How The Game Is Played

Short Take: Yahoo Music Unlimited

Okay, real short. This service is in beta right now and I really, really like it. I does everything my Real Rhapsody did for 1/3 the price ($5.00 a month if you subscribe for a year.) PLUS it also has a TiVo-like service in the "LAUNCHCast" section that you get with your subscription, too. Its called "MyStation" and it tries to guess selections you'll like based on some initial examples you give it. As it guesses, you rate the slections and it gets better and better at guessing.

It even has an off-line DRM solution so you can download your music and play it offline without paying a per-cut charge (you get it on a "lease" that expires if you don't keep your subscription up.) These cuts can then be downloaded to a portable player and taken with you.

The only downside is that, right now, they only support Microsoft's Janus DRM. WHich means you neeed MSFT software in your portable player and Windows on your desktop.

We should really talk to these guys about making other DRM soultions pluggable as an option.

Posted at 04:55PM May 30, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

BlogEd ate this blog

*sigh* I had this blog all nicely laid out in BlogEd and then I did something in not quite the order it was expecting and it over-wrote it completely with an old one :(

The dangers of free-ware. It often isnt nearly as well thought out or bullet proof as a commercial product. Not that this stuff doiesnt happen with comemrcial software, but its less common since there is generally a more complete design phase as well as a good Q&A phase.

I've also found that under Java 6 its a bit flaky, slow to respond to io requests, and interferes with real-time apps like my music player.

I guess I'm back to manual HTML for awhile. BlogEd is a really nice idea but definitely not ready for actual work-use.

Here is today's again, as best as I remember it:

RSI, never say "it can't happen to me." AFter 30 years of coding on every concievable keyboard and at every concievable position I had convinced myself I was immune. Bad call. This weekend I got up from the keyboard to discover that i could hardly move my elbow without terrible pain.

Turns out, I've got a case of "golfer's elbow", a not uncommon VDT RSI. Luckily its fairly mild and is already responding well to treatment. The bad news is that once you have an RSI, you basically have to baby it and expect its just waiting to come back.

It likely cropped up now at least in pert becauseeof my cramped home workstation environment. Im doing what I can to correct that now, though the realities of of our living situation makes that tough. We have us, 4 birds and 2 cats in an 800foot mobile home and are likely to be here at least 18 months more as we are trying to build a new house.

The moral of the story is pay attention to your workstation or it'll bite you in the arse.

Movie of the Week Speaking of bites on the arse, Shelley and I saw Madagascar last night. (You'll understand the segue when you see it.) We had a lot of fun! The plot is pretty predictable, but the gags are not and are delivered with wonderful comic timing.

One thing it might help to know, that many people don't, is that when chimpanzees wish to express displeasure, they often do it by throwing fecal material at whomever they are displeased with. There is a gag on this in the movie that is delivered with such perfect comic timing that I was laughing so hard I literally could not breathe.

My prediction: The two chimps are at least going to get their own short as I strongly suspect that they came out as two of the favorite characters in audiance tests.

Advice: If your looking for a movie, skip Star Wars and see Madgascar instead!

Project Update: I had a very good meeting with the Sun Grid folks. I learned some interesting things. I need to ask the Grid guys what I can say publically and assumning its okay Ill post what I learned.

Posted at 04:01PM May 30, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

Myself as a South Park Character

Okay, I couldn't resist.

Posted at 05:14PM May 24, 2005 by gameguy in Music  | 

Episode III: Revenge of the Lucas Marketing Machine

Yesterday was my birthday and Chris M. took me to see Star Wars Episode III. I went with low expectations. The incredible over-marketing of this movie led me to strongly believe that Lucas was trying to extract his last-gasp of star wars cash before the movie was even out, which would not speak well for the movie.

But it was better then I expected. Frankly I personally think its his best since the original Star Wars (but I am not a fan of any of the other Star Wars movies.) This makes sense in my mind since its also closest in time to the original movie, which was the only one with anything resembling a decent plot.

