Name: Anonymous 2005-10-15 22:21
Working on Amped 3 3 & 4 most worrying
"1. Music. No longer will you will be able to create a game-specific soundtrack. MS apparently wasn't too pleased with the weak support that custom soundtracks got on the original Xbox, and so they've taken matters into their own hands. Now, you create a "Playlist" that has songs you like on it. You can create as many Playlists as you like. This sounds fine until you consider event-specific music, such as that found in most sports games. Say you want a certain song to play when you hit a home run, or when you race on a certain course. NO LONGER. Now, you can only assign a playlist to these events and the 360 will pick a song at random from that list. So if you want to make a special soundtrack for a hockey game, you would have to make a new playlist for each event (Home Goal, Away Goal, ETC.) and then simply put one song in each list. To really make a good custom soundtrack for a sports game you might need 25 playlists, each containing one song each, to get the game to play what you want when you want. Again, it's all on the hardware side, so you're going to have to get creative to make it work for you.
2. Profiles. New to the 360 are acheivements. These are little game-specific goals that unlock as you play. They might be as simple as "Beat the game" or "Win 50 races." These are displayed on Xbox Live next to your profile, so you can showcase your skills. Obviously, it would be really easy to cheat as you could simply take a memory card from a friend that has 20 Halo 3 achievements and steal their achievements right? Microsoft thought of this, and so again they made things overly confusing to compensate. First, is that you save profiles and games SEPERATELY. This means that achievements do not transfer. If you take your memory card with half of Amped 3 beaten to your friend's house and beat the game, your friend will get the credit for the win on his profile, and not you. When you get home, you WILL NOT be able to update your own achievements unless you start over with a new game and beat the game on your machine. This gets even more confusing when you add in the fact that some people will have a hard-drive and some won't. You cannot transfer a save between a memory card and a HD during gameplay. All that has to be done from the Dashboard. You could transfer a save to let a friend play a later level, but neither of you will benefit from it.
3. The controller. So cheap. Remember the original Dreamcast pads and how faulty many of them were? The rubber on the analog sticks is so insanely soft that you can easily dig your fingernail in and scrape it right off. Every controller in the office has what looks like bits of eraser all over it because the analog stick is too close to the base of the controller itself and when it rubs it "sheds" little bits of eraser all over the thing. It's honestly just sort of filthy after a while.
4. The graphics. I've played 3 games now on the system and each of them are just barely above the Xbox. The big thing they're pushing is how many objects can be rendered. And it's true. The distances that the player can see into, and the masses of crowds in sporting events are really a genuine step-up. The trouble is frame-rates are generally quite bad, and an inter-developer memo from MS themselves says to try and lock down frame-rates at 30 or lower to maximize performance. 30 fps? I thought 60 was pretty much standard for high-production-value games since the days of the Dreamcast. Do not expect to be wowed. "
"1. Music. No longer will you will be able to create a game-specific soundtrack. MS apparently wasn't too pleased with the weak support that custom soundtracks got on the original Xbox, and so they've taken matters into their own hands. Now, you create a "Playlist" that has songs you like on it. You can create as many Playlists as you like. This sounds fine until you consider event-specific music, such as that found in most sports games. Say you want a certain song to play when you hit a home run, or when you race on a certain course. NO LONGER. Now, you can only assign a playlist to these events and the 360 will pick a song at random from that list. So if you want to make a special soundtrack for a hockey game, you would have to make a new playlist for each event (Home Goal, Away Goal, ETC.) and then simply put one song in each list. To really make a good custom soundtrack for a sports game you might need 25 playlists, each containing one song each, to get the game to play what you want when you want. Again, it's all on the hardware side, so you're going to have to get creative to make it work for you.
2. Profiles. New to the 360 are acheivements. These are little game-specific goals that unlock as you play. They might be as simple as "Beat the game" or "Win 50 races." These are displayed on Xbox Live next to your profile, so you can showcase your skills. Obviously, it would be really easy to cheat as you could simply take a memory card from a friend that has 20 Halo 3 achievements and steal their achievements right? Microsoft thought of this, and so again they made things overly confusing to compensate. First, is that you save profiles and games SEPERATELY. This means that achievements do not transfer. If you take your memory card with half of Amped 3 beaten to your friend's house and beat the game, your friend will get the credit for the win on his profile, and not you. When you get home, you WILL NOT be able to update your own achievements unless you start over with a new game and beat the game on your machine. This gets even more confusing when you add in the fact that some people will have a hard-drive and some won't. You cannot transfer a save between a memory card and a HD during gameplay. All that has to be done from the Dashboard. You could transfer a save to let a friend play a later level, but neither of you will benefit from it.
3. The controller. So cheap. Remember the original Dreamcast pads and how faulty many of them were? The rubber on the analog sticks is so insanely soft that you can easily dig your fingernail in and scrape it right off. Every controller in the office has what looks like bits of eraser all over it because the analog stick is too close to the base of the controller itself and when it rubs it "sheds" little bits of eraser all over the thing. It's honestly just sort of filthy after a while.
4. The graphics. I've played 3 games now on the system and each of them are just barely above the Xbox. The big thing they're pushing is how many objects can be rendered. And it's true. The distances that the player can see into, and the masses of crowds in sporting events are really a genuine step-up. The trouble is frame-rates are generally quite bad, and an inter-developer memo from MS themselves says to try and lock down frame-rates at 30 or lower to maximize performance. 30 fps? I thought 60 was pretty much standard for high-production-value games since the days of the Dreamcast. Do not expect to be wowed. "