Plain and Simple, see, even gold text!

In a move that will no doubt be blamed squarely on the door of the ‘economic climate’ that we’ve been living under for the past two years, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb, other known as, of course, Major Nelson, has announced today on his blog that prices for subscribing to the Xbox Live service are going up in certain territories.

The UK, in addition to the US, Canada and Mexico are the countries affected, and depending on how you subscribe, the rise is actually pretty nominal, despite what some people would have you believe. The only tariff changing in the UK is if you want to pay monthly, which has gone up from £4.99 for a Gold account to £5.99, but I don’t know anyone who pays for Xbox Live by the month. The three-month and yearly packages are remaining the same for the UK.

The story is mostly the same for the other territories, with the monthly subscription again going up by 1 Canadian dollar, in of course, Canada, and if it means anything you to you less ignorant folks out there, the Mexican figure for a year subscription is now up to 599 Pesos.

It’s the US where a lot of forum goers are getting all catty about it, as all their packages have been affected. To start with, the monthly Gold membership is now up to $9.99 from $7.99, the three-month is now five dollar’s more at $24.99 and the 12 month fee is now (and I’ll refuse to use the word ‘hefty’ as some people have) $59.99.

OK, so the most popular package (yearly) has gone up, but I’m pretty sure that’s only something like 80 cents a month or something like that, so as long as they keep regular checks on their sofa change (and other people’s sofas if you are crafty about it) you should manage just fine. Nope, no one likes prices going up, but just as with games, the price will keep rising as people keep paying. Even so, around $60, which the price of a recently released full price game is approximately £38-40 quid, which is becoming the price of a budget game in UK. And we’re not even getting onto the incredibly inflated prices of the Australian market.

Whilst being available to all users, the New Xbox Experience factors heavily into Xbox Live

Indeed, some people may not be very happy about the cost, the main thing people seem to be complaining about at the moment is the way that MS have communicated it, claiming the hike is due to adding content and valuable user experiences. Whilst the New Xbox Experience and all it’s trappings probably cost a fair bit to implement, the common view is that many Gold users feel that, apart from perhaps Netflix streaming in the US (and soon Canada), most of the features, such as Twitter and Facebook integration are pretty useless on the system.

The issue is perhaps, that if MS raise the price, but don’t change the product, it seems more like an effort to generate reliable funds from an area of the business, especially as they are preparing to release the potentially risky Kinect system in November. I’m pretty sure most people are kind of ‘Meh’ about this, and will accept to paying a bit more, but they may start feeling Microsoft needs to start offering more to them, as opposed to the ‘casual’ crowd.

The price rise does not come into effect until November 1st, so if you renew your subscription by then, you can dodge around paying the extra cash, but this really only applies to those who are on longer subscriptions in the States or Mexico.

Also, in reaction to this, retailers in the US, such as Amazon.com and Newegg are dropping the price of the 12 month XBL cards to $40 dollars, so as a service to anybody from the US out there, check it out or buy multiple cards to last you forever! Or just do the single year on Xbox.com, the choice is yours.

This picture of a dude's floor is cheekily used to head this post. Here is some of the stuff you used to 'network' your Xbox

Microsoft have announced that following seven years in active duty, Xbox Live’s support for the original Xbox and thus, games designed for the console, is to be ceased, starting on April 15th. Thinking back, I remember reading about it in a magazine all that time ago and because I was in the age of dial up internet and so were many others, we all thought that it was a waste of time and went back to split screen. Oops…

In this letter to Xbox Live members, Live’s General Manager Marc Whitten goes over why they have took the decision:

On April 15 we will discontinue the Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox v1 games playable on Xbox 360 and Xbox Originals. I want to start by saying this isn’t a decision we made lightly, but after careful consideration, it is clear this will provide the greatest benefit to the Xbox LIVE community.

It now gets a bit PR’d so brace yourselves

Seven years ago we laid out our vision for the connected console when we launched Xbox LIVE. We believed then that the power of the Internet to connect people would revolutionize living room entertainment. It started with amazing multiplayer games, and we’ve since seen that bet pay off again and again with the launches of Xbox 360, Marketplace, Netflix and powerful social features like Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. None of this would have been possible without the success of LIVE as a multiplayer gaming network.

There is no denying the impact that Xbox live has made on internet gaming and gaming in general. It made it almost mandatory for games to have an online mode of some description, encourage you to buy a console because “my mate is on Live” and connected up gamers who’s idea of multiplayer was occasionally letting someone else have a go.

Sorry guys, looks like your going to have to start playing another game...Like Halo 3

It’s not been all rosy. It’s seen the rise, this isn’t just on Live, of adolescent’s who think it’s big and clever to bitch that you just had someone crouch on your face. And whilst the fact that multiplayer has spread to other games is not necessarily a negative, there are very few games that actually pull off online gaming well, with the majority being poor, tacked on modes that detract from the single player.

