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Robot Monkey's Xbox Live faq


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Okay, I put together an Xbox Live faq for lcvg.com. Since there are rumblings about it going live in the near future, I'd like to make the current draft available for comments from the Peanut Gallery.

 

I'm posting (actually moving) this in General, because I would like to know whether it provides useful info to users unfamiliar with Live.

 

You can find it at a temporary location.

 

I'm thinking about doing a Lonely Planet-style series of articles on many aspects of video games, from thr Xbox Live faq to hardware to videogame forums. This is all contingent upon what lcvg's owners want, as well as any laziness barriers.

 

Feel free to post comments in this thread.

 

-j

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Funny stuff, Jay. Very well done.

For this part, though:

(Wolfenstein) Can a lieutenant call an airstrike without throwing smoke?

Yes, use your binoculars to target a spot for an airstrike. Then pull the right trigger.

I'd add that your "Power bar" meter, on the lower right-hand corner, needs to be full. Also, technically, when you do it this way, you call in an artillery strike. When you throw the canister, you're calling in an air-strike.

Also, instead of naming Dean "Supreme Ruler of the Universe in Trash Talking", I have quite a few more "titles" I'd like to bestow on him. I think I'll start another thread on that. :twisted:

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Also, an airstrike is happens very quickly after throwing the smoke grenade (3-5 seconds?), and completely covers a swath of ground around the smoke. An artillery strike takes much longer to initiate (10 seconds?), and drops 4 consecutive explosions in random spots around the area you marked with the binocs.

 

One more for you: Q: So who did win the Wolfenstein tourney, anyway? A: That would be those godlike Adonis warrior-poets, Simple Chat, long may they reign. :P

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You need a router in between your modem and your devices.

 

This is certainly an option (and probably the best), but not the only way to go about it of course.

 

What do I do about an annoying player?

 

What about mute? That can work too. Unplugging the communicator completely can work wonders too.

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Thats great work - ta. I'd been trying the Midtown "short track" trick, but I'd had the empty space at the end, not the beginning. As such, Underworld's Moaner is getting right on my nerves now.

 

You might want to actually add the details of how to do the trick; rather than downloading and burning his amazing three seconds of silence, you can just grab any short CD track - I used one of the 80-something ones that are used to hide the hidden track on the Stone Roses' Second Coming (the one good thing that can be said about that massive disappointment of an album). Nine Inch Nails' Broken has a similiar pile of 4-second silences, and there are a whole stack of very short music cues on the Half-Life game CD, you might want to use.

 

Its worth a mention of all this, because not all Xboxes read CDRs (mine will, which is nice, but they have used a series of different drives over the course of its life, and only some cope).

 

If there's one question that the FAQ doesn't answer I'd like to know the answer to, though, is some more on this 'guests on splitscreen' thing. I noticed that the MotoGP demo seems to allow up to fourplayer per machine; is that going to lag horribly, and more to the point do I need to pay for four Live accounts to do so?

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Nice work Jay.

 

I noticed you listed a divergance error under NFL2K3. The following may be similar.

 

There was a problem with NHL2K3. Right after the faceoff, the game dissconneted the users. It's been reported the reason was the users having different game settings. I've heard this reported as a divergance error. I actually had this happen several times as well, but don't recall the error message.

 

I created a new profile with default settings and never had a problem again (make sure your opponent does the same).

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4.17 Every time I play MechAssault I get blown up 50 times, can't score to save my life, and can barely walk 10 paces without five Atlases using me as a shooting-gallery duck. What do I doooooooo?

 

Your opponents are most likely 10-year-olds with no jobs who have nothing better to do except play XBox live 14 hours a day, learn every secret location of every power-up, and target you because you're a "n00b" (that's Dorkese for "inexperienced video game player").

 

My suggestion is to ride your XBox live account until it dies and go back to Tetris. It's a lost cause, trust me.

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If there's one question that the FAQ doesn't answer I'd like to know the answer to, though, is some more on this 'guests on splitscreen' thing. I noticed that the MotoGP demo seems to allow up to fourplayer per machine; is that going to lag horribly, and more to the point do I need to pay for four Live accounts to do so?

 

Yes, you can play MotoGP with up to 4 players on an XBox, and while I've only done this once, there was absolutely no increased lag, and I know people who play split screen all the time. It may actually help with the lag since you've got up to 4 players in that same game who are receiving and sending their update packets all at the same time, and up to 4 players that should be completely in sync with no latency between them whatsoever.

 

The additional players do not need their own account, they can login to the network as a guest of your account. Since they're a guest though, they do not get a gamertag (will usually appear as "DrunkOM/Guest", "DrunkOM/Guest2" etc, do not get any stat tracking or scoreboard entries, and cannot use their own voice communicator (even if you happened to have a 2nd headset and module).

 

In the case of MotoGP, some of the game's regular features and UI features that are present in the single user game are changed or removed in the splitscreen mode. The track map is moved to the middle (possibly to the empty space in 3 player mode), you cannot tell who is behind or in front of you, etc.

 

There are many games which allow guest accounts to play with you, some have 4 way split screen (MotoGP), Some just have 2 players splitscreen (MechAssault) and some don't split the screen at all (Sports games).

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1. Sorry about the spelling error, iain; it's been fixed.

 

You may want to consider dropping that extra "i", however. As you know, we're looking at a vowel shortage in the near future and Britain continues to flout conservation efforts by using low vowel-efficiency words.

 

And didn't Blair say he was going to do something about your heavy reliance upon foreign "u"'s?

 

2. Mike, if you can find a second reference to the NHL2k3 problem you mentioned I can include it in the faq. No, I'm not singling you out, but I don't have the game and this is the first I've heard of it. Waitaminnit, you don't hear my piteous cries in MM3, so f you. ;)

 

-j

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