The Heyday of this Generation is Here December 1, 2010

The prices are cheap.  There are major releases on all sides, and the consoles are now best they have ever been.  If you’ve been waiting for the right time to get into the console war, now is it.

The last time I’ve felt this way about a console generation was 2004, in the era of the PS2, GameCube and Xbox.  The prices for each unit ranged from one-hundred to two-hundred dollars.  The best games for each console had been released.  Just to name a few examples, Halo 2 was out for the Xbox, Metal Gear Solid 3 was out for the Playstation 2, and Metroid Prime was out for the GameCube.  New games were coming out so frequently that prices were dropping on them almost immediately in order for the games to compete with each other.  A collector’s edition of Doom 3 Xbox quickly dropped to $19.99. 

The problem was that all the consoles were around year away from being replaced.  Xbox 360 launched in 2005, the PS3 and Wii would release a year later in 2006.  There wasn’t too much time for the console gamers to enjoy their financial stability.  New consoles would be very expensive and the games would stay at their $60 premium for a very long time.

This November, I’ve noticed we may be headed back to those glory days in this current console generation.  The consoles are not only the cheapest they have ever been ranging from three-hundred to two-hundred dollars in price, but they’re now bundled with the best features the earlier releases of the consoles didn’t.  The Wii is now bundled with two of the best games on the system (opposed to one) and now includes the motion-plus technology made popular last year as standard.  The PS3 is now smaller and boasts the largest hard drive it’s ever had.  The Xbox 360 now is slimmer, has built-in WiFi support, and a native HDMI connection (but Hard Drive is still optional).

The games are now also more affordable.  Enslaved, which was a pretty well-received game when it launched in October, dropped in price from the $60US release price to the more affordable $40 within a month.  In fact, I was still able to get the pre-order DLC with it!  All Kinect launch games are priced at $50US, ten dollars less than a traditional controller game.  You’d think that these games would cost more at launch than their controller counterparts do, given how new the Kinect is!

Speaking of the Kinect, there’s the fact that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 now have been upgraded to support their own motion control systems.  While they are both quite expensive individually, the option to buy them bundled with a brand new console will save new adopters some cash, especially those buying an Xbox 360 Kinect bundle.

The plus side is, there are no successors for the major consoles in sight!  The only rumors musing around is perhaps an HD version of the Wii.  That has been debunked by Nintendo on several occasions, but even if it was true, it would not be considered a new console, as Wii games would continue to be playable on current units.

So if you’re on the fence about and really want to give your HDTV the chance to show you its full potential, consider giving console gaming a chance!  And for people who currently own consoles, welcome to the best time to have one, as there are a ton of great games to play on all three platforms already in stores, and they’re only going to get cheaper!

GameStop Pre-Orders DLC, How’d They Do? November 30, 2010

I’m sure many of you have seen the commercials that have been running non stop on TV since last week about the Halo Reach Map Pack.  GameStop, in a new move, has been promoting pre-order of the map pack in their stores, and for incentive they’re offering a pretty sweet exclusive avatar item, a flaming Mark V helmet.

Now, in the real world, digital purchases actually go faster if you do them from home so you can get them either immediatly or the very second they’re released.  Going out to a store to buy something is slow and cumbersome, it always has been.  You have to get in your car, drive to your destination (and enjoy all the red lights and heavy traffic in the process), wait in line behind all the customers in front of you, place your order (time to do so depends on how much the clerk actually knows about what you’re buying), scan your member card (every store’s got one these days), pay, and then finally drive home (again with the traffic and red lights).

So what is your incentive to drive out to a store to buy the very same thing (and pay the exact same amount) you could buy directly at home?  Well, there is the incentive for people who don’t use a credit or debit card, and who don’t have any spare MS point cards lying around.  There’s also the Mark V flaming helmet offer, and that’s the big one.

How did GameStop do?  Well, despite e-mailing all their members on the 18th and starting a national advertising campaign on the 19th of November, GameStop didn’t actually allow pre-orders of the Halo Reach Map Pack until the 22nd of November.  That’s a pretty big problem, espessially given the fact that the content came out TODAY on the 30th.  You only had about seven days to preorder the content.  Also, you had to buy it up front in full, no minimum payment option like with physical games.  Third, you had to be a member of their rewards program in order to preorder, and we all know how I feel about that.

Well the codes were e-mailed out at about 3:12PM EST today, some time after the content was released to Xbox Live.  Anyone buying directly from their house would’ve gotten it much faster.  Of course the Map Pack codes were not actually e-mailed out, just the code for the flaming helmet.  If you want the code for the map pack you have to log in to GameStop’s Power Up Rewards website and navigate through it to find where your code is buried.  Of course if you never bothered to register your Rewards card online, you’ll have to do that and set up your online account and games list before accessing the site.

