Microsoft yet again bungles a PR move. If your disk drive is defective, you get a free game… but if your entire console doesn’t work, you don’t.
“The digital download is only for the folks having issues with their disc drive because we want to ensure our advance exchange customers can stay in the game,” a Microsoft representative told CNET.
I can’t figure out how to turn a game off. The home button sends you to the home screen, but it pauses the game and the audio is still playing in the background. Can you not just exit a game?
I don’t think you can. I know that starting another game will end the previous game. Turning off the Xbox will also end the game. That’s the only two ways I’ve figured out so far.
I believe you can hit the menu button on the running game tile and it will give you the option to close it.
That’s what I do if I want to completely close the game and not be able to resume it. The menu button is where you find all the extended options throughout the UI.
Wendelius
Galadin
4674
Okay, hit my first big bug with the system. It seems that when the Xbox1 has been in sleep mode for awhile, it has issues with the HDMI input. Last night we got home, turned on the system, and the TV input would freeze after 5 seconds, and then the system would say it didn’t have a signal. At first I thought this was something with my FIOS box, so I rebooted it completely. However, issue was still there. I finally rebooted the Xbox1 and it cleared up. After doing some research, it seems like this is affecting some people (of course, no way to know how many and if it is a hardware or software issue.)
One of the fixes is to change the power settings so it doesn’t go into standby mode, and just turns off. Of course, this means the Kinect isn’t listening and you have to hit the power button on the box to turn it on.
Since my brother was here for the Thanksgiving holiday, I took my Xbox to my parent’s place where everyone is staying (my other brother lives in town and my eldest brother will be driving to town tonight). My dad has Dish Network so we set up the Xbox to be the media hub. He has an old obscure Sony receiver to which my dad lost the remote control years ago, so he was sure the Xbox wouldn’t be able to talk to it. Same with the giant Olevia TV he has.
But we set it up and it all worked beautifully. Only hitch is that the Oneguide has the SD and HD versions of the local channels switched. We couldn’t find a manual way to change that yet. Other than that, everyone was pretty impressed. Plus once you’ve setup the oneguide for cable, you can add channels from Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Crackle, etc. It’s pretty nice.
One creepy thing though is how my brother signed in and the Xbox automatically logged him into his Amazon Prime account and his Netflix account. With the 360 we could share accounts on services sometimes when we know each other’s passwords on each service, but now it recognizes our faces and knows what we subscribe to and what we don’t. It’s… unsettling.
Malderi
4676
Is there a searchable list somewhere that shows all the devices that the Xbone has presets for? I have a modern receiver that I’m sure would be up there, but I also have a recent projector and I’m not sure how complete that list is.
There are likely hundreds of them, and it’s a list they can keep updating with the correct codes for new devices. But I haven’t seen a full searchable list of all the choices, I’m afraid. If you post the make and model of your devices, I can try and have a look for them if you’d like.
Wendelius
Malderi
4678
The receiver is the entry level Pioneer from last year, so I assume it’s on there.
My projector is the Viewsonic PJD7820HD (I’ve seen it listed without the HD at the end). Thanks, I appreciate it.
Some of the multiple profiles thing is brilliant and some is just a mess sometimes. Like when I take the controller from my brother and the interface automatically switches to my stuff? That’s kinda cool.
But then, sometimes it mixes me up with my brother or even my 7 year old nephew or sometimes our other brother. That would just be kinda funny except for how certain menus in Forza 5 handle it. If you’re in certain menus under your profile and you hand the controller over you get a message saying “please reconnect the controller”. And it refuses to take any input from the controller until you hand it back to the person whose garage/game you’re in. That’s kind of funny, but when it IS the right person holding the controller and the Kinect is just mixing up the faces on the couch? Yeah, not that funny anymore.
Another problem this presents is when I was getting frustrated with my brother struggling with the interface and being so slow about pressing the button I was telling him to press, so I grabbed the controller from him “here I’ll do it for you slow poke”.
Oh, except I can’t, can I? Because when I grab the controller from him it switched over to my interface and I couldn’t pin the thing I was trying to pin on his interface without handing the controller back to him. Sigh.
Doh! Sorry. I forgot tonight. Will check it tomorrow morning UK time.
Wendelius
After putting the Xbox through its paces with the whole family there at Thanksgiving, I’m pretty disappointed with it this year. My brother gave it a 2 star Amazon review and I pretty much agree with his comparison that this feels like Windows 3.0: lots of potential, but shit just doesn’t work yet. When it was just two or three of us doing voice commands, switching back and forth between tasks and snapping TV in the corner so we could follow the football game while we played Forza, it seemed like we were in the future.
But when it grew to 7 kids and 7 adults, and the Kinect completely stopped responding to voice commands and the TV satellite DVR feed just stopped working four or five times (requiring a hard reboot via unplugging of the powercord on the XB1), and when Forza menus refuse to go on unless you give the ccontroller to the person it misidentified as the person who is supposed to be playing, well it was just a mess. So many problems we had just couldn’t be solved without a hard reboot of the machine that I do wonder why they don’t have a button to switch off the machine, or an option to do it through the controller like on the PS4.
Instead they’ve made going into standby mode way too easy. Any passing child can accidentally brush past that glowing Xbox symbol and send the machine into standby. Heck even I accidentally pressed that “button” 5 or 6 times over the weekend as it’s the natural place the to put your hand when you’re messing with the cables in the back.
I still prefer this machine over the PS4 because I do like their launch lineup and the fact that you can at least stream music from your computer and video from your computer. But man, they’ve got some kinks to work out.
Come on Windows 3.1. Eagerly anticipating your release. Hopefully next Thanksgiving everyone will be amazed that the future has finally arrived. But it’s not here yet.
JD
4682
This seems true for pretty much all games, be it first-party or multiplatform titles. If you insert FIFA 14 for the first time, it’ll take about 35 seconds until you’re actually in the game on PS4. On Xbox One it’s more than 5 minutes.
Yeah, the PS4 shocked me with AC4 taking way less than a minute to launch. I was expecting much, much longer.
Canuck
4684
So I guess the “just make a sandwich” argument goes to the Xbox this gen?
Maybe your expectations were too high expecting a game console machine to track 14 people at once. This seems like Star Trek level type of technology. Besides having a dozen people at once is not usually how Microsoft expects XBOX to be used. It is highly likely that normal average usage shouldn’t exceed more than 4 people at once and the engineers have designed the machine accordingly. And rightly so (and which you have confirmed that it is working whenever there are only 2-3 people around).
The problem is really that Microsoft’s expectations were too high. Because a lot of this stuff that can cause you issues on the Xbox One isn’t optional, it is just built into the core of the system, and when it fails it often does so in in-your-face and annoying ways. So if you use the system in a room with more than a couple of people and don’t want unexpected shit like random game pauses to happen (because Kinect is trying to be smarter than it is), well a hearty “fuck you” for knowing too many people.
This is an endemic problem with Microsoft’s devices/entertainment groups, thus the original Kinect (“Surely you have at least 8 feet of unobstructed space in front of your tv!”) or the always-on broadband DRM system they were forced to scrap. They have this demographic of console user in mind that is far less representative of the masses than they think, and when you don’t match their expectations exactly, they tend not to fall back gracefully at all.
But did Microsoft ever said anywhere that its Kinect would be able to track a dozen people at once? Maybe you need to dial down your expectations a little? Sure it’s great that you know a lot of people and you’re having a party, but in that case, why switch on your console?
Maybe so they can watch the big game or some dreadful holiday movie on the Hallmark channel? shudder
If a machine is the center of living room entertainment it’s not unreasonable to expect it to be used when a lot of people are around.
