Xbox Live
After countless requests from my brother Peter I decided to give XBox Live a try. So far, my experienced has been very mixed. Simply having the ability to play a countless number of people from your living room may not be enough for some to pay the monthly fee.
Short introduction
For those of you currently living under a rock, XBox Live is a service with which you can connect your XBox to the Internet in order to play any Live-enable game with people from all around the World. The service requires an account, which costs roughly $50USD per year.
The Bad
Typically, I would start off with the things I found most enjoyable - however I found more things that I didn’t like about this service than I liked. That isn’t to say that this service does not have it’s redeeming qualities, but we will get to those in a moment.
To setup an account with Xbox Live you must first have an Xbox Live starter kit. The starter kit consists of a 3-month subscription, an Xbox Live headset, and a “starter disc” (starter kits very in contents). To sign up, you must go through a difficult on-screen process. You must have a Live-enabled game to create your account, which is where the starter disc comes in, unless you have a Live-enabled game handy. Then comes the tedious task of entering in all of your user information via an on-screen keyboard using your Xbox controller. An Xbox keyboard would be so cool (if you’re listening Microsoft). The process took me about 12 minutes start to finish.
From within any Xbox Live-enabled game, you have the ability to see when anyone on your Friends list is online and what game that they are playing. This makes it easy to hook up with people you’ve played with in the past, just by challenging them to a game, or joining theirs. However, I’m still on the fence about the fact that every game has their own controls, interface and uses for these features.
Realizing that each game must use these features in a slightly different way, I would like to see a standardized way of activating and viewing these features. For instance, in Project Gotham Racing 2, to access the Friends menu you need only to hit the Y button at any given time. The interface within PGR2 is very simple, which makes it very quick and easy to get what you need done. However, the inability to leaves messages for your Friends is quite annoying. In Tiger Woods 2005 the Friends list is a different button to access it, and requires a degree in Human Interface Design to master, but at least I can leave text messages to anyone on my Friends list. They will, however, only be able to read those messages from within TW2005. A way to leave voice and text messages to anyone on your Friends list on Xbox live is a feature that must happen at some point.
Oh yeah, what brainiac came up with the idea that I would want to text chat to the the person I am currently playing, if I am currently talking to that same person using my headset! For those of you with Tiger Woods 2005, do the following and see if it’s annoying. Connect to someone who can chat with you using their headset. Now, hit a drive down the fair way tapping the black button to get the desired roll. While hitting that button, accidentally tap the B button. See, it’s incredibly annoying isn’t it?
Before this post becomes an all out rant, I would like to tell you about one more bad thing.
Conflicts, it would seem, run rampant with Xbox Live users. It’s undetermined, as of yet, whether these conflicts have to do with software, hardware or something in between them physically. I’ve personally found about 3 or 4 people that I can not play PGR2 with and there is no explainable reason why. This problem is not permanent either, with some whom I’ve had a conflict I can connect to the next day. It’s been suggested that there are IP conflicts within the Xbox Live service. Not knowing how this service actually communicates via the Internet or how it authenticates each user, I can not say for sure. The error messages that are received from within the game are completely bogus and do not lend themselves to any type of logical answer.
The good
Yes, I did find some good with the Xbox Live service. Simply put, Xbox live is like having every game player on the planet in your living room. Not just your Friends either, you can play with anyone. This may not be too astounding to those of us who’ve been playing PC games since they first learned what a keyboard was. However, taking this ability into the living room via a console is still cool to me.
The audio quality while voice chatting, even with 8 or more players within a given game, is very good. It rivals the quality of a telephone. On occasion the person, to whom you are speaking, will experience some lag and become hard to hear. But I’ve only found that true with a few people, and they admitted to using their Internet connection for other purposes at the same time. However, and I believe this is game specific, in NBA Live 2005 you an lose the ability to talk to the person you’re currently playing for as many as 3 quarters of the game. This happened to me on 3 separate games, and others have said similar.
When inviting someone to be your friend, most games allow for a short voice message to be sent with the invitation. I like this because it allows for people to know who you are, which helps with some of the Gamer Names that people have selected.
Having an insanely fast Internet connection as I do, I haven’t experienced any lag. But others have told me that lag is very scarce, and that it’s usually user specific. Meaning that if 1 person in the game lags, the rest of the people do not experience that lag. This runs true for many online multiplayer games. However, in Quake 3, if I lag I’m toast. In most of the games I’ve played on Xbox Live, so far, the person that lagged simply disappeared for a moment. I suppose that there are pros and cons to the way this is handled and is dependent on the game.
Conclusion
If you have a few extra dollars, pickup Xbox Live. It will allow you to get far greater usage out of your console system, and it’s fun to play with people you’ve never played with before. In all likely hood, the people you play online will be people you would have never had the chance to play otherwise. If, or shall I say when, Microsoft upgrades this service I am sure that they will address some of the above mentioned things I’d like to see, as well as many others.
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