Halo: The Master Chief Collection

So the Halo Master Chief collection is out. It was a big part of motivating me to purchase an Xbox One at last. It's hard to review a game like this when all the associated titles are already well-known and played, but there's always some details worth mentioning:

First up the four Halo campaigns included are perfectly rendered, and do not feel in the least bit "off" as ports or anything. Halo 2 and Halo 4 stand out as the former has it's Anniversary Edition here with some cleaned up graphics that look even better than the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition's redesign (albeit not "next gen" better but still good). The new cut-scenes for Halo 2 are some of the best I've seen yet, not just for Halo but any game this year. Meanwhile Halo 4 just looks incredibly nice; it clearly was designed with plans to port and upgrade to the Xbox One.

Aside from the four campaigns there's apparently a ton of multi-player, none of which I've tried yet because I've been too focused on the single player content, and the stories about persistent matchmaking issues have made it easy to decide to wait for the patch on this. Missing from the release are the Spartan Ops missions from Halo 4, but I have been led to understand they will appear in December (whether as part of the core package or a DLC offering remains to be seen). My expectations are that the Spartan Ops missions, being part of Halo 4, had better be "core" and not something you purchase.

The regular multi-player had some connectivity issues for some, but apparently it was something 343 Industries could fix on the server side. Haven't experienced this myself yet (by simply avoiding multi-player) so couldn't tell you what that was all about. That said, MP fans will find that each iteration of the game comes with its own classic maps and mixes. The underlying MP engine is the same one that powered Halo 4's MP (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), but the thematics are tailored to your favorite iteration of the experience. I've never had a MP favorite, myself, so it's all equally interesting to me. Missing also from the mix are the survival modes which I don't think showed up in the series until Halo; Reach and Halo: ODST --which I sincerely hope get Xbox One upgrades next year.

There's also a "mix mode" where you can string together a cluster of missions from across all four Halo campaigns into a sort of "best of" play mode. Nice extra feature.

The first Halo Nightfall pilot is part of the deal, along with a new utility for delivering Halo-related content to your console., a sort of "Halo TV channel" feature with game videos, tips, music content and other stuff. If they add some Red vs. Green on there it will be well worth checking out.

Nightfall has two episodes out right now, and it's proving to be rather fun, albeit with the caveat that it's got the sort of low-key "feel" of a made-for-TV SF series with no-name actors and a need to stick to the budget (you know what I mean). That said, the FX are pretty good. The live gear is great, the attention to detail on weaponry and armor impeccable. The story focuses on a team of ONI*agents on a remote backwater colony which has apparently survived the Covenant purge that hit most Terran systems by the end of Halo 3. There is an ex-Spartan** who acts as the military commander for the colony (and apparently went AWOL when he was a Spartan) and they did manage to find a suitably burly fellow to play the role. There are a few interesting "new" elements added to the Halo canon...at least two alien races that are not Covenant, Forerunner, Precursor or Flood, and the story involves a "unique element" that is poisonous to humans only which appears to have been synthesized on a chunk of the original Halo ring that's slowly plunging into a distant sun. It has potential....although how long that will last is suspect since I heard the Xbox TV wing was axed recently.***

So is it worth it? If you're a Halo junkie like I am, absolutely. If you've never gotten into Halo before but want to try it out, this is the best bang for your buck. If you didn't like it before obviously this isn't going to change your mind.

*Office of Naval Intelligence. They are the CIA-style spooks of the Halo universe.

*If I had to guess I'd say he was a Mark II Spartan, one of the Spartans that were part of the program that predated Dr. Halsey's Spartan III program which focused on augmenting children.

***Leading to the untimely demise of the planned Deadlands series, unfortunately.

Monday Blaaaaagh! Xbox One vs. PS4

Haven't had one of these for a while: what I call the "non-specific quota topic blog." Or, put another way, I haven't got any specific thing to write about, but I do need to write.

