1TO10REVIEWS

On a scale from 1 to 10, the Netflix / Xbox experience is slathered in weaksauce.

I have an Xbox 360. When I heard about the new Xbox Live experience (new UI, new architecture, more features, more customization, etc.) I thought it sounded really cool. I’ve always thought it was a neat product, but I also thought there was a better interactive experience waiting to be enjoyed, if only someone would come along and develop it. Last Thursday, November 20, 2008, that experience became available for everyone.

One of the features I was most interested in was the Netflix streaming directly to your Xbox 360. I believe that digital home media have a long way to go. Networked media PC’s are a pain to set up, streaming media servers even more so, and Apple TV (even with Apple’s vaunted user-experience) isn’t an elegant or simple solution. But I have an Xbox 360, a computer (for all intents and purposes,) already hooked up to my television and with an HDMI connection.   Netflix streaming directly onto my TV? Sounds excellent.

I even resurrected a membership for this. I had Netflix a long time ago, and ended up canceling because I just didn’t get enough value from it. I get lots of movies from the Library (I know, laugh all you want, but’s it free) and I felt like I was always forgetting to return the Netflix discs and just throwing money away on the membership. So I canceled. But this Xbox partnership seemed like a good reason to renew the subscription, because of the ease, convneience, and my sheer exuberance at the prospect of streaming it right on to my Xbox. Then reality set in.

I just re-subscribed to Netflix, activated my account on the Xbox, and added (hang on) 39 movies to my queue. Thirty-nine movies. Of those, not one is available to stream the Xbox 360.  Not one.

Now that, my friends, is weaksauce.

And before you retort smartly, let me say that this is not just a bunch of brand new, extra fun movies.  Among others I have indies (Run, Fat Bot, Run - 2007), thrillers (Revolver - 2005), TV (How I Met Your Mother Season 1 - 2005), Action (Blade - 1998), Sci-Fi (Resident Evil: Extinction - 2007), and comedy (Forgetting Sarah Marshall - 2008) to name just a few.  There’s a good blend, in my opinion, of older and newer, hotter and less-hot choices in my list.  And none of them are available to stream.  That’s not acceptable.

After searching diligently I did finally find one movie, National Treasure 2, that was available for streaming to Xbox Live, and I wasn’t wholly opposed to watching it.  It worked flawlessly.  I’ve never watched any of the National Treasure movies, but my wife convinced me that I might like them, so I gave it a shot.  Truthfully, I enjoyed the movie.  Low expectations help a lot, and the history is a lot of fun.  But more importantly, the Netflix experience on the Xbox 360 was fantastic.  Moments after adding the movie to my queue, the Xbox Live page displayed it as available.  I asked to watch the movie, and in 15 seconds it was ready to go.  The picture quality was excellent, and the controls all worked perfectly.  I was REALLY satisfied with the experience of using Netflix.   Unfortunately, there’s not much for me to watch.

Netflix and Xbox have bragged that there’s a library of 12,000 shows to choose from and stream to your Xbox 360.  That’s not real helpful, if I don’t want to watch any of them.  I am sadly unimpressed, and if I were forced to give this a numeric rating between 1 and 10, right now it would get a 4.  I like the idea and the service worked well, but there’s no content I’m interested in seeing.  No bueno.

Some Related Stories & Links:

News 4 Gamers

Gizmodo

CNET News

Tom’s Guide

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Update 11/30/08:

I’ve been thinking about this situation some more.  Jivebotic and Wunder both left very good comments (on 1to10) about what movies are available, and the benefits of the Xbox / Netflix experience.  I agree with both of them.  The way I see it, there are two major problems:

1. There’s still not enough good content available on the Xbox.  Jivebotic pointed out some good movies that I can watch, sure enough.  But they’re still not the ones I want  to watch.  I don’t know why that rubs me the wrong way, but it does.  Out of 40 or so movie titles that I want to watch, I should have been able to find a couple that were available.   For me, there was not one.  

2. Netflix needs to add some kind of serach and identification mechanism, and that right quick.  Currently they do identify their “instant” titles, but there are 4 or 5 different “instant” mechanisms for streaming movies, and not all titles are available for all mechanisms.  I need a way to search for Xbox-compatible films, they need to visibly tag those films with an Xbox logo, and they need to quickly add more titles if they want to keep my business.  

This post is also available on LIVEdigitally.

