How The Game Is Played

Batman Begins: And How

Spolier ALERT!

Chris M. was in town (he works for Sun on the opposite coast most of the time) and when he is, and has time, we like to go catch a “guy flic So we went last Thursday night to the late show of Batman Begins.

Wow. I went expecting a lot. And it went beyond my expectations.

I'm a bit of a comic book fan, or at least I was in college when they were still a bit over a buck a piece. I knew this was based on the Frank Miller “Batman: Year One” which I had heard great things about but never read. The movie is everything I heard the graphic novel was, and more.

This is the best. Most believable and darkest screen-telling of the Batman story to date. What Tim Burton's Batman was to the 60's camp version, this was to Burton's. Burton's Batman had a nasty edge, but it also retained a playfulness that is totally gone from this version. This version is about dark twisted people doing dark twisted things, an only slightly less twisted hero fighting them, and the most perfect example of a “Neutral Alignment” (ala Dungeons and Drafons) villain I've ever seen.

I'm going to try not to spoil too much, so Im not going to comment on some of the best plot twists but I do have to give a bit away to talk about all the things I liked about this movie. Ergo, if you wan't to walk in a plot-virigin, don't read anything after this paragraph. Just trust me and go!

Alright. Now on to the plot stuff! I love the way this telling of the story takes all the most important characters from batman's long and varied comic book history and interweaves their fate in a tight cinematic story.

Ras Al Ghul has always been a favorite villain of mine, as he's that wonderful kind of villain who does what he does with the absolute conviction that he is, in fact, a hero. It takes the story beyond what has justly been called “comic book morality” and into the real moral uncertainties of what constitutes right and wrong in the real world. Reinventing him as a Ninja master and making him integral to Batman's history nicely explains Batman's incredible, and sneaky, fighting abilities. I did find it a bit odd that we have not seen hide nor hair of Rhas' daughter, Talia, with whom the comic book Batman had a definite sexual-tension thing going on on both sides. Maybe she didn't fit well into this re-telling, or maybe we just have yet to see her.

One thing we always had to suspend disbelief on in the comic books was just how many absolutely raving mad homocidal loonies were running around Gotham City. This telling fixes that by taking The Scarecrow, originally a minor but interesting nutso-psychologist villain, and reinventing him as a Hannibal Lector who is the creator of all the other insane villains. Using the Arkham state home for the criminally insane, which in the original Batman was a place to get rid of villains, as the source of them is IMHO sheer genius.

The movie takes all this and delivers on it with a dark style that is delightful to watch. Christian Bale (who plays Bruce Wayne/Batman) is, in addition to being a fine actor, quite a good filmic martial arts performer, as anyone who has seen his indy film Equilibrium can attest. He's great both acting and fighting in this picture.

Some of the reviewers are complaining that the fight sequences are short and hard to follow. My guess is that they were going in expecting another Equlibrium, which has a hong-kong martial arts sensibility where the fight scenes are played out like a choreographed dance for the camera. While I love that stuff (and Equilibrium is a great little film with outstanding action sequences), I agree with the directors call here that that would be wrong. The Frank Miller “Dark Knight” Batman fights by stealth, and as much with the mind as with the body. Fear is his primary weapon and I think the way the fights were cut in this film does an admirable job of portraying that. Would i like to see Bale do another hong-kong action movie? Sure, but not in this one. This was more appropriate.

I could only find two plot holes in this film. The first is explainable, and I buy the explanation a friend suggest to me. The hole is that, near the end of the film, the now totally off the deep-end Scarcrow appears riding a horse as he does in many of his comic book appearances. There is no explanation though of how or where he got a horse. My friend pointed out that in a previous scene we saw mounted police and its likely he clobbered one and took his horse. My friend furtehr suggested that this likely ended up on the editing floor for a time-cut. I buy that.

The second one though I can't buy. It occurs right at the end of the film. Rachel the assistant District Attorney has known Bruce sine they were little and we can suspect loved him since they were in their late teens or very early twenties. He's back. He's Rich. He's gorgeous. And by now she knows he's a hero. Oh and its also obvious he's hot for her. What does she tell him. “Oh we can't do this now, Gotham needs you more.”