First the positives. The movie is breathtakingly beautiful. A 2 hour on-screen orgy of special effects. Ewan McGreggor is terrific as Obi-Wan in this movie. He makes the worst dialog in the movie business actually sound sensible, natural and interesting. The story delivers on its promise, the tragic downfall of Anakin/Vader and the birth of Luke and Leah. All the action scenes are tremendous fun and very well paced and shot.

Having said that, this movie also has lots of problems. As mentioned above, the dialogue is atrocious. Furthermore, Hayden Christiansen's performance in this movie makes Keanu Reeves look like Sir Lawrence Olivier. His dull, flat and shallow presentation really robs Vader of what should have been a much more interesting arc.

Many reviewers have said that his fall from grace was badly motivated. I actually disagree, the motivation is there and its a classic motivation-- hubris. (Monsterous ego, for those not familiar with classical literature.) However Christensen plays this all so wooden and unemotional that it is totally lost and all we are left with is the very weak love story.

While we are on that subject, Lucas so soft-pedals his new anti-hero that he never really becomes one at all. It is all set-up that he kills his wife, but then Lucas backs off and tells us she is "physically fine but has lost the will to live." In otherwords, this supposedly strong woman dies in a few hours from a broken heart. Trite crap that does nothing but demean her character. I can almost excuse Portman's less then thrilling performance on this alone. If I knew that was what was in store for my character I probably wouldn't be overly excited about playing her, either.

The story has also some real spots of convenience where the audience's credibility is strained and the puppet-master's strings badly show. Whats more unfortunate is by and large they were unnecessary.

Chewbacca just "happens" to be one of the wookies to rescue Yoda on the wookie planet. I wont say more then that because it would be a spoiler, but this is overly-convenient and totally pointless as Chewbacca and Yoda will never meet again in the next 3 movies.

When Anakin's body is rebuilt into Vader's cyborg one, Lucas has him screaming through the surgery. I guess a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away they had spaceships and cyborg technology but not basic anesthetics. We wont even go into the sanitary conditions of the surgery where they have not even bothered to clean the dead skin off his body first. (This is the first thing they do to ANY burn victim to avoid gangrene.)

The space combat is visually delightful, but logically silly. Destroyer ships when damaged sufficiently literally "sink" on screen, tipping forward and starting to "fall" even though they had to be outside of the gravity well to function at all. Furtehrmore, when these ships "tilt" people fall off their feet as they would on a sea going ship turning on end. This could only happen is the gravity onboard is relative to some external fixed frame rather then the ship itself, which again is totally illogical as it has to be an artificial gravity field to begin with.

I don't want to spoil a tense scene so I won't give the details on another major gaffe except to remind you that today, when a plane has to land with crippled landing gear, they spray foam on the runway to cushion it. This too seems to be a lost technology in the star wars universe.

What saves the film in the end is Ewan McGregor as Obi-wan. His performance is stellar and he manages to bring to even the tritest lines Lucas puts in his mouth a realism and depth of emotion that makes them work. Obi-wan is really the star of this picture. Everyone else walks through it but you get the feeling that he really "makes things happen."

Which is a problem since its supposed to be Vader's story.

Having said that, not even Obi-wan escapes the obvious pull of his puppet-strings in service to Lucas's very ill-formed plot. His last act, walking away and just leaving Anakin who he claims throughout the movie to have loved like a brother, dying in agony with third degree burns and cut off legs, was a total break of character and totally unbelievable. But it was needed for Lucas to get where he wanted to go.

The other star of the movie is the now digitally animated Yoda. 5 words. Don't Mess With the Muppet!

My Conclusion: If your a fan boy/girl/muppet/whatever then go and you will have a great old time. If you enjoy visual spectacle and/or silly but action packed action sequences then go see it on the big screen too.

Otherwise, you might want to wait for TV or DVD. And if your NOT a geek at all, and only like movies with good stories, acting and dialogue, give it a miss and you won't be sorry.

