Kongai-o? The name means nothing.

Kongai’s a really good game in it’s own right, and I was pondering why I don’t play it more than I do. Part of the reason as mentioned on previous posts is that the method of collecting cards still slightly wrankles me, which is offputting. But I’ve now got a big enough collection that it’s not really an issue – I have more card combinations available to me now than I’ve been able to use as it is anyway.

One reason is that I find to play Kongai well, especially against completely unpredictable strangers, my brain needs to be switched on so much, I need to be so alert, that if I am in a good state for this kind of playing level, I’ll usually end up playing something else that needs my reflexes to be good too – like a regular fighting game most likely. Thanks to my work and lifestyle my ‘quality gaming time’, when I’m mentally and physically fully switched on, is already a very precious resource for me – it’s not something I want to squander.

I also have noted that Kongai gives me the feeling I’ve ‘maxed out’ my own skill already. That might sound odd for someone with such a relatively small play-time on the game, but really, I do think I’ve got a lot of it sussed.  I’m well aware my main weakness is a failure to ‘do the math’ due to laziness in certain situations when I really ought to be calculating moves more carefully.

Of course this ‘max skills’ impression is likely really quite a false one. I am sure there is still lots for me to learn, especially in the matchup area, and of course, I can also win more cards to improve my deck further to what I think I’d like it to be. This last point is especially apparent now that Kongregate has added some really nice card collection features so I can see all the lovely cards I’d like to get my hands on. It’s a really nice feature on it’s own that encourages me to play more.. but still doesn’t do quite enough to entice me.

What would entice Remy77077?

Trying to look at this from a wider perspective, I was wondering about what I would do to resolve this, and I hit on what I think is a pretty good idea that would also completely solve the card acquisition issues I have. And it’s incredibly simple. Basically, an XP system: Instead of a random % ‘drop rate’ of getting a new card when you win a game, instead, give the player some points towards their next card. The amount of points could potentially be random, or perhaps related to the level of person you beat or whether it was a ranked or regular game. The reason why this would work so well is that most people love to see a progression like this – just take a look at any grinding in an MMO, XBox Achievements etc.. it’s so prevalent in today’s gaming scene I feel I hardly need to make an effort to prove this point. Then after a certain amount of points, allow a player to win a random card, or alternatively, allow them to save up even more points (double? triple?) to instead pick a specific card they want.

The amount of points needed to get to the next ‘levels’ would of course change with your card collection, so it would be very quick&easy to get the first few cards, increasing to much higher numbers later on; mimicing the effect changing % drop rates as they currently are, and mimicing the ‘level’ treadmill systems that so easily entices people to play.

I cannot think of any disadvantages to this idea over the current system of card collecting and I believe it would also encourage a lot more people to play Kongai, or at least get existing players more interested in playing it more – admittedly there doesn’t ever seem to be a shortage of players as it is, but I am sure Kongregate would always like more. The only reason it could possibly be bad for Kongregate is if they only want to use Kongai as a draw to get people to play their other games. But if that is the case, I am not sure why they allow people to win cards just by playing Kongai at all.

Orange.. Wednesday?

The Orange Box: Day 1.

Well at the insistent urging of my colleague, friend & co-blogger lordnaff I eventually found a copy cheap enough to get.

So to tie in with my ideas on time-based reviews and things that could be added to XBox Live, here’s how I got on with Orange Box after my first forays at it (3 Achievements!) for a few hours last night. Warning, this is going to be unavoidably negative in places, much moreso than I would normally ever blog. However I was planning a post regarding my problems with the FPS genre as a whole, but instead I’ve also included a lot of those points here. So if you’re a big close-minded fan of FPS’s.. please look away now!

As a multiplayer-competition loving goon, the first game on “the Box” I decided to try, naturally, was Team Fortress 2. I already knew it was a pure MP thing, but I hoping for some kind of practice mode. Bots or something maybe? Umm.. nope. Nothing. So instead I booted a LAN game solo and after waiting for a 15 second countdown, to check I was really sure I was ready with myself, it did actually allow me to run around the map on my own, read the character classes and get a few basic tips & figure out the controls before without having to go in totally cold to a multiplayer game. It’s cool that there was some way to do this, but why hide it? Then I ended the game and got a congratulatory message for the longest time alive with the Medic or something. 15 minutes. Oh great, so my attempts at practice have ruined that part of my ‘high score’ stats now too. What a poor interface: This isn’t starting out well for TF2.

