Tag Archives: maps

Xbox SmartGlass and Forza Horizon: Cool Tech, When It Works

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Forza Horizon logoBack in November 2012, Forza Horizon was one of the first games to get support for Xbox SmartGlass. If you’re unaware, Xbox SmartGlass is Microsoft’s “second-screen” technology for users to enhance their Xbox experience via a tablet. It’s cool stuff that I briefly talked about back in November when it first came out.

Forza Horizon is one of the seven currently-released games for Xbox 360 that actually supports SmartGlass – and the only one that I own – so I was excited to give it a try the other day. Its big feature in the game is to offload the map to your tablet, making it a little easier to navigate the game’s big open world. In my limited testing so far, this definitely falls into the camp of a promising technology that just doesn’t nail the execution.

Read on for more of my experience with Forza Horizon and Xbox SmartGlass

Getting Lost in The Witcher 2: How Not to Build a Map

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I may have to ask this dwarf for directions, but he looks pretty angry…

Nobody likes getting lost, let’s be honest. It’s frustrating, because there’s usually somewhere else that you’d rather be, and unless you happen to be lost on a beach in Hawaii somewhere, you just want to get to your destination. Even worse is when you keep ending up going in circles – at least if you’re seeing new territory, it feels like progress is being made.

Being lost isn’t any more fun in video games. Last week I talked about how Dice Poker in The Witcher 2 features a UI that is an exercise in needless frustration. The Witcher 2 makes another appearance on that game’s ux this week because the game makes it nearly impossible to figure out where you’re going. And there’s not even anybody that you can ask for directions.

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