SteveStreeting.com

I haven’t been a fan of tower defense games very much, I’ve found them a bit dull and repetitive sometimes, and there’s far too many of them. But Defense Grid has very much hooked me in and is proving to be a lot of fun, and at 800 MS points (or about 7 or your Earth pounds) it’s an absolute bargain.

I think one reason I like it is that there’s no tower damage. Your towers are effectively invincible, which may not be realistic, but it does mean that it makes the game entirely about planning, strategy and resource management. Some tower defense games don’t realise that it’s supposed to be a strategy game, and put all sorts of extra mechanics like enemies attacking and destroying towers etc, but this undermines the core planning game mechanic, turning it into a game of how-fast-can-I-repatch-my-crumbling-towers-if-I-even-get-time-to-notice-at-all. In Defense Grid and other TD games with no tower damage, you succeed or fail based on how well you plan – how you set it up, how you augment and supplement your towers as time goes on (which you should have thought out ahead of time), and watching it play out according to your will, or fall apart because of it. There are no random elements – it’s a little like Chess, and I think that’s a good thing.

I also like what they did with the fail conditions. Instead of stopping creatures getting to a map end point, you have to stop then nicking ‘power cores’ from your reactor and making it off the map with them. The catch is that when you kill an enemy carrying one, it floats slowly back to the reactor, and can be picked up by another enemy, creating the danger of a ‘relay race’ where a really tough enemy can make it through your tougher defenses, and even if they can’t make it all the way back, swarms of weaker enemies can potentially relay it if you don’t take them out fast enough, thus requiring a balance between defending against single tough enemies and lots of small enemies, and stopping you from lazily relying on one primary ‘choke point’ – because the ‘relayers’ might not ever have to cross it if another enemy already took all the damage getting through it. It’s a cunning design idea that works really well.

It looks great too, which helps. And the control system works perfectly on a control stick, which I didn’t expect. And the mechanic of being able to redirect enemies via longer paths with sensible tower placement, and how you can screw it up if you force them to breach this,  is good.

Highly recommended even if you’re not usually a tower defense fan, or perhaps especially if you’re not.

Finally. After months of speculation and general acknowledgement by all except Sony that the PS3 is too expensive for the market, and that no amount of brand loyalty, Blu-ray cross-marketing or theoretical performance advantages were going to outbalance that inconvenient fact, the inevitable has happened and the PS3 is now £50 cheaper in the UK. That’s actually pretty good; we usually get stiffed on prices in Europe so despite not quite being on par – a $100 cut in the US should mean about a £60 cut at current exchange rates, but they do have to hedge their bets there – it’s a healthy amount and I’m sure will help sales.

The new 120GB Slim is interesting too, especially since it’s priced at the same level as the newly-reduced 80GB ‘fat’ edition (as it will no doubt be known from now on); I’m not quite sure how they expect to clear the old stock when they’re priced the same with little difference except a bundled game. Although, I think aesthetically the old machine, despite being bigger, has a nicer looking design; the new one looks a bit plain, having gotten rid of the shiny looks presumably to save on dusting.

I’m semi-tempted, but right now I already have too many games to play for the time I have available – some of that is Fallout 3’s fault; I play a lot of co-op multiplayer games with my wife & friends so I only spend a couple of hours 1 or 2 nights a week playing ‘traditional’ single player games and F3 has gobbled that up for months – and I haven’t even touched the DLC yet. We’re still playing through new Gears 2 content (Horde rocks), and new Rock Band 2 tracks (we buy something almost every week), so really we’re getting loads of play time for our money these days. On top of that, XBLA fills in the remaining slots – if you don’t own Peggle, you have not lived, Trials HD is great,  and Shadow Complex is out today too. I’m just about finding time to play Dead Space a bit – I’m 8 hours in after a month! There are plenty of games I haven’t played yet, and the end of the year will supply more – L4D2, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age maybe. So, I don’t really have time for another games machine right now – I already have 2 I’m not using (DS & Wii). Maybe if my queue dies down a bit….

