Microsoft Apologizes for XBL Downtime With Undertow

The extraordinary problems that Microsoft's Xbox Live experienced over the holidays were followed up with swift promises of a free game to compensate for the frustration many users suffered. The company has followed through, and has announced that Undertow will be the free game sacrificed to mollify gamers. The game will be free to download all this week, starting tomorrow (Wednesday) and running through this Sunday. "Two weeks ago, Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten posted a letter to Live subscribers apologizing for poor performance during the holidays and promising a freebie was on the way. There are currently no plans to offer a substitute game for those who already own Undertow." Just the same, Major Nelson sent along word to 360 Fanboy that they'd 'take care of you' if you found yourself in that situation.

Re:Gold vs. Silver

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Actually, I was a gold member at the time. I let it expire, and as of tomorrow I'm a silver member. Also, not all of the gold members are paying gold members. When you first join Xbox Live, you get a free month's worth of gold membership for the same reason that the first month of World of WarCrack is free.

Re:XBox Online Has Become A Joke

[tcc3]

PS3 Online

Dedicated servers, only if the developer offers them and can be terminated at their whim. You can still play Mechassault for the original Xbox on Live, more than 5 years later.

A system so open that there is no system. Its all up to the developer. Some do it well and some don't, and theres no oversight or requirements.

No universal access to the system from within games. To send or look at messages you have to leave a game and go to the main PS3 screen (whatever they call their dashboard)

Do they have a unified friends list yet? I'm truly not sure.

The problem with PS3 online is its too much like PS2 online: there isn't any strategy really. You may balk at the paltry Live fee, but you get what you pay for.

Re:XBox Online Has Become A Joke

[toolie]

No dedicated servers
Laggy online play forcing players to rely on other players Net connections/bandwidth

Wasn't it the Warhawk developers saying that they were also including player hosted games because they realized that dedicated servers weren't the best in all circumstances?

Yeah, it was [playstation.com]. Only having dedicated servers is a bad idea. Even your precious PS3 game devs realize that. They even claim it reduces normal latency issues because you can find games closer to home, especially when in other countries.

Developer hostile and closed.

Because XNA is really tough to get a hold of and play with, right? Especially since the development environment is free and all.

PS3 Online:
Developer friendly and open system

Now that is some funny shit.

Re:Gold vs. Silver

[DeeDob]

Access to the silver service is included with the purchase of any 360.

Without access to Live, both silver and gold members cannot access parts of their 360.

Online gaming (gold) is just a small part of the Live service. MSN, marketplace, chat, mailing service, achievements system, leaderboards and more are all part of the package. Xbox live arcade games played on a friend's 360 also need to access Live in order to work beyond the trial versions.

Enetring my profile, then having to wait for 5 minutes until a connection can be made to live so that i can actually browse my games and demos on my own machine is a hassle for silver members. Playing Project Gotham Racing 4 and being returned to the title screen in the middle of a race with the message "your live connection has changed status, note that any unsaved progress has been lost" is not cool, even for silver members.

I may exagerate a bit, but every time you press a button on your controller, you send a signal to Live saying you are now "in the dashboard", "playing the third level in Halo 3 in single player" or "watching a DVD". With the Live service as of late, every button press to change your current gaming status can take a long while, sometimes over a minute.

So really, silver members need to be compensated just as much as gold members.

Re:XBox Online Has Become A Joke

[immcintosh]

Developer hostile and closed. System is designed for complete control by Microsoft and function as a revenue source for them alone. See the six month to year delay Epic is going through having to rewrite UT to work around the problems with Microsoft online service and mods.

Microsoft bashing is all well and good when it's true, but I'm afraid I've got to call bullshit on this one as Xbox is the only reasonably open [wikipedia.org] "next-gen" gaming platform out there. That's right, for a paltry fee ANY programmer can sign up for the Creator's Club and develop 360 games with an off the shelf system.

You let me know when $100 a year will get you a dev kit for the PS3/Wii to play around with to your heart's content. Sure, XNA isn't the ideal environment for high level game development by a long shot (.NET simply isn't suitable for the problem space, for a lot of reasons I could get into), but it's really an unprecedented level of official open development support for hobbyists in the console world.

So, to recap, with $100 and a high quality free IDE [wikipedia.org] you can make your own games for a current generation console. Don't even try to tell me this is developer hostile, because it's one of the most egalitarian things the industry has yet to see. Not saying they couldn't go further in this direction, but it's a good step in the right direction if you ask me.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a fan of Microsoft. I despise them. In fact, about a year ago I got so disgusted with them I reformatted my hard drive to go open source and really haven't looked back. I give them credit where credit is due though.