56ok.org

"Size not matter. Judge me not by my size, do you?"

In the days when I had Sprint 500 k inbound internet and most games fit under 10 MB and go up to a "stated maximum" of 50 MB, I had to wait 2-5 minutes to complete a download before I play. And I was barely 10x better than dial-up. And there were some good games on the 360. The Best part about it it was, it was free to try before you buy, which Microsoft made a REQUIREMENT to do business on Xbox 360. If the game was NOT available on a disc, then it was REQUIRED to have a trial mode. That was Xbox's policy. How well did that work out? I had all 3 home systems of that generation, an Xbox 360, a Wii, and a PS3. I did the most downloading on the Xbox 360, because they had free demos. And at least a quarter to a half the time, I buy the game if I like it. And $1 indie games I supported if I liked them even remotely. If it had an online mode, I learned the hard way that I should buy on day one once I like the concept, or else forget about playing it online.

There were a couple games on the Wii that SOUNDED interesting, using motion controllers in unique ways. But there's no way I can tell if the controls felt intuitive, or whether it's a broken waggle fest. One game that used the Wii Zapper and the Balance board, I bought blind before I bought the balance Board, Horizon Riders, looks kind of interesting, a shooter where you dodge. Dodging was kind of wonky with the rotation of the gun to move left and right. I thought the balance board would be better. The only good thing it did was not distract from my aim. I was used to Atari Paddle games where a slight shift to the left or right moves you only a couple pixels, and a violent shift would make you move real fast. However, if i only want to do a slight dodge, i sifted a little, and "held it" and made me move to the very edge over a second. Likewise, centering myself was awful, I thought balancing to center would shift me to center. Instead I had to shift my weight to the other side and it gradually moves me over to the center. Not the design choice I would have made. It's a difference between an "Absolute" slider and a "Relative" slider. The difference in dialing a posiiotn and dialing a velocity. I felt you would have more control with an "absolute slider". Not the worst game, and not relevant to this website because the primary purpose is determining whether it's 56OK or 56KO, but since this my website I can deviate.

Luckily the cost investment wasn't THAT much when it wasn't on sale, nor was the time investment with the download time. It fit squarely within 50 MB, even though it had Mario running to show progress, in a unique Nintendo way. But that changed when full disc games were available on the 360, and downloads started costing $10 as a basic instead of $5 and took hundreds of meg to up to 2 Gig. I had to be patient, but it was a free trial

Luckily, my internet speed tripled to 1.5 Mb/s, unfortunately game sizes have multiplied in size by up to 30x. Which makes me want to rent a physical game. So I went to my library and thankfully, they have free game and movie rentals (their 3D selection has but to be desired, but that will be for another page.) I though, I can try the game, see if I like it, and I thought, if I got a Disc, I don't have to download most of the game. In this day of "Day One patches" I expect to do some downloading. But I thought it would be where it would first offload the code to the hard drive and then it would surgically edit the code. Figuring these are Double to Triple Layer Blu Ray ROMS, it would between 50 and 75 Gig in size, but I can save over 95% of the code and have the update be a true update. I thought it'd be at worst 1 Gig in downloads.

Well, guess how much was saved by using a disc. 18 MEG. Not gig, MEG. Either one of 2 things happen: Either the updaters treat this code as "Monkey Typings", meaning NOTHING could be salvaged from the original code, but the only way that would happen is if you bought Pac-Man, and it updated the game to be Tetris instead, 2 totally unrelated games except for very rudimentary generic code you might be only to be able to save 200 bits of the actual 16 k code, it's just easier giving the 16k code. IT takes one second under dial up. One Street Fighter IV update was 500 BYTES, not megabytes, not even kilobytes, but BYTES, about the size of an Atari 2600 cartridge.

But it was a 50 GIG download. If only 18 MEG are used, how much time did that save getting the download? Literally the only thing it got me was a free trial, after about a week and a half of downloading.

But the more likely item is the Microsoft dropped its quality control. During the 360, most downloads of disc games were under 5 Meg. And they also had free demos of download only games. Now Microosoft denies this, but both those policies were dropped and it's time to screw the user. Screw the user into buying blind. And screw the user nto just downloading the whole 50 Gig+ disc just to get the game running. Companies save development time by sending patches that force you to download the whole thing again, just because it's easier for the developers to send the whole code instead of a few Meg patch. There is no way you go from 5 Meg patches to 50 GIG patches in one generation. Xbox got lazy and are not forcing developers to be efficient in codings. Don't people know there are speed limits, or bandwidth limits in place in lots of areas?

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