Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh, FFS. I will be getting NHL 11 as well. Good job online play can fuck right off, then.

Sounds bad at Realtime Worlds. Rumours abound that the Project:Myworld team of 60-odd people have been laid off and some are talking that RTW may claim insolvency soon.

As myp just posted in the APB thread, they are in administration.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/realtime-w ... nistration

UK games media league table
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/40509/First-o ... e-revealed

I'm sure some of those figures are a little low. Missing a few sites too.

Edit: although that is just UK data, so maybe the bigger sites I was thinking of (mainly pcgamer and RPS) just have a big international audience.

Xbox Live price rises ahoy.

Jonny is a slow Jonny.

Unwelcome, but not unreasonable.

Sod! I was posting in that thread anyway, so NER!

I feel much the same way. I mean, it's not going to bother us because the 12 month UK sub isn't going up. But talk about giving more ammunition to the people who already think it's a rip-off.

Wasn't that you, a year or so ago?

I say to those people: look at Playstation Plus.

No. Not at all. I've always been happy to pay for Xbox Live. I just found it extremely insulting that we pay for a premium service and yet still get bombarded with adverts and stuff. That's what I remember arguing with you lot about. And besides, I was referring to the PS3-only crowd, etc. Not people like me who question its rip-off-ish-ness but still happily pay for it anyway.

edit: No wait, that's a lie. Despite paying for Xbox Live since I got my 360, I did question what the hell exactly we were paying for, what with it being, essentially, a peer-to-peer service anyway. My main reason for starting that thread (which everyone massively disagreed with me on, for some reason), was basically to question what MS were actually charging us money for. I wasn't saying it was shit or "not worth it", I genuinely wanted to know what we were actually paying for - literally.

I always thought and still do think that it's "worth it" for the enjoyment I get out of it. But I wanted to know what we were actually paying for. What were MS spending the money on? We resolved it there, though. So LEAVE IT. (It was another one of those threads where I got very exasperated because people quoted me out of context and strawmanned the fuck out of what I was trying to say, before I just gave in and conceded defeat.)




But yeah, I still think they're not really doing themselves any favours here. Were it not for Playstation Plus, I imagine they wouldn't have dared do this.

To play devils advocate, "buy our overpriced thing because those guys overpriced thing is even more o er priced" is a bit weak!

I think I remember agreeing with you on this bit. Live is almost certainly a big profit centre for Microsoft. The infrastructure costs of things like matchmaking servers is quite modest, I suspect.

Triple post!

I like Penny Arcade's piece:
Its a fair point, that. A $10 rise, of itself, doesn't count for much - but it carries the promise, or threat, of future rises simply by being the first such rise.

I don't know what n/t means, nor what a "wash" means in that respect. Maybe they ought to speak English.

MS are releasing a new 360 controller with a decent d-pad! BUT! they've made all of the face buttons grey. I'm not joking.

The buttons don't look good either. I'd prefer if they were all the same shade of grey, or were still coloured.

Unless the dpad is really good, or I need to get another controller at some point, I don't think I'll be getting one.

Why would they grey the buttons though? Surely half of the recognition stems from the colour? Most UIs use the colours as an indicator. What the hell kind of advantage is there in removing them?

I'd guess it makes the new controller more instantly recognisable. They would look pretty much exactly the same as the current one if they didn't change that.

Or maybe not, as they are American. "n/t" isn't American either though, it's nerdish for "no text" and once upon a time was what you wrote in the body of an email if you weren't writing anything in the body of the email so the receiver didn't just assume the blank screen they were looking at was a technical error.

Do you really not know what "a wash" is, or are you just being your usual awkward self about Americanisms?

If the dpad is good I think I'll get one. Whilst removing the colours is an odd choice, a very odd choice, it wouldn't bother me at all in use.

I think I'm just gonna wait for them to roll the dpad out to all of the controllers, then I can get a black one with coloured buttons to match my Slim pad. Also, it only comes with a play and charge kit - you can't buy it alone - and therefore costs more. I already have two play and charge kits. It's like they don't want anyone to buy it.

