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XBox (Games)

Xbox 360 Blue-Ray Support, Achievement Addiction 41

Posted by Zonk from the still-waiting-on-the-great-games dept.
Fibonasty_Sequence wrote to mention a piece on Gamespy looking into the Achievement addiction that the 360 can provoke in gamers. Playing games with specific goals in mind can be lots of fun. In related news, these heady post-launch days have seen a lot of rumors that need to be sorted out. One that keeps turning up is the possible support of the Blue-Ray standard by the 360. From that article: "Microsoft clearly - and very understandably - doesn't want to risk lumbering Xbox 360 with an internal drive format consumers don't want, and while it's favouring HD DVD by announcing an external drive that can read that disc format, it wants to ensure it's free to support the BD if it has to."
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Xbox 360 Blue-Ray Support, Achievement Addiction More

Xbox 360 Blue-Ray Support, Achievement Addiction

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  • This is a must (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ecryder ( 851413 )
    for the 360 if it is not to be relegated to the junk pile within 18 mos. I spoke with 2 major US dvd manufacturers in southern california yesterday who have both phased out the pre-press operations for the hd-dvd format and are concentrating almost solely on Blu-ray. However MS wants to support Blu-ray - they need to do it...soon, too.

  • Achievements (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Saige ( 53303 ) <evil.angelaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @01:51PM (#14455919) Journal
    I actually rented King Kong through GameFly just to play through it one evening and get the 1000 gamerscore. I'm actually going to pick up NBA 2k6 for the same reason - all 1000 points are easily achievable in only a game or two.

    And I don't mind padding my gamerscore where available, because I still have plenty of noteworthy achievements to show that I do have my gaming prowess. My Grand Pearh Pooh-Bah achievement last night in Hexic is significant, and the Survive 1,000,000 in Geo Wars is a VERY HARD one to get - and I have it.

    Whoever came up with the idea for achievements and gamerscore really needs to get a raise. This is huge - and not just for the increased competitiveness to gaming I'm sure it's going to bring, but I suspect it increases attach rate and helps out with game rentals, too. It's also wonderful being able to actually see which people run off at the mouth about their gaming skills and can't back it up, and those which can. You say you're good at DOA4? Let's see the grade achievements to prove it.

    (Currently at 3185 [xbox.com] and growing. Should hit 3200 tonite with another chapter of Condemned.)
    • One thing that I don't like about the achievement system is people bragging they got the highest score in a fighting game. Sure, they may have earned X points for beating DOA4. But, that is just beating an AI. Human vs Human is a completely different story. As for adventure games, those are really good incentives for finding every single little specks of dust, I mean secrets, in a game.
    • Yeah, after reading that I really want to rent King Kong and play through it to get the points. I've only got like 1010 points right now. I need to work on things a bit.
    • Whoever came up with the idea for achievements and gamerscore really needs to get a raise.

      Sounds like you haven't played games for very long. There used to be a place we'd go to called "the arcade" where if you were really good (or had lots of quarters), you could get your initials on the "high score" list...at least until they power-cycled the machines.

      • Old arcade high score tables aren't quite the same. So what, I got the high score on a game for a day. The next day, it might be wiped. Or even on the games that store the table over power down - that only means that anyone who plays that specific machine would see.

        Xbox Live has leaderboards, so when I know I've made #77 on Hexic, I can know it's against more than a small crowd, but everyone on Xbox Live. And achievements are so easily comparable between friends and the like, that I don't think there's
  • This is slightly off topic, but it's something I've had on my mind.

    Is anyone really THAT excited over high definition DVD? I mean... my progressive scan DVD player going into my DLP HDTV looks impressive as it is. I'd go as far as saying that anamorphic DVDs look just as good as watching a tv show in high definition.

    Standard definition to High def for tv broadcasts is a huge jump... I couldn't go back. But, I really don't see how there can be as big a jump from DVD to HD DVD/Blue Ray when in my eyes, ana
    • I'm less interested in so-called "quality upgrades" going from DVD to HD-DVD, than I am the increased capacity of the discs. So honestly I don't care if it plays them or not. I'm thinking more along the lines of greater backup or transfer capabilities via dvd.
    • You are so right.