I wonder if the emergence of the slim edition might finally push MS to produce a slim 360 soon though. Come on guys, the 360 has remained fat, noisy and hot for almost 4 years now, with some improvements but not really enough. The PS3 slim makes it look like even more of a sweating hulk – time to get that machine’s ass on the treadmill!

[edit]I’m disappointed to read they dropped the Linux support with the slim though. It’s the ‘official’ support they dropped, I don’t know if it will continue to be possible to do it anyway (preferably without firmware hacks), but despite the RSX lockout it was quite a nice idea, and I’m obviously always in favour of giving developers tools to play with rather than keeping people at arms length. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, I wouldn’t have thought it would be that onerous to maintain the status quo. Hmm.

Now that I’ve had my 360 fixed & returned, I’m being pestered with requests to fill in a survey about my experience. Ignored the first two, since I was neither ecstatic nor furious about my support experience, so it would make a particularly tedious ‘ok I guess’ response. But, they’re insistent with their damnable reminder emails, so I tried to do it.

I got right to the end screen, and then got this:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80040e31′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

/CSatCalSrvy/LibProcess.inc, line 216

Heh. So, where do I fill in a survey about how badly the survey system worked?

[Edit] Ah well, 4th attempt worked at least. And to be fair, they farm this out to a 3rd party research firm anyway. But, still funny.

I’m still waiting to get my 360 back after it fell on its own sword, but luckily late last week I got confirmation that it’s making its way back to me (or at least, a doppleganger with a service label on it is). It’s now languishing somewhere in Belgium as it meanders through UPS’s various relay stations like some signal trying to evade detection. All in all it will have taken about a month for the repair to go through, with a week of that just being lost by nothing happening with the initial web-registered fault report, and the rest just being dreadfully slow UPS shuttling of boxes (a courier that takes a week to go from Germany to here isn’t really ‘express’ if you ask me – I made it in a day, and FedEx is always much faster than this).

We’ve definitely missed Rock Band the most, especially as there’s been some great DLC in the last few weeks, so we have a queue. I’m looking forward to getting back to Fallout 3 too, but RB will definitely be going back in the machine first when it (hopefully) turns up again next week.

In the meantime we’ve briefly tried out the Left4Dead survival mode on PC (the superior version of the game anyway), which is actually more fun than I expected although quite wearing over time – the main game remains the primary draw. At the same time I noticed the improvements they’ve made to the play tracking on the Steam community, which is really very good. Steam has achievements of course, but on top of that being able to see game-specific statistical breakdowns of favourite weapons, accuracy statistics, how much you saved other people etc is really quite fun to browse through. Here’s my Left4Dead stats for example; there’s not many games in here, picking up only 1 evening’s play, that’s why I know it must be a new feature. XBox Live could definitely learn from this, a bit of cross-pollination between services is always good.

So, following my 360’s demise I was looking up the practicalities of using an alternate borrowed machine temporarily until the repair is turned around. I’ve bought a lot of DLC (mostly Rock Band, but also quite a few XBLA games, Gears maps etc), and I know the license for them is associated with the machine, so I looked up the license transfer tool. All seemed pretty sensible and reasonable – I’d have to download everything again, but that’s no big deal.

Until I read the FAQ and realised that you can only transfer your licenses via this mechanism once every 12 months. WTF?

As I understand it, when a console is repaired, the license transfer is done automatically and doesn’t require you to use this tool (and also doesn’t count against your ‘once per 12 months’ limit). However, what I want to do is to use a borrowed machine until the repair comes back, and really I want to take all my DLC with me in both cases. I’m really not sure if trying to do this will cause the automatic transfer on repair not to work, and leave my DLC stranded on the ‘intermediate’ machine – I’m seeing a few  scare stories of people being told ‘tough’ by XBox support on this when they’ve tried to juggle 360s (usually because of a failure). Therefore, I may not transfer the DLC to the intermediate machine, which is a PITA because it basically rules out Rock Band, Peggle etc for the intervening period. Gah.