Bullshit. I'm sorry but no woman on the planet would say that. As my wife said whe I told her; “Screw that! When ya got em, real em in!”

But other then those two minor points I found this the most believable super hero film I have seen yet and I am really looking forward to where it goes moving forward. I just hope they an keep up the writing when they run out of Frank Miller material. (There is an Alan Moore Batman graphic novel, “The Killing Joke” that is supposed to be excellent as well and, knowing Moore's writing, I strongly suspect it will fit well into this new darker Batman cycle. But that at the most gives them one more movie.)

All in all, by far the best movie I've seen all summer. George Lucas needs to buy himself a ticket and learn what real action/adventure writing is.

Posted at 11:54PM Jun 17, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[2]

The Great Burnable UMD Debate

The Sony PSP uses a new mini high-capacity cd type format called UMD or “Universal Media Disc” by Sony. (Makes you wonder what Universal Studios thinks of that, doesn't it?) Its a little 2 inch disc in a plastic case that holds 1.8 gig of data.

This is arguably the single most important part of the PSP. Sony intends the PSP to be your complete portable media device. It has a screen that clearly cost Sony a lot of money and is actually comfortable for watching movies on. It also plays music in the form of MP3 files or Sony's DRM format-- ATRAC3. But without a high capacity storage medium it would make a pretty poor player for dense media like movies.

Currently however you can only buy pre-recorded UMD discs. There are no burners available to burn your own music or video to take with you. This has sparked a fervent debate in the PSP user community. One side is calling loudly for Sony to release UMD burnable discs and a UMD burner for the desktop. The other side is just as loudly claiming that this would be the death of the PSP.

In this blog I am going to explain the argument and then give my reasons why I believe there really is a right or wrong answer to the Great Burnable UMD Debate

The argument of the anti-burner crowd goes like this:

Sony loses money on every PSP they sell. Thats a fact. In fact its true for every game console maker except Nintendo. You might wonder how this can be a sustainable business model. The answer is that the console makers make all their money off of a tax on software. For every game you buy for your PSP or PS2, Sony gets something like $5.00 from the manufacturer. They enforce this by locking out any software they have not approved.

The anti-burner crowd claims that should UMD burners be available, this control will be lost and Sony will no longer be able to make money on the software. They also suggest that, even if games are not produced this way, piracy of legitimately produced games will so cut into sales of software that Sony will still not make enough money to sell PSPs.

This is not the crowd I am in, and I think this argument is fundamentally flawed.

To begin with, this supposes that hiding the definition of the physical media is enough to prevent commercial piracy. But “security through obscurity” never lasts long. Physical media can be reverse engineered easily enough. I would be surprised if there aren't already engineers in China that can make UMD discs.

The fact of the matter is that physical media has not been used as a security measure since the 80s/early 90s. What has taken its place is digital encryption of the bits themselves. The bits are signed with a cryptographic key that is mathematically provable to be unbreakable within the lifetime of the product. In point of fact, it is open knowledge that Sony use such a key to prevent unauthorized programs from being run from its already writable secondary media-- the Memory Stick Duo slot.

Alright, but what then about pirated software? With a burner couldn't you copy the signed and PSP acceptable bits from one UMD to another? Maybe yes, maybe no. A burned UMD format needs to be compatible with the PSP to be useful, but it doesn't need to be identical to the manufactured media.

Sony could create a compatible burnable format that, for instance, didn't have all the tracks of the manufactured discs. All it would take is one track that is un-writable on the burnable disc but writable by legitimate licensed UMD manufacturers. They could put a key there that allows the program to be run off the disc. If the key isn't there, the PSP firmware could reject executables while still allowing it as data. This would allow the owners of the PSP to burn their own media discs, vastly increasing the usefulness of the device.

We could go even further with this idea. What if Sony were to allow home-brew applications? Wait a minute, you say, wouldn't this destroy their control and thus their economic model?

