Switching to Windows 8? Read this before you fire up any game apps!

So I took the plunge and installed Windows 8 on my laptop today. Windows 8 allows you to log into your device using a Microsoft Account (formerly called a Windows Live Account). I had one I created back when outlook.com opened up, so I logged in. Everything was going great.

Then I downloaded a free game app, Jetpack Joyride. As soon as I started it up, Windows 8 announced that it had generated a temporary gamertag for my Microsoft Account.

Ha, I hadn’t even been thinking about Xbox Live. I do have an Xbox Live account of course, but it’s associated with a different Windows Live Account.

I did some research and I can “migrate” my gamertag from one email address to another, so I decided to migrate my ‘real’ Xbox Live Gamer Tag to the Microsoft Account I’m using on Windows 8. But I can’t, because now there’s already a gamertag associated with that account. So first I have to migrate the gamertag that Windows auto-generated for me off to another Microsoft account. This is an account I’m creating just for this purpose. Dumb right?

But wait! It gets worse. Since my temporary gamertag was just created today, I can’t migrate it for 30 days. You can only move these things once every 30 days.

So basically I have to wait 30 days before I’m willing to buy any gaming apps from the Windows 8 store, because if I do so before then they’ll be associated with this gamertag I’m trying my best to throw away.

I’m generally happy with Windows 8 so far, but MS really blew it with this one detail. I can’t believe they don’t prompt the user before generating a gamertag….

If you only have one Microsoft account this won’t impact you, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that had an old cruddy hotmail account for my Xbox Live account and would rather use a swanky new outlook.com account for my new system.

Time to bring back the shareware model?

So a lot of ink has been spilled recently (how long until kids have no idea what that means?) over declining revenues in the gaming industry. I’m not an insider so I don’t know if this is all alarmist press or a real problem, but I do see a lot of news items about layoffs and studio closings.

And I’m part of the problem. Y’know what I play every night before bed? Hill Cimb Racing. It’s an Android game, and it’s free. Their business model is getting you to buy coins. You may be familiar with Temple Run, which uses the same business model. I haven’t spent a dime on Hill Climb Racing. Why? Because the whole point of the game is earning coins to improve your car so you can do better and earn more coins to improve your car. Buying coins is deliberate reducing the ‘shelf life’ of the game for myself. Once I’ve maxed out my car I’ll lose interest.

But “free to play” seems to be where its at these days. The problem is that so few companies seem to get it right.

But free games aren’t a new thing. Back in days of yore we had shareware. You may have heard of some of the titles that started as shareware: Wolf 3D, Doom, Commander Keen… all shareware. You downloaded the game (or got it from a friend, hence the name…not everyone was online in those days) and played it for free. Generally these games were broken up into 3 episodes or segments and you’d get the first one free. If you wanted to play the rest of the game, you paid for it. By the time you finished the first part you knew if it was a game you were going to enjoy or not, and if you enjoyed it you’d be happy to pay for more.

I don’t see why more “free” game devs don’t follow this same practice. In Hill Climb Racing you spend coins both to improve your car and to unlock new locations to race in. I think the developer would’ve been better served to just sell the new locations for $1-$2 and kept the coins (remember, the point of the game) for improving your car.

Xbox Live has its mandatory Trial version of games and that can be essentially the same model as long as the trial is extensive enough, but on the PC and mobile marketplaces the system seems rare these days. Mobile devs will offer ‘free’ versions but they’re generally either full of ads or they constantly badger you to upgrade. With old-style shareware you didn’t feel badgered…during the first section of the game (which was generally several hours of quality gameplay) you weren’t constantly being prompted to purchase something or interrupted with ads; it was a pure gaming experience.

I wonder why it fell out of favor. It seemed like a win for everyone. You got to try and enjoy a game for free, the developers clearly did pretty well selling them (Id and Epic were shareware developers) and anyone who purchased the games knew they were buying something they were going to love.