I have to be honest here, I have no idea what the hell Microsoft are thinking on this issue, if they’re truly thinking at all. What difference does it make if a customer wants to transfer their DLC to a new machine more than once in 12 months? Maybe they’re afraid that people will use it to ’swap’ DLC, but come on – it’s an all-or-nothing process so not really very useful for that in practice. This just seems to be a completely non-customer friendly, administrative nonsense, which given the failure rates on 360 and the fact that other people are going to want to do exactly what I want to do, just seems nonsensical. Way to encourage DLC purchases, guys – it’s exactly this kind of bullshit that makes people afraid of buying it compared to boxed product.

I was feeling pretty good about the data portability on 360 compared to what I considered was a dumb decision on PS3 not to allow swapping of hard drives, but it seems 360 has its share of dumb decisions on storage too. It appears that neither manufacturer has really got their head around giving the customer the freedom to control their own data, which in this case they have paid for and should be able to take it with them. For Christ sakes, Steam is miles better than this (locking content only to a Steam account, not a physical machine), and even so look how much bitching that originally provoked. Were the people making this DLC transfer policy asleep during that whole debate? It certainly seems so. Limiting the transfer of the customer’s own property would be a bad decision at the best of times, but in the light of the 360 failure rates it’s plain ridiculous.

Yay, I can finally join the not-so-exclusive club of having my first 360 die, with the ever so fashionable E74 error code. I don’t have a launch machine, whose failure rates are legendary, I have the 2nd revision (‘Falcon’), and it’s about 18 months old now.

The ‘Falcon’ chipsets are not supposed to be quite as error prone as the launch machines, but still the failure rates are above what is usually expected of consumer electronics, so I seem to have fallen into that statistic (no official numbers, but thought to be around 16%, or 3-5 times the expected average). The issue is usually the GPU lifting off the motherboard because of excessive heat – the ‘Jasper’ machines dropped the die size of the GPU so this was less of an issue, but the ‘Falcon’ machines only had a die shrink on the CPU – which helps, but not as much.

I knew when I went into this that the 360’s thermal design was poor so I’m pretty resigned about it; it was always a risk, and the RRoD extended warranty made me feel content enough to take that risk given the rest of the deal. Of course, this isn’t the RRoD, but luckily Microsoft just recently added a clause to the extended warranty to cover the E74 error too (which is apparently very similar), so I’ll get it fixed for free. I’ve already logged it, just have to wait for them to send me a box. I also might be able to borrow a ’spare’ from my brother-in-law in the meantime, although I’m travelling next week anyway so I won’t miss it so much in the short term.

Thank goodness for swappable hard drives though – a friend’s PS3 died recently (YLOD) and it was only then that I discovered you can’t move your hard drive to a new PS3 without losing all the data on it. For me, being halfway through Fallout 3 that would suck on a planetary level.

My name’s Steve, and I’m here to admit I have a Peggle problem.

Don’t let Popcap’s family-friendly, cuddly surface fool you. These guys are peddling gaming narcotics in their most concentrated form, throwing the authorities off the scent with unicorn/squirrel characters, smiley faces, jingles and rainbows – but I know their true forms; they are a menace I say, a menace!

My wife has had Peggle for ages on the PC, and I would often make a jokey comment about how often I’d find her playing it. We already had Zuma on the 360 and I had to admit that it was a pretty damn awesome game – forget the ‘casual’ label that’s too often thrown about, it’s a fiendishly challenging game of reflexes, skill and wit that will give any other game a run for its money – and I dare any so-called hardcore gamer to take it on at the higher skill settings, and tell me that it’s just for people who don’t like ‘real’ games.

So, when Peggle finally got ported to the 360, I figured I’d give it a go (since while I still love my PC for gaming, until I get my back fully sorted out I need to spend time away from the PC in the evenings). Big mistake. Before I knew it I’d bought the full game. Last night, I figured I’d have a quick 10-minute go while waiting for my wife to finish up what she was doing so we could jump on Horde or something, and then all of a sudden it was 2 hours later and I still didn’t want to stop playing.

