[360] Xbox 360 Discussion. Thermal paste, the delicious and nutricious snack of the future.

Uh, to my knowledge MSoft doesn't make an HDMI cable... could that be the issue?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

To be honest, as long as the hard drive is available separately, I really don't care. Personally, my TV doesn't have a HDMI port in there, so having one really isn't a priority, as well as for the vast majority of 360 owners that don't have access or need for HDMI. The thing that confuses me about this is that releasing ANOTHER version of the 360 risks confusing consumers worse than how they already are. I don't think Microsoft is oblivious to the fact that the 2-tiered system confuses the average consumer, so I don't understand why they'd just abandon their current model for only a slightly upgraded one. I think they'd much rather be focusing on getting costs down on the current version.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by StarmanDX

I think it's more a pissing match with Sony than anything else. That, and the bigger number always looks more impressive to the average consumer. "I'm not entirely sure what a hard drive is, but does the 120 jiggabytes make the console twice as good as one with 60 jiggabytes?"

"Why yes sir, yes it does."

I really, truly, totally wish that that wasn't the case. But unfortunately, that is the case. There are far too many people spending a lot of money on things that they don't even understand, and it's disheartening.

How ya doing, buddy?

They may say they include it, but I believe that warranty only covers the "original retail purchaser", which is definitely not you, if you buy it on eBay.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

You're right in that it probably won't affect anything, but on the off chance you got checked for it, you'd have no real way to challenge them refusing to honor the warranty, because you were violating the terms of it.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Kairi Li

I like the fact I'm not stuck on one position and taking hits like a bitch.

If you don't like being hit like a bitch, don't play Persona 3. The game controls 3 of your characters for you, making you feel helpless sometimes.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

Rez in High Resolution. Educated guess would say that it's just going to be the core areas, right? Will we see "Trance Mission" and the other little features from the previous releases?

The question is "How much will they charge extra for those features?"

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Dakhathsk

I'm planning on purchasing an Xbox 360 in the near future but I do not have a high definition TV yet. I'll probably get one of those in the future as well but for now I'm stuck with standard definition.

My question is, will the Xbox 360 even work on a normal definition TV or is it high def only?

The 360 will work on a normal definition TV, and you will be able to notice a graphical difference.

There are a couple of games, like Dead Rising, where the game makers are assholes and decide that they're going to make their text readable on only HDTVs, but those are thankfully rare occasions and I'd think usually they'd patch it. Dead Rising guys were dicks about it, though.

You'll probably hear a lot of people say that the 360 looks like a PS2 on an SDTV, and you should instantly reply they're full of shit. Yes, there is a HUGE difference between an SDTV and an HDTV, but the fact of the matter is on an SDTV you can still see some of the biggest improvements: Draw distance is ENORMOUS on most 360 games compared to the PS2. Fog barely shows up unless it's supposed to be there. Also, the amount of objects onscreen is way way up from older systems. Texture quality is also markedly improved, especially from the PS2. PS2's problem was how a lot of the textures in its games looked like they were about 5x5 pixels spread on a 1000x1000 canvas, looking incredibly blurry. You can still clearly see that there's a lot more resolution in textures on the 360.

I played on an SDTV for the first year and a half that I had my 360, then upgraded to an HDTV. There are definitely a few advantages, and the main one is that the GUI in a lot of games feels less cluttered on an HDTV. Because the screen is wider, the components can be shoved farther away from each other, leaving the field of view feeling fuller. I never ran into a game where it was a PROBLEM on the SDTV, it was just nicer upgrading to the HDTV.

All in all, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't play the 360 on an SDTV unless you're a graphics-wanking faggot who counts pixels for fun. And since you don't own an HDTV, I'm going to assume you're not one of those, and tell you to have fun playing it.

IMPORTANT! Make sure you buy at least the premium (white box) edition. Since you're planning on upgrading to an HDTV in the future, this will save you the headache of spending $40-some right after buying your new TV for cables that output as component. The ones that come with the system have a switch that enables it to do SD cables, so it's easier to get that cable before the TV.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Colonel Skills

Why do people keep trying to rationalize the stupidity of buying a Core?

I've actually discovered at work that there is a market, however slim, for the Arcade bundle. For someone who would only be playing one game (in a specific case from yesterday, MADDEN) online, that 256 MB card is more than enough to store the data from that one game. Any business-type guy who gets maybe an hour a day to play video games, if that, doesn't necessarily need that huge hard drive and the $280 price for a system that, out of the box, can go online is enough for some people. Granted, those people will probably find out later that they wish they had the hard drive anyway, BUT if they're willing to leave with the Arcade system thinking it'll be enough forever and ever, more power to them. Honestly, Microsoft should release a 1 GB memory card and that'd solve most of the problems. 1 GB is enough for game saves and downloadable content to a point, while at the same time not being so much memory that it feels like a waste of space.

