On Vacation.

I have from now until Boxing Day off, and I’m already bored after three hours.

My step-son got the last of his Nintendo Ambassador Program games today for his 3DS, which he then took with him on his trip to his real dad’s house. He received ten games in total that I downloaded for him as part of the free program for buying the system before the price drop, such as Mario Kart Advanced, Wario Ware and Kirby, and another goddamn Zelda game. I now have four Zelda games on the 3DS and I didn’t have to pay for shit. Personally, I only ever liked the Zelda game for Super Nintendo. I’ve been meaning to try at least three different Zelda games for the system legacy such as the Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks and the Ornica of Time. If I could justify owning a Wii, I’d want Skyward Sword, because I refuse to own a motion-control system without games that involving me flailing an invisible sword around in my living room.

The first ten games were mainly rejects from the Nintendo system, with all their original charm and faults. Considering that Nintendo was trying to make up for consumers wasting a big wad of cash when they could have waited a few months an gotten the system on the cheap, the initial offering was pretty weak. They were mainly classic games that should be a part of any fan’s collection, but they made me worry about the Virtual Console in general. I’m a consumer that’s bought plenty of XBLA games, and enjoyed them, but their original digital selection seems sub-par to what you could buy in stores, and their classics are outdated graphically. On the other hand, it’s free, and I shouldn’t complain. The new games definitely make up for the old, and the fact that people in the program are getting them free of charge before they ever show up in the virtual store (if ever) is a definite plus.

I was part of the Xbox Live Update Beta program, and couldn’t talk about the impending changes. That’s all in the past now, so I can finally say: I kind of hate the new layout. For anyone who bought a Premium Theme, they lost a lot the functionality in it with the new page settings. It use to be you could switch menus and your Premium Theme would change along with select icons, like the backgrounds for the Avatars in your Friend’s page. That’s mostly gone, or buried deep. You now only see your friends who are on live in the main page of the Friend’s tab, and looking at the friends offline come up with some strange and somewhat unsettling animations for them, that make them seem like their sleeping in a Chinese laundromat. There’s a whole tab for Bing, which is just wrong. Nobody like you, Bing. The music tab is still as pointless as ever, as I doubt anyone really uses it unless they own the now defunct Zune. People who use music on the 360 are people who plug their iPods into the system. The Ap tab is solely devoted to video aps, so it could have been part of the video tab. On my system, even after the update went live, I still have the Preview tab for the Beta. I tried deleting the files in the system, and it’s still there.

I read someone complain about how Xbox found a way to put more ads onto the screen, and they were immediately bitched at for being ungrateful. The guy in the forum brought up the valid point that you’ve already bought the damn thing and paid for the service, so why were they still advertising themselves to you? The main middle of the screen is no nothing but an ad. That’s the main focal point. If you want to find a game to play, go elsewhere. Also, if you happen to like the ad, and try to click on it: good luck. It skips through about five different ads. It’s possible to switch back, but the new menus were intended for Kinect users only, so the controls for doing this are not intuitive. When you want the screen to shift left, you can’t simply push the “left” button. That doesn’t even make sense with the controller, as there are no less than five buttons for “left,” (a left D-pad button, two joysticks, and a bumper and trigger button). Pick one and you have a one in five chance of it being correct.

The only thing I really give a damn about is the Cloud saves. I have two 360s (or one 720). Now I can play a game in my living room, get kicked out by my wife, and then go into the bedroom and keep playing on a different console. Before, I had to use a third-party cable to transfer saves from one box to the next, which was time consuming and could possibly overwrite or damage the saves. It also screwed me out of getting official achievement points before, for some odd reason. Plus: I couldn’t have the same content on both systems at the same time. Now it doesn’t give a fuck.

I also picked up a third-party wireless router for the 360 on the cheap at $20. The official 360 version is still priced at $99, which is insane. The Mad Catz N-something or other (I’m not getting paid so I can’t be bothered to remember their names) required me to basically hack my own network in order to make it work. I followed every instruction, but couldn’t make it through one of the set-up stages. For some reason, it worked using Internet Explorer, but not Google Chrome, and I finally made it through without crying. It was one of those “Eureka” moments where you’re just wandering around work, staring blankly off into space and wondering how things went so terribly, terribly wrong. Now it works better than my computer itself, which is quite sad. It also recognizes the connection as “wired,” even though it’s going through a wireless router.

I’d have to say the one feature I don’t give a shit about is facebooking achievements. That sounds like a surefire way to piss people off. Remember when facebook was new and every time you “liked” a comment, or made a comment, or thought about making a comment, your inbox would fill to the brim with notifications? That seems like it’s part of that.