Another good reference for shackers is the shacker Xbox gamertag list of death by Portax located here http://shack.portax.net This will provide you with a list of shackers who use Xbox Live and what games they own so you and fellow shackers can have each other on the friends list and enjoy games together.
I am going to link some of my posts on the shack right here so I don't have to retype things over & over again. Please ignore that I'm replying to people and just look at the content in the posts. Hopefully this information proves useful to people along with the pages I have written below.
Post about friends list and price A couple more examples about ease of use compared to the PC Ease of use to create/find servers to play with your friend
Remember Xbox Live requires a broadband connection that is greater then ISDN such as Cable or DSL. With this requirement MS has been able to do some great standards such as voice chat for every game and content download. I have heard from people you can use ISDN with it but there is no guarantee that it will work with your Xbox or work properly with all the online games.
If you are one of the K-RAD PC elitists that think I am just an "xbox fanboy" and the "PC RULES 4 LYFE YO" because god forbid someone says the PC isn't blessed by Jesus and may just may not be perfect. For those people scroll the bottom of the page and read my disclaimer and realize i'm not anti PC or Pro anything. Other then that I hope people read this page and find the information useful.
Friends List:
This is probably the most important feature of Xbox Live. When you setup your Live account you are told to enter a gamertag. This gamertag will be your permanent name unless you setup another Xbox Live account which you can so roommates, brothers etc can share an Xbox. As far as I know there is no limit to the amount of Live accounts you can have on one Xbox. No one else can use your gamertag. What the friends list does is allow you & your friends to play games with each other in just a few clicks of the controller. You can add people to your list via the dashboard (Xbox loaded with no disc inside or open tray) or select the players name you are playing with at that time and hit add friend. Some games do allow you to manually enter a gamertag but most do not. The person on the other end has to accept this request as well so people you don't like can't see what you're playing and bother you.
The friends list is compatible with every Xbox Live game currently and every future Live enabled game as well. What makes this so great is no matter what game you have loaded in the tray you are able to access the friends list and see what all your friends are playing. From that point on you can select their name to join their games or send them invites to your game, all with a few clicks on the controller. In just a few button presses you can do more things faster from within the game then you can with 3 or 4 separate programs running on your PC. It also doesn't just say "this person is online in this game" it even says if they are playing in a full game, playing in a game that has an opening or simply "online" which means they are idling or searching for games. This makes it extremely easy to play with all your buddies.
If you are currently playing a game and someone sends you an invite a Mail icon will flash on your screen (placement depending on what game you are playing) notifying you that a friend wants to play with you. After that you hit Start, select friends list and it will tell you what friend wants to play what game. From this screen you can accept invitation or decline invitation. If you accept it you will disconnect from your current game and automatically join your friends game. If it's a game that are you not playing at that moment your Xbox will put a message on the screen asking you to put in the proper game disc after you switch discs it will load the game and you join your friends game. You can also access your friends list to see what everyone is playing from Xbox.com. Just setup a passport account that's linked to your gamertag.
Since Live is a closed network MS has certain standards that each publisher/developer must adhere to or they will not be able to sell a Live enabled game or connect to the network. This is good because it forces competing publishers to work together. Play Rainbow Six 3 by Ubisoft and you can still access the friends list with all it's features with people playing Midtown Madness 3 which is made by DICE. Every game is compatible with each other. Below are a few screenshots to give you an idea of what the friends list looks like. Notice in pictures 3 and 4 armaduck is able to join his friend from MotoGP while his friend is playing Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow simply by selecting his friends name. I hope to get a more comprehensive display sometime but the current shots should illustrate how easy it is for you and your friends to play with each other without any need to scan servers, copy/paste or distribute ip addresses and or passwords.
Example A:
Imagine playing FarCry and while playing you get an invite from your friends who are playing Neverwinter Nights, BF1942 or any other game for that matter and to join them all you had to do was access the friends list from Far Cry's built in menu, hit accept and it would automatically join you in their game.
This is how every game works on Xbox Live.