"Here's that thing you've been asking for since 2005, but we've combined it with a bunch of sheer stupidity because we wouldn't want you actually liking us now, would we?"

I just don't understand this at all.

Also, it's not just the buttons that have lost colour - the pad itself is a grey colour, therefore not matching either the new consoles or the old ones. The fuck?

Pics here by the way: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.ph ... tcount=126

It's not 'Xbox white' although it looks it in the photos - it's actually a matt silver colour with a black bit between the shoulder buttons.

Looking at it, I'm far from convinced that the d-pad will actually improve matters. It more looks like they've failed to understand what caused it to be crap. Which is the inernal workings rather than the shape. Hpefully they've got it right, but only mentioning the changable shape is somewhat worrying.

The buttons are a terrible idea, although I think it won't affect me. Others are probably different. (If sony had done something equally daft, I'd struggle, as I've never fully got my head around the square/circle buttons - probably as they're both a pinkish/reddish colour)

Only offering it as a bundle is equally daft, although probably short lived. I imagine they see it as a way to offset the R&D costs.

Major Nelson tweeted last night that the greyscale buttons are purely a feature of this specific pad, which is a relief. Whether or not they'll introduce the d-pad to all pads after a while remains to be seen, but I'm not going to bother with this one. And as you say, how do we know they've even fixed the thing at all? They claimed to have fixed it with the bright green limited edition pad which turned out to be a lie.

Do they even know what we've been complaining about? The fact that the d-pad is one huge lump on a disk is what makes it shitty - you press diagonals by accident as a result. Raising the + part of it off the disk doesn't really look like it'll remedy that. It might improve it slightly, but it'll be awkward to use because it's higher up than usual and it's still connected to that damn disk.

It looks like the + part isn't raised so much as the rest of the disc is lowered. Still remains to be seen as to whether it's much of an improvement though.

It's definitely raised. It looks like a normal 360 d-pad, but then a quarter twist of the disk pops out the + part. There's a video on Major Nelson's site.

That doesn't really illustrate it, but if you flip between these two images:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com ... oxcont.jpg
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com ... cont-1.jpg
it's pretty clear that it's the non+ part that gets lowered while the + part stays put.

It's a bit of both!

No, you're right! Major Nelson has lied to us all again.

Well, no, whqt that was about was a d-pad thaqt offered more than 8 directions, I seem to remember. It's just people got their hopes up that it would sort the existing issue when that wasn't the stated aim.


I'd say the problem is there's very little resistance and feel in the switches, and a very loose swivel in the pad, so pushing even slightly off central made the direction unpredictable. If the switch gave more resistance, there's no way that such a small amount of leverage on the undesired direction would cause the switch to be pressed. Depending on how loose the cap is, the raised D should allow for more accurate application of pressure.

I suppose they need a major outward change for anyone to believe that there's actually been something done. Just saying "We've fixed it" and it looking much the same wouldn't work.

Until they actually release it, we can only speculate.

I should add that I have no idea if blogcdn.com is a reliable source or just have someone handy with Photoshop.

The current d-pad just feels like someone's blu-tacked a bottle top onto a proper d-pad and figured it'll be ok as most games just use analogue sticks these days.

Yep, time will tell. I can't really think of many instances where I need a d-pad any more though. Mostly, I've learned to live with the analogue stick, and if I play a fighting game, I get my Hori stick out. Five years is a long time to fix a sub-standard product. People have already moved on. If you're going to pay a premium for a brand new pad, purely because it has a better d-pad and you play fighting games and stuff, you might as well buy an arcade stick, which would probably work out cheaper and would be better any way. Plus, how many of the hardcore folk this pad is aimed at don't have a stick already?

Maybe if your pad is buggered and you want a new one, you might as well go for this one instead, but even that possibility is hampered by the stupid greyscale buttons, the enforced play and charge kit bundle (and therefore higher price for something you probably already have) and the colour scheme which doesn't match any of the current Xbox console colours.