Anyway, I have the raw basics of the game down at least, although reloading on the B-button is proving to be an absolute nightmare for those used to Gears and Halo like me. Why on earth would you change that? But it’s time to leap into a Player Match on the same map I’d just ran around. Oddly.. there doesn’t seem to be any lobby, I am dropped straight into a game in progress. It seems to be a 3 v 3 game.

“Hello” I call over mic, to silence. “Anyone there?… Can you hear me?”. I run around for a good few minutes without seeing a single person. I hear intercom messages about ‘the intelligence’ being taken and stuff, so I know others must be there somewhere, but that’s all I get. Eventually I find someone on my team and get near to them and again call out; again with silence as the response. I was wondering if they could only hear me in close character proximity in-game. But it seemed to make no difference. I decide to follow my ‘teammate’ and sure enough I eventually find someone to shoot. A very brief firefight ensued and the usual spazzing about ‘figure-of-8 dancing’ that is all so common in the generally laughably-unrealistic FPS genre occured. I am pretty sure I got killed by a smack to the back of my head or something, although it was hard to tell, as I wasn’t left with any nice view of how I died or anything. The characters seemed to move way too fast to me, really hurting any attempt at tactical combat, not to mention how few hits seem to kill. The movements & attacks felt really jerky and non-fluid. It all seemed to heighten the sheer spazziness of it. As I’ve often felt with FPS games, it did accurately portray a gunfight between two people who had stuck traffic cones over their heads.

Eventually the opposing team ‘won’ the match and I noticed people seemed to be joining and leaving during the game too. But instead of a win/loss screen – it just seemed to restart immediately on another match with the same teams. I was getting bored with no-one to ask advice or anything, and then suddenly it popped up with “The Host has left”.

Maybe it was just a bad group? So the next match I enter the same map but this time one already full with 15 players, as I noticed it had felt extremely empty on that map. “Hello” I said once again as I was dropped instantly into a mid-game. Thankfully this time, someone answers. So it turns out you can actually hear everyone else on the same team. I explain I’m totally new to this and wanting some advice, and the young fella seems happy to help out – also, I notice no-one else seems to be really working as a team much at all. There’s no other communication going on so it doesn’t really matter that we’re talking about what the character classes and weapons over the game’s team channel. I try out a bunch of different classes but I couldn’t seem to get anywhere really with anyone other than the rocket-launcher Soldier who I am getting quite a few kills with at least.

Neither team seems to be be able to make any headway at all at actually gaining the objective. 8 v 8 seemed that it was impossible for either side to crack their defenses. Wandering into the enemy ‘base’ alone I could find no safe way in at all, and even following others in didn’t seem to help. I eventually ended up in a one to one chat with my helpful teammate because the game actually blocks the chat while one or other of us are respawning – but with no indication of this fact, I wasn’t aware I was in fact talking to myself half the time. Another gawp-inducingly moronic hole in the interface then. With the score on 0-0 for ages, the game eventually initiates “Sudden Death” mode which my teammate explains. A couple of minutes into this, without seeing any enemy… “The Host has left”. Oh dear. Well… I’m not really having much fun at this, so despite the fact I am really grateful to my teammate for chatting with me, I decide to go and try something else.

Overall, I can’t see why anyone would play this over Halo 3 at this point. The class selection is a very nice idea and it’s much better than running about the map to learn weapon spawn points. If I want a rocket launcher, I can play with one. That is great.

However for absolutely everything else Halo dumps on it from a stratospheric height. I am also pretty sure there is no party-play & a lack of good matchmaking… However I understand that some features may be a lot better in ranked matches, so I’ll certainly give it another try later. But when you’re looking at a bad interface, worse graphics, worse controls, and seemingly to me at this point far worse gameplay than the most obvious competitor that springs to mind… I’m left wondering why? Even the potential for the vaunted class-based teamwork seems much lower than in Halo without party play & with the flaws with the in-game communication.

So, time to try something else. Let’s start at the beginning with Half-Life 2 then I thought.

