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.

Let’s begin with the biggest change, the new RPG style ranking system. In other words, you can farm yourself a way to the ‘top’. I guess that this shows the problem of the system: it doesn’t show how skilled you are, just how long you’ve played the game, and there’s no one to one connection between those two things, unfortunately. In other words, the rank is quite meaningless, they could as well have made a clock that shows your playing time instead… It is, however, better than the unclear, and partially unfair, old ranking system. Although a better solution would have been to make 100 skill based ranks instead of 100 experience points based ranks.

Nevertheless, the old ranking system is still used in an invisible way for matchmaking. And needless to say, it still doesn’t work. The skill differences between the players in the teams are still very big and total walk-overs aren’t rare. It’s a shame that they didn’t change that.

One of the other big changes is the new system that puts a bot in the team when someone leaves. To be honest, I still don’t know what to think about it. Of course, it’s better for the team than lacking a player, but I prefer playing against a team full of real players who don’t have auto-aim, and who don’t know how to play the game (you’ll understand that last thing when you’ve played annex or King of the Hill against a team of 3 humans and two bots). But oh well, I guess it’s pretty nice not having to play 1 vs 5 anymore.

Besides these two large game-mechanic changes, there’s also a content update. There’s 250 gamerpoints of new achievements and there’s a new map pack. I haven’t got it, so I don’t know if it’s worth buying, but the maps look good. The big question in my opinion is: is the game now playable enough to actually buy extra content.

The answer, surprisingly, seems to be ‘yes’. I say ‘seems’, because I’ve only played for about 2 hours, but they were nearly without any lag. When scrolling through the change notes I noticed that thist wasn’t luck, or at least shouldn’t be. They’ve made the data exchange faster, people who standby are found faster and you are teamed up with people so your ping is lower than 200ms. It still isn’t totally lag free, but it’s a great start. Next to that, the matchmaking seems to be a lot faster than it was. I’m finding matches in 1 or 2 minutes. This used to be a lot more.

Also some minor changes have made the game a lot better. Like the new playlists. You can now actually choose between two gametypes that you want to play, because every playlist now just contains two gametypes. No random horrors anymore (except the maps.. but oh well).

When summing everything up, I’ve really got a positive feeling about this patch. I actually think that it might have saved the  game. With the lag preventing changes, the game is actually playable online, and it’s not as irritating as it was. It feels less like wasting time, and more like having fun.  Sure, it still has a glitch or two, but the problems aren’t as serious as they were.

So, if you have stopped playing GoW2 because the lag nearly killed you, try it again, and play the game as it was, probably, meant to be. This patch has really done it’s job well.

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.

Since the first patch, some improvements were made in the matchmaking system to make it faster, making the game actually playable for the first time… well for a short time that is. Shortly after this improvement I noticed that nearly all games were laggy. Of course, this lag produced more factors that rendered Gears of War 2 unplayable: Host advantages (something quite normal with lag) and the legendary “no-weapon-glitch” which screwed up the rest of the gameplay.

The reason why there’s so much lag seems to be that Gears of War 2 does not make the player with the best connection host… Besides that, it seems that if the host is inactive at start up, there will be lag anyway till the host moves. A problem that lies within Gears of War 2 itself, and that seems pretty patchable.

The second thing that made GoW2 unplayable were the early leaving people. One moment you are with a team, the second moment everyone is gone. Normally, I don’t care about this, but there are times when the host disconnects. In most modern games, this isn’t a problem, but in GoW2 it is. When the host leaves, no new host is selected and the game ends. As a bonus, all players in the game will get a penalty for early leaving (this has even demoted me once).

Next to these major problems, there are some other irritations in the form of minor bugs/glitches like the “jump over a shield and go through the doors” on pavilion glitch, which is extremely easy to do, and can get you a lot of kills with it, including taking out the enemy leader on guardian.

So, after this whole story: WHY does the second Gears of War patch fail? The answer is quite simple: It does NOT fix ANY of the bugs named above, and these are the most irritating ones. Epic even made the “host left -> penalty for all players” bug a bit worse by giving larger penalties for early leavers. Of course, they have fixed some small bugs that were quite hard to trigger (Kung Fu Flip… invisibility… etc.), they’ve done some balancing (or so they say, I don’t even notice the difference),  and the Hail map is really improved (no grenade advantage anymore), but the most essential bugs which make the game unplayable, like the extreme lag, are still there.

