Darwinia+ confirmed for Xbox Live® Arcade

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RabidZombie
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Postby RabidZombie » Sat Jun 14, 2008 2:41 pm

Katana Steel wrote:
RabidZombie wrote:I thought online Multiplayer was restricted to Live on the 360. I haven't seen any releases that suggest otherwise.


Well you'll need a Live Account to use online multiplayer functions,
however if the game uses its own servers you can make do with
a free silver membership.


I meant Gold membership. What games work online with silver membership?

And if it's going to be on XBLA you'd still need the Live Account
to buy and download it.
(and again silver membership would be enough).


Dur. The Marketplace front page when not signed in makes that quite clear.
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Postby factoid » Mon Jun 16, 2008 9:55 pm

The only game I'm aware of that allows online play but does NOT require a Gold membership is Final Fantasy XI. That was basically the price microsoft had to pay to get Square onboard with Xbox development.

I've never tried to play multiplayer with an XBLA title, though, so I can't say that some of those don't have some limited multiplayer capability without a Gold membership.

Don't worry about the PC version, though...just because it's being made for XBLA and PC simultaneously doesn't mean that you'll need a Live account for multiplayer on PC. In fact it's almost guaranteed that you won't. I've never heard of anyone actually doing that. Microsoft has had VERY little uptake on its whole "Games for Windows LIVE" campaign. Developers know better than to expect PC gamers to pay a subscription for multiplayer.


That said, I'm happily a Live subscriber. It's a vastly superior experience to any free service I've ever gotten on the PC...and that's coming from a long-time PC gaming enthusiast. It's just plain better. You're always gauranteed to have a base level of features from any multiplayer game. They all use the same sign-in. They all use the same interface. You can always make friends-invites. They all have to support voice chat.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that matchmaking services are also provided by MS, or at least the games matchmaking takes into account LIVE users who you've chosen to ignore (do not match with X player).

They've now made LIVE for windows an option for developers...but it would be folly of any developer to actually use it exclusively.
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Postby martin » Mon Jun 16, 2008 11:48 pm

factoid wrote:That said, I'm happily a Live subscriber. It's a vastly superior experience to any free service I've ever gotten on the PC...and that's coming from a long-time PC gaming enthusiast. It's just plain better. You're always gauranteed to have a base level of features from any multiplayer game. They all use the same sign-in. They all use the same interface. You can always make friends-invites. They all have to support voice chat.


try steam, unlike microsoft valve don't ask you to buy a game and then pay again to use part of it
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RabidZombie
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Postby RabidZombie » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:17 pm

I am also a Gold subscriber. It's inferior to Steam (and the open-ness of PC in general), but it SO much better than the competition in the console market. The ease of use makes it more than worth it.
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Postby Rkiver » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:19 pm

I recently got an Xbox 360, and with it came a free month of Gold. You're right, overall Steam is better, but for a console market it works fine, and the ability to download new content for games is rather nice (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Crackdown, etc etc).

I'll be getting a full year for gold, it's just that good for it.
Uplink help: Read the FAQ
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Postby factoid » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:38 pm

martin wrote:try steam, unlike microsoft valve don't ask you to buy a game and then pay again to use part of it


That's the standard issue argument from the anti-LIVE community. Naturally I think we would all prefer to have the multiplayer for free, but LIVE wouldn't be as good of a service as it is today if it were offered for free. I like steam. I bought Defcon, Uplink and a bunch of other games through steam. It's a different kind of service, though.

As I mentioned in my comment, what you're getting when you pay for live is a base level of features that developers otherwise wouldn't have given you like integrated voice chat, friend invites, etc...etc... Or in any case if they HAD given you those features they would work DIFFERENTLY with every single game and probably require you to create new accounts for every single one.

I've spent a lot of hours fiddling with server lists and 3rd party community apps on the PC (like steam, which I suppose is a 1st party app if you're playing a Valve game), and I find live to be a cleaner, faster experience. It's worth the 4 dollars a month I pay for it. Several million people agree with me.
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Postby bert_the_turtle » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:49 pm

Oooh, a fanboy.

* grabs popcorn, lawnchair, flamethrower and asbestos underwear *
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Postby martin » Wed Jun 18, 2008 9:20 pm

I really don't want to get drawn into a flame war about this... *sigh*

Valve recently released the steam community - so I can use steam community inside any game launched from steam and it's the same for every game (even games not built for steam), so that's cool.
Also, steamworks was released recently, which is a toolpack for developers for steam, use steamworks and you get things like achievements integrated with steam and some other stuff I've forgotten, but since valve are so great more and more stuff will undoubtedly be released and added to steamworks in short order.
Oh, and did I mention it's free?
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Postby MarvintheParanoidAndroid » Wed Jun 18, 2008 10:30 pm

martin wrote:I really don't want to get drawn into a flame war about this... *sigh*

Valve recently released the steam community - so I can use steam community inside any game launched from steam and it's the same for every game (even games not built for steam), so that's cool.
Also, steamworks was released recently, which is a toolpack for developers for steam, use steamworks and you get things like achievements integrated with steam and some other stuff I've forgotten, but since valve are so great more and more stuff will undoubtedly be released and added to steamworks in short order.
Oh, and did I mention it's free?

Also Steam Cloud which will sync your save games to your Steam account wherever you log in, at some point in the future. Something I've wanted in Steam for ages, looking forward to that (although I imagine it'll probably only support official Steam games if it's using their own servers).
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Postby RabidZombie » Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:06 am

MarvintheParanoidAndroid wrote:
martin wrote:I really don't want to get drawn into a flame war about this... *sigh*

Valve recently released the steam community - so I can use steam community inside any game launched from steam and it's the same for every game (even games not built for steam), so that's cool.
Also, steamworks was released recently, which is a toolpack for developers for steam, use steamworks and you get things like achievements integrated with steam and some other stuff I've forgotten, but since valve are so great more and more stuff will undoubtedly be released and added to steamworks in short order.
Oh, and did I mention it's free?

Also Steam Cloud which will sync your save games to your Steam account wherever you log in, at some point in the future. Something I've wanted in Steam for ages, looking forward to that (although I imagine it'll probably only support official Steam games if it's using their own servers).


Official Steam games probably. I can't image it being easy to make it work at all with non-Steam games.

I've been looking forward to Steam Cloud. It's a feature they said they were going to implement since, well, forever. It's just Valve Time took hold.
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Postby martin » Thu Jun 19, 2008 6:53 pm

Well save games are just files, I wouldn;t be terribly suprised if steam cloud got added to steamworks so all steamworks games could take advantage of it
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Postby RabidZombie » Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:46 pm

martin wrote:Well save games are just files, I wouldn;t be terribly suprised if steam cloud got added to steamworks so all steamworks games could take advantage of it


It'd probably be a part of Steamworks, you're right.

The problem is not finding out WHICH files to upload to the SteamCloud server, but where to put them on the other side. There exist the problem that the game's directory is in a different place, or the game is a different version, or it has already existing saves that would be over-written (e.g. Unreal Tournament's tournament progress data).
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Postby martin » Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:42 pm

well there would have to be game specific handling for the save files processing, but so long as valve offer a storage and transfer system I'm sure many games will integrate it - it's hardly the most complex task when building a game :P
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Postby RabidZombie » Fri Jun 20, 2008 4:05 pm

I was still taking about non-Steam games.
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Postby onigami » Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:56 pm

Hmm...there's been no news since the initial announcement of Darwinia+. Any reason beyond the release of Multiwinia?

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