Example B:
If you read the shack you may notice whenever anyone wants to play or setup an Xbox Live game they simply say "we need x more people in y game" or "I will be on tonight at 6pm PST" this is because of the friends list. You Never have to hand out IP address's to friends, never have to setup a private game room with a password and then distribute that password to everyone (you limit private games to only people in your friends list) you simply load up the game and play.
Example C:
Say a bunch of shackers are playing PGR2 but each game host can only hold 8 people max. With XBOX Live you don't have to find separate IP address's for each host and deal with copy/pasting IP address's to find an open game or post on a message board what your IP or game room name is. You simply click on your friends name to join (or host one with a few clicks).
Say I'm hosting a room for 8 people but it's maxed out so Jedi_27 hosts a room so another 8 friends can join that game but then Jedi realizes he only has 4 friends available for some PGR2 action but one of those 4 people may have a different friends list then Jedi so he can grab more people and get the full 8 players going. It's so ridiculously simple & powerful.
What makes this whole thing great is you don't have to have 80 people (max friends available on XBOX Live) on an IM program. There are people who I meet while playing games of PGR2, MM3, SC:PT etc etc etc but I don't necessarily need or want them on my IM friends list but we are on each others XBOX Live list. During my year and a half of playing Xbox Live I have had to copy, write down or deal with IP address's ZERO times. I never have to scan 3,000 servers to find servers/friends and never have to use AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo or a web message board to setup games with a private room, password or IP address. With Xbox Live you just power it up and click on each others names.
Live Aware:
This goes along with the above friends list but it applies to single player games. Not every game supports this but games like Fable, RS:3, PGR2, RSC2, Halo2 and many others do. What Live Aware games do is sign you into Live when you load up the game (you can choose not to) so you can access your friends list and receive invites while you are playing a single player game, very cool stuff. Games like PGR2 take it to a new level while playing the single player game it accesses the Live scoreboard so you can see and compete with the top players scores while you are working on completing the single player. It also uploads your scores so you can compare with friends and everyone else. I personally hope MS makes Live Aware a mandatory feature so all single player games have this feature.
Cheat Protection:
This is something I feel a lot of people don't know about. When people think of cheating in online games they think "cheaters will always find a way" and for a lot of cases this true but Xbox isn't like a PC since it isn't an open platform. Since it's a closed platform and not a multitasking environment like the PC MS was able to put new cheat protection into it that PC games can't have. For example if you connect to Live with a mod chip enabled your serial number will be banned preventing you to from playing Xbox Live games again unless you purchased a new EPROM or Xbox and more recently they started banning people who have installed different/larger hard drive's on their Xbox as well. Some people's reaction may be "omg that sucks" but when you realize why they do it you may change your mind. A PC is by nature (these days) a multitasking environment which allows people to run as many programs as they want to all at the same time. Load up task manager and you'll see how many are running at any given time. With Xbox Live you can only connect to the network if you are running the games code and nothing else or you are banned.
On a PC games are stored on the HD and do not run from a non writeable media like the DVD's are in a PS2 or Xbox. This helps prevent cheating by nature since people can't modify existing game files. Everyone knows the Xbox has a HD so people may think "well people can just modify files on that then cheat" this isn't possible due to the security measures Live has. If you are running any unsigned code you are immediately banned. Imagine if on your PC you were only able to play UT2004 (or any other game for that matter) if you were only allowed to run explorer.exe & UT2004.exe and if you tried to run anything other then that you would be banned.
This is effectively how XBOX Live works so it's a lot harder for people add cheats into their games on the service. People though have found different types of exploits like Action Replay cheats. One example was in RS:3 where people were using terrorist weapons that were ungodly buff in multi player and ended killing everyone in one or two shots. Within a couple weeks Ubisoft and MS put out a patch (which is mandatory and automatically updates the moment you connect to Live btw) that removed this exploit keeping the game secure. It's virtually impossible to have this kind of cheat protection in a multitasking & open platform environment, but kudos' go out to MS for doing this. They could have easily not put in these security measures but instead they took advantage of the closed platform and developed a closed network to go along with it.
