XBox 360 send me a Valentine's gift

HOW exciting! It's been YEARS since I got a Valentine's Day surprise from anyone other than the gf or the cat so you can imagine how excited I was when a red package turned up on my doorstep. My initial thought was that it was from the Chinese and was some sort of Chinese New Year Celebration present - "Mr Rivers, thank you for your continued patronage of our country's fine exported food emporiums and takeaways, here's some money." However I quickly realised this was not the case.

So far so, mysterious, opening the red box simply revealed another box. It was a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, wrapped inside cellophane.

And the behold! It was from XBox360. They loved me this much? I swooned in a way usually reserved for wet cousins in Jane Austen novels. I unwrapped the shiny plastic, teased off the ribbon and slid my fingers into the box.

I gasped! A completely red controller! How sweet! This was a pretty cool present to receive I must admit... and probably the best one I've had for V-DAY for a while!



But I was a bloke... How would a member of the opposite sex react if I gave them the same token gesture? I decided to try it on my friend Kyla and see...

I tried the card first, how often was it a major corporate entity wished you a Happy Valentine's Day? Surely that's what it was all about? I tried to counter the look of disdain by offering the box.

I have to say this did not go down much better. The look turned from disdain to "What the fuck is this?" "For two player Gears of War?" I countered, there must be nothing more romantic than that! Kyla shook her head in disgust. I had one final try to convince her. With a gentle fingering, I teased back the red satin inside the box...

"See? It comes with batteries, it MUST be a girl's best friend!"




John will probably be spending Valentine's Day alone in the pub following the events outlined above.

Digitiser

I HATE YOU LEWIS!

As many of you will realise i have been out of the gaming, err, game for quite some time, however one of my favourite reads, back int he day, outside of Amiga Format or Zero was Teletext's completely surreal but nonetheless brilliant Digitiser.

Rude, controversial and very funny Digitiser poked fun at the games industry, fanboys and, as they said, "hated everyone equally".

Characters such as Mr T, Morse and Lewis, The Man, Socky the Sock, Zombie Dave and Fat Sow were but few of the multitude of figures gracing a seemingly innocent computer games section.

You can read all about Digitiser (complete with the run-ins the team had with Channel 4's Teletext producers) here or jump on the Fan Archive here and read the Man's brilliantly surreal diary.

And of course, Mr T's problem page:

"Dear Mr T, I'm a submarine commander, and sometimes when I dive my ears pop. Can you help?" Commander Collis

MR T SAYS: "I don't know much about submarines, Commander, but if Mr T ever finds you GOING through his bins AT ANY TIME, Mr T will be out HIS backdoor and ON you in a SECOND with a WRENCH."

Learning to Love Lara (again)

What is it about girls from Public Schools? The education and the accent for one thing. The thought that spending most of their time surrounded by other females deprived of male attention, feeds a fantasy that under the properness they're testosterone-hungry sirens is another. 

Oh yeah, and then there's the 34D cupsize boobs that stay perfectly in place while she spits bullets from two 9mm automatics that are kept strapped to her thighs in a crude imitation of a garter belt.

Over the years, since the first release of Tomb Raider in 1996, it's been hard not to see Lara Croft as a bit of a joke. She is a 14 year old wank fantasy, even her original designer Toby Gard protests that he wishes "they hadn't made her breasts so big".

I honestly believed the series to be dead. On Sunday I sat through Lara Croft Tomb Raider The Cradle of Life ("We need a snappy title... how about something eight words long?") in which Angelina Jolie's Lara is hired by MI6, along with Gerard Butler (who probably has the words 'something for the ladies' under his Spotlight listing nowadays) to take on some sort of Bond villain who wants to hold the world to ransom with chemical weapons. It was severely lacking in two respects: tombs and raiding. It was like the director Jan De Bont had been handed a James Bond script, reversed some of the genders, added in a monster and asked for his pay cheque. In short it was dreadful.

Lara arrived in the film by somersaulting a jet ski over a wave and then hoisting her dripping, bikini-clad self up on to a boat. For this reason I assume a lot of teenage lads have slow-mo functions on their blu-ray players. Lara was a cartoon.

So it was with some understandable trepidation that I started to play Eidos and Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider Underworld. Having been told that it had some 'visually stunning moments' by one of the less-rabid games magazines I decided it might be nice to look at on my telly. 

The opening of TRU is stunning. A slow-motion, reversed pull-back through the burning Croft Manor while suitably epic choral chanting is heard in the background sets the scene for something new, taking Lara in a new direction perhaps, wiping the slate clean. You're then invited to watch a series of cut scenes from other games to explain what's going on. I skipped these, if you can't tell a story without relying on the 'Previously' recap then you should go back to the drawing board. Luckily the smart plotters had included what I needed to know - a week before the destruction of Croft Manor Lara goes looking for something that may hold the key to finding her supposedly dead mother who might still be alive in a parallel universe called Avalon.

