January 26, 2007 – 11:45 am
On the Xbox 360 marketplace Lumines Live has added some content, 2 add-on packs and a new skin.
- New skin called “Heavenly Star” - A pretty cool skin with a crazy video in the background, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the Japanese style techno music, Lumines 2 has better videos. At least its free for now.
- Player vs. CPU Pack - You play against the computer in a Tetris style battle where you add blocks to the CPU’s screen, pretty fun and you can unlock the skins after you beat each level, 100 MS points for a limited time.
- Puzzle/Mission Pack - This pack gives you a total of 50 missions and 100 puzzles to play through. You need to create boxes in certain shapes in order to solve the puzzles, very challenging, also 100 MS points for a limited time.
So for 200 MS points you can add some options to your Lumines Live, well worth the download time. Prices will change after February 21 to 300 MS points each so take advantage of the bargain.
January 18, 2007 – 7:10 pm
Kotaku is reporting that the newly released Call of Duty 3 Valor Map Pack for the Xbox 360 just plain doesn’t fucking work. There’s 5 new maps in the pack, costing 800 MS Points and weighing in at approximately 800MB. The problem is, users can’t select the maps in the game. Anywhere. Yeah.
Let’s break this down, shall we? Microsoft supposedly has huge certification processes for games and all forms of content. Hell, we’ve seen demos and stuff delayed because of it all the time (can anyone say Crackdown?). Now, to get content onto the Marketplace, it has to go through the developer’s QA (if that even fucking exists anymore) and Microsoft’s certification process. How the bloody fuck did no one test this? You would think selecting the map in the game would be the first place to start with testing. If you can’t load the map, you can’t test if something is broken in it. I seriously would LOVE to know how this passed any form of QA or certification.
There’s a huge uproar on the Xbox forums over this, and rightly so. The developers state they’ll have a fix out “as soon as we possibly can.” That means a few months. I would hope that Microsoft and the developers would make this right by the people who shelled out their hard earned money, but we all know that’s never going to happen.
January 17, 2007 – 12:38 pm
So EA today announced (press release here) they’re “making” an XBLA game, called Boom Boom Rocket. The game is actually being created by Bizarre Creations, the people behind the widely successful Geometry Wars and Project Gotham Racing. The basics of the gameplay is that you fire off rockets in time with music as you travel through a 3D city.
Knowing EA, they’ll charge way too much for the base game, then you’ll have to buy the rockets on the Marketplace for 200 points each. Yay for EA ass-raping people with pricing! I would probably pass this up on principle because it’s EA, but Bizarre makes some great stuff. We’ll have to see how the gameplay goes and how much it costs