Voice Chat:
This is pretty self explanatory. Like mentioned above since XBOX Live is a closed network and MS has certain standards you must comply with every game has voice chat. MS provides the developers with the software and they are required to implement it if they want to be XBOX Live certified. It's great for smaller dev teams who don't have the money as some bigger companies because MS provides all the XBOX Live software to them. These standards are great because no matter what game you load up everyone has it and you can talk to friends and or work with teammates in a better fashion.
I personally play Midtown Madness 3 (one of the only shackers heh) and being able to say "my car is damaged take the gold" to a teammate as you are driving 200+ mph while dodging cars is a shitload better then having to make a turn and type that out. SC:PT takes this to a whole new level since the game is actually reliant on teamwork. Coordinating with your teammate to shock, smoke, sticky cam a merc while your teammate works to decontaminate the objective is just awesome. It's also great knowing that my $50 per year I will always get voice chat. All future games like Forza Motorsport will support all the above features and integrate themselves with previous & future games.
The way voice is handled is very well implemented. The games music/sound effects come through the TV speakers or the 5.1 surround sound (dependant on your setup) while the voice and only the voice comes through the headset. Games don't require a "push to talk" button either. Simply talk and the microphone picks it up. You don't have to do any configuring either, just plug the adapter & headset in and your ready to go, that's it. Muting yourself so people can't hear you is as easy as clicking the mute button on the adapter, same thing with adjusting the volume.
This makes talking online very natural as your focused on using the gamepad to control the game not to talk. The microphone that comes with the XBOX Live kit is very high quality and doesn't pickup background noises unless it's really loud. You can use any standard phone/cell phone headset but beware of poor quality ones that may have poor noise cancellation.
If you are concerned about obnoxious people you can simply highlight the players name and select mute which you can also un-mute them at any time. If you want you can also send "feedback" about the person which can result in permanent voice ban so they can play games but never talk again. Read this link for more information
Voice Messages:
This is a relatively new feature. You can send voice messages to friends for up to 15 seconds from the dashboard but also newer games like Halo2 just released have this feature as well from within the game. Say your playing a game already and your friend hops on and wants you to join him or wants an invite himself. He can just click your name choose send message, voice recording and record a quick message to you. This has already worked great in the few days we've used this feature. It's definitely useful.
Downloadable Content:
This is one of the cooler features of the Live service. The majority of games have free downloadable content (can only think of a few pay instances). A few examples of downloadable content would be
Splinter Cell: 3 downloadable single player levels
Links 2004: 2 courses available one which is free and one which costs $5.
Midtown Madness 3: 4 car packs with 10 or so cars Rainbow Six: 5 multiplayer levels.
Project Gotham Racing 2: Two packs available Paris and Long Beach. Both offer around 8 cars and about a dozen tracks for $5 each.
For the content that costs money they charge the credit card you used when setting up your Live account. I may make a separate page linking all the downloads but for a complete list read http://www.xbox.com . To download & install any content all you have to do is click the "download content" button in the games menu system and XBOX Live will do the rest. Very slick.
It is definitely one of the better features of Live and content is being added to different games on a pretty frequent basis.
MSNŽ Alerts and Messenger Integration
This is a pretty cool feature but not necessary to use. If you use MSN Messenger on your PC you can access your friends list to see who's online and what they're playing from within the MSN program. You can also enable alerts to show you when new friends sign onto a game so your notified the moment someone is playing.
Clan Support in games like Halo 2
This is a new feature which future games will implement. What this allows you to do is register an official clan name inside Halo2 (no one else can you use your clan name). After setting up a clan you can then use the match making features of Halo2 to look for other clans of your skill level and play games with them. These are officially ranked games so your ranking will go up from winning these. With Halo2 there is no standard server browser you simply create a "party" with your clan and then do a search for other clans looking to play. This works amazingly well and the ability to always play with your clan members facing off against other clan members is great. You never have to setup matches or skirmishes on a webpage or email just form a party and you can play indefinitely with your clan against others since you and your 'party' are always together never having to reconnect or find each other. Not requiring a dedicated server and a time to play on it makes it extremely fun and easy to get into. Play any hours of the day you want with the Halo2's matchmaking system always with your clan against other clans.
