GamerHaze

There are certain things that annoy me about the current console generation, annoyances that could easily be fixed in the next. Here’s my top five in no particular order.

1. Faulty hardware

It’s widely recognized that the Xbox 360 has probably the highest failure rate of all time at this point. Why? Some believe that it was down to their hard-headedness to be the first to market, beating both Nintendo and Sony, but whatever their motivation was, it was inexcusable. Another 6 months of R&D would have maybe alleviated these problems a little bit. However it’s not just Microsoft, Nintendo’s Wii will fail to read dual-layer discs if so much as a speck of dust gets on the lens and I’ve had a few friends with failing Blu-Ray drives in their PS3s. Next generation, a little more development before going to market? Please?

2. Chasing of the casual market

Microsoft is especially guilty of this, but they shouldn’t bother, as Nintendo has it down to a science. Nintendo have become extremely good at targeting the non-gamer with their own range of casual games, and bundling Wii Sports (now recognized as the highest-selling game of all time) with the Wii, at least in Europe and the US, was a stroke of genius. Right out of the box you had a console that the whole family could use even with only one Wiimote. Microsoft, on the other hand, launched their console a year before the Wii and two years after the Wii’s launch, they decided they wanted Nintendo’s market. This culminated in the release of the new dashboard dubbed the NXE. All it appeared to do was alienate users, especially amongst my friends.

3. Region locks

Sony has to be commended for not forcing publishers into putting region locks on their products, although it’s certainly not easy to import their goods thanks to their lawsuit against Lik-Sang a couple years back. And although it’s not widely known, there are certain titles on Xbox 360 which are also region-free, such as Naruto: Rise of a Ninja. However this doesn’t really go far enough, why have some titles that allow it but not others? Next generation, no region locks at all, please?

4. The fear of homebrew

Microsoft embraced homebrew in their own way through the Community Games section on the new dashboard, making it accessable with no console modding. They seemed to have gotten the hint that people like running homebrew. If Sony and Nintendo embraced it in the same way, especially on the DS and PSP, then the argument that people only mod their devices to play homebrew goes away and they have a legitimate case to shut down stores that sell flash cards and pandora batteries.

5. Achievements

What started as a fantastic idea, a cumulative high-score of sorts across all games, has become utterly worthless. Avatar: The Burning Earth on Xbox 360 started the trend of easy achievements, it was possible to get the full compliment of points in the first level of the game by mashing one button over and over. While more recent titles have not been as easy, easy point titles do exist, and in fact several of my friends now seek out the easy games and play them to completion. Most of these titles are kid’s games, which make their gamercards interesting reading.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction

I will admit to being cynical about this title, hence not buying it until I saw it for £15 in a failing retailer’s store. However after sinking several hours into it, I am genuinely surprised by the gameplay. I haven’t read any reviews so I don’t know if this comparison has been drawn, but as I played this game I got a greater sense of it being an open-world platformer, even though it clearly isn’t. I readily admit to not playing a single game in the franchise before this one, so therefore I was expecting strictly linear game progression. However once you get your spaceship about three missions in, the game opens up and you can start exploring whereever you like. At this point I draw comparisons between this game and Mass Effect. Two very different genres of gameplay, however they are linked through their mission progression.

I think it’s more to do with it not meeting my expectations at all, but completely destroying them and in doing so, I found a game I genuinely enjoy and cannot wait to go back to.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

I bought this game after Brad Shoemaker’s (Giant Bomb) glowing recommendation. I had already tried the demo and didn’t get on with it at all. I got frustrated that even though I made vehicles they wouldn’t show up in Showdown Town, the game’s hubworld. Little did I know that that was intended, I just didn’t notice the game telling me that in the demo.

However, I bought the game, and I have sunk more time into that than any other game recently. I like to pretend to be a creative person, which is why my LittleBigPlanet level is still as-yet unpublished, so Banjo’s vehicle creation system tickles that part of my brain in all sorts of ways. The sheer number of parts the game gives you is staggering, and the limit placed on vehicle creation, 250 parts maximum, doesn’t seem like it’s going to hinder me that much. If anything it will force creativity when resources are at a premium.

This is another game I cannot wait to get back to and can see myself sinking a lot of time into.

Knothole Island DLC for Fable II

Oh dear.

It was all going so well, too.

Knothole Island is the first in a totally presumed line of DLC for Fable II. It costs 800 Microsoft Points (around £6.80) and is a complete and utter waste of money.

Here’s a summary of the first quest you will get from this DLC. You are asked to go to an island to help the settlers there with a weather problem. When you get there you will talk to the village leader who asks you to go dig up a key in order to get into a tower to manipulate a totem. The village’s problems are then solved and you leave the island.

Copy and paste the above paragraph two more times and you will have a perfect description of the three quests in the DLC, not including a completely throwaway moral choice at the end, which is as far removed from the moral choice at the end of the main storyline as you can get.

Sure there are plenty of new items to find, but they all do precisely nothing except undermine everything that happened during the course of the main storyline.

All in all, not worth the money, making this the first piece of DLC I truly regret buying.