John Griffin is just another media junkie
It’s a huge undertaking but the Windows UI Taskforce are trying to detail every single UI bug in Vista. Just looking through the list serves as a reminder to how half arsed and rushed out the OS was.
The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.
The Vista-capable lawsuit is finally yielding some facts about Nvidia’s record of horrendous driver support for Microsoft’s latest OS. This is of particular interest to me as last year I switched over to ATI after many months of problems with my Nvidia card under Vista (which worked flawlessly in XP). This caused me a lot of wasted time and my wallet was significantly lighter by the end of it. According to the newly released documents they were responsible for 479,000 crashes making up 29% of the total logged!
17.9% are Microsoft’s fault, those are the crashes that made me switch back to XP even after shelling out for the OS and new hardware for it.
Checking out the new content released by Microsoft during GDC this week hamered home that the Xbox dashboard and Live in general is getting rather complicated to navigate. Looking at my games folder it has 92 games in there including Live Arcade, demos and XNA stuff. Getting to what you want can be tricky and it’s not always obvious in which area the thing you are after will be located. Added to this many similar functions yield different interface concepts, just compare purchasing and running a Live Arcade game versus an Xbox Original game - completely different and sends my HCI alarm bells ringing.
Of course while I’m thinking of this comes the news that MS are looking to double Live’s user base and completely redo the way the content is presented. Maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s handbook on this one? I do like the new Apple TV interface.
Managing the sheer amount of content is daunting and MS don’t exactly have the best track record in UI design. I’ll be impressed if they even go ahead and completely refresh what they have now, its gonna take some big balls because the backlash from some parts of the community will be enormous. Good luck!
I am staring at the Windows XP installation screen as I type this. I just removed my Vista partition, formatted the drive and am going fully back to XP.
The final straw came a few nights ago. After trying and trying I simply could not get Vista to playback a 1080p video without slowing down, scrambling the picture or just cutting out completely. So I tested it on my MacBook - passed, tested it on an Ubuntu Live CD - passed, and then on a seperate XP partition - passed.
The fact that playback was better off a god damn live CD is proof enough that there is something fundamentally wrong with Vista. I’d stripped Vista down, tried different codecs, used different players but nothing worked. After trying out XP on seperate partion I started thinking why I actually need Vista. DirectX 10? Thats been a flop. Areo? More hassle that its worth (and not a patch on Leopard). Vista special features? Exactly.
Bye Bye Vista.
Finally, the studio is asking that Epic be forced to surrender all profits garnered by Gears of War as a result of misconduct.
And the reason,
“That advantage was nowhere more evident than at E3 2006, where Gears of War was awarded ‘Best Game in Show’ and garnered nothing but laudatory press,” the suit reads. “By contrast, Silicon Knights–one of the only other developers to publicly display a playable demonstration of its game–saw Too Human roundly criticized in the videogame press for its technical problems and generally unpolished appearance. The damage to Silicon Knights caused by Epic’s misconduct was manifest, because E3 attendees were able to compare Too Human with another game running ostensibly the same game engine, Gears of War, with vastly superior results.”
So it all comes back to E3 2006 again. First they blamed the press now they blame the engine. I seem to remember another Unreal Engine 3 game called Rainbow Six: Vegas coming out in late 2006 and being very successful. Funny that.
This game has been in and out of development for 8 years. Something tells me they have bigger issues internally than they care to admit.
While playing the new Lumines Live add-on packs last night I thought to myself “Why can’t I earn achievements on additional content?”. A few hours later and thankfully my questions were answered over at Gamerscore Blog. Looks like future downloadables will be dishing out achievements as well with 250 extra points for retail games and 50 for live arcade titles. Unfortunately it only applies to games released from now on so no points for completing Lumines VS CPU mode but good news none the less.