When forming a clan you are also automatically given web space and a forum on http://www.bungie.net so you & your clan mates have a place to talk about things or set a time/date to play. This is all automatic and all you need to do is register a clan from Halo2.
How & Why these features are easier, improved and faster then separate 3rd party programs on the PC
This can be a fucked up subject for people. I've noticed some people tend to get very defensive of their platform and act like idiots. The paragraphs below are not saying PC gaming sucks or shitty but it does attempt to elaborate on what separates the XBOX Live setup compared to the PC counterparts. Please refrain from flaming me and telling me you think the setup is just fine. I am not trying to tell you it's bad but more to illustrate how the PC matchmaking & voice chat hasn't really changed for close to 7 years and as a PC user we are still reliant on 3rd party setups and have to deal with less features that XBOX Live has had for 2 1/2 years now.
Voice Chat:
Voice over IP has been around for years on the PC with programs like Roger Wilco or Teamspeak but sadly only a handful of games actually have voice built into them like Valve titles and UT2004. The difference between voice chat with these programs & PC games compared to XBOX Live games (remember all XBOX Live games support voice) is substantial. In order to setup a team game with a 3rd party program like Teamspeak or Roger Wilco you need to either find a public server or have access to a private/dedicated server which the average person does not have. The biggest downside to this is distributing ip address's, passwords and predetermining teams for the team channels. With XBOX Live games you don't have to configure anything you just load it up.
In Halo2 I can run 16 player games with full voice chat on his 384k/4.0mb connections with virtually no lag, there is just no way any semi modern PC game is capable of that. I am not a network expert at all so I don't know how they pull it off especially on what is considered such a slow cpu with poor upload bandwidth for that many players along with voice. One of the cooler things is how Halo2 handles voice, something an external program can't do properly. It has proximity chat and team chat. Talking into the microphone normally is proximity chat everyone around you within a certain distance will hear you so talking trash to the other team that's right in front of you works nicely and you don't clutter up the team chat. In order to use private team chat you simply tap the white button (don't have to hold it down) then talk normally, as soon as you are done talking it turns off team chat and your back to proximity chat.
This is amazingly cool and one of the better ideas for voice chat that you simply could not do with an external program. Besides Halo2 all team games automatically put you on your private team channel and games like Midtown Madness 3 there is a toggle button if you want to chat in private team chat or public chat so everyone can hear you. Again this works much better then running Teamspeak in the background.
Match Making:
We all use programs like All Seeing Eye & Gamespy Arcade and have been for years. I remember having to go to stomped.com and manually ping servers from a DOS prompt. I have no problem with these programs (I use ASE myself) but unfortunately they are 3rd party programs and not integrated into the games themselves. It's a shame that in 2005 9 years after Quake came out PC match making hasn't evolved since the master server was introduced in ~1998 and we still have games shipped with absolutely horrible integrated server browsers. The way XBOX Live handles match making is so simple & powerful. Like I talked about it above the friends list allows you to join games, invite friends, setup party matches in just a few touches of the controller. ASE/GSA unfortunately require all of your friends to use the program so you can use the buddy list to find where they are playing. In the 2 years of playing various XBOX Live games I meet cool people all the time and add them to my friends list. Some people I meet online there is no way we would exchange AIM, Yahoo, MSN or ICQ names but on XBOX Live it's cool to add each other to the friends list just to play games together. Remember that with XBOX Live you never have to write down, copy, paste or distribute an IP address to your friends or new people you meet online.
Bandwidth Requirements:
With Xbox Live people basically host their own games or join another Xbox Live users hosted game. Most games aren't 32-64 player battles so it works out nicely. Just to give you an idea how well it works I've been able to host 8 way MM3 & PGR2 games with full voice chat for everyone and no lag on a variety of connections such as 128k/2.0mb cable and 384k/384k DSL connection. Games like Rainbow Six 3 do take up more bandwidth so you may have to limit the players to ~6 depending on your upload. Halo2 like mentioned above seems to operate 16way with full voice on a 384k/3.0mb connection just fine which is amazing..
