Digital Dad

What Does All of this XBOX Stuff Mean?

Wow - I am pretty psyched by all of the announcements at E3. The living room is going to get very interesting this fall. Here's my take on the Digital Dad impact:

KINECT - yeah, I liked the name Natal as well, but my kids kept calling is "Natle." I also dig the KIN part :) This is a game changer, a potential Minority Report moment in everyone's living room. This also gets all of us in the game, literally, and off the couch. I am not allowed to reveal my beta testing experience, but trust me - I am breaking a sweat! I can already imagine the demos and lines in Best Buy for this - huge viral retail experience.

NEW CONSOLE - built-in 802.11n and a 250Gb drive? Nice. Now that we have Netflix et al on XBOX it becomes a real viable option to put several around the house. It would be great to see a console SKU targeted at this kind of use - $149 or less.

ESPN - Woo! I am psyched to see this in action. Inasmuch as KINECT gets me off the couch, this gets me back on the couch :)  The preview says 3500 sporting events to choose from? If I can get my Yankees and Giants I will pay a big premium! I would love to see an MSNBC type program here as well.

ZUNE -  Did you noticed that Zune Pass will now work on XBOX 360 by this fall? That means the ZunePass you buy for your PC, or your KIN, will also work on your XBOX in your living room/family room/bedroom. Harking back to my comments about getting multiple XBOXes around the house, this could be a big winner.

Good stuff, looks like a very strong upgrade in the right direction. One conspicuous absence from the recent announcements - where's Hulu?

More Guitar Hero fun

Well, my birthday is coming up and I'm getting the feeling that I will need to buy myself a copy of Guitar Hero II, which comes out the first week of April.

I blogged about this a bit after I came back from CES and played around with it.

Now someone has documented how to create a GH2 controller out of a real guitar. As an owner of quite a few old guitars I am tempted to try this out on the old Vox 12 string. Cool!

Digital Dad meets XBox Dad

Well, not exactly. I haven't met him yet (although he appears to be a real Microsoft employee), but I have been forwarded his blog by a few folks around the office.

I commend him on taking on a blog with a pretty tight focus. Frankly, the amount of big titles available rated E for everyone are pretty sparse. There is Viva Pinata, most racing games, Ping Pong and a a good chunk of the Arcade titles (Uno!).

The rest of the youth titles are "10+" including Lego Star Wars II (laser guns, light sabers and lego arms coming off?) and even "T" for Teen.

With my oldest child at seven and two younger siblings, my policy is "E" is cool for everyone. If I review the game first then "10+" may make the cut. No "T" and NEVER any "M." (I am beta testing an M game but only play it after they go to sleep and I keep the sound off). The parental controls in XBox work well - my son can't play any games above 10+ without my password. Simple.

One area that will test my policies is Guitar Hero II. I played this game at CES recently and it should be out this spring. You get a this real-life platsic guitar that connects to your XBox and you have to play along with the "Guitar Hero" on screen. The more accurate you are the better your score. Neat!

My kids love music and this would be great fun for them. Unfortunately the game is rated "T" for the lyrical content. Come on guys - provide a "10+ mode" with tamer lyrics. You are really limiting your market with "T."

The Xbox "Invite to Game" Mystery

This was a weird one. I had my Xbox for a few months and had played a few games against other folks on Live. However, these were all anonymous challenges - Madden 07, PGR, etc. And yes, I always got my ass kicked.

Then my father-in-law bought an XBox and I figured we could then play one on one. My son would be very excited to play Grandpa in Uno.

We set up a time and then as we saw we were both online I brought up his gamertag and went to select "Invite To Game." It was grayed out. We both double-checked that we had Live Gold subscriptions and after a few attempts we gave up trying to play each other. Bummer!

This didn't make sense - isn't Xbox the "connected community" platform? I took advantage of my Microsoft status to ask some serious XBoxers at work about this. They all said that they played anonymous challenges so I received some suggestions but nothing definitive.

In Digital Dad style I invested some time a few nights ago (after the kids went to sleep) to figure this out. Here's what I came up with.

• You need to have an XBox Live Gold subscription (not just Silver).
• You need to be online (doh!) .
• You need to have the game running that want to play against someone. You can't "Invite To Game" if there is no game actively running on your console. Kind of makes sense.
• Now, you need to start a XBox Live game session in that game, like a "custom match" as opposed to a random Live game session.
• Hit your silver XBox button on your controller to bring up your friends list. Click on a friend and "Invite To Game" should be working just fine!

I did a few different searches on the web and couldn't find anything this definitive, so hopefully some other Dad will find this as they unbox their Xbox this holiday. Once you figure it out it makes sense, but the "fun" is in the figuring, right? Right?

Four blinking lights

I had a bit of a scare the other day - although fortunately just a Digital Dad-type scare.

I powered up the XBox 360 and the "ring of light" was blinking red. Was that a bad thing? When is a blinking red light not a bad thing?

Now I did a quick search and found that three blinking red lights means a hardwrae failure. But all four? I looked through dox and couldn't find a thing. I did a bit more digging through discussion forums and saw a mention of the display cable. I checked the display cable and gave it a push into the unit. Powered up and . . . tada! Worked like a charm.

So if your XBox ever has all four lights red . . .

Magnavox Odyssey vs. Xbox 360

I've been off the DDad grid for a bit. One reason is that as my 40th birthday recently approached, and realizing that no one was getting me an Xbox360, I decided to drive over to the nearby Costco and pick one up myself.

It was a "premium SKU" which means it has two wireless controllers, a headset, the hard drive, and a copy of Project Gotham Racer 3.

For me this was a major upgrade. Now when I say major I don't mean Major Nelson, but just major. Basically, the last gaming console I owned was an Odyssey. Yeah, an Odyssey. That was back in like 1973 when I was seven.

So things have moved along a bit in the past thirty-three years.

The big difference that stood out for me compared to the Odyssey was the graphics quality. The 360 is running games at 1080i, whereas the Odyssey was actually an analog video output to your TV via an antenna hookup. In addition you used plastic overlays on your TV screen with the Odyssey, whereas the 360 has component video-in that scales nicely on my 56" HD DLP.

Sound was also dramatically improved from the Odyssey's tinny single speaker to a full Dolby Digital; 5.1 surround sound with a strong powered sub channel.

The controllers on the 360 are way better. My main gripe with the Odyssey controllers was that they had a huge cable that ran from the box to the controller. You had to site pretty close to the TV and console to play and if you yanked the controller the whole box would fall over and the game card would get knocked out.

The 360 has no such problems. These controllers are wireless and provide a wide range of control from all the way across the room.

Games on DVD for the 360 are much easier to deal with than the game cards for the Odyssey. The Odyssey cards were actually like keys that told the Odyssey what game to play - they didn't include any content like the detailed renderings on PGR3.

Another major drawback for the Odyssey was the lack of online features like XBox Live. Your "gamercard" was a piece of cardboard you stuck in the spokes of your banana-seat bike. Although you could chat with a friend on your corded phone while you played (neck strain), that was about as close as you could get.

That being said, the Odyssey was $100 and I paid about $500 for the 360. You could argue that with inflation and improved game-play that the Xbox360 was a better deal than the Odyssey, but in fact my Dad paid for the Odyssey for my brother and I so neither of us were actually out of pocket.

Now I have the best of both worlds. I can toggle inputs on my HD set between the 360 and my Media Center PC running the Odyssey emulator.