Van Hemlock.com

Van Hemlock Episode 93

Jon Shute — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:28:23 +0000

This week we return with more of what we've been playing. Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars, DDO and Eve dominate the MMOs, while the console games reach the heady heights of Dragon Age: Origins, Heavy Rain and, um, The Wheelman.

We also have the final(ish) word on if PCs are dead. The definitive word. Please note devs: pay attention to what Jon says and act accordingly.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute or leave us a comment on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

Look out for the Twitter question on Fridays and have your say.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.

Equal Opportunity Moaning: Xbox 360

Jon Shute — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:25:56 +0000

Last time I listed the little niggles that I think are wrong with the PS3. This time I’m going to do the same with the 360 because I’m nothing if not an equal opportunities griper.

The first, and biggest, problem is their reliability. I’m not saying that the PS3 is bulletproof, I know it’s not as I’ve had failures myself, but the rate of 360s popping their clogs is staggering. I’ve had two fail, and nearly everybody I know has had one go. Hopefully the current design is stable, but they really need to make a new unit that can get a reputation for being solid as the current design is shot.
Xbox Live Arcade is great. There are some staggeringly good games on the service, from classics such as Doom to brand new games made specifically for it. There is one niggling little flaw though. It’s a real pain to find the games I want to play now that I’ve downloaded so many. Search, better categories similar ideas would help but in the short term the ability to favourite games so they’re at the top of the list would be great.
The controller isn’t perfect, in fact it’s far from it. Although it doesn’t leave me in pain like the PS3 one (yes, I know I’m a freak) but what excuse do Microsoft have for having the worlds worse d-pad? I can never get the direction I want reliably without hitting one of the others at the same time. Look at the design of the PS3 d-pad, that’s how it should be done with each direction effectively being an individual button instead of an inaccurate rocking button. OK, you get diagonals on the 360 controller, but what’s the use if you can’t reliably hit them? There’s also the matter of those bobbles on the two sticks. You remember them, they wore down in a few days and were gone. Well if you keep playing I’m sure some of you will know that you go further through the rubber on the stick itself and that then splits. You have to be pretty obsessive, but I haven’t noticed that problem with my PS3.
Possibly the best feature is the way that when you turn a 360 on you have to double check that it’s actually on because it’s so whisper quiet. Oh wait, the fan sounds like a 747 taking off in my living room. While (amazingly) later units are much quieter than the launch ones they’re still awkwardly loud. A new xbox model should be made to fix that, everybody would upgrade to it (probably)
While we’re talking about noise I can’t let the DVD drive slide. The best feature on the console is that one that allows you to copy the contents of the disc to the hard drive because it makes playing some games not sound like you’re playing while under heavy machine gun fire.
Games on Demand. This is a brilliant idea, and one that I support 100%. It’s just I can get the games off Amazon cheaper usually. Sure, I need to use a disc which I like, but I’m also running out of disc space on my 360 anyway so a few more 4gb game downloads aren’t practical.
The hard drive costs HOW MUCH? The rather strict rules about which hard drives can be used on the 360 which effectively limits you to buying an overpriced driver from MS (yes you can upgrade them yourself for less, but it’s a hassle and the drive has to be the exact right type and you risk a banning for modding). I have a 120gb drive in mine, a quick look at my hardware retailer of choice shows that I can get a 600gb or even a whole terabyte of storage on a 2.5” hard drive now. There’s even a smaller 10k rpm one I notice, that’ll help game loading times. I don’t mind playing a little bit more than the retail price of the drives, but just give me lots more storage than the pitiful amounts available now and don’t make me feel like I’m being abused while paying for it.
Xbox Live Indy Game. I think they’re brilliant, anybody can pay $99 or so and release their own games on xbox. Sure, they’re not going to be the new Halo and not going to sell a bazillion copies but it lets the average person who knows a little bit of coding to put something onto the console. Sony started this with special consoles for education, but Microsoft have opened it up to everybody. Nobody told the Marketing people though. Or the Xbox UI people. Put the games front and centre! I MAED A GAME WITH ZOMBIES!!!!111! was the best selling Indy game of last year, where is the big icon on the front page? Why not just link the top 10 games that week on a single menu and let people discover new games that way with a way to get through to the rest of the catalogue. The more people play, the more people will buy and the more people will develop because they make more money.
Gold is king, silver users smell. Because we pay for gold, silver get hardly any features because they want to make everything seem worthwhile. No, I don’t mind that. What I do mind though is when Microsoft turn down features because they can’t charge for it. Sounds nuts right, nobody would be that dumb? Well when Microsoft apparently told the BBC that they’d only add iPlayer to the service if it was allowed to be a gold feature, which is at odds with the BBCs access remit, we passed into the territory of cutting off your own nose to spite your face. 8% of BBC iPlayer viewing is via the PS3, I would imagine that there would be a similar number if the Xbox had it, or at least that 8% would split.

