Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

A Weekend with the XBox 360

Being the sort of early adopter who buys Japanese PSPs - because not being able to play Ridge Racer for an extra six weeks was quite unsupportable - I suppose it is unsurprising that I took the day off work on Friday to pick up and play my new XBox 360.  Over the weekend, I've played a lot of Project Gotham 3, too much Tiger Woods 2006 (too much, in this case, amounting to about 20 minutes), and a modicum of feature investigation.

The machine itself is a lovely piece of work, both aesthetically and technically.  As usual with Microsoft (since they opened their usability labs in 94 or so), a lot of work has gone into streamlining what you experience as a player.  Well, not so much player as user, since the capabilities of the console go beyond gaming: it's a pretty good substitute for a media center pc, being able to play content not, just from DVDs, but also from content stored on PCs on the same network.

The machine is noisy.  It's the noisiest piece of kit I've had since I shared an office with two HP 60MHz Pentiums a decade ago.  Those were like idling turbines.  You can hear the fans and disk noise of the 360 over the gameplay at times, but you soon edit it out.  Whether others in the flat below found it so easy to ignore, I am less certain.

The games I had were Project Gotham 3 and Tiger Woods 2006.  I'm really looking forward to some of the upcoming releases, particularly Ghost Recon 3, and the sequel to Morrowind, the latest Elder Scrolls title.  PGR3 was a no-brainer, but I was fairly meh about the second title.  Tiger won because I loved Links.

PGR3 is a cracker.  I'd give it a nine out of ten without hesitation.  The gameplay is great fun, the technology smooth, the usability excellent and the graphics spectacular.  There are a couple of reasons that it's not a 10/10 launch title, though.  Despite the addition of a bunch of fun mini-games, it's not the party game it was: bereft of minis and other slower vehicles, it has become solidly twitchy throughout, and a casual gamer can't compete.

The other reason is that the number of cities has shrunk to five, and have become a touch homogenous.  Don't get me wrong, graphically you have never seen anything on a console like the rendering of these cities.  But only the nightime in Vegas and Tokyo really departs from a fairly similar feel to all the tracks.  In PGR2, you really felt the blazing sunshine of Barcelona, and choosing the rennaissance-era centre of Firenze was an act of genius.  PGR3's tracks are beautiful but oddly samey.

This is despite the fact that my TV is a 42" set, though not High Def.  This really struck me struck me: the games look amazingly sharp even without HDTV (although the booths I've played HD setups in really showed what the advantages of the newer standard are).

Tiger Woods 06 is a different story.  If PGR was a 9/10 experience, then Tiger was a three at best.  There are no tutorials: just challenges which serve to train but have no real instructions.  Some of the controls remain a mystery to me, despite my having played the PSP version.  The graphics are very good, especially around long grass.  Water is rendered very well.  But putting and short play in particular would require hours of practise just to get to the point where a basic competition was possible.  On a 42" screen I couldn't see the hole when putting.  This is something of an issue.  It's certainly more of an issue than it would be on a real golf course, where it would at least give me an excuse.

On balance, I think I'll return Tiger soon, and hold out for the under-development next-gen Links title.

Finally, XBox Live! is now thoroughly awesome.  Matchmaking is quick and easy, and the detail is all there in managing the social side (choose people you would like to play with or avoid, rate people, compete with friends for badges and achievements).  I have no criticism of it whatsoever: ni a matter of minutes, without any technical issues, I had my 360 communicating with Live! through the superb wireless bridge add-on, via my wireless router and cable modem, and my existing account switched over with virtually no input needed.