Live Anywhere 4 Years Later July 22, 2010

Back in 2006 Microsoft announced something grand, perhaps too grand.  Their inital attempts to bring users closer to it flopped, and the rest that came along with it just never happened.

Try to remember what was happening in 2006 if you can.  Microsoft was throwing everything they possibly could to promote the ill-fated Windows Vista.  They knew they had a bloated, unstable operating system that no one wanted, so they were going to pull every dirty trick in the book to force people to buy it.  DirectX 10 exclusivity wasn’t going to be enough since most games weren’t going to support it at the OS launch given the anticipated low install base.

On top of that Microsoft had an OS for a series of phones that were selling moderately due to the wide amount of hardware and the wide popularity of cell phones, but could have been doing better.

They also knew they had one hell of a success in the Xbox 360.  It was the biggest selling product of the 2005 Christmas season.  The games for it were selling very well, even the bad ones, because they implemented a cross-game score system of achievements.  The gamers were going crazy buying new games just to increase their gamerscores, which granted them nothing but bragging rights.

So, how do you take the massive success of one platform and try to bring that success over to your other products?  Well, you take what worked in that platform and you bring it to the other two.  The thing that worked was a unified Xbox Live profile, and the solution was Live Anywhere.

In 2006 just before the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft spoke to the press about their plans for Live Anywhere, a cross-platform integrated gaming network designed to work on your cell phone, computer and console, enabling functionality at every turn and keeping gamers connected to live even on the go.

You would expand your Xbox Live account to your PC and phone.  You could spend all night racing your car on your Xbox 360 against people on the PC or the 360, check your statistics on your PC and compare them to gamers all around the world, and while you’re on the go make some tweaks to your car’s appearance and paint job from your cell phone.  At the time, that was revolutionary.  All it would require was Windows Vista, an Xbox Live account (which if you didn’t have you’d still have to pay 50 a year to play multiplayer on PC, even without an Xbox), and a compatible cell phone.  As long as you had the game, you’d be able to use this functionality anywhere you had access to these devices.  The first games to support this revolutionary platform?  Shadowrun, which would be released on the PC and Xbox 360 and support cross-platform multiplayer gaming, and the much-anticipated PC version of the biggest seller of the original Xbox, Halo 2 PC.

Shadowrun and Halo 2 PC flopped.  By making a 2-year-old Xbox game have a Windows Vista installation requirement, most consumers either passed it up, or continued playing their Xbox versions.  Shadowrun was a multiplayer exclusive game, and not a very good one.  The revamp to the Windows Phone platform never came, and Live Anywhere took a major hit, setting it back years.  Microsoft realized they screwed their PC gamers which had been getting multiplayer for free since the DOS days and refunded anyone who paid for a Live account without an Xbox and gave everyone their fifty dollars back, making the PC component of their multiplayer games free again.

In 2008 Apple perfected their iPhone design when they released the iPhone 3G.  Finally a phone was released that was both technologically advanced enough to support everything the Live Anywhere platform promised, but was also affordable to the enthusiast consumers.  Microsoft could have made the Live Anywhere platform compatible with the iPhone, but for no reason they never did, and for years there was no progress bringing Live to cell phones.

PC vs Xbox 360 plans have been scrapped.  The reason why is the same reason gamers said PC versus Xbox 360 games wouldn’t work.  A controller is not as precise with aiming as a keyboard and mouse is.  The PC player has just too much of an advantage, and even with autoaim cranked up as high as it can go, an experienced PC player was beating an experienced Console player every time.  This is probably also why games like Halo 2 and Gears of War were never made cross compatible.  If a game like Shadowrun, which was designed from the ground up to be platform cross compatible couldn’t work, what chance did any other game have?

Windows 7 series phones are expected to have Live access, and games with achievements that will count towards your gamerscore, however given the fact that the OS has been constantly delayed, is not compatible with current phones, and better options like Android and iOS4 are currently available to buy, these are not expected to sell very well.

I really was looking forward to this technology when it was announced, and while it never fully realized its potential (because Microsoft would never release it on the iPhone), it was a failed giant step which promoted smaller successful baby steps.  Games for Windows Live is widely adopted by many game developers, enabling achievements, stat tracking, and messaging between the Xbox 360 and PC.  I’m hoping that Microsoft swallows their pride and releases an app for the iPhone and Droid that could enable Xbox Live account control from your cell phone, but I have no reason to suspect that’s going to happen before Windows Phone 7 launches.  Maybe if it flops like the Kin, they’ll consider it longer.

