A Pirate's Life for Nintendo DS Owners
A staggering 90 percent of American Nintendo DS users play pirated games by means of special "R4" chips, according to the ELSPA's Intellectual Property Crime Unit manager John Hiller.
Hiller told The Sunday Post, "In America it’s thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s."
90 percent of Nintendo DS users? Really? If that's true -- and I'm not saying it is -- it would mean that at least 18.5 million of 20.6 million Nintendo DS owners in the U.S. are engaged in some form of DS piracy. Now since that number sounds preposterously high and to be frank, almost certainly false, let's consider the alternative interpretation: that Hiller means 90 percent of Nintendo DS pirates are using the R4 chip (as opposed to general users). I'm going to favor the second interpretation.
So what's so hot about R4 or "R4DS," i.e. "Revolution For DS"? It's a Chinese-made tool that lets you load and execute pretty much any Nintendo DS application you can find online using a computer. The flash card itself looks like a tiny unassuming piece of plastic -- a few centimeters wide, a few millimeters thick -- costs about $40, drops comfortably into your DS's card slot, and it's currently for sale all over the world.
According to this Times Online article back in November, retail stores that carry it even run signs like:
"New R4 shipment has finally arrived! You know what it does! Absolutely no questions will be answered concerning this product..."
...and
"Guaranteed for one week only! Of course we can’t explain what the R4 will do..."
It's perfectly legal to buy the chip, of course, for the same reasons it's perfectly legal to download file sharing software. It's not what you have, in other words, it's how you use it.
Believe it or not, I've never so much as attempted to play a pirated DS game, and in fact would have to admit to a certain naivete when it comes to violating hardware-enforced region- or code-specific regulations involving soldering and chip-pulling and chip-replacing, etc. The R4DS works around that sort of invasive surgery by simply tricking the DS into thinking the little piece of plastic is the Real Deal.
A quick text search on "Nintendo DS" at The Pirate Bay turns up 195 hits and what appears to be a pretty comprehensive list of DS games being downloaded, as I type this, by hundreds of users.
Poll time!
UPDATE (2/1/08): It seems Mr. Hiller was either quoted out of context or not quoted at all. Gamesindustry.biz has the scoop, wherein the ELSPA claims Hiller "didn't quote [meaning "provide a quote to"] The Sunday Post on any figures whatsoever." The ELSPA claims the Sunday Post's report is in fact a melange of incorrectly sourced material from a Singapore article with information about the R4. For some reason the author(s) of the Post piece elected to attribute the quotes to Hiller. Game On already concluded that the quotes were prima facie fallacious, though it seems even the less sweeping interpretation that "90 percent of Nintendo DS pirates are using the R4 chip" is spurious.
Grand Theft Auto IV: Have You Seen These People?
So it begins, with three posters I've nicknamed "Pushy," "Sulky," and "Sassy" (in that order) in the long and no doubt viral-hijinks-filled countdown to April 29, 2008. According to blog That Girl's Site, the author's cousin found three "wanted" posters slapped up near his place of employment, pulled them down, and let the blog author snap a couple photos. Want criminal bios? You got 'em.
There's a message at the bottom of the posters which reads "Notify the Liberty City Police Department with any information regarding the above subject" and an email which appears to read: tips@libertycitypolice.com.
Of course if you do happen to see any of the above characters for real, I highly recommend dialing 1-800-BE-SOBER instead.
[Thanks, EvilAvatar]
Sony's Gaming Division Returns to Profitability
The gaming division entire is finally back in black, says Sony, though at the same time fiscal PS3 projections for the same period were less bullish. The company's original sales goal for the fiscal year ending March 2008 was 11 million units -- that's now been reduced to 9.5 million. It means that even last minute price cuts weren't enough to rescue the controversially premium-priced PS3 from finishing the annual heat in third place...distantly.
PlayStation brand hardware as a whole stands to slot second again, abetted by sales of Sony's indefatigable PlayStation 2 and increasingly popular PlayStation Portable brands. Sony expects to sell 13 million PlayStation 2 and 13 million PSP units through March 2008.
Game-goggles off, and you see a very different picture. Thanks to strong sales of Sony's other electronic offerings (LCD TVs, Vaio personal computers, Cybershot digital cameras, etc.) the company is in fact reporting overall record sales -- up 9.6 percent with net profit up 25 percent to $1.76 billion for the final three months of its fiscal year.
cool. now that i'm interested - do one for microsoft since they do other things too.
and how is nintendo doing? (do they do anything else besides games?)
Nintendo deals exclusively in the gaming industry.
Microsoft has been losing money for the past several months, although I cannot say I've been looking at their stocks recently.
The First Annual Pwny Awards. Seriously.
Gamervision wants hits and who am I not to hand them some. Need a cheap laugh? This one costs about four minutes, even if it is just nerds mocking nerds. If you didn't know about any of these "scandals," or they somehow fail to register, I guess you're just not nerdy enough...something you can of course swiftly remedy by hanging out more on message boards with a detached sense of irony and a mouthful of quips.
Without further ado, the First Annual Pwny Awards.
World of Warcraft Boosts Vivendi Game Sales to $1.5 Billion
Break out the champagne and party favors, $1 billion Euros (or one-point-five billion USD) constitutes a record for Vivendi Games, which posted 2007 revenues up 27% over 2006. Blizzard Entertainment alone accounted for $1.2 billion of that total, up a whopping 58 percent over 2006's booty-gathering. The driving force behind the boost was of course Blizzard's The Burning Crusade expansion, released in January 2007 to amorous reviews and growing consensus that WoW is more than a temporary fluke.
World of Warcraft's subscriber base alone increased by roughly 2 million over 2007, reaching 10 million users in January 2008.
Just wait until Wrath of the Lich King hits, 4Q 2008, though with that late of a release, it's hard to imagine Blizzard besting its 2007 take in 2008. Then again, with StarCraft 2 potentially incoming...
While Blizzard grew, Sierra and Vivendi's mobile games arm didn't, declining 29 percent with only $303 million in combined revenues. According to Vivendi, "each of the business segments were impacted by unfavorable currency exchange movements." So but for the exchange issues, Blizzard would have done better and Sierra/Vivendi Mobile not as poorly.
Overall, Vivendi's year over year revenues grew by $2.4 billion to $32.2 billion in 2007, up from $29.8 billion in 2006.
Ender's Game Finally Becoming a Video Game
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was a decent enough sci-fi yarn that, over the years, garnered more of an adolescent cult status than a justifiably literary one. For the record, yes, I know it won a Hugo and a Nebula, and yes, I know the Marine University at Quantico wields it as a textbook study of the psychology of leadership. But Titanic won 11 Oscars in the same year that The Wings of the Dove won none, and in 2001, Soderbergh's dazzling Traffic took a bow to Ridley Scott's dazzlingly shallow Gladiator for best film, which while there's no accounting for taste, implies something curious about red carpet pageantry and "impact" versus "caliber."
I read Card's story about boy-genius Ender Wiggin in high school long-time-ago, where I of course fell properly in love with it and remained in love with it and its sequels for many years after. Then I read the first book again in 2004, at which point -- after flinching my way through the cracker-barrel plot and cardboard characters and thumping didactics -- it regrettably went "plip!" off my radar for good. The boy-hero reject, the socially vapid and developmentally neglectful parents, the savage bullies who rarely get their comeuppance, the genocidal messiah who can extinguish an entire race yet walk away only a trifle contrite and somehow remain likable. It was heady stuff for a teenager, but for an adult? Not so much.
Now the book that reads a little like the sort of video game non-gamer adults mean when they use the term broadly and pejoratively is finally set to become one.
Who knows, maybe Card's clumsy edifice has a higher watermark hidden in the very medium the first book unconsciously idolizes. It's certainly going to help that the developer will be Chair Entertainment, the folks who ably handed us a three-dimensional tactically fleshed out underwater version of Geometry Wars, i.e. Undertow, for Xbox Live Arcade last November.
The other bit of good news: the first game will focus on the Battle Room, the 360-degree anti-gravity space Ender and his military compadres use to hone their tactical skills and hash out personal quarrels, i.e. friendship as subordinate to aptitude, for the better part of the novel.
Have we already seen the Battle Room in video games? Not really. We've certainly seen rough analogues like id Software's brilliantly conceived secret low gravity level Ziggurat Vertigo in the original Quake, and more recently (though teasingly and quite badly) the alien spacecraft interior in Crytek's Crysis. But nothing in true zero-G that requires the sort of precision tactical coordination the book details, or -- minimally -- whole teams of players float-fighting in the context of hardline Newtonian physics. A caveat to Chair: nerf Newtonian fidelity to make the game "fun" at your peril.
In any case, does this news excite you? Were you a fan of the book? Still a fan? Care to curb my lack of enthusiasm?
I found Ender's game to be a good book, but i have to say Titanic dose not diserve 11 Oscars. While it may have diserved one Oscar it does not compare with how much better Gladiator was. Looking back on the Ender series I have to say the first book was the best, and the others where just faint echos. But with Orson's addition of the Shadow series, i have grown to enjoy his books again. Now this game they are making can become a double edged sword. For example, if it completly blows then theres no hope for a movie, and Orson might have some flak about it. Even though that lurks in the dark all i have to remmeber is Advent Rissing, a vey enjoyable game that included similar technology in Ender's Game. So in conclusion i have to say there are mixed feeling about it, could be good, could be bad.
I found Ender's game to be a good book, but i have to say Titanic dose not diserve 11 Oscars. While it may have diserved one Oscar it does not compare with how much better Gladiator was. Looking back on the Ender series I have to say the first book was the best, and the others where just faint echos. But with Orson's addition of the Shadow series, i have grown to enjoy his books again. Now this game they are making can become a double edged sword. For example, if it completly blows then theres no hope for a movie, and Orson might have some flak about it. Even though that lurks in the dark all i have to remmeber is Advent Rissing, a vey enjoyable game that included similar technology in Ender's Game. So in conclusion i have to say there are mixed feeling about it, could be good, could be bad.
- Xiphilinus
I thoroughly enjoyed Ender's game, despite my squeemishness at the first boy "murder" and the later giant's "eye gouge," when I was not much older myself. I still find the narrative of dogged determinationm, leadership, and creative 3d combat very compelling, if the realization was a bit amateurish. (Like my spelling.)
I definitely look forward to this game. If it captures the battle room feel at all, it will be great fun and more than a little satisfying after alll these years. A bit like watching Serenity after the years since Firefly. :)
189 Million GPUs: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part Two
That's right, Nvidia's GeForce install base is right around 189 million discrete GPUs, a number Nvidia only recently elected to disclose. Put that in perspective: Sony's PlayStation 2 topped 120 million worldwide in 2007 (according to Sony). Nvidia's number tabulates consumers with GeForce 5, 6, 7, and 8 series GPUs for desktops and notebooks. That's counting only a small number of motherboard GPUs, and none of Nvidia's contract deals making specialty chips for anyone else (including console manufacturers).
The information was recently disclosed in an interview with Nvidia's Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations, and James Wang who works in the company's technical marketing group. This is the second part of that interview.
On Crysis hacks, DX10 vs. DX9, and Nvidia's worldwide GeForce install base
Game On: Tell me about Nvidia's involvement with Crysis. At what point did you become involved with that game, and to what degree?
Roy Taylor: We were involved in every aspect of the game coming to market. We started working with Crytek about 18 months, nearly two years before the launch. For that particular game and that particular team I was personally involved as well.
James Wang: And of course we started working with Crytek when they were making Far Cry back in 2001, so we have a long relationship with that developer.
GO: I spoke with Cevat Yerli and Jack Mamais at Crytek back in early 2006 and wrote the story that actually broke the news to the U.S. about Crysis's existence, and I recall Yerli reacting to DX10 as supported, but not integral. Over the course of the game's development that obviously shifted, and perhaps owing in part to the game's lengthy delay, the final product was much more DX10-centric than originally planned. That manifested in the form of elaborate press videos highlighting purported "DirectX 10 gameplay." So you have this big DX10 marketing push and Microsoft behind it and everyone talking Crysis and DX10, then this so-called hack arrives that lets you access what certainly looks a lot like these claimed DirectX 10 exclusive effects, except running notably faster under XP and DirectX 9. What's the story there?
RT: First of all, the important thing to realize is that, during the early and mid stages of putting the game together, for the artists, they were requested to start working on DX10 effects before they even had DX10 hardware. And even when we got the first DX10 hardware, there wasn't always enough to go around for everyone. So the artists started to work on the quality of art that could be run or used in DX10 from the early stages. Now some of that was left in the game and so what that hack effectively does is call out some of the work-in-progress art that was actually there for the DX10 version. So the hack enables you to use that. But because it's a hack, what tends to happen is some of the close up stuff is there but some of distance stuff isn't.
So for example, parallax occlusion mapping, which gives you the great terrain effects, might look like they can be reproduced with the hack. But if you want to try and look at some of the view distance stuff it doesn't work, because it's not actually running in DirectX 10. Some of the trees and foliage for the view distance just don't come on, none of that is enabled, for example. Some of the caustic effects might also look like they can be reproduced, but they can not.
But probably the biggest difference you'll notice is with the day and night effects. None of the DirectX 10 visuals are present, because the art there is the early stuff, and the new stuff wasn't included in the final shipping version of the game, thus you don't get any of the visuals that take place during the day and nighttime effect changes.
It's hard to show in a screenshot, but much of DX10 is often hard to show in a screenshot, because it's to do with movement and realtime effects. Those are just some of the examples of what you can and can't see.
GO: So there are definitively DX10-only effects in addition to the acknowledged DX10-specific Shader 4.0 capabilities that simply aren't occurring under XP?
RT: Absolutely. Now some of those effects as well will be exposed only to those, and I'll admit this frankly, with the very best hardware. Now as hardware improves, and gets better and the systems run faster, those effects will become more apparent. In addition to that, with the patches that are coming through, more effects are going to be exposed, as they manage to improve the performance.
GO: Speaking of performance, where do you see the biggest changes occurring the fastest? Driver? Operating system? Application? API?
RT: It's a mixture of the driver and the application and the DirectX API itself. And the reason is because the more time we and the developers and Microsoft spend with the APi and the games and the drivers, the more we learn. So for example, what might take four or five lines of code to produce a particular effect when we first launch, we might learn that there are ways to produce the same effect with only three lines of code. There are also other effects that we can use to better improve the way things are produced. So we might use texture maps in a particular scene, and then find out that we don't need to, because we can do them in a different way, or produce them without using texture maps, which are very resource heavy. There might be improvements to specific lighting instructions, and so on. The other thing is we might have an effect we want to enable, which will run fast in DX10, which would be excruciatingly slow in DirectX 9.
Let me give an example of that. One of the things that DirectX 10 does very, very well is what's called volumetric effects. That's true volumetric smoke or clouds or mist. It's a very cool effect and really adds a lot to the game. But whilst in DirectX 10 it's truly volumetric with good performance, volumetric effects are extremely expensive in DirectX 9. So you might be able to produce some really good volumetric smoke in DirectX 10 on a midrange PC, but to produce that same volumetric smoke on a DX9 PC would require a very high end DirectX 9 PC.
