Xbox 360

Migrating Saved Games to Xbox 360 Cloud Saved Games

Richard Green on

So you’ve been playing on your Xbox 360 for sometime and you’ve built up a collection of saved games, all stored locally on your consoles hard drive. You’ve heard about the new Cloud Saved Games feature in the new Xbox dashboard update and want to be able to transfer (move, migrate, whatever you want to call it) your existing saves there for anywhere access?

The process is fairly painless and easy to complete, however it would have been nice if it was automated as part of enabling the Cloud Saved Games service. There is a gotcha to be careful of, but once you take it into account it’s plain sailing.

First off, you need to enable the Cloud Saved Games feature. You can do this by following my previous post Enabling Xbox 360 Cloud Saved Games at http://richardjgreen.net/2011/12/08/enabling-xbox-360-cloud-saved-games/.

Once you have enabled the Cloud Saved Games feature, do the following:

  1. Navigate to the Settings tab and select System.
  2. From System, select Storage, and from Storage, select Hard Drive to see the locally saved content.
  3. Within Hard Drive, select Games and Apps.
  4. Highlight a game that you want to migrate to the Cloud Saved Games service, and Press Y (Game Options).
  5. From Game Options, select the Move option, whereby you will be presented with a list of available storage devices. Select Cloud Saved Games and your game saves will be migrated across.

The migration process will detect the files which are game saves and the files which are updates, DLC and other non-save content. Using Forza Motorsport 4 as an example, with the installed files, it uses 3.3GB of hard disk space, however with a 500MB limit on your Cloud Saved Games service, you will obviously not be able to store all of this online. Fortunately, because the save files are detected for you, only the 20-30MB save file is actually moved.

This does mean that if you roam onto a friend or another persons console without that game already installed (and you have taken your game disc with you to play on) you will have to install the content first, but being able to have you save follow you is what is important and useful here.

The gotcha I mentioned earlier is relating to multi-player consoles. In my household, the wife and the kids use the console too. In my case, Dance Central 2 has saves for four people within it. Select the Move option against the ensure Dance Central 2 container would migrate everyone’s save to my cloud and would also grant me ownership of those saves, preventing the others access to their own saves.

In these instances, you will need to do the following:

  1. Drill into the game itself by selecting it with the A button.
  2. Highlight your own personal save file (the save file will show the Gamertag of the player on the right beneath the file size) and select it with the A button.

You will now have an option to move the save to the Cloud Saved Games service and this will only move your own save without effecting those of other players. I’m hoping that a future update might resolve this gotcha and will allow it to detect the ownership of other saves and as such, only move your own personal files, but time will tell on this one.

Enabling Xbox 360 Cloud Saved Games

Richard Green on

One of the new features included with the Xbox 360 Dashboard update this week is the ability to store your saved games in the new Cloud Saved Games service. The service is free to Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers and allows you up to 500MB of storage for your game saves.

Enabling the feature is simple and is done as follows:

  1. Login to your console using your Windows Live ID (Xbox LIVE Gamertag).
  2. Scroll to the Settings tab on the new dashboard, and select System Settings.
  3. Within System Settings, select Storage.
  4. From Storage, highlight Cloud Saved Saves and Press Y on the controller (Device Options).
  5. Select Enable Cloud Saved Games.

You’re done.

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t enabled by default for Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers, which I think that it should be, and I also think that as part of the dashboard update, you should be prompted upon first login if you want to migrate your saves to the Cloud, however it’s possible this may come in a later update?

With the shoe on the other foot however, I can see Microsoft’s dilemma. Storage isn’t free in the cloud (contrary to the belief of many). Disabling the feature by default and not automatically prompting people to use the service allows them to under provision storage reducing cost, because your local hard disk doesn’t cost Microsoft anything compared to Cloud storage.

Although the Cloud Saved Games feature has been advertised by people like Major Distortion and other people online, I think it’s been pretty under-played compared to the dashboard update itself, or the Xbox Companion App for Windows Phone 7 and iOS. It’s a shame, because the feature is really powerful and adds a new dimension to console, being able to ‘carry your saves around with you’.

The Day the Logitech Harmony One Works

Richard Green on

We’ve been lucky enough to have a Logitech Harmony One touchscreen multifunction remote control for little over a year now and it’s safe to say that it is probably the best amount money you could spend on your TV and front room electronic devices purely for it’s power and potential and the Logitech software albeit a little cumbersome and slow has enough options and features to keep anyone satisfied – Anyone but me.

At home, we have a Samsung LE40R88BD which is about two years old now. Ever since I configured the Harmony for our TV there has been a problem – It doesn’t switch between inputs properly.

In its efforts to be intelligent, the TV skips over some inputs when they are determined to be off but this isn’t so for the entire suite of inputs, so HDMI for example is skipped, while the SCART inputs or the Component is not skipped over meaning that the Harmony has always had problems getting you to the right channel for the correct viewing device.

When at Nicky’s dads house recently and adjusting his Harmony setup for him, I noticed his remote Harmony configuration for his newer Samsung LE40A686M1F gave him access to direct input buttons such as HDMI 1, 2 and so forth which made me very jealous because his remote worked exactly how it is supposed to.

About three months ago, I sat on the remote after one of the children hid it under our beanbag and needless to say, the screen took the brunt of my weight. The touchscreen still works, but you cannot see about two thirds of the display meaning I am the only person in the house able to use these buttons purely through memory of their position.

I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas, which, with built-in infra-red and Media Center Extender support meant I would need to add this to the Harmony, however this gives me a problem. If we can’t see the screen how are we going to see the new buttons and this could cause a problem for channel switching also.

I decided to perform an experiment. I added the model code for Nicky’s dads TV set to our remote as a second TV and didn’t make it part of any of our activities configured on the remote, and I memorised the position of the HDMI input buttons. When I took to our TV with these buttons, to my surprise the commands were received by the TV and they worked.

I’ve now since removed our original TV from the Harmony configuration and replaced it in all of the activities with Mick’s model TV meaning that the Harmony now takes us directly to the correct input for each activity and also allows me to control the Xbox 360.

The lesson to be learnt: Although the Harmony software gives you excellent control over your devices, don’t always assume it’s right, and experiment from time to time.

Stealth Patch

Richard Green on

So ever since the firmware update 1.8 for the PlayStation 3, media sharing has not been working for me, nor many other people if you believe anything you read on the Sony PlayStation 3 forums.

Firmware update 1.8 according to Sony fixes some little bugs which are nothing to do with media sharing? So why did it break – The answer it nobody seems to know – Everything else on the PlayStation works fine, although some users reported issues with Folding@Home not that I ever use this, but media sharing is an issue for me being that I like to listen to music or watch something DivX via the network after Sony released the DivX update for the PS3 late last year – Before Microsoft released it for the XB360 may I add 🙂

Read more…