Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

So, I’m sure everyone has heard all about the next-gen.biz interview with Marc Whitten (general manager of Xbox Live). This is the interview where he reveals there will be no spring update and also mentions delisting poorly performing XBLA titles.

I need to address both of these issues, because while a lot of people are foaming at the mouth over not having a spring update, people need to make special note of what Whitten actually said.

In response to a question about the spring update, he said the following:

We have taken a different approach this spring and spent a lot of our time and resources of building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service not just today but also into the future.

Remember the Xbox Live outages over the holidays? Well, sounds to me like Microsoft is focusing resources on reinforcing the Xbox Live backend instead of developing new UI tweaks. And rightly so, in my opinion. To build a network like Xbox Live really is a massive undertaking, and I personally don’t see a problem with MS spending some of that “spring update budget” on beefing up the network hardware.

It should also be noted that while there is no Spring Update coming, they are releasing a tool to transfer the DRM licenses for XBL content you’ve purchased to a different console. THANK YOU, Microsoft! This is something they should’ve had from the beginning, but better late then never. I still am curious about some of the details of this tool. For instance, will it be an all or nothing prospect? Will I be able to transfer content to a different gamertag? We’ll have to wait and see I suppose.

The other major component of this interview was the revelation that poorly performing titles will be delisted. First of all, I have a major issue with something that Marc Whitten said:

Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.

So, allow me to translate for the marketing-speak impaired. They are getting rid of titles to make QUALITY titles easier to find. Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t you improve the interface so that better quality titles are easier to find from a UI perspective? Microsoft is going to use Metacritic and sales to determine when a title should be delisted. Why not have an option to sort the titles by popularity? or sort by Metacritic (like Steam allows)?

And another thing, I actually have a major problem with using Metacritic to decide whether a title is quality or not. Metacritic is only an average. And an average is only useful in the proper context. What was the standard deviation for this set of review scores? Which reviews were given what weight in the Metacritic weighted average? And I also personally believe that indie titles, that often eschew mainstream genres don’t always get the best review scores or have the best sales.

Take Wartech Senko no Ronde, for instance. If this were an XBLA title, it’s paltry 59 Metacritic score and lackluster sales would certainly place it on the delisting chopping block. It’s a strange game, being part fighting game and part shmup. It also happens to be one of my favorite games.

It’s a perfect example of one of the problems with the Metacritic paradigm. Titles that don’t neatly fit into pre-defined genres often get poor reviews. Hard-core fighting game fansites will hate the shmup aspects, and hard-core shmup fansites will hate the fighting game aspects. Thus, they end up getting lower review scores than a title that fits neatly into one genre or another.

It’s interesting to me that XBLA, the platform that Microsoft has been trying to tout as indie-developer friendly is implementing a very indie-UNfriendly policy of delisting previously released titles. This is extremely disappointing, because reducing the size of your catalog is a poor substitute for improving the way that the catalog is accessed.