Not necessarily. By adding a cryptographic key to our scheme above we can take it a step further. Any cryptographically encrypted program, which would be all legitimate commercial programs, would not be allowed to run off the burnable disc but it could allow unsigned programs to run off the burnables. In this case the firmware could even bring up a screen before program launch that said something like: “Homebrew Mode. Warning, the application you are about to launch has not been approved by Sony Consumer Electronics. It is illegal to use this mode for commercial applications.”

The fact that such “homebrew mode” applications can be pirated would be a good thing for Sony as it would be further reason why real game developers need to go the proper developer route and pay Sony their due.

Could all this security be broken be really dedicated pirates? Sure, but no easier then breaking what little security trying to close the UMD format offers today. In a world where copiers are outlawed, outlaws will still have copiers ;)

So, to conclude, I find the argument that Sony cannot allow burnable UMDs to be both incorrect and incredibly short-sighted. If Sony wants their best chances of turning this beast into the Universal Media Player they want it to be, I'd say they have no other choice.

Posted at 04:00PM Jun 14, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[14]

Thr further joys of incompatable media

I assume many of you have read about my hard fought move to Linux.

Tonight, i started looking for a Linux program to pull tracks off my CDs and code them to ATRAC3 for my new PSP.

Surprise! It seems that Sony, while not wanting to give in to Micrsoft on DRM formats, has totally bowed to them on the desktop and makes sofwtare to code music for their DRM format, ATRAC3, available ONLY for Windows.

SO What you are telling me Sony is that I have to run your arch competitotr's desktop to talk to your portable player? Not bright. Once I go back to them for dekstop they have the wedge to push in everywhere else youa re trying to compete with them.

Get on the stick and give us SonicStage or at least some basic ripping utilities for the Linux platofrm. Some of us would RATHER do business with you but you need to offer us a complete Windows-free solution.

Posted at 01:41AM Jun 14, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

A market struggling to be born

There is a market out there.

Its one everyone in the consumer electroncis industry has been predicting for 20 years without really clearly understanding what it would look like.

It will change the way we do everything and its called "digital media convergence."

Its also in danger of stranglign on its own cord, stillborn in the fight between some media conglomerates who are afraid of it and others who embarce it and want to have sole control over it. The result is a miasma of mismatched technolgoies all competing for our dollars and our loyalty,

Strange as it may seem for a sun-guy, I am not a big fan of standards and stards comittees. Too many tiems such standards are created in a political whirlpool of conflicting corporate desires and fail to adress the one most important thing any standard should-- the needs of the end user. In this case though I see a danger of our brave new world comign to agrinding halt if we cannot get some cooperation between the players on standards and interoperability.

Right now I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited. Its a great service. I love it. I also have brqnd new PSP. The PSP is an amazing devcie really. Its the first truely usable mobile media center I have ever held in my hands. Music sounds great on it. The screen is big enough to cover my field of vision when held in my hands, giving me a wide-screen theatrical feel when watching a movie on it. And it plays kick ass games.

I am a video collector and own quite a library of DVDs as well.

Now we get into the bad thing-- lack of interoperability.

My Yahoo Music wont play on my Sony PSP because Yahoo uses an exclusive Microsoft DRM technology for its service, while Sony uses an exclusive Sony one for its music control.

My DVDs wont fit in the little PSP. I can understand that, but the disc technolgy Sony DID put in the PSP. the UMD, is used by no one else and there are no writers and writabel discs available fro it so I cannot evcen transfer music and video through my computer. (It does use a memory-stick DUO which is writable on a PC, but thats a pretty expensive medium to start trying to build a library of media on.)

In short, I have multiple media none of which are compatable and its only going to get worse. XBox360 will be using a new non-compatbale High Definition DVD format. The PS3 wont even be using UMD but will use another incompatable high definition DVD format-- blue-ray.

Im the consumer. And I am officially pissed. Sony, Micrsoft, Yahoo, Toshiba, and the rest: listen up. I'm in no mood for another beta v. VHS war, this time on multiple fronts (music and video, media and DRM) simultaneously. And I dont think other consumers are either.