Posted at 03:41PM May 24, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

The meaning of "service"

We at Sun believe in Online services. We believe its the wave of the future. But for a service to be a service it must serve the individual.

I sign up for a lot of services to try them out. Or I have up til now. Recently there seems to be a disturbing trend in online services to make it harder then it has to be to cancel. As servcie is all about rentention, and I'm sure making it hard to cancel ups their rentention percentage a measurable amount, the bean counters would tell me this is good for their service and by extension the industry itself.

Hogwash. You may keep some extra few percentage points in your retention numbers this way folks, but you will ultimately kill the golden goose as once someone feels taken advantage of once by your "support" structure they will be ten times as wary before every signing up for another of your services.

People aren't *that* stupid. They can certainly figure out that, if you computer can register them with a mouse click, it could de-register them just as easily. Instead though I am finding to cancel I have to call up and talk to support people. There is no reason for that except to make it harder to cancel.

At least Warner Brothers seems to have learned something from the initial outrage at this that boiled up from their customer base and they are now making it a fast, reasonably painless call and seem to have 24x7 coverage. Real Rhapsody OTOH I am going to have to call back tomrorow during "business hours" to cancel.

Guess which company I'm never trying another service offering from?

Posted at 09:29PM May 23, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

The E3 Report

Good news and bad news.

I'm back from E3. Unfortunately I managed to leave my camera behind so you will have to relie on Chris Melissinos for the pictures (see the link on the side of this page.)

Frankly, I was over-all rather bored. Maybe I'm just getting older but so many of the games looked so much the same that I really had trouble working up much enthusiasm for any of them.

A high-point for me though was the NCSoft booth. These guys are poised to be the powerhouse in the MMOLRPG space. I got a chance to play City of Villains, they much awaited sequel/add-on to City of Heroes, and earned myself an evil-cape by whipping some hero-ass. This game looks like serious fun. PvP for those of us who don't like KAOS (Killing As an Online Sport.) The PvP is controlled and villains and heroes can chose to fight each other or not. They are also adding bases and apartments to the game as well as some way-cool villain-only costume options.

In addition to City of Villains, I also played Auto-Assualt at the NCSOft booth. This is a Mad Max type car-combat game. The car physics still needed a bit of work, but it was also a lot of fun in a different sort of way.

Finally, I played Tabula Rasa, NCSoft's Space-Marines RPG designed by Richard Garriot of Ultima and Ultima Online fame. This has real potential and I'll defintiely be trying it out when it goes live.

NCSoft also has a small group robot-combat game thats cute, but at the end of the day its just another death match. Of course they already have Guild Wars out and that is gaining a pretty strong following offering a very different sort of fantasy-combat game. Devotees liken it to Magic the Gathering in the strategic decisions you have to make in choosing the skills to use in game.

Finally, they also have Lineage II. Lineage II is a hard-core PvP killer-mud MMOLRPG and they make no bones about it. If your idea of a good time is Compton on a bad day, then this is your game/. Needless to say, its not my idea fo a good time. But there are those who are devotees of this brutal kind of online play.

The really important thing about the NCSoft line-up is first its quality. All the games are beautiful and I haven't heard too many complaints about quality of service. And secondly, its breadth. Each game is a very different kind of game likely to appeal to different players.

Sony better watch their lunch or NCSoft is going to eat it in the next 18 months.

Another big surprise was Nintendo's announcements. The first surprise is that they are embracing networked play in a huge way. They get my "Turn on a Dime" award as the last time I visited their booth, 2 years ago, they were assuring me that networks were unimportant to games ;)

This year, they were pushing the DS heavily and it was all about networking. You could download games demos straight into your DS from their booth's 80211 network and they were showing many networked games and apps, including a VOIP application for the DS.