GO: How does Nvidia work with or assist or caution a publisher in deciding on the minimum specs and the minimum number of effects in a game, versus the install base they want to sell the game to?
RT: That's a really good question, and one I love to answer because one of my frustrations has been why are we not, as an industry, answering the question "Why are graphics just pretty? and "Why aren't they in the gameplay?" And the answer again and again from the publishers was "Well, we want to sell it to as many people as possible." And so what I then did was look at the numbers, and to my surprise, I discovered that a successful PC game sold on average about 2 million copies. There are exceptions. The Sims have sold over 20 million. But most PC games are considered a success at a million copies.
Then I went to the installed GeForce base and found we had an installed active user base of GeForce performance enthusiasts graphics of over 60 million. Which then led us to say a 60 to 1 ratio hit rate to sell a game is pretty good. If we can't convince at least 1 in 60 to buy your game, we're doing something wrong. And that's when we changed the Nvidia "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program to focus on introducing good games with good effects to the 60 million installed active users.
So what we do, in answer to your question, is that we will share with the developer what we believe that forecast installed base of graphics is at the time the game launches. So right now for games that are due two years from now, we already give detailed forecasts of what the installed base will be, and then we tell them what the minimum number of effects will be possible with that installed based at the time. That's leading already to a big jump in improvement in terms of the effects that are getting implemented.
JW: What's the latest number for GeForce install base, Roy?
RT: It's 189 million GeForce users in the world. We have the largest install base of any console in the industry.
GO: How do you get that number? Aggregate lifetime Nvidia chips?
RT: That's GeForce only. We look at how many have been shipped inside a tax period of three years, minus deductions for anything which knowingly went into a workstation SKU, so anything that ended up in a Dell OptiPlex or HP Vectra SKU is excluded. Then we break it down into mainstream, performance and enthusiast segments, and if you do that, then we can see that by far the bulk of it is mainstream.
Now for mainstream, it's entirely possible that someone just bought the PC or notebook and they're not really aware of the graphics. We know that a lot of them are, but we know that a lot of them aren't. And we're right now looking to research in detail to break that out how many, if you want to put it this way, how many of those mainstream users are GeForce aware, and we don't have that number for you today. We're still working on that. However, what we do know is that the number of performance and enthusiasts who either knowingly paid more for their notebook or desktop because of the graphics in the PC, or they made a decision to pay more when they built the PC themselves, or they upgraded -- that number is in excess of 60 million.
Next: DX10 for XP, annual single-card and SLI driver improvements, and driver nightmares when Vista launched
once again, vista sucks...
YEAH!
I am one of the 189 million in the world with a nvidia GPU!
a 7950 GT!
I don't feel lonely anymore
No, it’s more than that, there are too many faults to explain why Vista could have been a whole lot better. Lets start off with giving the user an option to tell the OS weather or not there will EVER be other users on the computer, and if the OWNER would like to activate protection rights. Would the OWNER like to disable "prefetch?" Would the owner of the PC like to configure THEIR PC they way THEY WANT. Does the "Control Panel” or the "Personalize" menu open every time when asked? Can you delete any file on your computer no matter what? NO, NO, NO. Why does Vista not start from the very beginning asking dear god "Insert YOUR name here"_______ what would you like me to do? Do you want, ever, to have a "guest account" ever. No, well you can’t go back, are you sure? Okay, no guest account. How about a "public user" folder, if you create this file now you will not ever be able to delete it, and I will have to assume that there will for ever be other users on your computer-oh, NO, OK!
Black Industries Scuttled: Goodbye Warhammer Roleplaying
The cold and bitter calculus that characterizes the phrase "commercial interests" has a new victim tonight. Sadly...very sadly...the folks who for the last several years have labored assiduously to produce some of the highest quality roleplaying source books and supplements I've used since Iron Crown Enterprises still had the rights to Middle Earth roleplaying, are officially out of business. I'm talking about Black Industries, the British-based pen and paper roleplaying arm of Games Workshop, i.e. the guys responsible for the Warhammer miniatures tabletop battle games.
Stunningly, this is happening mere days after the release of the world's first Warhammer 40k roleplaying game, the fabulously wrought Dark Heresy, which according to the news blurb on Black Industries' homepage, sold out "on the strength of preorders alone." I just received my copy, and while I haven't had a chance to get my arms up to my elbows into the rules and writing, everything I've seen so far radiates quality. Make that sterling.
The announcement in full:
Black Industries regret to announce that Dark Heresy: Disciples of the Dark Gods out in September will be the final product to be released from Black Industries.
Kevin Rountree General Manager of BL Publishing said ‘As a result of the continued and impressive success of our core novels business, which we have built around 40K and Warhammer, we have decided to focus all of our efforts on growing this part of our business. Black Industries has seen fantastic success, most recently with Talisman and Dark Heresy. This change does not take away from that achievement rather it allows BL Publishing to focus on producing the best novels we can. This is a purely commercial decision and will enable us to carry on the huge growth that we have recently been experiencing with our novels’.
For the time being Black Industries will continue to post articles in support of the products on their official website, which is a fantastic resource for scenarios and gaming tools for GM’s and players alike.
After an otherwise extraordinarily productive day, I was just getting ready to settle down with my DS and a little Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, followed by some time scanning my new just-arrived-in-the-mail-today (no joke!) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game Master's Toolkit, and then...this. I know pen and paper RPGs technically don't come on a disc or through a digital download spigot, but I'll make an exception for Warhammer. With its unmatched, brilliantly career-centric character system and (extremely) dark, fastidiously cultivated source material, it stands well apart from the rest of the rabble.
I know it's borderline maudlin to say my heart's a little broken over all this, but...well...there it is.
If you follow this sort of thing and want to participate in the discussion (play nice, of course) there's a thread at RPGnet here, and on the official Black Industries forums here.
UPDATE: I'm not in the business of speculating about hobby-centric companies, but I spotted this link to a Financial Times article discussing Games Workshop's financials via RPGnet. Among other things, you have Tom Kirby, chairman of the company, telling investors "I'm sorry we have not done as well as we should the last two years... We grew fat and lazy on the back of easy success." To the extent the tabletop game sales flattening affected the decision to scrap Black Industries, I'd call this doubly tragic.
The Vista Ultimatum: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part One
I've had my hands and eyeballs wrapped around Nvidia's new 780i chipset running a pair of 8800 GTX's video cards for the last couple weeks. The good news: Any way you slice it, Nvidia's Vista drivers and Vista SLI support are showing dramatic improvements over their dicey debut alongside Microsoft's pilloried OS uplift circa January 2007.
On the other hand, games like Microsoft's latest Flight Simulation X expansion and Vivendi's recently DX10-patched Lord of the Rings Online still suffer noticeable and occasionally punitive frame drops when switching from XP to Vista. Then there's the so-called Crysis hack that lets you ostensibly access DirectX 10 features running Windows XP without the Vista performance tax. Load a copy of Fraps and cycle a couple test demos and voila, you've got what certainly seems like a notably disagreeable frame rate delta.
But benchmarks tell no stories. They measure a game's bottom line without exploring its aesthetic contours. They reduce "satisfaction" to an integer and "image quality" to a range of filters and tricks.
In an attempt to crawl behind the scenes and put some of those numbers and tricks in context, I spoke with Nvidia's Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations, and James Wang who works in the company's technical marketing group. What follows is the first part of that interview, which I'll be airing uncut over the next couple days.
On Vista, Performance Penalties, and Peremptory Publishers
Game On: Jumping right in, when gamers claim to experience discrepancies between XP and Vista without noticeable visual rewards, what are they actually "seeing"?
Roy Taylor: Let's operate on the assumption that you're talking to the general gamer, and the question is, are they really seeing any performance difference? Now that might sound like a facetious answer, so let me back it up. What we're talking about I think really is the relative measure of performance, especially from the point of view of a general gamer. I think in positioning terms we have to ask ourselves, will the general gamer, and I do mean the general gamer now, really notice the difference between 39 frames per second and 32 frames a second? And I would argue that in a lot of cases, no. There might be some where they will, but for most general gamers, I think that Vista does not obviously give them a slower experience. They don't run benchmarks. They don't own Fraps, and they don't own 3DMark.
So for a general gamer, I would argue that they haven't seen a noticeable slowdown, and bearing in mind that Microsoft shipped in excess of 70 million copies [of Windows Vista] now, if it was really true that they had a problem in this area, it would be mainstream news of wholesale rejection of the operating system in every store and on every PC. And for the general gamer, we have to be honest with each other, that hasn't happened. Now there are some journalists who are unhappy about the performance difference, and certainly there are some hardcore gamers who've noticed it, and a lot of web sites have picked up on it. But for the general gamer, I don't believe that's the case.
GO: What about the enthusiast base (which includes me by the way) who want to understand why you've got this apparent performance drop moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista?
RT: Right, so for instance why would it be that a game that runs at 40 frames per second in Windows XP and on exactly the same rig would run it at 35 fps on Vista? The answer is "Because Vista is very, very different."
Why is Vista so different and what are we doing about it? Well the first part of the answer is that Vista was extremely ambitious. If you look from a gaming point of view at what they were trying to do, gamers weren't asking for faster frame rates. I've gone and I've looked because I'm told this many times, and you can google and google until your fingertips start to bleed, but there's absolutely no record anywhere of anyone promising that Vista would run games faster, or indeed even of anyone asking for that to be the case. No one was saying "Look, I'm playing Far Cry, and I want it to run at 100 frames per second instead of 60."
What gamers were asking for, frankly, is better games. More immersive games. And one complaint that was voiced is that games are too often pretty, but they don't really have much better gameplay. So that meant we had to ask, how do we work the graphics into the gameplay? And to do that, Vista sought to change things by introducing the ability to make structural gameplay changes based on the graphics. To make that happen, Microsoft had to put some pretty radical changes into the underlying structure.
GO: What about gamers who'll argue they don't notice much of a delta in terms of visual improvement going from XP to Vista?
RT: That's because most of the effects you've seen in Vista to date are what's called post-procedural effects. That means by the time Vista came out, and the way that Vista was introduced, it wasn't possible for most game developers to put the deep structural changes into the game for the operating system. And I'll be frank, most publishers, even had the developers wanted to, were not comfortable with implementing those deep structural changes. They wanted the game to sell to the widest possible base of gamers.
GO: Because you've got a base that doesn't care about incremental changes and a publishing consortium that's driven by the bottom line.
RT: Yeah, but the problem is that most people in the industry, on the developer's side, on the journalist's side, were not doing it for the money, but because it's something they really enjoy. Most developers make games because they really get a kick out of it. For publishers, that's not the case. They came out of business school, and it could just as easily be frozen pork bellies or tins of baked beans. They have no romance about it whatsoever. It's all about the money. And so they'll sit and look at it and say alright, in the first year, Microsoft will sell this many copies of the OS, the install base is this many, and so yeah by all means put something sexy into the game, the new stuff, but don't let it compromise the old stuff.
Now one of my favorite phrases for 2008 is "scalability is the enemy of experience," which is very true. So consider this. You would like to -- because it's inherently a good thing to do -- make a cool game. And DirectX 10 and Vista will allow you to do some really neat stuff. So you put it in, and the publisher says "Well how will this affect those guys with the older stuff?" Well, it pretty well won't run. And the publisher's response is "In that case, rip it out, because I don't care how good it made the game, if it won't sell to those guys, it ain't going in." So what you tend to do is compromise.
Right now, most of what you're seeing under DirectX 10 is post-procedural, which is to say, the developer made the game, they did the artwork, and they wanted to do some DX10 stuff, but what they did effectively is simply overlay some DirectX 10 effects on top of a DirectX 9 engine.
Think about making a sandwich. You've made your ham sandwich and now you're going to spread a layer of jam on top. It's just going to make the sandwich thicker, instead of putting jam in the middle from the get-go. You're applying more processes, so for every cycle of the game, you're adding some additional processes, and you're not really getting the structural version, because if you did it might not necessarily be backwards compatible. So for every developer and every game, I wouldn't call it a war, but let's call it this fun adversarial struggle which takes places between the artists and the storytellers and the publisher. Now every developer wants to get rich with a game, but oftentimes there are some cruel and tough decisions that take place on the content room floor, which stops a game being what it might otherwise be.
Next: Crysis hacks, DX10 vs. DX9, and (disclosed here exclusively) Nvidia's worldwide GeForce install base.
Blah blah get a better job and quit wining. Vista's great! Ram is cheap and graphics cards are coming down in price every month or so. The new intel 45nm dual core is only 200 bucks on new egg. So, for about a grand you can have a great system. E8400- 219.99, corsair xms2 2gigs for 74.99, asus p5k delux 199.99, MSI 8800 gts OC 269.99, computer case for 100 bucks or so, cooler master 750watts 79.99, vista home premium OEM 109.99. Thats only about 1,050 bucks for a custom vista machine that can play most games on high settings not 4 grand dude. People need to do research before they make a comment.
I agree with UmbrellaRobot. For some absurd reason, people are very eager to whine about perceived "faults". Vista's great. people need to stop Microsoft-hating and do some real comparisons.
No, it’s more than that, there are too many faults to explain why Vista could have been a whole lot better. Lets start off with giving the user an option to tell the OS weather or not there will EVER be other users on the computer, and if the OWNER would like to activate protection rights. Would the OWNER like to disable "prefetch?" Would the owner of the PC like to configure THEIR PC they way THEY WANT. Does the "Control Panel” or the "Personalize" menu open every time when asked? Can you delete any file on your computer no matter what? NO, NO, NO. Why does Vista not start from the very beginning asking dear god "Insert YOUR name here"_______ what would you like me to do? Do you want, ever, to have a "guest account" ever. No, well you can’t go back, are you sure? Okay, no guest account. How about a "public user" folder, if you create this file now you will not ever be able to delete it, and I will have to assume that there will for ever be other users on your computer-oh, NO, OK!
Is Sony Dropping PS2 Compatibility?
Long time ago, oh, say a year and a half ago, Sony director Phil Harrison called backward compatibility a "core value." Here's what he told GamePro in May 2006.
"Backwards compatibility, as you know from PlayStation One and PlayStation 2, is a core value of what we believe we should offer. And access to the library of content people have created, bought for themselves, and accumulated over the years is necessary to create a format. PlayStation is a format meaning that it transcends many devices -- PSOne, PS2, and now PS3."
I have a copy of Sony's January 23 "PlayStation in Review" press release sitting in front of me. Among other things, it devotes two of six bullet points to "PlayStation total [hardware and software] revenues." Clearly part of this company wants us to see the value of "PlayStation" as a brand, not a singular ailing third generation console.
Another part -- the one making decisions about what configurations of the PS3 ought to be put to market -- would apparently prefer you kindly forget its second generation product. Forget it, that is, despite a library of some 1,500 games, December sales of 1.1 million units (beating the PS3, with 798k) and more software unit sales than any other console on the market.
Why, if an unverified memo turns out to be correct, will Sony really drop its $600 80GB PS3 and the only currently available version that lets buyers play PS2 games?
