[360] Official XBLA thread. Complain about the new price points but buy the garbage anyway!

Arcade games are every Wednesday, actually, and the go live at about 3 AM central time (-6 GMT).

That said, Castle Crashers is next week, and Shred Nebula is the week after that, on September 3rd.

FELIPE NO

Ah~ I stand corrected. Still, looks like fun, at least.

...With that and Braid to download still, I'll have to buy more points. Bleh.

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

Meteos is coming to XBLA, at least in Japan.

I'm in the minority, but I've always preferred Meteos to Lumines, and the chance to finally play it over the internet is excellent. The only problem is, how could you possibly play the game without the stylus control?

How ya doing, buddy?

Well, the game did always have that alternative control method with the D-pad... Since you'd both be crippled in that sense, it might work out anyway. I don't know if it'd be as fun though, the directness of the controls on the DS was a major selling point to the game for me. Still, looking forward to it! I also prefer Meteos over Lumines, though they're both fantastic games.

Quote:

This Live Arcade port is the first time the game's offered multiplayer battles

More like the third time. I guess he meant it's the first Meteos version to have online multiplayer?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Don't buy Castle Crashers, it doesn't work. Multiplayer is broken, starting a game is next to impossible. Practically everyone is having trouble with it.

Behemoth fails miserably....again. Hopefully it won't take fucking six months to patch this this time. And that was for a quick fix for a lame achievement, this is for...something considerably more broken.

I'm considering asking for a refund the same way I did with Mr. Driller. This is unacceptable. Did anyone even fucking play this thing? I mean, they HAD TO. It's only been cooking for how many years now? Christ.

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

Is the broken part in Castle Crashers the online portion only? Cause I wanna buy it with the intend to play it locally with friends or family. If the local multiplayer works, I'm getting it as soon as I get my own 360. Any other errors the game might have that has nothing to do with the online multiplayer?

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

There are a few stage-stopping glitches sometimes that involve enemies dying but not really counting as dead, or getting stuck and being unable to move out.

There are also some save issues that no one has been able to figure out the root cause.

How ya doing, buddy?

Well, guess that means I'll need to wait for a patch. Game saving errors is pretty big deal to me.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

One glitch I did run into is an enemy that froze in mid air, and therefore not die no matter how many times i hit it. Since the level would not advance, I had to restart it. I was able to keep my xp and gold tho.

Another glitch was with Alien Hominid. Supposedly, he cant use any weapon beside his blaster, but I was able to pick up a pitchfork from the ground. I was not able to revert it back to the blaster, so now he is stuck with a pitchfork....

Ive been playing multiplayer with my nephew and I havent run into save issues yet...

FELIPE NO

Skills complains too much. I've played quite a bit of Castle Crashers today and online with two different people. Omagnus and I got disconnected, but only after playing for a little over an hour. That might make the achievement for kissing all 4 princesses in a multiplayer game difficult, but the game's far from completely broken. Some people seem to be having freezing/disconnecting issues online, but it's not universal.

The only real glitch I've encountered so far was the mini-boss in the forest stage. Since people and enemies don't count as dead until the combo stops, the game wouldn't let me die when I had 10-15 minions wailing on me. I was pissed at first since it said quitting to map would cause me to lose unsaved data, but that's apparently a lie. Kept all the exp and money I'd earned, and just had to fight my way back to that mini-boss again.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Cat9

Ive been playing multiplayer with my nephew and I havent run into save issues yet...

Yeah, these aren't universal. Whatever the cause is, it seems to be somewhat random now how it hits people. I've read a few forum posts elsewhere where people have lost multiple levels or a lot of progress and had to restart from near the beginning.

That said, Tritoch got lucky. The fact that it did shit out after an hour isn't really acceptable, despite the thought that "well, it's better than crapping out 10 seconds in" is correct. Also, having that crap out sure makes the problem pretty close to universal, since it, y'know, did hit you. You just got lucky as to when.

Considering how long it took Behemoth to fix Hominid's hats, I really am afraid we won't see the patch for this for some time. Despite the "we know, we're working on it" response they've already mentioned on their website.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I won't deny that it's apparently a bit unstable, but since I played for 30-45 minutes with Nutty later and it never disconnected us it seems rare enough not to bother me. Definitely not enough to classify the game as broken. When I said the problem wasn't universal, I meant how you could barely even start a game without disconnecting/freezing.