The second surprise was a related announcement about their new console. The Revolution. While Sony and Microsoft duke it out over who has the higher performance, Nintendo has decided not to play that. Instead, their Revolution will be small, sleek, inexpensive AND, the big surprise, will come with emulators to emulate all their previous game machines! Furthermore, they have committed to making their entire catalog of games for those older machines available for free download into the revolution. The video for Xbox360 looks very nice, and the PS3 looks amazing, but frankly I may well buy a revolution first as, at the end of the day, I find those old games more fun then many of the new ones.

Speaking of Xbox360. Microsoft got caught with their pants down. They had some very pretty demos, and some very pretty looking Xbox360s. Unfortunately, the Xbox360s weren't running the demos. Instead, the demos were running on the development stations, dual G5 Macintoshs, hidden in the bottom of the demo stations.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2005/5/19/362

So Microsoft gets my "Can't fool all the people all the time" award this year.

The sad thing was, even cheating, Microsoft couldn't really compete. The Xbox360 demos were nice. The PS3 demos were, frankly, breathtaking. We're talking real-time rendering at movie quality. If you don't believe me, check this out (and its not even the most impressive one I've seen.)

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=5833&type=wmv#

All in all, if the winner in the next generation will; be decided by graphics horsepower, PS3 is looking to be the clear winner.

But will it be about horse-power? I frankly don't know. I'm over-all pretty sick of prettier and prettier games that all look and play about the same. What I want are games I find interesting, fun and unique. I was reminded of this when I visited the small "classic computer games" display stuck into a corner of the least acessible hall at E3. In that display was an Atari 800 running one of the most brilliant computer games ever devised.

It was called "Qix" and it was originally a vector-graphic arcade game. Its not 3D, its not even representation, its just a set of abstract lines moving around a screen that you need to navigate in order to close off areas of the screen and get points. Its simple, elegant, and absolutely mesmerizing.

And for all their horse-power and impressive 3D rendering I didn't see any modern game at the show that came close to being that engaging.

Posted at 02:22AM May 23, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

My Biggest Fear

I promised in yesterday's Blog that I would share with you my biggest fear in the consumer space. Here it is.

There is a juggernaut barreling down its tracks aimed right at consumer computing. And it scares me that no one seems to have noticed. Certainly I haven't heard anyone else talking about it . That Juggernaut is owned by IBM and its called PowerPC.

For a long time now IBM has been entrenching PowerPC in the embedded space. A great many set top boxes run on PPC. We even use a PPC as the administration processor on one of our own AMD based server boxes. All for the same reason-- they are cheap. And the more they get used, the higher the volumes IBM can make them in, and the cheaper they become.

What really caught my attention though was this. Every next generation video game console is PPC based. Gamecube was already PPC and the assumption is Nintendo's next box, Revolution, will be too. Sony's much vaunted “cell processor” in their PS3 is, by all reports, just a multi-core PPC with a couple of extra vector processors thrown onto the die. And scariest of all, XBox2 is Power PC based.

Why is this scary? Because Microsoft has tipped their hand and announced that they intend a version of XBox2 that also has all of their MediaPC functionality. Written right there between the lines is this-- Microsoft is porting XP to the PPC. They have to in order to meet that goal. By the time they are done enabling all their Media software they will have virtually all of XP on that platform.

So lets play what-if for a minute, What if Microsoft has decided that they don't like being tied at the hip to Intel and intends to offer PowerPC XP based computers? “That'll never work”, is the answer I usually hear when I suggest this, “what about the legacy apps?”

Well, I thought Microsoft might have the guts to brave this anyway... and then I realized just recently they won't have to. They already own a technical solution to that problem. About a year ago they bought, lock stock and barrel, a company that makes a product that allows Intel software to run on PowerPC. A darling of the Apple community, the product is called “VirtualPC” (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/virtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc).

This seemed an odd purchase at the time and many guesses at Microsoft's motives floated, including that they did it just to screw Apple. That makes little sense however. Despite what Apple loyalists tell themselves, today Apple is no threat to Microsoft nor is it likely to ever be one.