I'd still quite like a decent d-pad for stuff like Tetris Evolution and Bejeweled 2. It shows how bad a d-pad is when Tetris is easier to play on an analogue stick.

Heh! That'd be an example of me "learning to live with the analogue stick". I'd snap this pad up if it weren't all horrible and ugly. I want a second black pad to match the new one I got with the 360 S, and if they implemented the new d-pad, I'd buy it tomorrow (assuming it is actually an improvement). But horrible colours and bundled only with a play and charge kit (I already have two), I'll just wait it out thanks.

Mr Dave is the new yardstick for Being Correct.

Hmm. My pad is generally 8-10 feet away from my console though, so I'm not sure why I care? If anything I want my pad to colour-co-ordinate with my remote controls and my console with my Sky HD box. Or, alternatively, I don't care, as I'm a bloke.

Of course you care.

*waits for Gaywood to fall to his knees and start crying, admitting his unhealthy obsession with consumer electronics minutia*

Things like Gears of War where it's used for weapon selection could do with it. Quite a few games use it for game critical stuff that isn't movement.

And the D-pad certainly interferes with post match hip-grinding in UTIII.

Whether the issues you find in these games is worth the cash is another matter entirely.

NEVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I don't really struggle when it comes to selecting weapons and whatnot. It's accurate enough for that. It's when you're trying slightly more complicated stuff that it completely fails.

I struggle with that sometimes, but it's just occured to me I'm using a quite old pad now and should perhaps switch to the almost-virgin one instead.

You care. You care. You care. You care.

I had my favourite pad which I used for three years and I didn't realise how crappy and worn out it had become until I got the new 360 and a new pad.

I remember having issues in Oblivion in particular, and I think that would've been the first time I used the D-Pad. But even things like GoW which only use 4 directions are not reliable.

Ah well, hopefully this will be not-shit, and then they'll roll it out to all controllers.

Maybe my joypad is just getting a bit creaky, but selecting weapons in The Saboteur using the D-Pad was painful. There you are, standing on top of a sniper tower trying to select the dynamite and Sean suddenly whips out his machine gun, followed by his pistol while you sit there stabbing 'up' on the D-Pad sobbing "I just want to blow the bloody thing up, you stupid Irish twit!"

Did we talk about how the PS3 has got proper hacked now?

All you need is a bit of open source code and a bit of fairly standard usb hardware (apparently costs less than £20 but I've not looked around), and you can run unsigned code. There is already available a backup manager that lets you rip games to the internal hard drive, or an external one, and boot them. Also would let you download them off the internets.

It also opens the door for proper homebrew. Emulators, enhanced media stuff, region free blu ray/DVDs, other OS without the hypervisor limitations and whatever else clever homebrew coders can come up with.

It's not really known for sure if Sony can detect it (they say that they can), but it wouldn't surprise me if a stealthy way of doing it is developed.

The 360's D-pad hasn't changed at all from the original Xbox's, has it? That was shocking, and I'm baffled why they went with the same (or indistinguishably similar) design given it was unreliably shit.

I can't count the number of times I've pressed one direction and had it register as another, which is a sorry state when so many games use the D-pad as a quick way to select different weapons. Gears of War, particularly, I've certainly ended up consistently selecting a pistol instead of a lancer, which is unhelpful at best.

They made a better one to tie in with one of those shite foosball games but failed to roll it out to their standard manufacturing.

The thing is, it shouldn't be possible to get a response of "Up" when pushing down on the d-pad. If your pad is even capable of that, you need to look at it again.

Err. Yay?


Like hacked xbxes before it, I don't see the point*. You get a slightly more awkward implementation of what most PCs can do. And have the joyful rigmarole of ensuring you don't update your console.

* - With the exception of piracy. Which I see the point of, I just disagree strongly with it.

I hacked my original Xbox and it remains my favourite way to play SNES games. It's all about playing them on the TV rather than my PC monitor.

I'm less than interested in the PS3 hack though. I can't remember the last time I turned it on let alone wanted to play a game with it.