Free Candy For Everyone

Been playing my Xbox 360 a bit. So far I’ve tried a bunch of downloads for free on the Xbox Arcade. It’s really easy to use. It’s probably all too easy to spend money too, since they know my credit card number. I fear that all you need to do is click to buy something. That’s not good. But I haven’t tried yet, fortunately.

I put about an hour or so into Oblivion - haven’t played anymore since that first session. We have a bunch of 360 titles floating around at work, so I took a stack of them home and I’ve been playing Kameo:Elements of Power, which is surprisingly good. It was a launch title that was originally going to be an original Xbox title, so I didn’t expect it too look all that great. It looks awesome. The graphics are good, and it looks really good on my big screen HDTV. It’s a platformer-type game, and I tend to be bad at those. It usually takes me a while to figure out what they want me to do in a puzzle situation (Prince of Persia was particularly irritating for me in that way), and then a bit longer to execute it. Don’t know why, but I’m just not good at these things. Despite that, I was able to appreciate it. It’s really sharp, the gameplay is interesting and unique - you are a cute little flying elf girl, but you can transform into a bunch of really different beasties, including a giant rock slug thing, a yeti-type-thing, and a walking-Audrey II. I’ll keep playing a bit I think.

Another thing to note is how crazily effective the Achievements system is. Basically, the Xbox platform has this built in achievements system. Any game has a set number of points (it seems to be 1000 for most titles, and 200 for arcade titles). These are doled out however the game designers wish through accomplishing tasks in the game. These points add up to your gamer score, which you can see above displayed on my gamer card. I want to play games that will give me points so I can see them catalogued (because I’m like that, ya see, loving the tallying and organizational type stuff). I kept playing Kameo past the point I might have stopped because I wanted to get at least one achievement. And I probably will go back to try to get more. Good system design there.

I have a few other titles to try, but right now I’m pretty happy with my 360. It’s kind of funny, since just before GDC I posted about how I wasn’t excited about the 360 at all, and couldn’t wait for the PS3, and yeah yeah, whatever MS. And hear I am, spouting MS rhetoric left and right. I guess that full day tutorial on Microsoft technology I attended at GDC must have sunk in a bit too deep!