Major Nelson Podcast Ridiculousness

For those who haven’t seen the story yet, check out the story on Kotaku called Major Nelson Mocks Gamers, Undermines Position.

In summary, essentially we have another case of Xbox Live’s Major Nelson teaming up with the simply-named “e” to marginalize player opinions once more. Personally, I’ve had it with the Major Nelson cast. The following is a post that I made no the Major Nelson blog.

“MN: Damage done, to be honest I’ve been listening to your podcast for a long time now and will probably not continue. I’ll still use your site for news of upcoming 360 and Live content of course.

Any time I’ve ever heard e on the podcast the two of you are usually addressing something to do with a Live update, some special bit of content, etc. That’s fine. But when addressing the concerns of Live’s paying customers the two of you frequently come off with a very condescending tone that’ll usually have me stopping listening to it.

I know you’re human, I know you’re trying to inject humor into it, but this kind of thing has been going on for a while now. That is, the marginalizing of the opinion of your consumers. Nobody’s asking that MS and the 360 developers bend over a barrel for every wish that everything be free, only that someone somewhere listens to us telling you that we’d have less of a problem purchasing content digitally if it was priced reasonably when taken in context with the content itself.

The problem is nobody sees that happening when time after time the consumer is given content which is unreasonably priced. It reads like we’re not getting heard, that developers are greedy, and faith is lost.

Anyway, just my opinion that I wanted to share, because I do see the value in the things that you do.”

I’m sure nothing will come of it, that no response will be garnered from Nelson himself, and that the various Xbots out there will flame the bejesus out of it, but oh well. This is just bad community relations, and at the very least he should be aware of how the consumer feels.

Systemfehler

Funnily enough, 14 days before my Xbox 360’s product replacement plan through Best Buy is due to expire, my 360 starts doing some weird graphical stuff while playing GRAW2. I reboot to see if it fixes the problem and whammo, get a single red light of doomy doom. Behold, the gallery of shame.

According to some useful debug information, the error could be because of a screwed A/V cable or a failed A/V encoder. I have two A/V sets, one for component and one for VGA. I’ve tried both of them, which worked before the problem, now both show this error. I’m inclined to think it’s a deeper hardware failure.

I’ve been using my 360 through the VGA connection so I can utilize the 1080p resolution on my set, so who knows, maybe running the 360 in a mode it wasn’t originally designed for has cooked the video chipset. At any rate, tomorrow I’ll probably be going to exchange it. Whee!

Review: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

Title: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
Platform: Xbox 360

Trying really hard to break the record for the longest game title, GRAW2 came out this week to a relatively decent amount of fanfare. Sort of. Well there IS a TV trailer which doesn’t even show in-game footage, but lets not go there.

If you’ve played GRAW1, you’ve played GRAW2. The gameplay is nearly identical, with some generally good improvements. Graphically, it’s a pretty large leap above GRAW1, which was pretty interesting in that GRAW1 looked pretty fracking good. Here the shadows and lighting effects are unbelievably good, with a very cinematic quality which immediately sets the mood for you. Things are almost too realistic here, it’s even more of a challenge to spot the enemy which makes the gameplay move at a more strategic pace.

The Cross-Com interface has been improved with some neat enhancements, such as the ability to hold down the RB button to see a full-screen view of the team member or support unit you’ve got selected. You can manually control drones this way, and with squad member in single player it lets you swivel the camera around and issue orders. You could almost stay back away from the action and just coordinate efforts from that view. It’s pretty slick.

Multiplayer has a new co-op campaign to play though, and has a couple of new game types such as Helicopter Hunt, where it’s your squad vs. an onslaught of helicopters. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the later choppers are gunships with missiles. Ow.

Overall though, the multiplayer area of the game is obviously where the development focus was, so if you’re buying this for the single player campaign you’re going to be slightly disappointed. The SP campaign is good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just ridiculously short. GRAW1’s was longer than this, but that being said GRAW2’s is far more cinematic and intense, as well as being easier to manage with all the Cross-Com enhancements. Still, multiplayer is where it’s at here, so if you didn’t enjoy that with the first game then give this one a pass.

You can even change the time of day in the non-co-op matches, so you can play during the day or at night. This means you probably won’t see too much in the way of $20 downloadable content consisting of relit maps, something which is universally considered to be a great big pile of crap.

Otherwise if you even liked GRAW1 in the slightest, this is definitely a great evolution of the game. Well worth trading in the old game for this, since I doubt anyone is going to be playing that anymore.

Rating: 8/10