Down for Upgrades

Ghostrazor.com will be down intermittently this weekend for server upgrades.  Likely this shouldn’t affect anything, but there may be short outages.

We’re Live!

And we’re back.  That wasn’t so bad.

Thanks to Reed and Brandon for the site access and the support.

As a side note, I’m moving all my RSS stuff into FeedBurner, so you may need to update your RSS feed.  If you don’t get any posts after this one, that’ll be why.

Slowy Joey

Apparently it takes a long time to switch domain registrars.

Due to shinannigans, Ghostrazor.com will not be unpacking until Wednesday this week, and it will probably do weird things at that point in time for a couple of days.  I’ll be updating the wordpress.com version and the new version at it’s new home in tandem so hopefully no downtime will actually occur.  Maybe.

No Xbox Originals Achievements Either

I’m going to get one last one in before the DNS throws up.

Major Nelson reports that Xbox Originals aren’t going to have achievements either.  So essentially buying the game digitally will be like having a buggy version of the disc version of the game with no achievements and random crashing when you chose menu options that you shouldn’t have chosen because you’re a stupid fuck who’s not psychic (apparently). 

“These are the original games that were created before Xbox 360. In order to preserve the integrity of the original gaming experience they provide, they will have the features available at the time of their initial release”

That’s some marketing bullshit that means “We don’t want to go into the source code and modify the game because it costs more to do that, so you’re going to get a sloughed out half-experience instead”.  Achievement points cannot possibly destroy the integrity of the original gaming experience.  This is one of the only modifications you could make that would be a no risk gain.  I don’t even see a scenario around this product anymore. 

There’s an opportunity to leverage the existing platform of awesomeness and bring it up to a new level.  Developers in general are happy to release their game on more platforms if the cost is low to them.  I would expect most would be more than happy to spend a month reworking their code to operate in this environment and add achievement points to their games.  It gives people a really good reason to replay those games they once loved and to buy them through this channel instead of getting them for ten bucks used at the local GameStop.  You guys do know that you don’t get paid when people buy used games, yeah?

By feeding your customers the raw scraps from the table in an attempt to make a quick cash grab you’re hurting your brand.  Xbox Live has become a touchstone and a symbol of multiplayer gaming.  Watering down that symbol with buggy content, or rechurn of games at a lower quality than their original incarnation burns your brand.  This will result in less money long term.  Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

Downtime

My blog is currently hosted with Wordpress.com

While it provides some nice features, it also puts in a lot of restrictions.  I can no longer tolerate these restrictions, and as such I’ll be rolling my own Wordpress offsite.  The practical upshot of this is Ghostrazor may be unavailable between now and Sunday.

When I’m back, I’ll put up a post on an exclusive Will Wright lecture.