Meanwhile I’m pretty sure anyone who wanted to buy it online had probably been playing on the maps for at least a few hours.  Also, It’s not like they’re going to run out of physical copies of a digital download, kind of defeating part of the incentive to pre-order.  Well, for those who contributed to GameStop’s experiment, enjoy the helmet, guys!

GameSpy: The Lost Network November 24, 2010

As the rest of internet was just gaining it’s foothold as a gaming portal, they already had a site.  When Microsoft announced they had the first ever cross-platform console multiplayer service, they had developed the definitive online game server browser, which was what gamers used to play on their favorite Quake, Hexen and Quake II servers.  It was called the GameSpy program and it revolutionized the upcoming PC multiplayer gaming revolution.  With the Internet no longer a detached series of BBS boards, and servers no longer needed to be accessed by directly dialing your friend’s computer, GameSpy offered the best option for selecting a multiplayer server to play a game on.

In 1999, GameSpy branched out and created their own gaming site and became the definitive location for gaming news and editorials.    They had Dave Kosak, known as “Fargo” as a staple of the site.  Every Friday he would write a new Planet Fargo, providing the tagline “Your Parents are Wrong” and covering the hilarious side of being a gaming journalist.  He published political editorials written by Solid Snake to plead with Senators to “please stop making the Metal Gear”, he moved into a mall for a whole week hoping to be the first person to own Diablo II.  But the greatest article he ever wrote was the research thesis on the heuristics to making a kick ass LAN party.  He also worked with other GameSpy members like Chris “shaithis” Buecheler, because as we all know, in comedy, you must have a straight man to make the funny man funnier.

The domination started with the Planet Sites.  Starting with Planet Quake, a news website for all things Quake, the site quickly became the definitive site for Quake news, mod updates, and commentary.  Others would soon branch out, like Planet Unreal and Planet Half-Life.  Then it started to go a little crazy.  Pretty soon there was a planet site for everything, Planet Vampire, Planet AVP, and Planet Anachronox were just a few sites that took shape among the dozens more that popped up.  There was even a Planet Daikatana (I’m not shitting you).

Then there was the E3 presence.  They dominated it.  The proud few who freely contributed their time to operate their planet sites would get free invites every year, no questions asked and no reason needed to that year’s E3 in order to cover the show.  They had a local headquarters set up in the center of the show, not only to court other developers but to provide a lounge area for their contributors to kick back and relax after checking out the show floor.  They also had David Lawrence streaming a live video webcast (unheard of at the time!), interviewing the major game developers and getting previews out to people unable to attend the show.  Anyone at the show was welcome to sit and watch the live stream as it was being broadcast, or just hang out at the makeshift GameSpy HQ for a massage and some Tony Hawk.

GameSpy was on top of the world and it was looking prosperous for everyone, and then they made the decision to merge with their biggest competitor, and it would bring about their destruction.  By 2005 the company merged with IGN.  Slowly the greatness from the site started to leak.  Loyal Planet contributors were no longer being asked to go to E3.  One by one the sites stopped being updated, yet their domains were still being renewed.  Since they were no longer supporting their Planet Sites, each individual Planet site would basically run until the contributor lost interest, and since they would not be taking on any new people, once the site’s contributors stopped (or the site broke), it would mean the end for the site.  For a while it was a network lost in time (2005 to be exact), a monument to a once great revolution.  Not too long ago, the DNS entry broke on most of them, and nowadays if you try checking out one of the sites, it’ll incorrectly redirect you to a random 404 page.

Nowadays GameSpy has become just a blip on the radar of the internet.  Microsoft and Sony both use their own personal networks to handle multiplayer with their own first party server browsers to play, making the need for a third-party game browser unnecessary on a console.  On the PC side, the side where they dominated for so long, most game developers have migrated to more comprehensive developer tools which integrate into the game and act as DRM, like Valve’s Steam or Microsoft’s Games for Windows initiative.  Fargo left the site in early 2009, but some of his old articles are still accessible.  The really old ones require some serious digging with Google.

As a former GameSpy contributor, early GameSpy adopter, and frequent Planet Fargo reader, I felt a serious connection with the company that goes beyond what I can type up on this page.  The one token I kept was the letter written for me to serve as proof of industry identification, signed by Dave “Fargo” Kosak.  I have it framed and it will always hang on my wall, an honor not even my College Degree has.  It got me into my first E3, an experience I will never forget.

