Be Excellent To Each Other

Manchester, eh?

Yes, I spotted that grand day out thingymajig that the world seems to attending but I'm too partial to my own safety around forty or so slightly rotund nerds.

Being one myself, I testify to the depravity of Manchester.

This post is awful, excuse me...

That Windows phone looks as shite to use as the iphone & other touch screen phones (my big spacky thumbs don't like them). Might be able to live with one if I liked playing games on phones though.


Hello, Arkham Asylum.

Two unsurprising things have been confirmed:
1) games have Achievements, unified with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live
2) it will have a Microsoft-run app store and that will be the only way to get apps onto your device.

I would expect getting into the app store to be strict-ish, as in XNA and the iPhone App Store, rather than simple, as in the Android store.

not liking the cheevos thing at all.

I'm all about maxing out games, if 'games' suddenly includes some piss-poor phone shit then that'll cheapen the whole thing.

then again, I don't even allow PC games on my gamercard.

if it's backwards compatible with WM6 then it'd mean that I could run the awesome PPC version of King's Bounty on there though. That'd be worthwhile.

*splutter* *cough* Yes, that's clearly worse than "100,000 kills in GoW2".

It isn't.

Hmmm, this could be the OS to convince me to ditch the iPhone as that has become my mobile gaming platform of choice (anyone want a black DS Lite with GTA:CW, btw?). It would have to be something special UI-wise, though, and looking at track-record I think going from Apple to MS would be a bit of a backwards step in that regard.

I've just had a Microsoft guy tell me how excited they are to be providing Bing on WindowsPhone7. Only, it's apparently not a search engine, it's a "decision engine". FFS.

Hehe.



No shit, Sherlock.

Cock off, Marketers.

Try having a whinge on Twatter using the #Bing hashtag and enjoy the bombardment of shilling cunts that will come your way.

That's not what I meant by cheap. That particular achv (one that I want absolutely no part of) is drawn-out and grindy.

By cheap I mean that any piss-poor phone app can now provide people with a max.

It'd be like putting gamerscore on XNA games.

Kotaku says it will also be following the iPhone in not having multitasking except for specific MS apps.

It's not quite like that. What they're doing, which I quite like, is having the 'tiles' on the home screen be active and capable of receiving updates. So, for example, your facebook tile will be getting notifications of new updates and displaying them onscreen without you having to actually have the app running, for example.

I think it's quite an interesting approach, and certainly an improvement over just having a little '1' in the corner of the icon, but whether it quite ventures into the realm of being multitasking, I'm not sure.

Some might say that playing shit like Avatar for an easy 1,000GS is cheapening achievements, though. Chinatown Wars deserves at least 200GS in my mind, as it's easily as good as the top XBLA games.

Oooh, nice. I like that a lot.

I think the idea that some games are more 'properer' than others and so 'deserve' more 'gamerpoints' to be amazingly abstract, meta and messed up.

Also, it is kind of silly to actually care about gamerscore and/or achievements.

It's what I would choose to have in the iPhone, too. I think this sort of "managed multitasking" is the right answer on a mobile device. Oh, Microsoft have some sort of background music streaming solution planned, too, apparently. All good stuff.

It's amusing how similar this is to the iPhone in so many ways that, in the past, the iPhone has been criticised for.

It's kind of silly to care about games, in that case.
Some people like them, some people go "meh".

Someone should make "Filmerscore" where you get numbers next to your name for watching DVD extras.

I think it's a really interesting option. What will be more interesting is seeing how much 3rd party devs will be able to take advantage of the functionality.



It's incredibly similar, and I have (from discussions today) been left with absolutely no doubt that this is, like the iPhone, a 100% consumer-focused device. Not that that is much of a surprise.

DVD extras are kind of silly, though.

So are a lot of achievements.

If it means people are starting to understand that a phone shouldn't have an OS and so on that mimics a PC then thats progress really.

The idea of having an app in android to free up the memory your multitasking apps are using seems ri-cock-ulous. Though I'm sure android will fix it eventually.

When the GF sells her car I'm going to padlock the boot and sell the key as 'on disk' DLC.

/twisted metaphor.

What car would windows phone be if it was a car? Car? Or in a pub?

Filmerscore is a good name for people DVD collections that consist of 'Films they'll never watch again until one day they stumble across it on ITV and end up watching the 2nd half, but like to keep because it makes the shelves look impressive to visitors'

/worse metaphor.

It would be a pint of Volvo.

Biggest "why did they do that" moment I've had with WP7S yet: Zune and the phone OS don't have a unified app store. The iPod Touch is a huge win for Apple; it's allows them to sell iPhone OS devices to people who don't or won't buy an expensive contract mobile phone. I can't understand why Microsoft rejected that angle.

Sounds slutty

Or going by the school I'm currently in, can't yet by an expensive contract, but now know who they will be getting...

It does mean tying your music player platform into similar hardware refresh cycles to your phone platform. Considering they won't have a single manufacturer for WP7, but they do for the Zune, I can see reasons to avoid linking them.

I'm only talking in the terms of what we already have. 1000GS for retail releases and 200GS for XBLA games. If Chinatown Wars was upscaled resolution-wise, it would easily sit well alongside stuff like Battlefield 1943 and Darwinia+.

Holy shit, it looks more like an iPhone every day. It won't have copy and paste. WTF?!

There's no way I'd buy a phone without copy and paste. It's a dealbreaker.

I didn't really understand the need for Copy & Paste until it arrived. Now I use it all the time, but more specifically, I use the iPhone's ability to highlight text. Formatting replies on this forum without it was a nightmare!

That's not the only thing that makes it look like an old iPhone. Under NDA unfortunately, but suffice to say I am displeased.

There's an Apple logo covered up by a sticker on the back, isn't there. I knew it.

Looks like that's exactly what they are doing. The Zune HD2 will be the WP7's iPod Touch:

http://gizmodo.com/5489587/zune-hd2-wil ... or-suckers

OK, good, that makes sense. But my god:

ZuneHD owners have been shafted in a rather uncool manner. The device is less than six months old.

I just realised -- they just Osborned the ZuneHD.

viewtopic.php?p=381885#p381885

Still, it's got a while before it comes out, so they might change their mind (even if it has been super-mega-double-confirmed). Have they been dumb enough to say that it "won't need copy and paste" yet?

Yeah, I saw that quote somewhere, Microsoft Dude of some type says "copy and paste isn't imoprtant".

I must admit, I've used copy and paste a total of once on the iPhone, and only then because I didn't realise you could forward text messages (which would have been easier).

I don't think it's a dealbreaker. I didn't feel the iPhone was fatally flawed without it. But I do think it's much more than a nice-to-have; I use it a lot.

I don't get it, is copy and paste a really difficult thing to implement? Why wouldn't you include it?

Quite. Obviously I wasn't exactly being serious with my earlier comment, having bought a 2G iPhone pre-v2 firmware.