Gamer ADD & DC Universe Online

I’ve come to accept and even embrace my gamer ADD. I used to feel guilty about jumping from title to title but y’know, games are for fun. I don’t join guilds so I’m not letting anyone down by skipping out to some other game, so if I’m happy, that’s kind of all that matters.

I’m also easily swayed. At my core, I’d rather love a game than hate a game and I’d rather love a game company than hate it, too. I don’t think I’m that unusual in these preferences, though I think the people who love to hate a game or a company are a lot louder and more vocal online, so it can seem like gamers all hate games and the people who make them.

So this was a tough weekend for me when it came to willpower. SOE was holding its Fan Faire and live streaming some video from it, and Trion did a video feed of the housing in their new expansion. Both events had me wanting to play Rift and SOE games. I always enjoy these videos more for what they tell me about the teams making the games than what they tell me about the games themselves.

To make a long story short, I pre-purchased the Rift expansion and the Planetside 2 starter pack over the weekend. But neither of those are launched yet and I was feeling the itch to try something new, so I finally fired up DC Universe Online, which is set to get a housing expansion pack sometime in the next few months.

Obviously DCUO isn’t a new game and it isn’t even new to me. I played the beta a bit and at some point in launch because when I fired the game up I was surprised to find a couple of characters. I rolled fresh though.

At the time I was downstairs on the couch (Angela and I were watching the livestream from Fan Faire on the living room TV) so DCUO’s controller friendliness was a real point in its favor. I first started it on Saturday and by the time I’d created a character I’d pretty much had enough. Something about the character creation process bugs me; I mean the actual UI and interface of it. It may be that there are just too many choices for the speed that the UI renders. Anyway, I found character creation to be a chore.

But I went back today and played for a few hours, getting my new telekinesis dude to level 6 or 7, and it was quite enjoyable. I still don’t think I’d pay $15/month to play it, but with it being “free” I might dabble in it for a while, and I’m considering buying some of the expansions (they’re $10 or the equivalent in Station Cash and I happen to have a bunch of Station Cash). It just really feels like a ‘lite’game in a lot of ways, and that’s not always a bad thing. Some of the voice acting is real hokey and the character models tend to be pretty low-res, I suppose to keep the speed of the game up. But it’s still a fun comic book superhero world and I just kind of enjoyed zooming around Metropolis and Gotham, beating up on bad guys and tossing them around like rag dolls.

There’s a Halloween event going on and I did that once. I had no clue what I was doing but we didn’t die and the NPC was defeated. You get candy corn for your trouble that you can then spend in a vending machine to get loot. I only got 2 candy corn though so I just saved it.

If you’ve never tried DCUO and have any interest in super heroes, it’s definitely worth the time to download and check out. It starts really slow; like I said, character creation is long and kind of tedious (or can be) and then there’s a pretty long tutorial section that somehow still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But once you get past that and start flying around the city doing stuff it gets more interesting. As you get a few levels under your belt you find more options opening up and it isn’t quite as directed as the first few levels are.

Aside from the Halloween Event it’s been solo friendly so far, too, and the Event auto-grouped me so I didn’t have to talk to anyone; a big plus when you’re kicked back on the couch playing with a controller and the keyboard is on the other end of the coffee table. 🙂 Yeah, I’m that lazy…

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is couch friendly

I finally got around to booting up XCOM tonight. I decided to give it a try on the living room TV to see how it worked. Turns out it works great.

I bought it via Steam and used Steam’s new “Big Picture” mode to launch the game. Unfortunately Steam can’t solve the issue of Windows User Account Control security pop-ups, but once in the game the only thing I couldn’t figure out how to do with a controller was rename my troops.

The folks at Firaxis went above and beyond the call of duty here. The UI is easily readable from across the room, even to someone with eyes as bad as mine. When you choose Controller as your Input Method, everything changes to support that controller. On-screen prompts match the buttons on your controller and a lot of floaty UI stuff goes away.

