My 360 recently found itself winging its way to Frankfurt to be repaired – but before you start throwing your rotten fruit, don’t worry, this isn’t a red-ringed theme entry.
With no console to spend my precious time on I could feel myself becoming startlingly close to turning into a soap opera zombie, where my evenings would be full of Eastenders, Coronation Street and *shudder* Hollyoaks.
Thankfully, my rescuer came in the shape of a black box known as Louis, my loveable PC companion. Having recently got myself a copy of FUEL for my birthday I figured it was about time to put it through its paces.
You know the drill with PC games by now, insert disc, say I agree, click install – wait five minutes, read some forums in the mean time, and then get prompted to restart. Feeling rather adventurous and naughty I waved my option to restart goodbye and immediately loaded up the game, a rebel? Yes, but a rebel with a cause, a gaming cause!
This is when things started to get quite interesting, and thankfully has nothing to do with my PC exploding or leaking a strangely coloured blue substance after turning the restart option down, sorry! Instead of ploughing straight into the game I found myself sitting at a somewhat familiar looking display of gamerscore, friends, inbox and chat.
You see, FUEL is one of the games that although on PC actually supports your gamertag so while playing you can feel free to start up a chat with anyone on your friends list, check out their achievements and even send private messages.
For someone like me who still enjoys playing games on his PC it’s a really nice system, and although FUEL doesn’t offer the chance to pit PC players Vs 360 players it does offer a glimpse at what we could see in the future.
FUEL isn’t the only game to support the Games for Windows Live system, there’s quite a substantial list already and it seems to be growing quite fast. Recent releases such as Batman Arkham Asylum (ok, it comes out tomorrow – don’t shoot), and Red Faction : Guerrilla both supporting the system. The current back catalogue of Fallout 3, Street Fighter IV, Dawn of War II and Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as factoring in future titles like Dirt 2 also supporting it – times are good, times are very good.
For those that own a gaming PC this is actually rather good, as for one PC games tend to be a whole lot cheaper than your standard 360 titles. On average you can pick up a brand new PC title for the likes of £25 compared to that of £40 for its 360 counterpart.
Obviously, some games fit better on the 360, games that you know all your friends will be playing will of course find their way onto your stack of neon green boxes. But for those single player titles like Fallout 3 and Batman Arkham Asylum, the PC not only has the distinct advantage of being cheaper to buy but also the ability to make the games look quite a bit better in terms of graphics – as long as your PC has the power of course. <insert He-man style .gif here>
Now if only Microsoft could persuade developers to support this further they could be onto something here. Of course with a rival system set up in the shape of Valve’s Steam and not to mention Blizzards Battle.net 2.0 that will no doubt lock down Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, one could easily see that there could be some friction caused.
That said, it’s a great start and one I think could easily expand further as time goes on, as it’s bringing extra features to games that some might pass up. Now, do the same for Xbox Arcade games, Microsoft, and you’ll have more of my money than I would care to admit.
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September 17th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
The absence of voice chat and the party system is a bit rubbish on the PC but otherwise its nice to have the consistent scoring system across platforms.
Did you mean Red Faction : Guerilla btw because 2 came out ages ago and was pretty rubbish if i remember rightly
October 13th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Heh, it is a nice little system. Maybe MS will just buy Valve and Steam rather than beat it though!
April 7th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Cool blog post, was wondering if you would allow me to link to it in a article i am currently typing for my own website? Lauren Branning