But factor in the port of XP to PowerPC and all of a sudden it stops looking like a weird whim and instead begins to look like a disturbing level of coherent strategy. With the release of the Media-enabled XBox2, Microsoft will own everything they need to dump Intel in favor of IBM.

At which point, IBM will own everything but PDAs and cell phones. But with all that other strength, plus their embedded experience and success, at that point thats a simple win. They are already half-way there with their embedded PPCs. And IBM certainly has the brain power to turn those into low-power PDA and cell phone chips.

And that would leave IBM and Microsoft holding all the cards in the consumer space. As the final, scariest thought. ask yourself this:

In a world of a single instruction set, the PPC instruction set, who needs a VM?

Posted at 04:50AM May 13, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[9]

Quickie: Truth in Advertising

Okay,

I had to comment on this. Marketing people sometimes come up with amazing statements just to get our attention.

I just got a peice of Apple-SPAM. Thats the only way I can describe it. An email arrives in my box with the subject "Steve Jobs Invites You to the WWDC". (Apple's World Wide Developer Conference.)

I must admit I opened it, Just to see if he was going to buy my ticket. Nope, no such luck. They're just trying to sell me something. (A ticket to the WWDC.)

So I want it on record that in return I am openly inviting Steve Jobs to my home.

But its going to cost him $2000 to get in the front door.

Posted at 01:29AM May 13, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

Why Electronic Arts doesn't matter.

Okay, I've got a challenge for you.

Name 4 film directors.

Now name 4 lead actors or actresses.

Now name 4 currently independent major film distributors.

That last one is a whole lot harder isn't it? And its not just because the film studio ownership changes from month to month.

Its because unlike the first two, who the studio is doesn't matter. People go to see movies. Who the director is or who the major stars are gives you a good idea of what the film will be like. But who distributed it? That really doesn't matter to anyone but the distributor.

Asking who the distributor is is a whole lot like going to a Frank Lloyd Wright house and asking who the bank was who financed it. That is the distributors primary role-- the banker. Without the banker, the house wouldn't get built, but who the banker is has no relevance on the product produced. The banker's role is silent, uninteresting, and ultimately the most lucrative of them all.

Film distributors in today's Hollywood are exactly the same. Do you care that Disney is distributing Pixar's films? Of course not. Would you have gone to see The Incredibles if Warner had distributed it instead? Of course you would have. Who the banker is matters to exactly one person-- the banker.

What drives the industry are not the bankers. What drives the industry are the creative individuals. And thats why you recognize and can quote their names. The George Lucas's and Harrison Ford's are the engine of the movie industry. They create the content, which is what you as a consumer care about. And thats why the folks who produce content you as a consumer eagerly consume are the stars and why the best thing a banker can own is a lock on a star property so they can't go to any other banker.

Big game distributors are exactly the same. Although you might buy a game because it's a “Madden” game, you would not buy a game just because its an EA game, or an Ubisoft game. Or any other distributor. Big game companies are primarily distributors and they act in the exact same capacity. And they are equally interchangeable.

What drives the industry are the star creations and their creators. And, because of the nature of the industry, today these occur outside of the major studios.

Look at it this way. There is an old saying that bankers are bankers because they hate risk. Big studios are in exactly the same business of risk reduction. Creating a new hit property is, by definition, the riskiest investment you can make, It takes a great deal of money to develop. Tens of millions of dollars, and generally an equal amount to promote. If your lucky, the result is a hit. If not, its a financial disaster. Thats why little game companies are typically born, if they are lucky ride high for awhile, and then die when that luck runs out. Thats too risky for big studios.

Instead, EA found another formula. Two actually. They found that they could buy a hit property and it would have a certain shelf-life for sequels at a far lower risk. In general, this meant buying the small studio that created it and turning them into a sequel shop. EA has had great success with this strategy and that has spawned imitators such as Eidos and Atari (formerly Infograme) who have also done quite well.

