COR! Flashback gets an upgrade for XBLAH/PISSYNAN

Saw the Double Dragon II remake and thought it looked like something that would have came out in the early days of XBLAH, when they were really pushing arcade Contra. Just tried the demo, and Jesus fucking Christ, I wasn't wrong! It's really charmless and mediocre, and the framerate's about as solid as Stunt Race FX's...

- I Am Alive, 480 MP (60% off)
- Gotham City Impostors, 600 MP (50% off)
- Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, 200 MP (75% off)
- Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, 320 MP (60% off)
- Lara Croft The Guardian of Light, 600 MP (50% off)
- HELL YEAH! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, 480 MP (60% off)
- Bionic Commando Rearmed, 320 MP (60% off)
- Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, 480 MP (60% off)
- Black Knight Sword, 400 MP (50% off)

Dorito's crash course 2 (free)

http://majornelson.com/2013/05/08/arcad ... -course-2/

Is it good? Is it worth 1600 moon points? Will it be half price soon?

LIVE Activity for week of May 27

Xbox 360 Top LIVE Titles (based on UU’s)

Call of Duty: Black Ops II
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
EA Sports FIFA Soccer 13
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
NBA 2K13
Halo 4
Battlefield 3
GTA IV
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Skyrim
Modern Warfare 2
Borderlands 2
Halo: Reach
EA SPORTS NHL 13
Gears of War 3
Forza Motorsport 4
Madden NFL 13
Doritos Crash Course 2
Gears of War: Judgment
Assassin’s Creed III

Please note that any funds we deposit into your account at the time of the transition will expire one year from the deposit date.

One other thing from the E3 conferences - Microsoft points are going away

http://support.xbox.com/en-US/billing-a ... retire-faq

One *big* thing to note from this is that they will convert your existing points balance to 'cash' at some point and when that happens that 'cash' has an expiry date of 12 months.

So if you dont spent it it will vanish

So they're punishing customers for the crime of 'giving them money' due entirely to the fact that they made a business decision to invent an online currency no one else wanted? That's just...wow.

unless all cash deposits last only a year (which would be terrible)

So what's the exchange rate, currently?

How will you ensure that I will get a currency credit that is equivalent to what I paid for my Microsoft Points?
To make this a seamless and positive experience for our customers, we have considered many factors to ensure that the amount deposited in your Microsoft account will be of equal or greater marketplace value than your Microsoft Points.

Xbox 360

Games with Gold: Beginning in July, we will release two free games per month to Xbox Live Gold members on Xbox 360. This includes favorites like “Halo 3” and “Assassin’s Creed II.” And it starts right now, with the download of “Fable III,” yours to keep on Xbox 360.***

And the newly slimmed (again) 360 : http://www.whosay.com/larry/photos/356389?wsref=tw

Summer of Arcade returns for what promises to be another exciting year of great games on Xbox Live. It doesn’t matter what kind of games you like, we’ve got a diverse line-up of games with something for everyone including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows from Activision, Flashback by Ubisoft, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons by 505 Games, and Charlie Murder from Microsoft Studios. Summer of Arcade kicks off August 7th.

Xbox One Achievements

Today we talked about some of the changes to the new achievements system coming with Xbox One. We just got done hearing from Chad Gibson, Principle Group Program manager for Xbox Live Gaming features and Mike Lavin, Sr. Global Product Marketing manager for Xbox Live on our live broadcast. This morning, we asked Cierra McDonald to explain some of the achievement changes in greater detail for us. Here is what she wrote for you guys

Ahoy! My name is Cierra McDonald. I’m from Chicago, I’m an Illini (I-L-L!!!), and most pertinently, I’m the Program Manager for the Xbox Live Achievements service. My love of gaming started as a wee child, playing Super Mario Bros. at home and joining friends on Altered Beast and Contra at the local arcade. My family’s team sport is Boggle. And apropos of nothing, I once shattered my elbow – or as my surgeon once put it, it’s like Humpty Dumpty fell onto a diamond surface. Fun facts!

Achievements are like a delicious gravy (or a fudge sauce, for the more dessert-minded) on top of a developer’s tasty meal of a game. Playing the game is fun by itself; and achievements add an extra layer of discovery, exploration, and accomplishment that reinforces the natural enjoyment of the gameplay. For Xbox One, my team (an incredible group of smart, hardworking folks) and I have rebuilt the Achievements system to be more powerful and more flexible so that developers and publishers can deliver more interesting, complex, and fulfilling goals and rewards to you. What exactly does that mean?

Let’s start with what you get.

Xbox blazed the trail back in 2005 by introducing Xbox Live Achievements as a metagame whose cumulative score – Gamerscore – spans across games on every Xbox Live platform. Many of today’s gaming systems followed our model and now offer achievements or badges as well. With Xbox One, we are once again breaking the mold and this time, we want consumers to reap more tangible benefits. In addition to Gamerscore, which will remain as a critical part of the Xbox gaming experience (and yes, your Gamerscore from Xbox 360 will carry forward to Xbox One – there’s only ONE Gamerscore (see what I did there?)), consumers can now unlock digital artwork, new maps, unlockable characters, and temporary stat boosts via achievements. And this is not limited to games! Other Xbox One applications such as video and music apps can now use Achievements to bring you awesome sneak peek content, early access, or subscription extensions. Only games will give you Gamerscore.

Cool, you can earn cool stuff with Xbox LIVE Achievements. Let’s talk about how they work.