You’ll notice that I left off a few things that you might consider a gripe yourself. I don’t mind paying for Live, in fact I’d rather pay and get proactive banning of cheaters and the better service in general than not pay anything and get the PS3 service. Yes, that also means I would pay for PSN if it were made better. MS points instead of cash? Nope, don’t mind that as I know roughly the conversion so I mentally do it in my head anyway now.

Let the flaming commence.

Van Hemlock Episode 92

Jon Shute — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:42:58 +0000

This week we're talking about random internet things. DRM, expensive bags and sexism all get covered with varying amounts of accuracy.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute or leave us a comment on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

Look out for the Twitter question on Fridays and have your say.

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Direct MP3 Download.

Van Hemlock Episode 91

Jon Shute — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:20:49 +0000

This week we're talking about the games that we have been playing. From LOTRO to Tropico 3, with a rather long stop over at a scary place with Aliens and Predators.

We also say where the news show has gone to, and promise that it's coming back.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute or leave us a comment on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

Look out for the Twitter question on Fridays and have your say.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.

I don't hate the PS3, I just have these gripes.

Jon Shute — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:00:04 +0000

I moan about the PS3. OK, I moan about the PS3 a lot, but it doesn’t actually mean I don’t like it as a system. In fact I rather like it and my PS3(s) do get a lot of use.

I do have one or two small niggles with the PS3 though that I’d like to see fixed. None of these are a deal breaker (OK, the last one is but I hope somebody has a solution for me) and should in no way be taken as anything other than a list of things I find slightly annoying or lacking. They certainly don’t make it a bad console; they’re just areas that could be improved.