You should try doing multiplayer some more before demanding a refund.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I already have. Trust me when I say you're a lucky one. Read any other forum and you'll see it's a pretty widespread problem. All the major fag centers like GAF, GameFAQs, IGN, whatever the fuck, are full of people mentioning this.

The official website was taking enough of a pounding from people making threads on it, or looking up questions relating to this, that they had their site crash, and they had to do this:



It's a widespread problem. Widespread enough that it's totally and completely likely that you will have an experience plagued by disconnects and an otherwise non-functioning game. And as such, you should pretty much not buy it. Since the multiplayer experience is broken.

And considering I certainly didn't buy it to play it by myself, there is no value in me keeping it as is. I don't want something that isn't fufilling the purpose it was purchased for, and I don't see the point in keeping it as such.

Additional Spam:
Go figure, I finally find someone to play with in Toku, who's connection doesn't shit the bed, and we play a good session with no problems cept for one or two bouts of lag.

I'd like to try playing with him and a third and/or fourth, and see if it holds up. All my previous games, with Mo0, Omagnus, and the few randoms I tried to join were all 3+, so I'm curious if that has anything to do with it.

Additional Spam:
Prime Gamer » Things I hate this week: Castle Crashers

Here's an article on everything that's wrong with the game. I'm cross posting it from primegamer. I think I covered everything.

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

Wow that's uh, that's too bad about that Castle Crashers huh?
I mean, everyone's been circle jerking over it for a year, and Behemoth repays their love with letting everyone pay $15 to become beta testers. What a shame.

No seriously, I was looking forward to it.
Thankfully I decided to hold off on getting it until I finished BC:Rearmed (oh yeah, did I mention I bought that?) and I didn't get shafted.

I guess I'll just hold off until next summer when it's finally fixed.

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

It looks like trying to find a game online is indeed broken. I wish it would tell you why you got booted from a game, instead of just saying "game no longer available".

Maybe if you organize it with specific people it becomes easier, but I don't really have the patience to do that.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Quoting my reply from Prime Gamer:

Quote:

Having played another session with Tritoch last night I find this game more and more frustrating in certain ways. Playing last night was an absolute blast. Rather under-prepared, and Tritoch’s blue guy being rather low level, we decided to tackle the most difficult stage I had open (the ice stage) and somehow made it to the boss, albeit with both of us on next to no health and no potions. As with other later-stage bosses in the game, near the end of his life the ice boss goes stupidly mental, but somehow we persevered and managed to pull off an immense win out of the bag. It was epic, brilliant and a ton of fun. But, of course, shortly after the game crashed again (thankfully having saved our progress).

The potential for this game to be so much fun is right there within reach, but we just can’t get access to it, and that is so fucking annoying. More irritating, and rather disappointing, though is that I’ve not seen any news coming from Behemoth about a fix in the works.

How ya doing, buddy?

Joystiq quizzed Behemoth at PAX and got some answers on the online issues:

Quote:

We've been hearing about some Castle Crashers problems where people can't connect to their friends over Xbox Live to play co-op. True, the problem could have been blown out of proportion, but there are legitimate cases of connection problems nonetheless. What are you doing to fix this?

Tom: This was something that never came up in testing and now that there are problems with the Live release we're looking into it. We had six hour play sessions and nothing ever came up.

Dan: When we went through testing, Microsoft approved all our network code and we had no problems at all. There are those things in real world scenarios that we couldn't account for. Just look at Call of Duty 4 when it came out, you couldn't play for a week straight and now it's fine.

So, you acknowledge that there are bugs that need fixing?

Tom: We have some bugs that have been fixed.

Dan: Yeah, there are certain network settings where, if you're in a very specific network environment, it won't work with another person's connection and that's what's happening. But that's something we're already addressing by working with Microsoft to get a patch out as fast as possible.

Will the patch release in a few days, a few weeks or a couple months?

Tom: We're hoping soon, as soon as possible. Though, there isn't any official time frame yet.

Dan: We're trying to get it out as soon as possible, because we know it's important to people. I've played through half the game with a friend online and it runs fine. And when it works, it runs like it's local. But there's those certain people whose connections we have problems with and that's exactly the problem we're onto. It's that certain connection where two people just don't work, but we're on it. The good news is that it'll work ... at least half the time.