 

First impression – well the graphics don’t exactly seem cutting edge but, well, this started out really interesting. I was really impressed by the voicing and I at least seem to quickly grasp some sense of what was going on with the controls etc. The storyline seemed to be really interesting. Who were these overseer-type class? Who was that white-haired man talking over the viewscreens all the time with the really Equillibrium/1984 style stuff… I felt the urge to want to agree with them and assume they really were beneficial just to see how it played out. I wonder how things would get revealed…  but then BAM. It was ruined. My heart sunk – you were already supposed to know that actually, the new ‘ruling class’ people are actually aliens now controlling the earth and they most definitely are the bad guys ™ and you should shoot them in the face immediately all without any qualms at all. No grey areas allowed sir! (but it goes so well with orange).

My interest in the story was almost immediately lessened to the mere curiosity that I get with 99% of videogame storylines.

Even worse, you were clearly supposed to know half the characters already. That’s to be expected I suppose for a sequal.. but it’s not much fun for anyone when you haven’t even brought the game out on the same console. At the very least I expected some kind of storyline prelude summary in the manual. Nope, nothing. Apart from a vague explanation that it was somehow my characters fault that unleashed a lot of this bad stuff ™.

Also.. as good as the speech was, because it was fading in & out as I approached people, and because of the loud voice over the top from the white-haired dude, I kept feeling I was missing things. I restarted a section with the subtitles on, and sure enough, there had been masses of speech I hadn’t heard, that made things a lot more playable and understandable.

Anyway, I got through the first few introductory sections still rather interested, if feeling really let down by the fact the big story ‘reveal’ had already prematurely spilt itself everywhere before the game had even begun. Then finally we get to the more ‘action’ section of the game proper, and finally a I get a pipe! Aaah. This is about the only thing fun I can remember from my brief plays on the PC Half-Life – playing MP matches purely to smack some sniper-rifling camping idiot in the face with a lead pipe.

But I notice the control still feels rather clunky though. Smacking down some crates with the pipe to get through a gap or picking up and dropping things and manouvring objects is a nice feature, but for me it just highlights how bad the first person viewpoint is for this kind of thing. Unlike in third person, sideways-on.. or even you, know, real life, it’s really hard to judge where objects are in relation to everything else around you when you are blessed with a Dalek-like “10 degree view” of the world. Perhaps it should be called 10% Life rather than Half-Life?

I can still see way more from behind a Dalek than in any FPS game

As I got a gun and firefights ensued, it just got even worse. It made me realise how important a feature the ’scanner’ in an FPS (like Halo has) is for adding any kind of realistic awareness of your surroundings. The “hit direction” indicators in Half Life 2 just didn’t seem to work properly at all either. I repeatedly got killed wondering “what the ****” was killing me. The worst case was when I was wandering along and suddenly couldn’t move, and my health dropped to zero. What on earth? On a later repetition I discover I’d been grabbed by some overhead egg-type alien thing. Fair enough, but why not pan the camera up automatically to, you know, let the player have some clue that his face is eaten off? Or better still.. here’s a crazy idea. How about making this game in something other than a first-person view in the first place?

I’m getting shot again and wondering where from.. so I try to backtrack into the cave-like area I’d just poked my head out from, but no.. I just stand still and die. Obviously this was because there was a tiny step on the ground that my character couldn’t backstep up over and, naturally, he had absolutely no awareness of it’s presence. Silly Gordan Freeman-Face! Another time it would seem my elbow got caught against a door corner in exactly the same fashion as I stood there getting shot. A problem I’m sure we’ve all faced in real life.. I’ve seen so many people stuck by their elbows in doorways when they don’t think to even move their arm, or maybe, you know, look out around the door frame rather than being forced to walk through it to get any view of what’s the other side. But of course.. you’d have to make something like Gears of War for that to work in a video game.

I also notice I’m repeatedly running through reasonably sized areas, but with really no clue as to where I’m supposed to be going. All the while being shot at. Again, it makes me realise how much better games have become these days to attempt to overcome these shortcomings of the FPS genre with objective and direction markers and map overlays for example. I got lost numerous times and died a few times before I found the ladder I hadn’t seen, or went in the right direction, or found the barrel I had to smash or explode.