      Most people compare the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray debate to Beta vs VHS, which is inaccurate. Before both formats, there wasn't an established mechanism for television video recording. This is more like DVD-Audio vs SACD, in which case both formats have barely survived, because CDs are fine for most people. And, as far as I know, there's no way (nor any point) to rip multichannel music to a portable media device.

      For most people, the DVDs they have in their collection is going to be as good as t
    • Your TV must be pretty poor if you do not notice the blocky artifacts from DVD's MPEG2 compression. No amount of upscaling will ever fix that, and noise reduction may smooth them out, but you lose details in other areas. I have seen video using the new Codec that HD-DVD and BluRay both use, and I can never look at a standard DVD or HDTV broadcast signal the same ever again.

      I am looking forward to BluRay instead of Toshiba's cheap hack for one reason only -- larger capacity. It would be a tragedy if Toshiba
    • There's tons of posterization and compression artifacts in DVD. DVD sucks balls compared to real HDTV. It is many times better than broadcast and VHS tho.
    • If you think that DVD's look great compared to hi-def source material, your tv must not be that great. No, it isn't poor quality. But it is similar to the jump from VHS to DVD.

      A widescreen DVD is encoded at 720x480. A 1080p hi-def display has a resolution of 1920x1080. That means the width is scaled by nearly a factor of 3, and the height is scaled by over a factor of 2.

      You could display 4 widescreen DVD's on a 1080p display without losing detail and have a sizeable border between each.

  • Oh, hell yeah. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by misfit13b ( 572861 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @02:06PM (#14456076)
    Achivements make me do all sorts of stuff I would have never thought of trying in games. They're most certainly the only reason I'm playing Call of Duty 2 on "Veteran" (the highest) difficulty!

    As long as they aren't all set too easy (EA Sports games, King Kong) or too hard (Bejeweled 2, NHL 2K6), achievements are a great addition to my personal gaming experience, and will keep me playing games I might not have stuck with for as long.

    • My personal favorite is Geometry Wars' Pacifism achievement, surviving the first minute without dying or shooting anything. I've been trying constantly for a week to get it, but to no avail...
      • I like that one too, and that's the one I went for first. I heard the beep telling me I got it right before I died (cause of death: screen FULL of enemies). Since then, it's been guns blazing.

        Of course, I didn't really learn much from that evasion lesson, as I'm still pretty terrible at the game. My best score is only a measly 100,000 and change. ;^)

      • If you think the pacifism achievemnt is hard... just wait until you start trying to get the survive 1,000,000! >_
        • Yeah, that one was a pain. The key is to not use any bombs until you hit 500k, then start playing very conservative and bombing at the first sign of trouble. You should have enough bombs to last, and since your multiplier is getting nice by that point, the second 500k is a lot quicker.

          I started playing for that achievement, and was able to get it in about an hour of play.
    • Same here with the Call of Duty thing. I would have never gone back to play through it again without the point thing going on.

      What if some companies start to create games that really suck but are super easy to get gamer points on. Like...what if they made Snood 2 for the Xbox360 and sold it for $9.99? I'm guessing the game blows ass because it's only $9.99 for the Nintendo DS at Best Buy. Would people buy a crap game for ten bucks just to get a jump on their points by 1000?

      my gamertag [xbox.com]
      • and I forgot to add that I hate the fact that you can't remove a game from your list that you just played only once on the Xbox and didn't even try to get points on it. It's just sitting there....0 of 1000 points and you can't make it go away unless you rent or buy the game and actually get the points.
      • Not for Snood, as that would probably be relegated to the Arcade (for a max of 200 points), but I hear ya. There's always a risk for point-whoring with everything, but that's when the ability to compare games on the xbox.com website comes in.

        From there, I can tell that you have half of your points from COD2--which is a tough game to earn points from--as opposed to some known creampuff game.

        On the surface, score bloat would look impressive, but could reveal itself with just a little digging.