Later in the evening I booted up the game a second time on my office PC, using mouse and keyboard and honestly I felt like I was fighting the controls at that point. Maybe it was just because my first hour with the game was done via controller, but for me at least the gamepad controls are superior to mouse and keyboard; I really didn’t expect that.

Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to put my save game in the cloud, so I do have to manually copy saves between machines if I want to continue the same game as I move between living room and office. XCOM is supposed to be Steamcloud enabled but… it doesn’t seem to be. Oh well.

Anyway if this is the future of Big Picture gaming I’m all in. It gives you the best of both worlds; the sharp graphics and speed of a fast PC and the comfort of gaming on your couch. Well done, Firaxis!

Pretty quiet here at Dragonchasers HQ

Yesterday Bronte posted a comment asking whether I’d disappeared. It was in the context of my Mistobox post but it caused me to become aware of how infrequently I’ve been posting here recently.

Now I take breaks from time to time but usually those breaks coincide with a break in gaming, and that’s not really the case this time. I’ve been squeezing in as much gaming as I have time for, and sometimes a little more than that. But no posts. Why?

I guess I just don’t feel like I have anything to say right now. According to Raptr in the last month I’ve spent 53 hours in Guild Wars 2, and I’ve spent a couple hours each in Torchlight 2 and Borderlands 2, plus a smattering of other games. These are all titles with more than enough coverage already and I don’t really feel I have much to add. I like all three games quite a bit, but then most people seem to. I’m enjoying the games but I don’t feel like I have a lot to add to the conversation, y’know?

Last spring and early summer I tried to push myself out of my comfort zone and start doing more active multiplayer gaming, and it was fun. But then Angela and I moved from MA to NC at the end of August and now I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone in terms of my job and my living space, so I’ve sort of retreated to my ‘natural’ gaming state. So I play Guild Wars 2 like a single player game that has a ton of really interesting bots, and I’ve only played TL2 and BL2 solo as well.

I also spend a lot of time and energy over on Google+; I find that by the end of a day of web development and writing my ITworld blog and chatting on G+, I just am tired of typing and talking.

One weird thing that has happened is that the dynamics have changed between Angela and I. It used to be that after dinner she’d be on her computer and I’d have the living room TV to myself for playing PS3 games, but these days she’s as apt to be watching one of her silly shows after dinner, so I’m not getting a lot of console time in. When I do fire up the PS3 I find myself gravitating to Netflix or Amazon Prime Streaming rather than gaming. I set up the Xbox 360 in the new apartment and the only thing I’ve done on it is watch HBO Go. I’m really ready for the next generation of Playstation and Xbox!

So that’s where I’ve been.. just quietly enjoying the same great games you folk are. I do miss writing here though and I’m considering that maybe I should cut down the G+ stuff to give myself more time and energy for Dragonchasers. But we’ll see. Thanks for not removing me from your RSS feed!

Mistobox!

My very first Mistobox arrived today.

What’s a Mistobox? It’s basically a gourmet coffee service. Every month they send you samples of four different artisan coffees from around the world. What’s an artisan coffee? Hell if I know; I’m just starting on the long journey of coffee snobbery. I just thought it sounded like a real treat, getting new coffees to try every month.

I haven’t even brewed a cup yet but I wanted to do kind of an ‘unboxing’ thing just to show what comes in the box. (Honestly it’s too warm for hot coffee today so I may have to wait until morning to taste test.) So here it is (plus a bonus photobomb shot):

Mistobox is $15/month which is about the cost of 4 coffees at Starbucks, so I figure it’s a decent value (granted it’s something of an indulgence in the same way Starbucks is). There was a promo code, 5FIRSTBOX, that would get you your first month for only $5, but I’m not sure if it’s still valid or not.

If you take a liking to one of the samples, you can of course buy that style of coffee in bulk from Mistobox.