All these things then seemed to combine on one particularly nasty section. I’d narrowly escaped some exploding barrels, and scraped through running down inside some pipes. I then walked out and got slaughtered by overhead gunmen. Ah, I forgot to mention until now that all enemies in this game seem psychically linked to your precise location at all times – the moment you step out of anywhere, or look through a hole in a wall, you will be shot. Even helicopters wheeling through city streets overhead are able to track you to almost sniper-like accuracy. I suppose it’s good practice for multiplayer. Anyway, I respawned and stepped out again, having learnt where the enemies where. I shot the first 2.. then more poured out and I died again. Respawn again.. and I notice each time I am starting this section with only 30% health. And I had no option to not save, no option to backtrack to find more health.

Not since I almost smashed the disk of Final Fantasy Tactics on the Playstation 1 have I seen such a game with such an atrocious save game interface that seems purely designed to screw over the player & perhaps artificially ramp up the challenge. It’s worse knowing that in all likelihood on the PC it had no checkpoints and the player could likely save anywhere and as often as they liked, and could manually backtrack to any previous saves they wanted. That kind of system also ruins games in it’s own way, but it wasn’t anything like this. Checkpoints are a great idea, but this was just so poorly designed as to be even worse than the save-anywhere method. I still eventually got through this section, but it left a really bitter taste in the mouth and resentment in my head.

Unfortunately the game seems all about repeatedly doing the same section over and over until you learn where the enemies are, where you are supposed to be going, where the ammo is. I don’t really feel much fun or progression from doing this. This is a definitive hallmark of all those bad PC games I’ve left behind. I’d heard Half-Life was meant to be immersive? Well it’s impossible to be immersed when you are dying over and over again and having to ‘learn’ sections of the game. Even good set pieces that should feel cinematic don’t really work when you see them over and over. I daren’t even compare it to something like Halo or Gears of War, as Half-Life 2 is so hopelessly outclassed on this front by games like these that it doesn’t even seem like a fair comparison.

I guess I was expecting too much. Worst of all, I was simply getting rather bored playing it. So bored in fact, I was periodically pausing the game and chatting & browsing on a PC while ‘getting through it’. This really isn’t a good sign when I’m only just starting a new game.

Oh and don’t even get me started on the torch! *mad glare*

The only point (past the very first level) where the game really entertained me was with the Achievements. The first one I got in the game was possibly the funniest and most accurate achievement for me personally I’ll ever receive, and when I was getting a bit frustrated with the game and it gave me “Malcontent” achievement, I did think this was a genius of programming to have read my mind like that.

Anyway, despite all this negativity, it’s still a game I feel I can still play more of. It’s reputation alone means it deserves more of my time. Who knows, in a few weeks or months I could completely change my opinion. But for now, I give this game my highest ever rating: One Turd

Draw, Pilgrim!

This is a rather belated post now, but as it’s something I keep referring to I thought it would be good to write this up still.

Over summer, as I was in London for a few days, I decided to go on a bit of a pilgrimage to see if I could find some good video games arcades… to prove they still exist, to hopefully get some good games in, and just to see what was out there really.

I did a bit of research over at Neo Empire forums to get some idea of what I should be looking for… and then set off on the Tube to see what I could find.

I’d been there a few times before, so although I didn’t actually know where it was, I figured my auto-pilot wouldn’t set me far wrong, and sure enough, I quickly found Goodge Street arcade:

Hurrah! Upstairs was all the usual rubbish, but here was the great lower floor – and it was packed with fighting games. Only one I really wanted to play though – I was straight onto Super Turbo which to my pleasant surprise actually had a few people playing it. Not to mention it was ridiculously cheap – I think a pound got me at least 5 credits at 3-rounds to win or something similar. Amazing! If arcades had been this cheap years ago I would’ve actually been able to afford to play on them properly as a student

At first I was at least winning a reasonable share at first, but then I found my nemesis in there – we battled over and over and with different characters, and although I could take him to 2-2 and last-hit kind of exciting action, but I never managed to beat him, despite a ‘coach’ I picked up there – who was giving me boxing mentor style encouragement through a load of my matches. I have to say I feel my attitude is pretty good so I didn’t really need it, but it amused me nontheless. Quite a few people I chatted to and gamed with had been at BOD too, so it was nice to have this little bit of connection with the London scene. Great Games!