The second thing EA discovered was that there was a certain market for low cost “shovel-ware.”

Something a lot of people don't realize when they walk down the soap isle at their local supermarket is that all the laundry detergents with all the different names are made by exactly two companies. Thats it. Those two companies discovered that by creating a whole shelf of apparent choice they could capture the consumer. In the retail business shelf-space is gold, and by having not one product line but a dozen, they could capture more shelf space. Even if its really only for two products repackaged over and over and over again.

EA does the same thing. They fill the shelves with generic, minorly differentiated product, figuring that the odds a random browser will buy one of their titles is pretty high. And thats worked well for them too, although the economics of game production have become so outrageous, and the individual titles so expensive, that I could argue the browsing phenomenon is endangered going forward.

Which ultimately gets me to my point. The EAs of the world don't drive the videogame industry any more then the Disneys or Warners drive the movie industry. They are the bankers. They take the lions-share of the money, but they depend on the individual small creators to keep the industry going. Without small companies creating new franchises that these giants can buy and ride through sequels, they wouldn't survive. And they know it, because neither business, film or videogames, is one where anyone who kids themselves about the economic realities survives long.

So why bring this up? Because I'm part of a team that is bringing Sun into the game industry, and to do that, we need to shake some old perceptions. Sun is used to selling to the bankers. And in banking, if you get JPMorgan/Chase you've just gotten a large segment of the industry. Sun likes selling to the JPM/Chases of the world. We know how to do that,

But if you sell EA what do you have? Nothing. Because they don't make the creative decisions and therefore don't make the technology decisions either. Those are made by the small independent developers and, because they are the engine of the industry and are where the real power lies, it will stay that way for a long time.

You don't take an industry like the videogame industry by convincing a few execs in a few big companies. You take it by winning the hearts and minds of the little guys. Microsoft has done it by outright bribery in the past. They've gone so far as to rent Great America for an evening for the personal amusement of all the individuals attendees at the annual Game Developers Conference.

I don't suggest we do the same thing. Frankly I don't think its as effective as simply addressing the technical problems the little guys face. And thats something Sun is good at. But we need to realize where the power lies and address the needs of those in power.

And none of them eat in EA's executive dining room.

Posted at 11:37PM May 12, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[6]

Preparing for the Electronic Entertainment Expo

Next week is E3, the videogame industry's number one retail show.

Likely I wont blog much next week but the week after should premier a new feature for my blogs-- pictures! I bought a new Cannon Digital Rebel EOS a few weeks back and I'll be taking it with me to E3.

Provided I can (a) get bloged to work for me and (b) can figure out hot to dump pictures from my camera to Linux I should be able to share highlights of the show with you all.

On other news, I've been using the Netbeans Profiler lately, now in beta. This is an AMAZING tool, Particularly since its for free, Its the equal of some very expensive Java profilers I've used in the past. I highly recommend it.

One Caveat, it depends on JVMPI which is broken in the current Java 5 build, but you can use it with JDK1.4 or Java 6 (also known as mustang.) There are instructions for all of this on the pages describing the Profiler at the netbeans site: www.netbeans.org

Another piece of game news. I just heard that M$FT is going to be premiering the Xbox2 on MTV tonight at 6:40pm and again at 10:30 pm. (I don;'t know but assume that's PST.) If you have any interest in either the videogame industry OR consumer electronics, you want to track this. M$FT has already announced that there will be an upgraded “media center” version of the Xbox2 that will play games AND do Ultimate TV AND do all the Media Center PC stuff. Its definitely their latest attack on the consumer electronics market.

I have a comment on whats going on in general in the consumer electronics market, frankly it scares me. But I'm going to save that for another post as its a whole blog in of itself. One last tidbit though, Yahoo has announced a cheap music streaming service (http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20050510203019787) to compete with Real Rhapsody. Like Rhapsody, its based on a M$SFT DRM technology. They say that your music can be”transferred to portable devices.” What do you want to bet thats only portable devices running a M$SFT OS?