Maybe they aren't. Maybe they're planning to introduce a $300 model and add PS2 compatibility to the $400 model. Maybe they're in fact planning to discontinue a really dumb idea (making PS2 compatibility a buy-time decision) and add software compatibility to the $400 model. Maybe they'll even offer a system update to buyers of the existing 40GB model that up-flashes their systems.
You know PS2 compatibility is just a software trick in the 80GB model, right?
The inclusion of BC in the PS2 helped separate it from the other systems. Now it seems the exclusion of BC in the PS3 is what separates it from the other consoles.
I always thought Sony was brilliant for supporting PS1 games on PS2 and now I think they are insane for not supporting PS2 games on every PS3.
How crazy is it that only NINTENDO got the backward compatibility right this generation?
Without BC, I won't buy the PS3, end of story.
That said, I hope the rumors only remain such. To tell the truth, I don't even care about on-line capabilities! I just want the next generation console to shoot up bad guys in even more glorious detail and virtual world realism. I'll go it alone, thank you.
Mass Effect Fiasco: Fox Says Onus on EA, Record Still Uncorrected
I'm glad EA knows the difference between slander and libel, because a couple of game sites reporting on this don't. Slander is spoken, libel is written. Whether Fox actually slandered Bioware's Mass Effect in this shameful report is debatable, because in order to slander I believe you have to be lying maliciously. While it's tempting to view Fox host Martha MacCallum and guest Cooper Lawrence's comments as malicious, I'm more inclined to view them as clueless. The distinction is open to question. Whether Fox should apologize and immediately correct the record (they should), of course, is not.
Sadly, no correction is forthcoming, and as far as Fox is concerned, Mass Effect absolutely and without question allows "players to engage in graphic sex" and "see full digital nudity." You get to decide what's going to happen between the two people, "if you know what I mean," says MacCallum. "Pandora's box is open."
Would Martha MacCallum care to be known as the new Dan Rather? With all due respect to Rather (and MacCallum), waiting to see if this achieves critical mass (no pun intended) only heightens the ineptitude. It's what you correct when no one's pressuring you to that counts, not what you correct after a million angry bloggers burn you in virtual effigy.
It get better. EA's vice president of communications Jeff Brown isn't playing along, and according to BusinessWeek, sent this letter to Teri Vanhorn, a Fox News Channel producer in charge of the odious segment. From Brown's letter:
EA is under new management and our CEO John Riccitiello has made it clear that we’re going to stand up for our people, studios and products. We’re not looking for a fight but if someone is telling lies about our products and maligning our creative teams, we’re going to step up and correct the record.
Cooper Lawrence is ignorant. She doesn’t know anything about Mass Effect but there are 100 people in Edmonton, Alberta who dedicated years to making that game. They’ve got names, faces and reputations – and they’ve been slandered.
Indeed, and this blog fully endorses EA's statement.
Why EA? Because while Mass Effect was published by Microsoft Game Studios, EA just purchased Bioware owner VG Holding Corp -- announced October 11, 2007, and official this month.
The latest rumor: Fox invited EA to appear on MacCallum's show but has "received no response." Sounds like we've got a case of the empty chair defense going. Regardless, Fox screwed up big here, and it's increasingly shameful that they're not taking the initiative to correct the record first before even attempting to profit off a live appearance (and presumably chance to yell loudly at whomever EA sends over) by one of the world's largest game publishers.
UPDATE (1/26/08): The New York Times' Seth Schiesel reports that Cooper Lawrence has rescinded her comments about Mass Effect after actually seeing the segments at the center of the so-called controversy. From the article:
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.
“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
Fox will correct the lie only when EA and Microsoft threaten them with legal action. The media doesn't care if a story about a video game is false. Look at one of their expert panelists who asked "what happened to games like Pac-Man". They're so detached from the industry they have no idea how far reaching the story goes.
wellllll.... i hate to say i told you so... because all of the worlds problems seem to boil down to *cough* *cough* CONSERVATIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *cough* *cough* *hak* excuse me, i dont know what got caught in my throat.... uhmmm whats everyone staring at me for? hahaha stupid fox, youll never learn.
New Final Fantasy XIII Screens Surface
Have you seen the latest screens of Square Enix's next Final Fantasy? Worth a look if you're into this series. A lot of U.S. gamers hate JRPGs because, I don't know, they don't have enough Steve Carrell or Judd Apatow or a trendy detached sense of irony, I guess. Not me. I've actually got Final Fantasy VII up on my PS3 as I'm typing this. I'm cooking around 53 hours, leveled in the 70s, and running the "unlimited" elixir exploit in the Great Glacier area so I can zip back to the endgame's Northern Crater and take advantage of the 8,000 experience points each Magic Pots that waddle around and shout "gimme elixir!" Which, if you care to inflict a single point of damage, you'll have to.
If it's not weird and illogical as well as complex and completely gorgeous, it's not a Final Fantasy.
Shots from Final Fantasy XIII
Shots from Final Fantasy Versus XIII
For the rest of the shots, see the original source. Final Fantasy XIII should release in the U.S. and Japan simultaneously around this time next year.
[Thanks, Final Fantasy Insider]
yeah but did you know about the hidden and/or secret enemies in the northern crater called "bounces" there are 5 of them in a fight which you can fight them as many times as you want, and give 2400 AP a battle, which if you have a weapon with "triple" as the effect you get an ungodly amount of AP for your materia.
Rock Band Drum Kit and Wireless Guitar Coming in February, April
You can lay hands on the standalone drum kit February 12 and the standalone Fender Stratocaster wireless guitar controller April 1. Still tardy, still not making a lot of sense (drums before guitar when everyone bought the bundle in lieu of the useless standalone DVD?) and not exactly bargain priced when you do the math.
New standalone drum kit = $80
360 or PS3 standalone game = $60
Which equals $140, no microphone, no guitar. The bundle (which includes the game, mic, guitar, and drums) costs $170, a mere $30 more. Unless you really, really want to play "Drum Hero" without boss battles, therefore, I can't say I see the point.
If you subsequently want to add the standalone $80 guitar, you'll first have to wait until April, then take your total cost up to $210. Factor in whatever wireless on the guitar is worth to you.
For posterity, here's how you can buy Rock Band today:
1. As a bundle. Comes with drums, microphone, and guitar. Maximum kitted band size is three. Accessories not sold separately.
2. The DVD, the whole DVD, and nothing but the DVD.
3. Buy the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero III ($100) and use the controller as Rock Band's second guitar or bass.
It's really too bad MTV and Harmonix couldn't figure out how to have the extra instruments ready when it mattered, i.e. the holidays, when families and friends were gathered. I can't wait to pick up the second guitar in April, but I'm a little miffed when Harmonix's CEO waves off criticism that the company flubbed Rock Band's debut by claiming Harmonix is simply "providing the opportunity for consumers to build their band one instrument at a time.”
Did Microsoft Okay Xbox 360 Failures Prior to Launch?
Remember all the media hutzpah over Microsoft's red ring of death? You know, the deathly semicircle of ruby-red light that's your console's way of screeching "I'm melting! I'm melting!" before winking out for good? I've had three, and I repeat three Xbox 360s go waxy witch-works on me. All, to be fair, quickly replaced by Microsoft without so much as waving a press credential. One thing you absolutely have to give Microsoft is that the company (a) acknowledged the problem publicly and (b) did just about everything you could possibly expect of a company to rectify it by extending the warranties and ramping up its mail-back support capabilities. If your 360 croaks, you'll get a transport box and prepaid shipping and even though they say "up to two weeks," generally only be without your console for around one.
I'm therefore not sure this matters, but blog-site 8BitJoystick has an email interview up with a person the site calls "an individual who has worked on the Xbox 360 project for many years." This purported "Microsoft insider" is claiming 30% of Xbox 360 consoles based on the original 'Xenon' (the codename for the initial 360 motherboard) design eventually kick the bucket, and that the problem boils down to competitive carelessness.
This individual accounts for the 360's current problems by claiming "MS was so focused on beating Sony this cycle that the 360 was rushed to market when all indications were that it had serious flaws." What flaws? Insufficient design and quality testing, gaps in test coverage, uncontrolled manufacturing processes, and initial end-to-end yields in the mid-thirties percentile-wise (a number that jibes with retailer claims last July). "Low yields always indicate serious design and manufacturing defects," says the insider, claiming management chose to keep shipping anyway because it desperately wanted the extra year lead on Sony's PS3.
"[Microsoft] tend[s] to make big decisions like that in terms of dollars," continues the insider, claiming the company would rationalize that if the first few million boxes had a high failure rate, a few tens of millions of dollars would cover it. Compare that to the money lost to Sony if MS couldn't get the jump and, say the insider, MS viewed the potential support costs from hardware failures as pocket change.
Not quite pocket change anymore, with the company's July 2007 decision to bump the warranty estimated to cost Microsoft billions.
On the actual cause of the RROD:
The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life.
On some games triggering the RROD:
Certain games will consume more bandwidth on the GPU, which has the most substandard thermal solution on the mother board, making it a lot hotter, warping the mobo and flexing the solder joints. Weak joints fail quickly. The better the game, the more often it will be played, again accelerating failures.
One a return netting a newer (vs. older) Xbox 360:
You send in a broken box, you get back a working box (hopefully). So there is a rotating stock of the original units that get repaired and returned to service. Plus, they keep finding these cashes [sic] of launch units here and there and using them too. Didn't you hear during the holidays that bundles were found with units made in 06? Those were pulled back from the retail channel last spring when the new heatsink was done, and had the new heatsink placed on them and then put into the shipping flow like any other box.
One user with 11 consecutive failures has been reported in a previous article. Given 17 million users worldwide (Wikipedia), a 22% failure rate would be expected if exactly one such person existed (binomial distribution), so the number seems reasonable.
If the failure rate is 30%, you would expect 1 with 14 failures, 3 with 13 failures, 9 with 12 failures, 31 with 11 failures... and 480,000 people like you with 3 failures. Of course it would take time to accumulate that many failures and many purchasers are recent.
yes i believe this article microsoft has a habit of doing this with all there hardware and software
after all why pay some worker to find out which systems are bad when you can get consumers to do it for free
this is also why i always wait at least 1 year to 18 months after a microsoft product will be released before i will purchase it weather it be a hardware or software
you should see if microsoft will pay you wages for working for them lol
btw i wonder how much it would of cost microsoft to include a 2 or 3 fan cooler with all xboxes? ( it cost us about 20 to 30 bucks for these units but bought in bulk it may have been considerably cheaper
good luck and take care
As a test analyst myself I can tell you that in the development of any product or application there is a pyramidal relationship between 3 things:
Time
Money
Quality
If you cut back on either time or money in the development phase you can be guarenteed that the quality of your product will suffer.
I'm currently on my 2nd 360 after my 1st launch console I got here in the UK bit the dust 2 weeks after its warrenty ranout. Unfortunatley this was the time just before MS offered replacements beyond the warrenty date so was left out of pocket.
With a company as powerful as MS you would have thought they would have had the QA done ont he product before going to market and allowing early adopters, the core of the Xbox failthful to bear the brunt in cost and misery just to make a deadline.
Gladly know I have a 360 which works and enjoy the live experience and all the array of game. I just hope that MS learn next time round to treat us with more respect as loyal customers.
Should Sony Cut the PlayStation 3's Price Again Now?
It really depends on who you talk to or when and where you think the endgame's lines are going to be drawn. Sony's been rather mendacious, and it knows this, about how it sold the PS3 in the system's first six months. Punditry about the company's arrogance aside, there's no denying Sony's game plan rested almost singularly on the popularity of its PlayStation brand. That brand of course failed to transcend the hard economic realities of foisting $500-$600 and change for extras plus higher-priced $60 games on a price-is-still-king audience, especially when one of the system's primary selling points -- Blu-ray -- was an unknown and unnecessarily inseparable component. The train bringing high-definition to the masses is coming, but it's still barely out of the station when you check sales and demographics (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the PS3 didn't zip off shelves at any point all last year whatever high-def enthusiasts want to bleat about the PS3's "total value").
Think about what might have been, had Sony instead sold the PS3 with an optional Blu-ray drive from the start. Such a system might have gone for as low as $400 or even $350. And let's get something straight: no game developer today absolutely needs Blu-ray's storage capacity. Nope, no more than the Xbox 360 needs an integrated HD DVD to play the same cross-platform games. Do gamers care about swapping DVDs once or twice over the course of a 40 to 60 hour game if that becomes necessary? They sure didn't mind swapping up to four CDs playing stuff like Final Fantasy VII. I don't recall a review anywhere that's ever knocked a console game for coming on more than one piece of physical media.
Sony could easily have introduced a Blu-ray integrated version for $400 (the entry level model's going price) around the holidays, or at the Winter CES, or at GDC next month. (They're certainly no strangers to juggling internal components and SKUs with all the unprecedented model shuffling that's already occurred.) No one could have predicted the significant corporate shift to Blu-ray that's just occurred, but with Blu-ray's momentum hypothetically kicking in, think about how Sony might've capitalized on the last 12 months of uncertainty by graduating (instead of bullying) toward an all-in-one player.
Imagine 12 months of a $300-$350 PS3 running terrific exclusives like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Ratchet & Clank Future plus all the solid cross-platform stuff, e.g. Call of Duty 4 and Assassin's Creed. Add in an external Blu-ray drive for early adopters as optional. I think such a system could have at the very least played neck-and-neck with the Xbox 360 in monthly sales last year, and produced an entirely different 2007 ouctome than the company's funereal actuals.
Back to the now: GamePro dropped Sony a line about so-called "rumors" of an imminent PS3 price drop and got this response:
"We have no plans for any pricing announcements on the PS3."
Do you believe them? Maybe you shouldn't, if history warrants credit, though I wonder sometimes if companies scrub things like planned drops when leaks occur just to spite the media. Sony certainly played a curious game with the media this last year when it flatly denied a rumored $100 price drop in July, only to officially confirm the drop 48 hours later, leading into E3.
On the other hand, someone got sloppy last July and leaked an actual Circuit City ad that spawned the $100 price drop rumor. That's not the case with this latest tittle-tattle, which doesn't even rise to the level of rumor, really. It's not based on anything tangible, just speculation off news a few weeks ago about Sony's manufacturing costs for the PS3 plummeting. Late-to-the-game punditry, in other words.
Should Sony drop the PS3's price again? That's an entirely different question. Sony's actually lost less money than you'd think by letting a kind of inverse "economies of scale" offset its low monthly sales numbers. Selling more of something you're losing more money on has the contrary effect of blowing chunks over your monthly quarterlies, after all.
Still, even with the notable bloodletting that would ensue in terms of component costs, the best reason to drop the PS3 to $300 is to eliminate the visible price delta between the PS3 and the Xbox 360. We've already talked about who's really more expensive (the Xbox 360) but most people only see the sticker price, and "total cost of ownership" be damned. Brand identity is worth something, but you only see buy decisions start to factor with price parity. You eliminate the visible delta, you quash remaining arguments for not betting on Sony (taking the brand-identity-is-king angle, anyway). And if new owners only wake to the value of the internal Blu-ray player a year or two from now, so be it, and more power to high-def sales.
so next time get your facts rite instead of running your mouth about stuff your clueless about you dumb ass
I hope you don't mind if I comment on the nerve the people that have commented before me have.
