Having a good friends list on Xbox Live goes a LONG way toward taking care of this problem. I can spend a couple hours playing Perfct Dark Zero with a group of friends, enjoy the joking around and such that comes from talking to friends, all without having to deal with obnoxious little brats and cheaters. If I hadn't been able to put together a good friends list rather quickly, I suspect I would have let my 2 month Live trial expire and stopped playing on live. Instead, I've made a bunch of friends and can't imagine not gaming with them.
And games that do it right - like Halo 2 - let you take a group of your friends into a game so you can take other groups of people. Even the annoying little brats aren't as bad when you're playing against them with a team full of friends - and beating the snot out of them.
Oh, I won't stop listening to them if, by some amazing chance, they went mainstream. I don't listen to them becaues they're not mainstream - I listen to them because I like them, and they're not mainstream because they're absolutely nothing like the stuff that the big record companies are focused on, and those artists probably wouldn't appeal enough to most people to ever really be looked at by the big labels.
I know my amount of CD purchasing has went up lately. But it's not mainstream crap that I just can't stomach, but more and more independent stuff that has nothing to do with the RIAA. But that's cause Last.fm has directed my music tastes in a new direction that is decidedly not mainstream. In fact, I think I'm going to get a handful of new CDs soon - The Cruxshadows, Icon of Coil, Autumn's Grey Solace, and Collide. Take that, RIAA, they're all artists that you don't have anything to do with.:)
That makes me happy to see. We replaced a 97 Intrepid this summer, buying a mostly-loaded Mazda3 5-door, with plans to drive it for a long time. Glad to know we picked a good manufacturer to do this with. And the car is wonderful too.
No MSN music. The PC already has it. Yes but wouldn't you like to be able to simply download songs with a subscription service you already have and use the songs ingame.
That's why you download them on the PC and use Windows Media Center/Windows Media Connect to stream from the PC to the 360. It's like having MSN music on the Xbox 360 - only better.
Pressure sensitive buttons are a waste. Too little value and too much of a pain to deal with.
Pressure sensitive TRIGGERS, however, are great. The Xbox, 360, and GC all had great implementations. The PS2, not so much, because the shoulder buttons there still don't have enough travel space or proper feedback. I get the impression that the PS3 is still going to fail in this regard.
Sony also had the option of including the PS1 as a chip in the PS2. For various reasons, that was not an option for the 360.
I think they deserve credit for doing what was considered by many (including, apparently, many of the Xbox team) to be an impossible task - get Xbox games emulated successfully and with proper speed on a 360.
Or maybe they fired them after all their ads got banned from TV.
LOL! They make three ads, decide to pass on airing one of them, and it gets out on the internet. Before long, it's not just an ad they decided not to air, but a "banned" ad - and now ALL their ads are banned! This one just gets more and more ridiculous.
Personalized internet streams such as Last.fm and Pandora give people a much better alternative to radio while they're working at a computer. You can get the music you know you like, while at the same time get exposure to new music - and not new music that the labels are promoting like crazy, but new music that will fit into your existing tastes.
Then you take this information to buy music that fits you more, toss it on portable music players such as an iPod, and you've got a ton of music wherever you go.
But this wouldn't be quite as necessary if radio wasn't getting worse and worse. The variety has gone downhill as ClearChannel and other corporations take over mass control and standardize everything to a small playlist and shove more and more ads in.
Well, if you spill coffee you bought in your lap, and end up in the hospital for a couple weeks while they treat you for third-degree burns, and the place you bought the coffee from had repeatedly been warned that they were serving coffee that was too hot for human consumption when it was received by the customer, perhaps you'd have a lawsuit.
Anyone who claims that lawsuit was stupid doesn't know what the lawsuit was about.
Yeah, it's a horrible product. I've only been playing on it for almost 2 weeks, mutliple hours a day (it was on 10-12 hrs on Saturday with games and movies and musie), and I haven't seen any of this advertised "overheating" feature, or the reported bonus feature of "graphical glitches" or "lock-ups".
I can't stand this thing. They sell me a perfectly functioning product. Who's going to stop them?
I actually wish I could enable it to show what music I'm listening to or what I'm watching on DVD. I mean, I already advertise my music listening on the computer.
Hehe - a key difference between the two, and the reason I only trust the recommendations of one of the two.:) Though to be fair, Amazon does fairly well at matching up artists. It just annoys me the way I'll buy 4 albums, two for me, two for my partner, then suddenly see a bunch of new recommendations at the top of my list on Amazon based on the ones for her.
