Microsoft has been threatening, ever since J Allard plopped down on the stage at E3 2005 in his fashionable hoodie/blazer combo, to give Xbox 360 users the chance—nay, the power—to create their own content and unleash it on an unsuspecting cyberpublic. Yeah, I scoffed at the time, due largely to the hamfisted presentation more than the concept itself. It was unclear what form this user-created content would take (other than we knew for sure we’d be getting a sweet-ass Amped 2 scarf from Ve1ocityGir1). In fact, a year later, following E3 2006, I was more or less convinced that their vision for sharing user content had been relegated to using the Xbox Live Vision Camera to change your gamerpic into a glorious snapshot of your genitals.

The basic idea is strong, as any PC gamer can quickly tell you: give players the tools to create their own skins, maps, images, et. al., and watch your product thrive. You’d think Microsoft would understand this as well as anyone, and that they’d be eager to leverage their system’s strongest selling point, its online connectivity and community, to make trading, sharing, and monetizing user content a hallmark of the 360. But they’ve been more or less silent.

Enter the users.

Project Gotham Racing 3, an Xbox 360 launch title, had an amazingly addictive and satisfying photo mode, allowing you to snap pics of your very best car porn in any of its meticulously renderend locales. Problem was, once you took the perfect photo, it was essentially stranded on your console. So much for leveraging that community. Well, that’s where the gamers took over. Resourceful little haxxorz figured out a way, using a memory card transfer kit and a homebrew app, to retrieve those images from their putty-colored prison and put them on their PC, or online, where they belong.

Seems Microsoft, or Bizarre Creations at least, is responding. A new photo contest for PGR3 offers players the opportunity to finally, legally, retrieve their photos for use online and on their PCs. I’m really eager to see the shots that come from this contest, particularly in light of what I’ve recently seen from the NCAA 07 community on the same topic…

NCAA Football 07 on the 360 also has a snapshot mode, which allows you to freeze the action, manipulate the camera, then take a photo that’s saved to your hard drive. Football fans are using a similar method to the PGR3 one described above to amass a collection of their own in-game pictures.

What’s truly unique and interesting about these photos is the degree to which they completely crush EA’s own marketing promotional screens. That seems crazy to say, considering the reputation publishers (not just EA) have for using doctored screens to promote their games. But it’s true. And I can prove it. Check out this pair of screens that appear on the official NCAA 07 site to showcase the 360 version:

Not bad. They’re competent, and they gave me just enough faith in the game to make me give it a chance. However, I was certainly heard to say such curmudgeonly things as, “I expected more on the 360 six months after Madden.” And you’d certainly expect more from the EA hype machine. Remember the infamous Madden 360 draft-day commercial?

So, imagine my surprise—and delight—to see a thread at Operation Sports, now some 40+ pages long, of users sharing their own in-game photos. And imagine my shock to discover that they’re not just of a similar caliber to those I’ve seen on the official site, they absolutely bury them. Honestly, some of these shots would make a Sports Illustrated photographer jealous and definitely demonstrate that user-created content can be a pretty damned exciting thing. Here are some samples to illustrate the point (along with attribution to the forum poster who captured the image):

This last guy, reverend_heat, could go ahead and release a book of his imitation sports photography right now and I’d buy it. You should really see the two dozen or so photos he’s posted over the course of that thread—if only to see them in their original, tasty resolution—unbelievable.

So, consider my faith in the future of user content high—through no doing of Microsoft, but rather the efforts of resourceful, obsessive video game fans, like you and me.

Now, bring on the Xbox Live Vision Camera . . . I can’t wait to see if the camera adds ten pounds to my genitals.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 1:38 am and is filed under General Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.