Before I begin, I'd like to say that I own all of the "Next-Gen" consoles, so my opinion is as biased as you make it out to be.
Regarding the PS3 - I do feel that Blu-Ray is becoming a necessity. However, "becoming" a necessity and "being" a necessity are completely different things. The price? Why should it drop? My phone costs more than my PS3.
Regarding the Wii - Innovative...Too bad there's nothing in it for traditional gamers. Sometimes I feel like I just want to have a normal controller and throw out the "Wiimote".
Regarding the XBOX360 - Beautiful system. I'm enjoying Mass Effect, among other games, and it's pretty fun.
In conclusion: The PS3 doesn't need a pricecut. The XBOX360 is rolling out some great games, although I have no idea what the lineup for this year is, as all of the lineups I've seen so far are false. The PS3 has a lot of great exclusives. Hoping for a good year.
I hope you don't mind if I comment on the nerve the people that have commented before me have.
Before I begin, I'd like to say that I own all of the "Next-Gen" consoles, so my opinion is as biased as you make it out to be.
Regarding the PS3 - I do feel that Blu-Ray is becoming a necessity. However, "becoming" a necessity and "being" a necessity are completely different things. The price? Why should it drop? My phone costs more than my PS3.
Regarding the Wii - Innovative...Too bad there's nothing in it for traditional gamers. Sometimes I feel like I just want to have a normal controller and throw out the "Wiimote".
Regarding the XBOX360 - Beautiful system. I'm enjoying Mass Effect, among other games, and it's pretty fun.
In conclusion: The PS3 doesn't need a pricecut. The XBOX360 is rolling out some great games, although I have no idea what the lineup for this year is, as all of the lineups I've seen so far are false. The PS3 has a lot of great exclusives. Hoping for a good year.
Video Game Shows Full Nudity and Sex, Claims Fox
No, no it doesn't, and what part of "research your story before covering it" do the big guns at Fox not get? They're talking about Bioware's sci-fi action-RPG Mass Effect, which depending on your in-game choices offers the possibility of viewing a brief, non-explicit, laughably indirect sex scene. Fox's Martha MacCallum barely talks about the game or the sequence in question, saying only (and wrongly) that "you'll see full digital nudity" and "the person who's playing the game gets to decide exactly what's going to happen between the two people." In logic circles that's called the straw man fallacy. In journalism, it's just called sloppy.
Check out the following clip, which contains some of the most facile and yellow journalism I've seen this year.
The unbelievably tacky and flatly fallacious headline: "SE"Xbox? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex
You know, Mother Jones just ran an interesting commentary by Jay Rosen concerning the way the media resembles "a beast without a brain." Lots of legs and limbs and trampling skills, but nothing between the ears. When it comes to things like election results, for instance, it has no special knowledge, but it certainly pretends to by vacuously filling what it views as dead space with pundits mostly vamping off cue cards. No insight, no vision, no wisdom, and most importantly -- no accountability -- just the media equivalent of a bunch of high rollers blithely shouting in front of a craps table.
Now take the panel segment toward the end of the Fox clip where you have a bunch of people who've never even played the game sitting around making detached, not even marginally insightful generalizations about games. Check out the lineup of deep thinking here:
"Who can argue, possibly, that Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas is a good thing?"
"There's a lot of grown men who love video games, let's be honest here."
"We live in a day and age where our children are not always supervised."
"I'm not sure why it didn't get an adults-only rating."
"This made me feel old watching this. What happened to Atari and pinball and Pac-Man?"
Sadly, only one guy at the very end half gets it when he says it's up to parents to monitor their kids.
If you can't even be bothered to do the sort of research journalism 101 demands, i.e. playing the game, or at least the sequence in question, then get the heck off my TV set and stop talking. What's happened that the media can trumpet baseless opinion to the masses and call it "news"? How many parents who don't know better (but who do get the "Debbie" reference) are going to assume Mass Effect, which has a brief, optional, and at best suggestively sexual sequence, involves a bunch of naked men engaging in hardcore porn with some singularly exploited female?
For the record, where's the criticism of romance novels with their ridiculously overdramatic and laughably graphic sex scenes? Available now, to any half-educated 10-year-old within walking distance of a bookstore. What about movies? The non-interactive scene in question in Mass Effect qualifies as "R" rated (PG-13 disallows sex scenes), perfectly compatible with the ESRB's Mature 18-or-older rating. Kids under 17 get into R-rated movies all the time. Even Juno, which got away with a PG-13 rating has a sex scene at the very beginning, i.e. a girl removing her clothes and unambiguously straddling a boy.
Why are we (and by "we" I really just mean Fox) even talking about this? Put implied sex in a book or a movie or a painting and it flies under the radar. Do it in a game, and because gamers are still viewed as this weird, slimy under-culture, it's worth six minutes and half a dozen clueless commentators.
UPDATE: Here's a link to the YouTube clip of the "sex" scene in question. At least YouTube gets it (you don't have to click on an "I'm over 18" link to give consent, because it's barely PG rated). If I thought it was even the tiniest bit more explicit than what you see any given day in a soap opera -- and in fact it's much tamer -- I'd post a warning. But since it's not, I won't. View (and yawn) away.
[Thanks, GamePolitics]
The media makes yet another half ass'd report on something it knows nothing about.
Wake up people. Seriously.
This has been going on since Vietnam.
Spouting anything( and I do mean ANYTHING) to get ratings( or more importantly "Attention") is what the so called "media" does. Be it rumor, half truths, un-researched information, or just bald-faced lies.
They wrap themselves in the trappings of infallibility and preach to the masses of what their bias'd opiions say are "right and "wrong". All the while getting exactly what they want. More and more people's attention.
Either to agree with what they're preaching from their soapboxes, denounce it as more attention-whoring, or simply to see what the fuss is about.
Personaly, I'd take morbid pleasure in watching Bioware sue the bastards for slander and misrepresentation.
But of course, the media is infallible, so if any legal actions were taken they'd simply air another broadcast and retract the mis-information they released.
I'm having a hard time finding the story on Foxnews.com. However I did find a fairly recent review of Mass Effect where they gave it 3.5 stars out of four.
Ironic.
Great blog with lots of useful information and excellent commentary! Thanks for sharing.
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Direct-TV.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Dish-Network.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-Radio.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/T1-Internet-Service.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-DSL.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-Internet.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/VoIP.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Phone-Systems.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Affiliate-Programs.html
Still Crazy (Vista) After All These Months
I keep trying to switch to Windows Vista, a little, I suppose, like a dog trying desperately to comply with someone's confusing and at times outright confounding hand signals. It's not just the fact that I can't seem to find a game that performs as well or better under Vista, or that the performance delta is oftentimes the difference between a playable 25-35 frames per second and stuttering damnation in the 10-15 range. It's not merely the weird compatibility issues I keep having with peripherals that worked fine out of the box (without third party drivers) under XP. I can even kind of overlook the fact that in order to do pretty much anything short of wiggling the mouse pointer you have to hit "YES, I REALLY MEAN IT!" two or three times.
No, it's more subtly disturbing stuff, like the way an audio manufacturer like Creative hasn't offered (or Microsoft hasn't demanded) an update to Creative's drivers for the Audigy 2 since last March 2007 (I have an Audigy 2 Value, certainly not an unpopular card). Result? Running Neverwinter Nights 2 under Vista precludes you from selecting EAX as an audio option, limiting you to stodgy Miles 2D Positional Audio support, emphasis 2D. Steve Ballmer calls Vista "the most advanced work that Microsoft has ever done" and hails it as "the beginning of a new wave of innovation" and Vista's telling me I can't even have basic 3D EAX support from the largest consumer audio card manufacturer in the world?
It's the way Vista takes application start menu artifacts and leaves them sitting on the "All Programs" bar without their executable shortcuts (games show up in "Games," which is fine, but splitting them from the rest of their menu shortcuts just looks sloppy). It's the fact that Vista wants to keep "Windows Updating" older video and chipset drivers (October 2007 timeframe) than the December 2007 WHQL-certified ones Nvidia offers on its website. And it's the way everything seems to take twice as long, from post-defragmentation copying the tiniest of files between folders, to opening and closing windows, to navigating the panoply of control panels and MMC plugins necessary to hunt down and disable all the automated stuff whirring in the background every time I so much as click on an icon.
I know I can disable a lot of this security shadowing manually (though not without Microsoft's silent klaxons, i.e. "pop-ups-from-hell" frequently kicking in thereafter). But come on, let's get real, because none of it's obvious or intuitive. Someone needs to produce a "Gamer" version of Vista that strips all the fluff and circumstance in favor of speed and functionality. Let us enthusiasts engineer our own destruction if we're going to do something silly like punch holes in our firewalls or execute unsigned drivers and unknown executables. Stop trying to anticipate our every desire like an automated phone attendant with the "0" for operator button blocked out.
I've loaded Vista literally at least two dozen times since last January, and every time I think I'm ready to roll, I encounter some horrendously show-stopping bug that sends me sighing and fist-shaking back to XP. I'm trying to see how Vista has stuff I can't live without, stuff I really need to make my day-to-day computing experience so much better than it was running a six-year-older OS. But to be perfectly honest, it still feels like I'm doing Microsoft a favor every time I punch Vista's ticket. Call it grass roots corporate welfare (forget the government, the subsidies come straight from us!). With all the stuff that still doesn't work (and all the stuff that in XP still does) you might as well re-sticker Vista retail copies "Microsoft Donation Box."
In my old gig as a Systems Engineer consulting on the deployment of a new operating system to tens of thousands of users, we'd literally skip what we considered superfluous versions of Windows. Windows 95 was a no-no between NT 3.5 and NT 4.0. And in the NT to XP transition, Windows 2000 got the axe. I'm beginning to wonder if Vista isn't going to end up being completely missable (I have no doubt my old company's skipping it) unless, of course, Microsoft disingenuously ties future games and applications to Vista (like Halo 2, which could be hacked to run not only fine, but better under XP) in an attempt to force us to accept all these problems with no commitments or frankly citable proclivity toward fixing them.
If that happens, Vista's instruction manual might as well just read "Grip harness firmly with both hands, insert head."
i made a typo
I meant "rig," not rug/
I seriously have no idea what he's talking about. I've had Vista for 2 months now ad it works like a dream. Everything is faster, the interface is more streamlined, and the Aero Glass looks beautiful. Perhaps PC World should be less biased against Microsoft- Just look at Mr. Gates' philanthropy- Microsoft is not really that bad.
Maybe Vista is just terrible for people that don't have modern computers. Honestly, my new high-end computer runs Vista smoother and more beautifully than I've ever had an XP run for me. Also, as if to add to this cesspool of irony, nearly every video game I want to play is running well into the 70 - 120 fps range (With the exception of Crysis...Crysis runs just under 40 FPS, consistently).
Why so much disdain for Vista? I find that I enjoy the new Windows OS more than the new Mac OS, and that's really saying something, as Mac seems to have been very well organized in the making of their new OS.
Sales Are Up, But Is "Core" Gaming Doomed?
Raph Koster, the former lead designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, likes to ask big questions, like "Are single-player games doomed?" and "Will market expansion harm core gaming?" The answer to both questions is, of course and as you might have guessed, both a resounding "yes!" and an equally resounding "absolutely not."
So it's not that Koster's opinion piece, dubbed "An Uncertain Future For The Core Gamer?" over at Gamasutra, isn't interesting, but it gets a lot of its assumptions…I won't say wrong, but let's just say not persuasively right. Go read the original post as well if you like (the Gamasutra version's been "adapted") but in essence, he's simply saying that as the market grows, hardcore gamers look "niche-ier" and are worth less money, while casual gamers are worth increasingly more, and ne'er the twain shall meet in terms of publisher commitment and retail price parity.
In other words, D&D fans, you're the shiz-nit, but get used to paying more for your games, because it's going to cost companies more to create more complex games for an infinitely more fickle audience, and Casual Jane or Joe could give a shiz-nitzel about epic levels and ex-pee points and plus-or-minus operands plopped in front of integers employed to crudely represent the game of chance as relates to the game of nerds living a vicarious dice-driven fantasy life.
Well okay, point taken, but we've already seen how this is going to work, and it's called wargaming. What's a wargame? If you have to ask, and I suspect a lot of you do, then I've made my point. Despite that lack of public awareness, the wargaming market is alive and well and arguably producing some of its best material. Sure, it's in cardiac arrest as markets go compared to the sales and brand awareness of games like Guitar Hero III, but that's irrelevant to my point – it's nonetheless managed to eek out a reasonably successful business despite remaining one of the least accessible genres in gaming.
Wargamers aren't a dying bunch. They're a niche bunch, but they didn't die, and they won't be dead in a decade or even a century. You can always count on a certain hyper-obsessive-compulsive segment of the gaming populace to care about the precise ballistic trajectory of a particular type of bullet in a specific type of magazine used in a particular type of gun fired by a particularly trained person in specific environmental circumstances under explicit psychological pressure (and so on). Combat porn? Well sure, but the point is that you may think that market went away a long time ago. It didn't. It won't. And while it'll never again be a booming segment of gaming-dom, well, I guess the point is that it never was in the first place. It just looked that way because the number of people with computers when wargaming was big was, you know, like a hundred or something.
The number of people using computers has obviously grown, but while you can't deny certain genres within gaming have modulated somewhat, no one talks about the way that escalating user-base was always destined to make those genres look even more niche by virtue of elementary relativity. Wargaming was a niche before computers existed. Computers briefly driven by Koster's "introverted core gamers" may indeed have appeared to momentarily wag the dog, but wargaming's never had its Wii Sports or Rock Band. The learning curve involved is by definition prohibitive. When video-gaming finds its ceiling, all the old-school core areas will simply look like they do in any other medium: appropriately, inevitably, enduringly niche.
Which brings me back to Koster's point about a rising tide forcing core gamers to pay more to enjoy their hobby. That's true if you assume more means "what they've always paid" compared to the lower prices associated with casual online or downloadable console content. But wargamers today, for all the ridiculous detail that goes into stuff like SSG's Decisive Battles series or AGEOD's Napoleon's Campaigns, are only paying a dollar for dollar premium if you assume progress equals "production value." Without question, wargames today cut conventional design corners and use fewer art assets while pouring resources into A.I. development and/or historical research and scenario design. But wargamers aren't paying literally more for new wargames. In fact they're oftentimes paying notably less, since they're usually purchasing their games online, direct download, print-your-own-manual, etc. Is $30-$40 for a wargame a price premium? I don't think so.
It's an important distinction I've not seen others make, i.e. that perhaps in the transition to "blockbuster gaming" as a succession of crowd-pleasing Roland Emmerich fare, we'll discover that the core audience cares a lot less about how "blockbuster" the next version of D&D whatever looks, and more about simple systemic fidelity and A.I. design and extensibility adjuncts like design tools that allow the community to broaden a game's vistas – grass roots growth in lieu of formal sequels, in other words, without the messy studio production costs.