What do you all think?  Was this too grand a plan? Or was the implementation of the plan doomed to failure?  Do you think it’ll ever be fully realized?  I want to hear from all of you.

No Love for Network Adapters July 14, 2010

I tried selling my old Gamecube earlier today. I have a Wii already and since then the Cube has just been sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

Gamestop had no problem taking it, however what they wouldn’t take for some odd reason was my Gamecube network adapter. It just was no longer supported by the store for sale or trade in.

Yes, the Gamecube did support online and LAN play in some of it’s games, just not anywhere near as many as it should’ve. Games like Mario Kart Double Dash was the big network play seller, but it was LAN only. Games that really could have used it like Metroid Prime, had no multiplayer, and Metroid Prime 2 only supported split screen.

I’ve seen this before. A few years ago a friend of mine bought a used Dreamcast to use it to play the classic games, and even wanted to turn it into a web server. While the Dreamcast came with a built in modem, you could replace it with a network adapter. In 1999, only college kids had broadband. When my best friend asked the clerks about network adapters for Dreamcast, he just shook his head and said, “Good luck.”

Dreamcast network adapters are impossible to find and incredibly overpriced if you can find one. Is the Gamecube’s adapter destined for the same thing?

What Makes Good Atmosphere in a Video Game Part 2: Fake Radio July 14, 2010

For me, It all started with Lazlow, who began with the words, “All right Liberty City this is your talk radio show, Chatterbox, where your opinion matters.”

As far as I know, the chatterbox radio station in Grand Theft Auto 3 is the first recorded attempt to bring a persistent fake radio station into a game, but more than that it wasn’t put there just to add music to listen to (I think that had been done before), but to provide an extra depth of character to the setting and the people in it.  They could add humor to a serious storyline, or provide further background you would not be able to get other ways.

I always appreciated when games would have radio shows in them.  I loved them so much I used to pull the original .wav files from the game installation folders and rip CDs just so I could listen to them in my car while driving.  Let me tell you I would get some weird looks from my passengers when these CDs would start to play.  Their production values were so high they were indistinguishable from regular radio stations, bringing them a lot of credibility.  Of course the content on a lot of them were pretty terrifying to the uninformed and it was pretty funny to see the looks on their faces when I would play them.

Other iconic openings followed in other games like in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, who started with, “Hello LA this is your talk radio show.  If you’re new to town or new to this whole radio thing, you’re listening to The Deb of Night, the only girl who will spend the night with you and leave first thing in the morning guaranteed.”

The radios could be heard in your haven, and sometimes on radios in the game world.  They added a lot of humor to the game, as it became obvious that Deb was probably the only girl the show’s callers ever talked to.  Landmarks in the game were referenced, and it was interesting to see what real people unaware of the Vampire society they lived in thought of your exploits, not knowing why you were doing them, showing that you were actually making an impact on the world around you and the people in it.

Of course there was also Prey, who started theirs with, “From the high desert in the Great American Southwest, I’m Art Bell.”

The Art Bell show of course is real, its use in Prey was actually the solution to a problem the developers were having.  The radio show’s inclusion was more of a storytelling addition than an atmospheric one.  During the development of Prey, the game developers knew they needed a persistent voice telling the player what was going on back on Earth.  The developers wanted someone like Art Bell to do the radio shows given the subject matter he covers fit in perfectly with Prey’s themes, eventually they just decided get Art Bell himself to do it.  Intentionally or unintentionally, its inclusion in the game became a highly anticipated moment, and it also allowed them to include a lot of inside jokes.  Bell even recorded his segments in his home, on the same equipment he used to transmit his radio show.  This not only increased the production value of the segments, it blurred the line between the game and reality.

For everything I said in the last article about Alan Wake’s advertising being non atmospheric, it succeeded and surpassed my atmospheric expectations when at one point in the game you get to see the actual radio station where all those radio shows were broadcast from.  On the billboard just under the station identification sign was the face of Pat Maine, the host of the radio show The Night Owl, which you’ve been listening to all game.

It was always great to hear advertisements for fake products that you’d see billboards for later in the game, showing that fake ads and fake radio shows are a fantastic way to add atmosphere, and they can function together for a deeper connection to the player and bringing this series full circle.

So that’s all for now from my series, “What Makes Good Atmosphere in a Video Game?”  I hope you enjoyed them.  Feel free to comment on what you thought, and post up any ideas of your own about new topics for the series.  If it’s good, I might just use it.

