Still No Pinnacle Station Joy for Platinum Owners

On the BioWare forums a message was issued that a fix has been released a fix for the PC version and that Xbox Live support should have a work around for the Platinum Hits edition owners.

Well apparently Xbox Live support knows nothing of the fix to the consternation of the BioWare support people and it still appears to be a major mess that will not be resolved for a few days at least because of the weekend.

So here I sit with some DLC I paid for and a Character that I’ve put many hours in that I can’t use with it.

XBOX 360 Price Drops

Microsoft has posted a $100 price drop on the Elite system, bringing the cost down to $299.

The price on the Pro system will be dropping to $249 “while supplies last” that indicates to me that they will be dropping the Pro system and just have the Arcade & Elite systems going forward.

With the new pricing it makes little sense for the Pro system to exist and 60GB gets used up pretty quickly when games are copied to the HD for play and throw in some HD video and it is puny.  Even the 120GB is not all the big with the push for “games on demand” and other content.

I’ve noticed online that the price for the 120GB HD upgrades have dropped $20 to $119 lately … still way too expensive.  I’m also wondering if they will be releasing larger HD upgrades now since 320GB laptop hard drives are common and 500GB & 750GB drives are available.

So far I have not seen any major online or brick & mortar retailers that have dropped their prices yet.

EDIT: It’s been confirmed that the Pro edition will be going away and the new prices go into effect Friday 8/28.

No Pinnacle Station joy for Mass Effect Platinum Hits owners

Pinnacle Station DLC was just released for Xbox 360 and being a Mass Effect Fan (I’ve played through 3 times on PC and just started on Xbox) I purchased it.

Now starts my tale of woe as apparently the add-on is not compatible with the version of Bring Down the Sky add on that is included with the Platinum Hits version of Mass Effect and the only fix currently is to pay for and download the version of BDtS off of Xbox Live.  I’m too cheap to pay twice for something so I’m waiting for Microsoft and BioWare to release a patch that resolves the issue.

There are threads on both Xbox Forums and BioWare Forums with people having the issue.  The fix for people that purchased their copy of BDtS on the Xbox Marketplace is to just delete the content off the Xbox hard drive and re-download it, no fix is currently available for Platinum edition owners.

There is finally an acknowledgement of the issue on the BioWare Forums so hopefully it will be fixed “soon” for owners of the Platinum Hits edition.

August 11, 2009 Xbox 360 Dashboard Update

Well just got done looking at the new dashboard update to the 360 and about the only things that interest me currently are the following…

1. User Ratings
   It’s nice that people can rate the games and other content on the Marketplace and you can get an idea if the game (especially Indy Games, formerly known as Community Games) is worth spending money on.
2. Games on Demand
   This could be a really nice feature if the games are priced right … more on that in a bit.
3. Avatar Marketplace
   This is kind of interesting especially the ability you can get avatar items by playing games.

When I head of games on demand I had high hopes that there would be a significant discount on buying online.  Unfortunately it looks like the price in the Marketplace is exactly the same as you can buy retail online, quite often with free shipping.  The physical game has some major advantages over the download version … the main ones being.

1. You can loan a game to a friend to play.
   Supposedly if you log into a friend's console with your Xbox Live account you can download it there, after which he can play it until it’s deleted. So maybe it’s not such a big issue, but I curious how it works out in practice.
2. You can resell a game once you are done
   Once you are done playing a game you can take it to GameStop and trade it in for another game.  I won’t get into how much publisher dislike the used game business, lets just say the would be happy for it to disappear.
3. Xbox Storage costs too much
   The 120GB hard drive costs $140 or $1.17 a gigabyte.  Your average 500GB Laptop SATA hard drive only costs $85 or about $0.17 per gigabyte.  With your average game running 6GB or so you can only store 3 games on a 20GB model and even a 60GB model you will only get 8 or so.
   

So to summarize things, the new update provides some nice features, but if Microsoft wants the Marketplace to take off they need to increase the size of the hard drives available and make some very significant cuts in storage price cuts to encourage people to buy content online.

Finished Gears & Gears 2

I liked both games … they had a decent story line to go with what you were doing unlike some other UE3 Epic game I will not name. The only part I felt let down was the ending of taking the Brumak into the hollow and later blowing it up was way too easy.

It has been confirmed that a Gears base movie is in the works, Hopefully it fares better than most game based movies.  Gears has several good characters with a history and a story that could be explored though prequels or movies taking place between the two games.

I’ve started on Mass Effect on the 360 and looking forward to the sequel to Mass Effect coming out later this year.  I have played though the PC version of ME a couple times already and aside from some UI changes to make it more PC friendly there is not any real difference besides 1 … the Mako (an APC you use to explore planets) is alot easier to control in the PC version.