So while I half get what Koster is arguing here (just like I half got what he was saying when he argued games for introverts are ipso facto doomed) I think he places too much value on gaming's production metrics and too little value on the tenacity of by-niche-gamer-for-niche-gamer studios or groups of developers who'll never swallow the notion that mass attraction equals mass satisfaction. For every American Idol there's a Slings and Arrows, for every I Am Legend there's a La Vie en Rose or Persepolis. Someone's making those 5-10 minutes short films they're showing at Sundance (also currently available as cheap Xbox Live downloads). Someone's going to see Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and Cirstian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. All I'm saying is, don't be so quick to assume there's anything "uncertain" about the future of core gaming, anymore than there's anything uncertain about the ability of independent filmmakers to keep making films only 10 people care about. As a so-called "core" gamer, I could really care less what kind of sales BioShock has, because I know someone, somewhere, is going to make it regardless. The point was never to convince everyone to read Raymond Carver instead of John Grisham or William Faulkner instead of Scott Smith. But while they'll never be modern bestsellers, Carver and Faulkner aren't going anywhere, and neither is niche gaming. Wait and see.
Damn right. First good commentary I've seen here. Hardcore and niche gamers drive the market, NOT casual gamers. Hardcore gamers make the microtransactions. Hardcore gamers buy multiple accounts. Hardcore gamers make preorders and buy the new MMO on a hunch that it might be good. And Hardcore gamers will still be playing that game months after the casual gamer has moved on.
Casual gamers are a one time cash influx, and then they're done. They don't buy the strategy guide. They don't buy the expansion. They don't do anything but buy the original game, play it twice or three times, and then move on.
Note World of Warcraft for instance. Is it developing new low level encounters? NO. It's developing high-level content for the hardcore gamers that play it, EVEN AS THEY RECRUIT CASUAL GAMERS. This is in the hopes that for every 10 or so casual gamers that play and leave, one will become a hard core veteran. They don't make millions of the casual gamer. They make millions of the hardcore.
Koster's argument concerning single-player games assumes that computerized opponents are not a "social environment". Rubbish: the only currently valid distinction is between face-to-face human contact and virtual human contact. You could never really know if an opponent online is programmed or a player no more than if the person you are chatting with is really 18 or elderly. Even video feeds and camera images can be faked. Face to face? Easier to discern.
Programmed social environments, opponents and/or robots have been subject to science fictions treatments, typically with the theme of extended "rights" to these constructs as they become more sophisticated. Even a face-to-face may furnish no clue as to their 'humanity'.
The late Peter Ducker, management theorist, requires of innovation the practice of 'constant abandonment' of successful processes to ensure future growth. Core gamers force developers to practice this form of innovation, casual gamers being the payoff for profit.
Rock Band Downloads Boom, Hit "Double Platinum"
MTV claims over 2.5 million songs have been downloaded for Rock Band in just eight weeks. I contributed about sixty bucks myself last Saturday, when we staged our own little post-holiday-January-blues Rockbandapalooza. After training everyone up and tousling each others' sweatband-secured wigs and "throwing the goat" or "rock fisting" (or whatever you want to call raising your index and little finger in the universal rocker's salute) we couldn't help but pause long enough to pull down the newest Bowie song and Police pack along with The Clash's "I Fought the Law" and Weezer's "Buddy Holly" (which had us up and howling on the furniture at one point).
Sometimes you tell the day, by the bottle that you drink
With a $170 price tag for the game plus three (of four) instruments, Rock Band isn't cheap, but I'll go out on a limb and call it Just About The Greatest Party Game Ever Made. Totally serious, and take that Poker and Charades and crawling around your friends and family on a little plastic mat covered in hands and feet and great big colored dots.
I play for keeps, cause I might not make it back
According to NPD, Rock Band has sold just north of a million copies (a mix of the standalone game and the special all-inclusive deluxe packs) since launching in November. It's not yet at Guitar Hero numbers, but I think we'd see that all but remedied if reports of the game (eventually) coming to the Wii are true, don't you?
I've seen a million faces, and I've rocked them all
Rock Band Top Sellers (Source: MTV Games)
1. Metallica ("Ride the Lightning," "Blackened," "And Justice for All")
2. The Police ("Can’t Stand Losing You," "Roxanne," "Synchronicity II")
3. Black Sabbath ("N.I.B.," "Sweet Leaf," "War Pigs")
4. Queens of the Stone Age ("3s and 7s," "Sick Sick Sick," "Little Sister")
5. David Bowie ("Heroes," "Moonage Daydream," "Queen Bitch")
6. Weezer, "Buddy Holly"
7. Foreigner, "Juke Box Hero"
8. Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Fortunate Son"
9. The Knack, "My Sharona"
10. All-American Rejects ("Dirty Little Secret," "Move Along")
Upcoming Downloadable Content
January 22nd - Oasis Pack (440 MS points, $5.50)
- Don’t Look Back in Anger (160 MS points, $2)
- Live Forever (160 MS points, $2)
- Wonderwall (160 MS Points, $2)
January 29th - Progressive Pack (440 MS points, $5.50)
- "Siva," Smashing Pumpkins (160 MS points, $2)
- "Working Man," Rush (160 MS points, $2)
- "Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial)," Coheed and Cambria (160 MS Points, $2)
2007 Video Game Sales Soar by Record-Shattering 43%
This just in: the U.S. video games industry shot up an astonishing 43% in 2007 with chart-busting performance in every product category. You've heard me mention record-breaking figures to come? How's $17.9 billion (versus $12.53B in 2006) in total sales grab you?
Says number crunching firm NPD's Anita Frazier, "While hardware sales realized the greatest percentage growth over 2006 due to the closely scrutinized console hardware transition, each category under the video games industry umbrella reached their own 'personal bests' in terms of annual sales."
December 2007 was by itself startlingly lucrative, with total sales of $4.82B, up 28% from December 2006's $3.8B. Console software led the charge, up 47% to $1.8B over 2006's $1.2B, with video game accessories landing the second best increase at $622k, up 37% over 2006's $455k. December's console hardware sales rose 21% over 2006, from $1.1B to $1.3B, and portable game hardware understandably brought up the rear at $526k, a 7% increase that seems low only because portable sales were stratospheric going in.
The NPD U.S. console sales breakdown:
Note the following:
1. The Wii predictably clobbered the PS3 and handily bested the Xbox 360, but the latter was neck-and-neck with the Wii in the one month that mattered most (December).
2. The DS beat the holy bologna out of everyone here, and with well in excess of 50 million units sold worldwide, if this keeps up, I'm pretty sure it's going to eventually trounce the PS2's sales record of over 100 million.
3. The PSP appears to be doing quite well at $1.1m, especially if you compare it to the rest of the power-consoles. It's really a mini-PS2, after all, and the recent size and cost shrink seem to be helping it along nicely.
4. The PS2 had a terrific year, beating its younger sibling by 1.4 million and change. That's a little unreal, and speaks volumes about how much gamers care about buy-time cost. The PS3 is going to have to come down sharply in price if it wants to survive 2008.
5. Add Sony's total take and you get 10.35 million in hardware sales, soundly thrashed by Nintendo's 14.79 million, but dramatically more than Microsoft's 4.62 million. Diversity clearly remained the soul of profit in 2007.
6. According to NPD's Frazier, the availability crisis surrounding the Wii didn't help the Xbox 360 or PS3 so much as the PS2. That's a guesstimate on her part, but it makes economic sense.
Top Selling Games, December 2007
1.5m - Call of Duty 4 [Xbox 360]
1.4m - Super Mario Galaxy [Wii]
1.3m - Guitar Hero III [PS2]
1.1m - Wii Play [Wii]
894k - Assassin's Creed [Xbox 360]
743k - Halo 3 [Xbox 360]
660k - Brain Age 2 [DS]
655k - Madden NFL '08 [PS2]
625k - Guitar Hero III [Xbox 360]
613k - Mario and Sonic [Wii]
NPD's Frazier On Halo 3: "Halo 3 captured the top-spot in single-game sales for the year selling 4.8 million units at retail. This performance certainly puts it among the elite in gaming history with performance similar to that of GTA: Vice City in 2002, and GTA: San Andreas and Halo 2 in 2004."
Top Selling Games, 2007
4.8m - Halo 3 [Xbox 360]
4.1m - Wii Play [Wii]
3.0m - Call of Duty 4 [Xbox 360]
2.7m - Guitar Hero III [PS2]
2.5m - Super Mario Galaxy [Wii]
2.5m - Pokemon Diamond [DS]
1.9m - Madden NFL '08 [PS2]
1.9m - Guitar Hero 2 [PS2]
1.8m - Assassin's Creed [Xbox 360]
1.8m - Mario Party 8 [Wii]
NPD's Frazier on 2008: "While I wouldn't count on similar growth in 2008, I would expect to see 2008 increase over 2007, with more growth (proportionately) coming from software sales. While we will continue to see strong hardware sales, particularly if prices come down again, the spotlight now turns from hardware to software."
No More Heroes Director Says Wii for Non-Gamers
People buy a lot of stuff they don't necessarily use. Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time with sales in the multimillions has the dubious distinction of being one of the most bought, least read books in history. You probably know someone (or are that someone) who bought some kind of exercise machine along the line, only to have it languish in a second bedroom or basement or storage area. We probably use less than half of what we purchase, half as much as we should.
The Wii sold like crazy in 2007, but according to upcoming Wii release No More Heroes (see picture upper left) director Goichi Suda, speaking to CVG, "Only Nintendo titles are doing well." Not just in Japan either, says Suda. It's an international phenomenon.
He's right, and it's something I've been chipping at for months. Nintendo grabs headlines because they continually beat the stuffing out of Microsoft et al. in hardware sales, no question. But -- and leaving aside questions of who has the better games, because that's not what I'm interested in -- Microsoft is clearly and consistently putting the smack on Nintendo in the far more lucrative domain of software dollars.
We play games, not the glorified plastic-shrouded circuit boards they run on, so celebrating hardware numbers as opposed to software figures has always seemed a little daft, especially when the hardware race between Microsoft and Nintendo is this close. While we know there's a rough correlation between hardware sales success and long-term publisher affinity (everyone wants the PS2's miracle-audience), the Wii is a completely unique animal, selling to a new and not entirely understood audience. Commonly held wisdom about what hardware sales figures mean is therefore null and void. If it turns out, as Suda suggests, that only first party games and the occasional niche-y Guitar Hero are sustainably salable, third parties could conceivably abandon the Wii quick as you can say "GameCube."
Lots of "ifs." So let's look at the latest sales data courtesy VG Chartz. The following chart represents a compilation of U.S. "top 50" 2007 software sellers for the Wii and Xbox 360.
Notice the following:
1. The Wii had 11 titles in the top 50 software sellers of 2007; the Xbox 360 had 18.
2. Slighty over half of Nintendo's top 50 software sellers were first party games; only one of Microsoft's was first party (Halo 3), and technically Bungie Studios moved to second party status as of October 1, 2007.
2. Microsoft beats Nintendo in top 50 sales for 2007, but only by roughly 15 percent; Nintendo had a very solid first party driven 2007 lineup. It's important to understand that first party titles were in fact the dividing line between "success" and "complete obscurity" for Nintendo.
3. Total software sales for 2007 were roughly:
48,014,338 - Xbox 360
37,481,345 - Wii
4. Total software sales overall (through 2007) are:
74,076,078 - Xbox 360
42,117,249 - Wii
5. Any analyst worth his or her salt is going to immediately point out that tallying "Wii Sports" with the rest is disingenuous, since it's a freebie add-in. I've left it in the tally because (a) it's what most people seem to be playing the most of and (b) you can make an argument that it's part of the total cost of the system, and should therefore be counted anyway. Pull it, of course, and Nintendo's 2007 software sales drop by nearly 20%.
Point #4, taken with point #2, is arguably the most telling. Since launching, Nintendo's managed to sell roughly one and a half times as many hardware units as Microsoft, ergo the Wii tallying 8.5 million units end of 2007 compared to the twice-as-old Xbox 360's 10.3 million units. At the same time, however, Nintendo's Wii software sales aren't keeping apace. The Wii sold just slightly more software in 2007 than the Xbox 360 did in 2006, but still notably underperformed the Xbox 360 in 2007 sales by over 10 million software units. Read that again. Nintendo undersold the Xbox 360 in its bumper first-party year.
Factor the first-party breakdown and you have a pretty elementary equation for 2008: Nintendo needs to have at least as many (and arguably more) first party successes over the next 12 months as it did in 2007. Trouble is, the only A-list first party titles formally announced to date are Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, and Wii Fit.
2008 looks at this point like it just might be the year that third parties make -- or severely break -- the Wii.
Actually Yuff, the reason people buy more games for xbox is because the thurd party developers have done everything they can to hamstring the success of the Wii. I would suspect its because they know that they cant match NIntendo's software development skills. The thing I dont understand is why console games try to act like they are some type of hardcore bunch. There are very few console games where a PC equivalent doesnt blow it away in every respect, especially with regards to graphics and competition. But all of this aside, Nintendo needs to begin utilizing the wii-mote, I think its a damn shame that they didnt release a Wii Sports 2 and simply stepped everything up a notch or two. Also third party developers need to start thinking out of the box for Wii development, simply put no one wants to buy their shitty ports. As for me, I am in a gaming rut with the Wii, the game I really want to see on it is Rock Band and in fact thats the only game I have been playing.
This is exactly what I told everyone would happen with the Wii - and it was so frustrating when people wouldn't listen! Everyone thought it was so innovative with a new controller, but the fact of the matter is that once the novelty wears off, you realise that you're left with a bunch of mediocre games. It's only Nintendo that are *really* making games for the Wii. The other manufacturers are releasing what they think is a good game, which it is on another console, but what the Wii needs is games that are specially designed for the Wii....
I have all 3 consoles. I rarely ever play my Wii and here is why. Third Party Titles Are complete crap! Further more, after getting off work, I really don't want to come home and jump around my living room. I'd rather throw in CoD4 or something, sit back, relax, and let the owning begin. As far as PC versions of games being better then Console. Hell yeah they are. You like viewing you're GoW in 1080i? Awesome, computer you're talking about resolutions upwards of 1900 or more.
Online Gang Violence Ends in Offline Murder
Russia Today has a story bound to be echo-chambered about an MMO gang-based rivalry that jumped off-screen and ended in bloody murder. Turns out a 33-year-old Russian man the article dubs "Albert" was a member of a hostile clan called Platanium, which had recently killed a member of the rival Coo-clocks clan in an online battle around the end of the year. A few days later, Albert and a member of the Coo-clocks agreed to rendezvous in real life for a meat-and-beat that culminated tragically in Albert's death from sustained injuries.
Evidence that games incite abnormally aggressive behavior? If you're seriously pondering that question, see my note on "availability cascades" here. I mention it only in anticipation of the pundits who literally make a living off the latter.