Whatever Happened to Cyberpunk? July 12, 2010

The following is an editorial I wrote last summer (which feels basically the same as this summer) and posted up on another website.  For some reason, I decided to wipe the dust off my copy of Too Human, which I got as a Christmas gift two years ago and started playing it.  The obvious cyberpunk themes made me decide to reprint this editorial here.

I’ve spent this summer with way too much free time on my hands. When I’m not pretending to work, sleeping, or spending a short time on vacation I’ve actually become obsessed, thanks to The Spoony One, with really bad FMV games from the mid to late 90s. You know, those games we’re trying to forget and in most cases don’t run anymore?

I actually missed out on the cyberpunk generation of the computing world. I entered real computing around the era of the dawn of Windows 95 (which was in late 96) back when the next era in gaming was just starting, and it was called “Quake”. So there was a lot I missed out on. DOS in particular, and a lot of really bad FMV games I just never played. The ones I have played were few and far between, I particularly remember were ones after FMV was on it’s way out, including X-Files Game and Star Trek Borg. I’ve actually been told those were considered actually the high marking ones of the whole genre! John de Lancie’s performance made Star Trek Borg a cult classic in some respects, and despite the terrible and unintuitive gameplay of the X-Files Game, it had high production values and good acting, even by it’s unknown lead actor.

Back when I was in high school I read a classic book written by William Gibson called Neuromancer. This book depicted a future where we’d plug our brains into the net in order to surf it. That hackers were celebrities living on the fringe of society and actually were considered attractive to female mercenaries in skin-tight leather plagued by inner tragedy. By the late nineties and into the new millenium we’ve seemed to have forgotten this aspect of our society. Computers instead of becoming rogue have become commonplace, even used by the most low brained of us to send nude pictures to their idiot significant others. It was more than just a genre, it was a way of life. Something for all of us that were into computers to look forward to for the future.

So two of these FMV games that Spoony mentioned were made at the height of the genre when it crossed over the cyberpunk reality. One was Johnny Mnemonic, not the really bad Keanu Reeves movie, this was actually the FMV game which officially while based on the movie, was actually more based off the short story, and did a better job of translating the artistic style of cyberpunk across a visual medium than that badly acted poorly directed piece of film did. Johnny Mnemonic (The Interactive Movie) intrigued me when I saw Spoony’s review. The atmosphere actually wreaked of style, the actors did a better job of making their dialog convincing because unlike the big named actors in the film, they actually had to work for their paychecks. For example, I always hated in the film how the viewer was informed Johnny’s storage capacity could not be exceeded and what would happen if it was. One of the guys who was not Johnny actually informed Johnny himself of Johnny’s own limitations. And then Johnny played it like an “uh, duh!” moment! Stupid. In the game, Johnny himself informs Jane, someone who logically wouldn’t have a clue what was going to happen to him, and also at the same time informing the player. It doesn’t come off as stupid, it actually comes off as well placed exposition! I also think that everyone down the line actually did a better job in their respective roles, with the exception I can never knock Udo Kier in any performance he does, so I have to give Udo the one exception, his video game counterpart actor was not as good, but defiantly had better more logical dialog. I even liked Issac Hayes better as J-bone, his whole discussion about unplugging from technology fit perfectly into his scientology believes, and while I don’t agree with them (I’m a proud atheist), IT GAVE IT A DEEPER LAYER TO HIS PERFORMANCE! When you watched Ice-T in the film performance, you were literally watching Ice-T being Ice-T. It didn’t work.

I also got exposed to another technological cyberpunk game recommended by Spoony called Ripper, a FMV murder mystery set in a cyberpunk era future where a copycat Jack the Ripper is somehow killing people from inside the computer networks. The performances of all the actors were phenomenal, particularly Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, and my favorite of the game David Patrick Kelly. I also thought that Jimmy Walker, Burgess Meredith and John Rhys-Davies also did phenomenal jobs but their roles were smaller. The deeper you went in the game the deeper the story got, the murderer changing with every piece of evidence that came out. But it also came up with this whole back story between the three leads (who were also the game’s three main suspects, the murderer changes from playthrough to playthrough, so if I said who it was, it might not be valid to another player’s playthrough) that they formed an organization called the Web Runners when they were all together at the University. They exchanged their secret location through codes hidden in the interactive campus post boards, and composed of some of the best and brightest young hackers and gamers of their time. Basically they were the pioneers of the virtual gaming movement as teenagers. A movement that has not happened yet, and should.

I think the cyberpunk era ended in video games after Deus Ex, released in 2000, created by Warren Spector.  Sure they released a sequel to the game a few years later, and a third game is in development to be released on current hardware, but one game being released in an empty market every few years does not equal the return of a genre which really used to own the market.

