And you thought I was crazy… (Updated)

Here it is: Official confirmation that playing Halo 3 early will get you banned. You can’t even play offline, as your play history will give you up as soon as you connect. Completely ridiculous but as I predicted.

Find Halo 3 in the wild and you may as well just let it go until 9/25.

*UPDATE* Apparently this story has already been nipped in the butt bud (thanks Megan). Microsoft has “clarified” that the ban only applies to Microsoft employees who play the game early. Whether this was the original policy or MS changed it quickly before the story could blow up is uncertain, but now that their stance is clear, feel free to play some Halo 3 early should the opportunity come up!

One more Halo 3 Thought

I just wanted to add that if I somehow stumbled across a copy of Halo 3 before its release date that, given the absolutely ridiculous punishments Bungie is doling out to make sure people don’t play it, I would probably just refrain from playing it until the 25th anyway. Admittedly, the guys that downloaded “Halo 3 Epsilon” basically stole someone’s account in order to play it, but I still don’t trust Bungie or Microsoft not to do the same for me if I obtained it through more “legitimate” means. Why not just disconnect from XBox Live and play the single player?   One word:  Achievements.

Even if I were to disconnect XBox Live until 9/25 and play the single player I’m not confident that Microsoft wouldn’t actually search out people who had achievements pre-9/25 and actually ban their accounts and consoles from XBox Live.  Perhaps I could change the 360’s clock and disconnect and blah blah blah… it’s a big hassle and even then I don’t know what’s actually being recorded into the “Achievement”.  It’s extremely ridiculous, but I suppose we don’t even necessarily have the right to play legitimately purchased games (from the consumer’s end anyway) on our legitimately purchased consoles any more without fear of losing access to their online service.

Sometimes I miss the good ol’ days of online-unaware consoles.

Master Chie

One of Halo 2’s biggest negatives for me was its lousy ending (which seemed like such obvious sequel-bait to me that I felt used, and unsatisfied).  So reading this Wired description of Halo 3 testing, I was very surprised to run across this paragraph, casually inserted into the middle:

“Perhaps worst of all, Bungie’s team didn’t have time to finish their story. Halo 2 ended with Master Chief announcing that he’s returning to Earth and “finishing this fight” against the alien force. Then… nothing. The credits roll. It was as if the coders had simply turned off their computers and walked away. In public, Bungie employees put on a brave face, but privately they were chagrined.”

What I assumed to be a blatant sales job was in reality just an inability to properly finish the game.  Is this common knowledge?  It was certainly news to me.  (By the way, it seems ironic that a company willing to provide Bungie with a state-of-the-art psychological testing facility to make sure the game turns out well would be unwilling to give them enough time to script a decent ending to their title.)

One-Liners Part II

I’m not sure how many people actually hate these, but I have about 20 minutes left before I board my flight… so I thought I’d try to catch up quickly on anything I’ve missed in the last few days.

- In what universe does telling a company that has agreed but failed to comply with your regulations constitute a “sucker punch“?

- I’m as tired of the guy as anyone, but any Jack Thompson fight that can be drawn out over 4 posts is amusing enough to warrant a mention.

- If Lifetime really thinks that “women’s casual gaming” is equivalent to “Golden Girls Trivia” and “Sally’s Salon,” both they and their audience should feel very dirty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Or Not…

I suggested earlier that Microsoft wouldn’t be trying to muscle in on Wii territory, primarily because it had no chance of grabbing a significant chunk of that market unless it both completely reoriented its software lineup and dropped the price so much it became grossly unprofitable.  The New York Times suggests that I’m wrong.

Anyone want to try to argue to me that this strategy has a good chance of succeeding?  Or is Microsoft just trying to ride the Wii publicity bandwagon?

E3 Presser ‘Pressions (Updated)

*Updated with small changes for accuracy*

I’m sure this will probably come as a surprise to our readers, but like David Jaffe, A Link to the Future was not invited to E3 this year. As a result, my impressions are based primarily on either watching the press conferences online, liveblogs, and then the various videos from Gametrailers and Gamevideos.com and such. Here are my not-even-eyes-on impressions of the big 3’s E3 press conferences, after the jump.

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Price Cut: 360 to 360

While we’re on the subject of the PS3 price cut, how should Microsoft respond?  eat.sleep.game has a few thoughts on what they’d like to see from the 360, based on a tiered price drop that would allow the 360 to compete with the Wii as well as the PS3. 

I can see the appeal, but I think they’re pricing more in line with what they’d like to pay than with what Microsoft’s likely to do.  If I were Microsoft, I think I would go another route. 

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Should Microsoft do More?

N’gai Croal thinks that Microsoft should either initiate a recall for the XBox 360 or at least be more forthcoming about the failure rate.  I am happy that Microsoft has decided to at least extend the warranty for the red ring of death, but as I also indicated in comments here and elsewhere, I’m inclined to agree that at least a voluntary recall would be the ideal solution.  Clearly, since this is already supposedly costing Microsoft over a billion dollars, they’re hoping that people will simply be happy with the warranty extension and that the problem will go away $1 billion later.

But N’gai makes some good points (after the break): Read the rest of this entry »

360 Con Call Numbers

So this struck me as fairly interesting.  If you read through the transcription of Microsoft’s 360 call - the one where they describe to analysts exactly how much this warranty program is going to cost them - you’ll see that they’re quoting a figure of about $1B 
(as we noted earlier).   But when the Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst asks Robbie Bach for the specific number of units affected, Bach demurs: Microsoft isn’t willing to share that information.

Fine.  But let’s make a really rough guess.  Say Microsoft has to replace every single unit that gets returned, because there’s nothing salvageable, at a cost of $500 per console.  The $1B set aside, divided by $500 per unit, implies a total of about 2M returns over the three-year period, or 666,667 per year.  Assuming that the total number of consoles sold remains constant at 11.6M, this would be a defect rate of: about 5.8%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Follow-Up On The 360 Warranty

Jeff’s already covered the story, but I just wanted to add my own two cents to this - $1B to cover the costs of the new warranty system?  Ouch.  I would not want to be the executive in charge of 360 engineering right now… even for a monstrosity like Microsoft, that has to hurt.  I would assume someone’s getting the axe for that one.

One thing’s been bothering me about this whole affair from the start, though.  Microsoft is still apparently unwilling to reveal the actual failure rate of the 360, implying that it’s even worse than the already horrific estimates hurtling around the internet.  So if these figures are so astronomical, shouldn’t more 360’s have failed during testing, when they’re run over and over and over again?  How could such an obvious flaw have been missed? 

It would have been far cheaper to delay the 360 slightly at that point to remove the engineering error than to absorb months of bad publicity, before instituting an expensive warranty program in shame.