I have to say that I dislike having to rate music to train a place. I much prefer the Last.fm way - I just listen to whatever I want, and it uses that data to discern what I like. It's a lot more passive to do things in that manner.
The key difference between Last.fm and Amazon is that while Amazon bases it on what people buy, Last.fm does it based on what people ACTUALLY LISTEN TO. Which can be significantly different - if I buy two albums on Amazon, it's going to use both of them equally to recommend other items to me. Last.fm, however, will know which I listen to more, and weight it appropriately.
Oh, and Last.fm requires no work on your part to tell it what to use for recommendations - you just listen to your music, and it uses that to create your profile.
I can't recommend Last.fm enough. That site is responsible for single-handedly changing my music tastes significantly, a little at a time. Recommending new artists, and exposing me to others through the streaming radio they have - now I'm waiting to see what happens when my profile continues to change as new artists climb their way up the list.
Besides, Last.fm is almost completely effort-free to use (like 5 minutes to sign up and install the plug-in), so I can't understand why someone WOULDN'T want to use it.
And in reality you can't judge a system in it's first months out of the gate. In ten years, no one's going to care about the initial launch. If the games are still lame in a year, then write the system off. It's really too soon to say.
There are already non-lame games out. Kameo is quite fun, PGR3 is really amazing (and I didn't touch either of the first two), and for what's fun, the #1 game is the Xbox Live Arcade title Geometry Wars Retro Evolved. Seriously. The best game for the system right now may well be a $5 purchase. And that's not an insult to other games - but a statement of how well done Geo Wars really is. Hard-core old-school shooter action with enough eye candy to fit a next-gen system.
I was thinking the same thing - did the submitter actually READ the Next-Gen article? It was totally positive on the 360, and pointing out that the games are going to just get better and better. (And if the graphics on 360 games get substantially better than PGR3, which is already the best-looking game I've ever seen, I think we're in store for some real visual treats
Agreed - Visual Sourcesafe is a big stinking turd that never should have been allowed into public.
VSTS source control is nothing like that. I haven't had a chance to really play with all of the UI for source control, just because I've always been running different builds on my machine then what we've been been using to store our source code in (yes, we use our own product, and have been for quite a while), but what I have dealt with has been nice. I look forward to being able to use the released product and have all the functionality available to me all the time.
The new source control system in Team System is much, much better than Visual SourceSafe. Not anywhere even close to that old system.
In fact, I believe that the source control in VSTS is actually based off of the internal source control system that's been in use in Microsoft in a while - similar with the bug/work item tracking portion of VSTS. These two tools already have had significant work and lifetime, just as internal tools so far. So having them as V1 is a little misleading.
The work item tracking system is the best I've used to date. Source control isn't Clearcase, but it's definitely not bad like SourceSafe, and being able to link changesets to bugs and builds and the like is very nice.
(Disclaimer: I am a MS employee and tester on the VSTS team. But I am not now speaking on behalf of MS, and in fact, never do speak on behalf of MS.)
I realized after a bit of play last night and this morning that Live is what's going to make or break the 360. The better graphics and more power is nice, but it's the amazing ton of features on Live that make it such a next-gen experience. Being able to voice chat with my friends while we play different games and even switch between them. Streaming my music from my PC to my 360 as a custom soundtrack in any game. Achievements and Gamer scores. Xbox Live Marketplace offering amazing games for $5.
I feel about 10x more connected to people on my friends list than I did on the original Xbox. It's no longer this separate "play online" section - you're ALWAYS playing online in one way or another, with scoreboards or directly against opponents.
I really think that anyone with a 360 and broadband needs to at LEAST make sure they're connected with a silver account, even if you don't want to pay the $50 to play online. It adds that much.
The Best Buy in Bellevue, WA, went around the front of the building, down the side, to the back of the parking lot, then down next to and finally around the back of the Home Depot. They managed to get MORE 360s than the 266 that were originally planned, and still ended up sending a significant number of people home with paid vouchers that guarantee them a system when enough show up.
I was in line at 7 am Monday for the midnight sale - and was #91 in line. It was quite the experience being there. I don't regret it for a second. Especially since my 360 is worth it, I can tell already.
(BTW, never thought much of it before, but being able to stream my music from my PC to my 360 as custom soundtrack for any game just is amazing - couple that with the media player and visualizations, and my 200 CD changer is now unnecessary)
Yes, the 360 can read the playlist info right off the iPod. Heck, it even knows what you've named your iPod. I got to play with it back at the end of August, and everything was handled wonderfully with the iPod.