Scary stuff. And thats not what has me the most scared, but for that your gonna have to wait for my next blog.

Posted at 06:26PM May 12, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[2]

Eulogy for a Blackbird

There is an old saying that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Sometimes though studying history is helpful in order to repeat things, particularly successes.

With that in mind, I want to tell you a story. It's a story with a happy ending, at least for someone.

Once upon a time, when the net was shiney and so new that the first porn sites hadn't even come up, a King named Bill happened to notice it.

"Hmm," said Bill, "this new form of communication is a threat to me. For currently there is one press in the kingdom and I own it. Should the net become important however it might upset my control."

So he thought about it and thought about it, and finally decided that he needed to control this new "net-thing" as well. He sent for his wisest advisors. They looked at the net and said, "You know, this HTML thing isn't so different from what we do now in our Help Engine. Lets redesign the Help Engine so it runs on the net and we can replace this pesky HTML thing with something we already control."

The king was pleased with this plan, and so was born a project known as Blackbird. The advisors gathered their best craftsmen and they labored long and hard. But while they were pounding out the old shape of the Help Engine and trying to pound it into a new one, a funny thing happened. The people were bored waiting for the King's new thing, so in the meantime they started playing with HTML.

And they decided they liked him. This encouragement made HTML swell with pride and almost spontaneously he started growing. In fact, he started learning new tricks at such a rate that the King's laborer couldn't keep up.

And so, the King, who after all was a king because he was wise as well as powerful, said, "Clearly, my advisors had their heads up their posteriors." So the King killed the Blackbird and sent the advisors to the dungeons and the laborers off to work on a way to control HTML directly.

And thus the Blackbird was given a eulogy, and that eulogy was called Internet Explorer.

The Blackbird died, but the King lived happily for a long time after because he understood exactly what he wanted from the beginning and, when he couldn't get it from Blackbird, he got it from IE.

And in that, there is a moral.

Posted at 07:29PM May 06, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

Desktops that work

I want my desktop computer to work. To do what it is suppsoed to when its supposed and not suddenly fail or lose data. To use the hardware I've paid for as my hardware was designed to be used and to maximal advantage. To run the software I need or want to run.

Is that really so much to ask for?

In today's world I'd have to say, "Yes, it is."

I switched from Windows to Linux some time ago. Let me tell you the sum of my experiences. I spent more or less 10 years with Windows. Windows if anything gets more problematic and less stable as time goes on, though stability was never ist hall-mark. Under windows I had to count on a night-mare re-install of a failed OS at least every 6 months and usually every 3. Each tiem i did that i managed to lose something important that I wish I hadn't.

Windows is also a bear to program, really discouraging me from doing much in the way of garage shop projects with it. The combination of factors led me to move to Linux.

Linux is much more friendly to garage programmers. The problem is that it really is a garage program. Its full of "almosts." The hardware drivers are almost good enough. The Windowing system is almost reliable. Software installation is almost friendly and almost reliable. Wine is almost good enough to run Win32 apps. Cedega is almost good enough to run Win32 games. And in general everything is almost finished.

Linux is almost what I need, but not quite. To be fair if I weren't doing cutting edge stuff it would be fine. My wife loves her JDS. It web browses, word processes, and does email fine and thats all she does with her computer. But I need more machine then that.

Which brings me back to my beloved Mac PowerBook and OSX. Frankly, I have concluded that today Apple makes the only desktop that works by my definition of the word. Its reliable, friendly, and easy to use. It uses the hardware to its maximum and what software there is is rock solid. Being a Unix its also a joy to program. Having its own Window system it really does work as a desktop, unlike almost-desktop X which was engineered for networks not local desktops.

Unfortunately that software is also expensive. Macs themselves aren't cheap. And there are a lot of programs I want to run, such as games, that don't run on it at all.

So today i have a choice, desktops that don't work, or a desktop that is expensive and won't do exactly what I need.

