Continue reading ‘Grand Theft Auto IV Spotify Playlists - Electro-Choc’
Spotify has become my main way of listening to music at home, though I’ll leave the discussion of that to another day. I’m also playing ‘The Lost and Damned’ addon to Grand Theft Auto IV at the moment, which has inspired me to check out some of the bands on GTA IV’s many radio stations (continuing the trend of my musical tastes being defined by what game I’m playing!). So over the next few posts I’ll be posting links to Spotify playlists for my favourite stations, with URLs that should jump you straight into Spotify.
The one downside is that a lot of the bands aren’t listed on Spotify so it’s not 100%, wherever I’ve not inserted a URL to a track in the post, it means I couldn’t find it in Spotify. If you can, let me know. Also, any track with a (!) means that the track in Spotify isn’t the original album track, but from something like a compilation album, again if you can find the original track in Spotify, let me know.
Lastly, just a note that the stations and the tracks are in the order they appear in the back of the manual, rather than Wikipedia or any other source.
Click on the logo of the radio station you want to listen to and jump to the relevant post.
Pros
- It’s responsive.
- Downloading games to the hard disk is a fantastic feature, making the Xbox 360 so much quieter.
- The whole interface reminds me of the various media centre apps out at the moment, with context sensitive backgrounds and information.
- The mini guide that appears when you press in the Xbox guide button is fast and actually useful.
- You can delete 0 gamerscore games, bye bye old arcade demos and Perfect Dark Zero.
Cons
- The majority of the tabs are advertising. Spotlight, Inside Xbox, Games, Movies etc.
- The friends tab is completely unusable if you have more than a handful of friends. It has gone from a list to a side-by-side lineup of everyone’s avatars, which is slow to load and looks awful. I have 99 on my list (which guarantees that there’s someone out there playing the same game as me!) and it looks a mess. Thankfully the mini-guide has an old school friends list.
- The whole marketplace is slow, slower than the old one. Though I’ll put this one down to the NXE only being out for a few hours.
- Old themes are almost useless now as the majority of the dashboard is taken up by a grey background. Remember people, no refunds!
- The Miis - er I mean avatars appear to be a piecemeal attempt to tempt some of the illusive casual Wii playing market. So far I can’t see the point of them. Also the level of customisation is in fact less diverse than the lower fidelity Miis. Why can’t I have a blue shirt? Because it was only developed in green. Go figure.
So I sound quite negative. However installing games to the hard drive is such a great feature, I’m willing to put up with all the cons!
With more details of the New Xbox Experience (NXE) trickling out as well as the first sightings of the ‘Live Your Moment’ advertising campaign on TV and online, it seems the marketing juggernaught at Microsoft is on the move and trying and steal some of the lucrative casual market from Nintendo.
Firstly we have a trio of adverts, which I do kind of like as they get my attention, aren’t completely off the wall (This Is Not Living) and aren’t sensationalist like the old ‘cradle to the grave’ Xbox ad. When I first saw the Rock Band one I thought at first it was going to be an advert for Orange, it just kind of had that ‘vibe’. The simple statements like ‘Music Games on Xbox 360′ feels a bit like the Apple iPod adverts that state ‘iPod + iTunes’.
Rock Band/Rock Band 2
HD Movie Downloads
Lego Batman
Next up with have the Xbox.com UK site (http://www.xbox.com/en-gb/default.htm). The whole front page at the moment is a massive Flash advert (hey Microsoft, I thought we were all supposed to be using Silverlight now?)
Like the massive Christmas campaigns for the 360 over the last couple of years, I hope this campaign gets people who would otherwise dismiss games as toys for kids to join in the fun. The questions are, will they go too far and end up alienating the core fans - the hardcore - like Nintendo seem hell bent on doing and what will Sony and Nintendo come up with in response?
EA is known for reaching new levels of diabolicalness with their extortionate prices for Rock Band 1 in the UK and releasing Rock Band 1 in other parts of Europe and Australia only now even though Rock Band 2 is out in the USA and was going for a a third by keeping silent about when Rock Band 2 would be reaching UK shores. Now an Xbox 360 TV ad has answered the question we were all asking: when is Rock Band 2 being released in the UK?
Answer: November!
Videogamer.com has the advert online: http://www.videogamer.com/news/25-09-2008-9474.html
I recently picked up a LG Blu-ray/HD DVD drive for my HTPC (model number LG GGW-H20L), along with Casino Royale and Batman Begins to show it off. Blu-ray is indeed a step up from DVD, though not quite the revelation that was VHS to DVD. There is one movie however, which has been acclaimed as the disc to pick up if you want to really appreciate the jump to high-definition: Blade Runner.
I spent today burning through Gears of War on insane difficulty with my brother, which was quite an fun way to breach the 10000 point barrier.
Regarding Gears of War itself, there are only two observations I have- firstly the cooperative AI is too daft to play the game on insane difficulty solo, and secondly you can’t stop the Cole Train, baby.