  • <joke>
    If the 360 starts supporting Blu-Ray, they'll be eliminating thier fans most touted feature: Blu-Ray/PS3 trash talk.
    </joke>

    Seriously though, cue all the 360 fanboys who are going to have to switch from HD-DVD is way better than Blu-Ray so the PS3 sucks to "Built in HD players are overrated, I'd rather the machine was cheaper".
  • in 3... 2... 1...
  • "Seriously though, cue all the 360 fanboys who are going to have to switch from HD-DVD is way better than Blu-Ray so the PS3 sucks to "Built in HD players are overrated, I'd rather the machine was cheaper"."

    You do know that the 360 will use HD-DVD's only for movies, not games, right? Sony is including Blu-Ray as a punishment to the wallets of gamers just to push the format.

    • You do know that the 360 will use HD-DVD's only for movies, not games, right? Sony is including Blu-Ray as a punishment to the wallets of gamers just to push the format.

      You're absolutely right. There's no way it was done because some game developers were already pushing the limits of DVD-9. It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that the addition of high resolution textures would only make the 9GB limit for DVDs feel even more constricting. And there's no way that HD FMV sequences would take up m

  • It's likely that Microsoft realized that since 1) 360 does not come with an HD-DVD drive and 2) Nobody else has released any HD-DVD players either that they realized they were fighting a losing battle, and, as always, Microsoft is quick to switch sides when there's profit involved.
  • Achievements and scores on the 360 are the real "next-gen" feature of the XBox 360.

    Forget the graphics (although they're great) and forget the other much-touted features of the 360 - achievements and high scores take that old-school high score competitiveness from yesterday's old-school arcades and make them relevant once again!

    This is great for someone like me - a guy in his early 30's who doesn't have many gamer friends anymore and certainly none on XBL - because it brings back that arcade competitiv
    • As an addendum to this, I must say that while I certainly plan on buying a PS3, after having played the 360 the lack of a centralized, integrated community will be one of the PS3's biggest disappointments (should it not materialize) no matter how profound its technical aspects or great its games. That's saying something.
    • BTW, if you're in need of XBL friends to play with, there are plenty of places to find groups of people to play with - and I don't mean the masses of teenage idiots. 2Old2Play [2old2play.com] is good for the over-25 crowd, and there are actually some decent threads on the Xbox.com forums.

      Heck, for that matter, toss me a FR (PMS GibGirl). I have enough people sending me FRs for various reasons that I cycle some people through quicker than I'd like, but depending on what you play, I may be able to get you into some games t
    • I'm as much of a Nintendo booster as you can be without cheering them on in a knee-jerk fashion, but I have to admit: the Achievements thing on X-box 360 is really, really great. (A better idea, in fact, than any of their in-store launch games.)
  • It's Blu-Ray. The letter "e" was intentionally left out of the name to allow trademarking, as the term "blue ray" is a commonly used phrase and can't be registered as a trademark. Thanks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc [wikipedia.org].
  • I suspect that the Gamerscore thing is one of the few elements that Microsoft has come up with that will be ripped off by Nintendo and Sony. It is such a simple idea, so easy to implement, but its implications are huge.

    While its obvious that many gamers will simply not care one way or the other about their gamerscore, many of the hard core gamers will. This will have several consequences. some of which are already being noticed, and are mentioned in that article.

    - Gamers will play games they otherwise mig

    • I suspect that the Gamerscore thing is one of the few elements that Microsoft has come up with that will be ripped off by Nintendo and Sony. It is such a simple idea, so easy to implement, but its implications are huge.

      The whole concept is predicated on a unified online system like Xbox Live. While Nintendo may have something out there like this for the Revolution (prompted by their need to cheaply sell old games online), Sony has said over and over that they're not going to do anything like Live. Wit

  • Atari 2600 games from Activision, featuring classics such as River Raid or SeaQuest, did include the aspect of game achievement and even reward.
    If you would succeed in the task described in the manual, as for example getting a score of 10,000, you were invited to take a photo of your TV screen and mail it to Activision.
    They would send you back a badge (IIRC) acknowledging your achievement in that particular game.

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