Make iPlayer work with the media remote (full screen mode and the pause button first). Probably impossible because of the way that all Sony do is add an icon for the web page on the main UI, but having to use a controller is a real pain.
Give the slim a USB socket on the back. I have a docking station that lets me put two controllers on it and it will charge them while not in use. The PS3 only has USB sockets on the front, which means that I need an ugly wire sticking out to use this. This also counts for keyboards and I guess everybody who just connects their controller using a USB connection (which is rubbish and another gripe as if you charge while playing a micro USB connection pulls out too easily, but that’s an aside). If there was a USB socket at the back I could run things through a hub, therefore hiding all those nasty wires.
The stop button on the media remote causes blu-rays to stop play back and returns you to the XMB. This button is awfully close to other useful buttons such as pause. I’ve accidentally hit stop before, and boy is it annoying when you’re just trying to pause a film. Return me to the blu-ray menu and then allow me to continue, even if I meant to press it then that’s probably what I meant.
Progress bars. The PS3 has a lot of progress bars. You get one when you install a game, you get one when you download a patch, followed by one when that installs. You can even get progress bars while saving your game. Compare your trophies with a friend and it’ll give you a progress bar while it synchronises. And then there are the hourglass like swirlys that indicate that the XMB is loading something. Press the PS button in game and you’ll get a couple of seconds of swirling. Scroll through a connected media server and you’ll get more. I don’t mind that these actions take time, although I think they take longer than they should do. It’s just that the progress bars are really out of place on a console. Running little big planet last night I was watching progress bars for a full hour, in which I couldn’t use the console for anything else and you know what? It made it feel like a PC that couldn’t multitask and not a console. It gives off a bad impression.
Talking of not being able to use the console, the lack of background downloads when you patch a game is annoying. They aren’t all as bad as little big planet because very few games get that amount of developer love post release, but patches on the PS3 certainly take longer than they do on the 360. Any really large patches on the 360 tend to be on the Marketplace as optional downloads, and so can be downloaded in the background and every critical “can’t play until you get this” patch only takes a few seconds. On the PS3 the patching process is longer anyway but the patches also seem to be bigger. I’ve never waited more than a few seconds to play a 360 game, but have gotten bored of waiting for a PS3 game to patch on more than one occasion.
Installations. No, I don’t mean installing to the hard disk in order to run faster. I mean the installation process that happens after you download a game and try and run it. Why does my closed system need installs? Why can’t it just download the files to the right place in the first place as, again, the 360 seems to do. The PS3 downloads everything as an encrypted compressed file installer and then does the copy, this is PC territory again!
Cross game chat. I use it on the 360 all the time and I miss it on the PS3. Hurry up and add it Sony. You’ve been saying it’s coming for ages now.
Reliability of the network connection. To start with I thought this was just me, but other people have said they have similar problems. One of my PS3s just won’t keep a connection to the PSN over wireless, and ever since an upgrade last year sometime neither think they’re on a plug and play network any more despite everything else I own knowing that it is. I also can’t reliably stream videos or audio from my PC or Mac without it stopping after a while. I’d love to know what it is about my network that causes this, and I’m sure many other people would too as I know I’m not alone.
Noise. Even after just 6 months of owning it, my slim is getting louder. This thing runs hot, the amount of heat thrown out the back is staggering and those fans run hard to keep up. Yes, the 360 sounds like a jet engine and tend to fatally melt, but that doesn’t stop me wanting the PS3 to be quieter too.
The media player. My PS3 is hooked up to the most expensive speakers in my house, it would be nice if the media player was better.
The controller sucks. Yes, you heard me. It’s too small and I can’t use it for extended amounts of time without it hurting my hands, which are abused from using a keyboard and mouse daily for years. Also, even the Dreamcast even better analogue triggers than the PlayStation has now. Are any of the madcatz controllers any good?
The XMB. This abomination of a UI is spreading like a cancer through Sony products and while it sort of works for some situations the PS3 is not one of them. It has a massive problem with large amounts of items. Connect to my music collection and it’s a pain to use because I have thousands of items in the list to scroll through. My games list is too large as well and is awkward. It’s just not a nice UI for scrolling through. One of the problems is that it’s the wrong way round. The horizontal scrolling changes the category and is the larger area. Vertical scrolling has the items, but is a much smaller size. Hundreds of items do not fit with this UI.
Trophies. Make them upload to the server when you get them, not when you decide to sync. Or when the console is not doing anything on the XMB. Or anything other than when you tell it to, it makes comparing them with your mates hard. Also speed up that whole checking them process, progress bars aren’t as fun as they look.
Invite to game. Hey, want to join this game with me? On 360 it’s simple and you just have to press the guide and click. On the PS3 what you’ve actually done is send a message and then they have to find the right option in the game to join you. If the game supports it.
This is my biggest gripe, and the one that physically stops me playing (and owning) more PS3 games. I own two PS3s. One is in the living room, and one is upstairs out of the way with all my audio recording and video capture gear. I also have two 360s for the same reason. With my 360s I have my saved games on an (overpriced) memory card. I can plug that in to either system and play my games where I want, even on somebody else’s 360. As far as I can tell I can’t do that with the PS3 and my saves are confined to the console that they live on. This annoys the hell out of me, as it means that if I want to play on the sofa I can’t play the same games that I was playing in what I laughingly call the studio earlier. I buy 360 versions of multiplatform games because of this (ok, and also because of the multiplayer. And maybe achievements. But this is a reason too)

The thing is that more than a couple of these problems can never be fixed on the PS3. Things like fixing game invites and making trophies synchronise when you get them will probably be breaking changes for every game and so we’ll not see them until the PS4.