Gang violence is ancient. Music aside, Leonard Bernstein was saying nothing particularly new in West Side Story. Kids beat up kids every day. It's not healthy, it's not acceptable, it's no one's favorite part of growing up, and it's also not really news. How many commited-by-under-18 homicides occur in a year in the U.S.? Try 1,763 in 1999 according to the DC Bureau of Justice, though the number was then and continues today to be in decline, down from 4,330 in 1993.
With all the irresponsibly disproportionate focus on games and anomalous criminal activity, is no one interested in the story of how video game use in the U.S. is at an all time high, while violent crime is at an all time low?
*THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE* Wow, and its a shame no one in the higher levels of government care enough to pay attention to what you say... they could learn alot from reading your rss's
it is expected that old school would meet new school eventually but why is it new schools fault and yuffiek why would they listen to reason when the big drug companies pay them $$$,$$$,$$$ to make a fuss about anything else but the faulty cholesterol medications, and global warming
why do you think i said what i said? "Wow, and its a shame no one in the higher levels of government care enough to pay attention to what you say... they could learn alot from reading your rss's" i believe that covered everything you just asked me.
Xbox Live Serves up Sundance 2008 Shorts
It sounds like the strangest of unions: The world's largest software developer, console gaming's most successful download service, and 45 of the most outre short films going. Will gamers pay 160 Microsoft Points at $2 a pop (or $90 for the whole shebang) to watch arty flicks about: The Iran-Iraq war? An Inuit hunter? A couple lovers gabbing about dogs they heart? A former rock idol who buys a monkey to be his friend?
Not to worry, if the answer's a resounding "What the heck is Sundance?" the films will be available via iTunes and Netflix for non-gamers and anyone short a 360 as well. Oh, and free online in a browser if you're willing to keep pace with the official festival site, which plans to show the top ten, one at a time (here today, gone tomorrow, 24 hours each) beginning today, January 18, with "I Love Sarah Jane" at 12:01 a.m. mountain standard time (MST).
The Xbox Live versions also launch immediately in collaboration with Sundance Channel and will include a selection of 45 short films from the festival, beginning today and running rather ambitiously through 2011.
The day-by-day "top 10" breakdown, from the official press release:
Day 1: Friday, January 18 "I Love Sarah Jane" (Director: Spencer Susser). Jimbo is 13 and can think of only one girl -- Sarah Jane. And no matter what stands in his way -- bullies, violence, chaos, or zombies -- nothing will stop him from finding a way into her world.
Day 2: Saturday, January 19 "Pariah" (Director: Dee Rees). A Bronx lesbian teenager juggles multiple identities to avoid rejection from friends and family, but pressures from home, school, and within corrode the line between her dual personas with an explosive consequence.
Day 3: Sunday, January 20 "Yours Truly" (Director: Osbert Parker) Animation and live action collide in the story of Frank and Charlie, a dark romance of psychological tension that unfolds as the two sacrifice their morals surrounding the ultimate kiss off letter.
Day 4: Monday, January 21 "My Olympic Summer" (Director: Daniel Robin) After his marriage fails, the filmmaker looks at home video footage of his parents when they were young in hopes to understand how they kept the magic. This film is set against the historical backdrop of the hostage crisis at the Munich Olympic games of 1972.
Day 5: Tuesday, January 22 "Sick Sex" (Director: Justin Nowell) Amanda has a fever. Ken is horny.
Day 6: Wednesday, January 23 "Because Washington is Hollywood For Ugly People" (Director: Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung) Employing images from popular culture, political figures and Internet imagery, this piece adopts viral advertising in a reduction of contemporary events to a cartoon-like mythology while touching on issues such as identity politics, US Foreign policy, sexuality and power.
Day 7: Thursday, January 24 "Force 1 TD" (Director: Randy Krallman) Three friends, one of whom is visually impaired and has a miniature guide horse named Carmine, set off to find Carmine a very special pair of sneakers for a very special occasion.
Day 8: Friday, January 25 "Wind, Ten Years Old" (Director: Marzieh Vafamehr) A day in the life of a 10-year-old Iranian girl highlights the Iran-Iraq war and the national/educational propaganda that informs the tumult, fear, infatuation, and mindset of a generation.
Day 9: Saturday, January 26 "Sikumi (On the Ice)" (Director: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean) An Inuit hunter takes his dog team out on the frozen Arctic Ocean in search of seals, and inadvertently becomes a witness to a murder.
Day 10: Sunday, January 27 "Spider" (Director: Nash Edgerton) It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Films Available on the iTunes Store, Netflix, and Xbox 360:
The rest of the 45 are listed with descriptions here.
Hats off to Microsoft for doing this deal. I love this stuff, and if you're at all about the art and theory of film, I'm betting you will too.
Mac Gamers to Get Spore, Call of Duty 4
Yesterday I lamented the lack of gaming oomph in Apple's sleek new Macbook Air. Granted, I said, gamers aren't the MA's target audience, but I'm a longtime Macbook user, and I often use it to game on the go, and however unrealistically, I want something that's light as a feather and formidable as an ox. Something, say, like the MA with Nvidia's 8800M (i.e. mobile) GTX GPU.
I'm a little nuts, I know, but not entirely bonkers when I argue that Apple ignores gaming (specifically gaming-on-the-go) at its peril. According to NPD, notebooks exceeded desktops in retail sales for the first time all the way back in May 2003. In 2007, notebook sales rose 21 percent and the dwindling units-sold gap between desktop and notebooks dropped to less than 4 million. Most analysts predict that 2008 will be the first year notebook retail sales actually exceed desktop sales. The underlying message? Don't tie me down, and don't compartmentalize my experience.
Now compare that with the year over year surge in games revenue. We're still waiting on numbers, but count on "best year ever" (because it already was as of November). Records won't just be broken, they'll be dashed with impunity. Games will once again generate significantly more revenue than movie studios and make serious inroads on the road toward trouncing other forms of U.S. media entertainment, from music purchases to DVD sales and rentals.
Back to Mac. EA and Activision just announced plans to release two of their highest profile games -- one past due, one in tandem with its PC counterpart -- for the Mac platform later this year. Respectively: Activision's Call of Duty 4 and EA's Spore.
Call of Duty 4, because it's got merciless one-shot kills and unusually bright-bulb enemies.
Call of Duty 4 was one of last year's finest first person shooters. In my unedited review of the former for Variety, I said the following:
Like conspiring under a canopy of bullets, "Call of Duty 4" deftly splices the panic and pandemonium of anarchic firefights with the sophistication and scheming of a modern tactical shooter... RPG contrails crisscross rooftops and bullets scatter like horizontal rain as dozens and sometimes hundreds of enemies flood roads and fields and towns. In opposition, small squads of high-tech U.S. and British soldiers probe enemy-filled bogs, defend downed vehicles, charge enfilade-fortified positions, and bathe massive swathes of terrain in howitzer fire from the fuselage of ground attack airplanes. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, in other words, "any sufficiently advanced military technology is indistinguishable from super powers."
And so on. Available -- and unless you're already playing the PC version under BootCamp, pretty much unmissable -- come May.
The second game's probably even bigger. Never heard of Spore? It's Sims-franchise designer Will Wright's shot at simulating evolution, as in the entire extrapolated shebang, as in "Play from tadpole to tribal leader to Chief Poobah of the Third Interstellar Empire of the Triskelian Unterploogles" (or whatever).
The Creature Editor in Spore. Float like a Battlefish, sting like The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Sound a little "navel-gazy"? Could be. No one knows for sure. But EA plans to co-launch with the PC version, and that's the sound of the world's largest games publisher staking out a major claim on the burgeoning Mac user base.
Which means that if EA has that kind of faith in the Mac's gaming potential, maybe it's time Apple does too.
Macbook Air: Powerfully Thin but 3D Anemic
It's official, and most of the guessing was right. The Macbook Air, as it's officially called, will be startlingly thin, a mere .76 to 0.16 inches thick (it tapers back to front) and just 3 lbs (note "thinnest," not "lightest" -- I've personally owned Sony Vaios that were lighter). It'll come with a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and a 1.8GHz option and sport a 13.3" LED-lit widescreen display @ 1280-by-800, built-in iSight, MacBook-style illuminated keyboard (but with an ambient light sensor like the one found in a Macbook Pro), a magnetic latch, an iPhone-inspired multi-touch trackpad, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and a 1.8" hard drive -- 80GB standard or 64GB super-speedy solid state, you pick.
Unfortunately you only get 5 -- as opposed to the rumored 10 -- hours of battery life. I get about 3 right now with my 90% healthy Macbook Pro battery.
Apple says it asked Intel to shrink the Core 2 Duo by 60%, which Intel purportedly did, though I'll bet less for Apple explicitly than simply naturally dovetailing interests. Intel's Paul Otellini says the processor is "thick as a nickle and wide as a dime."
What else do you get?
- 45 watt MagSafe power adapter
- 1 USB 2.0 port
- Micro-DVI to DVI or VGA
- Display polishing cloth
- Audio out (Given iSight, I'm assuming audio-in as well)
- Fully aluminum case
- First fully mercury, lead-free display
- Retail packaging that uses 56% less volume than MacBook
- "Remote Disc," a feature that lets you access nearby DVD or CD drives, though I don't get how this is any different from sharing a network drive?
What don't you get?
- An optical drive (a superdrive accessory is available for $100). How do you watch movies? Apple's answer: Buy or rent from iTunes.
- An ethernet jack (Jobs says the MA "was built to be a wireless machine," but you can buy an optional USB Ethernet adapter)
- Arsenic in the display or brominated flame retardant (BFR) on the circuit board (hooray!)
- A decent 3D processor (it's not officially spec'd, but almost certainly integrated, i.e. ridiculously feeble)
About the latter: remember if you're reading this that I'm a games columnist coming at this from the perspective of a gamer who'd really like to shave a couple pounds off his Macbook Pro. I know I've got my target audience cables crossed. Doesn't change what I was hoping to see (and would still like to down the road) one iota.
Gaming is officially bigger than movies revenue-wise. I'll venture a guess that more people use their PCs and laptops to game than watch Atonement or the latest episodes of Lost. Now maybe that changes a little and/or temporarily with today's iTunes announcements, but for Jobs to push the latter and completely ignore gaming -- whatever Apple's low-figure tracking data on Mac-gamers -- seems a little "missing the point." Especially as more and more of us want (and frankly have no choice but) to game on the go. Remember that World of Warcraft with its nearly 10 million subscriber base and billions in sales/subscription revenues is natively playable on Macs, too.
Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted about the Macbook Air. But I'm a little sad I won't be able to buy one, for all it won't be able to do for me.
Why yall being dramatic, the price is $1799. They aren't forcing you to spend $3098 on the solid state disk version. The MacBook Air uses the same video hardware as the standard MacBook. So I would assume gaming would perform how current MacBook users already experience it.
yes they are, because if you want a system with any real chance of doing anything for you, you are going to need the SSD over the other HDD version. its all just looks, no power, just looks and the sad thing is people will pay for it too. only to be disapointed in the end because it cant do anything other than surf the net or draft up word documents.
And there is the $64 dollar question. Do people buy Apple products because they really need to do things with them or do they buy them to just look cool?
Who Says Video Games Aren't Political?
Who says video games can't have their own political action committee (PAC) to donate money to game-simpatico politicians and/or candidates?
Not Michael Gallagher (pictured here). He's the president of the Entertainment Software Association, but he used to be the Assistant Secretary for Commerce and Information in the U.S. Department of Commerce and the chief technology adviser to President George W. Bush. The ESA, in case you didn't know, is a trade association, i.e. public relations organization funded by corporations, composed of the gaming industry's top publishers. It's pro-gaming, but to be more specific, it's pro-the-business-side-of-gaming.
Forget whether games makes us smarter or duller, whether games hurt people or people hurt people, the ESA exists solely to further the cause of game publishers who in turn exist by definition to turn a profit. And now they're forming a political action committee to increase their influence with politicians.
"We'll be writing checks to campaigns by the end of this quarter," said Gallagher in a New York Times article published today. "This is an important step in the political maturation process of the industry that we are ready to take now. This is about identifying and supporting champions for the game industry on Capitol Hill so that they support us.”
According to the article, Gallagher says the PAC will probably donate between $50k and $100k this year to national candidates, an amount he claims is comparable to the film and music industries. It's a relatively tiny figure, but apparently a critical part of the "business as usual" aspect of convincing politicians the ESA's behind them, or to be more clear, convincing pro-game-business politicians the ESA's got their six.
With the game industry today outpacing just about every other form of entertainment, gaming PACs were inevitable. The mechanism for submitting, assessing, and passing legislation is so badly broken that taking a holier-than-thou position by avoiding the "pay-for-a-say" approach would only embolden video gaming's loonier opponents. PACs are practical compromises, and with his insider experience, Gallagher's no doubt a practical guy. While he coyly circuits the question of controversial 527s (the largely unregulated say-whatever-they-like groups responsible for some of the most vicious mudslinging on all sides in the 2004 election) by noting no money will pass in that direction this election cycle, he's quick to add "I think that's a stage down the road."
Politics 101: Never take anything off the table.
Apple's Macbook Air: But Will it Play Games?
The rumors are swirling, the media's swarming, the hype is...well, it's hyperbolizing. All surrounding Apple very probably jumping into the ultraportable laptop market at the Macworld Expo which begins tomorrow. Does anyone care? Sure they do, because Apple draws attention for the same reason Andy Warhol can make us gawk at rows of Campbell's soup cans. Apple exudes cool, and if you're not cool, you're Dilbert, and getting Dilbert calendars for your birthday because your friends see you as That Guy isn't the same as getting Whoawuzzat?'s when you pull an Apple product out of your backpack.
That said, and assuming all the pundits aren't embarrassingly wide of the mark by assuming the ballyhoo's over at least some kind of laptop, I have to ask: but will it play games?
Yeah yeah, I can already anticipate the "but that's not what an ultraportable's designed to..." schtick, and I can see that point and occupy that space for all of two seconds. Otherwise, not buying it. People game on iPods. On cell phones. They've found ways to game on the iPhone despite Apple's reticence toward goofing around between flashing the thing at passerby to incite fits of fashion envy. 2007 was the biggest year for gaming yet. Designers -- even hip-to-be-contrarian designers like Apple -- ignore gaming at their peril.
Been reading the design speculation? If you have, you'll know that the so-called "Macbook Air" may:
- Be really, really slim. Well duh, if it's called a "Macbook Air" or "Air Mac" you'd expect it to either be lighter than air and capable of levitation (hey, don't put it past these guys) or, more likely, in the vicinity of "two pounds or less." If they've also somehow managed to mitigate the crazy-insane-bonkers heat issues the Macbooks and Macbook Pros have when employed as game rigs that rest in your lap, count as a major plus for gaming on the go. *
- Include a Solid State drive, i.e. no moving parts, i.e. dramatically mitigated seek time and latency and all-around more reliable. Next to the GPU, the hard drive is one of the biggest bottlenecks in a laptop when it comes to gaming, so count as a plus.
