Extra Life Webcast

At long last, here is the post containing the link to my webcast of the Extra Life event. I will begin casting promptly at 12:01AM on Oct 18th (just under 5 hours!) and will cease [to exist?] around 11:59PM. I think I have the best angle possible set up to not only show what I'm playing, but also a bit of myself. The plan is to do some commentary and not just sit and play, but I'm not a terribly interesting person so we'll see how that all works out. Talking for near 24 hours could very well kill me. A friend of mine, Brian, tracks182 from the site, is planning on stopping by in the wheresabouts of 3:00, so that will likely make some things more entertaining to watch. And hopefully my dogs behave, that's probably the part I'm most worried about. So between taking care of them, eating, occasional bathroom trips and such, it sure won't be 24 hours of solid gameplay, but hopefully enough to appease those who would be critical. See you all there, I hope. :-)

Webcast - http://www.justin.tv/brokendesign

Update tweeting - http://twitter.com/allaboutdolph

*Disclaimer: Due to the nature of some of the games I will be playing, the Justin.tv site asks you be over 18 to watch the stream.

Projected game list: for PS3 I am planning to play Wipeout HD, Burnout Paradise, Dead Space, Calling All Cars, Pixeljunk Eden, and possibly more arcade type games here and there. For 360 I will be playing Call of Duty 4, Castle Crashers and Halo 3, in addition to maybe some arcade games here and there, but not sure.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 8:13 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Extra Life

On October 18th, I will be taking part in the Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon to help raise money for research and treatment of pediatric cancer. The event is being organized by the group at SarcasticGamer.com in partnership with the Texas Children's Hospital. I've been looking forward to the marathon ever since first hearing about it, and am proud to be donating my time and hopefully doing my part to help raise donations to help those children afflicted by cancer.

For more information on the event, you can visit the official website for Extra Life. If you want to make a donation, please visit the donation page that I have set up through Texas Children's Hospital.

On another note, I will be webcasting my entire gameplay experience, starting at 12:01AM on the 18th and concluding at 11:59PM. A few nights ago I set up a page and did a bit of a trial run for quality and network stress testing, having a game of Crackdown online at the same time as streaming out video. I am happy to say the test was successful in every way, so the webcast is on. I will be posting the link to the cast page a few days in advance, so stay tuned. Thank you to all who donate and to all who offer their support by offering up any stories they may have, tuning in to the webcast for support, and any well-wishes that I am able to make it through. There will certainly be Bawls flowing like water that day to keep me up and keep me powered.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 12:05 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Live is free! .....for PC.

So Microsoft announced what everyone knew they had to do if they wanted to compete with Steam in any way, shape or form... they made Games for Windows Live free. That means they get all the features they did before, including cross-platform play with 360, for no monetary value whatsoever.

Ok, so, where does that leave us Xbox gamers who still have to shell out every year? I mean, I was ok with it for awhile because a majority of the games I want to play online are 360 exclusive. But now just because I have a white box I have to pay where PC players don't have to? Say what you will about the features of Live, they certainly are robust and they exceed those of the PSN in general, but truth be told all online PS3 games I've played have had little to no lag in them whatsoever. Any lag there has been has never been a killer of the experience. However, on Xbox Live, the service I'm paying $50 a year for, every single Halo match I play has some sort of lag to it. Every single big team battle I play, forget about it, is tremendously laggy to the point of making me downright enraged at people that I'm trying to shoot literally disappearing from my view and appearing a couple inches to one side or the other and suddenly I die without having any real registry of being shot, screen flashing or controller vibration. So you're telling me that I'm destined to give money to Microsoft for pairing me with people who kick my ass up and down the block in laggy matches of up to 16 people when I can get a less laggy experience with 32-40 players (more when some of the new games come out like Resistance 2 with 60 players and MAG with 256) for free? Call me crazy but I'm willing to give up some luxuries like sending game invites to people and voice chat that doesn't carry over into games for better online play without a $50 price tag attached.

PS - You may wonder if I just have a crappy connection, so I'll put that to rest. First and foremost, it seems unlikely it's my connection if I'm having a completely different experience on a different console using the same connection. Second, I'm getting 12-15mbps down and about 1mbps up. Well surpasses the minimum requirements for online play. Am I just being a whiney little baby? Let me know.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 10:31 pm EDT | Permalink | 5 Comments

When is a survey not a survey?

