Ask X3F: Riddick-ulous edition

With so many editions of Ask X3F come and gone, one would think that we would have answered them all by now. But no, man is a curious creature, a creature whose thirst for knowledge will not be slaked. Also, it turns out, people just love asking questions about unreleased games. The most recent game-du-semaine is none other than The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Announced just over a year ago, it missed its projected 2007 release and sank into obscurity. What happened to it? Find our best theory (and feel free to submit your own) after the break Oh, and we answer other questions too.

Got a question for Ask X3F? Maybe you have a story or some information you'd like to share? Send it all to ask [at] xbox360fanboy [dawt] com.

So I was talking with some of my friends about changing the hard drives in their PSTriples (I'm not a 'phobe, some of my best friends are PS people), and lamenting the redonkulous prices of the hard drives for the 360. Is there any way to use a 3rd party hard drive on my 360, like maybe an external one connected through the USB port?

Gamertag locked.

Yes, it is possible to use your own hard drive in an Xbox 360. The only thing USB hard drives (or flash drives) can be used for is playing properly formatted video and audio files. Game saves are out of the question. Now, it is possible to use a non-official drive to store game saves, but it will take some work to do so. In other words, you'll have to be comfortable with hacking and modding.

The process involved essentially tricks your 360 into thinking an off the shelf hard drive is actually an official hard drive. The only downside, which results from the "tricking" method, is that you're still confined to a maximum of 120 gigabytes of space. Should MS ever decide to release a larger HDD, the same hack could be used to increase the allowable size accordingly.

As usual, we must remind everyone out there that cracking open your 360 automatically voids the warranty, after which Microsoft won't repair your console even if you pay them. As such, we don't recommend you do so. Any modifications are done at your own risk. If you'd like to learn about the above mentioned procedure for educational purposes, you may do so by clicking here.

I have a question. Do you think they'll ever start putting in regional filters for multiplayer in games? p2p is great in theory if people are close together, but being in the UK come 7pm we cant help but have all games dominated by americans.. meaning our own connections suffer because 99% of the games are hosted somewhere in the states. Having a simple regional filter would easily sort this and allow us constant lagless games, so what harm could an optional filter make? not only would it enhance gaming experiences gameplay wise..but it would also cut out the constant racial bitching between America and the UK. And its not like Microsoft arent charging us over $15 extra in the uk for the experience.

As far as we know, there's no reason a developer couldn't implement a feature like this in matchmaking. After all, certain games (namely Army of Two) restrict online play between certain regions, so we don't see any reason that they couldn't put that in the users control. We're guessing it all really depends on whether or not a particular developer would want to implement such a feature. Anyone out there know of any games that already include such a feature?

Hello, I have a question for your next Ask X3F.

Microsoft is planning on taking some XBLA titles off of it's marketplace, titles that aren't selling well and have low metacritic scores. Anyway...

A) Is there a list yet available of what titles that will be taken down?

B) If I own one of those titles, will I still be able to re-download the game?

Thanks!
-Rob
RenaissanceMan2

A) There is no official list of which titles will be delisted, no. We did cover a list of potential titles earlier this week though. The list takes into account all the games on XBLA that are over six months old and have an average of less than 65% on Metacritic, which are two of the criteria for delisting. The third criterion, a conversion rate of less than 6%, is unknown to everyone except Microsoft and XBLA developers, so even this list could be wrong. Still, right now it's the best we have. You can check it out here.

B) The good news is that you will always be able to redownload any of the titles you downloaded before. This was confirmed by Gamerscore Blog earlier this week. Should you delete a game that has been or eventually becomes delisted, you can still grab it from your download history. Furthermore, delisted games will still retain all the features they had when you bought them. In other words, online play, leaderboards, and the like will all still work fine. Still, in theory, delisted games should be pretty awful. Thus, in theory, anyone who redownloads one should have horrible taste.

What happened to "Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena"? I haven't seen or heard anything on this in a long time.

Also, can you please check with Bungie.net about the "Graduate" achievement glitch that some of us were unfortunate to not get? I have the graduate pin but never got the achievement. I've contacted Bungie to no avail...please help.

We couldn't tell you exactly what happened to Assault on Dark Athena. We can guess, though. While it was originally announced as a 2007 title, all signs currently point to it still being in development. The official website is still functional, allowing gamers to sign up for updates (though all this does is sign you up for a generic Sierra newsletter). The most likely explanation is that Starbreeze has put Assault on Dark Athena on hold while it works on Project RedLime for Electronic Arts. All we know about Project RedLime is that it is a new version of one of EA's "most acclaimed classic franchises."

No offense to Riddick, but we'd say that a major project for EA is probably more attractive. We wouldn't expect the Assault on Dark Athena to hit before Project RedLime (or possibly even The Darkness 2).

As for your second question, we've heard of the problem before. Unfortunately, we have no idea how to fix the problem. Also, contrary to popular belief, we don't have a direct line to Bungie HQ. There is no emergency red phone in our office (oh, how we wish there were). If anyone here has had the same problem, please feel free to recount it in the comments (whether it was solved or not). We'll see if we can't do some digging on the subject. Given how long it's been since Halo 3 launched with no apparent fix, we're guessing you might be out of luck (assuming you don't want to start a new account anyway).


That's it for this week, folks. Keep sending your questions to: ask [at] xbox360fanboy [dawt] com.