing the firmware on the DVD drive. The firmware is basically the software that tells the DVD drive how to work and what to read. There is no “chip” that needs to be installed in the Xbox 360 in order to give it the ability to circumvent the game protection, all you need to do is pull out the DVD drive, hook it up to a computer, run some special software and BAM, modded. So knowing that, it seems as though Microsoft has found a way to read the firmware version off of your DVD drive via the internet, they then compare it to the known legit firmware versions that run on un-modded systems and ban those that don’t match. Now, this information could be completely wrong, but it makes sense. I know there was rumor in the past that MS could detect some weird wobble to a burnt DVD as opposed to a legit one, whether it was an actual wobble or the speed the disc spins or what I’m not sure, but that was the rumor in the past. But this new method seems a lot more precise in determining which consoles have been modified. And if this is the new method MS is using, even if you are playing a legit copy of a game on a modded system, the firmware will still show up as modded and you will still be banned.

With that in mind, some people have been complaining that they have been banned yet they claim to have a legit system that they never modded. Ok, either they are lying, which could easily be the case, or they unknowingly have a modded system, which is more likely. Say you don’t want to spend $200 on a new system because you’re afraid it may die on you (which it most likely will) so you head to Gamestop or eBay instead and pick up a cheaper used one. There is no way for Gamestop to tell whether or not the system is modded short of putting a burnt game into every trade-in system and seeing if it plays, which they do not do. The other way you could unknowingly have gotten a modded system is if you’re console got the RRoD (Red Ring of Death) and you had to send it in to Microsoft for repair. A lot of the times when MS gets a system in for repair, rather than actually repairing the original system they will send out a refurbished system instead and it appears as though they do not check every system for legit firmware. There have been posts on many forums from people who have bought a refurbished system or gotten one back from MS that has modified firmware on it. So my advice is if you get the RRoD and have to send it in, make sure you document all of the serial numbers of your system as well as the one you get back, and if you get banned you may be able to use that information to your advantage, but I really don’t know if that will work. My other advice is don’t buy a refurbished system if you don’t want to risk getting banned, or get a hold of 1 burnt game to test a system before you buy it, just to be sure, there’s really no other way to know.

And as far as I’m aware there is no way to get MS to reverse the ban and it’s permanent, I’m sure they hear people claiming their systems weren’t modded every day, so good luck getting them to believe you. And it is your console that is banned not your Xbox Live Account (Gamertag) so if you were to buy a new Xbox 360 you should be able to use the same XBL Account.

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