Beginning with the lag,  it’s not gone at all, but it does seem to be really time depending. When it’s quiet at xbox live, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of lag, but in the evenings, it strikes. The worst thing about it is that it seems to be worse than it was when there’s an incredible lag. Not because there’s more lag, but because of the bots. When a few people leave, some bots come in the game, and they don’t have lag, so they kill you. Next to that, the host doesn’t seem to have any lag either, so it’s quite unfair. Especially because of the leaving penalty. I also have the vague idea that the lag is forcible if you’re host, it just happens to much.

Another new thing is the seemingly invincible mode that some players have in the game. The interesting thing is that it always happens to the same people in the same game, and they always seem to end first… True, they aren’t really invincible, but they seem to be able to absorb the total damage of a shotgun shot when standing next to the shooter. Although a simple grenade or a headshot with a sniper will kill him instantly.

In my last post I also said that the matchmaking time has become shorter. This is true when it’s quiet at xbox live, but in the evenings it seems to stay as bas as it was: 5 minutes or more. A total waste of your time.

Another thing in the matchmaking caught my eye, and that is that it’s totally unfair. The matchmaking system seems to put you in a team of your skill, so far it’s alright, but the system seems to fail time after time at putting you against a similar skilled team. And the funny part is that you can really see it coming with the new ranking system. If you are put in a team with level 1′s and level 2′s (it’s fair so far) and if you are teamed up against a team of level 30 and higher, you just feel it’s going to be a walk over, and it nearly always is.

Well, that’s it for GoW2, maybe I’ll make a full review about it in the short future ahead, but I don’t think it’s really needed if people read my posts about it. It just ain’t as good as people say it is. Because the situation will probably not change about the lag, I won’t post about it again till a possible next patch, that probably isn’t coming.

The New Xbox Experience is exactly what it says. It’s a total makeover of the xbox user interface, and you can as well say of the whole xbox system. All this to improve your gaming experience on the xbox 360. It is clear that they’ve looked at the points where other consoles seemed to surpass the xbox to achieve this. Nearly all changes are based on those points.  Two big changes of that kind are the possibility to install games and the the new avatars.

The first change, installing games, was needed because of the large loading times that some games had. In my opinion, nearly every xbox game has some loading times that are just to long, so I was really waiting for this new option. However, now it’s here, I have some doubts about it. First of all, the install system just seems to make a large copy of the game on your hard disk, so it fills up your disk incredibly fast. Second of all, the loading times don’t seem to become significantly smaller.

The second big change, the new avatars,  is a little mysterious one to me. First of all because it’s nearly a one on one copy from the Mii system from the Nintendo Wii, not very original. Second of all because you can’t use them in games, a possibility that the Wii does have.  Sure, you can use a “photo” of your avatar as your gamer picture, but it ain’t very useful. As a result, the avatar seems to be nothing more than a commercial tool for microsoft. You can actually buy clothes and accessories for it… A bit weird for something probably only you will see.

The third big change is the new look of the whole menu, a change that was really necessary. The marketplace of the old version didn’t had enough filter options, and the new menu just looks better. However, it must be said that it looks like it’s stolen from both the Wii and the PS3. It contains the little tv screen thingies from the Wii menu and the scrolling system from the PS3, whichlooks a lot like the scrolling system from windows media center.

A little downside, and a commercial upside, of this change seem to be that the old custom theme’s are useless now. Sure, you can still use them, but it results into a really ugly wallpaper.

With the new look of the menu, a new look was needed for the xbox guide. Not only was it restyled, it was also reorganised, and they did a pretty good job on that. A lot more options on your xbox are accessible through your xbox guide now, and it’s well organised in menus, so you can find everything you need without much trouble.

However, a big downside of this change is that the guide has become really slow. When somebody invites me to a game, and I accept, the guide seems to hang for a minute, and sometimes a bit longer.  It is at its worst when playing in an online game. One press on the Xbox guide button can lead to numerous deaths, just because the whole system hangs. It seems that not everyone is experiencing this, but to me it’s enough to make this new xbox experience a bad one.

Luckily there’s something that compensates it at all, and it secures xbox first place in the console battle for the best online experience: the party system. There is not a single console where it’s so incredible easy to play with your friends. You invite them to a single party so you can privately chat with everyone and start a game. Simple, but seemingly ingenious.

So on one side, there’s a new refreshing look and the useful new options like the party system and the possibility to install games on your hard disk drive. But on the other hand, microsoft shows how incredibly commercial they are with the coming of the Mii cloned avatars, not caring about the slow xbox guide, contributing to a little negative experience. But when summing up all those new experiences, the total new xbox experience surely  is a positive one.

A few days ago, I switched back to a normal CRT wide screen television, and it occurred to me that the game I was trying to play, Battlefield: Bad Company, was unplayable online. Not because the people I played against were better, but because some things had become so vague that they limited my score. First of all, people that were far away, seemed to blur into the background (well, that happens…), and secondly my map was so cropped, that all the white lines on it blurred together, and the different marks (ammo, players, vehicles) were unrecognisable, and I’m really addicted to my map. Clearly, the map can’t be read without an HD television.