So.....!  Here are some amusing Xbox One vs. PS4 comparisons I have discovered this week:

Both machines require a full download of any disc-based software to run said software. However, the PS4 can do it pretty much immediately (presumably streaming from disc as it downloads in the background) while the Xbox One takes a while before it reaches a minimum percentage downloaded to function. Winner: PS4 but it's a pyrrhic victory

The new Xbox One OS doesn't require Kinect but does like to mention a lot how if you had one you could be doing voice commands. PS4 just had an update that likes to tell you it can now do voice commands if you have a mike plugged in. Xbox One came with a mike but apparently that's not enough to do the voice stuff. Winner: PS4 by a slim margin, unless you love voice commands in which case it's by a wide margin. But since I haven't actually tried to do voice on either, I couldn't tell ya'.

Xbox One's standard interface is smooth and efficient and actually quite an improvement over the Xbox 360 interface once you get used to it. The PS4 interface however is smoother and more efficient and a HUGE improvement over the PS3 interface. Winner: tie; they both work and have improved on what came before.

The Xbox One gets turned on and off occasionally by my cat who has discovered he likes to brush up against it when prowling. This seems to have no effect whatsoever on my Xbox One. The PS4, while having a touch-sensitive strip to turn it on and off, is pretty hard to actually make this happen by accident. PS4 hates being turned off unexpectedly (i.e. power loss) not sure about Xbox One yet. Winner: meh.

Xbox One interfaces with Smartglass on my Surface, letting me use the Surface's keyboard to type in codes and instruction. Nice! The PS4 lets me play games and navigate on a remote connection with my PS Vita. Also nice! However, the PS Vita is tied to an old account of mine with my real name showing (thanks Sony for not letting me change that) so while that account is on my PS4, I use my "not real name" handle account for all gaming. Since my PS Vita won't let me use a different account, it is largely useless to me for anything involving online gaming as a result. Winner; Xbox One by a wide margin. Microsoft's willingness to help fix accounts with name issues and smooth multi-media integration of smartglass is awesome. It's a shame, too, because the PS Vita's remote play connectivity is also amazing, but Sony's stubborn refusal to let people change game handles, especially on old established accounts made when, say, a confused person didn't think/realize he'd even have an online gaming tag to worry about (ahem) makes it necessary for said person to create an entirely new account to start migrating everything over to, when all he really wanted to do was change his Effin online game handle. Rant off!

Xbox One runs Netflix better than PS4. 'Nuff said. Winner: Xbox One.

Xbox One has Sunset Overdrive, a sort of genre mashup of Saint's Row, Borderlands and a mild acid trip. It's also hot the Master Chief collection coming out soon. PS4 hasn't got it's killer app (yet) but The Order: 1880 should be along early next year. Winner: Xbox One by a hair, but that's changing.

Space: it's a challenge for this era of consoles. When both machines require that you download the full game to the HDD, it means that you have to keep an eye on the 500 GB of space each console comes with. I've already had to think twice now about what games I will keep active on my PS4, having run out of space after about 14 games or thereabouts, and it's affecting my consideration for future purchases and what console they go on....do I keep CoD: Ghosts installed on my PS4 since I still enjoy dipping into the multiplayer, or do I delete in anticipating of the likely 60GB of space CoD: Advanced Warfare will command? Or do I simply by Advanced Warfare for the Xbox One, which currently still has 48% of its space free? Decisions decisions. Winner: no one wins here.

The Xbox One controller is very comfortable, works flawlessly on my PC, has cute feedback in the triggers, and is a perfect refinement of the old Xbox controller. PS4's controller is very comfortable, has a nice track/swipe square, fixes every conceivable issue one could imagine on the insanely bad old Dualshock controllers, and is very comfortable. Winner: toss up, I love them both.

Conclusion: tomato, to-mah-to. Seriously these are both fine machines in their own right and both also suffer from not having enough exclusives to really make either machine properly stand out. That's changing, slowly, but next time you see Sony fanboys mocking the Xbox One for it's 720p performance on some games (hint: I can't tell the difference) or Xbox cronies deriding the PS4 for Sony's epic failz just step away and hose them all down. Real gamers own both consoles!