I could’ve played there for ages, but it was time to move on as there was another place I’d heard about that I needed to check out before it got too late:

Going to the Troc really took me back. I remember going here when Sega World had just opened…

Of course little is left but reminders of those halcyon days. But I had heard there was a great fighting game scene here, so, braving myself against my acute vertigo, I went up the escalator to the top floor arcade (the same escalator that once really terrorised me; it seems I’ve gotten better at dealing with vertigo over the years, although I was certainly a bit uncomfortable still) to see what I could find. Incredibly dissappointing… All the usual arcade fare, gun games and dancing stuff, a mini-bowling alley. But the best I could find was a Marvel Vs Capcom cabinet and a few other lesser fighters, but nothing very good and no-one playing them, and definitely no ’scene’. So I wandered further, looking all over the place. It’s still a bit of a maze with all the floors, sub-floors and 1-way escalators. I took a look in a few of the new shops. I must have been there for almost an hour and I was wondering if I had been completely misled. But no… there MUST be some kind of fighters here – I’d come this far, and I know to never give up. And I have to admit a small part of me was hoping that just maybe there could be a Street Fighter 4 cabinet in the Trocadero somewhere…

Then, stuck behind an 18+ only gambling area on one of the middle floors, I found what I’d been looking for:

In this cramped hot little area of Funland was packed almost all the current fighting games you could want, and quite a few people playing them – I am pretty sure it was the busiest place for actual video games in the whole of the Trocadero, despite how ridiculously hard it was to find for an ‘outsider’ like me :O. Most of the cabinets were even the great back-to-back Japanese style ones I’d never seen in the UK before. I instantly recognised a few faces from BOD, including the Official XBox 360 magazine editor Ryan King. I spent a time just watching, and realised I was clearly no match whatsoever for any of these guys on 3rd Strike, and the Super Turbo machine I was eyeing up didn’t seem to have any chairs to actually sit down and play.. but eventually I got cheeky enough to grab a chair anyway and put my money in. Again, it was ridiculously cheap! Why did it take arcade owners this long to realise that people will play these games all day if they are reasonably priced? So I started playing ST on my own, but, like any really good arcade, that lasted all of about 30 seconds before I was challenged. And wow.. the level of play here was even higher than the best guys in Goodge Street I saw. I was getting slaughtered, but of course, I kept on trying. Once my Guile had lost about 7 times in a row to this ridiculously good Blanka a chap stepped up to show me how it was done. I was later told he was probably the best Guile player in London and it showed – wow. He was doing match-up related stuff I’d never seen before. I chatted to someone I’d been playing (& losing to!) earlier while watching matches for a while – he was also someone from the Neo Empire forums, but I have annoyingly forgotten his name. But he gave me some really insightful commentary and tips on what I was watching.

Watching how a great Guile player played so differently on ST and especially the match-up based tactics he used just made me realise, again, how little I know ST at this level. I always stand a chance on older SF games like HF, but given I’ve only ever generally got to play Ryus and Kens all the time at anything approaching a high level on ST, I’m really lacking. It made me think just how HD Remix is really going to be an utterly incredible experience for me. (Not to mention it will enable me to actually be able to do certain moves thanks to the easier controls)

No Street Fighter 4 though, which I knew wasn’t really likely. But at least if anywhere in the country had it, it would’ve surely been there. However I’m dissappointed to note that EventHubs SF4 machine tracker still shows NOTHING for the UK.

Anyway, my time was up to get back to my friend’s house in London, get some food, and go and look after her cat.

Leaving these arcades and knowing I wouldn’t experience anything like it again for many months, if not over a year, I left with a sense of melancholy that this was a such great scene – but one that I’d never been able to take part in, and one that, even now, I can never truely be part of, due to my geographical location alone. I’ll never even have a chance to get good enough to even go there and compete properly with these kind of people until a good home version comes out with great netplay so that I can practice against good opponents regularly. At the risk of sounding like a broken record.. roll on HD Remix…

In the meantime, if you ever find beat in an arcade, don’t forget to.. bury me with my, money.

XBox Live Love Be Believe

I’m a huge fan of XBox Live. I’ve already dipped into this when I described it as the “new arcade” in an earlier post. When I see comments in reviews like “it’s got leaderboards if you really want to see you have a better score than MasterKillPwnz666″, I just feel these people totally miss the point. I guess that a reasonable portion of my makeup is a Participant or social gamer, but of course it’s the unbeatable agon of real human competition that is the real crux for me.