Unfortunately, the other market is people who don't know any better. I think that probably amounts to 95% of the sales of the core, not necessarily the arcade.

However, for anyone else (i.e. non-retards who don't buy systems for one game only), the Premium is still the better deal. I'm just trying to point out that there IS a market, however small, for the Arcade.

Also, speaking of the premium, whoever created this impression amongst the parents of America that the premium is called the "XBox 360 Live" needs to be shot. It takes forever to explain to those people why the word "Live" isn't anywhere near the number 360 on the box.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Solis

5 crappy Live Arcade games

UNO IS NOT CRAPPY.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Here's my rundown of my reaction to the Fall Update:

What I Love

• The new response time for the Guide. It'll take me a while to get used to but DAMN is that sexy.
• The new UI in the Games and Media blades. Finally moves all of the little blade clutter on the sides out of the way when you're in the menus, and the Games blade FINALLY has a setup that doesn't feel redundant. Granted, Achievements and Played Games are kind of one and the same, but having demos and arcade under that one menu option is GREAT.
• It FINALLY doesn't ask you what device you want to use for media every. damn. time. It actually REMEMBERS. Hopefully that'll make selecting songs take a lot less time.
• Overall, everything looks full without feeling cluttered, in all areas of the UI. That's something that's plagued the 360 dashboard and guide since the release, there's been a lot of dead space. Not anymore!

What I Like

• The new UI for the Games Library. That Twist thing looks kinda neat, but I really wish they would've added a new sound or something to go along with twisting the UI rather than the standard "Boop!" It fits more arcade games on a page now, which is definitely a plus.
• Xbox Originals. To be entirely honest, the UI for that section is kind of out of left field, but hopefully they'll enable more of those section-specific setups in the future. The idea is neat, hopefully the games run well. I can't buy any today, though, my credit card is broke!
• Inside Xbox, at least for now. I won't be thrilled if it doesn't get updated a lot, but if it turns out to give some reasonably important news on occasion, I can live with it being on my main dashboard blade.

What I Dislike

• All those social networking muckamucks. The bio, name, and everything. Sure, it's neat, but do I really have to look at them on my friends list? THAT feels like overkill.
• Friend of friend list. Sure, it doesn't directly affect me at all, but hell, I'd rather they work on something important.

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Infernal, you have exactly 72 hours to get hooked up and choose a gamertag. >

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Shin

I like the sound of being able to set online status before I'm signed in. Much as I love playing with people online, some days you just want to play single player and it'd be easier to appear offline than to seem rude refusing game invites.

You can already do that, and I've done that many times on days where I've wanted to play by myself.

As for the delisting titles thing, are they fucking stupid? There is no logical reason that I can think of for them to need to remove titles that are performing poorly. There are plenty of people who've not taken their system online yet that might LOVE some of the games that are on the service. The fact that the games are online means that the game will never be impossible to find/sold out. It's right there, a button press away.

If they're worried about being able to find the good games, why not just put the crappy ones into a "Value" section? That's pretty much a euphemism for "Shit" at this point, you can just move all the crappy games into the Arcade Value section, knock them down a couple hundred MSP to justify them being a VALUE, then leave them there to rot.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Well, you know, maybe they set it up so the auto download registers differently from a --

Who am I kidding, if they have to go in after the fact and delete shitty games they definitely didn't have the foresight to make the autodownload not affect a metric like conversions.

I was speaking idiomatically.

So, that NXE. I am a total faggot and decided to write a giant review about it because I've had the writing bug the past week or so and I managed to score the NXE through the Early Access Preview thing. (So, I'll admit I'm also gloating. God dammit I'm entitled to brag once every two years )

I will admit I'm thoroughly impressed by what they did, and the best part is even if you irrationally hate the entire fucking thing for some reason, they've got enough functionality in the Guide now (finally) that you won't even have to mess with it most of the time if you don't want to. I'm personally a sucker for eye candy so I probably will.

Also, the SPEED. The dashboard itself rarely had any of those annoying "Loading" screens, I haven't had to wait for my game collection to load once (55 games took a while on the old dash) and the guide seems to pull up faster and at a better framerate than the old one. It feels more mature, more polished, and best of all, not NEARLY as cluttered.