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Having a good friends list on Xbox Live goes a LONG way toward taking care of this problem. I can spend a couple hours playing Perfct Dark Zero with a group of friends, enjoy the joking around and such that comes from talking to friends, all without having to deal with obnoxious little brats and cheaters. If I hadn't been able to put together a good friends list rather quickly, I suspect I would have let my 2 month Live trial expire and stopped playing on live. Instead, I've made a bunch of friends and can't imagine not gaming with them.
And games that do it right - like Halo 2 - let you take a group of your friends into a game so you can take other groups of people. Even the annoying little brats aren't as bad when you're playing against them with a team full of friends - and beating the snot out of them.
Oh, I won't stop listening to them if, by some amazing chance, they went mainstream. I don't listen to them becaues they're not mainstream - I listen to them because I like them, and they're not mainstream because they're absolutely nothing like the stuff that the big record companies are focused on, and those artists probably wouldn't appeal enough to most people to ever really be looked at by the big labels.
I know my amount of CD purchasing has went up lately. But it's not mainstream crap that I just can't stomach, but more and more independent stuff that has nothing to do with the RIAA. But that's cause Last.fm has directed my music tastes in a new direction that is decidedly not mainstream. In fact, I think I'm going to get a handful of new CDs soon - The Cruxshadows, Icon of Coil, Autumn's Grey Solace, and Collide. Take that, RIAA, they're all artists that you don't have anything to do with. :)
That makes me happy to see. We replaced a 97 Intrepid this summer, buying a mostly-loaded Mazda3 5-door, with plans to drive it for a long time. Glad to know we picked a good manufacturer to do this with. And the car is wonderful too.
No MSN music. The PC already has it. Yes but wouldn't you like to be able to simply download songs with a subscription service you already have and use the songs ingame.
That's why you download them on the PC and use Windows Media Center/Windows Media Connect to stream from the PC to the 360. It's like having MSN music on the Xbox 360 - only better.
Pressure sensitive buttons are a waste. Too little value and too much of a pain to deal with.
Pressure sensitive TRIGGERS, however, are great. The Xbox, 360, and GC all had great implementations. The PS2, not so much, because the shoulder buttons there still don't have enough travel space or proper feedback. I get the impression that the PS3 is still going to fail in this regard.
That Joystiq article has been confirmed wrong by multiple game developers.
Heck, even the little marketplace game Geometry Wars uses multiple cores.
Sony also had the option of including the PS1 as a chip in the PS2. For various reasons, that was not an option for the 360.
I think they deserve credit for doing what was considered by many (including, apparently, many of the Xbox team) to be an impossible task - get Xbox games emulated successfully and with proper speed on a 360.
They've already added a new update that both adds the compatibility for the new games, along with avoids the Halo 2 issue. All is good now.
Or maybe they fired them after all their ads got banned from TV.
LOL! They make three ads, decide to pass on airing one of them, and it gets out on the internet. Before long, it's not just an ad they decided not to air, but a "banned" ad - and now ALL their ads are banned! This one just gets more and more ridiculous.
Yep.
Personalized internet streams such as Last.fm and Pandora give people a much better alternative to radio while they're working at a computer. You can get the music you know you like, while at the same time get exposure to new music - and not new music that the labels are promoting like crazy, but new music that will fit into your existing tastes.
Then you take this information to buy music that fits you more, toss it on portable music players such as an iPod, and you've got a ton of music wherever you go.
But this wouldn't be quite as necessary if radio wasn't getting worse and worse. The variety has gone downhill as ClearChannel and other corporations take over mass control and standardize everything to a small playlist and shove more and more ads in.
Well, if you spill coffee you bought in your lap, and end up in the hospital for a couple weeks while they treat you for third-degree burns, and the place you bought the coffee from had repeatedly been warned that they were serving coffee that was too hot for human consumption when it was received by the customer, perhaps you'd have a lawsuit.
Anyone who claims that lawsuit was stupid doesn't know what the lawsuit was about.
Yeah, it's a horrible product. I've only been playing on it for almost 2 weeks, mutliple hours a day (it was on 10-12 hrs on Saturday with games and movies and musie), and I haven't seen any of this advertised "overheating" feature, or the reported bonus feature of "graphical glitches" or "lock-ups".
I can't stand this thing. They sell me a perfectly functioning product. Who's going to stop them?
I actually wish I could enable it to show what music I'm listening to or what I'm watching on DVD. I mean, I already advertise my music listening on the computer.
Hehe - a key difference between the two, and the reason I only trust the recommendations of one of the two. :) Though to be fair, Amazon does fairly well at matching up artists. It just annoys me the way I'll buy 4 albums, two for me, two for my partner, then suddenly see a bunch of new recommendations at the top of my list on Amazon based on the ones for her.