- Employ a collapsible ethernet jack. Okay, color me a little less than "woo-woo" over this, since I've been enjoying the benefits of Megahertz's XJACK (variously) for nearly a decade. If the collapsible bit's true, why we haven't seen this in ultraportable laptops already seems a little "missed the boat" to me.
- Come bundled with an external optical drive, i.e. DVD spindle. It's been a long time since I've seen "optical on the outside," so I'm not holding my breath that it's actually true. But if it is, it'll be bad news for gamers who want to play games that -- inanely, to be sure -- require the disc be present in a connected drive. In any case, say it with me now: Better Be Inline Powered.
- Ship with a Macbook-sized 13.3-inch screen. Hey, not bad. you can comfortably do 1280x800 on a screen that size -- plenty big for anything you'd expect to throw at a compromised compact. Which brings me to...
The Invariable Caveats:
1. Integrated GPU. You can almost count on an ultraportable to cut this corner in order to save space and minimize heat by going integrated, which means perfectly brilliant 2D performance but utterly abysmal 3D output. Stop by these Civilization forums some time if you want to read about the pain basic Macbook owners get to experience trying to play Aspyr's Civilization IV port at more than a dozen frames per second on even the lowest graphical settings. Don't blame the port, blame the feeble 3D power of Intel's GMA parts lineup.
2. Watered down CPU. I.e. Battery Life Is King. Right, I know, cheers to all you power business "keep those icky games away from me" users. Enjoy. As for the rest of us? Expect low voltage, low clock speed, and low performance in general when it comes to 3D gaming.
As always, assuming I haven't just wasted a longish post criticizing an as-yet fictional and entirely hypothetical product, I'd absolutely love-love-love to be proven wrong on any of my criticisms. Imagine playing Crysis at decent speeds on an ultraportable Macbook running Boot Camp. I know, I can't either, but I can always hope.
* Apple likes to somewhat disingenuously claim their Macbook and Macbook Pro models are "notebooks," not "laptops." Why? To put off users complaining of leg burns (the one thing Apple manages quite badly in their mobile computing space is heat). Can they get away with restricting an ultraportable as such? Unlikely. It'd pretty much defeat the entire purpose of the "air" moniker.
FINALLY! someone who sees it my way! apple sucks at computers, they should stick to what they are good at, which is ipods and phones and stop trying to hold us back with feable and uber expensive technology! i mean this hunk of junk is going to cotst at LEAST $2,000 more than a decent laptop which could run at 3 times the speed and actually do something more than surf the net and send emails... if i wanted to pay 3-4 thousand for an internet browser, then i give everyone permission to shoot me down over stupidity.
FINALLY! someone who sees it my way! apple sucks at computers, they should stick to what they are good at, which is ipods and phones and stop trying to hold us back with feable and uber expensive technology! i mean this hunk of junk is going to cotst at LEAST $2,000 more than a decent laptop which could run at 3 times the speed and actually do something more than surf the net and send emails... if i wanted to pay 3-4 thousand for an internet browser, then i give everyone permission to shoot me down over stupidity.
hmmm...yea good point. apple is good at animation and a bit in looks when it comes to hardware. but ill stick with windows OS coz no matter what you do theres a big thing about compatibility issues and softwares that supports mac is so little. lets face the fact that apple is not really into the computer side and ei if apple really want to be competitive try not to monopolize the products that they have....vistas surpassing linux and mac OS thats a good sign that no matter what they do they cant put a great company(microsoft) down!
PlayStation 3 Production Costs Halved, Says Analyst
From $800 down to a bargain $400, the PlayStation 3 has its production costs in hand, claims wholesale investment bank Nikko Citigroup's Kota Ezawa. While the rest of the Business Week article retains the skepticism prevalent in just about any dissection of PS3 economics, it's the following that may be of interest to anyone who views the system's shortcomings in shades of sticker shock.
Nikko Citigroup's Kota Ezawa estimates the games division will lose $1.4 billion this fiscal year, following last year's $2.1 billion loss. And while he doesn't expect the business to be prosperous until late 2009, Ezawa applauds Sony's efforts to shrink the PS3's chips and tweak its design. Already such changes have cut the cost per machine to around $400 now, from above $800 just before it went on sale in November, 2006, he says. (The PS3 with an 80-gigabyte hard-disk drive retails in the U.S. for about $499.) "We think the biggest factor here is that simplification has become possible through a reduction in the parts count, leading to a reduction in costs," Ezawa wrote in a Dec. 27 report.
CES: Red Sox Pitcher Swaps Fastballs for Online Games
Curt Schilling can curl two fingers around a baseball and turn it into a hundred mile-per-hour whirling white streak. Now he says he's quitting baseball in a year to turn a deep love of gaming that ranges broadly from Blizzard's World of Warcraft to his company MMP's tortuously complex Advanced Squad Leader into a second career. His first effort? A massively multiplayer online role-playing game code-named "Copernicus."
Talking to CNN, Schilling admitted the decision probably has some of his baseball fans scratching their heads. "No one looks at this and says it's a natural progression," he said, adding with pundit-mocking irony "You're a frickin' celebrity athlete who's going to make a game? Come on!"
Come on indeed. His new outfit, dubbed "38 Studios," may turn even more heads. It's a joint collaboration with baseball aficionado and comic book artist (and occasionally controversial figure) Todd McFarlane, as well as the mega-popular shared universe fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore of Drizzt Do'Urden fame.
What a curious lineup. I haven't thought about McFarlane in years. I was into him in the early 1990s when he singlehandedly launched the "variant cover" market with a half dozen versions of his conventions-toppling Spider-Man #1 (it sold 2.5 million copies, compared to today, where just breaking 100k can be monumental). But he's also the guy who took on writer Neil Gaiman legally and lost (twice). So aside from the fact that he makes some of the most highly wrought action figures going, I'm not sure what to make of him at this point.
R.A. Salvatore on the other hand has got to be one of the nicest, humblest, hardest working guys writing popular fantasy. Sure, you'd never mistake his writing for Cormac McCarthy (or frankly even Stephen King at his pulpiest) but he's adored by millions of readers who've made "It's a game I can read as a book!" into a lifestyle. Getting him to work on an MMORPG certainly seems like a natural fit, never mind the fan base perquisites.
It'll be interesting to see where Schilling takes this. I personally owe him a debt for rescuing Advanced Squad Leader from obscurity, and I own most of the 2nd edition sourcebooks thanks to his love of the game. ASL is arguably the single most complex and realistic company/battalion level wargame in the hobby's history. While that's also made it inaccessible to all but the hardest-core wargamers, it tells me Schilling -- who launched his own ASL Open in 1993 as well as a bi-monthly magazine called Fire for Effect dedicated to the game -- is anything but a gaming dilettante.
Oh yeah, according to Schilling's blog "38 Pitches" yesterday, he's a fan of upcoming MMORPG Pirates of the Burning Sea and after spending some time with it at CES, "can't say enough good things about it." Check it out.
McDonald's Blames Childhood Obesity on Computer Games?
Hold onto your coffee, because it's time to play "Blame That Video Game!" Well, sort of. According to MCV (amplified by game news sites and gossip blogs) McDonald's UK boss Steve Easterbrook is fingering the interactive entertainment industry as "a major cause of the childhood obesity crisis."
Or is he? Here's what Easterbrook actually said in the original The Times article (my emphasis):
I don't know who is to blame. The issue of obesity is complex and is absolutely one our society is facing, there's no denial about that, but if you break it down I think there's an education piece: how can we better communicate to individuals the importance of a balanced diet and taking care of themselves? Then there's a lifestyle element: there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside.
Miss the part where he "blames" video games? Me too. It's the line where, after calling obesity a "complex" issue, he refers to "a lifestyle element" and offers a few plainly non-all-inclusive examples.
Think he's being taken out of context? I do, and I'm no fan of McDonald's (I haven't eaten at a Mickey-D or BK in over a decade after getting food poisoning from an undercooked chicken sandwich). Why pick on this guy? Because he's an easy target. Because fast food probably won't be winning any health awards this side of the twenty-first century. Because "McDonald's Blames Video Games" is a nifty attention grabber.
So no, the CEO of McDonald's didn't blame video games for childhood obesity. He simply referenced a fact: that kids are more sedentary today than they were several decades ago, and offered a few perfectly reasonable examples of what they're doing while sitting on their duffs.
Do games make you fat? Of course not. You choose how and when you game, just like you choose a Big Mac instead of a salad or to fire a gun (it didn't fire itself) or to tap a smoke from a carton and light up.
We could solve the obesity crisis tomorrow, just like that. Snap. Over and done with. It's called self-discipline and moderation and exercise and responsibility. That's all I see this guy referencing.
Anyone have a problem with that?
How Ironic that the place that has a clown and the first to have that teletubbies type feel, and market it towards children say that Gaming is the reason why we have child obesity! Nice! Actually, it really is Parents and not either of these. If you can't control what your kids eat and how long they play games, then there is a problem with you parenting.
EGM Outs Blacklisting Publishers
There’s a secret war being waged in the margins of your news tickers and feature spreads and review feeds. You don’t get to see it because talking about or acknowledging it publicly is considered malapropos. Still, you might as well know there’s increasing back room chatter taking place in cubicles and meeting rooms and emails and instant message banter about the state of relations between game publishers and the gaming press.
The issue? Everything from press junkets and payola to game publishers (or, more specifically, unprofessional public relations representatives) blacklisting magazines that don’t produce rhapsodic reviews.
Now Electronic Gaming Monthly’s naming names. Reports Video Game Media Watch, the upcoming issue of EGM contains an editorial by Editor-in-Chief Dan Hsu claiming Midway’s Mortal Kombat development team, Sony’s sports game division, and Ubisoft (in general) have each banned EGM from ongoing coverage of their products. I’m not familiar with the coverage that EGM claims got them banned, but it’s probably safe to assume it wasn’t glowing.
Sometimes the gaming press gets it wrong. We’re not perfect. It’s not like game developers make good and bad games, but the gaming press only writes perfect copy. And no one’s yet come up with a solid way of vetting reviewers. Because they have a financial stake in the success of Game X, it’s considered bad form for publishers or developers to criticize their critics, and public feedback mechanisms (comments, message boards) tend to attract more juvenile than thoughtful reactions.
I can therefore at least relate to the forsaken publisher, the berated developer, the gratuitously savaged game. Imagine spending one to two years slaving day and night away from family and friends and life in general to produce the Next Big Thing, only to have a handful of snarky reviewers dash it to pieces in the space of so many words. Who wouldn’t be angry? It’s why I didn’t jump on the media bandwagon targeting Julian Eggebrecht this fall when he attempted (however unsuccessfully) to defend the control scheme in Lair.
Trouble is, publishers -- and I want to single them out from developers -- tend to be fair weather friends. When you’re up about their game, they’re up about you. When you’re down about their game or their technological angle of attack, they (or at least a few of them) go radio silent, sometimes permanently.
Who’s more to blame? Who knows. I expect it’s like anything else -- most of the players on both sides are probably trying to do the right thing most of the time, plagued by a few rotten and rogue apples. I wouldn’t be surprised (oh to be a fly on the wall) if it turns out that some of EGM's purported blacklisting registers as "What? Really?" to a few CEOs.
Matt Peckham and Klugle2 need to wake up and smell the coffee.
While I sympathize with game developers who slave away making games for months, if they don't like the reviews they're getting, then perhaps they should take extra precautions to ensure the game is up to snuff. Most games are rushed out the door to meet deadlines.
For far too long has it been the standard for game publishers to ship out to retail games that are in, what can only be deemed, Beta (or even sometimes, Alpha) status. The entire patch-it-later attitude is at fault here. Not the game reviewers.
Furthermore, as far as I'm concerned, game journalists should have the same set of ethical and professional standards of any other journalist the field. The game industry is much too cozy with game journalists and one can only hope that EGM's outing of the blacklisters will erode this unhealthy relationship.
Matt Peckham and Klugle2 need to wake up and smell the coffee.
While I sympathize with game developers who slave away making games for months, if they don't like the reviews they're getting, then perhaps they should take extra precautions to ensure the game is up to snuff. Most games are rushed out the door to meet deadlines.
For far too long has it been the standard for game publishers to ship out to retail games that are in, what can only be deemed, Beta (or even sometimes, Alpha) status. The entire patch-it-later attitude is at fault here. Not the game reviewers.
Furthermore, as far as I'm concerned, game journalists should have the same set of ethical and professional standards of any other journalist the field. The game industry is much too cozy with game journalists and one can only hope that EGM's outing of the blacklisters will erode this unhealthy relationship.
Although there are legitimate arguments in each article I believe the public should have the final say in which games are popular.The issue with some of the games are that they have too many bugs in them at time of release. I still can not get past the part in Bioshock where the guy is sitting in the lifeboat looking at a picture of his family. My system is no slouch,E6600/8800GTS-640MB/2GB Corsair Ram. I do believe that if a game like GTA4 and COD4 should have sequels as they were a real joy to play and view.Crysis was also a visual wonder but had graphics glitches as in stuttering frame rates and freezing. Why not let the gamers decide and not be put off by what the critics say.
CES: Have a Side of Blu-ray with Your Xbox 360?
Why not? Peripherals are easy. Strategy is hard. Figure out the latter and assuming Blu-ray wins the gold, plugging a Blu-ray add-on into your Xbox 360 sounds like a no-brainer. According to this Australian news site, a Microsoft exec said almost as much in response to the question “What if HD DVD fails?”
“It should be a consumer choice, and if that’s the way they vote, that’s something we’ll have to consider,” answered Microsoft group marketing manager Albert Penello.
And indeed it should be, the operative words being “consumer” and “choice.” Currently you can buy an HD DVD player for the Xbox 360, but unlike the PlayStation 3 which comes with an expensive integrated Blu-ray drive, you’re not required to eat everything on your plate. Sony makes gamers stomach that cost up front, love it or leave it, and even though Warner Bros just declared “love it,” those of you without high definition TV sets could probably care less. Well, you care that you’re being asked to fork over an extra couple hundred for technology you may or may not ever use, anyway.
Isn’t it ironic that Sony has managed in less than 12 months to come out with four or five entirely different versions of the PlayStation 3? What do you want, wireless or no? Flash card or no flash card? SACD support? And the big thinker, PlayStation 1 and 2, or just PlayStation 2 support?
But “To Blu-ray or not to Blu-ray”? Non-negotiable as far as Sony’s concerned.
How many PS3s do you think they would have sold in 2007 if their console cost $300-$400 instead of $500-$600? We’ll never know, but with incredible games like Ratchet & Clank Future and Uncharted, I’m guessing up to twice as many.
Why not Blu-ray for 360 now? Because Microsoft’s biding its time, and because it can afford to. It has a vested partner-driven interest in winning the format wars, even if it seems more likely than ever to lose them. The Xbox 360 is the number one and two console in software and hardware sales respectively. The company's just spinning its wheels strategically, and probably views Sony’s initial PS3 sales as largely Sony-enthusiast driven, not explicitly 360 losses.
