Xbox Year Two: It's Alive

As a beta tester for the Xbox live service I have had a few weeks to cut my teeth on the service before launch and I have to admit that I was already hooked when all I had to play was a rather limited demo of Whacked, Moto GP Online and NFL Fever 2003. Now that the service has launched officially I have become even more addicted. Now, whenever I consider buying a new game I check to see if it’s Live enabled. If it isn’t, it must be incredible for me to even consider it. While I loved games like Halo, Oddworld and DOA3 before Live, now I wouldn’t necessarily buy them. It’s not that these aren’t great games but the truth is they spend most of their time on the shelf. I spent hundreds of hours playing all the games in my collection, but each one, after a short while would become tiresome and get relegated to “the shelf” from which few games return. Xbox Live has changed all this.

For instance, Ghost Recon, a superb 1 Player tactical simulation really shines on Live. I’ve finished all the missions in single player but I keep coming back to playing online night after night. The surprising thing is that it isn’t Solo or Team play that holds my interest, but the Cooperative mode. In this mode you can team up with a bunch of other players to complete the missions from the game. This is such great fun that I’ve developed specific buddies who I like to invite on to my team. You see I’m pretty serious. We play on elite, with only one respawn and we start at mission one and go as far as we can until we all get too tired to play anymore. Amazingly, we seem to get six people (the maximum) almost all the time!

Ghost Recon (like most live games) isn’t without its flaws however. The real world physics engaged by the game are very exacting and even the slightest bit of lag can result in you pumping 100 rounds into an opponent (computer or otherwise) without killing him. This is particularly frustrating when the moment you give up the target shoots you dead with one shot. Another annoyance specific to Ghost Recon is the lack of always on voice support. Presumably, in order to act more like a radio communications device actually employed by these types of military teams you must press the white button (which is in a rather awkward place) in order to talk, which totally defeats the purpose of the mute button built into the communicator. This results in very quiet Solo games because no one wants to take their fingers off the trigger even for a moment. Finally, the lack of content downloading makes the future for Ghost Recon, despite its fabulous online play, limited. Without new missions, weapons, character classes or game types, Ghost Recon is destined to last only until Ubi Soft's similar game Raven Shield is unveiled.

Another game I’ve been playing quite a bit is MechAssault. This game pits players against each other in the famous giant robots of the MechWarrior (aka BattleTech) world. Although the graphics are cartoonish and the play control slightly daunting to master, it is a real riot to chase each other around it 100 ton robots, crushing building and firing missiles.  What bugs me about this game is the system employed for matchmaking via the service. Every time you finish a match you have to start all over. This is particularly painful if you want to play with the same friends again and again, as you have to recreate the game and invite everyone for each new match. The good news? Content Downloading is enabled so this may be fixed, plus we can expect new Mechs and levels in the near future.

As to the service in general there are several problem issues that are abundantly clear to users soon after they sign on to the service. One glaring omission is standardization between games. Every game handles the features of Xbox Live in different way. While this can be a good thing for some things, it’s is devastating for most. For instance, no two games provide the same means of accessing the friends list or adding players to it. In fact some games don’t even list your online buddies on top but instead in alphabetical order no matter what. One game I have played doesn’t tell you what game your friend is playing and makes it almost impossible to decide whether you should invite them to that game because you may not want to interrupt a long sports game. In addition to a friends list there should also be some kind of ban list. Sure muting works fine for the ten year old that won’t shut up, the guy with voice masking set to Brat or the newbie who keeps saying, “Can you hear me?”, but what about he people that just piss you off? Sure there is negative feedback but that doesn’t stop them from joining your game again and with so many people you may not remember that this guy likes to shoot his teammates until it’s already too late!

The voice masking (which can be fun with friends) is utterly annoying with people you don’t know and it would be nice if as a host you could set “no masking” for his game. Not a single game I’ve played has allowed for you to switch from team chat to all chat. This was a primary feature touted by Microsoft as the default use of the white button (or was it the black?) but it’s not used. Also, in most games it is impossible to tell who is talking until you get to know their voice. This is because there is no indication of who is talking on the screen. Moto GP handles this well by popping up each players name as they speak unobtrusively in the upper right hand corner. Another thing that would be nice would be a way to know what games your friends have. Since these are in fact perfect strangers for the most part it is almost impossible to invite someone to play a game you just bought without asking them in a game you’ve already played with them first. Considering that just about every game saves some data to the hard drive, I doubt it would be difficult for the Xbox to report on which titles each player has available to them. With some minor management a player could then just say which games he would like to accept invites for.

Xbox Live is a bold attempt by Microsoft to use people’s craving for social interaction to usurp rival kingpin of the industry Sony, and it may succeed. It is in fact a fabulous first generation matchmaking system for console gaming. I may have a few complaints but I am still addicted to the service. In fact if I didn’t play as much as I do I probably wouldn’t have these complaints. Since updates will be sent to us automatically we can expect great things in the future. I just hope the future comes soon. I mean Capcom vs. SNK EO comes out 15 days!

James Searles is a freelance writer from Rhode Island. You can contact him via email at james@activewin.com or on Xbox Live under the GamerTag crasher.

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