I’ve been told by a lot of film buffs that the culmination of cyberpunk on a film medium was “The Matrix”.  I would agree with this.  The movie borrowed heavily from cyberpunk themes, people hacking computers with their brains, and the hovercraft had so much technology being strewn about like garbage.  Obviously after the bombs the two Matrix sequels were, I think Hollywood swore off cyberpunk, because I can think of many people who left those movies with a bad taste in their mouths for the subject matter.  I haven’t seen a cyberpunk film since.

I really miss this genre, I hope some day I can make my own impact on it (in print form of course).  Based upon the awful sales of Too Human (ironically enough a game originally conceived in 1999, at the peak of cyberpunk) and the probable cancellation of the other games in that series I think game developers are probably going to stick to a never-ending cycle of realistic war games.

What Makes Good Atmosphere in a Video Game Part 1: Fake Ads July 7, 2010

This series is going to be a little different than what you might’ve read before.  I’m not going to be talking about graphics or sound in any of the articles.  For this article series, I’m going to be doing something a bit different than you might expect.  I’m going to be talking about “atmosphere” in levels of immersion.  Now this immersion can mean anything in the game that adds believability to the environment.

I’m going to devote the first part of this series to talking about in-game advertising.  Don’t get me wrong, I love advertising in games, so long as the product is fake.  Why is fake advertising more immersive than real advertising?  Because seeing a billboard for a product that you know can only exist in the game adds a level of immersion that further cements the logic of the setting, and can show the player that there is a deeper connection with the world behind the scenes than just the game itself.

The No More Heroes games are my favorite for the Nintendo Wii.  I was one of the few people that actually enjoyed the open world aspect of the first game and was also one of the few disappointed it was removed in the sequel.  While there were plenty of limitations to the open world which drew you out of the immersion of the game, to me the setting was incredibly real.  One billboard existed along the coastline, advertising a non-existent product.  As a person who lived on the West Coast of the US for a short time, seeing that billboard in the open world of No More Heroes felt like I was back there every time I played.

Then there was 2008’s Dead Space.  Peng, f33l, Sun. The fake ads all over the ship were the big testimony for me that not only people had lived on the ship but there was a larger universe out there.  Seeing Sun vending machines with cans strewn all over the place around it was jarring.  The vending machines were similar in style to our own, but yet still futuristic.  Showing that they had been damaged to the point of being broken into with all of that soda being ignored gave deeper credibility that a once lived in environment was now vacant, and whatever alien force left had no interest in our petty beverage choices.

This doesn’t work when I see real advertisements in games, I hate seeing real products in games (with the exception of Bawls, I’ll get to that later).  Nothing can throw me out of the game’s immersion more than seeing an advertisement for something real, even if the game is “realistic”.  Every time I see something real in a video game it throws me out of the action because there’s an anchor to the real world that pulled me out.

There’s also the practical application of using real world products in your games, such as what if the game doesn’t show your product as very reliable?  Cue Alan Wake, which showed the world Energizer Batteries ™ won’t last more than a few seconds in a flashlight without having to be replaced.  At least the unsponsored car batteries in the game would fully restore in a few seconds to a full charge regardless of how long the high beams were left on with no permanent damage or need to ever be replaced.

In fact the only time I could think of a real product being served well in a game (if not completely out of place) was the Bawls product placement in 2002’s Run Like Hell.  Of course the only reason I liked this was because Bawls is my favorite soda, and it was nice to see that the company, hundreds of years in the future, would finally have vending machines all over the place, and be served in arcades, bars, fitness rooms, and apartment hallways.  Oh and they also heal injuries sustained from fighting alien monsters too.  Not too much, but if you drink enough of them you won’t have to see a doctor.  About 20 could probably return you from near death.

Want reliability?  I’ll stick with Brand-X™!

Now this was just one article and I know I barely scratched the surface of some truly great fake products in games.  What are your favorite fake products?  Come back next time for Part 2 of “What Makes Good Atmosphere in a Video Game”: Fake Radio Shows.

Playstation Plus Lives, Should You Get it? June 30, 2010

Well, from the looks of it I’m passing on Playstation Plus right now.  The major reason is that the service just doesn’t provide me with enough of a benefit to buy into it.