Although I have little first-hand experience of them I’ve heard that other systems like PSN and Steam and others like it on the PC are gaining ground on it, so I’m keenly awaiting the new XBox Live “Experience” to see how this enhances XBox Live it on November 19th. Since Live is rather notably the exception in that it is not free – they really do need to add features if they aren’t willing to cut the cost. I’m really happy to pay for what, so far, is a superior service though.

However nice the new avatars and friend-group functionality is though, I suspect they won’t cover all the things I’ve personally being seeing the potential for, honestly, for years now. So here’s a run down of some of them. I’ll be interested to come back to this post and see if Microsoft actually ‘hits’ on any of these.

1. “Now fight a new rival”

What is the the most frustrating screen in any Live-enabled game? “Your opponent cannot be found” following the pathetic early quit of one of life’s losers?… close. But actually I’d give it to the “Waiting for Opponent” screen. I’d hate to add up the time I’ve ‘wasted’ sat there waiting for a challenger at any number of games since the advent of XBox Live. I used to attempt to allieviate this by reading a magazine or a paper at the time, and it has become a lot less frequent a problem now the community on the 360 is simply so large & games have become better designed to cause more frequent re-matches, but this can also make it seem even more irritating when it is unexpected and you’re not so prepared to deal with it. It would at least be better if games showed you how many players were online at that time in the game, to give you some idea if your wait is truely fruitless. Oddly the one game that manages this in a really excellent fashion, Halo 3, is arguably the game that least needs this feature. When I’m sat waiting and wondering if I am totally alone in the world in wanting a game of Speedball 2 or Joust, it would be nice to know if I really am alone!

However, there’s something even better that could be done. I don’t remember sitting at an arcade cabinet listening to the remixed Street Fighter Anniversary Edition menu music for an hour… because of course I was playing against the CPU instead of being sat there looking at a blue screen. I really don’t know why games don’t incorporate this feature – allowing you to play the game in 1 player mode whilst being available for a multiplayer match. I presume it would often add an unnecessary pause when a match is found and the game would need to load more; but regardless, it would be a worthwhile trade off. On so many games this simple feature would be a godsend.

But one problem is that many games that need this the most are the older and more obscure titles. Expecting the game’s producers to patch this kind of add on onto old games is obviously a forlorn hope, but a retroactive ‘fix’ could be done, if it was Live-wide. eg: As part of the Guide button overlay, have some kind of simple game, or games, that can be played over the top of any other game whilst you are ‘waiting’ and effectively in pause online. This would be a huge upgrade for me that would revitalise a number of older titles, especially if available in XBox 1 emulation mode.

At the very least I hope to see some new fighting game come out that uses this idea to some extent.. yes Street Fighter 4 – I am looking at you!

2. Metacritical

It’s really nice to be able to see what my friends are playing online. As some companies have noted, this is even a huge free advertising stream for them. I see a lot of my friends playing COD4, it makes me interested in COD4, at least until I remember it’s another flippin’ FPS anyway

But I also like, and use, the ability to send a “recommendation” to a friend for an XBox Live Arcade game. But this could be taken much, much further. For example a review feature where you could rate games you’ve played. You could then search for data on the most popular games from the entirety of XBox Live, or what your friend’s recommend. A simple 5 star review system would be simple and could work well. I’d be really interested to see what the highest rated game would be from my friend’s list for example. Time to get some new friends if you find your friends list rates Halolz higher than Braid perhaps?

Time-played data for games amongst my friends would also be something I’d find useful – although I guess this would need to be opt-in only or it could get rather intrusive.

You could even combine these ideas, and combine it with Achievements, and allow people to re-review games at a later point. Do people with huge time-played and Achievement scores tend to rate the game higher?.. you’d expect so but it may not always be the case. You could potentially filter out to only see review scores from players that had a certain amount of Achievements on a game – to see what players that really play that kind of game think of it for example.

It would also be great to have an easier method to see which games your friends actually play. The only way you can do this really right now, other than trawling through all your friend’s gamercards, or just taking a mental note when you see them online, is with an XBLA game that has an effective “View friends leaderboard”. For example last night I found out that a couple of my newer XBL friends actually play & own Joust! Something I will hopefully remember next time I see them online and I can potentially offer them an invite to a co-op game.