Having obtained an OEM version of Vista a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and move my main computer over to Microsoft’s much hyped new OS. Choosing to install the 32 bit version over the 64 bit one seemed like a wise move even with my modern processor due to the driver issues usually involved with the latter. Sure enough, after a smooth installation process, which is vastly improved over XP, I didn’t need to install a single driver to have a usable system.
So far so good. Booting in for the first time was cool, I quite like the effects such as the blurred glass and the window transitions. It gives Windows a much slicker feel then before even if purely aesthetic and of no functional use. After a playing about with this for a while and tweaking the system a little it suddenly hit me, where are the new features? I can see a sidebar, nice, now I don’t need to install the Google one, I can see indexed search, nice, now I don’t need Google desktop and I can see Giant Windows Defender, uhoh, better install AVG.
Having the Ultimate edition does entitle me to a bit of Media Center action. It hooks up well to the 360 allowing me to access all my masses and masses of Media Center recordings and the many WMV files I have stored right in the living room. Yeh so that’s not much use with the current crop of codec support. I am a strong advocate of MPEG-4 (especially AVC aka x264) and when it won’t even allow native playback of Xvid files it’s not much use to me. The fact that all they need to do is switch on direct show codecs to get it to work added to the fact the the 360 can natively decode x264 in software (!) makes it a bit of a joke.
Games support in Vista is a bit hit and miss. I played through the latest Sam and Max episode without a hitch but when trying to install Jaws Unleashed (I kid you not) I didn’t have much luck. Supreme Commander is looking like the next big thing to hit the PC so I will be nailing that in the next few weeks for sure. The real seller on Vista for me is Live Anywhere which won’t hit till summer making it perfectly ok to hold off upgrading. Getting achievement points for PC games is definitely appealing to me.
Third party application support much like the games is a mixed bag and I will write a separate post on this entirely to see if I can drum up some help.
Overall I am impressed with the OS if a little let down by the number of new features available right now. It’s certainly not a revolution but it provides some much needed polish to an OS that has been on the shelves far too long without an update. Once the Ultimate Extras and Live Anywhere hit I am quite positive that Vista will start to come into its own.
Finally took the plunge and bought an Xbox 360 this week. I was toing and froing about it but it basically came down to the fact that Gears of War is out this week and now I can afford to run the console.
Had a good weekend of play on PGR3 which came bundled and as I’m sure all 360 owners will agree Xbox Live is by far the highlight of the system. It’s the simplicity of playing quick games, joining up with your friends and chatting to them through the headset that makes all the difference.
If you want to add me to your friends list my tag is j0hn00 or just send me yours in the comments or by email and we will hook up online. On Friday I will be able to chainsaw you in the face :-).
It’s awesome. Great graphics, cool gameplay and one hell of a kick ass chainsaw. Only had time to squeeze in 15 minutes on a 4 vs 4 team deathmatch but I got a really good idea of how it feels and plays. It’s very polished all round and is definitely looking like the kind of system seller Microsoft were after this Christmas.
Not sure if I will have time tonight but I am gonna try and get back down to the bullring later and put some more time in. I would have really liked to try out single player but the deathmatch will have to do for now - in all its fantastic bloody glory.
This is great news coming from Microsoft today. Indie developers are going to be given the chance to make their own games for the 360 in an official capacity. We all know the vibrant homebrew scene on the original Xbox led to some awesome apps but this will be the time Microsoft officially recognise it.
From the announcement it seems as though developers will use the SDK to develop and then submit the games online where they can be downloaded. What I don’t understand is how restricted will this be. If ported a SNES emulator over to the 360 for instance would it be blocked by MS? Is it even possible to do this in the first place?
There are a lot on unanswered questions but if Moore really wants this to be the ‘YouTube for games’ then they will have to lower some of the restrictions planned.
My Amazon.com wishlist was created on Friday, March 2
Xbox Live 2100 Microsoft Points Card (Xbox 360)
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (PC DVD)
Apple Mini-DVI to DVI Adaptor
This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities![Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61THJCbOxwL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]")
Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]
Nyko Xbox360 Charge Base (Xbox 360)
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