Xbox One Sunset Overdrive Edition - Enjoying the PS4 while the Xbox One Loads and Installs

I actually took the day off to pick up and enjoy my new Xbox One Sunset Overdrive Edition, which is a fancy way of saying the white console version of the Xbone.

So far I've been enjoying my PS4 while waiting for the Xbox One to install games. It's a long, slow process, even with it cabled right in to the router. Sunset Overdrive comes as a downloadable code, so I have a sneaking suspicion it will be late tonight before I get to play. I've got Forza Horizon 2's disk in the machine now and it's installing at about just a bit over 1% per minute.

Oh! It's beeping at me....Forza is ready to play with 14% downloaded. Joy....!

Anyway, I've got Forza Horizon 2, Lords of the Fallen, Sunset Overdrive, D4, Dead Rising 3 Apocalypse Edition and Project Spark to explore today. More later......!


UPDATE: It took many hours to reach the 21% mark on Sunset Overdrive, but now it says it's playable with 80% to go....dare I tempt fate? The Xbone can't download while its installing disc-based games, and alas I had many disc-based games to feed into its maw. Such is life for this generation of consoles.

Lords of the Fallen is a hoot, however. Sort of like a mashup of Dead Souls and Diablo III, but with more explanation for how you play than the former and a more methodical, calculated style of combat than the latter; but something about it really pings off of my appreciation for both games, albeit with the conceit that I grew to hate Dark Souls with a strong passion. This one has some real potential....

Xbox One Decoupled from Kinect, now competitively priced at $399...but too little, too late?

Microsoft has announced that on June 9th Xbox One can now be bought for $399 without a bundled Kinect. That's cool, and it may prompt me to buy one (though still not likely to happen until they actually have some exclusives worth purchasing).

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people (like me) opted for the PS4, and don't regret that decision. The PS4 and Xbox One have very, very similar catalogs of games right now....if you look at the existing lineup of games for each console, you'll see that the number of exclusives is damned small, and technically leaning in favor of PS4 right now (based on Infamous: Second Son and Killzone: Shadow Fall mostly, but I'm rather biased since I never much cared for the Dead Rising series...and Ryse doesn't sell well to people averse to the creep-zone brought about by the Kinect).*

If the 2014 releases for both consoles are almost perfectly identical (and they are), and the exclusives that would sway decisions on this are still looking like 2015 or later releases for the Xbox One...is anyone really going to buy a second console just so they can have both, when having one pretty much nets you everything right now? And on a console which is being trumpteted for its superior performance time and again?

 I was never a Sony fanboy and I didn't even buy a PS3 until February last year  ....but I'll be damned if Microsoft didn't make me one.

*Given that the best version of Titanfall is on PC, hard to include it as "exclusive."

Microsoft acquires All the Gears of War

Story on Forbes here. Looks like Microsoft has secured Gears of War in its entirety as an exclusive IP now and forever, a smart move since GoW and Halo together are 99% of the reason many people (like myself) ever bothered with an Xbox 360. I can safely say that my Xbox One purchase will be tied to whichever of the next releases come out in these franchises....unless the next gen iterations of GoW are awful, which while theoretically possible (let's not forget the lesson of the Tomb Raider franchise over the last two decades) seems somehow unlikely to me.

I've quite enjoyed (well, sometimes) catching up on the Resistance and Killzone franchises on the PS3 and PS4 (Killzone Shadow Fall is a great game) but I'll be honest....the over-the-top space marine vs. aliens antics of Halo and "lost colony gears vs. monsters from the earth's core" themes of GoW have been a lot of fun for me over the years.