Give up your dreams of world domination and give us standards that work together. There is lots of money in this for everyone if you all work together to make it truely useful for the ones who matter-- your consumers.

If not, you may find yourselves standing alone in the brave new world you want to bring us.

Posted at 09:07PM Jun 12, 2005 by gameguy in Java  | 

Short update; What scares me the most

Some substantiation for my fears about PPC. The "Power everywhere" project at IBM... http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0506quasar.html

Posted at 02:24PM Jun 05, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]

Why Sun Doesnt Need VMs

I often have moments of intellectual clarity lyign in bed. Tonight a number of issues I've written about just came together clearly.

As you may recall, a few weeks back I wrote about the trheat that I see PowerPC to be to VMs in the comsumer/desktop space.

(See My Biggest Fear. )

Then, last week I wrote about Yahoo's Music Unlimietd service using Micrsoft's DRM solution "Play for sure."

(See Short Take: Yahoo Music Unlimited )

While these two items might seme to have little in common, by analyziung the second item I realized a startling thing abotu the first:

Sun Doesn't Need VMs in order to succeed.

Now this is a rather heretical statement. At Sun we tend to get focused on our technologies, sometimes to the detriment of the bigger picture. In particular, we have been focused on the VM as our leverage point for Java.

But we're wrong.

I realized this while studying Microsft's DRM solution.The surprising thing about that is this-- you don't need to run Wince on the player in order to use it! Its been ported, by Microsoft, to other handheld operating environments. My initial reaction to this piece of information was confusion-- why would they enable competing products to their own handheld OS? Then it dawned on me that they were being a whole lot smarter then I had been.

Somehing Micrsoft has always understood is that the real position of power is not the OS, but rather the API. Control of the desktop OS has, since Windows, been all about controlling the API. And this is because he who controls the API controls the content, and he who controls the content is king.

I can't stress that last strongly enough. People buy devices not for the technology they are built on, but for the content they provide access to. This has been understood for a long, long time in the consumer space but it is something companies like Sun sometimes find hard to wrap their heads around. Content is everything. Content drives the consumer.

And by making people use their DRM API to play the music, Microsoft achieves their real goal-- total control of the content. At that point what OS it is being played on is totally irellevent to them. Once they have a stranglehold on the content there are a million ways to extract money from the space.

And the lesson for us is this: Its the APIs stupid. And our Java APIs are not dependant on a VM. VM technology is still useful, even advantageous to us today in a world of mixed platforms but its just a technical solution to a particular problem-- portability. If the problem goes away we can still be highly sucesssful if we have established our APIs as the preferred way of programming the content.

The corollary to that is that non VM based Java systems, so long as they are Java systems are not a threat to us but rather could be another path to our goals in the same way that non Wince-based "plays for sure" handhelds are a clear path for Microsoft to attain dominance in the handheld space.

This thought both cheers me and scares me. It cheers me that, even if IBM grabs a hold of the processor space for all consumer applications, we still have a path to victory. It scares me that it falls into a traditional blind spot of ours. Which is the point of this blog-- to shine some light on that dark corner of our thinking and perhapse widen our field of vision.

Posted at 08:04AM Jun 03, 2005 by gameguy in Music  |  Comments[1]

Short Take: The new game I'm most lookign foward to.

My boss would hate this game. I once sat him down at an economic simulationgame and after about 3 minutes he looked up at me and said, "so when do I get to kill something?'

Thats actually a strength of the Sun Game Technology Group, together we cover a wide range of different kidds of game enthusiasts. I'm not into very head on head competitive games. I like cooperative games. I like simulators. I like toys. And I like making things.

Thus my most-anticpated game of this year is The Movies from Lionhead Studios:

http://www.lionhead.com/themovies/index.html

Posted at 02:55AM Jun 02, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]

Blog Ed DIDNT eat it!

Thanks to the author of blog ed I found my post. Unfortunately its now redundant so I deleted it, but at least we know that blog-ed didn't eat it... it just hid it from view. SO Im back to using bloged for future posts!

Posted at 02:26AM Jun 01, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]