New features to be used in the future:
These features except for the MSN Messenger integration were just rolled out on April 22nd. Future games will have to be programmed in order to take advantage of these features.
TEAMS
What It Is: Developer support for integrating team/clan functionality into their titles.
What It Means to You: It’s all tightly integrated into the service with built-in support for messaging, stats, competitions, storage, and presence. Just Imagine: A kind of automated clan communication set up that notifies the entire team of matches, strategy, and even competitions.
COMPETITIONS
What It Is: Easily build different types of competitions into titles that can be created and administered by the publisher and/or users.
What It Means to You: It’s all tightly integrated with the rest of the service and makes playing in and creating competitions a total breeze.
Just Imagine: Creating your own tournament and having Xbox Live do all of the work for you…you just create, invite, and play.
TITLE MANAGED ONLINE STORAGE
What It Is: Provides user profile data storage along with a simple way for titles to dynamically manage game influencing data on the fly.
What It Means to You: Create and share mottos, emblems, and custom content along with titles; create and update maps, rosters, and other environment data.
Just Imagine: Creating a custom logo for your squad and playing on maps that you have just created!
As you probably understand what makes all these upcoming features so cool is future games will have them all built in. No need to use a 3rd party program or web pages to run leagues, manage clans or anything. The upcoming Rainbow Six: Black Arrow game and Halo2 should support built in tournaments and clans.
Price:
Xbox Live costs $50 for a 12month subscription or $5.99 per month. The two most recent packages MS just released to coincide Xbox Live 3.0 rollout are the following
In addition to the new Xbox Live features, Microsoft Corp. also announced the availability of a new three-month subscription Xbox Live Starter Kit, introducing an already rapidly growing online community with a more broad and diverse pool of gamers. The new Starter Kit offers consumers a new, more accessible, three-month subscription to Xbox Live, an Xbox Live Communicator and game demos of "MechAssault" (Microsoft Game Studios) and "MotoGP" (THQ.) The new three-month Xbox Live Starter Kit will be available for $39.99.
Next week, the 12-month Xbox Live Starter Kit will be updated and packaged with a 12-month subscription to Xbox Live, an Xbox Live Communicator and a full version of the award-winning "Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge," from Microsoft Game Studios. "Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge" launched in the fall of 2003 to glowing reviews highlighting the software's stunning graphics and superior Xbox Live gameplay. The standard Xbox Live Starter Kit is available at $69.99.
If MS had just added basic TCP/IP software on it and let developers deal with it then themselves it would be free like PS2/PC is but as you see you get a lot more with all integration that's built into every current game and all future games. Hopefully all of the above features show exactly why Xbox Live costs a little bit of money and what you actually get with that money. I find the $50 per YEAR price to be very affordable and well worth the price.
Please shackmsg me any comments that I could fix. I'm sure it has tons of spelling errors and bad grammar. I'll try to update this and make it easier to read in the future.
Disclaimer because idiots exist:
Sadly I feel I need to write this since people get way to defensive about their respective systems and start to act like morons. I am not a PC, PS2 or Gamecube hater. I have been playing Multiplayer PC games since Dwango in 1994. I owned & ran Frag.com which was a popular site during the quake1/quake2 era. I helped organize Quakecon 1997-1999 and even paid $1,300 of my own money (me and sTeve split the bill) at QC'97 for a portable power generator since the hotels power kept going out due to all the computers.
I probably put more hours into quakeworld then any other game in my life. So please spare me the "you just hate PC games" and I am a Xbox "fanboy". I like good products and don't give a shit what platform it's on. Xbox Live does some great things and that's why I am a fan of it. If any other platform had the features above I would be praising that. Hopefully the above descriptions & examples will help people understand why myself & a lot of other shackers are fans of the system.
armybob