Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

So, I finally joined Xbox Live, after more than a year of using a broadband Internet connection and two years of Xbox 360 ownership. It was the need to play the full version of Pac-Man: Championship Edition that forced my hand. As a nostalgic old fart and classic arcade completist, I simply had to get this game, especially after playing the demo version.

I'd hesitated to sign up because of the awkward arrangement of my house, and the fact that I don't have a wireless router. My computer is on one side of the room at the back of the house; all my consoles are on the opposite side. But stringing an Ethernet cable across that space, while awkward, proved less problematic than I'd thought; and even though I'm working with a direct modem connection and swapping out my computer's Ethernet cable for my 360's when I want to log on, so far I've experienced no problems. I didn't even have to use any of the workarounds Microsoft's tech support site suggests might be needed-- the 360 detected the correct IP address and login information automatically.

During the account setup process, I also found out that you can use MSN/Windows Live Messenger while logged in to Xbox Live. Why I didn't know this already, given Microsoft's continual attempts to meld all of their technologies into one hideous synergistic monolith, I have no idea. It's a nice convenience, except that the Xbox 360 version doesn't offer the range of online status settings of its PC counterpart (you're either online, or you're not, and you can't set an "appear offline" status where you can still send or receive messages), and if the emoticons are in there I sure as hell can't find them. The larger issue is my inability to multitask-- playing a game and dealing with incoming messages is a little much for me. So I shut off the automatic sign-in, but I did get one of those little keypad attachments for my controller for those moments when I do feel like talking. It's a lot less awkward than using the controller to peck out messages on that on-screen keyboard, though the "F" key is a little wonky.

Once all that was out of the way, I discovered that Microsoft Points are absurdly expensive. Pac-Man: CE costs 800 points, and I really, really wanted it, so I bought 1,000 points. I just couldn't see shelling out the extra cash for a larger quantity, though I did end up getting some more points later to unlock the full versions of a couple of other games I had as free demos. There seems to be no coherent pricing model on Xbox Marketplace-- why, for instance, is Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved a mere 400 points, while ancient arcade shoot-em-up Time Pilot costs 800? Then there are the games that have a whole ton of scattered add-ons at smaller prices that add up to a shitload of points when you stop and think about it. Beautiful Katamari is one of the main offenders in this respect, and as much as I love rolling crap into a giant ball, I'm not really tempted to download every single new stage and character set.

Anyway, Pac-Man: CE was worth the money. This is the best damn Pac-Man game ever made, in large part because it changes the rules and forces you to use new strategies, often strategies that would've made no sense in previous games. The ability to chain together power pills, so that you can keep eating ghosts at high point values, changes everything, especially combined with the drastically different level structure. Instead of clearing a succession of mazes, eating the dots on one side of the maze causes a bonus item to appear, and eating it reveals a new set of dots and a new maze layout in that half. So the key to high scores is to time eating the power pills and revealing the next set of dots so you can keep eating power pills and top-scoring ghosts. This is harder than it might appear, because in some modes you'll get sets of dots with no power pills, and also because you can end up with wildly asymmetrical mazes that favor the ghosts. And on top of all that, there's a time limit in each mode, either 5 or 10 minutes, and the game gets crazy fast by the end of that limit. I remember reading that Billy Mitchell, the Pac-Man high score champion, dropped out of the tournament where Pac-Man: CE was unveiled because he couldn't get the hang of it; and I can understand why. Old-school strategies are of little use here.

And a check of the leaderboards revealed how much of a n00b I am: my score in the five-minute Championship Mode ranks in at 2,102. But that was nothing compared to my utter humiliation in Doom. Yes, I'm talking about the original game, not that crazy spiffed-up remake id inexplicably decided to call Doom 3 (I know, it wasn't a precise remake, but that's still essentially what it was). You'd think I'd have no problem taking people on in a 15-year-old PC game that I played from its beginnings, and in almost every subsequent console incarnation. You'd be wrong. The match I found only had one other guy in it, and he kept beating me to the rocket launcher. I could blame my adjustment to the 360's control pad, or the fact that I usually play ZDoom on my PC (with its welcome always-run option and the addition of the ability to look up and down and jump), or the fact that E1M9 is sorely lacking in weaponry... but even apart from all those excuses, I strongly suspect I just suck. I may have some trouble unlocking that 50 online kills achievement.

I have yet to try multiplayer modes in any full-fledged 360 games. I'm currently focused on getting through Bioshock, so once I'm done with it I may branch out and try some online play. Maybe a team-based game would be a better fit for me than an all-out deathmatch...