It really intrigued me when it was said MS may use metacritic scores and download rates as their guide for ‘purging’ old Arcade games from their burgeoning download list – when you think how much more data they could easily have available for this kind of thing.

3. “Remy77077 is . “

Ok, I’ve got my XBL ‘motto’. I’ve gone from “Complex Competition” to “Team Shiity Shotty” recently… but will anyone actually notice this update? Some kind of facebook-like comments and updates would really add to the Live experience for me. Maybe I’m just too much of a socialite and other people wouldn’t like this, but again, with the right privacy and opt-in options, I don’t see how it could do any harm. I’d also love the ability to tag comments against people on my own friends list. Something like “Lives in London, met playing HD Remix beta test” or something would be great to help you manage a large friend’s list – as many people’s profiles are annoyingly sparse. I often find myself using the “Compare Games” feature just to figure out how I even know someone.

4. “It is a gift”

I was wanting to give some MS Points to a friend for a birthday recently and I was bemused that the only way I could do it was to hand him an actual real-life MS Points card. Surely there should be a simple digital way to manage this? Why not allow me to spend my MS Points to send a full game to a friend at least?

5. PeeCee

I’ve noted a few more games these days using the “Live For Windows” moniker and I wonder why there is so little intregration between the systems. I really like the ability to use certain features of Live through XBox.com, but I’d really love it if I could link my PC games more readily into one system. Obviously with a platform as open as the PC, versus the closed system of 360 this is never going to fully intregrate – but I am still shocked at how little has been done so far. Perhaps MS has it’s reasons for keeping it that way, but as noted, it seems to be making baby-steps in this direction.

I don’t think any of this is rocket science…

One team has STICK!

Team Shitty Shotty enlisted a new member last night, wildpaintings, and the team went on another foolery-filled rampage on Halolz. I suspect that wildpaintings maybe in danger of demotion from TSS however, as he led the Team to their dramatic first ever win. 50 to 49!

The game started off badly, with a member of the opposing team immediately making it onto both my ‘Mute’ and ‘Avoid Player – Communication’ lists before the game even began for his ridiculously annoying screeching in the lobby. But there were no drops, and a nice lag-free game that was incredibly close on score all the way… with myself dealing the, not-at-all-lucky-honest, final kill to the enemy team as Navan Daughn distracted the enemy from the flank:

Much whooping and cheering ensued as the glory of Team Shitty Shotty lit up the rankings leaderboard… umm, well not quite. It was only a Casual Team Slayer game. Still, some delicious fiero in the face of agon was certainly felt all-round.

We even won again just a couple of games later, but it wasn’t even close, as the opponents were all on split-screens and one seemed to have turned into a stationary target practice dummy for reasonable periods of time which made the win rather anti-climatic after the previous excitement. However TSS was also fairly close to pulling off an upset in a number of other matchups against far more experienced and skilled opponents thoughout the evening. Definitely improvement was being seen in fact. I will attempt to counter this alarming trend with alcohol next time.

The next challenge is for Team Shitty Shotty to steal a victory from the pansies in a Ranked Match game, and perhaps to take their honed skills into other game arenas.

It was a rather good night of other gaming on top of this as well for me. I once again had some great Street Fighter AE matches with The Uberwarlock, who is an awesome Street Fighter opponent for me always. As usual, I was losing to him, but at least my game was reasonable this time – I even managed to beat his ‘Gief once. A fantastic challenge.

And, much later, I got out of bed for an insonmia-fueled 5am completion of Braid. Both of the Agoners crew are big fans of Braid with lordnaff in particular declaring it one of the best games ever. Myself, I am hugely enamoured with its existence as a 2D game & it’s aesthetic and design ideals, and would have bought it almost no matter what I thought of the gameplay. But overall as an actual game for me, I just think it’s ‘rather good’. The dissappointments that lower it to that category for me are firstly that I became very irritated with the manner in which the obfuscated game mechanics became a part of the puzzle themselves on one too many occasion – a problem a decent tutorial or smarter level design could have easily allieviated; to at least let you understand what tools you had available. And secondly I am feeling really let down by the storyline switch-up in the ending, which was far more poorly delivered than expected, and has pretty much ruined the game’s narrative for me. Then again, I prefer some good emo angst to some hard-hitting plot twist; your tastes may vary. But, I am named after Remy for a reason!

Fight For Futility!