Joystiq.com
Project Gotham Racism (Xbox 360 annoyance #001)
Justin Nolan over at 360insider blogs about one of our key annoyances with Project Gotham Racing 3 and Call of Duty 2. When in a multiplayer match, smack talk is expected. But some people who play on Xbox Live are sometimes very foul, probably in part because they feel immune from punishment.
that would be really annoying with the things flashing up whos talking. Its a hard enough game as it is with most cars trying to snatch away from you at evey corner. And its not hard that in the lobby to just watch the lights go up. theres No more than 7 other people than urself at any time. U dont have to be a genious to realise who it is.
The issue is that PGR3 and other games lack an on-screen indicator showing who is talking. If you want to leave negative feedback for the jerk who thinks that black people should not be allowed to play video games, you can't, because you don't know which of the people you're playing with spouted the hate in the first place.
It needs to be fixed. This is not an optional feature in an online game with voice.
Xbox 360 wireless controllers aren't (Xbox 360 annoyance #002)
Before we get all nitpicky it should be noted out of fairness that the Xbox 360's designers had no easy task. They wanted to give gamers the beauty and convenience of a wireless controller, but they also needed to make sure that help is near when batteries run low in the middle of a critical Xbox Live competitive experience. Hot-swapping of batteries isn't an option in high-stakes scenarios (those of you who are in league 1 of Project Gotham Racing 3 know what we mean).
The only solution to these conflicting concerns is to create a controller that accepts a power cord for charging at any time.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's designers underestimated gamer laziness. Rather than use the play-and-charge kit only when the controllers need to be charged, we find ourselves just leaving them plugged in all the time because it's too much trouble to neatly wrap up then put away the play-and-charge kit. Once we started leaving it in the system, we were able to recharge the controllers more conveniently, but now our living room looks messy! The core wireless design aesthetic has been ruined.
Like us, most gamers are going to leave their play-and-charge cables plugged in to the Xbox 360 so that when their controller runs out of juice they can charge it up conveniently. At that point, it doesn't matter if you disengage from the play-and-charge for wireless gaming because you've still got a spaghetti monster's worth of wires spilling out from your Xbox 360.
Essentially, we're now back to wired controllers. Even if Microsoft were to release the mysteriously absent battery charger, we'd be subject to the fundamental risk of play interruption. But at this point, anything's better than these damned wires.
this guy is stupid. Hes laying into microsoft because he is too lazy... What? I personally never have my controller linked up to my play and charge kit unless I actually need to charge. And concidering that the chrage lasts for 40 hours (at least) I might charge it once a week if that.
Stupid download screen limbo (Xbox 360 annoyance #003)
File this one under bad UI design. When downloading content in the Xbox 360 Marketplace, a small dialog box shows your download progress. While this dialog box is in place, you can access no other content on the Xbox 360 if you want your download to finish.
Surely the system can multitask, but perhaps the designers of the system wanted to make sure that the hard drive and Internet connection on the Xbox 360 wasn't busy with any other task when gamers were playing a game. In this way, the system would appear to be speedy and there would be no risk of the sluggishness that tends to plague any computer that is tasked with too many jobs.
And yet, we still think it dumb. The download feature should allow users to select content, add it to a download queue (see the playlist feature of the music player—this functionality should be extended to downloads), and then do other stuff on the system.
Xbox 360 can't fast forward trailers (Xbox 360 annoyance #004)
This first image shows the media controls when playing a trailer downloaded from the Xbox 360 marketplace. Note the extremely simple controls. The widget is lacking fast forward and rewind, not to mention step forward, and other functions that are included on even $50 DVD players.
This second image shows the controls available when playing a DVD on the Xbox 360. Why are the controls so much more limited for downloaded content? Why is this feature crippled for downloaded content?
This is annoying.
Trailers are what? 1 min 30? 2 mins long. Why would you need to fast forward one? Ive never watched a trailer and gone "This is way too long!"