nastybun

It’s been a week of new things happening.. now I shall monologue about them.

First of all we have the New Xbox Experience. First impressions are that it’s vastly different from the Old Xbox Experience.. and for the better. Things are presented much better, it seems to run better and there’s a lot of new shineyness about it. The biggest thing is that you can create for yourself an Avatar.. MS’s ‘totally not a Mii’ representation of you that you can build and dress and what not. The realism factor is a little stronger than Nintendo’s Miis, and you can customise the clothes and accessories rather than just the colour of the top.. this gives them the option of selling you more outfits for them, using them as value adds for LE game releases, or handing them out as rewards. It’ll also make it easier for developers to include them into games, as they’ll be easier to fit into a game’s design. I get the feeling that we’ll see a lot more Avatars in games than Miis. The main complaint I have about Avatars is that there’s no way for one not to wear shoes.. which makes it difficult for me to accurately represent myself. Still, they can always sell me the ‘no shoes’ later on.. Otherwise it’s mostly successful. For some reason it takes about 20 seconds for my system to back out from looking at a friend’s profile, but hopefully that’s something that can be patched out…

The other new thing for me is the Games for Windows Live interface. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 (more on that later) which is a Games for Windows Live game. I’m not totally sure why.. it has no multiplayer or any online components.. but it did give me a chance to check it out. It uses the same login and database as Xbox Live, so earning achievements adds to the same gamerscore as my Xbox360 games, which is kinda nice. Its interface has also recently been overhauled apparently… unfortunately it has not been as successful as the NXE seems to be. It’s not a design thing.. it’s a very slick design, everything is where it should be and it’s nice and minimalistic. Unfortunately, the curser appears to have no relation to which button is selected (you’re better off putting the curser near the button rather than over it, and they don’t unselect when you move the curser away), clicking only works on half the buttons, and half the time you just have to close the interface and start again when you’re attempting to do something. Last night I accidently sent a friend a voice chat request when I was trying to message him about how awful the interface is. Apparently the old PC Live interface was rather unfriendly towards using it with a keyboard and mouse, as obviously all PC games are played with a game pad (buy an Xbox360 pad for your PC!), so I guess they’ve not fully ironed out the kinks. I’m not seeing a huge amount of vitriol about this on the ol’ internets, so maybe it’s just my install… or maybe the complaining just isn’t loud enough yet. Still, it’s the internet.. if it’s a wide enough problem, I’m sure you’ll see people complaining about it everywhere pretty shortly.

Next time on nastybun, the weird RAM issues I’ve been having and Fallout 3: is it any good?

Yes.

A noisy restaurant is 100,000 times as loud as a watch ticking. A rock concert is 1,000,000,000 times as loud. Loud headphones are 10,000,000,000 times as loud and a shotgun blast is 1,000,000,000,000 times as loud.

No idea what kind of watch… this probably isn’t very scientific.