Armed with this sweet notion about reuniting the family I dove in. Literally. And spent the next four hours exploring a lost Norse underwater city.

Lara's probably never been so able to interact with her environment. Walls can be scaled, columns shinned up, cliffs rappelled down. Amazingly, her cleavage never gets in the way. The same goes for the acrobatics, Lara doesn't just climb up to something, she does a handstand and spiders up to it. It might be amazing in the bedroom for her, but you'd need a harness and six months training with the Moscow State Circus to keep up. 

And then I got the 'Wow' moment, as I ran into a chamber filled with one giant pissed-off looking Octopus.

That was the moment when I realised how much I had missed Lara and was taken back to the first game when the T-Rex first appeared. It wasn't about Angelina Jolie's accent* or the ridiculous outfits - it was about exploration, puzzle-solving and giant Harryhausen monstrosities. Second Life had spoiled me in terms of 3D exploration, all leisure time, no one shooting at me and more often than not completely deserted, but TRU showed me once again how exciting a game like this could be.

Surely the time for team exploration and not something as frenetic as World of Warcraft is here? I'm not talking about an XBox Live version of Time Team, but you must be able to create vast cave systems or castles that groups explore together online, pitting their wits and reflexes against other teams. Perhaps such a game does exist, but for now the XBox Live experience seems to be one about the team killing of underground insects, zombies, Nazis or underground-insect-Nazi-zombies. There must be a way of bringing TRU's puzzle-solving to a team environment... so for now I'll stick with Lara, the perfect partner... but only when it comes to scaling cliffs and killing giant creatures.

*In TRU Lara is voiced by Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes who does a great job of putting on that voice you want to say "You've been a very naughty boy, now go to my room."

What else could you do with the camera?

Does the Xbox have a social gaming killer app?

Arguably you could say yes: a) XBox Live offers plenty of opportunity to play together or b) I've got Rockband/Guitar Hero World Tour - surely that counts?

What it wasn't was You're in the Movies, though unlike Guitar Hero etc, the marketing, Burt Reynolds and all was placed very squarely on Nintendo's doorstep. The difference was suggesting that the camera, a feature the Wii does not have, would be enough to make you and your family clown around in front of the TV.

That You're in the Movies did not perform well in the reviews was not surprising, but does this mean the end for the Xbox Camera? Well not necessarily. The opportunity is to use the camera socially.

Let's say you want a create a room for you and your friends or family. You put the room together in the program beforehand, make it as strange, beautiful or crazy as you want - an island paradise, a space station, a replica of your own living room. The room is then uploaded to the Xbox Live server and becomes your private chat space. All you do is sit in front of the camera and your live image is uploaded to the room, other people you invite to your room can do the same and there you have live, virtual chat. Use it for fun or board meetings.

Anyway I'm not suggesting this will save the XBox camera as a peripheral of choice, but it would be interesting to see if using it could be developed in some way, however limited.

You're in the Movies!

(but maybe not the whole of you).

So last weekend I had some friends over for a few drinks before we headed out to a party. Unbeknownst to them I had planned this as the perfect time to expose them to social gaming on the XBox... or at least the beginnings of it and like a drunken Hollywood mogul chatting up the waitresses at the Brown Derby, I was going to put them IN THE MOVIES!

First however I needed to get into the mood. Judging by the box cover art the mood of YITM is one of extreme excitement and jubilation.










Yeah! Look at all the pointing and stuff!



















With this in mind I decided to do my best emulate those on the box and get in the mood. That guy on the left looks like he's having fun, I thought, I'll try him.








Are we having fun yet or what?!















Now that I was suitably in the mood it was time to set up the camera.





You'll notice that the camera is precariously placed, especially on a thin telly like mine. After all this is the place usually reserved for the Wii infrared unit, which came with sticky tabs to hold it in place. No sticky stuff on the XBox camera, so it rested on the Wii bar. The camera is so light, it doesn't have to be that secure, just something to be aware of as you're going to be jumping around.



YITM loads up with a short movie explaining the best way to play the game. This includes the four things you're going to need to make the game work.

1. Correct lighting.
2. Lots of space.
3. The ability for people to get in and out of shot.
4. Alcohol.*

Cheekily shot in home-movie style with toys, the introductory movie is genuinely funny, well-acted and will give the most technophobic player a good grounding to what's going to happen next.

