I’m going to start off by grabbing a few snippets of text that I’ve run into on the Internet over the past couple of days, and hopefully pull it together into an editorial of sorts.
The thesis of this editorial is probably best written by this commenter from a recent article on Ars Technica regarding the new Microsoft-authored deal with Warner Music to distribute premium (read: you want me to pay for this?) music videos over Xbox Live Marketplace. His name is Aedile, and this is what he had to say in response:
Hello all. Criterion Games has announced that their again delayed 360-flavored Burnout update (this one’s named Cagney) is FINALLY hitting Xbox Live on Monday, August 4th (no trouble getting that PS3 patch out, huh guys…):
We’re delighted to be able to finally announce a date for the Xbox 360 release of our long-awaited software update - codenamed Cagney.
The update will be available on Monday 4th August.
You got it, folks; I’m talking about Geometry Wars (or, as the Good Reverend DLB would say, “Math Attack”). As I’m sure many of you have heard, Geometry Wars 2 is being released next week (July 30). When I had first heard about it (I was sure it was in development, but the Microsoft E3 press briefing was the first I had heard about any concrete details about it) I was overjoyed! As Khidr succinctly put it, GeoWars 1 was the killer app for the 360 at launch. And then, the bad news started rolling in…
In no particular order, here are two terrible mistakes that they have made with GeoWars 2:
…doesn’t have the same ring to it. And Jeebus knows I’ve been wrong about my predictions before. But I’d call your attention to a couple of interesting pieces of information:
So, Khidr and I just finished completing the single player campaign in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 cooperatively. We’ve touched on it before in previous posts, but co-op is an extremely important part of why I love multiplayer gaming, and weighs in fairly heavily when considering whether a game should be rented, bought, or passed-over completely. (Too Human broke our heart by not following Ozymandias’ Co-op Bil of Rights‘ first tenant: All co-op games should allow players to play cooperatively through the rich, single-player experience. Doing so through suspension of disbelief (ie, when cinematics refer to only a single player) is ok, though not ideal. Jerks.)
Hot on the heels of this morning’s dashboard 2.0 visualization post is a Kotaku-sourced rumor about a THREE-DEE Dashboard!!! ZOMG! I’m not really dropping this one in the “confirmed” bin just yet, but it’s nice to dream, I suppose.
Kind of a busy day today, but I want to point “y’all” to a fairly well-written (and awesomely rendered) post about a particular gentleman’s take on what the dashboard should look like. For all of my waxing about what the functionality should be, this is a great visual representation, and I wanted to be sure it gets some more exposure. Anything he’s leaving out?
Quick note: The Developer Diary #4 for Too Human is now on the Live Marketplace! Special thanks to Rob Semsey from Microsoft Game Studios’ Global PR for following up on this!
Being bitter about the lack of a 2008 Spring Dashboard update is a full-time job, but I guess it’s OK for me to take a moment to stop my seething hatred for Microsoft’s dumbest decision this year to let y’all know about the Xbox 360 License Management Tool. Have fun…or whatever.
I was going through the motions of setting up my new windows mobile phone (an AT&T Tilt, upgraded from my aging Verizon 6700), and got to the part where I… install funambol on the phone to sync with www.scheduleworld.com to let me keep my PIM info synched between my home and work pc’s outlook and thunderbird, and of course, my phone. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. It’s always been a much more functional than it is pretty. The kind of thing that made people think it was an ordeal and recommend the still-unreleased mobileme for $99.00 instead.