Paying 50 dollars gets you a total of 1 year plus 3 free months of the Playstation Plus service.  By signing up you get a bunch of PSN and PS1 games at reduced or no price.  However, while I enjoy a discount card just as much as the next guy, I noticed that the games were at pretty low prices to begin with, and the discounts, even the ones as high as 50 percent off, can’t justify paying $50 for $2.50 off a new game.  I’d need to buy 25 PSN games and add-ons at that discount to break even, and my HD is full.

That having been said, I have already purchased all the PSN games I wanted to begin with at full price.  Perhaps when more new games come out for PSN I’ll take another look.

Nintendo Wii System Update Upsets Homebrewers, Yawn June 24, 2010

From the “What Else is New?” category, System Update 4.3 (mentioned here) for the Nintendo Wii has predictably made it harder for modders, homebrew enthusiasts, and pirates to run their illegitimate software on the console.

Nintendo has been doing its best to keep modders out of its hardware for some time now.  The last 4.2 update also did this, because it replaced the bootloader modders used to replace the console’s operating system with Linux with one they said was pretty buggy but I never had any problems with it.

I don’t trust homebrew code further than I can throw it.  I don’t modify my consoles in any way, because I find it more likely it would restrict me from doing legitimate things with my console, give my system a backdoor for the software creator to exploit, or at the very least hamper my performance.

System Update 4.3 also promises behind the scenes code improvement, which should make system performance a bit smoother.

Playstation Plus is Not Xbox Live Gold, Stop Comparing June 18, 2010

I saw a lot of articles over the past two days comparing the pros and cons of Xbox Live Gold to Playstation Plus.  Other than the fact that both services charge users fifty dollars a year to use them, they have absolutely nothing in common.  Comparing the two (Microsoft went as far to say that Sony’s imitating them, well more that their service has “attracted imitation”) is like comparing Apples to Zebras, and here’s why.

Xbox Live Gold is practically a required service in order to use full functionality of the Xbox 360.  You cannot play your games online (unless it’s an MMO), or host large party voice chats without paying for the extra service.  You are also forced to wait an extra amount of time to access downloads from the Xbox Live Marketplace

Sony’s doing something completely different with Playstation Plus.  All the features that are currently offered to their current users will continue to be offered.  You will not have to pay anything in order to play multiplayer games online, and still have trophy support and voice chat.  Playstation Home will remain free.  What you will be offered for paying the premium is access to bonus digitally distributed content.  To start off with you will have early access to beta tests and demos, as well as full PS1 and PSP Minis games.  You’ll also have access to Core, the digital magazine for PS3 that reminded me a lot of Substance TV.

My issue with Playstation Plus is that when they announced it at the Sony E3 Conference, the presenter clearly said that you’d have access to your content “for as long as you had the Playstation Plus subscription.”  To me, that means when you terminate your account, you lose access to all those full versions  of games.  So you could in theory be paying fifty a year to play Final Fantasy VII and six other games so you don’t lose access to it.

It’s a much better deal if I wanted Final Fantasy VII to just buy the game and own it outright.  At $10 US per PS1 game I’m paying a heck of a lot less.  Honestly I think they’re lumping Core into this because a lot of people (myself included) did not renew my subscription to the digizine after the first year.  However, that whole year I was constantly getting free game unlock codes as a thank you for being a subscriber.  Let me tell you, getting a copy of Syphon Filter PS1 was a lot more valuable to me than a lot of those issues.

These are not similar services in any way.  Stop comparing them.

My Favorite E3 2010 Moment June 16, 2010

Many people have asked me what I thought was the best moment of the E3 2010 Conferences.  Well, speculate no longer, it was this moment.

You really get me, Kevin, you really get me.

Flash 10.1 Released, now HD YouTube Videos Won’t Run Like Flipbooks June 14, 2010

From the “two years late” department, Adobe has finally gotten around to taking Flash 10.1 out of beta and put it in the hands of everyone who goes to their site to upgrade their old versions of Flash 10, or since most people don’t know about that sort of thing, probably versions of Flash 8 or 9 (anyone with versions older than that have probably had their computers die on them by now).

The important extra feature about this release, GPU rendering.  That’s right, something that video players have had since 2003, making rendering HD video since then on mid range and high range PC’s extremely seamless and beautiful.  Well, even though flash has supported HD video for a few years on sites like YouTube and Gametrailers, you’d probably notice that the videos in HD would usually run like crap, because until yesterday flash was CPU rendering only, which in this modern time is equivelant to having your software stuck in 1998.

So you’ll probably notice an increase of performance on our YouTube embeds if you upgrade.  You’ll probably also notice you won’t have to cut the Gametrailers feeds to download the video instead, because their streaming videos (since they forced flash playback) have been unwatchable.