Peggle doesn’t involve reflexes, but it does require a lot of concentration. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a modified, electronic version of Pachinko – ie Japanese pinball (ish). You fire a ball from the top of the screen and try to clear all the orange pegs before you run out of balls. There’s a few wildcards like point multiplying pegs, different shaped & animated pegs, power ups, combo rewards etc to keep it interesting. Very, very simple, but fiendishly addictive. Some people say it’s random / chaotic, but nothing could be further from the truth – in theory, you can predict absolutely everything that happens when you fire that little ball off, if you have the will to calculate it. It’s all just physics after all, and it’s immensely satisfying when you’re on your last ball and need to hit 2 pegs at opposite ends of the screen, and pull off a great rebound shot to do it. I’d say it’s most like a cross between playing pinball, Breakout and performing trick shots in snooker. The ability to control precisely the launch angle of the ball is what makes it so addictive – if the ball was just launched upward imprecisely like in a pinball machine then it would be random, and that would destroy the fun. You know that if you could just learn to better predict where that ball was going to go, you’d be able to get that precious multiplier / clear that advanced level…

Another masterful game by Popcap it seems. Bastards.

Short answer: I really like the new dash for the 360.

The old ‘blades’ system was efficient (excluding Marketplace, which got hugely unwieldy due to the amount of content) but about as attractive as the back-end of a donkey, and pretty confusing for a newcomer. The new, clearly coverflow-inspired aproach is infinitely more attractive and welcoming. Navigation is in essence the same as the XMB on the PS3, only transposed – i.e. up/down switches categories and left/right selects things within a category. I do think the new look is even nicer than the PS3 though, since the amount of box art and themed sections really makes it attractive and varied to look at.

Those worried about speed navigation should like the ‘guide‘ – just pop it up and you basically have a new version of what you used to get from the blades before – only if anything it’s even quicker to use in my experience, since the interface is much cleaner and navigation is more direct now that there’s no need to have promotional material sandwiched in among regular options (since ‘new’ announcements etc now have their own section in the main interface, and also appear as extra pages within the various sections, nicely filtered based on what you’re looking at).

The avatars get most of the attention, which is understandable but really unwarranted, since it’s the main UI that deserves to be paid attention to. The avatars are of course just better quality Miis, and you use them probably about the same amount (ok, maybe slightly more if you use the Friends Channel rather than the guide). I found mine useful just from the standpoint of being able to generate my own unique(ish) gamertag picture at last. Those that think they’re a frivalous addition can just ignore them once they’ve picked a random one.

I take my hat off to Microsoft on this one. It’s clearly a product of the iPod generation and manages to pull off being approachable, highly polished and very functional at the same time. Good job.

Oh, and Fable 2 is definitely quieter and a little faster now I’ve installed it on the hard drive

This is kind of interesting, because I’ve certainly noticed the noise that Fable 2’s data streaming causes:

I only have a regular old-skool 20GB HDD in my 360, but I seem to constantly have around 12GB free anyway so I’d be willing to burn 6.8GB on this kind of noise reduction.

Wow, Fable 2 is getting some pretty impressive reviews (both Edge and Eurogamer loved it). I was already expecting to get it, but the reviews have convinced me to pre-order. I love good (western) RPGs, particularly when they come loaded with character and Fable 2 seems to deliver that in spades. It sounds like for the first time in a while, a game fronted by legendary Peter Molyneux may actually live up to the hype. That’s not to say ‘his’ games haven’t been good in the recent past (and of course he doesn’t really crank the code anymore, he has a team to do that now), just more often than not they’re a bit overhyped and overrated – particularly Black & White, which I thought was a collection of really clever technology desperately crying out for a more entertaining game to inhabit.

Part of the problem is that when your back catalogue includes classics such as Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper (personal favourite) and Theme Hospital, and don’t mind talking frankly with the media, you can quite easily get into trouble with over-inflated expectations. Judging by the reviews it sounds like Fable 2 may be the first game originating from the Molyneux stable in 10 years to fully deliver (or nearabouts) on the jive-talking promises. Kudos to the team on a great job.

I’m a little disappointed that the reviews so far seem to have ignored the co-operative element, but maybe that’s down to the fact that the online co-op is due to be patched in at release (although why couldn’t they find a local mate to play with?). My wife and I will be playing through it completely co-operatively and it would have been nice to hear more about that.

Knowing my luck though it won’t arrive until after next weekend, and then I’ll miss a week because I’m travelling.