There are now two types of Achievements: achievements and challenges. An achievement is probably already familiar. There’s a goal or activity you must accomplish and a reward that you receive upon completion. You can unlock an achievement at any time, be it on a game’s launch day or 3 years later. I guess you can say an achievement is like a promise in that sense. A challenge, on the other hand, is more like an opportunity – better grab it while you can! It is also comprised of a goal and a reward; however, challenges are time-bound (as in, real life time). That means you can only unlock during its eligible time window, and if you get close but don’t complete the goal when it ends… *Kanye shrug*

Achievements and challenges are both officially considered Xbox Live Achievements, so they inherit many of the same benefits:

You can unlock them and win their rewards;
Once unlocked, they are saved to your achievement history;
They each have an icon to visualize the cool thing you did;
They often are associated with a Game DVR capture to show your friends that you are better than they are
Developers can release more of them after the game’s initial release (more on that in a bit).

There are also some notable differences between them:

Challenges are time based. As just noted, challenges are only available for a certain period of time. Only your activity during that timeframe will count toward unlocking the challenge. Achievements do not expire, so you can unlock them at your leisure.

Challenges do not give out Gamerscore. We want everyone to have the same shot at increasing their Gamerscore to its highest potential. Since challenges are intentionally temporary (an opportunity) and achievements never expire (a promise), only achievements may offer Gamerscore as a reward.

Challenges may cross titles, but achievements cannot. Achievements cannot be shared across titles whereas challenges are allowed to span multiple titles.

Challenges can be unlocked by the community. Community challenges are typically goals that exceed what a lone player can accomplish in the given period of time. Imagine, for example, a game releases a headshot weekend challenge that requires players to cumulatively headshot 1 million baddies in a 3 day period. And every person who participates and meets the challenge’s goals gets the unlock on his or her achievement history and reaps its reward.

Another really cool thing with the new Achievements system is that it’s cloud-powered. A magical term, I know, but it delivers real value to users. Check it out:

Having cloud-powered achievements makes it easy and consistent to run challenges across all players of a game simultaneously.

It makes it possible for developers to add new achievements and challenges after their game is initially released. Why is that good for you?

1) It means you can get new achievements without always being required to buy new content (read: free!) or download title updates.

2) It allows developers to learn from and respond to user activity and focus on adding stuff that you’ll find fun. For example, let’s say a certain game is known on community forums to have a fun little sub-game of kicking chickens. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the game developers noticed the community enjoying an unintended aspect of the game and creating a challenge around it, with a reward to boot?

3) It empowers developers to involve the community (that means YOU) in the achievement creation process. If they so choose, a developer could run a contest for users to submit and vote on challenge ideas, for example, with the winning idea being released to the public as a legitimate Xbox Live Achievement. Not too shabby!

Let’s bring it all home and talk about what you actually see.

The Xbox One dashboard experience greatly improves how you discover and view Xbox Live Achievements.
Ever wondered how far along you were toward completing an achievement, particularly those that involve a lot of collection or linear progress? With Xbox One, games may now expose your latest progression toward unlocking an achievement right on the dashboard, even before you launch the game.
Quickly catch up on what your friends have been up with the achievement activity feed that keeps you informed about your friends’ latest unlocked achievements.
Check out video clips of that magical moment when an achievement was unlocked.
Easily discover upcoming challenges for a game at any time.
Your achievement history has been transformed into a more beautiful gallery of achievement icons that properly show off your hard-earned victories.

You guys all rock, thanks from all of us here on our dev team. Can’t wait to see you on Live!

If they so choose, a developer could run a contest for users to submit and vote on challenge ideas, for example, with the winning idea being released to the public as a legitimate Xbox Live Achievement

manipulative of their customers

Considering he's explaining the difference between Achievements and Challenges, it's a good job he doesn't completely confuse the two.



Oh.

Achievements and challenges are both officially considered Xbox Live Achievements, so they inherit many of the same benefits:

wut?

Ah, yeah, can't write for toffee at the moment, but basically here's my feelings (this post started out quite different and has turned into cod-Philosphy on the state of games)

In the old days pre-computers:
Gambling has age resistrictions or is often illegal (in the USA) because it manipulates people into (arguably) unhealthy behaviours. Boardgames typically don't because they're just games. Boardgames and gambling overlap in a Venn diagram. It gets a bit murky in the middle.

There's scales of intellectual pleasure (problem solving, puzzles etc), social interaction and competition and addiction. Addiction comes from two routes pattern finding (solving puzzles, mastering dexterity/physical skills) and fake pattern finding (gambling). Both are tied up in probability. Mastery of probability is 1) hard and 2) addictive.

With computer games we historically started with. Intellectual, added more and more social, but then people in search of money realised they could sneak legal gambling in.

F2P and achievements are gambling systems innately. They might gamble time rather than money, but the mechanisms are designed to scratch that same addictive itch.

A huge amount of MS decisions with the Xbox have been to invest gamblers in the bet. The gamerscores, the gold system, their designed to tie you to there system, not so you have fun, but so they can secure their space in the living room. They are by definition exploitative.

In the same way a casino is.

I believe we don't have the vocab or experience to really vocalise or discuss the negative effects of such systems yet and so they run rampant.

MS clearly thought their binding mechanisms created enough loyalty to bind their users to the bone (and they may still be right).

The annual Summer of Arcade starts August 7th, and I wanted to share the schedule and pricing details:

Brothers: a Tale of two Sons launches August 7th for 1,200 Points

Charlie Murder launches August 14th for 800 Points

Flashback launches August 21st for 800 Points

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows launches August 28th for 1,200 Points

As a bonus, buy any two of the above Summer of Arcade games and receive a Souls Pack for Ascend: Hand of Kul for free.

Do you remember when the Summer of Arcade used to be for indie games, instead of games from major publishers?