What will it take for the industry to make a desktop that works, is reasonably priced AND runs all my software? I don't know. Maybe if Apple ported OSX to Intel that would happen but I'm not holding my breath.

All in all, I miss DOS.

Posted at 02:43PM May 05, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

How to ruin a MMOLRPG in one easy lesson.

Massively multi-player on line games are the direct children of the pen and paper role-play games. In a lot of ways they are closer to them then they are to the single player CRPGs (computer role-play games) they evolved from.

Pen and Paper (or PnP) RPGs typically suffer from a problem known as PC escalation. Players are focused on developing their characters strengths. As the characters get stronger the things they face have to be tougher and the is results in a kind of cold-war escelation that ultimately takes the game into the bounds of the ridiculous.

Besides the inherent problems with keeping such a game believable and enjoyable, there is a very real problem that RPG groups arent static. New players come in and old players leave. When new players come in in the latter stages of such a game they can often feel like ants suddenly thrust into a a battlefield full of giants. This is both frustrating and un-fun for the new players. On Line RPGs can suffer from this effect, only on-line its often even worse. The developers are generally surprised at how fast the quickest developing players get to the end of their released content. They typically react in horror as they see all the work ahead of them to please these players.

In response they do two things:
(1) They make the whole game tougher in order to try to make it tougher on that top 5%
and
(2) They make the game tougher in order to try to slow down the growth of that 5% into a larger number.

This however results in a game that is much more difficult to play and much more frustrating for the users. The result is what was a fun and enjoyable balance for 80% of the players is destroyed for the sake of the top 5 or 10 percent. This builds a barrier to entry for new players as well as discouraging many of the mid-tier of players into giving up.

Although they don't generally talk about this, the experienced MMOLRPG players all know this phenomenon well. That is why in the early stages of the game you see them "grinding" the levels, their entire focus being on getting to the top of the ladder before the hatchet falls. Most MMOLRPG designers decry this player behavior, but ironically it is the designers' incredibly predictable behavior in "tuning" the game that gives rise to the player actions in question.

We are seeing this right now in City of Heroes. The easy ways to the top that the first players found are being declared "bugs" or "exploits" by the developers and removed. The result is that they are punishing those who either didn't get a chance to use these accidental features OR were honest and cooperative enough not to take maximal advantage of them while they were present.

I originally recommended this game as, perhaps, the game that would finally break the casual game-play barrier and allow players who didn't devote every minute of their lives to be real game participants. Alas, from what I see now, I have to retract that. The same old patterns are re-occurring and those who did not devote every waking minute to exploiting the early days of the game are going to have a hard and frustrating time trying to match the accomplishments of those who did.

Its sad and a shame. And, as for me, I've learned my unfortunate lesson. The next MMOLRPG I try to play I am going to level-grind from day one.

Posted at 03:24AM May 05, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[67]

Okay, a clarification

It seems I was just a TOUCH too subtle in my humor and I offended someone. Since I cant seem to respond to his comment in the comments, Im going to do so quickly here.

Azim writes:

Anybody who reads your FAQ for the first time will decide immediately that you are a stuck up snob, if they didn't know you better. I am not saying it is wrong to be rude to Warez and cheating students. But what is the big deal with someone questioning the speed of java. Why all the hostility when it comes to online FAQs? Can you give any of those answers to some one face to face? Is it impossible to maintain a decent and respectable answer to those questions.

Well, the point was these were stupid ignorant statements and/or inappropriate questions. Ones those of us who deal with the public hear semi-regularly. Obviously I would never (well almost never) give the "short answer" directly to someone's face. Thats why the Blog. It was letting off the steam and saying the things many of us in this sort of position wish we could say to some peoples' faces.

I thought the humor element in that was self-evident. I think it was to many of us who have been in such positions for any length of time. That it wasn't obvious to others was my bad, and for not making that clearer I apologize.

Posted at 07:32PM May 02, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[3]