On the Joy of Not Caring About New Consoles

One of the nice things about having a diversity of interest is that no single thing necessarily dominates one's attention. In my case I've been far more excited about discovering 13th Age than I am about the imminent arrival of the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. Given that I just bought a PS3 earlier this year that makes a bit of sense; I have 20+ games in my shelf backlog on that machine that I hardly have time to get to; the prospect of paying $400 right now for a PS4 just to play the new Killzone doesn't sound like a smart move...and all the other titles coming out are almost all cross-platform, including PC, which makes for very little incentive to pick up one of these consoles Day One.

Given that the 1st release of new consoles also comes with hideous uncertainties like fatal design flaws and unforeseen errors and other problems, it's sometimes a miracle that they can get such a high rate of adoption early on.  Still....a lot of people out there use the console as their primary gaming bread and butter, so I imagine there must be households out there where having one of these machines is both a necessity and a sign of prestige.

So in the midst of this consumer chaos I have opted out. I'm going to keep prepping for my 13th Age game (we're running one this Saturday!) while I enjoy my recently acquired Kindle Paperwhite (more about that later). And speaking of big spectacles, the recent World of Warcraft "Warlords of Draenor" announcement was enough to push me over the edge....after two years I have decided, shockingly, to not only resubscribe to WoW but to even get the Mists of Pandaria expansion....! So what did did I do with this return? Why, roll up a brand new level 1 human fighter, of course! I'll suffer through a pandaren later....but not a monk. I'll make something else a monk.

I don't know if it's nostalgia or just the video game equivalent of comfort food, but it is nice to return to WoW again. In the world of MMOs there's something rather pleasant and addictive about the way WoW does it's "thing" that the endless competitors keep missing. I'll play it for a while, probably lose interest eventually and then be ready for when the rather impressive sounding Warlords of Draenor finally arrives.

Have some Humble Pie, Xbox One

Apparently Microsoft is not above admitting it made a bad choice and recanting. Don Mattrick came out with an official statement that the Xbox One will no longer require an internet connection every 24 hours, will only require internet access at startup, will not restrict the trading and resale of games, and will let you play all games the same way either online or offline.

Interesting. I guess the backlash was even more noticeable than just a lot of internet flack (maybe preorders were way below what they anticipated?)

Unfortunately, they still have that mandatory Kinect requirement and a $500 price tag so PS4 still looks like the better deal to me.

Focusing on the Positives!

Okay, back to the usual round of gaming stuff on the blog!

Penny Arcade summed up Microsoft's E3 presentation nicely:

At this point....like, literally the only thing Microsoft can do to salvage it's image issue with the Xbone is to recant some of its established position. My suspicion is that due to numerous behind-the-scenes agreements and issues already in place that this is not feasible, so I guess they'll have to keep figuring out ways to spin their current tangled web.

I mean....if you haven't seen the video by now, it's really quite amusing: PS4's process for sharing games:



Sony really owes Microsoft, they couldn't have made E3 so entertaining and successful without them!

PS4 takes the First Shot and hits it out of the park

Who knew?!?!?! The idea that Sony, only slight less vitriolic and clueless at times than Microsoft, would properly announce a Playstation 4 that caters to all the features that the now infamous Xbone has specifically eschewed.

According to Gamespot:

The PS4 will support the used market as it exists currently....so no convoluted new scheme to force  consumers to give up the Right of First Sale, nor to assume that there is any harm from the used market that must be squelched, presumably.

No online check-in required. Wow!

And at the Escapist (I don't recommend Escapist for properly researched news bits, but it is convenient):

Price point of the PS4? $399. That's one hundred bucks less than the Xbone.

It'll come packaged with a 500GB hard drive, controller, headphones and HDMI cable out of the box. Looks like it does come with a Sony Eyecam or whatever it's called. I wonder if it will be an "always on" element or not? Given the Ps4 is designed to facilitate offline play as much as online, I'm guessing not.

Also, it's shaped like a Rhombus and does not look like it fell off of a Delorean.

Tech Radar has the best overview I've found so far.

I'll be putting my preorder down for the PS4 it looks like. Nice to feel excited for a console, even if it's just to be a part of the process.

Your move, Microsoft.

