Don’t get me started about how lame the new avatar system is either. In a blatant ripoff of the Wii’s Mii feature, the 360 now makes us setup an avatar to be associated with our XBL account. If I wanted to play a cutesie, made-for-4th-graders console I’d had bought a Wii already.

IANster's Xbox 360 avatar

The only thing that saves the new Xbox 360 Experience from being a total waste is that we can now stream Netflix Watch Instantly content to our 360. I tested this with a couple of different shows and had mixed results. First I watched the movie Enchanted, and was disappointed to see that it was presented in 4:3 Full Screen mode, and was only in 2 channel stereo. Yuck. The second title I watched was the first episode of Jericho. Thankfully this was at least in wide screen, but again it was only in 2 channel stereo. Both titles were noticeably compressed and looked worse than even watching them on a bad satellite TV channel.

While this probably isn’t the fault of the Xbox 360 or Microsoft, it still isn’t the best experience, and I doubt that I will be paying for XBL Gold Membership if this is the only feature worth using and it remains half-baked.

UPDATE: Here is more info on the Netflix stream encoding process.

I should start this mini review with a disclaimer: I had high hopes for 2K Sports’ MLB series after I read that EA’s Ben Brinkman (who had worked on MVP Baseball) was coming over to 2K to work on MLB. Unfortunately, now that I’ve been playing MLB 2K8 on my Xbox 360 for the past week and a half, I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed.

There are so many problems with this game it isn’t funny. I’m sick and tired of waiting all season for a new baseball game only to find that the new one is just as crappy as the last. Especially after they hype it up all year, talking about how great it’s going to be. This game gets an F in my book.

My personal commentary on the series is this: They’ve lost sight of what really matters in a baseball game, and that’s just freakin’ PLAYING BASEBALL. They spend way too much time on new features (like the stupid baseball card simulator) and making the uniforms ripple in the wind, and not enough time just making the game work. Until they refocus on game play, this series will continue to suck, year after year.

The good:

• Graphics look good
• Presentation looks nice as well
• Current rosters
• You can play baseball
• ESPN News is integrated into the bottom of the screen, just like a real broadcast

The bad:

• Tons and tons of bugs:
  • Mid-game announcements routinely get things wrong: like announcers talking about hitting an inside the park homer, yet I’ve never hit one
  • Presentation stats are often wrong: when I went to the post season in Franchise mode the first game showed that the pitchers had a 0-0 win-loss record (like they would in the first post season game), but they showed ERAs and strike outs from the regular season
  • Half the time the new pitching system won’t recognize my controller inputs and will fail to execute the second half of a pitch, resulting in an extremely annoying meatball
• The new pitching systems SUCKS big time. I’m almost always throwing meatballs.
• Base running controls suck more than they did last time, especially with more than one runner on base. I’m constantly sending runners to the wrong place. Oh and this time it takes twice as long for the runner to stop and go back to a base
• I still hit more homers and doubles than base hits
• The AI seems to throw way more strikes than balls
• That could be because its twice as hard to figure out if a pitch will be a ball than last time
• Fielding a player in the first couple seconds is weird, often I’ll be controlling the wrong guy by default and will miss a routine ground ball.
• After a visit to the mound I’ll hit A to skip the cutscene, but the game will both skip the cut scene and throw a meatball pitch down the center of the plate (when using the 2K7 pitching controls)

</rant>

Sorry to all my friends and family that wanted to play this game with me. I guess it will be 3-4 weeks before we can plan another Rock Band party

Stupid Microsoft.

The few tracks they have are a lot of fun. They’re pretty hard though, harder then GH2. I’m more excited about Rock Band though

Phew! This game is awesome! It’s been talking up almost all of my time recently. I’m about 20% of the way through the game and probably 40% through the career mode. There’s just something about taking a car and customizing it to the point that it only resembles the original car in its body shape. Take my Turbo IS350 for example. I’ve ramped it up from it’s default class C482 to a class U999, which means its higher ranked than just about anything on the street.

That’s what happens though when you can upgrade everything from the engine block to the width of the tires. I love it!

Update: This car is rated U999 with the following stats:

• Top Speed 7.3
• Acceleration 7.0
• Braking 6.1
• Handling 5.8
• Rarity 9.4

Here are some specs:

• Turbo charged 6-cylinder, V6, producing 685 hp @ 7,300 RPM
• K&N Intake
• Magnaflow Exhaust
• XS Engineering Race Turbo
• OMP America racing seat, harness, and roll cage

Update: You can follow my Forza 2 photostream at Flickr!

So far I’ve been playing the demo and these are my best lap times:
0:52.804 – #4 Corvette C6.R
1:01.645 – Ferrari F430

Speaking of baseball, the Angels have their first game in only 11 days! Woo hooo!!! The first game I’m going to is on April 25th versus the lowly Devil Rays. I didn’t buy season tickets this year, so I decided to just buy a few games here and there… and get much better seats.