I actually have a theory that the fact that 360s all tend towards the exploding end of the reliability spectrum has the benefit of making 360 users not complain about the little things.

Agree with my gripes? Disagree? Am I just being an idiot and missing something, am wrong about something or have I missed a gripe? Add them to the comments.

Next week in this series of venting that my imaginary therapist said would be useful: what annoys me with the 360.

Van Hemlock Episode 90

Jon Shute — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:49:56 +0000

This week we've delving deeply into Eve Online and looking at Tim's experience at trying PvP by taking the Agony Unleashed PvP training course.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute or leave us a comment on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

Look out for the Twitter question on Fridays and have your say.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.

Van Hemlock News for 14th February 2010

Jon Shute — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:08:43 +0000

Van Hemlock News for 14th February 2010

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at the new www.vanhemlock.com to catch the latest updates or leave us a comment at www.vanhemlock.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

You can also subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.

Van Hemlock Episode 89

Jon Shute — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:56:08 +0000

We're back with another look into what games we've been playing in the last few weeks.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute or leave us a comment on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

Look out for the Twitter question on Fridays and have your say.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it's published each week.

Direct MP3 Download.

It's the future, aren't things meant to get better?

Jon Shute — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:39:44 +0000

I used to be something of a god of technology. I could make anything work first time. All interfaces were obvious to my mind, and nothing ever failed badly. That was in the past-times though. A golden age of technology. Now we’re in the future it’s a different story.

My iPhone just crashed and now says that it contains no music. Usually it says that after syncing with iTunes, but this time it came up just from opening the iPod software on it. It never used to to do this.

Maybe it’s not just me. Does technology actuallly get worse with each update? Did we peak somewhere around the turn of the millennium and are we now on a downwards slope to the new dark ages*?

Games consoles used to be more reliable. Now we have an effort by Microsoft that falls over at the drop of a hat (does anybody not know somebody who has had at least one fail?), and Sony isn’t much better with the rate they seem to be falling to bits. I actually had to unplug my PS3 slim when we recorded the last show as it made too much noise on standby now and was being picked up by a mic. That’s insane, it was on standby! And don’t get me started on how slow the XMB on the PS3 is, or how it always used to be easy to play games back in the day as I’d just stick the disc in the drive, now I have to dig through nasty Xbox menus to play something I used to have on an older platform on a disc, tape or cartridge.

Blu-ray films are no better. Many of them have a progress bar when they start to show you how much they’ve loaded as they go off to the internet and look for updates. Who thought that was a good idea? DVDs never had progress bars. Updates have made technology worse again.

I predict the end of civilization as we know it. The next round of consoles will not even be able to play games, the iPhone will not be able to make phone calls (insert how will we tell comment here) and our laptops will all explode whenever we even think of using them.

Somebody print out Wikipedia while we still can, we will need its knowledge of farming and metal working in the future after technology fails us.

If anybody wants me I’ll be playing fallout as survival research.

* The historian in me would like to point out that in reality that isn’t what the dark ages were and continuing this idea is wrong and I shouldn’t do it. The writer in me is lazy though and likes an easy time and has promised the historian side of me beer if I let it slide this one time.

God of Whatnow?

Jon Shute — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:00:12 +0000

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing games outside of my usual comfort zone. There are two things that I really hate in games. The first is quick time events (QTEs), best described by the term “Press X not to die now!” I hate them. I think they’re lazy. They also cause me to forget where the buttons on my controller are. I don’t know why, but I can remember perfectly until one of the QTEs comes up in a game and then I freeze. It’s the same as when you write a word so many times that it starts to look like it’s spelt wrong whenever you write it again. It’s a moment of doubt that kicks into a familiar action that throws me off my game. I even grabbed the last (only?) Bourne game because it was so QTE-tastic in order to make myself like them. It didn't work.