Grumpy XBone Post #2

So Microsoft released more details on the XBone and it's not terribly reassuring for many people. Ars Technica has an overview on the new info here. In parsing out the new data, there are actually some decent features being pesented.....but they're modest and hard to appreciate in the wake of the other more draconian elements. Specifically:

1. You can have a family account with up to ten people on it. This is pretty neat actually, something Steam doesn't provide for on PC and something the current Xbox 360 only touches on with family accounts. On the other hand, I can pop a disk into my 360 and anyone can play it. In fact I am pretty sure the only limits right now are on DLC and XBLA downloads purchased on my account. Even Sony's PS4 is a bit more reasonable than that, allowing a certain number of current accounts to access my downloaded content (so my wife can play Demon Souls too, basically).

2. The phone in online-every twenty four hours or every hour at a friend's thing doesn't really bother me because I'm always online at home, but the friends part does because I like to drag my Xbox 360 to my friend's house once in a while for some Halo or Gears of War gaming and he's got occasional internet issues (also, he doesn't even have an Xbox Live account so we usually don't go online at all). The new Xbone doesn't favor this freedom. The loss of offline functionality for more than 24 hours is problematic for the two or three times a year that Comcast/Xfinity craps out, too. I've always been able to lean on the 360 in the past to fill those periods with gaming. Admittedly, that's not a big concern for me....I am not lacking for offline entertainment, I admit....but it's still a negative, another loss of freedom that Xbone's predecessor offered.

3. The used games issue isn't a deal breaker for me either, as I don't buy many used games. However, the key reason I will buy a used game is if I want to try it out but want to return the game should it prove to be a terrible experience, and Gamestop still offers that sort of return one week from date of purchase. I also happen to think that Microsoft's got lots of evidence on its own current XBLA store that they don't really plan on moving to a competitive digital sales model ala Steam, simply because they barely touch upon the concept now. Xbox Live weekly sales are occasionally cool, but 95% of the time most sales are "meh" at best and the typical cost of games on their current digital service are disproportionately high relative to the long-tail value of PC titles, for contrast. If you want even more compelling evidence that Microsoft has no interest in consumer-friendly pricing structures and sales look at the travesty that is the Games for Windows Live store. So in this regard I have to clearly state that Microsoft's demonstrated how it handles digital sales, and it's not pretty.

4. There's no upside best as I can tell to the always-on Kinect elements, and I'm going to show my paranoid colors here by stating that for every other issue with the Xbone, this is the one which kills it for me. Actually, the language Microsoft itself used is what's the deal breaker, as the curious covert double speak, suggesting that the Xbone can and will be recording if you don't specifically opt out, is a tacit implication that it can spy like this, and therefore one must assume at some point it will do so. Someone coined the phrase "Xbox1984" as a title for the new machine, and I think it's apt. Yes, they do state "we won't record you," but the fact that they then discuss "opting out" as a process you have to go through suggests the default setting for the machine is "we can record you if we want, unless you specifically tell us otherwise. And even then, who knows!" The level of detail the Kinect is capable of recording is even more disturbing.

 At this point, literally the only reason I can see to purchase an Xbone is if I want to continue with the Halo franchise. Gears of War was a great series, I quite enjoyed it....but it was clear with Gears of War: Judgement that the franchise was done and had just released one more retread that I strongly suspect was intended originally to be a DLC content pack for GoW 3 before Cliffy left Epic. Meanwhile Halo 5 will have direct competition from its progenitors at Bungie with Destiny....which, of course, will also be on the PS4.

All Sony needs to do is announce a PS4 that operates in the same core model of digital sales and distribution as the PS3 currently, with continued support for used game sales and I think they've won this console war before the first machine is ever sold. We'll see. That...or Wii U needs to do some aggressive advertising and Nintendo needs to display a distinct uptick in the number of third party releases for its machine. However, if the PS4 jumps on the Xbone bandwagon and Wii U continues to look irrelevant....then I think PC gaming is going to dominate.