Another example is Dead Rising. The texts on the screen are so incredibly small, that you must put your face inside your television to read them… that is, without a HD television. Although the whole user interface seems unusable if you don’t use a HD television.

Gears of War 2, famous for it’s totally erroneous matchmaking system, also seems to be made for High Definition televisions. While collecting the various collectibles, it occurred to me that the texts of these collectibles are totally unreadable, even if you sit next to your TV. The numbers that appear when counting down before the match begins are way too small to see a difference between a 3 and a 6.

You could say that I can’t see it because my eyes are bad, or because I’m used to HD quality, but I don’t think that’s true. The Dead Rising incident even took place before I had a HD television, and more people seem to have trouble with it, so there’s only one option remaining: the game industry is focusing on HD televisions.

I think this is bad because of a few reasons. First of all, not everyone can afford a HD tv. Second of all, the HD option should be there because IF you are so lucky to have a HD tv, you can have better graphics, but you should be able to play every game on every working standard sized television. I don’t want to be forced to play on a large HD television. Next to that, the game industry is selling games that seem playable until you try them out. There’s no sort of warning that you need a HD television to be able to see everything, so some people pay for a game they can’t play without being irritated because they can’t read some text. It reduces your gaming experience, and that’s bad.

In other words: the game industry should stop producing games that contain texts or graphics that aren’t visible on a normal CRT television. And if they do, they should at least put a warning on the box that some parts of the game are unreadable when using a normal television so they stop deceiving their buyers.

It’s incredible how you can fuck things op twice. The first release is faulty, then you focus on this specific mistake, and you do it wrong all over again. Of course, something has changed, finding your team is a bit faster, but the overall process is still slow as hell… I still can prepare a meal within the time it costs to actually find a game.

I hope Epic can solve this problem on a short timescale… otherwise I’m forced to play horde till I reach lvl 50 on my own… torture. EPIC, STOP FAILING!

Well, how slow is it… It’s really so slow that it can take longer to find a game than it takes to be defeated in that game, which is quite irritating. My average connection time is 5-10 minutes (this is contrast to the 2 minutes to find a game in CoD4 or Halo3), but there are cases where it just took me more than 15 minutes. I’ve even found some people on fora who claim it took more than 20 minutes to find a game. Just imagine how much you can play if you only have to play an hour a day… But even if you can play a little bit longer, it’s just screwing up your time waiting.

So, WHY ON EARTH IS IT SO SLOW!? Of course, it’s only guessing for the reasons, but the most likely case is that Epic has made an epic fail matchmaking system. At least, the claims that it would depend on your router/network configuration are falsified by people who report that it doesn’t matter if you enable DMZ (that’s opening all ports, and that should rule out any router influence) for your xbox360 or not. I’ve even tried it myself, and there’s no difference.

What did Epic do wrong? There are a few things that are unique to the GoW2 matchmaking system and could, in my opinion, slow down the matchmaking process. The first thing is that finding a match is splitted in two different phases: finding your own team and finding a team that would be a fair match for your team. This method can slow you down because of two reasons. First of all because it takes a while before you have a team because a lot of people leave before the process is finished, and this system starts over when someone leaves the team before the match starts. The second reason is that you need to search twice, and the second time you have a harder search because you need to find a match that suits the collection of matchmaking ranks of the teams, and not only that of individual players. In this view the system of Halo3 is much faster. You search 8 people, you split them into teams, and if somebody leaves the process isn’t stopped.

The second thing is the Trueskill ranking system. A lot of people get stuck with in the first rank, so there are a lot of teams with the same average Trueskill, but the are all a little bit different. So if you want to find the BEST match for your team, you need to compare all the Trueskill ranks of all different teams. If this is a large number, it can take a while.

There are a lot of other reasons that you can come up with, but I guess that we will never know (although someone came up with the plausible idea that someone is matching teams by hand… that would tell us why it is so slow). The only thing we can hope for is that they will find the mistake they’ve made (Epic seems to have noticed it according to this post), and will solve it, otherwise this good game is doomed, and we are forced to play GoW till GoW3 appears.

9. Super Smash Brothers Brawl
This is just an example of one of the things that irritated me extremely about the Wii, the lack of real or good games in the months after the launch of the Wii. Before the launch, a few titles, including this one and Sadness, were hyped into heaven, but none of them were available at the launch. Not only that, they wouldn’t be in store after one the console’s release. Sadness is even considered as a hoax nowadays. In my opinion, there were no interesting releases (games like Zelda) in a period of a year after the release. Well, Wario Ware and some other mini game compilations and non-games weren’t bad, but I guess I prefer those on a DS, and they don’t have a long life as single player game.