I don't know what they're on about, most of the sessions where I've had the game working they've died after a period of time (with Tritoch it was pretty much dead on the hour). I also find the 'very specific network' stuff to be complete bullshit, because I've read a lot of people having issues with the game, so even if we all fall into this 'very specific network' category, that's clearly a category that needed catering for you dipshits.

FELIPE NO

It's pretty tough to test all of the different retarded networks setups people have at home without actually releasing something.

Networking, especially the insane topographies you have in many home network settings combined with UPnP/NAT-PMP, firewall triggers, DMZs, and load of other things make for a difficult experience. What's more is that for games networking code also demands a high level of performance so centralized proxy servers are not usually an option.

As things stand now, two peers on home networks connecting without instructing someone to open a specific port on their firewall (a nonstarter for the vast majority of people who buy Xboxes) is one of the more difficult things to write "correctly" (which is not really quite the right word here because it is not like math, there is no exact solution). People have trouble with this all the time, it is very difficult to get right and the landscape of technologies and techniques for doing this stuff is always changing.

The real question is why isn't Microsoft writing this code once and providing it to third party developers.

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

ramoth: First of all, thanks for the baby lesson in networking, but I didn't need it. Secondly, I don't expect 'all' set ups to be tested, my point was more that there appears to be a lot of people having trouble getting online games going. Therefore, even if it's one very particular kind of set up causing issues, it is clearly a very popular kind of set up since it's affecting many people.

Your argument also ignores the fact that many games are released with online networking (across many more than 2-4 players), which by and large work without issue. I've managed to play the online portions of a great many titles with various GFFers, but so far there's only two people I've managed to get games going with (out of about 8 I have tried with).

Whilst having Microsoft sort the netcode is a sound idea (they have the expertise after all) and a network API would probably be very useful, in reality it would probably be far too restrictive and make life more difficult for devs.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Yeah, the excuse sounds like bullshit to me. The only network issues I've ever experienced personally with Live is getting people with funny NAT settings in the same Halo party but even that's incredibly rare. If a game like Frontlines can cope with 50 players at once, all with different network architecture and settings in a full on FPS with the need to minimise lag so sniper rifles are still a viable option, I find it hard to believe Behemoth couldn't manage to make a stable game for four people.

Although thinking about it, do you connect to a dedicated server in Castle Crashers or are you essentially reliant on a direct connection to the other people because that might explain the piss-poor connectivity. This might put off smaller developers from including too much online stuff if they're going to need to shell out for a bunch of servers to ensure people can play the damn thing.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Frontlines may be different (though I didn't think it was), but pretty much all Xbox Live games use direct connections with one of the players acting as a host, which is why you get host advantage issues in some games (such as Gears and the shotgun). It's one of the things people raise when asking what it is you're paying for when you sign up to Xbox Live Gold, since a player is still relied upon to act as the server.

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

No, Kaos have dedicated servers. It's that and only allowing you to talk to four people at once that lets you have 25 a side with very little lag. You can host your own games but the lag is crippling. I assumed most games worked like that.

How ya doing, buddy?

Refund requests must be up, or something. I got given the run around last Friday when I called about a refund for the points for Castle Crashers.

They dodged the question, said they'd phone me back, and what not. I didn't trust that, but lo an behold, they actually did today. Gave me a code for a prepaid 1250 point card.

I recommend anyone else who bought this pile of shit to attempt the same. There's no point in everyone suffering because Behemoth is incompetant. Only harm done in the end this way will be the fact that Behemoth will still see +1 sales and continue to think that being full of shit is an a-ok business practice. At least you can avoid them in the future.

I'll be saving this for either Vigilante 8 or Mega Man 9. That honestly covers the interesting looking arcade titles for some time now, too.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Wait, they gave you 1250? If that turns out to be the official response then I may have to call for a refund. I've got 750 points right now, and it's really irritating to know that I'll have to pay full price for some points the next time I buy a game just because I'm lacking 50 points. I'd just re-buy Castle Crashers with the 1200 since I'm still enjoying it quite a bit.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I still have access to Castle Crashers (and Mr. Driller, subsequently). It's not like they took away my rights to play the damn thing. Omagnus also still has the permission set to play as well. They just refunded the points, since, y'know, the product is busted ass.

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