Tron’s Legacy November 23, 2010

Ten years ago I was at a LAN party being held by a bunch of Open Source Users in my area.  Let me tell you something, Open Source guys REALLY know how to have a LAN.  Every few months, the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group converted the computers in their offices to a Red Hat distribution that contained only one program, Unreal Tournament.  They also had a full projection system with surround sound able to broadcast whatever they wanted.  Since having a virtual camera on the match playing on the projector usually made everyone sick (it did, I asked) they would instead play classic movies which were staples of nerd culture.  One night in 2001, this was how I was first exposed to the movie Tron.

I’m ashamed to say that for a movie made in 1982, which has been considered by most of my compatriots as the movie which ignited the digital revolution and inspired gamers the world over, gamers who would later become game makers, I had not seen Tron until I was 16 and knew nothing at all about it.  I think I remembered seeing a few previews for it playing occasionally on the Disney Channel back when it was a premium service channel back in the early 90s, but the previews could not do justice to what the movie truly was.

This was the most imaginative depiction of the world behind the computer screen I had ever seen before.  Kevin Flynn was the guy I wanted to be at 16 years old, a cocky self-taught computer genius and he had something happen to him that is an unfortunate reality of such a cutthroat business, his work was stolen from him.  But he wasn’t going to take it sitting down, he was going to do everything he could (legal or otherwise) to prove he was the original designer.  He just had no idea that he was tangling with an artificial intelligence capable of putting him on the game grid he created.  Now the best gamer in the world is forced to play the games he created from the inside or die.  What an epic concept.

Within no time I picked up a copy of the 20^th Anniversary DVD for my own personal home theater collection.  I think I watched the movie so much I wore the DVD out, even the second disc with the feature length making-of documentary got a lot of play.

Then in 2003 I went to my very first E3.  Twenty-one years after the release of the original Tron, I caught a glimpse of what was going to be (what I believed at the time) the closest thing to a sequel the movie Tron was ever going to get, the Tron 2.0 video game made by Monolith Productions (who later went on to make F.E.A.R.).  All of the staples of Tron were in place in the game, the art style, the actors.  I could play on a lightcycle match or match discs against viruses and intrusion countermeasure programs.  When I got the final version of the game, I played through it at least three times.  I hoped Monolith would have made a sequel (they never explained who F-Con’s CEO was), but they never did.

I’m eagerly anticipating the Blu-Ray.  Director Steven Lisburger has confirmed to the press and fans that he has finished the 2K digital restoration of the movie, and knowing that the movie was made to be viewed on 70mm film projectors could make Tron’s BD release the next major industry staple.

Then this came out.

Bring your Encom Group 7 access badges, Tron Legacy comes out December 17^th.  Flynn lives!

I Game, I’m Healthy, Live With It November 22, 2010

I read a question recently on the Halo Waypoint forums that a user asked the group how they kept healthy and kept up with the gaming lifestyle.  While I’m sure he was just asking for tips on how to keep fit and meant nothing disrespectful about it, it reminded me of all the times in my life I’ve heard people tell me if I kept playing games and didn’t exercise I’d be stupid and unhealthy.  Well, you’re reading this article off of a webpage I designed and maintain myself, so I’m not stupid, but believe it or not, I am actually quite healthy as well.

If there’s a smaller slightly-less annoying sister to the “all video games are evil and will make you violent” crowd, it’s the “video games will make you fat” crowd.  I’ve had it with these completely false prophets who claim to know more than I do about my own body’s health.  They claim that by not constantly doing repetitive physical activity instead of sitting for hours in front of a screen interacting with a game, coupled with a high-fat, high-calorie and high sugar fast food diet is driving this entire country into becoming an unhealthy overweight lot and only by allowing them to pass laws to protect ourselves from…ourselves because we’re too dumb to know what’s good for us (and they somehow do), can we become healthy, happy people.

Allow me to remove all the bullets from their points right now.  At 26 years old I am 5 foot 9 inches tall.  I weigh about 135 pounds and have weighed around that much since I was about 15 or so (give or take about five pounds here or there).  I do not exercise, other than regular human movements, (walking from place to place, going up and down stairs, etc) and my only recreational activities as of late (other than posting up here for all of you fine people) are watching movies, TV and playing video games.  My blood tests are perfectly fine, with no trace of diabetes.  I have perfectly fine health expectancy.

