The 360 thread!

[chub]

Just switched on my 360. The first thing it shows is the Summer of Arcade (An Arcade Heatwave) on the Spotlight section. I select it.

"This feature is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Status code: 807b0194"

I love NXE.

[betamax]

I bought Fable II over the weekend. I'm sad because I didn't buy it ages ago. I love it. It's a big cloud of cartoon awesome. I'm busy buying up property and taking my dog for long walks in the pastel countryside. He's a good dog.

Why am I posting this here? I have a potentially relevant question- the game mentions friends orbs- now, I have them switched on the options but I've yet to see one. Do they appear only when someone on my friends list is actually playing the game? Or are they tucked away somewhere awkward? I'd quite like to sent someone a gift or try and swap dolls for the achievments, but without those orbs, im guessing it just aint happening. Any suggestions?

[Flabio]

The orbs show where other players are standing, so they have to be playing the game.

If you want to see it in action, switch it to 'all' rather than 'friends only', as there's bound to be someone else playing the game in the same region as you.

Of course, someone will probably just hand over several million in cash and ruin the game for you because we were too dim to put in the ability to refuse a gift from another player (something they call 'drive by gifting' on our forum).

[betamax]

The orbs show where other players are standing, so they have to be playing the game.

If you want to see it in action, switch it to 'all' rather than 'friends only', as there's bound to be someone else playing the game in the same region as you.

Of course, someone will probably just hand over several million in cash and ruin the game for you because we were too dim to put in the ability to refuse a gift from another player (something they call 'drive by gifting' on our forum).

Yeah, I've set it to friends only- that explains why I dont see anything- most of you lot finished up in Albion ages ago.

I don't trust random Live Hoi Polloi, but I can't understand why anyone would waste gold they took time collecting just to spoil such a lovely game for someone else. Are there really people that craven and broken out there outside of MMO subscribers? Or are they previous victims trying to pass on the game-breaking antigift? It's like lycanthrope, but with cash instead of biting.

[chub]

gold they took time collecting

Since you continue to gain gold from house/shop rent even when the console is off, when you have a lot of property, getting millions doesn't take that long.

But yeah, I don't know why anyone would just hand it over to unknown people. Mind you, I guess I would be OK with it if someone came up and gave me several million in real life.

[Flabio]

The economy system is basically broken (waits for Bag to turn up and start frothing at the mouth).

There's a point where you're making so much cash from the property market that it basically becomes valueless. You'll have way more than you'll ever need.

So people tend to just give it to random strangers online.

[betamax]

The economy system is basically broken (waits for Bag to turn up and start frothing at the mouth).

There's a point where you're making so much cash from the property market that it basically becomes valueless. You'll have way more than you'll ever need.

So people tend to just give it to random strangers online.

Im only buying shops and a crib for the missus (who I stole from a stupid ghost- top magic darts!) so I'm not really getting much in the way of gold. Every time I go over 70k I buy another modest shop. At this rate I'll not be super rich for a long time- just how I like it. I would like to buy some of the centerpiece places- the graveyard mansion and the wizard tower. But they can wait.

[fog]

Splosion Man then. I love the idea and the implementation isn't as bad as i was expecting, I even quite like S'Man himself, yet after the first few levels when the novelty of blowing yourself up begins to ware off, it's all a bit uninspiring and repetitive.

Everything soon just turns into a series of wall jumps interspersed with the occasional exploding barrel or obligatory enemy. And as exploding is used 90% of the time as just an alternative to jumping in normal platformers, for the most part you just have a platformer with a slightly less accurate way of "jumping".

I don't know. I want to like it and I'm prepared to ignore some of the technical issues(*), but it does seem to run out of ideas fairly quickly. Or are the later levels more interesting?

(*) Iffy collision detection in a couple of places and explosions not always seeming consistent in what they blow up. And yes we know the 2D gameplay uses a fancy 3D engine, but stop spinning and panning the fucking camera around to change the perspective and leave me at one point where I couldn't even see my character.

[Mark]

I liked the fact that Splosion Man has half-a-dozen different run animations to choose from, one of which is holding his arms out like he's an aeroplane.

Everything else bored me in very short order. Played it on partnerNet briefly but after a few levels of mostly wall jumping I'd had enough.

[chub]

Some other forums seem to be treating this as the second coming of platform games. I played the demo and thought, well, the attack and jump is now on one button, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else to it. Apparently it does get much harder as the game progresses, but I think the inaccuracy of the 'jumping' would annoy me too much when a level requires precision timing.

[fog]

Some other forums seem to be treating this as the second coming of platform games. I played the demo and thought, well, the attack and jump is now on one button, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else to it.

That's what I don't get and why I hoped the later levels were a lot better. It currently has a really good average on Metacritic with half of them giving it 90%.

You almost get the feeling they read the press release, thought "hey that's a cool idea" and came up with a score without even playing it. Surely not

[fog]

Apparently some journos have got early access to the latest NXE update. This has me very worried:

We know they're still working the kinks out, but there seems to be noticeable slowdown when shifting between pages, something we've never noticed before in the NXE.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/24/the-new-xbox-live-dashboard-update-preview-is-live/

So what does that potentially mean for those of us that already have horrendous slowdown? Has anyone tried it yet?

[Bod]

If you've got bad slowdown already, have you tried flushing the cache?

[juice]

If you've got bad slowdown already, have you tried flushing the cache?

Yups. Made no difference whatsoever - the games page still takes around 30 seconds to load.

Also, every so often my X360 will fail to auto-login on powerup. It works fine when manually triggered, but it's a bit odd...

Various things about Splosion Man

I've not tried this one yet, but this sparked off a reminder: did XBLA games ever show screenshots or am I imagining things? Currently, all XBCG games show screenshots, but this very handy feature is conspicuously missing from XBLA! Given the ever increasing size of XBLA games and the fact that there's a distinct time penalty involved in scanning through demos, I'd like to have something more than a paragraph of text to go on when choosing what to download.

[fog]

If you've got bad slowdown already, have you tried flushing the cache?

I wont go through it all again, but if you read a couple of pages back you'll see that a lot of us have crippling slowdown in a number of places in NXE and it's certainly not just the cache