I will say, though, old themes, while they work, do NOT look so hot on a HDTV. They're stretched (unless there's a way to not have it stretch) and they look pretty wonky. Fortunately it comes with four NXE themes that all look okay and there's already a few NXE-compatile ("Premium") themes available. Those look really nice, and even skin the "Friends" panel. Right now everyone on mine has various Gears-y "gunmetal gray and destroyed things" behind them, it's neat. In terms of which pictures get shown, the one that currently displays on the starting tab is the one you see 90% of the time. The other ones only get shown when you're doing things like messing with photos and other stuff deep inside menus, which is kind of a shame.

The Community Games they have available, for lack of a better word, suck. They're all nothing better than you'd find at a flash game site in terms of gameplay value, and in a couple of games' cases in the case of graphics as well. Fortunately, they do all have demos, and in a change from the norm on Xbox, they're time-limited. There's no onscreen timer that I've seen, though, and it's kind of annoying. When you run out of time, it basically tells you "Either unlock the game or you're getting booted back to the dash." Kinda sucks, but hey, it's free. And there are a few of them that released at the 200 MSP pricepoint.

I love the little coverflow-esque way to navigate through most everything. The Friends one doesn't make too much sense just yet, and I think that has a lot to do with how I'm the only person on my friends list who has an avatar and therefore I get to browse through a lovely collection of black silhouettes. When there are Parties going and shit, though, that'll probably be a well-organized way to view Friends. I hope.

To allay some people's fears:

No, you do NOT have to use the Avatar as your gamerpicture at all. In fact, you have to go out of your way to make it your private picture, because the "Take Gamerpicture" button in the Avatar-making program only sets your public one. It presents you with a selection of randomly generated avatars, you can pick one and be done with it in like 15 seconds. It's a neat idea, actually, they let you mess with it if you want to but make it easy enough to get it out of your way if you don't.

The Guide has all the functions in the current Dashboard. Weirdly, you can select options like "System Settings" while in a game, but then it'll tell you you need to get back to the Dashboard to actually do it. Kind of odd, but I guess it's for those who just can't STAND the NXE and want to find everything the old way.

Yes, you CAN delete games with 0 Gamerscore. It took me a while to find it, but in the new Guide there's a much easier to reach achievements page (Finally, that seemingly redundant Achievements menu in the old dashboard has a purpose! You can look at all your achievements via the guide without going through 3 menus!) and THAT has the removal of games feature. Not the other two different places in the NXE that you can see gamerscore, which threw me off.

In Parties, you can set your own chat channel to either party chat (similar to private, overriding the game's chat) or game chat, and it shows an icon next to a person in the party menu when they're not listening to the party chat.

I've not installed a game to the HDD, and the sad truth behind that is that I simply don't have enough room on my HDD to install one and didn't feel like finding things to delete. I've heard good things, though.

All in all, I'm quite impressed. This is a great job by Microsoft of fixing something that resisted being broken for years, and here's to hoping it won't need another facelift.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Protip: When you make your avatar, http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/YOUR GAMERTAG HERE/avatar-body.png



FELIPE NO

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Originally Posted by Rotorblade

Dear Mo0 Police,

Please remove faaaaace.gif on the grounds of

a) old, &
b) old

While I disagree with your assesment, I have complied with your request.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by nuttyturnip

It's like an angry little troll doll, urging me to push its chest and turn it on. The stuff of nightmares.

Why's everyone hatin' on my Avatar? Y'all a bunch of bitches.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

My brother made an avatar

It is quite disturbing



This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I think with a BIGGER moustache you'd have the next Fatlus RPG hero.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by ENEMY CONTROLLER

WHERE ARE THE LONGER HAIR OPTIONS I CAN'T DO BLONDE MIKI DAMN IT

Apparently they're adding more stuff every couple of weeks. Who knows, they might even add that skin color your heart so desires~

As for the two of you who didn't get it, it was being released in waves in terms of whose consoles would be turned on to access it.

Let me just say I'm glad to see people on GFF actually put effort into their avatar. I was worried I'd have to look at a bunch of "random douche I picked because avatars are for children" avatars.

Jessy your avatar rocks.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Hotobu

Am I the only one disgusted by Microsoft's lack of creativity when it came to Avatar art style? I mean could they try any harder to make it Mii 1.5?

While a lack of originality is not exactly a GOOD THING by itself, the fact of the matter is if you were trying to court casual gamers you'd do the exact same thing.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Shin

I managed to make my avatar smack his face on the inside of my tv by wiggling the right stick up and down. It was pretty funny.

What? All I've ever gotten him to do is smile as I make him nod yes.

How ya doing, buddy?

Actually unless you're prepared to bitch to the CS reps they tend to direct you to service.xbox.com lately. It's actually a quick way to see if it's under warranty.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by kupomog

I do know that I'm addicted to that new Peggle game, though.

How can you play that game, it's all about balls moving around.

You know.

Balls.

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