Now you’re probably going to say I probably don’t eat very much.  That’s not true, I eat and I eat plenty.  Since I can’t cook, a lot of what I eat is either ready-made ramen noodles, or food I can buy on the go (oh no, fast food).  However, it’s not all bad.  Since my mother can cook, she does make me dinner occasionally (and she makes ingredients from scratch) so I eat about a fifty percent good, fifty percent bad diet.

If half of what “health” experts said was true, I should be a 400 pound diabetic.  I’m not.  I’m sure you can see me in any of my videos, other than the fact I grow facial hair faster than Grizzly Adams I’m a healthy individual of average build.  Do they have any explanation for that?  Well I do.

The reality behind weight gain is actually all about the amount you eat on a regular basis.  The human body is quite adaptable.  If you regularly eat the same amount of food at around the same time, you will not gain any weight.  It is only when you throw a wrench into the works and heavily alter your eating habits by eating larger portions of food than you usually do, that you will start to gain weight.  Also there’s been concerns that stress and other emotional factors can affect weight gain, as the chemicals your body produces during these periods can affect the rest of your body.  This is usually why crash dieting is a bad idea, it’s unhealthy and harmful to your body.  Also any kind of physical activity you’ll do on a normal basis will maintain your body weight.  A lot of college students or city inhabitants will walk (a lot!) daily, and by continuing to do this activity their body weight is maintained.  If it’s stopped, the body will react and you may gain some weight, but it again will eventually even back out.  Also, many health experts and doctors believe genetics plays a lot in the factor of weight, although it is a debated topic.

The nanny brigade won’t tell you any of that.  Maybe they should write it all down.  Granted, I don’t drink or smoke, but that’s a separate can of worms.

Who Are the Patriots? November 14, 2010

As a thank you for your regular patience, I decided to dust off one of my full sized research articles dating back 5 years and give it a little update.  It was originally written for my College US Government class, and the subject matter was who the true rulers of the country were, Metal Gear Solid 2’s Patriots.  The article discussed their origins (Pre MGS-4), how they came to be, and what they were responsible for.

Well, now that MGS4 was out, I knew I had to give it an update with the new information provided by the game and post it up for you guys to read.  Since it’s far too long to post on the main page, I have given it it’s own tab on the main site.  I am considering if I have to create a new one to just create one major tab and post all of my longer articles on a subdivision of that.  You can read it here or just click on the tab on the top of the screen.

So if you need any help understanding the history given in Metal Gear Solid 3, or need to know just what the heck the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 was trying to say, give it a read!

Project Natal vs Kinect: Fantasy vs Reality November 9, 2010

Update:  I have been corrected (by many commenters) about the facial recognition capabilities in Kinect.  I’m altering the article based upon those comments.  I had been misinformed.  I don’t have one and I tremulously apologize for the incorrect statement.

A little under a year before I started this website Microsoft at E3 2009 released this video during their Pre-E3 show.

The media and the internet shit a brick.  I remember.

A year and a half and one name change later the product is now on store shelves, and scene to scene you can clearly see that a lot of what was shown in that video could not make it to the final version.

Was the concept far too grand for Microsoft to deliver on?  Were the people who made the video completely clueless as to the technical capabilities of what they were promoting?  I’ll leave you to decide on that, but I will tell you specifically what parts turned out to be fantasy and which parts got it right.

First off, the opening, where the teenager is playing a fighting game with his whole body.  One player interacting with an AI controlled opponent is quite likely to find a place in Kinect’s library, and who knows, with Xbox Live you could have two players controlling avatars fighting each other from their respective homes.  Sure makes fighting in the parking lot after school obsolete.

Next came the driving game.  While you can see a whole family is watching the tv only two people are actually interacting with the game.  The girl is clearly seen driving and the father is doing the motions of the pit crew.  While this does fit within the rules of Kinect (two players only) the Xbox 360 does have a racing wheel which would work a heck of a lot better.  Hold out your hands for a few minutes and you’ll notice how quickly your arms tire without holding them on something.  The pit crew motion control is much more interesting here, and I think it would work a lot better matching one player with a control device while a separate one does a strictly Kinect motion.  Recent news has said controller plus Kinect interactivity is possible, so it is technically feasible.

Then there was the little boy playing as Godzilla and destroying a city in his wrath.  I think a game like this already existed requiring the vision camera, but I could be wrong.  I do remember XBLA games where you’d have to stand in front of the vision camera and swat balls headed your way and move things around, and the motions the boy is using is very similar.  Please note the vision camera had problems capturing the imput correctly sometimes and Kinect shouldn’t have that problem.  Regardless, one player being captured, perfectly feasible.  It gets a pass, but it really doesn’t look like much fun.