My Review: 5

I think Guitar Hero, the series of games from Red Octane, kicks motha-flippin’ ass. I love to rock out, it’s simple and fun. So I am not going to review Guitar Hero in general; everyone already knows that it rules.

Instead I am going to review, specifically, GH3 for the PC.

I don’t own a gaming console. I know, it’s crazy, my bad. For a techno-weenie geek-boy to not own a gaming console is like a Kansas City holy-roller only owning one bible. Not normal.

Nevertheless, I don’t own a gaming console. I’ve played GH2 on the Xbox 360 with friends, and played GH3 on the Wii. I had a lot of fun, but I didn’t want to sink $400-$700 into owning a console so that I could play one game. However, I did recently build my own PC. My buddy Jeff helped me put together a custom computer. This was my first time building my own machine. I bought all the components, installed everything, the works. Jeff helped. Here are the major stats:

• NZXT Apollo mid-tower computer case
• Antec Tru-Power Trio TP3-550W power supply
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz processor
• Asus P5E-VM DO motherboard
• Corsair XMS2 240-pin DDR2 memory (4 x 1 GB)
• 2, Asus 18x lightscribe DVD-RW burners
• Nvidia GeForce 8400 Graphics card w/ 512 MB dedicated video memory
• 2, 7200 rpm Seagate 500GB hard drives in a RAID 1 (hardware RAID)

Being as I have a brand-new bad-ass mother-jammer (three hyphenated double-words in a row, yes!) I figured maybe I should search for whether there is a PC version of Guitar Hero 3. Wouldn’t that be cool? Maybe it’s nicer to rock out in front of your television, but I do have a 22″ widescreen LCD monitor, so that’s not too bad. Since I already built the computer anyway, this seemed like a cheaper and more reasonable alternative.

So, 1 or 2 Google search results later, lo and behold there is a version of GH3 for the PC.

Aspyr, a gaming company, contracted with Red Octane to port a version of GH3 for the Mac and the PC. Sweet. Better yet, on my routine visit to Costco the next day they are selling the PC version. Right there at Costco. Life is good again.

So, now I have a sweet machine and the video game I’ve been drooling over. How does it all stack up? Not that great.

It’s not terrible, but I have some deep concerns. For one thing, it stutters a little bit. When you are playing a musical game that depends on your being able to follow the rhythm of the song, stuttering present a pretty big issue.

The minimum system requirements for the graphics card list a “Video Card: 3D Hardware Accelerator Card Required – 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible 128 MB Video Memory.” They recommend 256 MB video card. Mine is a 512 MB card, and it still stutters. The only way I could find to mitigate the stutter was to lower the graphics resolution in the game options to the minimum setting. This did not wipe out all the stuttering, but it did help enough so that the game is playable. Yay.

Now Guitar Hero is not really a graphics intensive game, and truthfully I don’t really notice the difference all that much. However, I think it is totally lame that it was necessary to lower the resolution to the minimum. My new computer meets or exceeds all the other system requirements in addition to the graphics card. That tells me that the problem is probably not my system. I think it much more likely that Aspyr did not make a very good port.

It is also possible that Red Octane did not do as good of a job with GH3 as they did with GH 1 and 2. Harmonix (who is now making Rock Band, a Guitar Hero competitor) did all the coding for GH 1 and 2. Red Octane contracted with a different company to code GH3 - that’s part of the reason that it looks significantly different from previous versions.  The new company coded it up pretty fast, and perhaps they didn’t do as good of a job.  I have seen stutters on GH3 even on the Wii, though not as bad as what I experienced with the PC.

Another bone I have to pick is the controller.  The guitars for all other versions of Guitar Hero 3 are wireless.  Not so for the PC version.  In fact, the guitar for PC is actually the Xbox 360 guitar for Guitar Hero 2, right down to the little Xbox logo.  That is pretty lame.  I can (sort of) understand using a wired guitar on the first version, probably simplified a few things.  But at least give me my own guitar, and not one that has Xbox symbols on it.

Apparently Aspyr has released a patch for the game, patch #1.1, and it is supposed to resolve certain issues. I am going to download it and try it out, but I am not overly optimistic.  I supposed any port is likely to work less perfectly than the original.  And it honestly  isn’t that bad.  It’s just not great either.  Not the experience I was hoping for anyway.  So, because it is mediocre, it gets a solid 5 out of 10.