8. Kirby’s Adventure
A little time ago, Nintendo made it possible to exchange Nintendo stars (stars you get in Europe when you purchase a Nintendo game) for Wii points. I used it to download Kirby’s Adventure. While finding out how I should hold my Wii remote, it occurred to me that the whole remote was made to play old NES games. This explained the weird place of the “1” and the “2” buttons, which are quite hard to press if you are holding the controller when you are playing Wii Sports or something like that. It also explains why Nintendo didn’t come with new games in the weeks after the launch, but DID release a lot of old games on the shopping channel. A conspiracy theory? Maybe… but it is a weird coincidence, and I do think that the controller is the proof for that.

7. Super Mario Galaxy
Maybe some people won’t agree, but I do think most games, not only those for the Wii, are made to be easy these days. I have cleared the story line of this game without a problem, practically without dying. It really became obvious with this game, because you can get to the final boss without playing even one of the harder levels, something which never happened to me before, even GTA San Andreas was harder. I do think that Nintendo is dumbing down its games on purpose, to attract an as large possible audience. Unfortunately it does destroy the experience for real gamers.

6. Zelda Twilight Princess
Without any doubt, one of the best games available on the Wii. Well, not only on the Wii, it’s also a GameCube game. My second favorite Wii game, Resident Evil 4, is also a port from the GameCube. I do think that these games, and Mario Galaxy, offer the best graphics available on the Wii. Well, if my first statement is true, and my second statement is also true, then the Wii offers GameCube graphics. Well, I don’t think that’s a problem, but those games offer the best graphics available on the Wii. So the other games offer graphics that are worse than GameCube graphics. This makes me a little bit confused, you simply can’t release a “next-gen” console with graphics that sometimes seem to equal N64 graphics. This is a crime if you do give people the impression that the Wii should be able to offer better graphics than the Game Cube.

5. Curve Ball
Curve Ball, you probably know it, it’s probably one of the most popular flash games around. In a state of total boredom I started my Wii, the Opera browser and eventually Curve Ball. I have a fine computer, so why am I playing Curve Ball on the Wii? It’s too ridiculous for words. The only explanation I can think of is that I was done with all the games I own for the Wii, and that nothing interesting came out in the mean time. So I played Curve Ball on the Wii, just to make use of it. I didn’t play on my Wii for about 3 months. I do want to know why the online functions of the Wii only seem to offer this quite useless browser, a weather channel, a poor maintained news channel and a shopping channel without demos. If there were some good online titles for the Wii, I probably would have played those instead of Curve Ball.

4. Wii Sports
One of the biggest delusions I experienced was packed with the Wii. It was probably supposed to show you how great the Wii Remote is, but it just showed the lack of possibilities. You can golf with only an uninteresting swish of your wrist and tennis without any effort. It also didn’t offer any interesting things like running through the field with tennis or baseball. You only need to make one move to bat, and after that it’s all scripted. It’s like pressing buttons, but in stead of moving your fingers, you move your whole arm. Well, the Wii Remote isn’t as useless as I put it, Zelda and Resident Evil 4 do make great use of the possibilities, but I do think that they can get more out of it.

3. Call of Duty 4
This game is probably one of the best shooters available. Well, available? It’s available on nearly every electrical device except the Wii. You can even download it on your mobile phone. Not having games like these available on your console can really destroy the popularity for your product. It looks like Nintendo scares away third party producers with the controls and the graphics it can offer. This results in a lack of good third party games for the Wii, an overload of games that scored 2/10 in my favorite game magazine, and just a few games for my Wii.

2. Metroid Prime 3
I hoped this game would feature an online multiplayer mode, strangely enough it didn’t. It seems that “Oops I did it again” is the only song that fits with Nintendo’s online policy. The Cube would get online functions, but in the end, only one or two games made use of it. The Nintendo DS offers online multiplayer, so there was hope. But unfortunately the Wii can only offer the same online possibilities as the DS, which are no match for the PS3 or the Xbox 360. You don’t have a useful friends list, instead you must enter friend codes. No chat, no voice chat, nothing. Besides that, there are practically no games that offer online multiplayer. Nintendo could and should have improved the online system. Besides all those things, the only really good game that features online possibilities is Super Smash Brothers Brawl… and that game is not available in Europe and Australia yet (while it has been released in Japan a whooping year ago, and 3 months ago in the U.S.A.).

1. Wii Fit
If you really look at the Wii closely, and if you have considered my criticism above, the Wii just isn’t a match for the PS3 or the Xbox 360. So why is it selling so well? Yes, because of the incredible amount of non-games, and Wii Fit really is a non-game in it’s most extreme form. In my opinion a console is made to play games and enjoy yourself, not to lose weight, So when I first heard about this game, it really made me angry. They can’t produce enough real games to keep the (hardcore)gamers among us satisfied for 12 months, and after that, they come with yet another non-game. Why? To let every fatty in the world buy a Wii. Commerce, commerce and yet again commerce.

So, Nintendo did really disappoint me, but that doesn’t mean that I hate the console. Games like Zelda Twilight Princess, Resident Evil 4 and Mario Galaxy are great, but I hoped Nintendo would focus on games like these, and not on non-games. But all right, there’s still some time left before the next “next-gen” consoles comes out. With that, there’s still some hope that Nintendo motivates some (third party) producers to make real games.