The next video, a girl and her mom playing what looks at first to be Dance Central, but then turns out to be a generic split screen soccer game.  I think that’s already been made, and it fits with the two player limit.  If that game’s not already out, it should be out by Christmas.

Then comes the infamous skateboarder video.  The boy clearly is seen scanning his skateboard into the Xbox 360 to play a Tony Hawk Ride-esque skateboarding game without a board.  One would think if the boy knew already how to use a skateboard and already had a skateboard he would just…oh…GO SKATEBOARDING!  That aside, the Kinect has a 640×480 camera in there, not exactly high-definition by anyone’s standards.  Capturing an image of the board’s appearance from that distance would not give a very sharp texture to apply to the virtual board, and it would be very apparent on the family’s HDTV that the board logos would’ve been blurry when upsampled like that.  You also see some voice command work here when the skateboarder orders the Kinect to “SCAN” and it responds on command.  The final version of the Kinect does in fact have a mic…but voice commands are….well I’ll talk more about it later.

Ahh yes, then we get to the infamous teenage girl scene.  The Xbox in the video clearly recognises the girl’s face and loads her profile.  This is one of the famous bits that made a lot of nerds go crazy, and it is pretty cool, and I’ve been told that the Kinect can in fact do this, so it gets a pass.  As she talks to her friend who also happens to be conveniently using her Xbox at the same time (and she also conveniently has a Kinect installed on her own 360) they rattle on about dresses, and wave their hands around a conveniently placed dress shop which suddenly is selling their wares on Xbox Live, and superimposes a dress on a 3D image of herself before deciding the first one she virtually tries on is the one she likes.  This scene is a complete lie.  I don’t know one woman who likes the first dress she tries on, ever!  Heck I even know a girl that will spend hours dressing her Rock Band avatar with virtual apparel after playing one song, at the expense of the time of an entire group who’d rather just be playing songs.  The Xbox will be able to have full voice and video chat from multiple Kinects allowing for two people to have a full-duplex video chat from their living rooms with voice.  They also claim to have limited voice command support, so telling it to contact a friend online is certainly possible, but voice accuracy technology is still iffy.  Try telling an automated phone service where you’re trying to reach and you’ll likely get an operator every time since the service is useless.  Then there’s the whole dress shopping experience… a total pipe dream.  The framework to have an entire dress catalog does not currently exist in Xbox Live (unless you’re dressing virtual avatar clothing), and there are no real world stores which have deals to sell physical goods through the service.  You can also clearly see that the dress is being stored on a stored 3D image of the girl and not her current physical state on the real time video chat.  While Kinect might be able to take a 3D image of you, there’s just no reason for a user to do it.  You would have to stand in front of the camera and do a very specific series of turns that the system would prompt you to do, and then it would layer it onto a 3D image based upon your 3D frame taken from your current motion capture state.  Plus, since the camera’s resolution is so low, it would not stand up to being displayed in full 1080p and would have to be kept windowed or it would blur.

Next is the game show.  You clearly can see four people on one family’s side playing through Xbox Live with three people of another family in a generic trivia contest.  Aside from the fact the teams are imbalanced (which is kind of unfair) you can clearly see more than two people on each side playing.  Kinect can only support two people, so having a whole family doing a trivia contest is kind of a fantasy.  It’s also kind of unnecessary since trivia games on Xbox Live Arcade already exist using a controller, and would be better suited to just pushing the A button, even my mother would be able to figure that out.  The fact the system would accept voice responses for the trivia questions is kind of neat but time will tell how good that voice recognition software is.  Also we know that Chuck Norris’s push up count is still climbing as I write this, so that’s a trick question.

The movie selection system comes next, and you can clearly see the arm control system in place, another scene that made nerds go crazy.  This is not a fantasy, this is now a part of the Xbox 360 system, as is the full selection of movies to watch in full 1080p through Zune Marketplace and Netflix.  Technicians and programmers have been swapping back and forth about if Kinect can support arm motions while sitting or standing, originally it couldn’t, but after E3 it could…can we get a ruling on this?  Please post a comment if you own a Kinect and know if it can or not.  In the last bit of the video you see the woman telling the Xbox to shut off.  People interpreted this that you’d be able to turn the Xbox 360 on and off just by voice command.  You can’t do either.  Update:  The Fall 2011 update has added the ability to turn off the Xbox 360 by voice command.

So thank you for reading through this meaty article comparing what was originally promised with Kinect back when it was called Project Natal and what is actually coming with Kinect.  If you don’t get anything out of rewatching the video a year and a half later, at least you get to hear some of Wolfmother’s “Joker and the Thief”.