Xbox 360 – Page 2 – Los Havros

My driving game of choice: is there a worthy successor?

I’ve been enjoying Collin McRae: DiRT for a while now, but have started looking around for my next driving fix. I’ve totally skipped Burnout Paradise because I don’t like driving games trying to be role-playing games. I don’t want to cruise around a huge city looking for a set of traffic lights which has the event I want. Instead I just want to select the car and the event on a menu and then race. Period. DiRT does this perfectly, as does the entire Gran Turismo series and all previous Burnout games.

Sooo… I have Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Am I enjoying it? Not particularly. Sure, the graphics are impressive but it’s quite tough and doesn’t ‘feel’ fun. It just doesn’t. Heck- it’s even billed as ‘the real driving simulator’. I want a fun racing game, not a simulator. On the PS2 the World Rally Championship series and the Burnout series satisfied my appetite.

Race Driver: GRID

So what game will be the worthy successor to my current driving game of choice- DiRT? I feel that it just HAS to be Race Driver: GRID. I’ve played on a demo and it is amazing- I’ll be buying it as soon as it is released. Ok, so why am I hyping this game up? The demo I played borrowed certain menu effects from DiRT (which is no bad thing), and seems to have bags of personality (ala Burnout) that seemed sorely lacking in TOCA. The visual style and handling seems to be the result of putting Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Burnout Paradise and DiRT into a smoothie maker and achieving the perfect blend. What’s surprising is it’s actually the successor to the competent TOCA Touring Car series; a series which I’ve played occasionally on demos, but not actually bothered to buy.

When I get Race Driver: GRID soon, I’m sure I’ll post some more thoughts up here. This game should be on the radar of both PS3 and Xbox 360 owners. Better still, try the demo!

PSN hits one million accounts in Japan

PSN hits one million accounts in Japan– Whilst nowhere near as high as Xbox Live numbers (obviously) these numbers are encouraging and there’s room for solid growth. What has been noted however, is that these numbers represent half the number of PS3 owners which begs the question- what are the other half doing? A PSN account doesn’t just mean online gaming, but extra game content, game trailers, demos, film trailers, themes, wallpapers etc.

PlayStation 3 has been outselling the Xbox 360 since October

PlayStation 3 has been outselling the Xbox 360 since October– This is in Europe, baby; where our loyalty to Microsoft ends with Windows :p

GamePro interview with Scott Steinberg, marketing VP of Sony

GamePro interview with Scott Steinberg, marketing VP of Sony– Interesting read. There’s discussion of the Blu-ray victory, Microsoft’s 2008 game line-up, and possibilities for new PS3 downloads (including the possibility of movies, music, and PS2 games).

Sony’s marketing VP tells GamePro that Microsoft may have “already leveraged all of their big assets” for the Xbox 360 in 2007, leaving 2008 wide open for the PlayStation 3.

Home has great potential

From Kotaku:

Sony is apparently pitching features like these to developers to extend the lives of their titles, using strong first and second party development showcases to prove that Home can effectively market outside of traditional means. We hope they take them up on their offer, because we’re definitely excited about the prospects.

Kotaku has examples of extra Home integration with Warhawk, Resistance: Fall of Man and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. If developers add this extra functionality into their titles then the PS3 could leap ahead of the Xbox 360 for sheer richness in online offerings. As of yet, the Xbox 360 is quite far ahead.

New slim line PSP info-splurge(tm) and critique

This post was originally written on the City In The Clouds blog.

It is slimmer, lighter, loads games faster (due doubling the RAM) and outputs video to TV screens etc..

But what about the owners of existing PSPs though? Sure, you had the PSone redesign and the PS2 redesign but this is a substantial change. All’s the PS2 redesign did was slim the unit down, add networking and get rid of the (mostly) unused hard drive expansion bay.

So, what makes the PSP so different? Well, this time Sony makes software updates as well to its systems. Take Sony’s upcoming 3.60 firmware upgrade for the PSP- all the features I’ve seen so far are just for the slimmer PSP (mainly due to the new hardware) like UMD-caching, and options for outputting video. I suppose my argument is what if Sony only creates more firmware updates for the slimmer PSP or possibly even hardware that is only compatible with the new PSP? Maybe unthinkable, but surely possible.

In the past, hardware revisions weren’t much of a problem, but now major new features are being incorporated into software updates (via firmware). Is it really fair to (pardon my upcoming language) shaft current hardware owners in this way? I think Microsoft has done well in this regard with its Xbox 360 revisions.

Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

This post was originally written on the City In The Clouds blog.

Wow, another expansion pack! Looking back through the Age series, there has generally only been one expansion pack per game. Age of Empires III gets its second expansion pack! I suppose the most interesting thing to note is that Ensemble Studios is NOT the main developer. Instead the task has been given to Big Huge Games, the development studio responsible for Rise of Nations. Why? As many have suspected Ensemble Studios have got their hands full developing Halo Wars for the Xbox 360.

More details as I find them.

Links:
Press Release
GameSpot Interview
Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2