The other thing that I hate is combos. I play a lot of games. Actually that’s not true. I play way more games than is healthy and jump around between them like a gnat with ADD. I never sell my games as I’m always wanting to go back and look at them again, and I get nervous when lending them to friends because I know I’ll get the urge to play them again the moment that they’re gone. Coming back to a game six months, or two years later and not being able to remember the combos that were doing quite well for me when I stopped played is annoying, especially as I probably stopped because I hit a hard bit and got fed up, which is the worse moment to be trying to remember the combos as it doesn’t exactly make it easier to get back into. I can barely remember what I had for lunch today, let alone which combination of combos were the ones that I was relying on to get through the game.

So I’m out of my comfort zone and playing the slew of games that rely on these features that are being released at the moment: The God of War-a-likes.

OK, there’s three things I hate. Add boss fights as well. Why do you always have to do something three times to kill them? What is it with the number three? Anyway, these games love boss fights. Bayonetta has more boss fights than it does normal enemies. Dante’s Inferno made my burn Cleopatra’s infected nipples in a boss fight as well. 10/10 for style, but minus several million for effort when it comes to needing yet more QTEs to finish off the bosses.

I have a confession, the only God of War game I played was on the PSP and it did not leave a good impression. The sex minigames to get health back went a long way to make me not take the game seriously for anybody who is older than about 14 and the save system was really not suited to a handheld game that you’d want to drop into for 5mins when you had some spare time. I never played the first two games on PS2 so I apparently don’t know what the high points of this genre look like.

Despite my griping I’m actually enjoying Bayonetta, Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno. I may not be a massive fan of the genre, but I do enjoy what they’re doing. Dante’s Inferno and Bayonetta especially have a very nice visual style that goes a long way to making up for the fact that I don’t like the gameplay that much. I need to play Darksiders more, but it certainly seems to be the weakest of these three games. Unless it ups the level of presentation a good few notches soon it really can’t compete with the madness of Bayonetta and the wonderfully envisioned Hell of Dante’s Inferno.

According to Edge Bayonetta is a 10/10 game, and according to Eurogamer (I think, it was a podcast and I tend to listen to loads) Dante’s Inferno is a weak clone of God of War that doesn’t really match the heights of world design. That sounds promising, as that’s the only bit of Dante’s Inferno that I actually like so if it gets a lot better than that then it’ll be great. Bayonetta has game design flaws that are passed off as features though, the save system is designed for you to play through whole chunks of the game in one sitting trying to beat your performance from last time and the game is actually getting praised in some circles for having an incomprehensible plot! Apparently I really don’t get these games.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times on the show that I really don’t understand what God of War 3 can add to the genre to make it the leap forwards that it needs to be to be considered great and not just a rehash. Sure, this is a failure of my imagination but it really makes me look forwards to the game. I’m suspect going to be disappointed as I just don’t like the genre (THIS is your big improvement? How about getting rid of the QTEs and coming up with a real way of being epic? Or making the game a bit more playable as a drop in game? And what’s with that pointless button mashing to open doors in all theses games? What do you mean I don’t understand the genre?)

I’m really tempted to play through all three God of War games in order, but we don’t have the re-release of the first two over here yet. I assume they add trophies? OK, I’m going to play through all three games in order then. Maybe then I’ll understand what’s so fun about these games, but at the moment it bugs me at the moment that I just don’t get it. And that really doesn’t help my ability to enjoy myself.

Still they’re nice to look at. Well Bayonetta is a freak with freaky legs that only teenagers who have still to see a real woman will enjoy looking at and Dante doesn’t exactly have the most appealing chest decoration, in fact it makes him look like a gruesome teletubby so I don’t mean the characters of course. At least the worlds are nice to look at until get fed up again at a hard bit and move onto something I find fun before I break another controller.