The score: After two patches we’ve got an unplayable game, some worthless achievements with which they try to boost the Combustible Map Pack sales and a lot of wasted time. I can not say that I have every seen this in any game before in my life. Similar problems were solved on CoD4 with one or two patches. What irritates me the most is that the patches are so ineffective that the only use seems to be to promote the premium map pack, but what can I do about it? Nothing…

There’s still a little bit of hope if I read the official forum post. They will try, notice the “try” in this sentence, to fix the other problems, and patch them in the future… Sounds to me like they’ve abandoned the project, but we’ll see. If they plan to do something about it, they better do it fast, because I don’t really see the fun in this game anymore… I got better things to do than lagging around.

Thank you Epic!

It must be said that the main idea of this game is crazy, but very original: T-rex dinosaurs hunting in cities for Doritos trucks… You must have a pretty distorted mind to come up with that. An even bigger miracle than the idea itself is that it works.

You can either play the T-rex campaign in which you hunt for trucks while destroying whole cities in your frenzy to get them, or you can play the delivery truck campaign where you dash away in the hope not getting eaten by the killer dinosaur. The first campaign is probably the most fun, destroying whole cities, but the second one is surely a bit harder to play, although neither of them are very challenging. I guess the fun of the campaigns (and the rest of this game) lies within the crazy concept and the weird upgrades for you truck and your T-rex.

Destroying the cityUnfortunately there’s not a lot more to do after you’ve cleared both campaigns in about 15 minutes (30 minutes if you really take your time to enjoy it). And there is the weak point of this game. Because the campaign is so easy and short, you will be finished with it in no time, and you will have 190/200 gamer points. There’s no real challenge after that.

If you have people who can play with you, you can expand the life of this game with a few more minutes playing the multiplayer. I must say that this multiplayer is very enjoyable for a free game, and it has a very easy and intuitive game play, so it’s ideal if you have guests who have never touched a xbox controller. Unfortunately there’s no online multiplayer, which would have extremely expanded the lifespan of this game, as would online leader boards (you now will have to post your scores on ninjabee’s forums).

Overall it’s a nice game and it’s very kind of Doritos to release it to us for free (more companies should do that, really). The only weak point of the game is the lifespan, if you don’t have a lot of people in  your house who want to play this game with you, you’re done with this game in 15 minutes (competing with your own scores just ain’t fun). If you do have people who want to play with you, you can stretch the lifespan to about an hour or two. However, it’s free and you should download it, even if it’s only because of the easy gamer points.

Score: 6/10

To start with the Guardian bug, here’s what happened. The game just started as usual, but then something strange happened. There first was a message that the opponents leader was dead… but just as fast, a new tracking thing appeared like there was a second leader. When that person was killed, there was another message about a killed leader, but our leader was still alive… 2 leaders?

It looks like that, because the ending stats also did show 2 leaders in the opposing team.  But it’s strange that the first leader didn’t come back alive… so it’s useless to have 2 leaders in your team, if you are the second leader, you only will be found faster. But a bug is a bug, and epic should fix it.

*update* You ARE (sort of) invincible as a team if you have 2 leaders, I had it a second time this day, and it proofed that if the opposing team has 2 leader, you can only win if you kill the second leader while the first one is dead. I hope I can get a link to a screenshot I’ve made as proof.

The other bug is far more irritating. If you have a bit of lag, and you die at the end of the round, there’s a chance that you won’t be able to play the next round. You will start in observation view, and sometimes you are even able to shoot from that view (just at one point… but you can shoot)… but it seems that you can also get killed if that’s the case. It really ruins the online multiplayer, and of course, they should fix it.

I hope that Epic really releases a patch to fix the current glitches and bugs, because GoW2 seems to become a little bit unplayable online… If they do so, I can start to find some real interesting things to write about, not this bullcrap.

Stay tuned.

- First of all Team up with 5 people in one party, with invites.

- Invite the 6th person, but DON’T let him accept it… yet.

- Now start the matchmaking, and try to let the 6th player join as soon as you’ve found an opposing team. This probably needs incredible timing, but I can assure you that it’s possible to do it. You can also try to just let him join while you’ve started matchmaking, maybe that works too.

- IF everything is OK, and that’s what happened to me, you will find the 6th player under your party, but it blinks, and you get a warning that you have one player too much, but then the pre-game lobby opens, and he’s in it with you. You’ll see one opponent missing (so they are with 4), and the extra player isn’t listed in your team.

When the match start, you have 6 players on your team, and the other team just has 4 players, and that could be in your advantage .

As soon as the match is over, your extra member will be kicked from the party.

Maybe Epic should patch this glitch, along with the other glitches and the slow matchmaking system, it will really save the game. I hope that someone can confirm the glitch with pictures or a video. Next to this advantage of partying up online with GoW2, it seems that partying up with 5 people really is speeding the matchmaking up, so party up people!

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.