Apart from what has been said above, there is another thing to come out of this and it’s that you won’t be able to play Xbox Live games such as Halo 2 and erm, a bunch of others, even if you play them on the 360. I’d heard a while back that the reason they couldn’t increase the friends count any higher than 100 was a result of maintaining what is essentially legacy support for these games and services, so perhaps Live will become a little more optimised as a result of shutting all this out.

So, what do you do if you own an Xbox now you can no longer play Halo 2? Well, I was actually thinking not too long ago of picking one up, very second hand and very cheap, and turning it into a media server thing. I’ll let you know if I ever build up the courage. Which is probably unlikely.

The service will, eventually, show what channels your friends are watching amongst other features

Sky launched their streaming channel service on UK 360′s yesterday, promising access to 24 channels on demand. If you have an Xbox Live Gold account, with either a Sky TV or Sky Player subscription you can watch the ‘Base Entertainment Pack’, which includes GOLD, Sky Real Lives, Sky Arts 1, MTV One, Sky Sports News, British Eurosport, ESPN Classic, Sky News, National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, History, Eden, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Nick Jr.Oh, and if you need your movie or sport fix you can add them as well, unless you have them already in your sky subscription. If you are not a Sky Subscriber, it’s £15 for the standard pack (per month) with an extra £19 for sports.

However, you now can’t on a 360. The service, which requirements were essentially a 2mb internet connection, appeared to be very unstable at launch, crashing quite a lot. So much for this digital TV revolution, and Sky have now taken the service down. A quote from CVG from Sky said:

“Sky Player engineers are hard at work to resolve the problem. We expect to have the full service available on Wednesday.” 

Now it is Wednesday and apparently the service is still not yet up at the time of writing. Sky have also responded to calls for a similar service to appear on PS3 and the response has been the default ‘no comment’. So it’s just 360 users, who soon will have access to both Facebook and Twitter through the dashboard following the next update, will soon have their Sky TV back.

Somehow I think the odds are against blue

The on going duel between Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 for top spot on Xbox live has been going on for quite some time. Depending on which side of the fence you sit on, you may still be wondering which one is actually the most played. Major Nelson, when he releases the list of top ten most played, doesn’t actually provide us with any numbers, which whilst it may be surprising to see games from 2007 still topping the lists, doesn’t really add that much context to it.

“Hey, remember me!”

There are certain pieces of music we all associate with certain things, even if they were not actually written for them. Many classical pieces are associated with films and probably one of the most dinstinctive games music wise is LittleBigPlanet, which you can see and hear here. With a mix of licensed, quirkey mostly European tracks, the game’s music brought your little Sack Person alive and instantly made the world more recognisible. 

Probably the song that nearly everyone who has followed video games for a bit will associate with LittleBigPlanet is “Get It Together,”. Although you may not be aware of the name or artists (that being the  ”The Go! Team” a British band), once you hear the tune, you’d expect instantly to see a sack person swinging on a ball of polystyrene…or whatever.

And it seems, that, perhaps unknowlingly, giving them the very large benefit of the doubt, Microsoft also thought that “Get It Together” was an tune that really “fit their brand” and used in in the lastest advertisment for Xbox Live. I’m not saying there is nothing wrong with this at all, it’s a licensed song and the band probably got a fair wad of cash for it, so good for them. It just seems, after trawling through some of the youtube comments, that whilst they are usually wrote by people about 13 years old with the grammatical skills of pre school kid, it’s incited a massive fanboy war.

So go there, point and LOL, OMG, LBP MOOSICK!!!!!!!

Anyway, here is the video for MS’s ad.

 [video:ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwu0gExNVuw 420x360]

And the march of free (ish), casual (ish) software continues. Microsoft have confirmed that you, and yourself in Avatar form will be able to take part in their virtual game show, 1 vs 100 on the 10th of July. But that’s not all folks! You’ll be able to win some cool prizes, including gadgets, MS points and even a automobile!

For those who haven’t the faintest clue what I’m writing about, 1 vs 100 is the first (in a supposedly long line) of community games that will be appear as an option on the service and will be free to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. It’s being going in the US and Canada for a bit longer, but they have been unable to win any prizes through the beta period, so UK members will be the first to test out the prize system.

The “show” (yes it does have it’s own host, although not sure if “Chris” will appear in the UK versiona at all), is based around you having a hundred players, the mob, against The one, a single player who is chosen at random, and answering random trivia questions about pretty much any topic. The US version’s questions have mostly being pretty good, with even some general gaming ones (Metroid popped up once!) going into the mix.

The big prizes, such as cameras, laptops, cars and holidays (those are the only ones confirmed) can be won only by the one, who can choose whether they gamble against “the mob” for better prizes (the more of the Mob get questions wrong, the more the One will get), or, as in “Who wants to be a millionaire”, take the money and run. I enjoyed just watching the game and seeing if I knew answers to the questions on a few videos’s and everyone get’s a chance to be part of the game. Check out a video from the beta here

So, are 360 owners really looking for a trivia game on their console, even if it’s sleek and you can win stuff?