May or may not, AGMonda, read it carefully. And my main point stands: Sony could just easily have offered it as an optional peripheral. There's no consumer-driven reason, not a one, that justifies its *mandatory* inclusion.
Disagree? Great. I'm glad you think less choice as a consumer is a good thing.
Matt,
You article seems to look at the situation through blinders. Sony's purpose from the beginning of the PS3's development was to create a media center with the PS3 - read back over their releases in 2005-2006. BlueRay was an integral part of that from the very beginning. The PS3 was never intended to be just a game platform. Ever. If you're looking for just a game console, then stick with the x-box 360. Or get a WII. Sony's strategy has proven effective; the PS3 with the BlueRay imbedded has been a significant reason why BlueRay will win the format wars, and the value of the PS3 with the Blueray player (vs. a Stand-alone BlueRay payer) will accellerate the sales of PS3's, and that in turn will sell more BlueRay movies. It works as an upward revenue spiral for Sony. BTW, I have both xbox360 (2nd one after the first one melted down) with the add-on HD-DVD player. It's ugly and antiquated compared to my PS3. I upgraded my PS3 hd and loaded Linux as a 2nd OS. try that with Xbox
I never said that wasn't their strategy Chuck, I'm saying it's a bad one. High-def movies simply don't have the "oh snap!" appeal to the average consumer that DVDs did when the VHS/DVD transition occurred. I'm not convinced Blu-ray's going to be driving *anything* in the foreseeable future, even if it wins the format wars. Unless Sony gets the PS3's price down, no one save for a minority of videophiles like you will much care.
Crysis 1.1 Patch Released, Boosts Performance
Did you play this game yet? Did you not because you’re afraid it’ll gleefully bully your PC choking and sputtering to the mat? Did you read some snarky rant about the end sequence seeming bipolar compared to the rest of the game? Does the thought of pummeling trees with your fists in lieu of axes or chainsaws sound a little navel-gazey? All true, all true. Still, best chaos theory simulation I’ve ever noodled with, and now there’s a patch that fixes bugs and actually improves performance in DirectX 9 and 10 rendering modes.
The fix list:
Fixes:
- Damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW has been made consistent
- F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well
- When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will not be in a permanently raised position anymore
- Memory leaks and potential crashes
Updates:
- Improved SLI / Crossfire support and performance
- Improved overall rendering performance (DX9 and DX10)
- Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10
Tweaks:
- Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
- Clamped water tessellation to avoid cheating in MP
- Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
- Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly
Only complaint: Where's the "removes misleading sense that you need Windows Vista to employ all the so-called DX10 effects under Windows XP" bug fix?
CES: Microsoft Claims Games for Windows Momentum
You’ve probably heard of it or seen the colorful logos, but do you know what Microsoft’s Games for Windows initiative is all about? Let me tell you.
Basically, it's supposed to be a push to make PC gaming as accessible and user-friendly as your average Xbox 360. Pop your tray, drop in a Crysis or BioShock DVD, and presto game-o. In theory, anyway. In practice, since that's clearly not what happens when you plop pretty much anything into your PC, it’s little more than a redundant brand awareness campaign for Microsoft's ubiquitous OS.
"Games for Windows." Like you've really got options.
All’s fair in marketing and public relations. Still, I’m a little disappointed in the whole Games for Windows schtick. That’s because it seemed like a really interesting idea a year ago, but today just feels like a missed opportunity. As a certification initiative it’s practically toothless. Games have to include an “easy install” option, be compatible with Windows Vista Game Explorer and the Xbox 360 controller, run on 64-bit versions of Vista, offer widescreen resolutions, and -- wait for it -- be launch-able from Media Center. So in other words, what everyone was more or less planning to do anyway nets you a trendy box logo and some free publicity when Microsoft announces new recruits, like it did today at the 2008 International CES in Las Vegas.
The newly announced rank and file:
Alone in the Dark (Atari)
Bionic Commando (Capcom)
Conflict: Denied Ops (Eidos Interactive)
Empire: Total War (SEGA)
LEGO Indiana Jones (LucasArts)
Microsoft Train Simulator 2 (Microsoft Game Studios)
Sins of a Solar Empire (Stardock)
Space Siege (SEGA)
Tomb Raider: Underworld (Eidos Interactive)
In November 2007, reads the Microsoft press release, the Games for Windows portfolio (i.e. GFW-branded games) “accounted for 20 percent of all PC game sales at retail stores.” Stop me if I’m missing something, but how is that figure supposed to impress anyone? 20 percent? Less than a quarter? How does that prove the GFW brand “drove the PC gaming category in 2007”?
PC gaming in 2008 remains a mildly schizophrenic experience (replace “slightly” with “delightfully” if you’re a PC enthusiast). Use this video card except not with that mainboard or this BIOS version or plugged into a cruddy underpowered gigawatt power supply or running the latest revision of GPU Manufacturer X’s drivers unless you tweak a file to disable a performance setting to kill the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house...etc.
Until Microsoft can figure out how to get the full wrapper marching to the beat of a streamlined drum (i.e. all the meta-services wired into consoles, from VoIP to matchmaking to digital distribution) without royally cheesing off developers and hardcore PC enthusiasts, the GFW initiative is just a sticker on a box and an excuse to launch more press releases claiming successes where requirements were bound to be fulfilled anyway.
I miss the good old days of the Amiga and it's "AutoConfig" architecture. Plug the device into the slot and the driver was loaded from a EEPROM on the card itself during what is referred to as the "POST" stage on the PC. Simple, elegant, and still updatable if there was a bug in the code.
PlayStation 3 Hooks 1.2 Million Holiday Buyers
1.2 million may be a fraction of the total Microsoft's bugling, but then Sony sold three-point-nine million PlayStation brand units in North America alone during the holiday window from November 23 to December 31. That's 1.2 million PS3s plus 1.4 million PSPs plus 1.3 million PS2s. With all the monkey-works manufacturing overhead, it's anyone's guess who turned the "purer" profit, but 2007 still rewarded eggs hedged in two or three baskets. I'm sure we'll see that borne out when Nintendo weighs in with likely record Wii and DS sales. (How many original Xbox's do you think Microsoft sold in 2007? Non-existent handhelds?)
We're starting to see data on the holiday beating administered by Nintendo. Reports are out that Nintendo's Wii demolished the PS3 in Japan last year, outselling Sony three-fold, 3.63 million Wii consoles to 1.21 million PS3s. That ratio held through the holidays, with Nintendo selling 774, 123 Wii consoles versus Sony's 232,421 PS3s. Microsoft brought up rears with a mortifyingly low 257,841 Xbox 360 sales. The latter number's for the entire year.
Look at Sony's PS3 sales another way and you've got the bestselling Blu-ray player in 2007, pretty much hands-down. Even though a fraction of PS3 owners actually employ it as a high-def movie playback device, the announcement that Warner Brothers is going Blu-ray exclusive (devastating news for HD DVD) coupled with reports that 2007 was a bumper sales year for high-def displays suggests Sony may be able to add additional non-gamer videophiles to its monthly numbers in 2008.
I'll bet just as poorly as Matt said it was. More PS3's are bought because more companies are becoming Blu-ray exclusive, and the XBox 360 doesn't double as an HD-DVD player very well (you have to buy an extension to use it).
On top of that, the features for the XBox 360 like WiFi, HD-DVD player, online gaming and even the hard drive size has to be bought.
With the PS3 the baseline hard drive is twice the size of XBox 360 (although the max is a small 80 GB while 360's is 120 GB). WiFi is integrated, and online gaming is usually free (depending on the game, but most of them are free).
Ontop of all of this, the 360 has restrictions on the hard drive (you can't install an operating system on it easily) and there is no web browser, while both of these are able to use on the PS3 (Ubuntu has a Cell version of their OS, and a web browser included from the start.)
Just my two cents. ^_^
Well,I own both systems. 6 months ago I swore by the 360 while my PS3 just kinda sat in my entertainment cabinet solving Parkinson's and waiting for NetFlix to deliver my next BluRay title.
But I guess I expected too much from HALO and was disappointed so much that I decided to give PS3 gaming a legitimate shot. I now hold a high rank in Warhawk (truly a fantastic game that doesn't get the respect it deseves). I also purchased Call of Duty for the PS3 instead of for my XBOX...I kinda feel that was a mistake, but it still runs nicely on the PS3. The PS3 media client and web browser are also getting a good workout; in fact, if it wasn't for Tampa Bay Lightning games, I would cancel my cable service as I'm finding that between College Humor, Youtube, and Reuters I get all the video I need. Now my 360 is collecting dust and it's not even solving cancer or waiting for a Hi Def movie...I feel kinda guilty. What if God had intended my PS3 to cure Alzheimer's? Sigh.
Great blog with lots of useful information and excellent commentary! Thanks for sharing.
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Direct-TV.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Dish-Network.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-Radio.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/T1-Internet-Service.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-DSL.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Satellite-Internet.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/VoIP.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Phone-Systems.html
http://www.1-satellite-tv-facts.com/Affiliate-Programs.html
Microsoft Claims 17.7 Million Xbox 360s Sold Worldwide
That's 17.7 million since the console's launch over two years ago, with nearly four-and-a-half million of that total sold in the fourth quarter of 2007. Official sales figures are still being tallied but that's not stopping Microsoft from tooting its own horn and attributing those 4.3 million to sales hits like Halo 3 and Mass Effect.
In fact the company says Mass Effect has so far sold 1.6 million copies, while Halo 3 has to date sold 8.1 million copies, meaning nearly half of all Xbox 360 owners have purchased a copy. Microsoft claims it sold 13.4 million Xbox 360s by the end of September, when Halo 3 debuted.
That's generally positive news for Microsoft and I doubt we'll see it replicated when Sony's numbers hit.
Nintendo? The company had sold 13.2 million units worldwide in September, but most recently projected it wouldn't hit 17.5 million units until the end of its fiscal year in March.
Does that mean Microsoft outsold Nintendo console for console in the final quarter of 2007?
I don't think so. Wait for Nintendo's numbers (I expect they'll be much higher than Nintendo expected, though admittedly offset by serious supply issues) and we'll see. Anything north of 4.4 million will knock Microsoft down a peg and put the Wii numerically neck and neck with the Xbox 360 worldwide. Of course it's highly unlikely anyone saw overall software sales as high as Microsoft's in the final quarter. Again, we'll see.
Notable: GameSpot astutely points out that 17.7 million total may actually show a sales downturn for the Xbox 360 -- from 8.9 million in 2006 to just 7.3 million in 2007.
Nvidia 9800 GX2 Pics and Specs Revealed
Hardware enthusiast site [H]ard|OCP (no, I'm not trying to sound trendy, that's how it's spelled) has exclusive pics of Nvidia's sequel to the company's SLI-on-a-card 7950 GX2. Think die shrink to 65nm, think launching "in late February or early March," think "at least 30% faster than an 8800 Ultra," and think "Quad SLI" support.
You can have a look at [H]'s exclusive pics for yourself, but they don't reveal much beyond the fact that it looks big and omni-grilled and totally shrouded in black-metal mystery.
A mix of speculation and overseas sourcing on [H]'s part, here's what they're listing as a few of the likely specs.
- 1GB Frame Buffer
- Two PCBs
- Two 65nm GPUs
- 256 Stream Processors
So fast, and power-hungry, and despite the die shrink, ostensibly case-space chewing as well as probably still pretty toasty, in other words.
Note that it's not called a 9800 GTX, which if we're placing bets on naming conventions driving product lines, suggests to me that we're not looking at the official successor to the 8800 GTX. Then again, [H]'s source says it's a "9800" GX2 and not an "8950" GX2, which if all of the above is more or less true could simply mean "sea change."
Bear in mind most or all of this information could turn out to be wrong, but in the meantime, enjoy the rumor du jour.
This is 100% bullshit. What's up Matt? Can you not get up off your ass and do a lttle fact checking? Is parroting rumor the standard of journalistic integrity? Don't be [H]trendy, be diligent.
This is 100% bullshit. What's up Matt? Can you not get up off your ass and do a lttle fact checking? Is parroting rumor the standard of journalistic integrity? Don't be [H]trendy, be diligent.
Red Rover, Red Rover: The Iowa Caucus Game
It's like a game. Sort of. First we lump ourselves into groups according to our preferred candidate. Groups that get less than 15 percent of all supporters are deemed "non-viable," at which point multiple "non-viables" can cluster together to form one or two "viables," move into an "already viable" groups, or simply do nothing and go uncounted.
(You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out...)
According to Iowa-based Dayton Daily News, Jennifer Duffy of The Cook Political Report calls it "a grown-up game of Red Rover." In Red Rover, players join teams and hold hands to form a chain which the opposing team has to break. Can't break the link? Come on over to the other side. All for bruises, and bruises for all.
Sounds kind of violent. Maybe we should make the caucuses run exactly like Red Rover and just blame video games for inducing the one-half of a quarter million people who generally show up to engage in wanton acts of physical irony.
While you're waiting for tonight's results -- if you're waiting and not about to throw your political-ad-jacked TV or radio or computer or phone out a window -- you might enjoy USA Today's Candidate Match Game. It isn't really a game, but more like an insightful 11-question quiz with goof-around issue sliders as well as the more or less accurate positions (global warming, tax reform, immigration, health care, etc.) most of the candidates have themselves been loathe to divulge with clarity.
I Played Games Once, But I Didn't Inhale
If I had, though, and I was suffering from serious pain, I gather from this story that I'd be feeling a lot better playing Mario than pill-popping. “Video games beat drugs for chronic pain” trumpets a Canadian news site, which suggests that experiments “consistently show people who suffer serious pain often find more relief in virtual reality environments than drug-based treatments.”
But is that really true? I don't know. I suppose it depends what “often” and “relief” and “virtual reality environments” mean.
Happy 2008. Welcome back “Do games eat your brain or simply anesthetize it?” stories. Did you miss ‘em?
No? Well brace up. 2007 was a bumper year for video games. Which means 2008’s going to see them under the blade like never before. In principle, that’s just swell. In practice, it means we’ll almost certainly miss the forest for the trees. Some are calling the latter an “availability cascade,” i.e. job-security-speak for “overrepresentation.”
The media and public make mountains out of molehills? No way. Stop it.
The solution? Don’t add snow to the snowball. Don’t be too credulous about the press releases to come. Don’t jump on the blathersphere bandwagon. Monitor the signal-to-noise ratio.
Play games. Use common sense. And don’t expect games to either turn your child into a fame-seeking killer or totally cure your chronic back pain. Games don’t work like that, and neither do we.
The Toys “R” Us $700 Wii Bundle
Even Nintendo dislikes and actively discourages game system bundles. Nonetheless, Toy “R” Us has a $700 dish seasoned with 10 Wii games, most of arguably dubious quality.
Jam it? Slam it? Is nabbing a Wii post-holiday rush worth $700 and a stack of second- and third-stringers?
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
WOW, people are REALLY cheap if they do this. its really sad considering the incredible lack of 3d capabilities on the ds. like seriously, go and get a psp and then try this because the games for the ds are only like 20-30 bucks.