Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• Gamerscore:Each Xbox LIVE game can assign Gamer Points to individual achievements, as we’ll soon discuss. These points are applied to your Gamerscore, which starts at 0 when you open the account. The higher your Gamescore, the more experienced you are, generally speaking, though many hard-core gamers only play in multiplayer matches that don’t provide multiplayer achievements and thus might have deceptively low Gamerscores. Likewise, those with higher Gamerscores could be achievement point addicts, or even cheating.

• Gamercard:Your Xbox LIVE Gamercard combines your Gamertag, Gamer Picture, Rep, Gamerscore, and Gamer Zone into a single, easily viewable overview of your Xbox LIVE account, or gamer persona.

• Messages:Using an e-mail-like system, Xbox LIVE members can send messages to each other using text, audio, and video. These messages aren’t ever broadcast via normal e-mail systems (via the e-mail associated with your Microsoft account), but you can view and respond to received messages, and create new ones, on the Xbox 360 and via the Xbox website, as shown in Figure 10-13.

• Friends list:As with Facebook and other social networking services, you can “friend” other people online, send and receive friend requests, see what your friends are doing online in real time, send messages to friends, and more. The Xbox LIVE Friends list is sorted by online status, so that online friends are listed first.

Figure 10-13:You can access the Xbox LIVE Messages functionality via the web.

• Players list:Xbox LIVE tracks the players you’ve most recently played against so you can find them again later and request a rematch, send feedback (positive or negative), or send a friend request.

• Games list:Xbox LIVE also tracks the games you’ve most recently played on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Windows 8, as well as the achievements you’ve most recently earned, including all of the achievements earned in each played game. Friends can examine your account to see which games you’ve played, and which achievements you’ve earned, and compare them to their own results.

If you’re an avid game player, one of the best reasons to join Xbox LIVE is, well, the games. And among the cream of the crop are those games that get people together so they can compete against each other online.

On the Xbox 360, the most common of these types of games, the multiplayer games, are online shooters, such as those in the Call of Duty , Gears of War , and Halo series. But there are many other wildly popular online game types on Xbox LIVE as well, including real-time strategy, racing, and, Kinect titles, the latter of which use that device’s motion-sensing and voice technologies to provide unique experiences.

Aside from facing off against your friends and others, Xbox LIVE also offers an achievements system in which games can offer between 200 and 1,000 achievement points, usually via a large number of individual achievements. When you do trigger an achievement—perhaps by completing an in-game level or other task— the console displays the ever-popular Achievement Unlocked notification, providing the name of the achievement. You can tap a button on the Xbox 360 controller to learn more, including how many achievement points you’ve earned and the description of the achievement. You can also view your overall Gamerscore to see how the achievement points affected things.

Although 200 to 1,000 achievement points seems like a wide range, it is, in fact, even wider than that.

Xbox LIVE games for Windows Phone, and Xbox LIVE Arcade titles, which tend to be shorter and much less expensive than normal Xbox LIVE titles, typically provide 200 achievement points that can be spread out over up to 12 individual achievements. Retail Xbox LIVE games for the Xbox 360 and Windows 8 typically provide 1,000 achievement points, which can occur over as many as 50 individual achievements. But Microsoft has also expanded the achievement points system for those game makers that wish to support their games with add-on packs that extend gameplay and provide new features. For those games, it’s possible to have as many as 1,750 achievement points, over as many as three separate add-on packs.

Xbox LIVE games also support a feature called leaderboards, which are ranked lists that are relevant to the individual game. In a shooter like those in the Call of Duty series, for example, there are leaderboard lists for most overall points, most overall victories, most victories per game type, and so on.

While Xbox LIVE was originally conceived as an online service for the Xbox video game consoles, Microsoft ported it to Windows, poorly, as Games for Windows – LIVE in 2006. Games for Windows – LIVE is pretty lackluster, only offering a subset of the capabilities you get with Xbox LIVE on the 360. But it still exists and Microsoft has pledged to continue supporting it in Windows 8, even though it supports only those games that run via the legacy Windows desktop. We won’t examine it in more detail here because nothing has changed.

In the years since creating this weird offshoot of Xbox LIVE, Microsoft also created the Windows Phone platform, which debuted in 2010. One of the major features of that platform was an integrated version of Xbox LIVE.

Unlike Games for Windows – LIVE, Xbox LIVE for Windows Phone wasn’t a horrible compromise, and it provided access to great Xbox LIVE games, with achievements and other Xbox LIVE features. Xbox LIVE on Windows Phone was so successful, in fact, that Microsoft decided to bring it to Windows 8 as well.

Windows 8 also includes apps for Xbox entertainment services, including Xbox Music and Xbox Video.

So what’s the difference between Xbox LIVE (for Windows 8) and Games for Windows – LIVE? It’s two-fold. First, Xbox LIVE works with Metro-style games on Windows 8, not desktop-based games. Second, Microsoft has created new Xbox LIVE user experiences for Windows 8 that mirror those it created first for Windows Phone. These experiences take the form of two apps, for now, called Xbox Games and Xbox Companion.

Like so many Metro-style apps in Windows 8, Xbox Games and Xbox Companion are connected apps, meaning that they require you to sign in with a Microsoft account. As always, it’s easiest if you simply sign in to your Windows 8 PC or device using a Microsoft account. But if you are using a local account type, you can sign in to a Microsoft account the first time you run either of these apps.

The Xbox Games app is identified only as Games on the app’s live tile and in All Apps.

Xbox Games is the front end to all of your Xbox LIVE game activities on Windows 8, and oddly enough that includes a ton of Xbox 360-related functionality, too. If you’re familiar with the Games hub in Windows Phone, you will see the functional similarities, though the Windows Phone interface lacks the links to Microsoft’s dedicated gaming console. And if you’re familiar with the Xbox 360, you’ll immediately recognize that the Metro-style Xbox Games app is very much based on the console’s Dashboard user experience. You can see this app in Figure 10-14.

Xbox Games is a standard, horizontally oriented, Metro-style user experience, but with one twist. Yes, it’s divided into a series of groups that extend from left to right, like other Metro experiences. As with the Xbox entertainment apps, Music, and Video, Xbox Games does not start up oriented at the left edge of its extended, multi-screen user interface. So while you can scroll to the right when you first enter the app, you can also, oddly, scroll to the left.