I have to say that I dislike having to rate music to train a place. I much prefer the Last.fm way - I just listen to whatever I want, and it uses that data to discern what I like. It's a lot more passive to do things in that manner.
The key difference between Last.fm and Amazon is that while Amazon bases it on what people buy, Last.fm does it based on what people ACTUALLY LISTEN TO. Which can be significantly different - if I buy two albums on Amazon, it's going to use both of them equally to recommend other items to me. Last.fm, however, will know which I listen to more, and weight it appropriately.
Oh, and Last.fm requires no work on your part to tell it what to use for recommendations - you just listen to your music, and it uses that to create your profile.
I can't recommend Last.fm enough. That site is responsible for single-handedly changing my music tastes significantly, a little at a time. Recommending new artists, and exposing me to others through the streaming radio they have - now I'm waiting to see what happens when my profile continues to change as new artists climb their way up the list.
Besides, Last.fm is almost completely effort-free to use (like 5 minutes to sign up and install the plug-in), so I can't understand why someone WOULDN'T want to use it.
And in reality you can't judge a system in it's first months out of the gate. In ten years, no one's going to care about the initial launch. If the games are still lame in a year, then write the system off. It's really too soon to say.
There are already non-lame games out. Kameo is quite fun, PGR3 is really amazing (and I didn't touch either of the first two), and for what's fun, the #1 game is the Xbox Live Arcade title Geometry Wars Retro Evolved. Seriously. The best game for the system right now may well be a $5 purchase. And that's not an insult to other games - but a statement of how well done Geo Wars really is. Hard-core old-school shooter action with enough eye candy to fit a next-gen system.
I was thinking the same thing - did the submitter actually READ the Next-Gen article? It was totally positive on the 360, and pointing out that the games are going to just get better and better. (And if the graphics on 360 games get substantially better than PGR3, which is already the best-looking game I've ever seen, I think we're in store for some real visual treats
Agreed - Visual Sourcesafe is a big stinking turd that never should have been allowed into public.
VSTS source control is nothing like that. I haven't had a chance to really play with all of the UI for source control, just because I've always been running different builds on my machine then what we've been been using to store our source code in (yes, we use our own product, and have been for quite a while), but what I have dealt with has been nice. I look forward to being able to use the released product and have all the functionality available to me all the time.
The new source control system in Team System is much, much better than Visual SourceSafe. Not anywhere even close to that old system.
In fact, I believe that the source control in VSTS is actually based off of the internal source control system that's been in use in Microsoft in a while - similar with the bug/work item tracking portion of VSTS. These two tools already have had significant work and lifetime, just as internal tools so far. So having them as V1 is a little misleading.
The work item tracking system is the best I've used to date. Source control isn't Clearcase, but it's definitely not bad like SourceSafe, and being able to link changesets to bugs and builds and the like is very nice.
(Disclaimer: I am a MS employee and tester on the VSTS team. But I am not now speaking on behalf of MS, and in fact, never do speak on behalf of MS.)
I realized after a bit of play last night and this morning that Live is what's going to make or break the 360. The better graphics and more power is nice, but it's the amazing ton of features on Live that make it such a next-gen experience. Being able to voice chat with my friends while we play different games and even switch between them. Streaming my music from my PC to my 360 as a custom soundtrack in any game. Achievements and Gamer scores. Xbox Live Marketplace offering amazing games for $5.
I feel about 10x more connected to people on my friends list than I did on the original Xbox. It's no longer this separate "play online" section - you're ALWAYS playing online in one way or another, with scoreboards or directly against opponents.
I really think that anyone with a 360 and broadband needs to at LEAST make sure they're connected with a silver account, even if you don't want to pay the $50 to play online. It adds that much.
The Best Buy in Bellevue, WA, went around the front of the building, down the side, to the back of the parking lot, then down next to and finally around the back of the Home Depot. They managed to get MORE 360s than the 266 that were originally planned, and still ended up sending a significant number of people home with paid vouchers that guarantee them a system when enough show up.
I was in line at 7 am Monday for the midnight sale - and was #91 in line. It was quite the experience being there. I don't regret it for a second. Especially since my 360 is worth it, I can tell already.
(BTW, never thought much of it before, but being able to stream my music from my PC to my 360 as custom soundtrack for any game just is amazing - couple that with the media player and visualizations, and my 200 CD changer is now unnecessary)
Yes, the 360 can read the playlist info right off the iPod. Heck, it even knows what you've named your iPod. I got to play with it back at the end of August, and everything was handled wonderfully with the iPod.