Tag: Xbox

Where is Gaming Headed?

Gaming

There are plenty of people out there itching for the announcement of Microsoft and Sony’s next generation consoles.  Personally, I’m not.  The graphics of the current generation are quite good, awesome in fact, and I’m not really in need of “better” graphics.  I could try to speculate on where I think things are going, but instead, I’m going to just list out what I would love to see as the next step.  Seeing as my preferred console is the Xbox, I’m going to talk in their terms…

The great thing about technology is that it keeps getting faster and smaller.  I’d love to see the next Xbox be just another revision of the 360.  I’d want it to be a stand alone hand held system, a portable 360.  However, I’d want it to also be a traditional console.  When totally unplugged of all it’s cables, it’ll be a hand held, with a screen and controls, just like current hand helds.  But when you plug in an HDMI cable and flip the switch, it transforms into a traditional console.  Suddenly it’s playing on your TV and through your surround sound system, and those 360 controllers you have sync up with it just like they do today.

Other peripherals, like Rock Band instruments, would also sync up, and things like the Kinect would continue to be a USB addon to the device.  There would have to be a new disc drive addon since you’d have to lose the internal one to make it portable, and you might need to have external HD addons since drive space might be limited in a smaller unit, mostly because the portable has to make room for a battery.

To make things even better, games, all games, should be able to be purchased through the marketplace and re-downloaded at will, as needed, anywhere you are connected to the Internet.

In either mode, the console should support adhoc multiplayer against other consoles in range.

Catan

Gaming

Almost four months ago, Big Huge Games released Catan for the XBox 360 Live Arcade platform. It is a good example of what to do right and what to do wrong with a game.

The game is a faithful redo of the board game Settlers of Catan. It retains all the fun of the original game, translating it wonderfully into a digital format. Because of this the reception of the game was high, everyone talking about how cool and fun it is, lots of people buying it, lots of people playing it.

On the other hand, right now it really plays best as a single player game. Many people have been reporting for a while now that there is something screwy with the network code. Random drops are fairly common so that its rare you finish a game with all the other people you started with. And then there is the problem with achievements… many players come to a point where they stop getting achievements, not anything being done on their part, they are completing the goals of the achievements but the achievements are not being rewarded. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to enough people that the xbox.com Catan forum consists largely of people asking why they didn’t get an achievement they believe they have earned. The rest of the posts are about disconnections.

Joe Pishgar was the community manager over at Big Huge and he posted a couple of times about a patch being worked on that he said would be available “soon”. That was back on May 15th, about 13 days after the game was released. Three months later and we have no patch. We also have no Joe as he’s moved on to become the community manager over at Sony for Star Wars Galaxies.

I really want to play Catan more, but won’t until the problems are fixed… It was a great design, a good implementation, but with crappy follow through. And, for me, a black mark on Big Huge. If they can’t fix a game as small as this, I have no faith in their abilities as it concerns that new RPG they are working on.

It is a shame that more game review sites don’t go back and re-review games, because I’m fairly certain that Catan would get much lower scores the second time around, especially when you consider most of their good reviews were done within the first week of release. Some problems just don’t reveal themselves in a week.