Comments on: Games For Windows Live Gold – Now Free

By: withwowgold

withwowgold — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:27:12 +0000

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By: Krupo

Krupo — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:47:38 +0000

Oh no, my free month of Gold membership that came with Gears of War is now worthless!

Seriously, though, maybe I’ll finish GoW now…

By: Barky

Barky — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:52:57 +0000

I have a 360 and I play on it regularly. Absolutely nothing wrong with them.

By: iainl

iainl — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:12:36 +0000

D’oh. Sorry SwiftRanger – I’d missed that. So how do they do all the bot-blocking stuff, then? Because as a 360 owner I know I’ll be avoiding any game full of cheating PC people, even if any individual one of them can be easily avoided.

By: BrokenSymmetry

BrokenSymmetry — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:58:06 +0000

About the TrueSkill system: It is in fact too good, if used in its raw form, because it arrives at your “true” skill level after only a very few number of matches. After that you will only see very little progress, simply because it takes a lot of time and effort to improve real skills. This was first seen in PGR3, which used TrueSkill as its only visible means of progression, and was not very satisfying for that reason.

Later games, such as Halo, only used TrueSkill in a strongly modified form, to give a (artificial) sense of skill progression, to make it more satisfying for the players. I think that TrueSkill is great for matchmaking, but its best used invisibly to the players, with other (more experience-based) systems of progression for the players.

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:43:05 +0000

@ianl “the single biggest point to GfWL, and why it’s Vista only ”

It was only Vista exclusive in the beginning when Halo 2 and Shadowrun came out on PC. Before Fall 2007 they made it available on XP too, just in time for other GfWL supported games like Gears of War and Kane & Lynch.

By: Bhlaab

Bhlaab — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:13:12 +0000

Hopefully part of this deal will include bringing the xbox live arcade to PC.

By: JonFitt

JonFitt — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:48:18 +0000

Microsoft gets a clue. Finally.

Perhaps there will be more incentive for cross-platform games to be produced now?

I like the idea, I have lots of real life friends who haven’t played PC games since 1998, and all have Xbox360s. I would be able to play with them without needing to use a gimped controller!

By: iainl

iainl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:04:34 +0000

@The Letter Z – the single biggest point to GfWL, and why it’s Vista only is that it’s a totally paranoid security monster; hacked clients should be about as difficult as playing on a Windows box can be. The second is that the matchmaking settings are a Godsend for ensuring you don’t have to play with annoying people twice, before you file a report (which gets followed up) for them being cheating cheaters.

@Robin – on the one hand I kind of agree, but on the other they don’t seem any worse than Sony or Nintendo in that regard. Rare still didn’t have anything like the freedom they did when they were Ultimate Play The Game.

By: Fazer

Fazer — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:37:06 +0000

Am I the only one for whom the GFW website is down? ;-)

By: Skalpadda

Skalpadda — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:34:16 +0000

I’m just confused as to what it is that’s so new and shiny about this marketplace. They seem to be holding up demos, trailers and patches as something new and exciting, but as mr Walker says, that’s already being done by the erm.. internet. Also, Steam.

I guess the only thing this does that Steam doesn’t is let you play with 360 friends, and I don’t have any of those, so “meh”.

By: The Letter Z

The Letter Z — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:28:58 +0000

@Robin

That’s excatly why its horrible.

Can you image some poor sucker on a 360 playing against some1 on a PC using a laser mouse w/ a 2560×1600 monitor.

now image that the person on the PC end is using a hacked client & shooting through walls, or zooming in & sniping from a mile away, or using an aimbot for 1 headshot kills while bunny-hopping.

avoiding players like that is the only reason i subscribe to XBL. if they start showing up i’ll end up moving all my multiplayer to the PS3; & MS will lose my money on 360 & PC.