You're then invited to stand in front of the camera and let it take your pic to give you a) a player avatar and b) differentiate you from the background. This where the problems set in.

The process that YITM uses to magically transport you to the cinema is one very similar to chroma key, an idea that's been in use in tv since the 70s and in movies long before that. In short, the person in shot must wear a different colour to one that is used in the background behind them, as the background is then 'filled in' with a static image. Therefore if you have a black jumper on and let's say a black coat is in the background, bits of you will disappear when encountering the space occupied by the black coat. Here's Dan playing one of the minigames:






If you look carefully you can see that not all of Dan has been picked up and that he's not all there...














In fact that's a sizeable chunk out! Which is a shame as it detracts from the enjoyment of the minigames, but more importantly from the eventual trailer you're going to star in.













Used successfully the effect can be quite dramatic such as during the death of Monitor here in the Doctor Who story 'Logopolis'.









So, there's already a problem with the camera, which is an annoyance more than anything else. However, the minigames are actually quite good fun. Being made to run on the spot, pretend to hit targets, dodge flying film cans or enter into a tug of war are a laugh, especially if you're one of the players watching from the sidelines. Even better is when you're asked to go 'In the Spotlight' and the director tells you how to pose, act and be a star. The best thing to do here is let go of your inhibitions and play-up to the camera as much as possible, it will all help the finished trailer.



















So once you've finished the minigames, the game then invites you to your premier. All of your antics in the minigames have been recorded and are now dropped magically in to the trailer of your choice. We started off by trying thriller 'Scared Witness', but then quickly progressed to Superhero movie 'Everyone's Super' as evidenced by Kyla here doing her best Clark Kent.
























So overall it would be wrong to say we didn't have fun with YITM cos we did, we laughed, jumped around and had a good time. The longevity of the game is going to be limited though, with only a finite number of trailers to be played through and the minigames not providing that much of a challenge (certainly not enough to sustain the game's half-hearted attempt at competition via a points system and awards ceremony at the end). It's life will therefore probably not exist much beyond this Xmas, but could perhaps be viewed as a stepping stone to better things.

I would say a Moviewatch five out of ten for this one. Moderate fun, but no real need to go back for more. Maaaaaaaaarvellous. I'll also do a follow-up post when I've looked at the editing mode bundled with it.


*They don't recommend you need this in the movie, but trust me it helps.

Thanks to Steve Hill's Image Archive for the Logopolis pic.

They gave John an XBox 360

Last week I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business when I got a phone call from Bill Gates.

Not Gates himself, of course, he's too busy to actually call people. Like Santa Claus, Bill hires a team of people to impersonate him, especially at this seasonal time of year. The conversation went something like this:

BILL: Hi, is that, John?
JOHN: Yeah, who wants to know?
BILL: John, it's Bill Gates, we need a man who doesn't play games to review our games console.
JOHN: Bill that's crazy talk, I mean I'm 'a PC' and stuff, but getting someone who doesn't review games to play with an XBox 360- It's madness! It's the worst idea since Vista!

Over the next forty minutes Bill explained to me the deal. You see, the House of Mario had released this console called the 'Wii' and families and groups of people were getting together to play it. Not really for the solitary gamer toiling long in to the night. This was 'social' or 'casual' gaming. And it was eating market share like Godzilla with the munchies.

So Microsoft want a piece of the action and they were keen to find social gamers who could help them. Now I do own a Wii and I go game socially with it. Our favourite game is bowling and I have about 10 Miis created by my friends stored on the console. I am actually best at Wii Sports Golf, relaxing to play by oneself, frustrating in a social situation. I think bowling works because the turn around of players is so quick, so no one gets bored.

Anyway Microsoft have asked me to test out the XBox 360 with a game called You're in the Movies. You may have seen the above-the-line TV commercials with Burt Reynolds. Nicely matched with the exposure he'll be getting for his new British comedy A Bunch of Amateurs.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to put the XBox through its social gaming paces. First I'd thought I'd take some unboxing pics, cos you know, that's cool as well.











Mmm, shiny, shiny/Shiny box of plastic...



















Actually this probably costs a fortune in orange and green plastic bags.















The testing area set up, note the Wii perched on top of the DVD player.


So some disclosure to conclude:

1. Microsoft really have given me this console and this game. No lie.
2. I own an iPod and ambivalent to the whole Microsoft vs Apple thing. Unlike Stephen Fry...
3. Neither am I some sort of Nintendo freak, YES the N64 was for me the best games console ever, but I have an open mind.
4. As an online marketeer myself I'm finding this whole process fascinating.
5. Any questions give me a shout. johnrivers@gmail.com