I am glad I built a new computer, as XBL is only working intermittently. It appears that Microsoft’s service was unprepared for the deluge of new gamers that received their Christmas consoles. As a result, several people have complained openly on Larry Hyrb’s–aka Major Nelson–blog. He has personally addressed people’s worries and complaints with the following response:

You may have noticed that the LIVE service has been having a few issues over the past few days. This includes things like signing in, matchmaking and account recovery. Not everyone has had problems, but I know some of you have and I wanted to give you and update. While the service was never completely offline, problems like this are not acceptable. The entire LIVE team has been working day and night to ensure that you can have a great LIVE experience. While we’re not done yet, I wanted to let you know that things are getting better each hour and that no one on the team is going anywhere until the job is done. Thanks for your patience.

Edit: As people have noticed, we have made good progress. We have a bit more work to do, but we’re doing much better now. I know some of you still may be having issues, and we’re working on those. Oh, and Happy New Year to those that are celebrating.

At least they are working for the money they take from you every month. I would like to see Microsoft give something like a free week of service–as WoW has done when they encountered server issues–but I doubt that will happen. Back to computer land for me!

Chufmoney

[via Evil Avatar]

Xbox.com has recently had a face lift. If you’ve never visited the site before, you will not notice anything exceptionally special and will probably think that the site is solely an ad delivery system. Which, uh, it is. But those who use Xbox.com to check messages and see who is on-line will enjoy a few simple updates. The home screen is still mainly for advertising with a few game shout outs. But type in your gamertag information at the upper right and you are taken to your gamertag home page. Once here, you’ll probably have no reason to go to another portion of the sight. The tabs now have translucent drop downs. It makes the movement on the site very quick and less cumbersome. The Xbox Live Marketplace information is still hard to find, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would Microsoft make if difficult to find out what movies are coming out and when? And why do they stagger their release? I’m ranting, sorry. The messaging system for Xbox live on the website is still good and bad. It is not as user friendly as I’d like and I’m not sure why audio can’t be heard from the site. If a friend leaves you a voice message, you have to log on through you Xbox 360 to hear it. I’m sure it has something to do with some technical mumbo-jumbo that is beyond me. But it would be nice. The best thing about this minor update is that the site is cleaner, a bit easier to navigate, and is more focused around your gamertag. Hopefully updates like this will continue, with more direct links and interactions between specific games. Hey, we pay $50 bucks a year for something, right?

JaySlacks

I refuse to write another technical dissertation on the memory constraints and properties of the various next gen consoles so soon after the last one, so this is going to take it easy in that regard. Anyway. Activision, the publisher with the rights to games based on the Spiderman property (both film and comic, I believe), handed the development duties for their film tie-in Spiderman 3 to Treyarch, their most competent team. They’re responsible for the Tony Hawk series, Gun, and Call of Duty 3.

Stop laughing.

Now, this would have been a good choice, as Treyarch has as much experience as (if not more than) anyone in doing multiplatform games during the current console generation, as the last Tony Hawk game and Call of Duty game can attest to. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone was asleep at the wheel during the title’s development cycle. The 360 was serving as the lead development platform, which makes sense, given it’s install base advantage, and unfortunately, those console differences I talked about yesterday slipped someone important’s mind:

The initial intention of Activision was to have the Spider-Man 3 movie tie-in game out a month ahead of the movie’s release, evidently. But when it turned out that, one month before ship date, the game was still gobbling up RAM as though every console was an Xbox 360, the company panicked. According to the Conference Fonz’s inside source, Activision had to halt all other publisher-side Q/A work in order to get this turd ready for market before the movie arrives tomorrow.
Thus, nothing else could get through the company’s Q/A department in April.

Ouch. I don’t know that Activision had anything else big coming out last month, but I’m thinking that’s the kind of mistake that might get the project lead (I think) into some deep doodoo. Unemployment line standing doodoo, as a matter of fact. Anyway, let that be a lesson to everyone that storage space and a hard drive aren’t the only things developers have to worry about this gen.

-Aegies

Kotaku is running with a rumor that Mass Effect, the highly anticipated sci-fi shooter/RPG hybrid, has been delayed from a rumored July-ish release date (oh please oh please oh please), to a September (SON OF A BITCH) release date. Reaction has been decidedly disappointed, and understandably so. It’s a highly anticipated game from a studio that has a very good history of making amazing games with compelling stories and customization, and, well, it looks amazing.

However, in the comments section of the Kotaku story, a commenter claiming to be a Bioware employee has felt the need to clearly state that Bioware, the creators/developers of Mass Effect, have announced no release date for the title, and that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions. So who do we believe? Kotaku’s source is an uncorroborated story on Computerandvideogames.com, not necessarily the most reliable of sources for news, but the contradiction comes from a commenter on a news story on a blog (and the irony of pointing this out does not escape me).

I think this just points to the importance of at least some degree of journalistic practice outside of simply writing a story based on one source. I’ve mentioned previously that standard practice for conventional news media is to try to get at least three sources prior to running with it in press. This is what is known in the professional journalism establishment as “covering your ass”. It’s harder to refute a story that has three unrelated, reliable sources of confirmation, and while this can slow down the news cycle while confirmation is obtained, it also cuts down on retractions or follow up stories where a site tries to ameliorate how stupid they look for running with a random story on the internet.

People often complain about how the bigger sites may take a day or more to print news that the blog sites run almost immediately, but perhaps this could be explained by the higher editorial, ethical, and professional standards that are in place at larger sites. I would rather have a story that I know was researched or at least fact checked or followed up on than a story I got 12 hours earlier, but maybe that’s just me.

-Aegies