So in the past couple days I had 2 survey invitations pass through my inbox—one from Microsoft regarding Xbox Live, one from Sony regarding the Playstation Network. The timing was certainly interesting, considering they were literally a day apart, but I digress. When I had clicked to take the XBL survey I had a fair amount of ideas about what sort of feedback I was going to leave, mostly due to my frustrations lately of the seeming lack of matchmaking that has been in effect for the top games I've been playing with friends, namely Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. You know, just like everyone else with a 360. Anyway, long story short, my experiences in both games has been less than satisfactory since in almost every single match my friends and I have literally been paired with the worst players against the best players and have been losing by tremendous margins. When looking at the player ranks before a match it's no wonder it happens. My question is: seeing as how I'm paying $50 a year to play games online in a friggin' PEER TO PEER setup, how is it that my $50 isn't at least being well-implemented with great matchmaking, as is one of the supposed advantages of Xbox Live? There have been times I thought to shut off my console and sell the games on Amazon because I'm not having any fun getting completely slaughtered by people immensely outranking me. It's not fun. I don't feel I have to win all the time, but hell, at least once in awhile, or at least not lose by margins of 200+ points in a COD4 match of Headquarters (and for eff's sake, can I never ever be Op4 ever again? I've been stuck on that team 7-8 times out of 10 and it's getting ridiculously irritating to hear that guy yelling at me. Can we not hire more than one voice actor per side? Cripes).

When the XBL survey page loads I'm pretty put off to discover it's a whole whopping 3 questions long. These questions are over such topics as what do you spend your Microsoft Points on and what is your favorite feature of Xbox Live. I can't remember the third one, but it was very similar to the other two. So essentially, instead of being a survey to help better the Xbox Live experience, it was a PR's wet dream. A survey that can be spun in many ways to hail how great users find the XBL service to be. There was no real feedback, no possible way to help improve things, just questions that someone could say "Xbox Live is amazingly popular and our users are happy to spend $50 a year to connect to friends and *insert most popular survey answer here*!!" It was a complete joke.

On the flip side, when I took the PSN questionare I was presented with several pages of no less than 5 questions per page regarding such things as what I felt about PSN, what I felt about PS3, what features I liked most, what features I wanted to see most, and how I felt about the competition. For each of these questions there was a feedback scale of 1-5 with the range of extremely *satisfied* to extremely *dissatisfied*. It was a survey that easily can be used not only for PR (as any survey usually becomes, no doubt), or more importantly, to be used to improve upon a service and make it better.

The thing that really gets to me about this whole experience is that Xbox, the console and the experience that's supposed to be by gamers, for gamers, and have the best position of any of the consoles, seems to care the least about improving their service. They've officially gone the way of EA Sports' Madden series, essentially being the only show in town and resting on their laurels until they don't have a choice. To me, this was apparent in the last few dashboard updates which gave me next to no additional features I gave any care for. Windows Live Messenger integration? Gag me. Last thing I want is to be playing a game and have to pause every 5 minutes or less to respond to a message someone has sent me from their computer. Forgive me for wanting to play games on my game console instead of chat. DivX support? Shoot me in the face, why would I want that? The latest MPEG4 codecs including H.264, which have been supported much longer, have better picture and smaller file sizes anyway. And where's my private group chat? The feature that has been, in my experiences, the single-most requested feature on blogs and message boards each time an update is released that lacks it. This just screams "we will release minor features that no one really cares about, but one fairly big feature that some people have been requesting, but save the big guns for later on if there's actually some competition raised, that way we can get a big press release and try to steal the thunder of our competitors." Screw that. Meanwhile, Sony seems to be aware that online functionality is something they should've delivered but really haven't to its fullest and are making an effort to see how they're doing and see how they need to yet improve. Say what you will about how the PSN is in its current state, but for a first-time outing on a system as complex as the PS3 I'd say they're doing a damn good job. After all, I have my group chat in the XMB, something I can't do on 360. And, rumored to be in April but confirmed to be coming is the XMB update that will bring nearly full functionality of the PS3's UI in-game. Once that drops and we can do private group chat, messaging and custom soundtracks in-game.... where will XBL be? Sitting tall with its matchmaking that doesn't especially work? I can understand people's adversity to PSN in that it's a server-based mode of play so the servers could be shut off at any time, but with P2P you can play the same game for as long as you can still find people, but I've experienced far less lag on my PSN games than I have XBL in general and most of the time when a newer game comes out I tend to shift focus to the new one and not play the old much, if at all. Usually by the time servers have been shut down I don't play the affected title(s) anyway. I'd rather things be that way than in Halo 3 when I'm trying to shoot someone and the lag is so bad that their character is flashing from one side of my screen to another. And yes, I checked, it's not my connection. Unless for whatever reason it needs more than 7mbps down and 800kbps up (hint: it doesn't).

Dear Xbox Live division: just because you're on top doesn't mean you can have a nap. I'm paying you an annual fee and you're making more money in advertising than you need to fund the operation yourself, so how about you put that money to use. Sincerely, BrokenDesign

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 2:38 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Unreal Tournament 3

News has just dropped from MacWorld online that MacSoft Games officially announced Unreal Tournament 3 for the Mac will be available in "early 2008". Rock the eff on! Can't wait to drop my cash on it and see how my Mac Pro handles the awesome! Still no word on the release of Gears of War for Mac, but presumably it will be forthcoming shortly after the UT3 release. After all, why pump out old bones before the new hotness?

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 12:27 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments