Omar L. Gallaga writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman. He's worked for more than nine years at the Austin American-Statesman and edited Technopolis, the newspaper's personal tech section, and ¡ahora sí!, Austin's Spanish-language newspaper. He's been a writer and performer with Austin's award-winning Latino Comedy Project and is a contributing writer for Television Without Pity, MSNBC.com's books section and The Almost Late Show with Bobby Bones. He writes a comic strip, "Space Monkeys!" with his brother, Pablo, and lives in New Braunfels with his wife and three technologically savvy cats.
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“The Killing of a No Good Goomba,” a locally shot short feature, was one of 10 finalists in a filmmaking competition Nintendo sponsored called Nintendo Short Cuts.
The film’s creators, Cole Evans and Jonny Riggs, didn’t make the top three online vote-getters when winners were announced today, but their film still earned them some prizes from Nintendo for placing in the top 10. You can see all the finalists on the site. “Goomba” features familiar characters from Nintendo’s stable including Luigi, Princess Peach and Wario. Evans and Riggs appear in the short as well as James Fair and Marisa Walden. Some of the scenes are obviously shot on familiar-looking downtown alleys.
The winner of the contest, Jack Paccione, Jr. of Staten Island for “Good vs. Wiivil,” gets $10,000, travel fare and spending money to go to the Tribeca Drive-in Short Film Series and a screening at this festival, as well as Nintendo game goodies. All finalists get a Nintendo DS system and a DS game.
The new game “BlackSite: Area 51,” developed by Midway Studios Austin, is poised to ship in September. A first-person shooter which, we hope, will feature big, nasty aliens, it will appear for the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation3.
Here’s a screen shot and the box art:
And lastly, a quick game description …
Featuring a powerful single-player campaign, along with multiple multiplayer modes including online-co-op, BlackSite: Area 51 delivers vicious combat action, next generation graphics and A.I., and a plethora of powerful weapons and vehicles. Set in present day, players take the role of decorated military veteran, Aeran Pierce, charged by the government to lead a squad of secret soldiers, each with his/her own specialty skill set, into the Rachel, Nev., area to fight off the invasion of unidentified enemy races.
Aeran Pierce has an awful lot of vowels in his name. You can get more info and a teaser trailer at the official site, Blacksitegame.com.
At the Seattle’s Best on Fourth and Congress:
Me: (Walking to the counter, unsure where to go for a quick half-hour online break before a meeting) Do you guys have Wi-Fi?
Counter Guy: Yeah!
Me: Is it free?
Counter Guy: Uh, yeah.
He said it with such assurance. Like, of course, it’s free. What is this, Belgrade? My good customer, the Wi-Fi is abundant and nectar-like here! Partake, my friend, partake. (Also, order a green tea latte and tip well.)
The mental calculations on my part were that at some point Starbucks bought Seattle’s Best, so surely they were under the same iron Internet umbrella, the one that charges for Wi-Fi because they are Starbucks and they simply can.
Seattle’s Best now feels to me like Starbucks’ rebellious little brother, giving away the cool baseball cards that older brother kept in a neat album, stingily, hoarding.
You have some new friends in your AOL Instant Messenger buddy list. Or haven’t you noticed?
Earlier this week, AOL’s chat program (which many of us use as iChat on the Mac side of things), added a few buddies to everyone’s list with strange names like Prof Gilzot, Spleak, sharethisdotcom and the less-creative “WSJ.” They join “Moviefone” as chat bots, automated programs that can answer your questions about movie showtimes, Wall Street Journal news and Hollywood gossip.
While the notion is commendable — free, instant access to information — is commendable, the method of their introduction is not. For me, I came in to work with these new “Buddies” and thought somebody had hacked my instant messenger account and added a bunch of their strangely named friends.
When I attempted to contact “Spleak” (represented by an icon of an animated female in a pink tank top; see image to the right) to figure out what was going on, I got this message:
Hi! I’m a little stressed out lately and could use a diversion. What about you? - Get a double life. Type “playme”. - Give me a new color. Type “color”. - Find out what’s new. Type “whats new”.
Oh…. ‘kay.
Crunchgear goes into more detail about these new, uninvited buddies. So far, I haven’t found much use for these, but Prof Gilzot, at least, is worth a chat: he’ll give you a vocabulary, math, or sentence-completion test and score you along the way.
Like I said, I think AOL’s heart is in the right place, but a heads-up via an instant message alert letting us know what was going on would have cut down on the paranoia a bit.
The new Web browser on the block, Safari for Windows, made its debut yesterday in public beta form.
I took it for a short test drive last night. The application is a small download (about 8 megabytes) and sets up quickly. There’s an option to download Quicktime with it in a bundle, but if you already have a recent version of iTunes installed, you’re fine just opting for Safari on its own.
As promised, the browser is pretty fast, rendering pages swiftly. Tabbed browsing works well. I’m not sure I’m a fan of the design interface, which tries too hard to emulate the look of iTunes and the upcoming applications in Mac OS Leopard. The application title bar and menu items blend together into a brushed metal expanse that lacks panache.
Most intriguing is an option to surf privately — called “Private Browsing.” By setting this option, you can navigate using the “Back” and “Forward” buttons, but cookies, histories and passwords won’t be saved. It’s a good feature, but unfortunately, the option doesn’t stick. If you quit Safari and reopen it, it won’t remember this as a preference.
Like its Mac counterpart, Safari is not great about importing bookmarks. Doing so shoves all the imported links into a folder and you still have to manually drag them into the Bookmarks Menu or Bookmarks Bar. It doesn’t feel very elegant, to be honest.
I don’t use Internet Explorer much in Windows and I love the ability to customize Firefox with so many add-on options. Safari may attract some Windows users who want a more streamlined, faster browsing experience. But the difference in speed for those with high-speed connections, for me, isn’t enough of a trade-off for Firefox’s customization options.
The product is still in beta — I’ll be curious to see what Apple improves by the final version.
A few weeks ago, I had Time Warner come out and install a digital phone line in my house. This is after about nine years of living without a land line. My wife and I both use cell phones and we’ve never felt the need to keep a regular phone line in the house.
That’s changed recently: I’m doing some work from home that requires me to do phone interviews (which is tough to do on a cell phone even with good reception). We also have a baby on the way and we figured we’ll be spending more time at home and want family members to be able to reach us.
Time Warner called with an offer of cutting our Road Runner bill in half and getting the digital phone service for a year at a rate that would only add about $5 to our monthly payment. Not a bad deal, right? We figured it was worth a go.
Two guys spent about half a Friday at my house installing the line. We have some complicated home wiring and they had to make sure all the unused phone outlets in our house were working properly. Once they were done, they gave me my 830-area code number and told me I was good to go.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a phone to call anyone with. Unlike voice-over-IP services like Vonage or SunRocket, the digital phone service didn’t come with a phone. For that, my wife and I went to the store and spent nearly $100 on a GE interference-free phone system that included two handsets and an answering machine.
Getting used to a big, clunky house phone took some getting used to and it’s frustrating that even relatively pricey home phones still don’t have half the features of a bottom-of-the-barrel cell phone. Entering phone numbers into memory was an annoyingly long process and forget about cell amenities like using a Bluetooth headset.
The service itself, however, offered great sound quality, even using the cordless’s speakerphone option.
I fired up my TiVo to dial in and got a successful connection. Now I wouldn’t have to lug my TiVo upstairs to dial out through a complicated process involving my computer.
Somewhere around the third day, though, we realized we were getting a lot of calls from strangers. Several people were trying to find a woman who apparently had used our phone number previously. Telemarketers began calling.
We asked Time Warner to change our phone number. Three days later, they did.
After we were given a new number, the telemarketing calls began anew. Someone tried to sell us magazine subscriptions. A caller from Arizona dialed but would not speak when I answered. Someone from the American-Statesman called to sell me a subscription; I told them I already subscribe.
I asked some of the telemarketers how they got my number. Some said they buy numbers from other companies (like Time Warner?) and that my number was in the phone book. (No, it’s not. I just got this number.)
I’m putting our number on the do-not-call list. I’m hoping this will fix the problem, though according to the Web site, it can take up to 31 days for the calls to stop.
I was taken aback by how quiet our cell-phones-only lives had been and how noisy our house suddenly became when we introduced a digital phone into our home. Every day, our caller ID has been logging random calls from all over the country, only a fraction of them leaving messages.
So far, I like the service and the price is right, but I might have been less enthusiastic to sign up if I’d known I was opening the door to a flood of junk calls.
Bonus tech news: Apple makes some announcements, but introduces no new hardware at today’s World Wide Developers Conference. Biggest take-aways: its Safari Web browser is now being offered in beta for Windows, promising faster speeds than Internet Explorer and Firefox. Game developers Id Software and Electronic Arts promise upcoming games for Mac. The Leopard OS, due in October, keeps looking better and better.
McDonald’s is sponsoring a Midnight Gaming tournament, continuing this week in Austin. Here are the locales if you’re interested. I’ll probably go check it out on Friday:
Thursday, June 14 5-8 p.m. 7950 Burnet Road
Friday, June 15 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. 1024 E. Anderson Lane
Friday, June 15 5-8 p.m. 8500 E. U.S. 290
Games being played include “Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2,” “Super Smash Bros. Melee” and “NBA 2K7.”
“Heroes” are hot, as is evidenced not only by the TV show of the same name, but by the success of “Spider-Man 3” this summer and the full slate of superhero movie projects coming down the pike.
So it should come as no surprise that Austin-developed “City of Heroes,” the videogame, is being made into a movie by some of the principals behind July’s “Transformers.” Movie rights have been snapped up, but according to my source at NCsoft, a story that ran yesterday in Variety is old news: he says those rights were snapped up three years ago by Tom DeSanto.
Still: superheroes vs. aliens on a big screen. The fanboys will pay to see that. The sequel is ready-made with “City of Villains.” And, though I’m biased on this point, you can’t lose with a hero named The Statesman.
We’re all assuming that the iPhone is going to be incredibly hard to find and that long, disappointed lines of people are inevitable. But what if there’s an iPhone for every set of anxious fingers that want them?
Apple Insider thinks there’ll be 3 million iPhones available on June 29. That seems to gibe with goals to sell 10 million of the devices next year.
If you’re still convinced we’re in for Nintendo Wii-like shortages, consider this: people thought the PlayStation3 would be in incredibly short supply for a long time until shoppers were struck into dismissal by the price tag: at $500 and $600, the two models of the PS3 are priced the same as what the iPhone will cost.
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The company, out off of Loop 360 not far from where Origin used to be located, is focused on massively multiplayer online games like “Guild Wars” and “City of Heroes/City of Villains” and its newest project is “Tabula Rasa,” which will be launched this fall (likely early October if I’m to hazard a guess).
Garriott and longtime developing partner Starr Long played host to me and to gaming press folks from around the country, letting us in on “Tabula Rasa,” which tries to improve upon many of the frustrations some gamers have with MMOs, as they’re called, while building a rich space mythology that can incorporate hundreds of thousands to millions of players if successful.
The day started with a tour of NCSoft, which works with its Korean partners in game development, building on the success of games like “Lineage.” While the offices are standard corporate-issue, Garriott says he’s tried to spruce up the place with videogame machines and memorabilia from his personal collection. Lining the walls of the offices, along with concept art and information about current games, are bits of history from Origin and Garriott’s past. On one table were some of the first games Garriott created, along with the tiny, beige machines on which they ran:
If you’re a longtime gamer, seeing pristine copies of cloth maps from the old “Ultima” games or the original box art from “Autoduel” was no small thrill.
After the tour, it was time to sit and talk about “Tabula Rasa,” which has been in development for about five years.
Some concept art from the game:
In a conference room, Garriott and producer Starr Long showed gameplay from “Tabula Rasa,” running us through a multi-part mission involving disabling a power station used by the evil aliens in the game, who are known as the Bane.
The story in short: The Earth is blown up and humans are scattered across different planets trying to make a stand with alien species to stop the Bane. A species called the Benefactors has harnessed ways of bending the laws of science and shares that knowledge with the rest of the universe through a series of symbols, which make up a written language employed throughout the game.
Dynamic battlefields are placed throughout the game and they continue to be in action with or without player involvement. Much like the mechanics of group war games such as “Battlefield 1942,” strategic base points are overtaken by waves of enemies and the balance of power shifts constantly.
Other ways that “Tabula Rasa” looks to change how MMOs work: more dynamic battles, instead of what Garriott calls the “Whack-a-mole” method of typical combat in online games. Players will do better in combat if they take cover, use higher ground and factor in other real-time decisions when fighting.
In an effort to avoid the grind of creating new characters in most MMOs, “Tabula Rasa” will allow players to save characters at any point in the game and “Clone” them. Instead of having to start a character from Level 1, you could take a cloned character from a ways back and continue that one on a different path, changing the appearance or character class. Garriott says that any time you make players start from scratch, you risk losing them entirely to a competing game.
Most intriguing for casual gamers: Garriott is hoping to make this game more story-driven than most massively multiplayer games. He says a common problem in MMOs is that players rarely feel like they’re the star of the story or that they’ve really accomplished something when they finish a difficult task or mission.
“We felt that was a solveable problem,” Garriott said. “We’ve made great strides making an MMO that’s extremely story-driven. Instead of statistically average, it makes you feel unique and special.”
Constructing a specialized experience for thousands and thousands of individuals is a daunting task — Garriott hopes that the decisions players make will have deeper ramifications in this game than most others, hearkening back to the ethical parables of Origin games like “Ultima IV.”
In most MMOs, he says, “Every mission you get you should just do. You generally don’t bother reading it. 100 percent of the time, what they tell you to do is the right thing to do.”
In “Tabula Rasa,” players will sometimes be faced with conflicting missions, many of which will have unintended consequences, even if performed correctly. Garriott hopes this will make players more focused on what they’re doing, instead of skimming narrative information just to find out what’s next on the mission task list.
After the presentation, it was time to take the game for a test drive. Note: tThis isn’t a review of “Tabula Rasa.” The game has months until release, so it would be unfair to judge the game on such an early build. Instead, this is just a series of impressions based on just a few hours of gameplay through early levels and one advanced level.
Visually, “Tabula Rasa” looks as good or better than most MMOs I’ve seen. Environments are detailed (as would be expected given the high-powered Dell XPS gaming machines we were using). Sound design is immersive with lots of chatter from non-player characters. Voice chat among squads of players is pretty seamless.
Character creation was fairly limited — there wasn’t a varied set of character models to choose from, but that’s something I’d expect would be beefed up before release.
The game throws you right into battle from the very beginning and unlike many fantasy-based MMOs like “World of Warcraft,” the sci-fi setting and quicker pace of combat makes “Tabula Rasa” feel at times like a action game like “Halo.”
Although the “Tabula Rasa” team is taking pains to keep players from approaching gameplay like a first-person shooter, there is definitely run-and-gun action in the game that heightens the fun in combat. You won’t be standing around pushing buttons as you fight. Instead you duck for cover and try to find good combinations of firepower and magic-casting.
The game’s controls are simplified and the interface isn’t too cluttered.
Early missions don’t feel as much of a grind as most MMOs, but there definitely are elements of going and hunting for items and bringing them back to people. And although the storyline is a nice change from orcs, goblins and elves, I still found myself skimming mission information to get to the end and find out what exactly I was supposed to do. I didn’t find myself faced with any major ethical decisions early in the game, through about five or six levels of play.
There are different planets in the game, each with different species, storylines and “Instance” play areas. Travel time is kept to a minimum with teleportation spots, so you don’t find yourself walking for miles and miles, as is the case in other MMOs.
By the time the gameplay session ended, as I blearily rubbed my eyes and got out of the dark room, I yearned to keep my character when the game launches later this year. The combination of action and MMO gameplay in a sci-fi setting will make it irresistible to “World of Warcraft” and “Guild Wars” vets looking for something different.
I’m not great at MMO games, but this is one that I came away from wanting to play again.
For a much more detailed analysis of gameplay elements and design of the game, check out Allen Rausch’s excellent write-up on “Tabula Rasa” over at GameSpy.
After the day at NCSoft, we toured Garriott’s nearby home and saw many of his curiosities, from a mini-house full of animatrons to a piece of the deck of the Titanic. The house is like a catalog of Garriott’s many interests, from Victorian-era technology to space travel to Middle Ages weaponry and curiosities. I’ll leave you with a few pictures from Garriott’s home, which he enthusiastically showed off to the gaming press:
A very dead dude in the basement.
The view from the back of Garriott’s home.
As revealed by a commercial that aired last night during “60 Minutes,” the iPhone has a release date: June 29.
The ads, which are available on Apple’s site (and which, interestingly, haven’t popped up on YouTube), show the ease-of-use of the iPhone against a black background. The point seems to be: this is not your typical, hard-to-navigate cell phone interface.
More interesting is that Apple chose to air the commercial during “60 Minutes” (which featured an interview with Jack Kevorkian) rather than the MTV Movie Awards. Between this, the recent Paul McCartney deal and the promise of The Beatles music on iTunes (if we’re placing bets, I think the catalog will be made available right around the same time the iPhone comes out), it looks like Apple is looking to target the Baby Boomer market with this one.
As Michael Barnes told me this morning, it’s time to start lining up now at the Apple store.
Edited to add video of the commercial:
Who wants some Swayze?
You do. that’s who.
The videogame industry, having lied in wait lo these 20 years, is finally ready to release a “Dirty Dancing” videogame. Will I be playing it? Do you even have to ask? (Note: The answer is, “Yes,” but purely for kitsch value, I assure you.)
It’ll be a niche game, for sure. Orthon The Orc from “World of Warcraft” isn’t going to pick up this one for his next adventure.
But it will scratch a certain 20th-anniversary itch for certain people and I have no doubt it will be a crazy, time-of-your-life success.
I wish I’d been there to hear the announcement to the game developers who worked on this:
Lead designer: Hey, guys, With some help from our marketing team, I figured out what the world of videogames needs.
Programmer 1: A first-person shooter set in really dank dungeons?
Lead designer: No. A “Dirty Dancing” puzzle game.
Programmer 2: … YES!
Programmer 1: A what? That movie with Patrick Swayze?
Lead designer: That movie, yes. This is our next project. You’ll both be working on this for the next two years.
Programmer 2: Do we get to meet Swayze? I love “Roadhouse.”
Programmer 1: Did I just wake up in Hell? Who just killed me?
Lead designer: Now, all these character models we’ve got lying around for space ogres and large-chested space Medusas…. can you make any of these look like Jennifer Grey?
Programmer 2: Can I!
Programmer 1: I’m so sad I think my stomach just ate itself.
And… scene.
Bonus: Penny Arcade did a fantastic comic about the game.
Does big tech news come in threes? It does today, and, coincidentally, from the three biggest names in consumer tech:
Microsoft: Call it, “Microsoft Coffee Table 2007.” A new product from the Redmond giant is a table with a screen surface that combines the touch-screen features of the forthcoming iPhone with the retro appeal of that old tabletop Ms. Pac-Man game you played at Pizza Hut. “Surface,” as it’s called uses a projector, Wi-Fi and Windows software to create a touch-surface tabletop that can also detect devices like cell phones and cameras. It can do some neat tricks, but some of the tricks seem familiar. Squeezing or expanding your fingers to resize photos? Didn’t we see Steve Jobs do that back in January? Oh, Microsoft… will you ever catch up? And speaking of Apple…
Apple: Today is down-with-DRM (digital rights management) day. A new version of iTunes, 7.2, now offers “iTunes Plus,” which will allow you to download slightly higher quality audio tracks from music company EMI that is free of copy protection for $1.29 per song. Apparently, setting the option for $1.29 music means you can’t see the $0.99 and $1.29 versions side-by-side, but you can go back to copy-protected tracks if you like by changing your account settings. Songs that you’ve already bought can be upgraded for 30 cents each.
Google: Bay-area geeks are enthralled by street-level views for Google Maps. Even we, the jaded tech geeks, think this one’s pretty cool.
What’s everybody else up to? Well, if the reaction from the commenters on Gizmodo is to be believed, Palm just unveiled the least-wanted product you could imagine. Really, Palm? A sub-notebook-sized “Companion” to carry with your smartphone? Great gravy, that sounds awful!
Local game legend Warren Spector (“Deus Ex,” “System Shock,” “Thief”) is teaming up with dove-loving action filmmaker John Woo for a film/game project called “Ninja Gold.”
In a smart move, Woo will handle the film side while Spector will be doing game duties. This sounds a bit like what Microsoft was trying to do with Peter Jackson on a “Halo” movie, but that project seems stuck in development.
Woo’s got more to come in the game world. His long-awaited “Stranglehold” hits next-generation game consoles in August. For PlayStation3 owners, a Blu-ray version of his film “Hard Boiled” will be included in a limited collector’s edition.
Spector, who founded Junction Point Studios, Inc., in Austin, gave a great South by Southwest Interactive presentation this year on game design and we can’t wait to see what he does with his Woo collaboration.
A few e-mails I received in response to Sunday’s “Star Wars” article and costume sidebar:
Hi!! Great article! The Bazaar Backstage (a costume store here in Austin) actually sells a $999 complete Vader costume that is made from molds from George Lucas’ company. I wish you had known that for your article. It would have been cool for someone to know where to get one. Maybe next time, I guess!Thank you,
Gail
From Khanna:
I really enjoyed the prequel “Star Wars” movies and can’t believe that anyone wouldn’t. I didn’t like the original “Star Wars” that much, but I can see how others would. I just wonder why you would knock 1, 2, and 3 around so badly when there are so many who completely adore them. It would be nice if when you butcher something you would acknowledge that there may be some that don’t appreciate that.A reader of “The Austin-American Statesman”
From Carol:
I enjoyed your Sunday article very much about “Star Wars Turns 30”.I was 24 years old in 1977, and although I did not embrace The Force as a legitimate religion, I (and many of my 20-something friends) were very taken with the energy, humor, special effects and sheer enjoyability of the film. I watched “Star Trek,” but it was NOTHING to compare with this.
I recall one post-movie conversation where we actually admitted we were jealous of the younger members of the audience, because their immersion in the Star Wars universe was so much more complete than we (all-knowing, worldly) adults.
It remains the ONLY movie I have seen more than once in a theater. (5 times at the old Capitol Plaza.) It was a film you dragged friends to, if that was the only way to get them to see it. “Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” were equally delightful, but couldn’t have the “Oh Wow” impact of seeing the original back then.
I will wholeheartedly concur that the 3 prequels were a dreadful disappointment. I saw them in the theater…and made 2 separate efforts to watch the DVD versions and “get” whatever Mr. Lucas was trying to convey to his audience. Save yourself the effort. They don’t get any better with re-watching.
Thanks again for your article and for sharing the viewpoint of that little boy you were “Long Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.”
Nudity! A bare bottom! Scandal!
That’s the completely unexpected reason why the Windows Vista version of “Halo 2” was pushed back again after its original release date earlier this month was scrapped.
The details, involving a guy engaged in mooning in the game’s level editor, are in this hilarious story from Next Generation.
When Microsoft acquired Bungie, the makers of “Halo,” there was talk about how Bungie would adapt to life under their corporate overlords. This may be some small clue of how that’s going. Microsoft can’t be happy about this, coming as it does after the “Grand Theft Auto” “Hot coffee” mod fiasco.
All I can say is that if you need a good reason to disappoint gamers again and push back the release of a game, this is it. No ifs, ands or pixellated rear-ends.
I was out of the office all day yesterday on an assignment and, boy did the tech news stack up. I subscribe to over 50 RSS feeds, and when I got home last night, I was horrified to see that I had over 500 items to read. That wasn’t counting the 100+ e-mails I hadn’t been able to check all day.
I know, I know. We’re all overloaded. I shouldn’t complain. Now that I’m (almost) caught up, here are the best bits:
Psst. Hey, buddy. Welcome to your work-week. Happy Monday! Hey, did’ja catch “Sopranos” last night? Whoah, right? I mean, whoah!
Quick, while the boss isn’t looking, here’s some stories you probably missed over the weekend. Let’s go grab a coffee later after you catch up on your e-mails.
Good New York Times piece about the success of Firefox and what might be owed to all those open source geeks who supported it in the early days.
Some “Starcraft II” news from Saturday. Can’t wait to play it! The gameplay videos on GameTrailers.com are hot.
Did you know the American-Statesman has a guy at the Cannes Film Festival? He’s blogging it up. That Coen brothers movie sounds fantastic.
I was doing some “Star Wars” research for a story and I came across this fascinating story about SuperShadow.com, which purports to have a direct link to George Lucas about the (very likely fake) next trilogy. The site has detailed plot summaries for “Star Wars 7-9” and I almost fell for it. For longer that I’d care to admit.
One more from The New York Times. Hey, I know those Naturally Curly Austin ladies! One of them used to be my boss!
All right, I hope that gets your Monday started off right. Oh, by the way… are you gonna eat that doughnut?
Fans of gaming behemoth Blizzard Entertainment (“World of Warcraft,” “Diablo”) are in a frenzy today after a late-night announcement in Korea that the next big game will be (drum roll, please) … “StarCraft II,” a sequel to the legendary (and surprisingly sequel-bereft) real-time strategy game “StarCraft,” released in 1998.
Remarkably, that game was so well-designed, that it’s still popular today, especially in Korea where it’s a favorite at Internet cafes.
Blizzard has already put live a site for “StarCraft II” and the Blizzard home page bears the game’s logo and the words, “Hell, it’s about time.”
While a new “StarCraft” game in any form is welcome news for gamers, some might be disappointed that the announcement was not for a massively multiplayer online version of “StarCraft,” along the lines of a “World of Warcraft” game. Something like that would be a huge cash cow for Blizzard, especially given the rabid fanbase and sci-fi storyline.
In typical Blizzard fashion, no release date has announced. The company hasn’t released a new game since 2004 (“The Burning Crusade” expansion pack for “World of Warcraft” was released earlier this year) and is famous for saying their games will be done when they’re done. According to the site FAQ, the game will be available for Windows Vista and XP, as well as Mac. No plans have been announced for console versions of “StarCraft II.”
Blizzard had at one time been working on a game called “StarCraft: Ghost” for consoles, but it was eventually put on indefinite hold.
My guess is that Blizzard is working on an MMO in the “StarCraft” universe to be released some time after this one. They took that strategy with “Warcraft III,” which was developed at the same time that “World of Warcraft” was being built.
I downloaded the free “Halo 3” multiplayer beta on Xbox Live last night (via the disc for “Crackdown,” likely the most popular method of getting in on the beta).
There was a delay on getting the beta up online, but I was at work all day and didn’t even hunt for it until after last night’s despicable “American Idol” debacle.
When the game finally downloaded (it took a few hours), I saw that about 70,000 players were partaking of the beta goodness.
I only got to play the snow level, but the game looks great so far with no server lag and lots of visual polish. It’s not a crazy leap from the upscaled graphics of “Halo 2,” but not shabby by any means.
Players usually trash-talk in “Halo” games, but the session I played was pretty quiet; I imagine people are getting used to the new maps.
The game menus are lovely in design and I’m intrigued by options to create and upload gameplay movies.
And, of course, the “Red vs. Blue” “Halo 3 beta” video is great.
Nothing will make you look with scorn upon your current cup of coffee more than reading geeks debate about their painstaking methods for extracting sublime coffee flavor.
Roasting your own beans on a cast-iron skillet? Seriously!?
I used to grind my own beans, but this day I just buy the pre-ground Seattle’s Best, especially when it’s on sale. Lately I’ve been drinking the “Big” dark roast blend or the medium “Henry’s blend.”
I put Horizon organic half-and-half in there and a teaspoon or more of Splenda for Baking for my morning commute.
I have a pretty plain cone-filter coffeemaker, having never sprung for the coveted red “Grind and Brew” model that would look so nice in my kitchen. Maybe someday.
If you liked the breakdancer/baby video (and who among us didn’t?), you can catch the hilarious remix here. Warning: You will laugh and the laugh will be loud.
I saw “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and it was better than I’d even dared to hope. The DVD came out on Tuesday. Go buy the two-disc special edition with all the great extras.
It may be cruel, but I’m working under the assumption that this kid is perfectly all right after this and that something like this will probably happen to my kid at least once every day.
(I think the whole newsroom could hear our hoots over in features)
Link via Gawker.
What they don’t tell you when you go on an Epic Quest to Save Middle Earth is that when you quit midway through, you are left with an empty, sad feeling. You didn’t save anything, really, except for a few Shire farms. You delivered some mail. You attacked a wolves’ den and bought a flute.
You didn’t come close to disposing of the foul ring or kicking that giant evil eye right in the pupil.
And being a hobbit can compound the feelings of self-loathing. What was the point of it all?
If you’re looking to bail on a Massively Multiplayer game, you have to be prepared for these feelings. Book a spa day. (A real spa day, not one on “Second Life.”)
Take a hike outdoors in the real world. Reacquaint yourself with sunlight that is not server-generated.
Don’t dwell on that Level 12 character you left behind and how close you were to acquiring new minstrel skills.
Avoid the “Lord of the Rings” movies, because they will only make you believe you have a chance at having an impact at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
Get a can of compressed air and clean out that keyboard. It’s probably filthy from the crackers and chips you ate in front of the computer while on your various quests.
Most importantly, cancel that account! Every time they charge $15 to your credit card, you’ll feel compelled to jump back in and get your money’s worth.
It’s not easy to break up with an MMO. There can be a palpable sense of loss. The best way to deal with it is to move on.
Hey, guess what? I hear there’s a “Pirates of the Caribbean” MMO coming out! Arrrrrr!
I made a very personal announcement on my own Web site today and I can’t help but feel a little weird about it.
We followed the typical guideline of not telling friends or family about the pregnancy until after the first trimester. Now we’re toward the end of the second and I’d still held back from writing about it or really speaking much about it publicly.
Part of it is that there are plenty of great dad bloggers writing about their experiences and I didn’t really want to beat the same drum.
Also, my wife is not a public person, doesn’t like to be written about online, and she didn’t really want our personal bidness out there for the world to see. For once, I agreed with her.
But the child is coming. It’ll be a real, three-dimensional human entered into the public record as a citizen of this country, on Planet Earth. Sooner or later, the reality was going to have be addressed online, as it has been in our own lives.
So it was only after taking a very deep breath that I put a very small version of the ultrasound picture up with only a negligible amount of text. I’m still nervous about it, and I don’t know why.
I live a lot of my life online, but I’m not sure it’s fair for me to put my (future) kid out there, too. I’m still mulling it all over.
Some thoughts on Joost.com.
They’re raising quite a bit of money and developing a lot of content relationships.
The site is still in closed beta, but it’s very easy to get an invitation (you could just ask someone who is on the service, hint hint).
The site promises full-screen video and lots of programming. On that, it delivers. It’s got a very slick interface and the amount of videos on the site surprised me with its variety and depth. You can watch full episodes of some Adult Swim and Comedy Central shows, some classic TV series (if your definition of “classic” includes “Who’s the Boss”) and some pretty great music videos, including stuff from Amy Winehouse and Snow Patrol.
Here’s the issues I have with Joost, though:
All that being said, Joost is very enticing, at least on first impression. Video is, on most channels, very crisp and good looking. On a good Internet connection with decent hardware, Joost blazes. The interface is sharp and most videos look great. (They do pixelate quite a bit on large monitors, depending on the video.) Navigation is a little glitchy sometimes, but for the most part, Joost delivers lots of eye candy and I can see why people are in a rush to invest in it. We’ll have to wait and see how it develops and whether people will embrace having to install a non-Web application to see Joost content. I’m not convinced that this is the way the Internet is going, but with enough content partnerships and enough money to expand their vision, Joost could end up being very hard to ignore.
My review of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game “The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar” runs Monday in Life & Arts. Here’s a little preview of the review:
All right, Tolkien geeks. It’s time to bust out those credit cards.
The massively multiplayer online game for Windows, “Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar” launched on April 24 and, after two weeks of intensive play, we’re happy to report that The Shire is safe.
Turbine Inc., the game’s developer, has remained faithful to the J.R.R. Tolkien books to an obsessive degree, crafting for online players a world that is as rich and detailed a digital recreation as any fan could hope.
For more casual gamers, the game will feel like a retread of arguably the most successful PC game out right now, “World of Warcraft,” which boasts 8 million subscribers worldwide. While the first few levels of the game move swiftly — you feel as if you’re a minor character swept up in the story that begins with “The Fellowship of the Rings” — it soon shifts to the grinding, quest-driven gameplay typical of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.
That’ll be a disappointment for some gamers. Instead of protecting the One Ring or fending off Smeagol, you’ll be collecting chickens for farmers, slaughtering swarms of gnats and delivering mail among postmasters to earn experience points in the game’s early levels. Many of the quests are easy but involve lots of walking or tedious item collecting.
In other news, I just created a Technorati Profile. I’ll let you know how that goes. Come claim this blog, benevolent search engine spiders!
On the front page of Monday’s paper we listed in our week ahead that “Halo 2” for Windows Vista would be out today.
And by all accounts it should been. Game site advertisements listed a countdown for the release. PC gamers, who’ve long suffered the indignity of seeing gamers play it on their Xboxes for almost two-and-a-half years while they patiently waited for a PC version, were waiting. Sunday’s Best Buy circular announced that the game would be on store shelves today.
May 8 was the official release date of the game. The game only runs on Windows Vista, but those dedicated enough to go ahead with the upgrade (buyers beware), were willing to do whatever it takes to finally play the game on their computer.
And it’s not here.
According to many gaming news sites, Microsoft has announced that the game has been pushed back to May 22 for some last-minute tweaks.
Are you kidding? The game was completely finished for Xbox in November of 2004. It really has taken this long (and a few extra weeks) to port that thing to Windows? “Halo 3” is almost out for the Xbox 360!
Microsoft has kept the delay quiet, with only e-mails to a select group of game sites spreading word of the delay. A peek at the official Halo 2 site gives no word of the announcement. Users on Bungie’s message board are confused and angry.
It’s really just silly at this point. Microsoft’s “Games for Windows” has become a big joke. They urged PC games to upgrade their computers to Windows Vista, which for many months has crippled game performance as graphics card manufacturers have struggled to update their drivers. And games using the fabled “Direct X 10,” the promise of which made many gamers upgrade to more expensive hardware, have yet to materialize.
Come on, Games for Windows. Get it together.
You’ve raided dragon’s dens and conquered vast undead hordes. You’ve achieved the acquisition of crazy l33t weapons and armor. You wear a shiny pimp hat.
But did you earn credit card points while you did all that?
Behold! The “World of Warcraft” Visa Rewards card. Use it to tell the world (or the clerk at EB Games) that you are a serious cash-wielding citizen of the U.S. (as well as Azeroth) and that not only do you possess great mining and smelting skills, you also are card-carrying consumer. With decent credit.
I really wish I had the skills to make this stuff up.
John Kelso e-mailed me today to tell me that his wife bought the Miramax movie “The Queen” on DVD only to find that it wouldn’t play on their Philips DVD player.
Amazon.com sent her a replacement copy, but the second DVD did the same thing — it froze right after the FBI warning. Amazon is refunding her money, and Philips said many customers are having the same problem.
The issue is not with the hardware. It’s with film studios mucking around with copy protection schemes to thwart would-be DVD copies and pirates.
The problem, though, is customers who buy a movie, put it in their DVD player and can’t watch the movie they paid to see.
The issue recently bit Sony (oh, beleaguered, stumbly Sony), which had to replace copies of movies like “Stranger than Fiction” and “Casino Royale.”
This is ridiculous. When you buy a DVD, it should work in any DVD player. That’s it. End of story. In trying to keep up with illegal activity, movie studios are burning their legitimate customers, the ones who buy DVDs and fill their coffers.
Digital Rights Management, the same issue that Steve Jobs is trying to work out with music studios for music delivered on iTunes, is a time bomb for media companies. The more they try to control the way we can use media that we buy, be it music, movies or games, the more they’re losing touch with customers who simply want to use the media they’ve paid for. And it only takes one flawed copy protection scheme to lose a customer. I doubt Mrs. Kelso will be buying “The Queen” on DVD again, in any format.
This is just one example of how media companies are sealing their own doom: by treating all customers like criminals. It’s gotten to the point where downloaded music won’t play in our music players, $50 video games won’t play after they’ve been installed and DVDs won’t play in DVD players.
Frustrated yet? As we move on the high-definition DVD formats, more digital delivery of movies and music, and more paranoia from media companies, it’s only going to get worse.
Don’t expect your dollars to buy you media that work. And get ready to ask for some refunds.
Those who download illegally are going to end up having the last laugh after all.
Given what a visual feast this movie is supposed to be (I haven’t seen it yet; yes, I know. I should have caught it in the theater.), it’s almost a crime that there’s no release date for an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray version of the movie.
Instead, there’s a regular and a two-disc “Platinum” DVD edition set for release on May 15.
So if this two-disc set is “Platinum,” what would that make the inevitable high-definition disc? Undiscovered Radioactive Ore Edition? That Black Alien That Turns Into Peter Parker’s Costume Edition?
Come on, Guillermo del Toro. Don’t you want us to see your movie in the best-possible resolution?
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Popular Web-link aggregator Digg.com removed some posts from its page that contained information about a decryption code that hacks the copy protection for HD-DVD discs.
Bad move.
Stung by this, Digg users began flooding the site with links to headlines and sites containing the key code, a 32-character string that begins “09-f9-11-02-9d” and that has suddenly become the most popular string of gibberish among geeks since Hurley’s lottery ticket numbers on “Lost.”
The Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, the consortium behind the copy protection scheme, has been threatening Web sites with legal action for posting information about the hack.
By Tuesday night, Digg’s front page was overrun by defiant posts containing the key and criticizing the citizen-driven site for censorship.
According to BBC News, Digg has reversed course. In a post on Digg, founder Kevin Rose said, “…After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”
Wow. Don’t you love it when things like this move at Internet speed?
Whether posting or pointing links to the HD-DVD information is illegal or not (let’s leave that for the courts to decide), Digg found itself betraying the spirit of its own site by trying to follow the law. Was it the right move? Digg users have overwhelmingly voted in their actions on where they side on the issue.
Addendum: According to several folks (including my dad, who has the service), Time Warner’s Digital Phone is not the same as voice-over-IP. To hear my dad tell it, they bring you a new cable modem that has phone capabilities and the calls are transmitted via cable, not through your Internet connection.
Time Warner Austin called asking if I needed the date of installation moved up on my Digital Phone service. I told them the service was actually through San Antonio since I live in New Braunfels and that I was all right with forgoing the special treatment and waiting until June to write about the service. Thanks for the offer, though.
I just signed on for a digital voice-over-IP phone.
Lord, help me. I hope I didn’t just make a big mistake.
A few months ago, I was very close to signing on with SunRocket, but held off. More recently, a relentless barrage of calls from their telemarketers (one of whom called me three times in one day, even when I asked not to be called during the day because of work) turned me off. The legal issues with Vonage also didn’t help bring me into the fold.
Today, someone from Time Warner called me. They told me they’d halve my Road Runner rate for a year to try their Digital Phone service, which would hook up to our cable modem. All told, I’d be spending about an extra $5 a month (before those sneaky telecom fees that always pile up with phone service). I could cut the service off at any time. No installation or setup fees.
OK. I bit. We’ll see how it goes.
We’ve been living a land-line-less existence for years and years with no problem, but on the few days that I work from home, I hate relying on a cell phone for interviews or any serious phone work. For that reason alone, it’s worth the $5.
So, here we go. I’ll let you know how the voice-over-IP experiment goes. They told me the demand has been so good that they couldn’t fit me in for an installation appointment until June 8. I’m not sure how much installing is actually involved (don’t you just plug the thing in?), but I’m going to leave it to the experts to figure out what and when I need this set up.
Everybody wants to be MySpace or YouTube these days (and why not; it seems the best way to get rich in tech these days is to tweak some existing technologies into something that catches on, then wait for the buyers to come knocking). I get tons of press releases for sites that promise to be “The MySpace of (Whatever)” or “The YouTube of (What-have-you),” but better.
Not only do most of these sites not pan out (I’m still on the fence about whether Twitter.com will amount to much).
So without pronouncing them to be anything more than new sites with a little potential, here are two more:
Kyte.tv looks like it’s trying to merge a YouTube-like video site with live chatting, but also incorporating an intriguing amount of phone interactivity. While I think the comic-strip-style examples are beyond lame, I’m impressed by the elegance of the video interface (I like how the chats go on within the video window as it continues to run). Kyte.tv may be an example of trying to do too much. Before I was even willing to sign up for an account, I already felt overwhelmed by a blitz of options. Sometimes less is more and despite a trying-too-hard interface, it already feels like work. The New York Times bunched Kyte.tv with other emerging “Always-on” sites. I’m not quite sold on this one.
A friend of mine let me sneak into her account on iminlikewithyou.com (right now the site is invite-only). Despite an interface that’s overly cute with lots of beeps and boops and floaty small windows, this one is a charmer, depending on your mood.
Seemingly built for singles, I’m In Like With You gives you points for all kinds of activities and then lets you use those points to bid on other users’ games. Games can be simple quizzes, but the point of them is to connect users in a flirty way.
It’s got a very clean interface that favors big photos and easy-to-read text, which automatically puts it ahead of MySpace in terms of design. It feels very stripped-down and direct, which is a good thing.
My friend reports that from what she’s seen it’s mostly filled with tech geek men. But I imagine that will change over time. Still, with MySpace overrun with spammers, fake offers for iPods and phantom profiles leading to adult sites, this one could easily get overrun by fakers if the owners don’t give it the proper care and oversight.
Austin’s Richard Garriott, the gaming legend formerly of Origin and now with NCSoft, was on the team that went on a zero-gravity jet flight with professor Stephen Hawking.
NCSoft released information on a blog entry posted by Garriott on Friday, including two photos.
More information on the company (of which Garriott says he was an early investor) and the flight at the Zero G Web site.
When you open up the newly released “Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar” (Angmar is no relation to me, by the way), the tagline on an included leaflet reads, “Millions of players. One game to rule them all…”
Whoa, whoa. Hold on there, “LOTR.” You’re not “World of Warcraft” yet. Get a few million players first before you start declaring yourself the king of anything.
I’m installing the game now and hope to have a mini-report on it soon. Should I be a hobbit or an elf?
Are Apple’s financial results from yesterday evidence of Mac OS making some real headway against Windows Vista? If you couple that story with some of the more telling comments from this recent Slashdot post, signs point to yes.
The PlayStation Eye has been announced for the PlayStation3. It’s the successor to the EyeToy and boy is it ugly. Still, it seems more than capable of bringing console Webcamming to the next level with four-channel audio and 120 frames-per-second video capturing.
Video/TV site Joost.com is expected to officially launch early next week. We haven’t been invited, so we can’t tell you how this may be better or worse than other video sites out there, but this one has a lot of buzz and investing going for it, at least. Here’s a review of the beta version for the meantime.
Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures. My brother is ecstatic that a commercial from his childhood has found its way online. I must admit, it is a cool ad:
I spoke to Jonathan Rochelle of Google Docs and Spreadsheets over the phone yesterday.
The more I read about applications being developed for online that challenge the notions of installed local hardware (like, say Microsoft’s bloaty Office Suite), the more intrigued I get.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets are the online equivalent of Microsoft Word and Excel (minus some features that the majority of regular users likely won’t miss). The key difference is that Docs and Spreadsheets are built for collaboration. Google makes it easy to set up a file (or upload an existing Word, text, PDF or other file) and invite others to publicly or privately edit the file. All collaborators can access a given file at the same time and make changes, which are kept track of in case someone needs to revert to an old version. The documents can be exported to .doc, PDF, text or other formats and e-mailed out or published publicly at any point.
Google is working on presentation software to add to its offerings (like an online version of PowerPoint). Here’s some notes from my interview with Rochelle about the future of Google’s online applications.
Rochelle says both products (Docs and Spreadsheets) were introduced last summer and officially launched Oct. 11, 2006. Since then, he says millions of people use it.
He says the applications are meant to help the creation of information and collaboration. Goals for the future include more features around sharing and to increase the ease of use of entry so people can easily see how Docs and Spreadsheets can be used.
New features of Spreadsheet include “Comment on cells” and “Charting” of information. Information can be published, saved to a document or posted to a blog.
Both applications work in tandem with Gmail, Calendars and other Google products. For the upcoming presentation application, “Our goal is to make them work together as best as they can,” Rochelle said.
When asked if he feels Microsoft’s Office 2007 feature changes, which might require a learning curve for upgrading users, have brought more users to Google Docs, Rochelle said, “We don’t see it as segregated that way. It’s not that they’re choosing between our product and that upgrade. Most of our users are looking for a way to easily collaborate.”
Some users, he says, use Google Docs because they don’t have a copy of Office installed at home.
Google Docs doesn’t support Microsoft’s new XML-based Office formats, but Rochelle says it’s on their to-do list. As more people upgrade to Office 2007 products, he says, he expects more requests from users for that.
Rochelle says some surprising uses of Google Docs have included collaborative spreadsheets that can be posted to blogs, including a food blog list that approved readers can update themselves.
For those who use Google Docs, e-mail use can be cut as it decreases the need to send e-mailed documents back and forth.
“It’s how we work internally at Google,” Rochelle said. “Almost every single person at Google is using this product every day.”
I asked whether Google Docs is in a leadership role within the open-source community (even though it’s not open source) given its similarities to other free products like Open Office.
Rochelle says that Open Office is trying to achieve “feature parity” with Microsoft Office, whereas Google Docs is an alternative for very specific things. Rochelle says Google is serving the 80 percent of features that users really need, especially for sharing.
I asked how users can deal with online outages that have plagued TurboTax and the Blackberry network when all their important information is online. While Rochelle says Google can’t be responsible for Internet outages on the user’s side, he says that Google is very focused on its own infrastructure and preventing outages. “It’s critical for us,” he says.
For mission-critical documents, it never hurts to have a locally saved copy just in case, he agrees.
Rochelle didn’t elaborate much on the future of mobile access to Google Docs, but he says they are focusing on making sure Docs and Spreadsheets formats can display correctly on mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs.
You can find Google Docs & Spreadsheets here and see what Rochelle’s team has to say on the official Docs & Spreadsheets blog.
A few items for your Monday.
The guys from the excellent “Halo”-meets-“Stripes” animated comedy “Red vs. Blue” will be showing their work at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown on Sunday. There’s two screenings — I’ll be checking out the 7 p.m. show.
As previously mentioned, the crew is wrapping up “The Blood Gulch Chronicles” next month with Episode 100. I’m going back and watching the first few seasons to reacquaint myself with the superb series.
I’m no Webcam diva, but I have been experimenting with the Xbox Live Vision camera to dry to do some online Web chatting. I haven’t had a whole lot of luck getting the thing to work between iChat and AOL Instant Messenger, but I accidentally stumbled on two great Web sites that make use of just about any Webcam.
YouCams.com combines the social networking of MySpace with video. It’s good for setting up a quick chat room with video with others who might not be on the same instant messenger service.
The downside is the site’s weird credits system. In order to view multiple feeds, you need credits and the credits are obtained by advertising the service on a Web site or sending invites to friends. Not exactly optimal for one-time use.
Ustream.tv feels even more robust. You can quickly and easily create a live Web show with a chat room component. It’s similar to YouCams, but seems a little more stable and without a lot of the restrictions. Both use Flash and I think Ustream is running Java. I’m just glad not to have to rely on AIM for Webcam needs.
I’ll be keeping an eye on both sites — let me know what you think if you’re using either of them. My thanks to Ryan in Hawaii for experimenting with both. He’s been doing live Webcam feeds from Hawaii, including some glorious sunsets he’s capturing by connecting a laptop to a mobile Sprint EVDO modem.
Incidentally, Twitter’s been a great tool for giving people the heads-up when these feeds, often spontaneously done, go online.
For your perusal: suggestions and answers on making next year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival even better.
A while back, I told you about Gmail’s excellent cell phone application to let less-than-smart phones check messages on the go.
There’s an even better one for you now, fellow RAZR users: Opera’s Mini Browser allows you to view Web pages that the phone’s built-in software would normally choke trying to view. Simply point your phone’s Web browser to operamini.com and it’ll prompt you to download the application.
Once installed (it’ll sit inside your “Games” section, at least if you use Cingular), you can view MySpace pages, Twitter feeds and everything else. Sure, on a tiny screen you’re not getting and enormous view and load times still crawl along at dial-up speeds, but that complex Web pages come up at all on the RAZR is still a wonder to me. This one’s a must-have.
Mozilla finally released Thunderbird 2, the open-source e-mail program, this week. I’ve never heard anyone say they love Outlook or Outlook Express, but plenty of people enjoy Thunderbird’s easy importing features. Now it’s got built-in support to import from your Gmail account, which at the very least makes it a good backup option should you ever find yourself unable to access your messages on Google’s service. A similar feature is also built-in for users with .Mac e-mail accounts.
I haven’t used Thunderbird much since I lost the ability to automatically forward messages from work, but having all my personal e-mail messages from Gmail handy made me curious.
I installed Thunderbird 2 on my Windows XP machine this morning and have been playing with it the last few hours. It found all my old Thunderbird 1.5 e-mail without incident and bringing in messages from Gmail worked well. (You have to set your Gmail account as “POP” in the settings first in order to do this. Don’t forget to set the option to leave messages on Gmail’s server after they’re retrieved or you’ll stop seeing them in Gmail.)
Thunderbird mercifully didn’t bring over spam messages or deleted ones, but did import all other mail, including my sent messages.
The downside is that e-mail labels from Gmail don’t carry over. I spent about an hour manually setting tags for over 1,000 messages and then moving them over to folders. Thunderbird now allows you to set multiple tags for messages (and you can assign them with number keys; very nice feature), but there’s no easy “Archive” feature like the one Gmail has. Viewing threaded messages still isn’t as elegant as Gmail’s “Conversation” view, but give it time. I can’t imagine someone won’t come up with a way to make it even more Gmail-like for those of us who prefer that service.
At the very least, I’ve got a local backup of all my Gmail messages.
Otherwise, Thunderbird works very nicely — it looks clean, responds snappily, has improved search functions and seems very stable. I didn’t have any crashes despite dealing with some pretty large message attachments. I’ll be curious to see what the add-on community contributes to this already very good product.
It’s been a bad 24 hours for Blackberry users and last-minute tax filers. Research in Motion’s Blackberry network went down, causing e-mails to be delayed into today. And a surge of tax filers swamped Turbo Tax’s site, causing confirmations that a filing was successful to be delayed.
The bad news is: Expect this to happen more, especially as companies are taken by surprise by big spontaneous events or fail to plan accordingly for their businesses to scale up. Even seemingly invincible Web applications like Gmail have recently had troubles with outages.
As we continue to rely on our information stored and pushed online (our work e-mail, for instance, sits on a server and when that server is down, that e-mail is inaccessible), it leaves us pretty helpless when these things happen. It’s like trying to make a cell phone call while standing in the middle of the Austin City Limits festival.
The best advice I can give? For mission-critical work information, contacts and documents, make sure you have a readily accessible copy on your hard drive, PDA, thumb drive or any other place you feel comfortable keeping your goods. You never realize how important that stuff can be until you can’t get to it.
Hey, parents! Want to really mess with your kids? Put one of these in the shower. The Shower Manager!
It’s a gadget that limits the amount of time for a shower. You can set it to 5, 8 or 11 minutes. When the time limit is reached, the water pressure is cut by 2/3rds to a dribble. It’s enough for rinsing, but nevertheless cruel, if you ask me.
Just try to install one of these, parents, and tell me that your family will not be ripped apart from the stress.
The product, made by Global Network Solutions in Colorado, costs $114.95 and the product’s Web site (which, charitably, could be said to have Web graphics imported from the year 1996) touts water conservation as a major reason a family would want to invest in this emerging hydration-limiting technology.
The press release, by the way, misspells the Web site several times as “ShowerManger.com.” I would hope that the Shower Manger is a whole other product, soon to be available for your livestock showering needs.
And because I would feel bad if that was all I brought you today, here’s a funny Mr. T video!
I didn’t know much about Dodgeball.com until I started hearing about it last month in relation to Twitter.com. Both companies are seeking to bridge the gap between social networking and text messaging. Twitter does it with a clutter-free interface and ease-of-use. Dodgeball, presumably, does it with the ability to meet new people (friends-of-friends) and with the engineering power of Google, which purchased the company two years ago.
We might have to rethink that Google part. Cnet and other sources are reporting that the founders of Dodgeball have left the Google-run enterprise (can we call it Google-Ball?) in part out of frustration that Google hasn’t put resources into the start-up.
Co-founder Dennis Crowley alludes to other text-social networking sites (like, say, Twitter) innovating in the space while Google idled.
It would be a mistake to read too much into this, but you’ve got to wonder how a company of Google’s size and growth rate can keep all its ducks in a row. Sometimes, as things scale up and technology moves so quickly, there will be some casualties along the way.
It’s Friday and you don’t have time to read a long blog post. The weather’s bad, Kevin Durant’s leaving UT and your iPod just ran out of juice. It’s all right. I’ll keep these nice and short:
More reader-submitted Miis… Thanks for sending these, everybody:
Two photos by Austin digital photographer Trey Ratcliff have been selected out of 8,500 entries as finalists in Smithsonian magazine’s 4th Annual Photo Contest.
A photo of a macaque monkey in Kuala Lumpur is one of 10 finalists for the category of “The Natural World” and a Fourth of July photo of Lake Austin is a finalist in “Americana.” Both photos use a technique called high-dynamic range (HDR) photography that takes multiple exposures of an image and combines them to create a dazzling, sometimes painterly view of a subject.
A grand-prize winner and winners in the magazine’s five contest categories will be announced in its summer 2007 issue and on the magazine’s Web site. All contest finalists can be viewed at photocontest.smithsonianmag.com.
Ratcliff, whose digital photos frequently appear on digg.com, was a nominee for best photo blog at the “Bloggie” awards during South by Southwest Interactive for his Web site Stuck in Customs.
You can see some more of his photos in a gallery that we published here.
First “The Sopranos,” now this?
The team behind the Web series “Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles” — which originated in Buda, but gained worldwide attention for its “Halo”-based machinima animation — announced they’re hanging up their virtual assault rifles at episode 100 after four years of big laughs.
Burnie Burns made the announcement, opening up an extended period of advanced mourning, hair-ripping from heads and flesh rending among its fans. All right, we exaggerate a little, but “Red vs. Blue” was funny and smart, and brought some much-needed levity to the “Halo” universe (and by extension, to Microsoft itself). The series, which uses the games “Halo” and “Halo 2” to tell a hilarious, “Catch-22”-flavored story of military incompetence and intrigue, is much renowned. It brought legitimacy to the machinima movement and acclaim to its talented and production team.
Episode 93 has been posted, and Burnie said in his post that they’ll be tying up loose ends on “The Blood Gulch Chronicles” as the series pushes toward episode 100.
Best of luck to the Rooster Teeth team. We can’t wait to see what they do next.
You guys have been busy! Thanks to everyone who is sending Miis from their Nintendo Wii. I’m capturing them as fast as I can, but the Mii plaza is getting so crowded I can’t always pick them out of a crowd. Here are half of the ones I received over the weekend. I’ll post the rest in the next day or two.
Thanks!
Although I was just being goofy in my last blog entry, I do see evidence that the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD may already be drawing to an end, just months after a clear winner seemed impossible to project.
To clear things up, Blu-ray and HD-DVD are rival next-generation DVD formats that can deliver high definition picture and sound and hold much more data than a standard DVD. As such, the movies on these next-gen discs can’t be played in regular DVD players. You either have to buy a new Blu-ray or HD-DVD player, buy an expensive combo player that can play both formats or invest in pricey hybrid discs that, in the HD-DVD format at least, offer both the standard DVD version of a movie as well as HD-DVD.
The Xbox 360 has an add-on HD-DVD drive that costs $200 and all PlayStation 3 consoles have Blu-ray DVD capabilities. HD-DVD drives can’t play Blu-ray discs. Blu-ray drives and the PS3 can’t play HD-DVD.
Sales so far seem to indicated that Blu-ray has taken the lead. Exclusive movies like “Casino Royale” and the news that Disney will be releasing its films on Blu-ray and not HD-DVD haven’t hurt. And, in my opinion, Microsoft put a nail in HD-DVD’s coffin by not including an HD-DVD drive in its just-announced Xbox 360 Elite system. Whether or not there would have been technical complications inherent in making an HD-DVD the primary drive in the system, it screams a vote of “No confidence” to me. Pity because HD-DVD seemed to have just as much potential as a format as Blu-ray.
Which means that all of a sudden, the $500-$600 versions of the PS3 seems like a bargain for anyone who wants to get into Blu-ray video. I can report that watching “Casino Royale” on Blu-ray recently was a fantastic experience. The picture was far superior to a regular DVD, the sound was dynamic and the movie itself pretty great.
Unfortunately, a movie I’ve been dying to see, “Children of Men” is only available on DVD and HD-DVD, not Blu-ray. And I don’t have an HD-DVD player. Oh well. I’m sure the DVD version will look just fine.
As if the Blu-ray camp needed any more good news, we have this stunning announcement from Buena Vista Home Video:
“G.I. JANE” — Demi Moore gives “the performance of her career” (NBC-TV, New York) in director/producer Ridley Scott’s (“Gladiator”) riveting saga of uncompromising courage. Presented for the first time on Blu-ray Disc, G.I. JANE’s tale of grit and determination is more triumphant than ever in this astonishing format. Moore stars as trailblazer Lieutenant O’Neil, the first woman to earn a place in the elite Navy SEALs. “G.I. JANE’s” Blu-ray Disc bonus features include a movie showcase giving you instant access to the film’s most cinematic moments that highlight the ultimate in high definition picture and sound! Experience the brutal rigors of training camp - and O’Neil’s endless battles with top military brass and her male Navy SEAL teammates - in hard-hitting, in-your-face 1080p. Feel the explosive action of combat with 5.1 48 kHz, 16-bit uncompressed audio. You’ll stand up and cheer for G.I. JANE, thanks to Blu-ray High Definition!
That caps it, folks. The format war is over. With this announcement, Blu-ray is the clear winner. Mark your calendars: April 3 is the day Blu-ray gets “G.I. Jane.” And victory. Blu-ray FTW!
Two of South by Southwest Interactive 2007’s biggest blogging names are taking a break from blogging because of death threats.
Kathy Sierra, who delivered a keynote at the festival, detailed the threats against her and, sadly, anyone who spends lots of time online may not be surprised by the level of ugliness in some of the posts. (Warning: pretty harsh content, though the remarks by Sierra about the situation are worth your time.)
Robert Scoble, another blogging luminary, is taking a one-week break from his blog in solidarity and offers his own thoughts on the situation.
All in all, a pretty bad day in the Blogosphere.
We’re not sure whether to shrug our shoulders and move on or give serious note to the fact that YouTube has awarded some of its best videos with the “YouTube Video Awards.”
While the pool of nominees was fairly deep (10 nominees per category), limiting the awards to seven in a community of millions of videos seemed a bit too exclusive. Why such obvious categories such as, “Best Commentary” and “Best Series?” For a site that offers such a stunning variety of diverse content, the final choices of the awards seemed both safe (blame that on the voters) and too obvious (blame that on the categories chosen).
Unless YouTube suddenly goes the way of Friendster, you can expect the awards to expand and maybe get more interesting next year. But a good chunk of these video winners are ones that regular YouTube viewers already are well familiar with. Call it a belated big pat on the back.
From Jake Coyle at The Associated Press:
The video series ‘‘Ask a Ninja’’ and OK Go’s treadmill-choreographed music video are among the winners in the first YouTube Video Awards. The video-sharing site announced the seven winners from its inaugural awards on Monday, a week after the nominees were put forth for voting. Each category included 10 nominated videos, which users could rank in order of their liking. ‘‘These individuals put the first stitches in the fabric of the YouTube community,’’ said Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing for YouTube. ‘‘Instead of seeing a way to share videos, they saw an opportunity for worldwide visibility and through their success have changed the landscape of how a ‘star’ is defined.’’
List of winners:
Most Creative — Here It Goes Again, OKGo
Best Comedy — Smosh Short 2: Stranded, Smosh
Best Commentary — Hotness Prevails, thewinekone
Best Series — Ask A Ninja, digitalfilmmaker
Best Music Video — Say It’s Possible, TerraNaomi
Most Inspirational — Free Hugs Campaign, PeaceOnEarth123
Most Adorable — Kiwi!, Madyeti47
The winners and nominees are compiled in a gallery at http://www.youtube.com/YTAwards. YouTube says it will later unveil what a YouTube Video Award will look like.
Apple doesn’t send us review units of their products typically, and I’m not inclined to spend $300 on an Apple TV to try out, mostly because I already know I don’t want or need it.
Though reviews of Apple’s new living room product have been mostly positive, I think many people will buy it for the Apple name alone without stopping to think whether it’s a device they’ll get much use out of.
First things first: It’s not a PVR. Despite having a hard drive, it doesn’t record shows the way a TiVo does. For Apple TV, you’re stuck with whatever’s in your iTunes library. You’ll still be paying to download shows and movies from iTunes and despite Apple TV’s high-definition HDMI port and its ability to output 720p resolutions, you can’t download TV or movies from iTunes in high-def. Yet.
The device streams wirelessly, but not everybody has a Wireless-G or Wireless N-draft router to feed the little slim box. While Apple’s own Airport Extreme router is $180 worth of goodness, according to reviews, older wireless routers or sub-par “G” routers might not be able to stream video smoothly. Those who want a great Apple TV experience might want to consider upgrading their home network.
Without hacking, Apple TV doesn’t play popular video formats such as DivX, WMV, AVI, etc. There are programs you can use to convert videos to Apple-friendly formats, but the process is cumbersome and, even on a fast computer, anything but instantaneous.
What I told Michael Barnes last week when he asked me about it: “I think Apple TV is a solution to a problem that maybe 5 percent or less of TV viewers have — people who A) have HDTVs (it doesn’t work well on older standard TV sets), B) have lots of TV content on their computer from iTunes, C) haven’t already figured out a way to get that content to their TV. The fact that iTunes itself doesn’t sell HD content and the thing only works on HDTVs tells you that this is a first-gen product that probably is amazingly designed with about 25 percent of its utility out of the box right now (like, say, the first-generation iPod). Whether that 5 percent translates into actual big sales (I think $300 is steep for what it does) might be trumped by people just thinking it’s a cool new Apple product they want.”
That said, I can’t forget that the best product in the marketplace doesn’t always win. Apple might take the lead in networked set-top devices simply by integrating well with iTunes, by offering a very attractive box that works reliably and by rolling out new features such as the ability to record TV or deliver high-def content.
To be honest, I was a little surprised by the hoopla last week at the product’s launch, since this is one of the few Apple offerings that makes me just shrug. It shows how far Apple comes that even their least revolutionary new products can still elicit passion and desire from those who closely watch the company’s every move.
Here’s the first batch of Nintendo Mii characters sent in by readers. Check out our Austin Miis story and photo gallery for more information on how to submit yours.
I’ve gotten a lot of requests from readers on the “Post my Nintendo Mii!” front. \Unfortunately, I’m traveling today, but when I get back into town tomorrow, I’ll be posting a batch in the evening and, if necessary, on Friday.
Most awesome response I’ve gotten so far: “Hello my name is Derek (last name deleted). I’m 11 year old. And my Mii name is MASTER WII. I play flag football i’m a runnyback.”
I hear ya, Derek! Be patient! If I can receive everybody’s Miis on the Wii, I’ll find a way to post them here.
Keep sending those Mii codes to ogallaga@statesman.com and add 0732 9602 4121 0857 to your Wii friend list.
Thanks for the great response, everybody!
Submitted by a reader this morning as a follow up to our “Mii Time” story and photo gallery that ran in today’s paper:
Christopher writes:
Here’s a collection of photos we’ve started. Most people so far are Austinites!
I’ve been playing around this week with Twitter, a site that was much-mentioned at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
Think of it as a scaled-down version of MySpace, or at least a swift substitution for your Instant Messenger’s Away Message feature. The point of Twitter is to post a 140-character-maximum message saying what you’re doing.
That’s it. Others can view your Twitter page or add you to their list of buddies as a “Friend” or “Follower” and keep tabs on what you’re doing whenever you update. You can get updates via Instant Messenger, by text message or on your own Twitter Web page. You can also update your own Twitter message via IM or by texting “40404.” IM seems pretty sluggish (it took a few hours to update via IM), but text messages appear almost instantaneously, as do messages posted via the Web site. The site’s been a little slow this week, which I attribute to lots of South by Southwest activity and quick growth.
Twitter becomes more useful the more friends you add to your list, although I can see Twitter overload being a real possibility if you have a lot of people on your list who update too frequently. But the site seems like a natural for South by Southwest, when it’s easy to lose track of your friends and you need a quick way to connect without making cell phone calls or sending e-mails. One of my friend Shannon’s recent Twitters: “Planning my evening. 10:00 (Beirut at Emo’s), 11:00 (Finally Punk, Wiggins, Die Die Die at Habana), 1:00 (Les Savy Fav at Red Eyed Fly).”
You can see what other SXSW attendees are doing on the official 2007 SXSW Twitter page.
Twitter allows you to post different styles of “Badges” on your own Web site or blog to let people know what you’re up to without having to visit Twitter. Here’s what one of mine looks like
Twitter is pretty much the opposite of LinkedIn.com, a business contacts site that is about as inviting as a Fortune 500 company conference room. Maybe I’m missing something, but the site’s uninspiring design and leaning toward résumélike presentation just doesn’t speak to me. I finally updated my profile on there after about a year of incessant invitations to join and to get “Linked In” with friends and business contacts. I’m there, but I don’t think it’s a place I’ll be spending a lot of time.
Arrest on 6th Street!
Is this a Redmond vs. Austin thing? West Coast vs. Third Coast? Would he have been arrested for putting up iPod posters?
The mind reels and the toes curl with more questions. We’ll stay on top of this one for you.
The Austin blogging story that ran last week generated some very nice e-mails and some nice comments from folks at South by Southwest Interactive, so that was cool. Whenever one of my stories runs on the front page, I have an irrational fear that I’ll run into one of my sources on the street and that they’ll spit right in my eye or take a tire iron to my knee. Thank goodness I’m not a gossip columnist.
One local blogger, Mike Lutz, sent a link to a response he wrote on the subject. I think it’s good for bloggers to discuss where they’re going and what’s happening in the ‘sphere. There was probably about 40 more inches worth of text that could have gone into that story, but my editor Sarah Lindner wisely guided me in streamlining the story and not leting it get out of control.
Another story that ran this week, one about high dynamic range photography, generated some nice comments on Trey Ratcliff’s work. Unfortunately, Trey didn’t win the Bloggie award he was up for. You can read his response to that here.
The HDR story also elicited this e-mail from a local Web guy, Carl Griffin:
I first heard of Trey back when the Statesman printed a blurb about his showing at Halcyon coffeehouse. I decided to check the Web and came across stuckincustoms.com. That resulted in my learning as much as I could about the HDR process and I’ve been practicing that procedure for the past couple of months. The attachment is of the Port Aransas jetty at dawn over New Year’s weekend. I’ve since made a new department in my Web store that is all HDR images
You can see more of Carl’s work at his site.
Entries from me, Sarah Lindner and Lilly Rockwell on the Interactive fest are being posted over at the South by Southwest Source blog.
I’ve got some panels I’m trying to squeeze time to write about including ones about the future of book publishing and an incredibly slick next-generation TV navigation interface. I’ll be at the Will Wright keynote later today and probably the Deadspin.com panel this afternoon.
Stay tuned!
Photos from last night’s Austin Museum of Digital Art digital showcase (which was paired with a strataTX VIP reception) at Mohawk:
Jennifer Wijangco of strataTX and Todd Simmons, executive director of AMODA.
DJ Lady Malice of Dallas prepares for laptop battle.
Artist William Hundley atop his Foosball table art. Digital photos of his are on the wall behind him.
DJ Faux Furs does his thing. The laptop battle bracket is behind him.
(Left to right) Andrew Krell of Infusion Marketing, Bill Barth of Texas Advanced Computing Center and Marcia Inger also of TACC.
Stacey R. Farrar, gallery director of Austin’s Else Madsen Gallery.
Sheel Pathak and Danae Clark, friends of a competing DJ.
Dear Calvin Klein:
“Technosexual”? Really? That’s all you got?
Lame!
What’s going on today:
I was expecting some news from Nintendo along the lines of Sony’s announcements yesterday, but instead we got this. BOOORING!
God bless Prentiss Riddle for creating this searchable SXSW Interactive schedule (as in searchable through your browser’s “Find” option, not by search box). It’s always the seemingly little things that turn mere mortals into heroes for the ages.
I’m still not sure what panels I’m checking out yet, but this certainly helps.
My story about Austin blogging has been posted. This one was a toughie to write.
Do you like the “Is Blogging Dead?” headline on the Austin360 home page? If this were TV news it would have been, “Can blogging kill you? We’ll tell you at 10.”
Sony finally got off its online duff today and unveiled “Home,” which is sort of like “Sims” meets MySpace meets YouTube meets “Second Life.” (Check out the video here.
But given Sony’s track record with online so far in the PlayStation 3’s life (and its spotty track record in allowing individual developers to call the online shots during the PS2’s lifespan), it might end up being none of those things, a shambling division of those parts instead of a mighty sum.
It’s too early to tell.
One thing I do know about “Home” (which was introduced today at the Game Developer’s Conference with the execrable heading “Game 3.0”) is that whatever it is it’ll be better than the desolate graveyard that currently is Sony’s online home within the PS3. The other day I was in there and a tumbleweed passed by! Yikes!
It won’t be out till Fall, which still gives Nintendo and Microsoft plenty of time to unveil something similar, but as a friend of mine said recently — if Nintendo does it, your vast online world will only be visible to those who happen to live in your house. Nintendo is not exactly blazing any online trails right now.
One thing I’ll say in favor of the PlayStation 3: the new game “MotorStorm,” which I was ready to dismiss as a floaty, not very good racing game, has begun to grow on me. My brother came over to play and after watching him sail through an early level on a motorcycle, the game suddenly seemed fresher and more fun that I’d thought. Yay! Finally a really fun game for the PS3.
Starting today, Xbox 360 owners can download for free an episode of “South Park” in high definition. It’s the first time the cardboard cutout Comedy Central toon has been shown in high-def, and the episode offered is “Good Times With Weapons,” which features some anime-style animation sequences. (And here you thought you’d just be seeing very sharp versions of cardboard.)
“Free,” is a relative term because an Xbox 360 costs about $400 (at least the one with the hard drive which would allow you to store the large episode file) and membership to the online service Xbox Live costs about $50 a year.
But for owners of the system and the service, the download is a nice bonus and gives the service, which this year added movies and TV shows to its offering, some cachet. Console rivals Sony and Nintendo have yet to offer any significant movie or TV show downloads for their systems and Microsoft is instead positioning itself against media download services like ones launched by Wal-Mart, Netflix and of course, Apple.
Of these movie/TV downloading services, Xbox Live’s is the most elegant for living room/TV viewing — it works on a system that is already hooked up to a TV and there’s no need to move files around or deal with limitations on burning files from a PC or transferring them wirelessly. But there’s been concern that the Xbox 360’s 20-gigabyte hard drive is too small to sustain a lot of downloading and that the console’s lack of an HDMI port puts it at a disadvantage for offering HD content.
Best buy is planning to give away copies of the South Park episodes on an HD-DVD disc to anyone who buys an Xbox 360 or the add-on HD-DVD drive (about $200) later this month. Could a long-rumored newly redesigned Xbox 360 console featuring an HDMI port and a bigger hard drive (and possibly a built-in HD-DVD drive) be waiting in the wings?
I was willing to let it slide when Barack Obama called for us to get rid of our Game Boys to create positive change in the world. Most of us gamers have moved on to the Nintendo DS, so I was more than happy to leave the old Game Boy in the Videogame Relics drawer.
But now he’s asking people to shut off “SportsCenter” and get out to vote:
“I know if Cousin Pookie would vote, if Brother Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching ‘SportsCenter’ and go register some people and get them to the polls, we’d have a different kind of politics,” Obama said, the crowd rising to its feet. “Kick off your bedroom slippers; put on your marching shoes!”
I’d be a little more outraged if he’d referenced “Pardon the Interruption,” but still. Where exactly are we going to draw the pop culture line, Mr. Obama?
Here are some things that might get Barack into big political trouble if he asks us to give them up in the name of political sleeve-up-rolling:
Hello Kitty
TMZ.com
“Project Runway”
Nerds-brand candy
Adam Sandler movies
“Wii Sports”
Those little Andes chocolates they give you at Macaroni Grill after your meal
The Pussycat Dolls
Applebee’s (in red states)
“Heroes”
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue
The last “Harry Potter” book
Kelly Clarkson
The iPhone
That “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff
Watch those campaign speeches, Barack. Some people can balance their pop culture consumption with political action, thank you very much.
The PlayStation 3’s online store is what would happen if you tried to reflect the online retail experience we’ve all become accustomed to, but had Franz Kafka write all the HTML coding. You are made to feel as if you, the human with money, is somehow wrong in believing you could go in, purchase a game or download a demo, and get away without feelings of inadequacy, eye strain and an ego crushed to fine powder.
This comic perfectly encapsulates the purchasing experience, but I would add that every time I’ve had to download something, I’ve first had to do one of many frequent system updates before I can even set foot in the virtual emporium. There’s a guard at the door who is demanding to frisk you roughly for half an hour. They ask you to plug in your (wireless!) controller, unplug it, restart your system.
The whole affair is demeaning, not just to us, but to Sony. Have you no sense of decency, Sony?
I was willing to jump through all the flaming hoops late last night to download “fl0w”, which is a dreamy, simple, $8 game offered online. Getting there? Not so dreamy, simple, or fun.
What did I do during the painful 45 minutes or so it took to system update and download “fl0w?” Played with my Wii, of course.
Yes, you can own a bit of the Intel shell building for the not-very-low-at-all price of $20 via this Web site.
I don’t know what’s stopping them from putting a bunch of gravel from their driveway into a container and calling it history, but I should really just relax because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s to completely trust the Internet.
(Link via Austinist)
Game publisher Electronic Arts sent a breathless press release announcing that music from all its games is now available on iTunes and that you can find out more about this monumental stride ahead for humanity at their Web site.
Anyone who’s played any “Madden” game knows that these EA-licensed songs have a way of burrowing into your brain like a “Star Trek II” space creature. Joystiq.com notes that not all the songs are on iTunes that you might want.
But Lily Allen is today’s featured artist on the EA Trax site, so as far as I’m concerned, all is forgiven. Oh, Lily Allen … sometimes I just sit here and daydream about your charming accent.
Wrigley (the gum people) are offering a minty treat for Wii owners. Their “Candystand” Web site features games you can play on the Nintendo Wii via the game console’s Internet Channel browser. The site (which you’ll have to enter manually unless you’re accessing this blog from your Wii, in which case I’d say, yay you!) is wii.candystand.com.
I haven’t been home to try these out yet, but I’ll hit you up, blog-entry style, if they deserve your attention.
You’ll have to weigh for yourself whether the thrill of free Wii games is worth the humiliation of playing titles based on the Altoids and Big Red brands.
Here’s an alternative: Wii games from Homestarrunner.com are available at www.videlectrix.com/vii/.
I have taken a vow of silence when it comes to posting negative things about Dell, so I’ll just let this site weigh in on the current Dell/Linux kerfuffle.
Even using the word “Kerfuffle” there might violate my vow. Would “Foofarah” have been better?
All right, fine — because I’ve already broken my vow, I might as well tell you my Dell joke:
Q: How many Dell executives does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: 11, but they’ve all left the company. We’ll let you know when the new management team is ready to take on the lightbulb-changing task.
We’ll know after today whether the “Queen of MySpace” Tila Tequila can use her massive friends list to parlay herself a music career. Her song “I Love U,” produced by Lil Jon (“YEEAHH!”) hit iTunes today, and the diminutive self-promoter has been relentless in getting the word out.
If you’re on her friends list (full disclosure: I’m one of her nearly 1.7 million “Friends”), you’ve been bombarded with bulletin posts from her with subject lines like, “OMG ARE YOU GUYS AWAKE???” and requests to get the word out about the new song.
I heard one of her earlier amateur videos on her profile page a few months ago … well … let’s just say that Celine Dion and Beyoncé have nothing to worry about.
But even if the single does well, will Tila’s novelty soon wear off? Is the whole thing a nonstarter, an Internet-only phenomenon that won’t translate to online 99-cent sales? (And yes, this does remind me an awful lot of the week leading up to the underwhelming theatrical release of “Snakes on a Plane.” Remember all that hype? Oh, how we miss you, 2006.)
The fact that Tila is getting press at all (in the New York Times, no less) is a kind of triumph for social networking. Yes, you can live the dream if your dream is to be overexposed and slightly undertalented online.
Game blogs are abuzz today on news that European PlayStation 3 won’t be able to play as many PlayStation 2 games as their Japanese and North American counterparts.
According to reports of comments from Sony, the PS3 will have “Limited” backward compatibility in that region, a step back from the robust PS2 compatibility we’ve come to expect from PS3. The culprit is likely to be Sony removing hardware for that function, saving some production money on a console that loses several hundred dollars every time a PS3 is sold. Sony makes up the money on software and accessory sales, but given the lumbering PS3 launch, the company could probably use all the help it can get.
Europe was previously up in arms after a long delay in the PS3 launch. Originally scheduled to be released there at the same time as the rest of the world, the European launched was moved back to March, which careful calendar watchers will note is fully four months later! That’s a long time to wait to play nonstarter games like “Genji” and “Untold Legends.”
And here we thought those pesky back-compat issues had been fixed with those frequent software updates.
What did Europe do to Sony to deserve such treatment? I mean, we love Europe over here. England gave us Ricky Gervais, France gave us the Statue of Liberty and a really elaborate and calorie-rich way of eating toast. And what do they get? A crippled, late PS3.
Given the number of PS2 games still being sold and even some that are upcoming (“Guitar Hero II” is still a huge hit and “God of War II” is coming), this sound like a blunder of international proportions.
Where were all the gamers? Microsoft sent its family-friendly games bus into town and parked it right front of the Capitol building, but for the half hour I hung out, visitors were a little like Bill Gates himself: slight.
Which is a shame, because I was really wanted to see some state legislators come in and get their “F.E.A.R.” on.
The bus was equipped with several Xbox 360 consoles hooked up to flat screens in the front of the bus and in the back were three laptops equipped with the company’s new operating system, Vista. Outside, a table offered stress balls, pens and brochures for parents with information on safeguarding kids’ videogame playtime.
Parents who wandered by were very interested, some of them saying they’re often confused about what their kids are playing and how to monitor activity. While the Xbox 360 has had such controls in place since launch, Windows Vista has a pretty robust set of parental controls. Those with administrator privileges can set what games can be played by other computer users, by game title, rating or from a list of kinds of questionable content. Parents also can set a calendar schedule of dates and times their kids are allowed to play games and there are plenty of Web site filtering options.
It wasn’t clear if online games (say, Flash games on a Web site) would be detected by Vista, but overall I came away impressed with the parental controls, which are a huge leap from Windows XP, where you’d have to buy separate software to get the degree of control offered here.
Still, you gotta wonder where all the kids, gamers and desperate parents were. In all only a handful of people visited that bus, which moves on to Dallas and other cities on its 20-stop tour.
For more info on safe gaming, check out Microsoft’s “Is Your Family Set?” site.
Here are some photos of the bus:
Microsoft reps Kate McKewan and Andrew M. Wise show off Windows Vista.
Travel is tough. Big-screen TVs help.
Inside the Chamber O’ Xboxes. No Muggles allowed.
Wanna play some games? Jaime Piña and Nuri Martínez of Midland College’s Student Government happened to be in town.
No free Xbox 360s, unfortunately, but Jaime and Nuri were happy to try out some E-rated games.
Jaime tries out’Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy’ for the 360. Much fun.
Kate tells Nuri about parental controls as she plays ‘Cars.’
Parental controls for Windows Vista are much more intuitive than past efforts by Windows.
Microsoft is wheeling into town to show off its family games in an effort to educate the public about safety (as in, “Watch what your kids have access to”) on Wednesday.
The “Family Gaming Bus” will be parked at the Capitol Complex 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday. It’s a 20-city tour co-sponsored by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Best Buy. The tour bus will include eight Xbox 360 consoles and three laptops with Windows Vista. The tour seeks to educate parents on how to make sure their kids aren’t playing games where there’s guts-a-flyin’ or naughty body parts on display.
Windows Vista includes new parental controls for games. Unfortunately for hard-core gamers, some titles are running a little sluggish until new video drivers and software updates catch up to the operating system.
Sadly, I missed the “SingStar” event at the mall over the weekend, but I did play “SingStar Rocks!” at home. Sadly, I don’t sound anything like Elton John. Or Chris Martin. Or Mick Jagger. Must be a British thing. I was able to approximate Fred Schneider, but I was really faking the voice. The most embarrassing thing about this game is that it captures video/sound of you with the EyeToy camera, and you can see yourself perform after the song is over, minus the sing-along track. They should just call it, “SingStar Mortifies!”
I got this press release a few days ago, but wanted to go home and try it out before I posted:
FUN Technologies Inc. today announced that its SkillJam subsidiary has partnered with DIrecTV, Inc., the leading satellite-television service provider in the U.S., to provide skill-based cash and prize tournaments in popular casual games to DirecTV customers via Game Lounge, a new gaming channel available exclusively on DirecTV. This first-of-its-kind partnership will allow DIrecTV customers to compete against other subscribers in online skill-based game tournaments, directly from any TV set in their home.
As part of the Game Lounge tournament structure, SkillJam will develop customized versions of eight online games, including popular titles such as “Free Cell,” “Solitaire,” “Sudoku” and “Bejeweled 2.” DirecTV subscribers select the game they want and the type of tournament in which they’d like to compete (i.e. against one or several players) — all from their DIrecTV remote control.
I rushed home to try it and, alas, my two TiVo-DirecTV boxes (or TiFaux, you might call them) won’t access the service. If you have DirecTV and want to see if your box will play the games, just try channel 110. There’s more info at Gamelounge.com. Color me disappointed. There’s nothing “Casual” about games that you can’t play.
Oh well. It’s not like you can’t play the crazy-addictive “Bejeweled 2” on your cell phone, the Xbox 360 or right there in your Web browser.
We don’t know who you are, Mark Leung, but we salute your mad moviemaking skills and your fantastic take on “Final Fantasy VII,” the videogame that for many gamers is the only one to ever make them cry.
Thank you for “College Saga”
(Part 1 of 4. For the rest, check out Mark’s YouTube page.)
If you like singing into your PlayStation2, you might want to drop by Barton Creek Square this weekend for the “SingStar Rocks!” Mobile Tour, which will bring to the masses a demonstration of “SingStar Rocks!” a microphone-enabled game for the PS2 where you sing tunes including “Somebody Told Me” and “Rocket Man” (“… and I think it’s gonna be a long, long time!”) and get judged, sometimes harshly, for your lack of ability.
Maybe the accuracy in these games has improved and I would actually be told that I am a good singer playing this. One of the first “Karaoke Revolution” games scarred me for life by breaking the news to me that I don’t at all sound like the guy from Better than Ezra. LIARS!
“SingStar” should totally hear my Fred Schneider. “Love shack BAY-BEEEE!”
Go check it out: Friday 3 to 9 p.m., Saturday 1 to 9 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. at Barton Creek Square. If you go, please take some pictures and post them here in the comments.
UPDATE: I’m told that the SingStar van/mobile stage will be inside the mall, outside of Nordstrom in the “Elevator court.” I’m presuming that’s downstairs.
I don’t like to write about proposed legislation concerning the videogame industry because almost always, the legislation fails, or is overturned somehow, and the digital world continues to roll on, 1 over 0, as it did before.
Asking that every game up for ESRB ratings review be played in its entirety by a review board shows such a lack of understanding about how games today operate and the effort/cost involved in such a feat that it makes me wonder if Sen. Brownback even knows what he’s asking for. Many games are not linear experiences and playing a game to completion (“Beating” the game) doesn’t mean you’ve seen all the content there is to see. To play a game through to see every bit of content could take hundreds of hours. Per game. Per version of a game. If a game comes out for six consoles, will the poor ratings board player have to play through each version individually? You’re trying to legislate futility, Senator.
Although self-regulation by the videogame industry hasn’t worked all the time, but Rockstar Games’ “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” hot coffee snafu was a wild exception. The ratings system isn’t perfect, but it is more detailed and oftentimes less arbitrary than that of the movie industry. Why not pass a bill to try to clean up the MPAA’s ratings system, Sam?
This comment on CNet pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter: “How about this: we’ll force ratings boards to play through an entire game before rating it when congress(wo)men read through every line of every bill in front of them before voting on it. Sound fair?”
… admittedly, it’s not very much.
I was asked about it a few months ago and, given that I entered a morass of seemingly arbitrary numbers and anti-immigrant e-mails the last time I wrote about regular radio, I sort of lost my happy curiosity for the new format, or really anything terrestrial-radio related.
Wired has a piece today about what you’ll need to make the leap to HD radio (which will very likely be built into the next new car you purchase). Higher quality music with fewer commercials and no subscription fee sounds pretty great, but if you’re not listening to regular radio now (say you get by on CDs, an iPod or satellite radio), I’m not exactly sure you’d want to spend $200 right now to hear a handful of channels.
There are more HD radio stations than I thought in the area, though. Has anybody out there listened to any of these? How’s the quality/variety of music?
See also: a story in the Austin Chronicle by Kevin Brass that ran last year on the subject.
Somehow I missed “Sid Meier’s Pirates!” when it came out on the PC, then I missed it again when it hit the Xbox. The PSP version hit my desk, and I could resist the siren call of the sea no longer.
I spent a few hours playing it Sunday, and now it’s hard to put the thing down before I go to bed at night. I can’t really compare the game with its likely beefier PC counterpart, but the gameplay on the PSP is outstanding, with sharp graphics, very fun gameplay, pretty decent music and more pirate parlance than you can shake a sword at.
While I’m not sure I’m playing the game right (most of my adventuring involves randomly attacking ships at sea, talking to lots of governors and trading spices and food haphazardly), I’m having a lot of fun. I’m not sure if my career choice of a sword-slinging privateer is making the duels a little too easy on me, but other than a few minor quibbles, this one’s definitely a keeper. I’ve been bearish on the Sony PSP, but with this game and Rockstar’s shipment of “The Warriors” for Sony’s black portable console, it looks like happy times for the PSP.
Avast!
… but on Friday, after I posted an entry about a potential fiery problem that might have been caused by a Dell laptop, I got an e-mail from a reader who sought help on a problem he was having with a Dell Vista upgrade. His e-mail said, in part:
All my conversations have been with foreign customer-service centers, and I’ve been told everything from “there’s NO WAY I’ll get an upgrade from Dell,” to “they’ll give it to me for 50 percent off retail” (a far cry from what I was promised in previous communication). On Dell’s Chat Session ID 9105806 (for any of you out there with access to it), I had one person go so far as to suggest I just go out and buy the retail version (Dell wants to KEEP customers, don’t they?) … In my book, a man is only as good as his word; and Dell is not fairing so well with me.
I e-mailed the gentleman back and told him he might want to check out consumerist.com or contact Dell through customer-support e-mail. Today, I saw this entry about Dell Vista upgrade delays on Engadget.
It seems like our reader wasn’t alone.
I’d be reluctant to post two entries in a row here about Dell problems if a reader hadn’t specifically asked for help here. We probably hear a lot more about these issues because we’re in Dell’s backyard than we do about other companies, but let’s just hope for all concerned that Dell is able to get a handle on the Vista upgrade issues.
Consumerist.com is running a letter from a Biddeford, Maine, reader who says his house burned down and that the probable cause of the fire was a Dell Inspiron 1200.
Of course, you can’t expect Dell to instantly address an incident where there may be some doubt as to whether its product had anything to do with a fire, but if the story’s legit, the loss of a 130-year-old ranch home and all of the family’s worldly possessions might be worth some investigation. Especially after last year’s overheating battery fiasco.
If “The Jetsons” has taught us anything, it’s that the future won’t ever get here fast enough and when it does, it probably won’t include the pneumatic travel tubes we all crave.
But loving technology is about loving possibility, so here’s a few things that aren’t too far-fetched that I’m really looking forward to:
Whoah! WHOAH! Steve Jobs says DRM doesn’t work in an open letter on Apple’s site, explaining why copy-protected music (like the kind sold on iTunes), is ultimately futile in the face of unprotected music CDs and downloaded MP3s.
Expect this seemingly simply open letter to have huge repercussions in the next few weeks. Is this the beginning of the real end for Digital Rights Management?
(Quick postscript: Joe Gross and I have been talking and after letting our heads return from their exploding states, I mentioned that I think this may be part of a larger salvo against Microsoft. If you truly believe that Microsoft is as vulnerable now as it’s ever been, this may be Apple’s sly way of saying, “We don’t want to lock down your content the way Microsoft does with Vista.” If Apple is smart, it will strike fast and hard while the Redmond giant tries to figure out what went wrong with the Zune and why people aren’t more excited about Windows Vista.)
(SeekingAlpha link courtesy Dale Roe.)
Wal-Mart has entered the increasingly crowded video-downloading market, and while their prices are comparable to DVDs, we’re still left wondering if a digital format is so much easier to work with than a DVD that you’re willing to spend that much money and still be left without any DVD extras, subtitles, commentary tracks or the ability to easily lend your movie out to a friend.
It’s remarkable that the company has corralled all of the major studios on this, but will the company’s downloading site offer the same elegance as iTunes or the same technological ambition as Netflix’s new video-on-demand service?
We haven’t tried downloading any movies from Wal-Mart yet, but a few things on the Web site give us pause: namely that it only works half the time in Firefox, it warns you explicitly that its “portable media format” is not compatible with iPods (what the … !?) and when you try to find out what the compatible portable formats are, it just sends you to its electronics retail site, presumably to go shop for something other than an iPod and guess that it might be compatible.
You do get the option to download a desktop format bundled with a portable format, which is nice, and you get the option of full screen or widescreen.
No Mac support. No Linux support.
You can download TV episodes (portable format only) for $1.96, but some of the wording is cryptic. Tonight’s episode of “Veronica Mars,” which is not yet available, contains the text: “Cast: null. Episode Synopsis: Placeholder for TV episode metadata to be ingested with video content.”
“Ingested with video content?” Yikes. Is this thing really ready for prime time?
Buying a next-generation game console?
Get ready for the update game.
What, you haven’t played that one yet? It’s almost as fun as “WarioWare, Inc.!” See, what happens is, you turn on your game console, expecting to play something, and instead you get a message telling you that you need to upgrade your game console for various bug fixes and enhancements.
Given that the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3 are meant to be connected to the Internet 24/7 with their built-in WiFi capabilities (the PS3’s $599 version is the one with WiFi; the cheaper version has regular Ethernet), the consoles are capable of downloading updates that can tweak system performance or introduce new features. The Xbox 360, no slouch in this area, usually limits updates to a few large updates a year, but individual games might need a quick patch, as an alert will tell you when you try to play, say, “Gears of War.”
As game consoles get to be more like PCs, it’s gotten a bit out of hand. Over the past several weeks, I’ve actually spent more time applying patches to the buggy PlayStation 3 hardware than playing games on it. Almost once a week, I learn that my PS3 is running an old system software version. Time to update. And rather than being an unobtrusive automatic patch, each system update requires that you download the software, agree to a lengthy user agreement, install the software, plug in the PS3 controller via a USB cable and restart your system. The whole process rarely takes more than 10 or 15 minutes, but it’s still 10 or 15 minutes you’d rather be spending playing games on the system you paid more than $600 to play games on.
The Wii has limited its system updates to times when it introduces new features such as the downloadable Opera Web browser and its news channel. But many of these features arguably should have been available when the console launched in November, not introduced piecemeal over the next several months.
The Wii, at least, will retrieve messages from friends and character “Mii”s sent online even while the system is asleep via the Wii Connect service. You wake up in the morning and the disc slot glows blue, alerting you that there’s something waiting. Sometimes, though, it’s just another system update.
Fixing glitches is great and new features are welcome, but console makers still haven’t figured out a way to make system updates fun. They’re anti-fun, a slog that feels like unwelcome work.
Today’s the last day to vote for the incredibly prestigious “Bloggie” awards. We wrote recently that Austin photographer Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs is up for one, so go show your love.
Other notable nominees include several for popular gadget site Gizmodo, and several for Go Fug Yourself, co-owned by our friend Heather, a former Austinite who used to work for the American-Statesman. (Choking back tears) You done good, Heather!
The awards will be presented at South by Southwest Interactive. You know we’ll be filling you in on the winners.
We gotta admit, we also love it that Deadspin and Cute Overload got noms. Not that we’re telling you how to vote or anything.
By the way, speaking of Deadspin, how amazing was their posters’ commenting attack on ESPN.com yesterday? Yikes!
CNET’s got an interesting story about what’s happening in “World of Warcraft” since the expansion pack “The Burning Crusade” was released. Though I can’t imagine Ironforge as a ghost town, apparently the new release is creating some societal shifts in the game. Would that I could ever get to Level 60 to begin with.
The low-fi brains (debatable) behind the electronic device marketing campaign that figuratively blew up in their faces have to be at least a little bit amused by what’s happened.
CNN anchors and staid mainstream media outlets have to say with a straight face the words, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and show images of the middle-finger-wielding Mooninite character. (My favorite needlessly breathless CNN headline: “A scary promotion.”)
A few things: How scary is it that these supposedly threatening Lite-Brite panels weren’t noticed for two weeks? That’s either bad marketing or terrible national security.
Despite Turner Broadcasting System Inc.’s apology, they probably aren’t too saddened by the fact that the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” movie is out in March, and it will arrive on a wave of controversy. I can already hear Bill O’Reilly screaming about it.
The whole incident is perfect, really, and you couldn’t write a better script when officials say they’re not amused by what happened. Would they be any more amused if they actually saw an episode of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” which is itself absurdist, Dada humor geared toward hipsters and geeks?
As reporter Joe Gross keeps pointing out to me, could there be two more stereotypically perfect examples of Adult Swim’s audience than the two guys who were held for the Boston incident? In a news conference with reporters, the two struggled to keep a straight face and came across as bemused smart alecks.
Local site AustinSwim.org has some video of the scary devices being planted in Boston (I’m reposting below). I guess we should count ourselves lucky that Austin is a hip enough city to be part of a national day of hysteria.
Given the quick adoption of high-definition TVs by shoppers, it’s likely you might be watching this year’s Super Bowl for the first time in high-definition. Get ready for widescreen, eye-popping clarity! Here are some tips to make sure you get the full HD-enjoyment out of the game:
Apple got to declare a national geek holiday when it announced the iPhone earlier this month, so why shouldn’t Bill Gates get to have a little fun on consumer Windows Vista launch day (today)? It’s been a long time coming, and even if the buzz on Vista is that it’s about as revolutionary as, say… the second “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, that doesn’t mean Microsoft shouldn’t get some credit.
I’ve got my head pretty far up the intestine of the tech industry, and I still have no idea whether I should upgrade my Windows XP machine or which edition I should get if I as willing to pony up the cash. Do I want “Ultimate?” “Home?” “Grumpy?” “Dopey?” “Shemp?”
I think I’m going to hold off for a while, at least three to six months, while bugs are ironed out, and I figure out whether I made a huge mistake dropping $900 on my most recent PC upgrade instead of just putting that money toward a new Mac.
So tell us what you think. Will you be upgrading to Vista? Have you already? Do you care? Leave us a comment below.
Before you answer, check out clips of Bill Gates on “The Daily Show” and then gaze upon the all-powerful visage of The Bill:
Wii demand and sales have been on my mind lately for a story that I’m working on (a not-yet-finished version popped up on this site yesterday; oops, sorry about that). I spent Saturday night around midnight at a South Austin Wal-Mart where customers lined up at the side of the building waiting to purchase one of Nintendo’s wonderboxes. 16 units arrived, more than was expected, and nearly everyone in line went home happy.
Most people I talked to said they were long-time Nintendo fans, having grown up in the world of Mario, Link and Donkey Kong, and had tried multiple times to find Wiis available in stores.
The New York Times writes about the controversy over the “Super Columbine Massacre” video game. I haven’t played it and am not quite sure what I think about the idea itself, but I expect and hope that the knee-jerk reaction that any game about a national tragedy is in poor taste simply because it is an interactive experience will fall by the wayside. As game design continues to strive toward art, it must be allowed to deal in controversial subject matter (even if it does so badly) if the industry is to evolve.
Only the most uninformed of critics would argue that video games are a kids’ medium these days. The irony of the game’s creator receiving death threats from those outraged by the game’s premise should not be lost on us.
Got a chance to play “WarioWare: Smooth Moves” for the Wii and while it doesn’t revolutionize the formula for the ADD-flavored “WarioWare” series, it’s an awful lot of fun to play and lends itself to gaming in short bursts.
It makes excellent use of the Wiimote, but the quick nature of the game and sometimes confusing mini-games might be a little overwhelming for those who haven’t played a “WarioWare” game before.
In other words, if you’re going to sit your parents down in front of the game, you might want to stick around and babysit a bit so they don’t get too frustrated and cry.
Game blogs are reporting that Wal-Mart will have Nintendo Wiis in stores tomorrow with at least five systems guaranteed for each store, according to early peeks at the retailer’s Sunday circular.
Given that many Wal-Marts in our area are open 24 hours, that means the systems will be available a little earlier. Try midnight. Tonight.
A phone check of several stores reveals that some will be taking names on a list in their electronics department, while others will ask shoppers to line up outside the store to await their chance at the $250 game console. Check with the electronics department for the store in your area if you want to know what the procedure will be.
If you’re in the market for a Wii, happy hunting tonight.
For those still hunting for the elusive Nintendo Wii, which is still nearly impossible to find on store shelves, you’ve for something to look forward to: an online news channel.
What initially sounded kinda lame — do you really want to use your Wii system as a source for news? — is actually a very tight and slick way to browse headlines between playing games on the console. The service launched this morning and is now fully functional after you download a system update.
From a “News Channel” button on the main menu, the service downloads stories from the Associated Press and then presents them by category. You point at it with your Wiimote, select Sports, National News, etc., and up come quite a few headlines, some with photos. Click on a news story and you get the complete text, photo, caption and even a map (similar to the one on the Wii Forecast channel) to the right of your screen showing where the story takes place. Once the news is downloaded, switching between stories is very speedy, with little lag that I could detect.
You can zoom in and out, changing the size of the text for readability and every time you do, the text breaks apart and reforms in a neat little bit of visual pizazz that wouldn’t look out of place on MacOS.
While you could nitpick that this was a feature that should have been ready to go by the November launch of the console, it’s still a welcome addition to what’s beginning to look like a bargain bundle at $250.
Entering the vowel-eschewing space traditionally dominated by the Motorola Razr and Flickr.com, Journler is a Mac application that puts several personal journaling tools into what looks like one elegant package. You can download the free demo at Journler.com.
A friend of mine raved to me about Journler, and I’ll be downloading the demo to try it out on my iBook. One deal-breaker for me might be whether it accepts a USB Webcam for video diary entries. My iBook is an older model that doesn’t have an iSight camera built-in and I never bothered to buy one (they cost $150, which seems pricey what the iSight does).
If you’re using several Web sites or applications to manage your scrapbooking/journaling, you might want to check it out. I’ll write again after I’ve had a chance to take it for a spin.
My adventures with GPS navigation continued the weekend before the soul-crushing, toe-chilling ice storm.
My comedy troupe took a quick trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
I didn’t lug all the windshield-mounting tools. I just took the Magellan RoadMate 3000T and a charger. From the moment we busted the RoadMate out from my hotel to an appointment I had a few miles away, the troupe fell in love with “Madge,” the sensible and slightly sensual-voiced woman in the device directing us.
“Turn left in… 0.2 miles,” she’d say softly, and we had no choice but to follow her lead.
We considered other names for her, but “Madge” won out over “Marge,” “Gladys” and “Debra.” Truth be told, I think the RoadMate lady sounds younger. She could be a “Tara,” “Christy” or even a “Condoleezza.”
Madge was patient with us. If we took a wrong turn, she’d find us another route without judging. She also didn’t get mad when people doubted her sometimes oddball directions. And she didn’t gloat when those directions turned out to be completely accurate.
Madge got us from the San Francisco airport to our hotel, from our hotel to a gig across the Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley, and even located an In-N-Out Burger within a mile of a theater we were leaving so we could eat just minutes before the place closed.
Most everyone in the group had never used a GPS device, and before the trip was done, most of them swore they’d try to get one in their next car or at least look into a cheaper alternative for trips like this.
Needless to say, Madge is probably flattered by all the attention.
I’m looking for people to talk to for some stories I’m working on — if you’re shopping for a Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3 and are having trouble finding them, or if you’ve already bought one or the other, please contact me.
Also, if you’re doing any online dating, I’d like to talk to you!
A few e-mailed responses to a story I wrote about fertility bloggers in yesterday’s Life & Arts section:
Melissa writes:I was so excited to see your article on infertility bloggers in the Statesman tonight. Wanted to let you know about another resource for infertile bloggers— we pulled together a creme de la creme list of 2006. Each infertility blogger (infertility is used widely to include adoption, miscarriage, and all A.R.T. blogs) was asked to choose their favorite post from 2006, and we’ve been compiling them in a list. We have around 75 entries right now. People are added daily (and Larisa is on the list!). We’ve also been keeping a blogroll of every infertility blog broken down into categories so people can find the stories they wish to read: IUI/IVF, choosing to live child-free, international adoption, etc. The creme de la creme list can be found at http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/2007/01/creme-de-la-creme-of-2006.html. And the general blogroll is found on the side bar of my blog: http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/.
Christine from Austin writes:
what is today? rich white women feel sorry for themselves day? you’ve got your article about women making a career out of whining because they are not getting their own way, you’ve got Ms Vail’s “I almost got killed by a shot, so I must take a year off to recover from my minor injuries” article … these are both geared toward people w/ plenty of cash and an overly inward viewpoint … how about some articles on REAL people, who work hard for little money and don’t have the luxury of “taking a year off” or whining about being infertile and seeking out expensive treatments, etc. sick to the teeth of self-indulgent whiners.
PS - I am rich, white and female, so I am not indulging in class/race war here!
Norbert of Bastrop writes:
As a man I guess it’s difficult to understand how a woman could yearn to be pregnant, as you have expressed in your column. I wonder what these women think of the one million plus abortions per year due to unwanted pregnancies. I did not see mention of this in your story but did the subject come up during your interviews?
I told Norbert that the subject didn’t come up, but that adoption did. One popular blogger who wrote “Naked Ovary” got back to me, but wasn’t able to respond to questions in time to be included in the article. She has adopted and has since shut down her site to the general public. (Naked Ovary is now invitation-only and password-protected.)
Baseline Magazine describes the inner workings of MySpace.com, including all the technical hurdles the company has faced as it leapfrogged so many other Web sites in popularity.
As simple as the site may seem, the amount of computing power and bandwidth needed to keep the social networking site’s specialized functions going. All those technical errors and glitches over the last year suddenly make a lot more sense. There’s also some interesting information about the origins of the site. It’s a must-read for anyone curious about MySpace.
(Link via Slashdot.)
Trainwrecks.net, a popular site among online journal writers for its take-no-prisoners snarkiness that slammed “trainwrecky” blogs and forums, is no more.
While there’s not enough information to speculate on whether the writers of the site got a taste of their own harsh criticism (a flurry of vicious posts on the site Heaven Nose targeting Trainwrecks.net couldn’t have helped; warning - expletives abound), all posts on the site have been removed and a goodbye message has been posted. It reads:
Sorry, folks, but Trainwrecks is gone and it’s not coming back. Some deeply disturbed people with an irrational fixation on this site decided that stupid photo montages, libel, and obscene anonymous comments just weren’t enough, so they decided to take their little hate campaign into the real world. And since their information came from gossip and bad detective work, they didn’t exactly hit the right targets. As anyone might have expected, the people who suffered the most were not even involved with this site.
Once it became clear that the people posting at Heaven Nose were willing to cross the line between a one-sided flame war and real-life harassment, our web host decided enough was enough, and we agreed. This site wasn’t important enough to us to be worth having innocent people harassed at home and work. We’re done.
Although the domain name for the site is registered to Beth Campbell of Bad Hair Days and the The Usual Suspects forum, the writers of Trainwrecks.net posted anonymously and often opened the floor on open commenting threads, allowing readers to contribute their own examples of blogs and forums where people’s lives seemed a mess.
In a weird, schadenfreudeish way, the site will definitely be missed.
I thought the ice storm was over until I tried to drive to work today and ended up pinned on I-35 for an extra 45 minute as huge numbers of 18-wheelers surrounded my tiny car.
Still, you can’t beat the entertainment value of watching enormous sheets of ice fall off the back of vehicles as they speed up an incline.
Here’s what’s going on today:
Some cold-weather humor: it’s so cold in Austin right now that on 6th Street, Leslie has swapped out his G-string for a flannel thong.
I’ve been working from home Tuesday and today and while distractions at work include co-workers talking about “24” and phone calls, I’m finding melting icicles and strange creaking coming from the roof to be even more harmful to productivity.
There was also the case of my DIrecTV satellite dish completely freezing over last night. The poor little dish is encased, like Han Solo, and unable to pick up channels. I tried in vain to throw some kosher salt at the roof-mounted thing, hoping to somehow free ESPN from its freezing prison, but to no avail. The salt just landed back in my face, a cruel smackdown from the TV gods.
I can still pick up a handful of over-the-air channels with my indoor HDTV antenna. The San Antonio stations are in a full hysteria over the hard freeze. They’ve taken to showing near-misses on the highways as a way of warming the mood. But they all agree you should be at home with your hot chocolate watching them and not out slip-a-slidin’ on Interstate 410.
Even my feet shiver under my desk (I thought it was smart at the time to put the desk by the window so I’d have a nice view), the tech world moves on.
There’s a rumor at the Beatles will be on iTunes soon, on the apt date of Feb. 14, to be exact. Steve Jobs using Beatles music during his iPhone announcement pretty much assures that this rumor isn’t groundless. In fact, there’s probably more ground here than is visible anywhere in my yard. Oh, crunchy ice.
I only left the house once since Monday and that was to get gas. My little satellite radio receiver was so cold that its LED readout didn’t so much as switch from channel to channel as it reluctantly slid, its readout sluggish and lazy from the temperature. I brought the thing inside and made sure to take out any other gadgets that might not benefit from being in the cold.
I’ve found that the perfect way to beat the stay-at-home blues is to watch Paula Abdul snooze, slur and wiggle her way through a series of TV interviews. Who knew schadenfreude could warm you up like vodka?
Despite hearing that there might be delays in the mail, a Netflix movie arrived in the mail Tuesday. I didn’t brave the slick driveway until late in the evening, and when I saw what movie it was, I had to smile.
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” The one about global warming.
Good one, Netflix.
The view from New Braunfels:
Leave it to “Late Night with Conan O’ Brien” to put the iPhone hysteria in perspective:
Now that the euphoria has worn off just a bit after Apple’s bombshell iPhone announcement yesterday, let us address some of the criticisms and shortcomings that a fickle tech industry is already lobbing at the product five months before it is set to become available:
Price: $499 and $599. Steep, yes. Even if you use Steve Jobs’ justification that the price of an iPhone is comparable to buying a rival smart phone and an iPod, $600 (plus tax!) is still a tough one to swallow. When Sony announced that pricing for its PlayStation 3 game console, many in the game industry thought Sony must be high. But, for all its power and mass, the PS3 is still a game machine that plays Blu-Ray DVDs. You can’t carry it around with you and it doesn’t do all the things the iPhone supposedly can do. So, for $600, would you rather have a PS3 or an iPhone? I think I’d get more use out of an iPhone. Whatever the case, Jobs was smart to let Sony fall on that sticker shock sword before announcing iPhone prices. And, yes, prices will probably fall as newer versions of the iPhone are introduced, perhaps as early as next January.
3-G: Some are concerned that the iPhone doesn’t use Cingular’s higher-speed 3-G network. This does seem odd given that the phone is being initially lobbed at the high-end customers, typically business travelers who need that speed on the go. The phone may blaze on a Wi-Fi connection, but when you’re using it outside a Wi-Fi area, you’d think the Web functions are going to be pretty sluggish. We’ll just have to see about this one. I can’t imagine we won’t see a 3-G version by next January, especially if early adopters complain about data speeds.
Expandability and space: Here’s where I come in. I use a 30-gigabyte iPod (I’m listening to Weezer’s “El Scorcho” on it right now), and I don’t relish having to cut my tunes and videos back to cram into 8 gigabytes of space. Does Apple expect existing iPod users to chuck their music player and consolidate? Those 8 gigabytes (if you opt for the higher-end iPhone) will also have a chunk of space devoted to the operating system, photos and whatever other non-iPod content you need to carry around. A slot for expanded memory, say a mini-SD card slot, would help. But it’s very likely that Apple is nervous about having purchased music and movies transferred around on removable media. Which brings us to…
No wireless docking/syncing!?: What’s up with not being able to purchase iTunes content directly with the iPhone or using Bluetooth to wirelessly sync up with iTunes? Very likely this has to do with security. Apple doesn’t want your credit card info floating around in the digital ether, and having all those personal contacts and info transmitted by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth might be a hacking nightmare. Still, since all this is based on Mac OS, I expect some smart Mac person will figure out a way around this and introduce a hack for users to transfer their info to and from iTunes sans USB wire.
No user-replaceable battery: I don’t like this much, either. iPod batteries go soft over time with repeated use and you can expect this phone’s battery to wear down in a year or more, too. Not having an easily replaceable/swappable battery is annoying, but not surprising given that hasn’t happened with the iPod. What’ll be really annoying is sending in your iPhone to get the battery replaced. Being without your iPod for a few days or weeks is annoying, but doing it for an iPhone is going to be disastrous for people who don’t have an Apple store nearby. I wonder if they’ll train employees at Cingular stores to be able to handle that.
“Jesus phone”: I’m not sure if it was Gizmodo that coined the term Jesus phone, but I’ve already seen it on Defamer today and only expect the name to spread. I can’t imagine Jobs will be thrilled about this since he’s the one who usually gets deified.
Did I mention price?: $600. Wow. It still seems like a lot of money, no matter how many times I type it. I bet sometime between now and June, Apple will throw in one more thing to push those on the fence over. “Did we say 8 gigabytes? We meant 16. You’re welcome!” Five months is still just enough time for Apple to market this thing to death and make some last-minute enhancements to sweeten the deal.
So, while we pontificate about all this, peep this Bluetooth headset accessory. Maybe this is just enough to push us over the edge (from Gizmodo.com):
Few in the tech industry were surprised today that the long-rumored iPhone from Apple is real.
What is surprising is that five months before the thing is even available through Cingular, it already feels like a clear victor against its clunky, hard-to-use and inelegant competitors.
Assuming the device works as advertised and doesn’t have some crippling design or interface issues, the iPhone manages to cram MacOS onto a nice-looking touch-screen-based device that brings together the iPod video (now with widescreen capabilities); Web browsing, chat and photo capabilities from Mac computers; and innovative ways to manipulate information with your fingers.
Plenty of ink will be spilled on what the iPhone can and can’t do, but by including WiFi capabilities, GPS features, syncing with desktop applications and fingers-only navigation that already screams, “Eureka!” Apple may be driving a huge stake through the heart of the cell phone hardware industry.
My prediction is that it won’t be the iPod features or Web browsing that’ll sell the iPhone — it’ll be the tactile innovation allowing users to move through menus, zoom in on Web pages and photos, and zip through e-mails and voice mail messages with just a few finger movements. Anyone who has gotten used to the two-finger scrolling method on Apple laptop touchpads knows that it’s hard to go back once you’ve gotten used to such an innovation.
Cell phones, even “smart” phones like the Treo and Blackjack, are relatively difficult to use and expensive and have more buttons than are probably necessary. Even though the iPhone’s price is high ($499 and $599 depending on the included amount of flash memory), if you consider the price of buying a high-end smart phone and an iPod Nano, it doesn’t seem so outrageous.
The true test of whether it’s the breakthrough product will be when it’s available and in people’s hands — will it give the same thrill as the iPod did the first time everyone learned to use its touch-wheel?
Start saving those pennies. If it works as promised, the iPhone is going to profoundly change the communications industry, perhaps as deeply as the iPod changed music.
I don’t hate birds.
But when they mysteriously die, 63 at a time, downtown, shutting everything down and creating national news, it is time to take action. Robotic action.
Please consider my proposal: We need to get rid of all the birds and replace them with robot birds.
Preferably solar-powered ones that don’t poop. Much.
We as humans have for too long allowed these scavengers of the air to bespoil our clear skies with their barely-evolved and weak frames, stealing precious grubs and scaring adorable little kittens with their incessant cawing.
I wouldn’t suggest this idea if I hadn’t given it careful consideration since about 3:30. The time for action is now, while the local bird population is slightly smaller than usual.
The robot birds cost about $1,900 each, so we should be square with about $1 billion worth of them. The best thing about it is that they don’t migrate very far, so it won’t be wasted money.
City leaders: Please loosen up those purse strings and get this project going. We cannot allow 63 dead birds to create such a panic. Nobody will feel frightened or panicked if 63 robot birds run out of batteries.
I look forward to seeing these electro-avians in our fair skies soon.
The Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing, and while I can’t be there, I can see from afar that the theme of the year seems to be, “Let’s take all those HDTVs, iPods and media-centric computers and find ways to let people move files around their house so they can view anything anywhere.”
This is fantastic, but it would have been great if there’s been some foresight and these wonderful innovations had been thought out before so many of us tried to wrestle with competing file formats, devices that don’t play nice with each other and the limitations of bandwidth.
Ah, the joys of early-adopting.
Still, true convergence is in the wings. Everyone from Microsoft to TV manufacturers, makers of wireless routers and content producers are going to get in the game to make your home wired together so you can view photos, videos and Web content wherever, whenever.
There will be dozens of useless set-top boxes that nobody will buy and so many ways to things to connect your iPod into that your music player will probably contract a venereal disease.
The challenge now: make these devices simple enough for anyone to operate, cheap enough for many families to afford ($500, including lots of hard-drive storage space and high-def capabilities would not be outrageous) and make sure that they play all formats, from protected iTunes music to movie-studio-flagged high-definition content, without a hitch.
Truth be told, I don’t have confidence that such a device will emerge this year. In the meantime, we’ll be left with piecemeal solutions and maybe one or two stand-out devices (Netgear, could this be what we’re hoping for?) that can do some of what digital homebodies of the future might need.
According to Wired, Austin is one of the 10 top tech towns.
Hardly surprising, but the fun criteria include, “Circuit City stores per capita” and “Comic book stores per capita.”
The Austin write-up says: “Inspiration for Slacker, epicenter of the first EFF battle, home to Dell, Whole Foods and South by Southwest. Not to mention host to the most dorkbot attendees in the country. Only downside: It’s surrounded by Texas.”
Based on this “highly scientific methodology as well as algorithms snuck out of NASA and Google,” Austin scores a 10 for “Number of attendees at local meetings of dorkbot, a group for ‘people doing strange things with electricity,’ ” a nine for availability of free wi-fi and an eight for… wait, what is that? It looks like there’s a tiny graphic missing.
Says the Web page’s source code, the eight is for “Proximity to top-ranked engineering schools.”
Well, yes.
It’s Friday. Your boss won’t mind if you check out this Rosie vs. Donald online game. In fact, you should forward the link to your boss. It’s good for about 10 or 15 minutes of silly gameplay. Check out Rosie’s fierce battle tongue!
I had trouble getting the game to work at first on a Mac using several different browsers, but it seems to be working fine now.
You may want to sit down for this one.
Ready?
There’s a new DVD format coming. Not HD-DVD or Blu-ray, which can already be found on store shelves (though not so much for rental). Warner Bros. plans to introduce “Total HD” hybrid discs, according to the New York Times, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week.
Still breathing?
The good news is that this isn’t an altogether different format. If the report is accurate, Total HD just combines the HD-DVD version of a movie on one side of a disc and a Blu-ray version on the flip side. So whether you’re using a Blu-ray player like the one in the PlayStation 3 or an HD-DVD player like the add-on for the Xbox 360 (or stand-alone players in each format), you’re covered when you buy one of these discs.
But … Total HD won’t include a standard version of DVD movies, so forget about lending your DVD to someone without an HD-DVD or Blu-ray player.
The new discs presumably won’t have artwork on the disc, so you’ll have to make sure you keep your discs in the right boxes so you can easily differentiate your movies. (Or you can squint at the tiny text in the center ring of the disc like you do now with DVDs that have a full-screen version on one side and widescreen version on the other.)
The discs will also cost more. HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies currently cost more than regular DVDs, topping out sometimes at more than $30 for a regular movie. Expect to pay even more for these hybrid discs because Warner Bros. will have to pay licensing fees for both formats.
Still excited?
An alternative is a hybrid DVD player (like one being introduced by LG) that can play both formats, but you can bet these players will be more expensive than the current HD-DVD or Blu-ray players.
It’s very likely that 2007 will be the year when all this shakes out and a clear format winner emerges, or the hybrid technologies make the format war irrelevant. My prediction: extras will become less a factor as everyone but film buffs finds they have less time to enjoy them, so what will be left will be a war based on pricing and what movies end up in what format. Most early adopters will vie for digital delivery of HD movies instead (via cable, satellite or Internet) and the longer the film studios and hardware companies engage in DVD brinksmanship, the more money they’ll lose.
The X factor, I think, is what Apple decides to do with its forthcoming iTV device and how soon it introduces Blu-ray in its future laptops and computers.
If Apple finds a way to stream Blu-ray movies to its iTV devices, or forgo the format entirely to deliver HD-quality movies over the device (it features an HD-capable HDMI connection), that could swing the needle enough to move people toward or away from HD discs.
This humorous piece about coffee technology of the future might seem wild and crazy … unless you are one of us, the people who drink 20 ounces or more of coffee every morning. Then it just seems … very, very reasonable.
I can’t help thinking that you couldn’t create a similar list about bagels. Shouldn’t we be able to teleport them fresh from New York by now? And cook them with lasers coming out of our iPods?
Get on it, scientists. The future is NOW!
As if the supremely stupid next-gen-DVD format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray weren’t confusing enough for consumers, now comes word that at least one movie, “The Descent” is having problems with playback because it uses Blu-Ray-Java, a programming language that some stand-alone Blu-Ray players can’t yet read.
Nice one!
Did you even know there was a “Blu-Ray-Java” format? Neither did I. Neither does anybody. Nobody should have to keep this stuff straight.
My wife and I rented “The Descent” on Blu-Ray from Netflix last week and watched it on a PlayStation 3. The movie played fine, but I did notice a few times while booting up the movie, the screen went blank and nothing happened. I chalked it up to a PS3 glitch (there are many), so I just rebooted the machine and the movie played fine. (It’s awesome, by the way with some great next-gen DVD features like a picture-in-picture commentary/making-of track that goes for the whole movie). I’m not sure if that blank screen I was getting has anything to do with the Blu-Ray Java issue, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Judging from questions about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD I’m getting from co-workers, the formats are causing more confusion than commitment. Unlike the launch of the DVD format, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are not exactly ready for prime time and annoying bugs like this are only going to make the uphill battle to transition over even harder for the film studios, hardware manufacturers and most of all, movie lovers like us.
Link via Gizmodo, where readers are not happy.
My parents and brother got me a very thoughtful Christmas gift this year — so thoughtful, in fact, that I would have never thought to get myself: a GPS navigation system.
Unless I know where I’m going and have been there multiple times, I get lost while driving. A lot. My wife tells me often that whenever I’m trying to choose a direction to go, I should veer toward the opposite direction of whatever my brain is telling me is correct.
Because I’m going back to reporting, the gift makes perfect sense: I’ll be on the road, looking for weird addresses (it already happened to me recently with an interview way up in the Lakeline Mall area). Great idea.
The reason I’d never considered a GPS system myself has been price and ignorance. Getting a GPS system as an option on my Prius would have cost about $2,000 and I’ve rarely felt $2,000-worth-of-lost. I’ve seen handheld GPS systems at Target, but I just always thought of those as tools for campers and hikers. It just never occurred to me that technology could help me from losing my way on what Volkswagen used to call “The road of life.”
My dumbstruck look upon opening the gift must have struck my folks as disappointment — instead, my brain was whirring with possibilities — GPS! Of course! Why didn’t I get one of these sooner?
The model my family got me is a Magellan RoadMate 3000T. It’s got a crazy-bright touch screen, very clear voice commands and an almost unholy degree of accuracy in telling you where you are and how fast you’re traveling.
On the minus side: not all the maps are current (especially any area where there’s construction happening — it didn’t know about the big Ben White/I-35 changes and it doesn’t recognize our street in New Braunfels even though we’ve lived there for two years). I called customer support and they don’t expect a map update for at least six months.
The device also has lots of very sensitive buttons that get pressed accidentally when I try to handle it in the car. I’ll need to mount it somewhere so that doesn’t keep happening.
I do love, however, the way it re-calculates your route if you intentionally go a different direction than the GPS advises (say you know a shortcut the GPS doesn’t). It does so quickly and efficiently and rarely tells you to make a U-turn unless you really find a way to screw up.
I’m just starting to use the Magellan, but I’ll keep you posted if it should strand me in the boonies somehow.
I’ve been using AOL Instant Messenger for years (on the Mac, I access it through iChat). It’s pretty much the only chat program I keep using. I’m what you’d call a loyal user.
So why is AOL trying so hard to make me move to something else? Every time I upgrade AIM, they add more terrible features, make the interface uglier and uglier (seriously — what is up with the Cingular-orange buttons?) and lose my preferences. Note to software designers: when someone does an upgrade to software, the user’s settings should always be kept intact by default. I don’t want to hear a monkey laughing every time someone sends me an instant message and I sure don’t want to hear a door squeaking open every time someone goes online. I shouldn’t have to go in and change those settings again every time an incremental update is offered
AOL Instant Messenger has also continued to add annoying multimedia features (some would call it “Malware”) that clog up system resources and spit out loud and grainy commercials in the box above your buddy list.
Among those installed features, AOL Instant Messenger puts Wild Tangent on your PC, which in theory allows you to play online games with other chatters, but in practice is just extra software you might not want or need if you’re using Instant Messenger to chat and don’t intend to play.
If you have an older version of AIM that does everything you want and doesn’t bombard you with ads, I’d suggest you stick with it and avoid upgrading to the new 6.x versions, at least until AOL gets its act together. The only thing I can see that enhances AIM in the latest version is tabbed chatting, which is nice, but not exactly an original new feature.
MySpace, Google, MIcrosoft, Yahoo and other companies have perfectly workable chat software. Just give me one more reason to switch over, AOL.
AP reports today that Apple’s iTunes music store is back to normal after a slowdown happened earlier this week, presumably because iPod and iTunes gift card recipients swarmed the music service.
This is good news for Apple, which had to fight off reports earlier this year that sales on its legal music downloading store were slipping.
I can report that when I tried to redeem an iTunes gift card earlier this week (thanks, Uncle Rick!), the store was a bit unresponsive and it took a few tries to get to my account. But a few minutes later, everything was fine. And I downloaded a few lengthy podcasts on Tuesday night with no slowdown in download speed.
As one snarky commenter on Slashdot points out, Microsoft has reported no such problems with its Zune music store.
It’s a slow tech week. Everybody’s playing with their new toys. Apple probably won’t announce anything new until January (iPhone? Could it be? Please please please?).
But those of us working through the week have all the year-end articles to read and a few fun things. It’s the time of year when the news gets a little wonky as people finally have time to do a little tech navel-gazing.
From ACL to MTV? — The Shins asked fans at the Austin City Limits Fest to phone-camera record their song “Phantom Limb” (which is being played to death on Sirius Satellite Radio among other places). Sure, the Beastie Boys did it first, but this is different because … well, I can’t really figure out how it’s different, but I like “Phantom Limb” and the Shins so much that it doesn’t really matter. Maybe they can guitar-duel with Stephen Colbert next.
Someone to (politely, yet firmly) gripe toward — TechLore.com provides a very handy list of Customer Support phone numbers and Web sites. Just the thing to keep the celebrating going after Stuff Don’t Work Day.
Those crazy “Rabbids!” — It’s impossible not to love this Christmas commercial for the fun, yet repetitive Wii game, “Rayman Ravin’ Rabbids.”
Your fearless leader — I have a totally platonic crush on GeekBriefTV’s Cali Lewis, the giggly yet very entertaining host of a semi-daily gadget podcast. Lewis and her husband cover a wide range of consumer electronics territory and except for Liam Lynch’s eclectic Lynchland, it’s the only video podcast I watch regularly.
Happy “The Gadget I Got for Christmas Doesn’t Work” Day!
As the complexity of our digital cameras, game consoles, TVs and music players grows, it’s not enough just to read the manual. You practically have to have a post-grad degree from MIT to set up that new HDTV set.
I was going to write an entry about how to give gifts to the non-gadget inclined, but since we’re way past that, let’s focus on what to do when the gift you received (thanks, gift-givers!) doesn’t work the way it should.
First … deep breaths. If you rushed to open that digital camera and take pictures while the gift wrapping was still weeping its torn tears, you may have realized that it doesn’t come with a memory card or you were given the wrong kind of memory card. That’s OK! Memory cards are easy to return and a decent-sized card (about 1 gigabyte is good if you’re not taking poster-sized photos) isn’t too expensive. Most run about $20-$50 now depending on speed. Also, make sure to charge that camera or get the appropriate batteries before you start complaining about that flash failing to go off.
If you’re setting up a home theater, you may need professional help. There’s some good advice for calibration and chronic problems with certain TV sets at the ever-reliable AVS forums. Go ahead and register and post questions in the appropriate areas if you need guidance. AVS geeks love to help and offer advice. But do a search first to make sure your question hasn’t already been asked and answered.
Setting up an MP3 player’s not as easy as it sounds. You’ll need to hook it up to a computer and set up the appropriate software to get tunes from your hard drive to the player. IPods use Apple’s iTunes software, which you’ll need to download. Other devices use programs including Windows Media Player or MusicMatch Jukebox. You’ll definitely need to check out the manual unless you have one of those easy-to-use USB players that allow you to just drag-and-drop MP3 files onto them. Bless these little devices for their simplicity. You’ll also need to either download some music (hey, it’s Sufjan Stevens’ five-disc Christmas epic!) or import music to your computer from CDs you own. Don’t worry. Doing so is perfectly legal. It’s your music!
If something about your gadget is genuinely defective (say it spontaneously combusts or comes pre-loaded with pornography), you can try calling the tech support number in your manual (or hitting up the manufacturer’s Web site) or simply taking the item back.
If it’s an open video game, DVD or music CD and there’s no actual defect, you’re out of luck trying to return the item, even if it’s awful. But if there’s a scratch on a disc or some other defect that happened before you opened the product, most stores will take the item back.
Most hardware (printers, TVs, cameras, computer accessories) is returnable within the retailer’s grace period for returning merchandise, though gadgets like cell phones sometimes have a much shorter window for returns. Last year, I got the run-around on returning a defective Razr phone because I took it back to a store a day after the 15-day return period had passed. I had to contact Cingular directly to get mine replaced.
If you feel a bit overwhelmed by the holidays, wait until the weekend or when you have a few spare hours to start using your new toys. There’s nothing worse than trying to get something to work when you’re running late to meet relatives or have to get up early the next morning for work. Relax: that GPS navigation device isn’t going anywhere (until you take it with you).
My one serious low-tech hobby (besides playing with our cats) is baking. I enjoy making sugary treats that I probably won’t partake of myself and distributing them to hungry co-workers.
(Which is sort of a problem at my new assignment because there is seemingly a never-ending supply of tasty, decadent breakfast tacos, cakes, pies and brownies; my wares were much more in demand back in ¡ahora sí!)
While I do make a high-tech concession to baking (a KitchenAid Pro Empire Red mixer that got me on this kick to begin with and was on super refurbished discount on Amazon), mostly I try to keep it simple: good ingredients, recipes from Epicurious, off-the-beaten-path results (this season I’m experimenting with chipotle peppers and chocolate. I’m no Miss Adventure in the kitchen (she has offered fantastic advice on fine entertaining), but it’s nice to do something at home that doesn’t involve holding a mouse, a remote controller or power tools for the yard.
I didn’t do the SunRocket deal. It’s the holidays. I’m busy. I’m making cookies. I don’t have time to think about voice-over-IP right now and all its implications.
Call me next week, phone rep guy, when it’s super slow.
MySpace is being offered on Cingular phones as a downloadable application.
However, unlike Google’s fantastic little e-mail application, this one’s not free. You have to pay $2.99 a month to use MySpace which is about $2.99 more than I’m willing to pay for that.
MySpace is fine and all, but I’m not ready to pay to browse it.
About a month ago, I got a call at work from a customer service representative at SunRocket, which offers voice-over-IP service, similar to Vonage.
The timing was good: my new job is likely to entail some working from home, and I’m still on a cell phone only. We have no home phone, but we do have a cable modem. If I’m going to be making lots of calls during the day for interviews, it makes sense to get a more reliable home phone.
I asked the rep to call me on my cell later that evening so I could discuss the deal with my wife. The quote I was given was $199 for two years of service with no activation fees. Equipment (including a cordless phone) was to be free.
We decided we’d try it out. But by the time we discussed it, it was late at night and too late to try to call the rep back.
A few days later, the representative called, and we discussed the offer. He told me the two-year deal was no longer available (it was a one-day offer, you see) and that he could give me an extra phone, but the charge was now $199 for one year instead of two. Not as great a deal. I told him I’d need to reconvene with Mrs. G.
We decided to hold off on the offer. We didn’t need the line at that exact moment, and we hadn’t really studied other options.
In the weeks since then, the representative has continued to call, at least four or five times a week. I’m not always able to answer my cell phone, but I’d see a number from the 605 area code and knew where it was coming from and usually just didn’t feel like haggling. The calls continued to come. No voice message was left, just constant calls. I stopped answering the phone when I saw that “605.”
Today, the rep finally left a message. The one-day offer is back: $199 for two years of service. The offer also appears on SunRocket’s Web site.
So what do you think? Was this just an example of slightly over-eager customer service? Was I smart to hold out for the two-year offer? Or should I be wary of doing business with a company that called so many times it began to be annoying?
I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what to do here.
I drive a Prius and have for the last two years since I was desperate to replace an ailing Hyundai with something that wouldn’t fall apart like a dry blueberry muffin.
So far, so good. I’ve put an enormous amount of miles on it (I’m past 85,000 miles; I got it in November ‘04 with 14,000 miles on the used car). I saved a lot of gas money when the price of a gallon hovered near $3. And I’ve gotten used to the quiet little car and its quirks (loud beeping when I’m in reverse, a sometimes distractingly bright screen that recently needed replacing and was luckily under warranty).
Still, even with gas prices settling back down, I get at least one or two people a week asking me how I like it. It usually happens when I’m bent over reaching to get something from my car or when I walk into a restaurant or some other business where the car is the furthest thing from my mind.
Waiter: So how do you like it?
Omar: The restaurant? Looks clean, I guess.
Waiter: No, no, the hybrid! You get good gas mileage?
Omar: Oh yeah. It’s good. I commute about 100 miles a day. It’s, you know (shrug), it’s good with gas.
Waiter: Yeah, I’ve been looking at a hybrid. (Wistful look. Sometimes a sigh.)
I’ve answered the question so many times that I’ve sort of run out of things to say. I’m looking forward to the day when hybrids are so commonplace that they’re not seen as curiosities. I wonder if people with kids have to answer for them:
Gas station attendant: So, how do you like ‘em?
Parent: The gas pumps?
Gas station attendant: No, no, the kids! You have kids right?
Parent: Yes. Two.
Gas station attendant: How’s that workin’ out for ya? Are they pretty safe?
Parent: They haven’t killed anyone, if that’s what you’re asking.
Gas station attendant: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about having a few. I don’t have a wife or a girlfriend or anything, but still, kids look like a lot of fun. (Wistful look. Sigh.)
Parent: Sure. Yeah. Well, I need to go.
Gas station attendant: I baby-sit sometimes…
Parent: Gotta go! See ya later!
Instead of just telling people that hybrids are good and quiet, I should spill the real secrets of hybrids. That they run on devil oils. That they turn you into a smug jerk. That they’re so quiet you frequently run over birds and old people. That the best restaurants in town have “hybrids only” parking spaces that they don’t even want the rest of you to know about. Also, hybrid owners meet once a week to figure out ways to flatten the tires of all the F-150s in town.
If you’re a truck driver and we haven’t gotten to you yet, don’t worry. You’re on our list.
On the subject of violent video games, a letter to the editor in today’s paper talks about the “Games sampler” video game holiday gift guide we ran last weekend. Here’s the letter as it was published:
Why highlight the violent video games?Re: Dec. 9 article, “Game sampler”:
I think the American-Statesman missed the “Peace on Earth, good will …” theme, which should really be more than just a seasonal idea.
Right out of the blocks, the article endorsed the action video games as having “gun-blazing action … the simply awesome chainsaw gun … battle walkers … and Create a Fatality, which is just good fun for the holidays.”
This section was written by seventh-grade boys who just don’t get it yet, right? This was tongue in cheek, right? Surely the paper doesn’t think this is “cool.” I bet there are many folks who wish you had described the less violent video game options first.
ROGER BOWEN
Head of school
St. Stephen’s Episcopal School
rbown@sstx.org
Austin
My e-mail response to Mr. Bowen:
Mr Bowen,
I read your letter in today’s newspaper and was hoping you wouldn’t mind me responding. I was in charge of putting together the “Game sampler” article (with contributions from Dale Roe and Joe Stafford). One of the things I asked our designer to do was to make sure the “Family/Kids” games began on the front of the section, but after reading your letter, it makes sense that we could have switched the order with “action” games and led with the family-friendly titles.
Our goal was to give an overview of some of the more popular/well-reviewed games out there and action games are a popular category. The “Mortal Kombat” item for the holidays was indeed tongue-in-cheek. We did our best to include puzzle games, kids’ games and sports as well as other categories. The majority of the titles featured are nonviolent games (“Guitar Hero,” “Yoshi’s Island, ” “Tetris,” etc. are just a few of our favorites.)
You’ve offered a very interesting perspective, and I thank you for bringing it to our attention — I’ll be sure to keep it in mind for future games roundups.
Incidentally, I haven’t spoken to any of my seventh-grade teachers in years, but I’m sure they’re glad not to have me in their classes anymore.
Thanks for the feedback,
Omar Gallaga
Nintendo is replacing the not-so-tough straps on its Nintendo Wii controllers, several sources are reporting this morning. About 3.2 million straps will be replaced with sterner stuff.
If you’ve been lucky enough to score the in-demand Wii game console, you can get your straps replaced for free at Nintendo’s wrist strap replacement page. You’ll need your Wii serial number. According to the site, shipments will start going out on Dec. 21.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the terror will soon pass.
While many gamers who don’t flail their arms around like overexcited chickens have seen the reports of so-called “Wiimotes” breaking TVs and causing black eyes as little more than goofy news of the weird, Nintendo is probably doing well to cover its Wii, so to speak, and avoid costly litigation that would surely ensue once the Wii is more widely available and enough rough-playing kids find ways to injure themselves and destroy their homes with the otherwise harmless ‘mote.
As always, play safe, kiddos. Smooth movements, everybody.
This video has been making the rounds showing that despite the supposedly awesome hardware power of the PlayStation 3, its backward compatibility magic may be lacking.
According to the video (which has received more than 200,000 views in its multiple incarnations on YouTube), you’re better off playing PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games on the original systems than on the PS3. They point to “Jaggies,” the jagged edges on graphics (note the hair on the “Final Fantasy” characters) caused by a lack of anti-aliasing, a feature which smooths out rough edges.
Whether this is something that could be fixed with a future PS3 software upgrade is debatable (the PS3 could potentially lack the necessary hardware to “upscale” older games). But until we hear more from Sony or see other comparisons (this could conceivably be a hoax), we could be seeing a case where outputting video in the wrong resolution, or through an HDMI cable instead of component, could be part of the issue. The video evidence is compelling, but for now, take it with a grain of salt. You can read more about it on this discussion thread.
One thing I forgot to mention in the last entry:
* Greatest plan ever thought up today about a Sanrio purchase by Microsoft. Many other plans related to war, love and even kids’ soccer matches are probably better.
All right, Microsoft. You weathered the holiday crush of retail attention paid on your rivals for console supremacy, Nintendo and Sony. You introduced a new service for people to download movies and TV shows (a few in high-def, even!). Sure, the pricing is pretty high considering they’re just rentals and you weren’t able to keep up with network demand. But it’s a step, at least.
Here’s what you can do to steal back some thunder from Sony and Nintendo:
Good luck, Xbox 360. Right now, you’re still my console of choice. But you can’t stay complacent or the Wii and the PS3 are going to overtake you next year.
I don’t know why this video makes me so happy on a rainy Monday, but it just does.
(Link courtesy Engadget.)
From around the Web today:
The Wall Street Journal reports today that about five percent of the sextiquintaquadrillion iPods out there are likely to fail, making the number of failed iPods large, yet these aren’t Shaq-at-the-free-throw-line causes for despair.
As some of you may remember, my iPod died a few months ago, and after some brief hoping that iPodResQ.com would fix my beloved OmiePod1, I had to send my dead friend to be recycled and buy a new one.
Sure, I wasn’t thrilled. And the 10 percent discount on a new iPod was more aggravating than welcome. But as I type this, listening to Nine Inch Nails on my new video iPod, I’ve gotta say that my old one did put up with an awful lot of abuse in its two-year lifespan.
Behind me, Joe Gross has an iPod that looks older than Moses (and probably plays the same number of songs), but his seems to be chugging away just fine, so as usual with consumer electronics for the masses, your mileage may vary.
On my list of story ideas for my new beat is one about older gamers and a study that the University of Texas at Dallas is doing on the effect on elder brains of videogames.
NPR did a story today and I’m wondering if they also saw it on Joystiq or if they read the original Yahoo story (no longer online).
Fascinating subject. I hope to do something on this in the near future.
Time Warner is apparently doubling its download speeds for Road Runner for customers, which is good news for people like me (yay!), but is probably not much help to people who run Web servers and want similar speed increases for uploads (boo!).
Suddenly, downloading HDTV movies over an online pay service doesn’t seem so crazy anymore.
Your laugh of the day: more (and hilarious) safety precautions for the strap-breaking Nintendo Wii. (Link courtesy Penny Arcade).
Speaking of Penny Arcade, the boys behind arguably the Web’s best gaming comic, are again working on the Child’s Play charity.
This is a charity set up to provide games and game systems to kids in hospitals, including two in Texas, which is as worthy a cause as I can think of for warm-hearted gamers.
Check out the Child’s Play Web site and donate, or if you’re cash-strapped, check out how you can help at GameTrailers.com.
As Gabe and Tycho have pointed out many times over the years, gamers get generally a bad rap. Let’s give it up for gamers who are working on something undeniably good and doing a phenomenal job of it.
The Nintendo Wii has a few great games out of the gate (“Wii Sports,” purportedly “Zelda”), but “Rayman Raving Rabbids” is the first one that’s made me genuinely gleeful.
It’s a collection of mini games with a threadbare story line featuring Rayman to connect them, but the villainous “Rabbids” of the game are so hilarious and the games themselves so inspired (using the Wiimote to draw food that the rabbids then eat; hurling a cow as a shotput) that you can’t help but admire the crazy ingenuity that went into this showcase title. An end-of-stage battle involving plungers and a “Mad Dog McCree”-like shooting interface is loads of fun.
It’s definitely a pick-up-and-play kind of game with on-screen instructions before each challenge. You won’t get that kind of help from a game like “WarioWare Inc.” where part of the challenge is to figure out what you’re supposed to do before the mini-game is over.
My wife and I only got to play “Rayman” for about an hour last night, but already it feels like a keeper. We’ll see if the length of its gameplay (my guess would be it’s on the short side) becomes a factor.
Many who follow the tech biz (and many readers of Cnet, this one included) mourned yesterday for the life of James Kim, the Cnet tech editor who, by all accounts, was a committed and brilliant technologist.
Many tech and videogame blogs started reporting that Kim and his family were missing long before the mainstream media caught up, but the drama made national headlines right up until the start news alert on CNN yesterday dashed everyone’s hopes that the journalist would be found alive in the Oregon wilderness.
Most tech blogs have been appropriately mournful and Cnet’s own site has received an outpouring of support from readers. Some offensive comments were deleted quickly by moderators and the technology site has been a hub for those who had been following the story and hoping it wouldn’t end in tragedy. Some readers have complained about the deleted comments, but these nits are far outweighed by those wishing to offer their condolences to the family and to remember Kim’s work.
Maybe I’m feeling a little oversensitive given the shock of yesterday’s news, but it seems a little opportunistic to me for Gizmodo to post a Wilderness Survival Gadget Guide the day after Kim’s body was found. Sure, it’s useful information and there’ll be lots of interest, but waiting a few more days wouldn’t have hurt a story like this.
Different news outlets, especially online, are free to react as they wish to what became national news, but this one just feels really tacky, guys.
Ricky Gervais, whom we love around here without reservation (the script he and Stephen Merchant wrote for last week’s U.S. “The Office” was, as expected, brilliant), talks to Wired about videogames, technology and British boys who need more sunlight.
I find it interesting that his debut as a voice in a videogame is in “Scarface: The World is Yours,” which for all its strengths is still sort of a movie-tie-in version of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” You could argue that “Scarface” the movie came first, but the game sure has a “Been there, done that” feel as it coughs on Rockstar Games’ two-year-old dust.
I haven’t played the game “Archlord” (mostly because the name reminds me too much of Rowan Atkinson as Lord Blackadder), but come January, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game is going free. Here’s part of the press release:
Beginning Jan. 4, 2007, no further subscription payments will be required to play ArchLord, and the period from Dec. 4, 2006 through Jan. 4, 2007 will be the last official billing period before switching to the free-to-play service …
As the transformation takes place, existing three-, six- or 12-month ArchLord subscribers will be eligible for refunds. New players who purchase a retail copy of ArchLord will be able to play without paying for a subscription, as the retail box provides 30 days free play, and the game will have switched to its free-to-play model by the end of this period.
So you still gotta pay for the game but, like NCSoft’s “Guild Wars,” you get to play after that without a monthly subscription. Hear that, Blizzard? Wanna at least reduce the fee on “World of Warcraft?”
(Also, I don’t see how a company that calls itself Codemaster could possibly do any wrong. I mean, am I missing something? These guys are masters of code. Clearly they are wizards of modern technological syntax.)
Wanna see everything, in minute detail, that’s on my desk?
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m in a new workspace.
It’s a little scary, but I’m comforted by many silly toys designed to lull my co-workers into thinking I’m harmless. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it works all too well.
So check out my Flickr set (don’t forget to click on the photos and hover over items to see them exhaustively detailed) to see exactly how a Statesman reporter’s desk works. I’m not sure if it’s Feng Shui, but is intended to maximize output (and input) and to increase productivity 1.5-fold. Exponential folding is in my job description, so I need to pick up the pace.
Today is my official first day back on the Statesman side covering technology again. (Yep, the past two and a half years of blogging “Digital Savant” were just for fun. Seriously.)
Where have I been? I’ve been editing Cox’s Spanish-language newspaper, ¡ahora sí!, which was incredibly rewarding and got me out of the main newsroom for a few years. Huh. I think I’m going to have to change the text over on the left side of this page … And that muy-serious mugshot has got to go.
I’ll be covering technology, but my hope is that I won’t just be writing about video games and gadgets. I hope to cover how technology affects culture and what it does to us and to our subcultures (both good and bad). I also plan to write about the evolution of bagel technology in all its forms. We will have a perfect bagel in Austin one day! This I swear!
My first day back involved an ergonomic keyboard from 1985 (you don’t even want to know; the thing looked someone eviscerated an old Commodore Vic-20), not having my phone number moved over yet (refreshing, actually; I didn’t have to answer it all day) and a new chair that tried to tip over and kill me every time I sat down. Can you get workers comp if your chair causes you to tip forward and hit your head on the desk?
The techs at work managed to get my (less 80s-style) keyboard to work. I swapped my chair out, rescuing the one that had carefully molded itself to my hindquarters for years. And I spent the morning adjusting the settings on my new monitor, re-doing all the bookmarks that mysteriously disappeared and tweaking Firefox to do my browsing bidding.
All in all it was kind of a fun morning and now that things are comfy in my new digs, I’m off to the races. Now that I’m no longer editing (my proposed new job title: Writer/Reporter of Things), expect me to write so much you’ll be incredibly tired of hearing/reading my voice.
You’ll be all, “Dude, shut up already,” and I’m gonna be like, “No, dude you have to hear about this Web site I just found,” and you’ll be like, “Well, all right, but just this one time,” and I’ll be like, “See?! Check it,” and you’ll be like, “THAT ROCKS!” and I’ll smile and go, “Totally.”
It’s going to rock so hard, y’all.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk more with you (or “rap,” as the kids call it) about the PS3 and Wii anymore — it’s just that the sooner I get out of here, the sooner I can go to sleep and wake up to a turkey Thursday! Turkey, you see, is one of the analog things I love most.
But let me hit you up, real hungry like, before I go brave I-35 southbound:
We’ve talked about the game consoles (I even talked about them out loud).
“Genji” for the PlayStation 3: Supposedly this isn’t the worst game out so far for the PS3, but I bet it comes pretty close. Lame storyline involving swords and honor and stuff. Very muddy graphics (although the cut scenes are all right). Characters awkwardly flirt with each other while waving swords around. Sometimes when you say a game is “Very Japanese,” you mean it in the coolest sense of the words — “WarioWare Inc.” is very Japanese and it’s fantastic fun. This game is feudal in pace and brainless in execution. It’s one of those games where you wander around smashing pots and fighting 100,000 bad guys in order to get a crystal that increases the potency of your smash staff by like 2 percent. Yawn. “Genji?” More like “Gigli!”
“Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” for Nintendo Wii: Maybe I’m just the wrong person to review this because I’m not willing to spend 8 hours to get past the boring first part of the game. I’m sure it gets better. I’m sure this adventure becomes epic and grand and is measured to scale. But given the spoils of the holiday season, I have become an impatient gamer, and very little about this game screams, “Play me now!” to me. I’m going to give it one last go, but right now this one just isn’t my cup of green tea.
“Need for Speed: Carbon” for PS3: This game looks very, very good and plays well. It also has a lot of motion-captured actors who are then animated for a very creepy effect that I guess works with the game’s dark, illegal driving theme. The game goes from cutscene to straight racing smoothly and, although it may not be the best-looking racing game ever, the graphics are no slouch and the menus move along with zip and verve. Just don’t ask me whether zip and verve are engine parts of not. This probably needs some more playtime, but so far it’s one that I’d like to go back and explore some more.
Gears of War for Xbox 360: I kept putting off playing this even though it was in my living room, growling for attention, because of the PS3 and Wii launch. I finally unwrapped it and tried it last night and it’s everything that was fantastic about Unreal with the play mechanics of the excellent Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. I only got to play for an hour or so, but in that time, the game completely sold me. Its graphics are stunning. The controls are marvelous. The weapons feel chunky and delicious. I want to play this some more and the though that there is a whole multiplayer and co-op version of this game also waiting take it to the top of the heap. It does everything right that the PS3’s rival Resistance: Fall of Man is going for.
Resistance: Fall of Man for PS3: I kept getting killed on the first level and then went back and tried again and got much further the second time around. But to what end? The game feels like a mix between all the WWII action games that have flooded the market with the aliens from Halo thrown in to mix things up. It looks good and sounds fine (when you can get the sound to work; I had to disable Dolby Digital sound to get anything to come out of my speakers). But it doesn’t feel particularly innovative or fresh in the way that Gears does. That it’s the PS3’s top-selling game so far is evidence that the system launched without enough great games to choose from. I’m going to plug on in hopes that the story or the action picks up, but so far this feels like a game that wouldn’t have made much of an impression if it wasn’t being launched on a new system. Again, I may be missing something, but so far this one just isn’t grabbing me.
And I’m out (for now).
Happy Thanksgiving, folks!
I’m working on some more Wii and PlayStation 3 updates (as well as a bit about “Gears of War” for Xbox 360, which might just blow away anything on either of those systems) for later today. In the meantime, here’s some more game console info.
An interactive guide (featuring my silky man voice) that breaks down the features of the three game consoles in Flashy form has been posted. Try to figure out where I went off-script and had to improvise. Shout-out to my homie Rob V. for putting it all together.
Also, we want to know what you make of all this. Why not use the handy comment feature to let us know:
Hmmm… I see there’s some interest in this thing.
Question I’m being asked today: “Is it worth it?”
By which I’m guessing people mean the waiting in line, the camping out, the $600 (plus TAX!) + money for memory card adapters + money for at least one extra controller ($50!) + of course, money for games ($60 each!)…
No. No, it isn’t. I’m sorry, but not even a decent gaming PC is worth much more than that. The PS3 seems to be a quite capable piece of hardware, but based on my two days with it, it feel like a rushed, unfinished system, one that will no doubt grow and mature through downloadable software updates. But its small library of games, reliance on unproven Blu-ray disc technology and the big question mark of its online service — these are all red flags for me. I know people love to stand in line and say, “Me first!” but I’m telling you that your time would have been better spent waiting in line for a delicious Freebirds burrito.
Unless you’re selling it on eBay. In which case, well-done.
More thoughts on the PS3:
Tried the Blu-ray movie “Black Hawk Down.” The grainy nature of the movie makes it tough to judge, but close-ups on faces look mighty fine, and firefights are convincingly dynamic in HD. I didn’t get to dig into the extras, but the film looks great. But along with “Talladega Nights,” which uses a lot of bright and overexposed stock, it’s hard to get a sense of the quality of the video output. Something like a Pixar movie might be a better gauge. Still not blowing me away, though.
Tried “NBA 2K7,” a very good basketball game that looks and plays well. Player models are pretty great (albeit all very sweaty-looking). Annoying quirk: The game installs data to the hard drive to (presumably) decrease load times later. I’m not sure if I did something wrong, but I had to stare at the screen for several minutes waiting for this data to copy over when all I wanted to do was jump in and shoot some hoops. I’m told other games will ask you to install data to the hard drive before playing, too.
It’s still having weird resolution issues. The PS3 asks you what your HDTV’s highest resolution is — 720p or 1080i. Do you know the answer off the top of your head? I always assumed it was personal preference. (I like 1080i better.) 1080 is a higher resolution, but 720p is progressive. According to the PS3, 720p is preferable, and many of the games require you to either use that or dump to the undesirable and dreaded 480p. Yucko.
Next up, I’ll be checking out “Gengi” and “Need for Speed Carbon” along with more of “Resistance.” I’ll also be checking out the online network and seeing how nicely the PS3 plays with an iPod, a PSP and a thumb drive.
The box from Sony arrived, large, brown and inconspicuous. Inside, wonders of technology that people are willing to camp out and get injured for.
The PlayStation3 within is itself a big, heavy hunk of shiny black metal and plastic. Though it’s not as huge as I feared from photos I’d seen, this thing is dense as if its innards are made of mercury. It’s got some heft, is all I’m saying, and you’d do well not to try to balance one of these on top of a thin above-TV surface where it’s likely to topple over, shattering your $600 investment (plus TAX!).
At least it only has a single power cable and not the massive power brick we find on both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. So THAT’S where that density is coming from — the brick is inside the PS3. Brilliant, Sony!
Unlike most modern A/V devices, this one has a relatively simple set of ports in the back. HDMI for newer HD sets (my HDTV doesn’t have this port; I have to use an HDMI-to-DVI cable, which I handily happened to have in the house. Call me prepared). Sony was nice enough to send an HDMI cable, but if that’s your connection of choice, you won’t find it included with the system. Budget an extra $20-$50 for that.
Once set up, the system asks you to plug in the wireless controller via an included USB cable. Then it went to a main menu that will look familiar to anyone who plays with the Sony PSP. You can stroll through options for playing music, playing games, playing Blu-Ray DVDs, setting up your network, Web browsing and other tantalizing options I didn’t have a chance to fully explore.
Getting online via my wireless network was simple — even simpler than doing it on the Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360, which was surprising. My wireless network was detected with no fuss and soon a required update was being downloaded.
Restart.
Once updated, the system could not Web browse. Web pages looked very tiny on the high-definition-resolution screen, but I’m sure playing with some settings might help that.
I tried popping in the included Blu-Ray DVD “Talladega Nights.” At first, the colors seemed washed out and nowhere near as awe-inspiring as I’d come to expect from a next-generation DVD format. Hell, my “Finding Nemo” standard-def DVD blows this away.
But after settling in for a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the picture. It looks good, crisp and clear, but won’t blow anyone away who is already used to watching Discovery HD or over-the-air television shows in high-definition. However, being able to access DVD menus without leaving the movie is very nice indeed.
Even when playing a DVD, the PS3 is pretty quiet, definitely quieter than its console competitors.
Let’s see… what else…
I only had time to try one game, “Resistance: Fall of Man.” I got a message telling me I needed to change my high-definition settings to display the game in 720p resolution.
Quit the game. Adjust the setting. Come back to the game.
No sound. What’s up?
After some troubleshooting, I figured out that I had to disable Dolby Digital on my optical cable connection in order for the game to output any kind of sound, even though sound in the Blu-Ray movie and on the main PS3 menus worked fine.
All right, Sony. That’s really annoying. You really expect 50 million potential customers to have to wade through menus to figure that out?
So what have we learned?
The PS3, on first glance, is an attractive (though large and heavy) piece of hardware.
You’re going to need to know how to deal with arcane cables and weird high-definition and surround sound settings to get the most out of the PS3.
Its menus, while obviously stuffed with capabilities, are much harder to navigate and make sense of than the Nintendo Wii. The target is obviously techies and gearheads. Is Sony stumbling by not making its console easier to set up and use? I foresee software updates to address these issues after a flood of calls to tech support.
“Resistance: Fall of Man” looks great. The WWII+aliens shooter has fine graphics and good sound (once you get it working). But it feels a lot like “Halo 2” with a World War II setting. Still, not bad for a launch title.
Blu-Ray works well, but I’m not sure most people will be able to see a huge jump in quality from DVD paired with a good HDTV set to Blu-Ray + HDTV. Many good HDTVs and DVD players upscale to HD resolutions anyway . I hope Blu-Ray has more up its sleeve than the supposedly much-improved image quality. (To be fair, my HDTV only goes up to 1080i resolution; the holy grail is supposed to be 1080p, though many experts say the difference is negligible to most eyes.)
Sony’s in for a huge battle. On first glance, the PS3 is certainly powerful, but it’s not as fun as the Wii to set up and play.
More updates to come.
Oh, the humanity!
Anyhoo… after having a reporter wave a microphone in your face, referring repeatedly to the PlayStation3 as a “game” and telling you that “us girls” don’t fit into the world of gaming, an appropriate response would be to say, “THIS INTERVIEW IS OVER!” and skulk off. But then you’d lose your place in line and your mad eBay markup if you actually score a PS3.
Sadly, online gamers are a cruel bunch. Expect the mockery to continue.
The video in question:
“Wii Sports,” a bundle of games that will come packaged with every Wii system, will be one of those rare titles that’ll appeal to jaded, hard-core gamers as well as people who rarely, if ever, pick up a game controller.
It includes cartoony versions of baseball, bowling, boxing, tennis and golf and each of the games is controlled by the “Wiimote” in an approximation of the actual sport. For bowling, you swing the Wiimote like you would a bowling ball, holding the “B” button trigger and releasing it when you want to let go of the ball. (Beware: Nintendo is serious when they tell you to wear the goofy wrist-strap when you play. I found that out the hard way when I accidentally threw the Wiimote and watched it slide across the floor and under the TV.)
For Tennis, you swing your Wiimote like a racket, including backhands, and twist the device to put back- or top-spin on the ball.
Nice, huh?
You can use any character you’ve created from your “Mii” library of avatars (I imagine you can also use ones created by friends if they bring a Mii stored on their own controller). If you have enough controllers, you can play from 1-4 players on some games (tennis, golf, bowling) or 1-2 players (boxing, baseball).
My wife liked tennis (although she got a little bit bored with the repetitiveness of playing backcourt: The game controls the player movement and all you do is swing). Much better for her was boxing, which uses the Wiimote and the detachable “Nunchuck.”
Skeptical at first, she raised her hands and began punching at the air with the two sensor-enabled controllers. Soon, her diminutive opponent was on the canvas, nursing a bruised head.
Minutes later, she was swinging wildly, throwing a blinding fury of punches without bothering to block or move around. She crept closer and closer to the TV. Her months of “Body Combat” training at the gym were paying off in brutal virtual pugilism.
“Watch out! You’re gonna punch the TV!” I cried. “But I gotta beat this guy up!” she yelled back.
In short: good times. After a few sweaty matches (I think her record is currently 6-0-0), we moved on to golf.
Like tennis, the game can get repetitive, but the Wiimote can sense even minute degrees of movement. When putting, the Wii can tell the difference between a tiny, tiny swing and a shot that’ll send your ball way past its intended target.
Put together, the games are nick package. And training and fitness modes add several more mini-games that make fun use of the system.
Next update: “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.” Is it just me, or is this game boring?
We were lucky enough to get our hands early on a Nintendo Wii (and by “We” I mean me, although I’m happy to share. Come on over for a visit, everybody!).
The game console, which launches on Sunday, is Nintendo’s entry into the next-generation console business, but rather than focus on advanced graphics or playing next-generation DVDs, this is a games console first and foremost, and that design philosophy shines through in the diminutive Wii.
Here are some initial thoughts after a weekend of playing:
The hardware: The system is tiny. VERY tiny. It takes up about 1/3 the size of an Xbox360. The PS3 is reported to be even bigger than the 360, so the Wii wins the price for most compact size.
Standing on its side on the included plastic stand, the console looks no bigger than a softcover book. Game discs load up through a slot-loading drive in the front. Under the hood are ports for memory cards and four controllers from the Nintendo GameCube. There’s a slot in the front for an SD card, used in lots of digital cameras, to view photos and some kinds of media files like MP3s and QuickTime videos.
The big selling point for the Wii is its unique controller, a remote control-shapes white device that senses movement. A very small wired sensor bar, which looks no bigger in size than a ruler, can sit on top of your TV or under it to detect the controller’s movement. The bar, designed in black and gray and with a very thin gray cable, doesn’t call attention to itself, which is nice in a home theater setup.
The wireless controller is thin and light and runs on two AA batteries. It has a small speaker (more on that later) and can vibrate. When scrolling over Wii menus, you can feel small tactile vibrations that make it easier to make selections on screen. You move around the TV as if using a laser pointer. There’s a trigger under the remote and other buttons. A wired addition to the controller called the “Nunchuck” is also sensor-enabled and using two together gives a remarkable degree of freedom and fun. In a game like Wii Sports, you can control a boxer by using one hand to land right punches with the “Wiimote” and the other hand to land left hands with the Nunchuck. Using the two together, you can dodge and move around. It’s fun and works surprisingly well.
Setting up the system was easy, but I have one major gripe: the included A/V cables are only composite video (the old yellow, red and white cables), which seems cheap. There’s not even an option for S-Video unless you buy a separate cable.
Games We had three games to test out. The new “Legend of Zelda” game, the bundled “Wii Sports” and a racing came called “ExciteTruck.”
“Wii Sports” is a winner. It includes Tennis, Baseball, Boxing, Golf and Bowling. Each one uses the Wii controller in unique and fun ways. You swing the remote like a racket in tennis. For golf, you hold the Wiimote like a golf club and swing. In bowling, you swing the remote, holding down the trigger, then releasing to let go of the ball and move it down the lane.
The bundle encourages play with multiple players (although the console only comes with one controller and nunchuck). The graphics are colorful and fun. Gameplay doesn’t feel repetitive.
“Zelda” might be fun, but it starts slowly and the graphics feel dated and drab. I’ll have more to say on this one once I’ve had more time to play it.
“Excitetruck” is fun, basic racing with a twist on the controls. You hold the controller horizontally and more it like a steering wheel, tilting the controller toward or away from you while in mid-air to control jumps. It’s fun and fast and exactly the kind of game that’ll sell the Wii to jaded gamers and casual gamers in equal measure.
Online and features
So far, the online capabilities of the Wii are lockdown, presumably until the launch day. But we know there’ll be a channel for weather, a place to buy older-generation games to download (stuff like “Donkey Kong” and older “Mario” games). A “Mii” feature that lets you create a little avatar is a lot of fun and gets players used to using the controller. You can also send messages to other Wii players and leave memos for other players in the house.
The system has built-in WiFi capabilities and I’m curious to see how well online gaming works as Nintendo has been the slowest to embrace online gaming of the three major console makers.
So what’s the verdict? At $250, the Wii will be a very attractive purchase for both casual gamers and the hard-core ones. The Wiimote had made a believer out of me. It works almost perfectly and brings something to the table that neither the Xbox 360 or the PS3 will offer — a new way of playing games that adds a new dimension to the experience.
It remains to be seen whether the games live up to the console’s potential and online is a huge question mark for now. But given that Nintendo is expected to have many more consoles in stores than Sony will be able to produce, it may have an early advantage in capturing holiday shoppers.
So that’s it for now. You can read some more of my impressions of the Wii in this message thread at Videogamey.com.
I’ll keep you updated this week here on Digital Savant— I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll have access to a PlayStation3 soon for comparison.
The Democrats have taken over the House and could possibly be taking the Senate, Rumsfeld has resigned, Britney dumped K-Fed (favorite new nickname: Fed-Ex) and Microsoft just finished work on a whole new Windows operating system and has a ship date.
Did I wake up this morning in the wrong dimension? What is up with all the crazy?
All right, now the next-generation console war is getting interesting.
Sure, you can do this with iTunes and an iPod and on the Web with some TV network sites, but for those who already have an Xbox 360 hooked up to an HDTV, digital delivery is, BOOM, right here, right now. Who needs a high-definition disc format war when you can just download movies and TV shows and watch them right on your TV?
Nice one, Microsoft.
November promises to be a busy month for gamers with lots of new titles being released (I’m personally most excited about Guitar Hero 2 and Gears of War. ) We’ve also got the PlayStation3 and the Nintendo Wii ready to make their debut.
What holiday systems/games are you most excited about? Post here in the comments. Do you plan to make the jump to a next-gen game console?
Last week I raved about Google’s new Gmail Java application, which allows mobile phones such as the Motorola Razr to access the Web-based e-mail service.
I still love the application’s design, but in using it for a few more days, I’ve noticed a few glitches. I’ve had my phone crash on me twice while checking mail. The phone simply goes to black and dumps me back to the main phone screen. On one other occasion, the application simply froze while retrieving messages from my inbox.
This is a first-generation product and free to boot, so don’t expect it to work perfectly on every type of phone. Hopefully, some bug fixes will be addressed in future releases.
If you use a Razr and you use Google’s Gmail for e-mail, you owe it to yourself to download their new free Java application.
Point your phone’s Web browser to www.gmail.com/app to download the wee file and you’re off to the races. (The e-mail races. The ones with the fast e-mail horses. But then I analogize too much … )
The application, released today, works with pretty much any Java-enabled phone. In my quick 10-minute test, the interface is much slicker than trying to navigate Gmail with the regular Web browser. E-mail threads appear similarly to what they do on the regular InterWebz and I was able to open up a Word document and image attachments with no fuss and next to no muss.
The Razr doesn’t exactly feature the best mobile Web browsing around and this free file makes life just a little more bearable for those of us who opted for fashion over form when choosing a cell phone. (Why, oh why, didn’t I just buy a Treo in the first place? Oh yeah … because the Razr is preeeetty.)
A professor at a “private university in San Antonio” claims in this Slashdot posting that the school is using Web-screening software to block everything from The Village Voice to anything to do with .mp3 files.
While I think there’d be a riot that would burn down the city if UT tried that, do private universities have the right to block whichever content they see fit? Isn’t that detrimental to the learning process for university students, many of whom have to do much of their research online?
Just askin’.
Every two years ago, especially around the time a new technology cycle ramps up and prices fall quickly, I get the hankering to upgrade my desktop computer.
Sometimes a data disaster or a particularly good deal on a video card will make for incremental updates, but a full-on motherboard + processor changeover is something you really have to commit to. For one thing, taking apart your whole computer and putting it all back together with new components is a weekend project. Being extra-extra careful, the whole process can take four or five hours and that’s not counting if something goes wrong and you need to troubleshoot why your computer won’t post (that is, starting up the first; the flat PC speaker beep is its birthcry).
My last upgrade was to a AMD Athlon 2600+ Mobile processor (which works just fine in a desktop motherboard). I bought a new case and power supply at the time to accommodate the new system. The changeup also required me to buy a new kind of RAM. And while I was in there, I updated my IDE interface to rounder connectors that aren’t as restrictive of airflow as older ribbon-style cables.
I also spread some Arctic Silver 5 on the processor and upgraded from the stock heatsink/fan that came with the processor bundle. The result was a speedy machine that overclocks well, up to about 2.3 GHz, far beyond the 1.8 GHz the processor was meant to run. It’s been running fairly stable for the last two years.
Recently, though, the price on dual-core processors has fallen so far that the performance jump has finally made the upgrade worthwhile. Couple that with some power supply problems I’ve been having and an aging video card, and it was time to rebuild.
So I started haunting online forums, checking out prices on newegg.com, scrutinizing the Fry’s circulars as if they were Dead Data Scrolls, looking for good deals. Sure, I thought about just buying a new computer for just a few hundred dollars more, but my problem with computers is you can’t always pick the components you want and except for very expensive custom PCs, you usually don’t get a decent videocard with most pre-built machines. Sure, there are very inexpensive PCs (and the thought of buying a Mac desktop did cross my mind), but they rarely offer the performance you get from picking your own top-of-the-line components and tweaking the BIOS settings yourself.
The upgrade is happening this week. Instead of doing it myself, I’m using a local computer store that charges a flat rate of under $50 for upgrades, but I’m buying everything a la carte and taking it all to them (except for the processor and motherboard, which I’m buying from the store).
The goal was to build a fairly affordable system that will be rock-solid stable (my wife also uses the computer and has little patience for unplanned restarts or system crashes) and run very fast with some room for overclocking without exotic liquid cooling or aftermarket processor heatsinks. It would also need to be able to run the latest PC games at high speeds and be able to upgrade to Windows Vista next year when the time comes.
Here’s what’s being upgraded:
Processor: Intel Duo 2 Core E6400 (runs at 2.18 GHz but is commonly overclocked well beyond 3 GHz with the right components and cooling). I’ve been running on AMD Athlon processors for a while now, but this time it looks like Intel scored a coup with its Duo 2 Core line. They run cool and efficient and very, very fast if the campfire stories are to be believed. This processor is about $100 cheaper than the next step up and the performance on it is said to be stellar. About $225.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3. Choosing a motherboard was by far the hardest part of the process. Depending on whom you ask, some motherboards overclock well, while others are better if you want to run at stock speeds. This motherboard had almost universally good reviews, though it’s considered a mid-range board compared to some of the more deluxe offerings from rival manufacturer ASUS. In this case I tried to balance price with performance. The only downside is that this won’t run a dual-graphics-card configuration (known as SLI for Nvidia cards of Crossfire for ATI cards), but I decided to stick to a single graphics card because I don’t want to mess with trying to eke more performance out of two separate video cards. The board runs about $150, but the prices on it keep dropping as more competitors that run Duo 2 Core processors enter the mix.
Memory: Two gigs of Patriot DDR2 667 MHz memory. Again, balancing price with performance. DDR2 800 memory is theoretically faster, but this particular model is said to overclock well past 800 MHz for a much cheaper price ($181, on sale). Patriot memory is considered to be very stable and worth its premium pricing. Memory prices for DDR2 memory (the emerging standard for newer motherboards) is incredibly high right now. You might find yourself paying more for decent memory than any other component in a new PC right now.
Power Supply: 600W Ultra V series power supply. Fry’s had a sale on these recently: $20 after rebate. You can’t beat that. For newer systems with high-end graphics card, a power supply upgrade is usually necessary. To future-proof your system, you probably shouldn’t go below 500W. Many higher-end power supplies run for more than $100.
Graphics card: Sapphire x1900XT 256 MB. A very well priced high-end card that compromises on memory (most x1900XT cards run at 512 MB) with a negligible performance hit unless you’re running at insanely high monitor resolutions. ATI and Nvidia are price cutting and introducing new card models left and right. A new generation of videocards is pending (those that will run the upcoming Windows DX10 standard in Vista), but if you don’t mind settling for a current-generation card while that all shakes out, there are great deals to be had. About $235 after a mail-in rebate.
Components from my old system moving over include an SATA hard drive, an IDE hard drive partitioned into two drives, a budget Audigy sound card (with a very useful Firewire port) and a DVD drive/burner. There’s also an old SCSI CD-ROM drive and a spare, empty 40 Gig hard drive sitting in my case, but I’m not sure that those components will make it over to the new system.
I’ll be using the same case (assuming everything fits in there; it looks a lot like this one). And before I take it in, I’ll be backing up everything to an external hard drive.
Total price: Right around $900.
Sure, you can get a new mid-range computer for that, but what fun would it be not to be able to do all that shopping?
I’ll let you know how the upgrade goes.
APC Magazine tears Steve Jobs a new one with this hilarious blooper compilation video. My goodness. Poor Steve:
Wow, you’re not so slick without your silhouetted iPod dancers, huh?
(Via Gizmondo.)
Is no laptop safe from the scourge of Sony-made fiery laptop batteries?
Toshiba has joined the recall madness (though, apparently, not for flaming hotness), and there may be more on the way. There was a report this week that an IBM laptop caught fire at Los Angeles International Airport.
My best advice to laptop owners, short of full firefighting gear, is that when you’re at home, keep the battery in a fireproof cage, away from paper, blue-tip matches or flammable liquids. Do not expose the battery to bright light or to water. And whatever you do, don’t feed it after midnight.
A big news day today:
Nintendo announces Wii launch details. $249 price (with a set of sports games bundled in!) with one controller, Nov. 19 launch, two days after you won’t be able to find a PlayStation3 in stores. You’ll be able to download classic Nintendo games, but disappointingly, no support for playing actual online games at launch. Come on, Nintendo. It’s 2006. Where’s your online multiplayer gaming?
Microsoft launches its Zune player to not quite Apple-levels of hype. As I said recently, I was gonna go buy a new iPod after mine died, but this makes things more interesting. I dig the wireless song sharing, but then you’d have to know someone else who has a Zune and that may not happen for a while. My prediction: if it costs $199, it’ll do very well for those not p0wned by Apple’s marketing. If it costs $299 for the 30 gig model, it is doomed. (Or maybe Zumed.) In any case, the news that iTunes 7.0 is reportedly glitchy won’t hurt.
A woman gets a bionic arm. Am I the only one who thinks that’s kind of hot?
Sometimes a press release comes across your desk that is so ridiculous, so on its face untrue, that you will find yourself doubting the veracity of anything that comes from that news source for years to come.
McLaughlin & Associates released the results of a “national survey of 1,000 adult wireless phone users, who are likely voters, via telephone on August 27-28, 2006.”
Here is the stunning first conclusion of the survey:
86% are satisfied with their wireless phone service
86 percent! Do you know ONE person in your life who is satisfied with their cell phone service? The rest of the questions/results have to do with government regulation of the cell phone industry (that must have been an awesomely fun survey to conduct; cell phone users love digging into the issue of government regulation); but you have to doubt every single thing in the rest of the results of this highly unscientific survey when you see that first conclusion.
86 percent? Really? Where, in Bizarro World?
Here are the results of my equally unscientific survey, in which I called one person (me) to get my thoughts on cell phone service in Bizarro World.
FACT: In Bizarro World, there is no such thing as a dropped call.
FACT: In Bizarro World, you don’t have 15 weird unexplained charges on your cell phone.
FACT: In Bizarro World, you don’t get charged for cell phone options you will never, ever use.
FACT: In Bizarro World, you don’t deal with arcane cell phone plans and coverage areas that heavily penalize you for going a few minutes over your plan or calling from the boonies. (Er, Bizarro Boonies.)
FACT: In Bizarro World, 86% of customers are satisfied with their wireless service.
The results of my survey are clear: We should all move to McLaughlin & Associates’ Bizarro World.
I’m feeling a little ambivalent about today’s major Apple announcements about its iPod line because mine just died last week.
My 20-gig monochrome iPod (OmiePod1 to his friends), went to the big music graveyard in the sky (what’s up, Rob Pilatus? How ya doing, Janis?) last week when the hard drive started clicking and whirring, and I got the sad/sick (but undeniably cute) iPod icon.
I tried several methods for reviving the thing, from dropping it and banging it around to physically prying it open and examining the innards to make sure the hard drive cable wasn’t dislodged.
Nothing worked. I banged it on the table some more.
I took it to the Apple store and a smug “Apple Genius” played around with it for two minute (after making me wait 15) and declared the thing was “A goner.” He offered me 10 percent off a new one.
I sent the iPod to iPodResQ.com, which was the best solution I could find for figuring out if my ‘Pod was worth saving. For $29, they’ll overnight you a box to pack your iPod, diagnose it and either fix it for you after you’ve approved the estimate or send your dead friend back, no questions asked. The friendly rep called me on Friday and told me my iPod had a bad hard drive and a bad “Logic board.” I knew my iPod had logic because sometimes it would play the Raconteurs and White Stripes back to back, as if it knew instinctually what Jack White sounds like. Fixing both would cost $250, about the price of a new shiny iPod.
So now my dead friend sits on my kitchen table, stripped of its blue rubber sleeve and asleep forever. $249 is a decent price for a new 30 gig video iPod (plus the 10 percent funeral/recycling discount), and I like the new announced features for iTunes, but I don’t quite know if I’m ready to make the leap just yet.
I think I need a little more time to mourn OmiePod1.
P.S. Dear Apple — $300 for a set-top box that streams video, but can’t record anything on its own? You have just a few months to make this “iTV” junk worth our while.
Apple enthusiasts (who, let’s face it, can be a smug lot) suddenly have a lot in common with Dell users — it’s battery recall time!
Apple is recalling 1.8 million Sony batteries, similar to the ones that Dell is recalling to the tune of 4.1 million units.
There’s a Web site to check out if your battery needs replacing, but as of 1:35 p.m. on Wednesday, the site is not accessible. Apple must be getting slammed with page requests. We can only hope that the support server doesn’t run on one of those hot batteries.
I was at a party Friday night for a Web site launch when I met a guy who’s been working at Dell for just shy of a decade.
It used to be that when you met someone from Dell, you’d wonder if they were rich yet and congratulate them on the company’s seemingly always-rising stock price.
Now it’s like talking to someone who has a family member in the hospital. You have to tread lightly and try not to seem callous.
“Oh, wow, how are things going over there?” I asked.
He looked grim. “Battery recall, SEC investigation, stock price. It’s pretty miserable.”
I asked what the mood is at Dell. “They gave us these stock options and everybody called them Golden Handcuffs because that’s what kept you there.” Now, he says, he’s being offered stock options at about $60 a share, far above the $21.51 Dell stock is selling for now, making the options pretty worthless.
At 9 p.m., Tito’s Vodka started offering free drinks, and I hoped that was some small consolation on a Friday night away from Round Rock.
If you’re to take the judge’s decision literally, Dish Network giant Echostar would have had to disable millions of digital video recorders currently residing on top of TVs and in entertainment centers of many of its customers within the next 30 days.
The latest news is that the decision has been blocked by another court, giving Echostar a reprieve, but still … TiVo wins, at least for the time being.
The action comes a few months after TiVo scored a legal victory against Echostar for patent infringement.
We haven’t seen TiVo go after other cable and satellite companies yet, but that might be because they still have an ongoing licensing agreement with DirecTV and another with Comcast to introduce new recorders.
Mostly I’m curious as to how Echostar actually would handle the task of disabling a few million of those boxes. Would customer service reps have to go out and do it manually? Would a giant switch be flipped, rendering all recorded programs and recording functionality dead late one night? Would the company have to order millions of fruit baskets and offer tons of Pay-Per-View vouchers?
It just may be morbid curiosity, but I really want to see PVR Judgment Day.
More discussion on the subject in this forum.
This new portable Sirius radio hasn’t even officially been announced yet, but I already want one.
I held off on Sirius’ S50 because it’s not a true portable satellite receiver (you can record programs when it’s plugged into a base unit, but you can’t listen to satellite live and on the go), but if the specs on this are right, the WiFi will be especially useful for using it indoors. I get sporadic reception in my house in New Braunfels with the indoor antenna I use for my Sirius radio. If it were mounted on the roof or outside, it would be no problem, but using it indoors involves moving it around every few hours based on where the satellites are at a given time.
So far, listening to Sirius online works well, although slower computers aren’t good for it and a slow Internet connection leads to skipping. Sometimes the buffering on channels takes a while and you don’t get artist/song info while listening online. Not sure yet if using WiFi with the Stiletto would address those issues or not. Timeshifting is definitely the wave of the future for satellite radio, though — my radio only buffers 44 minutes for rewinding and pausing at a time, but it’s already a feature I use quite a lot. Setting shows to record in advance to listen in on later would be even better.
Still, $399 is a bit pricey for a satellite radio unit considering you’re still paying a monthly fee and this isn’t a product that has an “i” at the beginning of its name. It seems pretty slick, but it remains to be seen whether packing this many features into a portable unit is going to make it a dream device or, in the words of Red Stripe beer, too much of a good thing.
Any XM users out there using the Inno or Helix units? How does the (purely speculative) Stiletto seem to compare in terms of features? Comment here.
Cute kittens and fuzzy chicks charm me easily, sure, but when was the last time you got all warm and fuzzy about a site that sells stuff online?
I’m late to the party in finding the Web site Woot!, but even a cursory look reveals that this is no average e-commerce Web site. The Dallas-based company sells one item a day on its site. One item. That’s it. Today it’s a “Razor Copperhead” videogaming mouse. Yesterday it might have been a Bluetooth headset or a DVD recorder.
Maybe you’ll see it as crass marketing, but the site’s attitude — including openly mocking some of the products it sells and referring to the first buyer of each product as “First sucker”— is a refreshing change from every other e-commerce site in the world, which all seem to have carry the same heavy-breathing Pottern Barn catalog style of writing.
Woot! has podcasts, silly songs, an entertaining blog and an easy way for users to comment on the products for sale. (You won’t see messages deleted when potentially customers rip into a less-than-reliable product.) The site’s only been around a year, but already it’s cultivated a good-sized community who seem to appreciate the site’s sharp writing and (we’d hope, profitable) wit.
There are some lessons to be learned here about engaging e-commerce and knowing your audience, but I’ll leave it to the Dells and Amazons to figure it out for themselves.
As first reported by trade magazine MCV and on Gamespot and on Next Generation, an announcement is expected today that the massive Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) will be canceled or downsized for the coming year.
If it’s true, it will come in the same year that all three major console manufacturers, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, touted their next-generation systems at this May’s E3 in Los Angeles.
The event, which since 1995 has been a showcase for videogame developers and publishers and which attracts a growing cadre of celebrities, has grown into a costly, mass-media affair.
The rumors are that some of the major exhibitors are finding the cost of putting on an attention-getting show at E3 is not bringing in the payoff on their investment.
If I had to venture a guess, I’d say two companies may be responsible for the no confidence vote in E3. Both Sony and Electronic Arts had lackluster showings at E3 this year and both spent likely millions on their respective presentations. Sony’s wallet-busting price announcement for the upcoming PlayStation3 and E3’s relatively weak lineup at E3 this year (which consisted largely of sports games and a few military sims and one potentially great Will Wright game) both generated bad buzz among the gaming press. If you were pouring millions of dollars into a once-a-year event only to buy a massive backlash against your company, you might think twice, too.
An announcement from E3’s parent company, the Entertainment Software Association, should be coming soon. We’ll let you know what happens.
3:05 p.m.: UPDATE — The ESA has issued its announcement, promising an “evolution” of the conference that indeed sounds like a much-scaled-down version of the flashing lights show we know as E3.
It’s far too early to say whether this is good news or bad news for the videogame industry, but whatever it is that the E3 show has been, it’s never been an intimate, laid-back affair. But there are plenty of smaller games conferences that are less high-glitz (The Game Developers’ Conference, the Austin Game Conference).
What it sounds like, really, is that the games industry just lost its Super Bowl.
You know I love you, right? You know I’d never want you to go out in public and look foolish. You understand that about me, right? I want what’s best for you and if I have to hurt you to tell you this, I hope it’s only for a moment, like tearing off a Band-Aid from your hairy knee.
You look ridiculous. There, I said it. That Bluetooth earpiece you wear when you’re walking around in the mall or crossing the parking lot at Central Market?
Ri. Dic. U. Lus.
The earpiece you wear is a chunky piece of plastic with a glowing blue light on it. Are you planning to ride a bicycle later? You can see that thing blinking on satellite photography. If you get lost hiking, all they have to do to find you is wait until dark.
You know what that cheap piece of blinking plastic makes you look like? Like you’re trying to work your way up to the presidency of the Geordi La Forge Fan Club.
It’s not that I don’t think you should wear a Bluetooth headset. At least you won’t have your hand in a permanent L as you hold a phone up to your ear. But there are nicer, understated models of Bluetooth earpiece that don’t look like homing beacons issued by Starfleet Command. You don’t have to use the ugly free one that came with your phone or the cheapest one they sell at Best Buy. You wouldn’t just wear whatever ugly necktie came with the shirt you bought, would you? You wouldn’t wear earrings that came with your necklace if the earrings had ugly LED lights on them, would you?
This? Is UGLY. It looks like a metal slug is burrowing into your ear.
Check out this one. Good lord! The Borg are coming! And they’ve brought advanced weaponry! Blocky weaponry!
Being pink doesn’t help. Look! An ugly factory! Horrors!
Just think about it, won’t you? I’m not trying to make you mad, really. Please don’t shoot me with your crazy ear death ray.
More bad news for Sony. According to GamePro, Target is dropping the PSP’s UMD movie format and, in a cited Reuters story, Wal-Mart seems to be considering making the same move.
If you like UMDs, now’s the time to stock up — I see some heavy bargain binning in the near future.
When Sony unveiled its coaster-like little UMD discs for watching movies on its PSP game system (and, really, nowhere else), everyone marveled as to the wonderful clarity they were able to pack into those small discs. Spider-Man 2 in a handy to-go format! Genius! And who cares if it’s missing all the extras of a DVD but costs just as much? It’s, like, PORTABLE and stuff!
Never mind that you can put your own movie files on the even more portable Sony Memory Stick and take that with you without the trouble of paying $20 for a movie you might already own.
Sony, too late, seems to have figured it out. The UMD format is dying a slow, lonely death. You can still find movies on store shelves, but Hollywood’s sweet embrace of the pucky discs is dwindling to nothing and even Sony’s own movie division has stopped returning its calls.
This week, Sony introduced a (potentially even more boneheaded) approach to movies on the PSP: copying DVD movies onto Memory Sticks is final scratch on the disc for UMD. It’s purely a face-saving move. Want to know how much faith Sony has in this new idea? These are the movies you’ll be able to copy from DVD in August: Hitch, S.W.A.T., The Grudge and XXX: State of the Union. Wow. Stellar lineup there, Sony. What, you couldn’t get Deuce Bigelow 2?
Expect UMD-format movies to get super-discounted in the next few months then disappear entirely by the end of the year.
If you Google “Dell” and “Exploding laptop,” you get about 299,000 results, many from blogs and news sources detailing an incident in Japan (caught, unluckily for the company, in photos and posted online) in which a Dell Inc. laptop burst into flames. (See the original Web item here.)
An investigation by engineers concluded that it was the fault of a bad battery, but it was one of two incidents, another involving a bad chip, in a very short time. Despite the millions of nonexploding computers the company sells, the blogosphere, as it is wont to do, is going to latch onto the two machines that did catch fire.
The mainstream media has detailed Dell’s publicity woes as well, including the dust-up between the company and financial analysts, one of whom alerted clients to the potentially bad publicity the exploding laptop seen round the world might cause.
Given that many of its customers probably haven’t even heard about the Japan incident, it’s tough to say what the financial impact will be, but it comes at a time when the company is trying to repair bad buzz about its tech support service, which it has said it will invest $100 million to address.
Is it fair that two laptops flambé out of millions should result in such bad publicity? No, not at all. But as Dell has surely learned over the years, the Web is hardly a fair place. Good luck with that ad campaign.
UPDATE: Blogger Jeff Beckham points out Dell’s new official blog, “One2One,” which just launched this week.
The entry I wrote about the Harmony 880 remote turned out to be a bit of a surprise for my dad — I was shopping for it as a birthday/Father’s Day gift for him.
A few minutes after he’d opened his gift, we were already charging the remote and getting online to update the 880 and get all the components of my folks’ home theater into the device. Before I’d blinked, he’d already written down the model numbers for all the pieces, from the DVD player and recorder to the TV, receiver and VCR. I dutifully entered them in and, except for a few tweaks, we got the remote most of the way running. Because of the weird way his HDTV handles device inputs, we weren’t able to get the 880 to switch the TV to the right device automatically with one button press, but there was a way to do it manually.
A few days later and after a call to tech support (and a software update), the remote was perfectly programmed, resolving the input issue on the TV and configuring everything correctly, even my brother’s Xbox360.
So, it sounds like the Harmony 880 is a winner (I got a testimonial from Debbie Hiott in the newsroom, too: She and her husband use pics of their dogs and cats as screensavers on theirs). But it seems like it’s meant for people who have the patience to program it correctly (the setup can be a bit confusing even for technophiles), people who are willing to make a call to Logitech’s tech support when trouble arises, and folks who have access to the model numbers of their devices. My dad has all his tech manuals well organized, but I have a feeling that if I got the remote, I’d be digging behind components for the correct numbers.
The Harmony 880 is said to be a remote that makes things easier than having several remotes around, but the tech curve on programming the thing is high, possibly higher than casual home theater enthusiasts might be willing to deal with. If you have a tech-savvy person in the house, the $150 price tag could make it a good purchase. Otherwise, you might be better off sticking with whatever near-universal remote you already have in hand.
I was going to tell you about a great deal I saw at the San Marcos Prime Outlet Sony store — 900 MHz refurbished wireless headphones for $29.99 (down from a retail price of about $100).
I tried them on and they were comfy. The sound wasn’t bad from a nearby DVD of “The Hunt for Red October.” I noticed a bit of static but I figured it was because I was in a massive room full of electronics and lots of people walking around using cell phones. If I didn’t already have my own home-rigged patched-together extension cord for my earbuds to use late at night while playing videogames when my wife’s asleep, I might have bought them.
According to the reviews on Amazon, I might have regretted doing so. The static appears to be a chronic problem. If you have a microwave oven, an Xbox 360 with wireless controllers or other potentially interfering devices, you probably want to stay away from these.
Which points to the larger lesson: always hunt online for consumer reviews before you make major electronics purchases.
It also doesn’t hurt to do a quick Web search for a $30 “hot deal.”
You know you’ve hit the big time when the front page of the New York Times declares that your multibillion-dollar competition will have to lower prices or offer free service altogether to compete with you.
Congratulations, Voice-over-IP businesses. You have officially hit the mainstream today.
I’ve decided, as my upgrade gene has dictated, that it might be time for a new remote.
A few years ago I raved about the Kameleon, a remote control with a blue touch screen that is highly programmable and allows you to set up your whole home theater into one remote.
Well, the Kameleon that was Christmas-gifted to me has fallen on hard times. It eats batteries quickly and sometimes won’t auto power-off like it’s supposed to. The plastic film on it has gotten worn on the bottom and is falling off like dry skin. And more and more, we find ourselves using the TiVo remote to power on/off everything and change channels. So, even in the best of circumstances, we still have two remote controls to contend with. The cats knock them off the couch. Batteries are drained often.
We’re not buying a fancy multiroom $500 remote (some are even more expensive), the kind custom home theater builders will set you up with and often require two hands to operate. I’m just looking for something that operates cleanly, that doesn’t eat batteries by the handful, and that my wife can operate with a minimum of fuss and steps.
Right now, the front-runner is the Logitech Harmony 880. It has a recharging cradle (no more batteries) a full-color screen that you can program via a USB connection on a computer, and it seems to have more codes for devices than you can shake a remote at. (My beloved Kameleon, unfortunately, didn’t keep up with newer devices, and the whole line seems to have fallen on hard times with no new products in years.)
There’s a Harmony 885, and logic would dictate that 885 is a higher number than 880, but I’m told the 885 is mostly for Europe and has the same features as the 880. There’s a Harmony 890, but the main selling point is that it’s an RF remote in addition to an IR remote, which just means you can control items behind walls and from more of a distance. We don’t really need that and early reviews of the 890 suggest some pretty serious bugs that are keeping me away. Also, it’s about twice as expensive.
So, how about it, 880? Are you the remote for me? Are you worth the $150-$200 that I still think is a little crazy to spend on a remote control? I’m on the fence. Maybe it’ll have to wait until Santa comes around in December.
An online story on game Web site The Inquirer has created a bit of a bad stir about the upcoming PlayStation3 console.
Combining two unassailable journalistic sources — tough to gauge technical specs and some dude on a plane — The Inquirer concludes in its headline, without benefit of a question mark, that “PS3 hardware slow and broken.”
While the specs listed in the story do seem to point to some danger, more, how shall we say it nicely, truthy Web sites such as Joystiq and Slashdot put the info to a higher level of scrutiny and the word seems to be that the kind of memory listed on The Inquirer as hobbled isn’t really that necessary for what the PS3 will be used for.
At least that’s the early conclusion. Maybe The Inquirer is right and the PS3 will ship as a pretty, but bleeding-on-the-inside monstrosity, a slow and awful thing that can’t process graphics as well as competing systems because of a miserable mistake that will cost its company billions, if not thousands of millions!
But I really wouldn’t bet the Simfarm on that.
We’ve got chip and memory experts here in town. Come on, folks — help me out, here. Is The Inquirer totally wrong or just mostly wrong?
Some representatives from Intel Corp. (In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re the ones who compete against AMD) stopped by our offices earlier this week to demonstrate Viiv, which is a cool name (cooler than Nintendo’s “Wii” at least; maybe Nintendo just needed another consonant), but sort of a hard-to-pin-down technology.
Viiv really isn’t a product or a line of products. It’s just a fancy name for a set of specifications that are supposed to tell consumers that the computer they buy meets certain standards for things like streaming high-definition video and doing neat-o home networking. They say that it’s meant to “Simply your digital life,” but like most things technological (and no slam against Intel here; I don’t mean to single them out), that is often a bald-faced, evil lie.
I caught the tail-end of the presentation with Kirk Ladendorf, and in the few minutes they had left, they chatted with me, but didn’t show me much in the way of cool features or even anything on the computer and new-looking peripherals they’d brought and set up in one of our conference rooms.
I asked about TiVo and next-gen game consoles and how Viiv might be incorporated in these consumer-friendly devices. I got answers ranging from, “We don’t really handle that,” to, “We don’t know.” I learned that the whole “Viiv” movement is tied to dual-core processing, which was awesome two years ago, but which now doesn’t seem so impressive. Lots of PCs now have that capability and the upcoming PlayStation3 will have a processor connected to eight other digital cores. Dual-core processors are beginning to look like last year’s handbag.
I can’t help but say I was a little disappointed with the presentation. That wasn’t their fault: they were pressed for time and didn’t get to go into much detail with me. But I was saddened to realize that this had become something like an anti-presentation, a demonstration that left me feeling like I knew less about a technology than when I entered the room, robbing me of the opportunity to pass on to readers why they should care about “Viiv.”
Maybe I’m wrong, but you probably shouldn’t. It feels, to my gut at least, like purely a branding effort, an “Intel Inside” for ‘06 that won’t change your life in the least bit, but will probably look great as a sticker on the front of a new PC.
The $600 price for the PlayStation3 has sent financial analysts to their desktop calculators scrambling to figure out what the effect could be for the games industry as a whole.
It’s not good. According to DFC Intelligence, a higher price targeting more affluent gamers means fewer games sold overall, which could put a crimp on the bottom lines of games publishers who have come to rely on Sony’s massive market share.
It’s too early to tell if Microsoft and Nintendo’s game consoles will take up the sales slack (it’s likely), but the very high price tag (the $500 version of the PS3 has already been dismissed by many gamers as lacking key features that the $600 PS3 has) could erode some of Sony’s market share in the console market. It currently enjoys a very healthy lead in the current gen of consoles with its ridiculously popular PlayStation2.
The console battle rages at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
Sony shocked on Monday with its PlayStation3 sticker price ($499-$599 depending on whether you want the full deal or hobbled hardware), then on Tuesday it was time for Microsoft and Nintendo to strut their stuff in carefully orchestrated press conferences.
Nintendo’s Wii, which despite tons of press is still the most mysterious of the three next-gen consoles, made an interesting showing that leaned heavily on its motion-sensor-enabled remote control controller (called by many the Wii-mote). A photo of the controller shell was revealed, and footage from E3 seemed to indicate that what the Wii console will lack in graphical power it will make up for in price and gameplay fun. Imagine your kids or friends in your living room waving their arms around to simulate sword fighting, golf club swinging or gunplay.
Nintendo said a new Zelda game will launch with the Wii and that a current-gen GameCube version will also ship. Other details were more vague. No launch date (though Nintendo promises a fourth-quarter debut) and no price, although insiders say it’ll be about $250 or less. Will Sony’s revelation of a gyroscope-enabled controller steal some of Nintendo’s thunder? Only time will tell.
Microsoft’s message on Tuesday was about connectivity. The Xbox 360 will be one leg of a gaming barstool (like my metaphor?) that will include Windows PCs and cell phones. The popular Xbox Live Service will be reachable via Windows PCs and cell phones allowing you to keep track of your online friends and game information on the go or in your office. Some games you buy on Xbox Live Marketplace (say Zuma or similar low-tech puzzlers) will also be available to you on your cell. And some games will launch simultaneously for Xbox 360 and PC allowing gamers on each end to compete online against each other. Hello, console vs. PC wars!
Microsoft revealed that Grand Theft Auto 4 will launch in October 2007 (it’ll also be on PS3), that a plug-in HD-DVD player will be out by the holidays, and that a slew of arcade classics are on the way for Xbox Live. A wireless headset and Eyetoy-like camera are on the way. Microsoft also showed a Halo 3 trailer, but nobody thinks that game will be in gamers’ hands anytime soon.
So here’s what we know so far:
Sony PlayStation3: Expensive, but worth it, according to Sony. Blu-Ray DVD support, lots of action and war games, a free online gaming service, camera card ports and wireless capabilities. An unproven new controller feature that seeks to take some of the novelty off Nintendo’s “revolutionary” gamepad. Many of the games themselves, however, looked underwhelming and that $600 price tag is going to be an uphill battle. Self image: We are an expensive dinner at the best restaurant in town. Don’t settle for fast food.
Nintendo Wii: Potentially paradigm-changing system looks to make games more fun, but will it work as advertised? Nintendo is a goofy company and many of its small risks pay off big time. The Wii will likely be cheaper than the Xbox 360 or PS3, so it could win among many casual gamers by default. And no matter what happens with the Wii, Nintendo will still make a fortune off its portable games and Pokemon franchise. Self image: We are crazy, but you love us. Forget high-definition graphics, it’s all about the gameplay. Mario! Zelda! Pokemon! Your kids will love it!
Microsoft Xbox 360: With its console already in gamers’ hands and a proven online gaming system, Microsoft has the least to lose at E3 this year. As long as good games keep hitting the system and Xbox Live Marketplace offerings continue to grow, Microsoft can pick up gamers who will balk at the PS3’s $600 pricetag. New peripherals are nice, but the jury is still out on Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. The smartest thing Microsoft could do is give the 360 a modest price drop ($50, at least) before November to sway on-the-fence gamers. Self image: We own Windows. We’re taking this Xbox Live thing to the next level and we don’t need gimmicks like making you wave your controller around to get there.
Sony announced yesterday more details about its November-launching PlayStation3 and, although most insiders totally expected it, it still was a shock for many gamers: the premium version of the console will sell for $599, making it the most expensive mass-market game console to date.
Sony’s decision to include Blu-Ray high-definition DVD technology made the high price almost a given. Stand-alone Blu-Ray players will retail for about $1,000. Bundling one with the PS3 was a guarantee that it would be more expensive than the current highest-priced game system, the Xbox 360, which sells for $299 and $399 depending on the package you get.
Sony had a few other surprises in its Monday night Electronic Entertainment Expo news conference. After criticizing Microsoft for its two-tiered Xbox 360 sales strategy, Sony instead embraced it with its own business plan. The PS3 will sell in two versions: a $499 system with a 20-gigabyte hard drive and a $599 system with a 60-gigger. The “Budget” version will not come with an HDMI port, limiting its high-definition capabilities, and will also eschew some camera-card slots and will have a slightly different design. It will also lack internal wi-fi support. This is already causing gamers to grumble that anyone serious about high-def and Internet play will end up springing for the $599 system, making the PS3 essentially $600. Start saving your lunch money.
The other big surprise was the the PS3 controller looks the same as the PS2 controller, but now lacks vibration/dual shock in favor of motion sensors similar to what Nintendo is doing with its next-gen console.
Over at Videogamey’s E3 site, gamers are already mocking the controller and some of the lackluster game demos Sony showed off.
Nintendo is putting on its E3 press conference right now, but has already said it will hold off on announcing a pricetag and launch date just yet. Nintendo says gamers will have its oddly named “Wii” console by the end of the year and rumors place it around the $200-$250 range, making it a bargain in comparison to the PS3’s pricetag.
Microsoft might have some surprises this week as well. But Sony is taking a huge gamble with its $600 console and it might be the tipping point for gamers to look to Microsoft and Nintendo if the PS3 games don’t live up to the hype.
Best Buy Invaded By Legion Of Blue-Shirted Pranksters - Gizmodo
How great is this? I wish they would do this with every single retailer that makes their employees wear such uniforms.
Of course, that’s incredibly irresponsible of me to say, but then I just drank a Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper, so I’m hopped up on an inordinate amount of sugar, caffeine and the Dr’s “Pepper.”
Nintendo’s new console name: “Nintendo Wii.”
After lots of speculation on what the new Nintendo console would be called (it’s been referred to by its codename, “Revolution,” for months) we finally have official word from the company.
“Wii.”
Pronounced “We.” Or “Oui.” Or “Wee.” Or “Wheee!”
Here’s the official line:
Introducing … Wii. As in “we.” While the code-name “Revolution” expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer. Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else. Wii will put people more in touch with their games … and each other. But you’re probably asking: What does the name mean? Wii sounds like “we,” which emphasizes this console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii. Wii has a distinctive “ii” spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play. And Wii, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd. So that’s Wii. But now Nintendo needs you. Because, it’s really not about you or me. It’s about Wii. And together, Wii will change everything.
Wow. That’s… uh… interesting. “Wii” shall see.
The name won’t mean a thing if the games are great and the big N’s new controller lives up to the fanboy hype.
Long-time video game players are holding their collective breath this morning for word on whether the latest game-to-movie translation “Silent Hill” will be a heartbreaking, spectacularly failed fiasco or merely a fiasco.
Despite heavy promotion and even a tie-in PSP “Experience,” the movie wasn’t screened for most critics and early reviews range from admiring of the film’s style to perplexed by a perceived lack of plot.
My brother tried to hit a Drafthouse midnight screening in San Antonio, but the room was sold out.
Game players have not had much to cheer about when games they love have been turned into films. Much of the blame can be set on the stooped, evil shoulders of director Uwe Boll who, apart from having an easy-to-make-fun-of name is also mindbendingly untalented in his medium of choice, film. Uwe Boll is to video game adaptations what Sam the Butcher of “The Brady Bunch” was to sides of beef. He leaves blood and grist in his cleavering wake. His work, on a purely aesthetic level, makes hard-core gamers wake up in the middle of the night, clutching at their pillows, mouths open in a silent scream, as the nightmares recede.
“Silent Hill” has generated more advance hope among gamers than any other adaptation I can remember. It was written by Roger Avery (no slouch having co-written “Pulp Fiction”) and directed by Christophe Gans, who made the silly but visually thrilling “Brotherhood of the Wolf.”
The video game in the “Silent Hill” series themselves are extremely stylish, genuinely scary experiences that, in their own small way, have helped push the medium a little closer to becoming an artform.
We’re not asking for an Oscar-winner here. We just want something watchable that won’t embarrass players in general. Please, don’t let it be “Super Mario Bros.” or “Street Fighter” or, heavens help us, “Bloodrayne.”
Please let it just be mediocre enough to stand tall among other Hollywood spring dreck.
Welcome to California!
Today’s rolling blackouts are making me type a little faster, lest I suddenly face a blank screen.
Get those iPods and cell phones charged up. Have a friend across town TIVo “24” in case your power cuts out just as Jack Bauer is about to shoot someone’s wife in the leg as an interrogation technique. Don’t leave your desktop PC on if you can help it unless you’ve got some serious surge protection.
And above all else, don’t panic. You and your gadgets will get through this.
They won!
TiVo’s suit against EchoStar communications was a costly gamble — if the company had lost, it could have easily seen itself get erased from the “Now Playing” list of players in the landscape, and its relationship with other cable and satellite companies would have only become more marginalized.
Now, TiVo, which as a brand has become synonymous with Personal Video Recorder technology, will surely be knocking again on the doors of cable and satellite companies looking for action. Nobody expects a “Make us your licensed PVR service or get sued” shakedown, but many companies will fall in line to avoid legal action just as DirectTV did in anticipation of the verdict this week.
DirecTV may be shielding itself, but the agreement with TiVo falls short of keeping the satellite company from stopping plans to keep rolling out its own line of standard- and high-definition recorders. DirecTV TIVo users (myself included) can breathe a sigh of relief for now: they won’t be deactivating our boxes just yet.
The bottom line is that for potential TiVo users, this is very good news. Many efforts from cable companies and satellite providers have fallen short in usability of TiVo’s well-refined boxes. While some set-top recorders come close, many are clunky and unreliable and certainly lack the personality of the user interface TiVo provides.
TiVo’s big misstep, I think, has been to insist on stand-alone boxes, many of which are a nightmare to install given the rat’s nest of cables most TV watchers have to contend with to get a TIVo box to record off their current setup. TiVo’s subscription fees, while not excessive, have not been as competitive as cable and satellite companies, who in many cases give the boxes away and add a fee under $5 to a customer’s monthly bill. TiVo hasn’t worked to compete with those kind of offers. With this lawsuit’s result, it may not have to.
his is a golden opportunity for TiVo to re-examine its business plan. Why not offer HD boxes for under $100 and subsidize the hardware cost by offering exclusive pay-per-view content? Or partner continue expanding online capabilities and move into more areas that competitors can’t or won’t support?
TiVo undoubtedly has a great product on its hand,s but the great stumbling block has been getting itself into people’s homes. The company just got a second chance; if it fails to make itself more than a catchy name in many more consumers’ eyes, it won’t be able to blame patent infringement the next time around.
Dude.
Dude, seriously.
I am completely freaking out about this Mac Boot Camp thing. All new Macs will be able to run Windows XP? Madness! Insanity! What’s next? Yogurt in portable, squeeze-tube form?
Sure, you could run Windows on a Mac before, but it was through a clunky software program that was so slow you rarely thought about doing things like playing current games or running anything more intense than a Web browser or a Word file through it. Its very name, Virtual PC clued you in: This was fake Windows, faux Windows, Windows of grime behind heavy shutters.
Now Macs with Intel processors will be able to run Windows on a separate partition, natively. This is a bit like finding out your vacuum cleaner can also wash dishes. Sure, they’re close cousins, but still … WHAAAAA?
We’re not just talking about beige or black boxes versus white or silver ones. We’re talking about inflamed passions of PC users and Mac users. About giant corporate accounts. About borders blurred and unspeakables suddenly … er, spoken.
I knew that someday a new desktop PC purchase was in store, but I always figured I’d be replacing my Windows desktop with a higher-end Windows desktop and keeping my Mac laptop as the machine-on-the-side.
Now I think that next computer will be a fast iMac. We’ll create a beautiful partition together and have a Windows OS baby. If the Mac can run Windows with the stability and speed that it runs OS X, we’ll have a real marriage here, one committed to out of love and not just based on convenience and looks.
I’m actually thrilled that Microsoft has delayed its Vista operating system, the heir to its not-quite-so-broken Windows XP OS.
I have a lot of things to do this year and upgrading my desktop computer in the blind hope that everything will still work when it comes out on the other side of that scary tunnel is not high on the list.
Windows XP was a huge improvement over the buggy Windows ME, and while XP isn’t perfect, it’s a lot less prone to crash and much improved in recognizing devices like digital cameras, external hard drives and, say, iPods. However, as the continual security updates I’m asked to install indicate, it’s a major virus target.
And each upgrade of the OS requires a significant box to run. Most casual PC users will have to upgrade their hard drive space, RAM or other hardware to move up to Vista, if past Windows upgrades are any indication of system requirements. The move from ME to XP, while seemingly incremental, still took most of a day. And sure, it paid off in terms of stability in the long term, those first few days were frustrating. Items (like Windows Explorer and the built-in CD player and Briefcase) disappeared, only to be found later, huddling like scared children in the massive C:/Windows directory. Some devices that worked fine in ME suddenly stopped working in XP. And many older games refused to run after the upgrade.
So you’ll forgive me if I enjoy running my stable Windows XP system a while longer — I’ll probably wait even after the Vista launch to upgrade while all the early wrinkles in the OS are ironed out.
Or better yet, I’ll keep using Mac OS on my laptop and work computer. At least with Apple, I know the leap to a next-gen operating system (evidenced lately by the switch to Intel processors in its newest systems) won’t be full of so many nasty surprises.
I’ve lived in Austin for more than eight years and I have yet to acquire a music badge or wristband for SXSW’s music fest.
That doesn’t mean I forego it entirely. It’s only Thursday and I’ve already seen Erykah Badu and Funk Sway’s magnificent set at the Austin Music Hall Sunday night where my favorite song of hers, “Green Eyes,” kicked off an amazing set of songs that included Wendy & Lisa (of Prince fame), DJ Jazzy Jeff, ?uestlove and Doyle Bramhall II as well as members of Austin’s own Blaze.
A few minutes ago, I got back from a short set by the Islands at Longbranch Inn, where Vice Magazine held court, passing out copies of sample CDs and the free “Vice Guide to Austin.”
First two sentences: “LIving in Austin has always been about doing nothing. In the late ’70s, while the rest of Texas was hard at work farming or manufacturing or some other (b.s.), Austinites were in their own little countercultural world — wacked out on psilocybin, wandering the local streets and creeks in a blissful haze.”
The Islands set was brief (who in God’s name could imagine a daytime set starting not only on time, but early? I got there at start time and had missed half the set), and as great as it was, I won’t be trying to crowd in to see their midnight set tonight. I hear they’re playing Emo’s in May, so I’ll wait for that.
I’m going to try to see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at an evening party tomorrow, and then I’m out. Enjoy SXSW, townies and visitors. If I catch Clap, I’ll have seen the three attractions I’m interested in. You can have the Arctic Monkeys. I’ll just check them out on iTunes later.
Dave & Busters on a Friday night is not the place you expect to get all deep about art, but there it was: a panel discussion put on by the Austin Game Developers, a collection of programmers, artists and media types in the business of digital entertainment.
Artists is a key word because the discussion, held in the party room of the adult arcade, was “Are Videogames Art?” The panel included Mike McShaffry of BreakAway Games as moderator, Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad to gamers) of NCSoft, Damion Schubert from Wolfpack Studios and Allen Varney, writer for gaming online magazine The Escapist. (A good blow-by-blow of the event is available.)
After gamers milled and gathered in clumps, then hit the buffet (palm-sized mini burgers, chicken strips, nachos — hey, this is a gamers’ meeting!), the discussion started with an infamous quote from Roger Ebert that in recent months has made him a whipping boy in the videogame world.
Interestingly, the panelists didn’t outright disagree with Ebert’s assessment that games cannot, by the very nature of their interactivity, aspire to be works of art on the level of major films, music or works of literature.
Gamers who’ve played games like “Deus Ex,” “Half-Life” or “Final Fantasy VII” know that games can certainly carry a narrative, and for some, the test of whether a game can make you cry has actually already happened. (A major character death in “FFVI” was a watershed for many role-playing gamers.) But, as one of the panelists pointed out, it wasn’t the gameplay that made you cry, it was the full-motion video sequences in between the interactive parts that elicited such a strong emotional response.
Comparisons were made to Shakespeare (who, depending on which panelist was talking, is either a 400- or 500-years-dead old guy) in guessing whether games created today will be played in 500 years. I’m not even sure games of today will be played in 50 years. The retro gaming movement is cool, but it seems to be most popular with people who grew up with the games now considered “Classic,” not a new generation of gamers.
The panelists and folks in the room (a heavily male audience as expected, ordering up mostly Dr Peppers in favor of beer) have a vested interest in making games art because they want to feel that their careers and passions are more than just ones and zeros packaged in a shiny box and sold to 14-year-old boys. Game developers continue to put out shooters and RPGs (big boobs, bigger guns), but the market demands that. For every “Katamari Damacy” that breaks the mold, there are dozens of “Grand Theft Auto” and “Everquest” clones.
But game developers are just like everyone else — they want to inspire, they want their labor to matter and they want to create works that will be remembered beyond the next holiday buying season. They have heroes: Will Wright of “The Sims” and “SimCity,” Warren Spector of “Deus Ex” and “System Shock” and Richard Garriott of the revolutionary “Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.” The challenge is that many games tell a great story, but are no fun to play. Many fun games have no story whatsoever. Is narrative necessary to create a compelling gameplay experience? Is it beside the point? Is it a better parallel to compare the act of playing games to sports than to film and literature? Can a football game be called a work of art?
Game design continues to evolve and change and the role of interactivity in games is still a huge question mark going into the future. As the wall is hit on photorealism in games, where will developers take us? Will we move toward persistent worlds like “World of Warcraft” or will casual videogaming continue to grow, becoming the dominant form of home entertainment? Maybe some combination of the two will happen.
The good news is that game developers are self-aware about the sorry state of most rehashed and released games and that they want to do more. As Jennings pointed out, the gaming world has not yet produced a work on the level of “Schindler’s List,” but then who’d want to set a game in a concentration camp anyway?
A few months ago, when I was kvetching about my cell phone dilemmas and planning a switch to Cingular with potential financial pitfalls that make the Dubai/ports deal look like a friendly game of penny-ante poker, the RAZR seemed like my best bet.
I found a place I could get the hardware pretty cheap, the Cingular calling plans I was seeing looked reasonable (I can only justify a $50-a-month cell service bill because we don’t have a land-line and haven’t needed one for about six years), and all seemed well in the cell phone world.
The thing I didn’t count on, the bit that surprised me was — it’s not that great a phone. Three months later, with the price drops on the RAZR and the ubiquitous promotion, the RAZR, in black, steel and even pink colors now, is as likely to be in someone’s hand as those gray clamshell Samsung phones have been the last two years. For about $100 or less now you can get a RAZR through Cingular or T-Mobile or online service-agnostic dealers. You can even get a non-flip upgrade called the “SLVR” that includes iTunes.
Incidentally, dropping vowels to make your product sound cooler is STPD.
The switch over to Cingular was not without its complications. I bought my phone at a Cingular store in New Braunfels before realizing that I wouldn’t be able to port my old Sprint number to it because New Braunfels is out of the 512 area. You can’t port a number across area codes, I learned.
So I took back the newly activated phone, bought one at a giant retail store in Austin and then found they couldn’t port my number either. I had to go through Cingular corporate and after several phone calls, they were able to do it by phone, but then I was slapped with a $35 number-transfer fee in addition to the money I’d just spent on the hardware, activation and my first month’s bill.
My wife followed suit and she was able to get the number-transfer fee waived. But then a bigger problem was lurking: Two months later I found out the New Braunfels account had never been deactivated even though I had taken the phone back within two days and asked for the account to be canceled. I accidentally paid the wrong bill and spend a whole day trying to get $110 I paid moved to the correct, active account. I’m still waiting on a refund check for that because it was impossible to get that check I sent moved to the right place.
Aside from the billing glitches, the phone itself worked like a dream. It was sleek, took grainy but decent photos and worked in my home, which was why I got away from Sprint in the first place.
Then it broke. While visiting family and after one too many margaritas, I was trying to post a blog entry via the RAZR (a bad idea, I know) about how totally fly I felt at that moment. I don’t know what I did, or what I pressed, but sometime that night, the left side of the keypad stopped working, as if it had suffered a RAZR STRK, paralyzing its operations. The keys 1, 4, 7 and * wouldn’t respond to any presses, making it impossible to text message with any degree of legibility.
I hoped the problem would go away, but no dice. I lived with it for another week, hoping maybe whatever I’d done would fix itself, but then I took the phone back to the store. The day I took it in was one day past the 15-day time limit for returning it for a full exchange. I called Cingular and jumped through tech support hoops before they agreed to send me a new phone.
A few days later, the unit arrived in a tiny box and bubble wrap. I transferred my numbers via the SIM card and transferred images to my iBook via the Bluetooth connection and then Bluetoothed them again to the new phone.
Everything transferred over just fine. But now my “new” phone (I have no way of knowing if the replacement phone was new or refurbished) has started displaying weird grainy horizontal lines. And friends have told me that if you keep your RAZR in your pocket for any length of time, you will most certainly get specks of dirt on the screen that are impossible to get out.
As time has gone on, I find myself using the slow Web browsing features less and less. I’m taking fewer photos. The phone’s menu and addressbook software, convoluted and sometimes plain dumb, are so 2002. And the call quality, while decent, isn’t anything to get thrilled about.
So I’ll stick with the RAZR a while longer because, unlike my old Sprint phone, I can at least make calls with it from my home, but I’m already looking over the horizon for a replacement, probably within the next year.
On my list for future updates: my cell phone search ends (…or does it?) with the Razr, satellite radio update, another zombie game that looks promising, the death and possible rebirth of diary-x.com, and anything else I can think of now that my head has cleared from an awful sinus infection.
For now, I wanted to go back and give my first impressions (three months after the launch) of the Xbox 360.
I can’t say I disagree with what’s been written about the 360 since its launch, including Seth Schiesel’s good analysis of what makes the system more than just a game machine.
The best thing I can say about the Xbox 360 is that it took me hours of playing with the system before I even had the urge to open up one of the four $60 games stacked next to the console. By that I mean that the Xbox Live service, which has undergone an incredible metamorphosis since the original Xbox games, has enough to keep you entertained for days before you’ve even spent a dime beyond the initial console price. Playabale demos of everything from Quake 4 to Madden 2006 are available for free download (each takes anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour to grab depending on your broadband connection speed). There are movie and game trailers available in both standard and high-definition quality. You can chat with other 360 players or send text/voice messages at no additional cost.
Plugging in an iPod allows you access to all of your music (except “Protected” files you bought from the iTunes stores) and it’s not hard to get a networked PC to stream music or photos to the Xbox 360.
And best of all are the demos and full versions of Xbox Live Arcade games, which even at this early stage are already a strong and varied set of titles. While the demos are free, the full versions aren’t pricey at all. You can get 1,000 xbox points for about $12 and most games only cost about 400 to 600 points. For about $5, you get the full version of “Geometry Wars,” an addictive “Robotron”-like shooter that I’ve spent more time with than any of the full-blown retail Sega sports titles. Coming soon for retro game fans: Xbox Live versions of “Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting” and “Cyberball.”
The retail games themselves are hit-or-miss, which is not unusual for launch and early titles for a new console. I find myself playing “Fight Night 3” and “Project Gotham Racing” most, but I’m intrigued by the gorgeous and cartoony “Kameo” and I’ve heard good things about “Condemned.” I don’t own the fighting game “Dead or Alive 4” yet, but it’s on my shopping list.
But there’s the conundrum and an unexpected challenge for Microsoft and 3rd-party game publishers: How do you get customers to shell out $60 per game when they can get entertaining demos and downloads from Xbox Live for free or for under $10? Many gamers will be content to use the 360 to view high-definition content, play Xbox Live games with their friends online as well as original Xbox titles that are backward compatible and stick to buying just one or two must-own 360 retail games.
The 360’s interface is nicely designed and functions nicely, a welcome change from Microsoft. The wireless controller handles well and you can turn on and off the console with it, which is a godsend for any gamer who hates getting up from the couch any more than is necessary.
Is it worth $400 for the premium system? If you’re a serious videogamer and you have a high-definition TV, that’s an easy yes. I’ve mostly abandoned all the other consoles in favor of the great games on Xbox Live and I’ve been using the console as my default DVD player — it outputs a crisp, sharp image and great sound. If you’re scared off by stories of lackluster games for the system, be aware that there’s plenty available online to play, from card games and puzzlers like “Bejewled 2” to “Joust,” “Gauntlet” and more. And if you’re holding out for Sony’s PlayStation3, you might have a long wait. I don’t think it’ll be available this year and based on Sony’s lack of a decent online service for the PS2, it’s unlikely they’ll have anything approaching the stability or usability of Xbox Live when that console launches.
There are several reasons to believe that the shortage in Xbox 360s is soon to be over, the most compelling of which is that I found one on store shelves recently and bought it.
Since November, when the initial shipment of Microsoft’s new next-gen console dried up in a frenzy of pre-holiday retail partying, the only people have able to buy 360s are those on pre-order lists at game stores like EB Games and Gamestop, folks lucky enough to stumble upon the systems as they arrive in dribbles at retail outlets like Circuit City and Costco or those willing to pay loads extra for marked-up bundles online that include games, memory cards and extra controllers.
And then there’s always eBay.
I spent the last few months making calls and holding out for console arrivals at EB Games, where I was updated on the status of the number of people on the list for consoles. The number went from several dozen to 15 to 10 to about six at most stores in the last week. It seemed like I’d finally catch a break when one EB employee told me that the Barton Creek store had finished off its list of those waiting for Xbox Premium consoles. The reviled “Core” system, while $100 cheaper, is not a great deal; it’s missing a hard drive, for one thing; the hard drive is a necessary component for downloading games, demos, movie trailers and other goodies from Xbox Live, the console’s online service. If you buy a Core system, you’ll probably end up buying the detachable hard drive anyway, and that $100 easily makes up the price difference between the Core and Premium system. The Premium also includes a headset for trash-talking online, cables for hooking the 360 up to an HD set, a wireless controller and the ability to play games for the original Xbox. You’re much more likely to find the Core system than a Premium, though some desperate gamers are picking up Core systems and paying extra for the items it lacks.
Several Web tools for tracking down 360s have emerged. One site helps you find what online retailers are selling the Xboxes, but the only ones who seem to have consoles available are the ones in bundles.
One enterprising programmer created a Windows program that tracks inventory at Best Buy and Circuit City stores. Using the program last week, I found that the Best Buy near the Arboretum had gotten a late-night shipment. Next morning, I waited at the door with other shoppers who’d obviously downloaded the same app. The first three shoppers through the door got premium systems. The rest of us did not.
A friend who found a Premium console at a Target store in Los Angeles suggested I start making calls to Target and Wal-Mart stores. I’d heard tales of large shipments at those stores and even though several Target told me by phone they hadn’t seen a Premium system in weeks, an EB Games employee told a mythic tale, featuring everything but unicorns, about 30 systems that had somehow ended up at the Wal-Mart on I-35 and Ben White recently.
I printed out a list of Wal-Mart locations and went down the list, calling electronics departments. On my third try, I got lucky. The Wal-Mart at Slaughter and 35 had just put out four premium systems minutes before my Thursday evening call.
“Can you hold one for me?” I asked the retail associate on the phone, hoping I didn’t sound too desperate.
“No,” she said.
I hauled booty to the store and all four systems were still there, untouched, unfought for, in a glass case. Was this an alternate dimension where the laws of supply and demand don’t apply?
In any case, retailers and the poobahs in Washington state say such retail store findings won’t be so rare come mid-March. Now whether you still want to spend $400 on a videogame system is a whole other question, but for those with the money ready, it shouldn’t be too much of a struggle before too long to find the recently rare Premium system.
I’ll post again soon my impressions of the system and whether I think you should buy it. Maybe the delirium has gotten to me, because my current answer would be, “Start hammering that piggy bank.”
Some frequent users of netflix.com are in a postal huff about the company’s on-the-downlow practice of “throttling” delivery of new and in-high-demand rental DVDs to customers who watch and return their movies more frequently than is healthy for the company’s financials.
I stopped using Netflix about a year ago when I realized the DVDs already on my shelves far outnumbered the hours I had to watch them. The Netflix discs I had sat on top of my top of my TV for several months, unwatched. I was the perfect Netflix customer.
I’m not a business major. Or a business expert. I was once a business reporter, but I was largely feigning interest. However, it seems simple enough to me that the business plan for a company like Netflix would take into account that there would be lethargic, pokey customers like me as well as DVD junkies who would take advantage of an “Unlimited” deal by going through lots of discs every month. To my untrained brain, it would seem that the profit margin would lie somewhere in the balance of those two extremes of customers. But then, I’m not trying to scrape a living competing against Blockbuster.
The Associated Press story lists a few Web sites where customers have gone to complain. It’s not exactly a secret practice: Netflix added information about the practice, according to the article, in their Terms of Agreement last month. But, really — when was the last time you read all the way through the Terms of Agreements of anything? I bought a house without reading all the contracts. My Realtor assured me everything was in order. Sure, my house fell into a sinkhole and I live in an Army surplus tent now, but that’s neither here nor there.
In any case, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (real name? I’ll have to investigate.) digs himself a deeper hole of customer dislike with his quote: “‘unlimited’ doesn’t mean you should expect to get 10,000 a month,” he says. Yes, Mr. Hastings, but you see that’s exactly what “Unlimited” means. Unless the definition changed when I wasn’t looking, it means no limit, dude. And it’s not physically possible to go through 1/50th of that number of DVDs in a month with movies flying back and forth through the U.S. Postal, so I’m not sure where he’s coming from. Don’t they have trained PR people to keep CEOs from saying stupid things like that?
In any case, Netflix is still a good deal for casual movie watchers, but if you’re a film major planning to rush through multiple DVDs a night, you might want to look elsewhere for a rental service, lest you get throttled.
The Gorillaz/Madonna pseudo-mashup at last night’s Grammys hit me where I live in that:
A conversation about what Gorillaz is played out in my house after the show. Try explaining it to someone that’s never seen their videos: “Well, it’s a band. But it’s really that guy from Blur with some guest musicians. And the characters are cartoons. It’s like the Archies. Or Josie and the Pussycats. But cooler. And they do videos. “
Depending on whom you ask, a Gorillaz tour may not happen for a while If it’s just 3-D-animated characters on big screens while Damon Albarn works his magic backstage, I’m perfectly fine with that. I’ve seen Modest Mouse at Austin City Limits Fest. It can’t be any less lively than that.
The attempt at publicity-lidding Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow’s breakup by making the statement on a Friday night was good, I’ll give them that.
Especially after those recent breakup denials.
But missing in the news that’s going to send all of Austin mourning for the weekend (beers, anyone?) is a reason. Might I suggest: Saturday Night Live killed their relationship, specifically the titanically awful sketch in which Lance sings Sheryl some self-composed songs while at a piano.
Love is hard. Comedy is much, much harder.
I’ll stop now. I’m going to go back to respecting Lance and Sheryl’s privacy during this very difficult time.
Patrick over at It’s SXSW, Baby! provides a very handy Austin wireless hotspot map and is looking for folks to send in other wi-fi spots that may be missing.
(Link via Metroblogging Austin.)
All right, now I know what a commercial-grade bagel slicer looks like.
I can’t help thinking that here in the year 2006, we should have already moved on to laser-based bagel-cutting technology. If they can operate on my eyes with those beams, I don’t see why they can’t turn them on some day-old poppy seed bagels.
To the Einstein Bagels employee who didn’t want to slice my bagels at 4:55 p.m. because the slicer was “put up for the day”:
If it’s not too late to take my money for 13 bagels, it’s too early to put away the slicing machine.
Also, how complex a machine is this bagel slicer that it would take “a while” to set back up? Does it run on nuclear power? Is there a hand-crank involved? Does the manager have to be alerted to activate the launch sequence codes?
They’re bagels. They need to be sliced. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking so.
Two of the Web sites I use every single day, Blogger and Bloglines, have gotten into a nasty habit of scheduling outages lately.
Having one of those sites stop working and having no explanation or reason is certainly frustrating, but setting a time and day when things won’t work only takes the sting off of it a bit. Blogger’s recent scheduled outages have been scheduled during the day, which means tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of blog publishers won’t be able to update their sites or edit anything starting at 6 p.m. this evening.
With Bloglines, which has been making system improvements to increase response time, it just means not being able to quickly browse through my 50 or so RSS feeds, many of which don’t update daily anyway.
These are free sites with free services, but it’s 2006 and I really had faith that those 404 error and instances where Web sites just stop working would one day just stop happening. Am I the only one who feels that Web site outages are so 1998?
My dear Rhiannon Gammill throws down a zombie challenge, and I (probably incompletely) answer the call.
How is that about technology? Uh… because… by understanding the music and culture of the zombie, we may better develop technology to destroy the foul undead, on the day that they surely will rise up.
The Islands are coming to South by Southwest! Three shows!
Maybe that’s totally old news and it was on a band list a month ago, but I just found out and my brother and I are psyched.
The Montreal band was formed from the ashes of The Unicorns and their first album is expected to drop (as if hot) sometime around March. The leaked songs I’ve heard so far (“Flesh” and “Abominable Snow”) are fantastic and anticipation is high.
See you at one of their shows!
Link courtesy my buddy Glark at Videogamey.com:
Take the Videogame Name That Game sound quiz at the PBS Web site.
I got 12 out of 18, but I attribute that relatively low score to some trick audio questions. And that I’ve blocked out all memories associated with the Atari 2600 “E.T.” debacle of my youth.
One of the reasons I think Apple’s iTunes software and its iPod portable music player will continue to be dominant for at least another three to five years is that Apple’s competitors seem to be completely deluded as to their market share, the allure of their own software and the idea that people don’t care if podcasts have ads as long as there’s an easy way to skip past them.
The most absurd idea coming out of that panel is that people aren’t downloading iTunes content legally. Unless Apple has completely been inflating its sales numbers, somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 million songs have been legally downloaded and several million videos have been bought as well, even though the vast majority of iPod users don’t yet have video-capable players.
The competitors of iTunes and the iPod clearly don’t know their enemy, and don’t seem to be making the effort to understand why Apple has been so successful.
Incidentally, I’m really liking David Pogue’s tech blog, especially his Consumer Electronics Show posts.
So how about that Master P? (Unnnnnggghhhh!)
He doesn’t have a crush’n’s chance at Amy’s of winning the contest,
But he does narrowly edge out crazy Tatum O’ Neal for the coveted “Only I may make myself look like an idiot on national television” award for refusing the generous offer of dancing shoes in favor of his ugly basketball high-tops.
As for his dancing on last night’s show, he did move his feet and there was music playing, but it was more “Clomping with the Bison” than “Dancing with the Stars.” You could call it dancing, but then people would be able to call you a liar.
Oh, and hey Master P (Unnnnngghhhh!) — if you’re going to dedicate your dancing to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, could you please just wear the damn dancing shoes already? Because, seriously, P, those people just don’t deserve to deal with another televised tragedy.
In my gushing about Sirius radio, I forgot to mention one of the coolest features: Using your subscription’s login and password, you can listen to streaming music on your computer from many of its music stations on your computer. (It crashes Safari in Mac, but seems to work fine in Internet Explorer.)
The streams sound good and, although the online player doesn’t display titles and artists like the receivers do, it works fine for an early-generation bit of Web software.
Lots of the talk channels are missing, from NPR and CNN to Martha and Howard, but for listening to music away from the car, it’ll do.
You know what would make it the ultimate killer product, though? Broadcasting the Ricky Gervais podcast 24/7.
The Chronicle writes about these here Statesman blogs and then I link to it, thus completing some sort of meta-chain.
Gotta give it up, though. This sentence is pretty funny:
“With circulation sliding, the Statesman vigorously trumpets its Web sites, Statesman.com and Austin360.com, as the great new frontiers, where readers count more than subscribers and the paper’s profits aren’t siphoned off by those greedy paperboys. “
Forget that my decision to buy a Sirius satellite radio may have had a tiny, tiny bit to do with Howard Stern and I used to listen to him on my commute when he was on Jammin 104.9 and that his absence after mid-December did cause me a small amount of panic and withdrawal. Forget all that.
Because it doesn’t matter.
When I tell people that I got Sirius sometime around the holidays, it’s assumed that Stern is why I got it and the people who know or think they know that I listen to Stern are going to give me the same pitying, disgusted look: like I spat in their open Ozarka bottle.
There’s no way I’m going to give them the satisfaction of telling them that I got up an extra hour early just so I could catch the West Coast rebroadcast of The Howard’s maiden broadcast. (Riddled as it was with sound glitches in the first hour, it was more than made up for by the sweet, sweet baritone of Mr. George “Ta-kay, not Tak-ai” Takei, who is now officially the Best Sport Ever.) Or that I stopped what I was doing on New Year’s to listen to Stern’s call-in in my car; before the stroke of midnight, he was legally unable to be heard on Sirius’ airwaves.
I’m a fan. Forgive me.
More of note, I think, is how completely bowled over I’ve been by the commercial-free music stations. There’s always something on. I never get bored with the artists and songs offered up. And the little miraculous $79 receiver (after $50 rebate) I bought can pause, rewind and fast-forward through 44 minutes of buffered content and can alert me when a favorite artist or song is being played anywhere on Sirius’ 100+ stations. (I never knew how much often play Elton John and the Ramones on the radio.)
We inaugurated the Sirius service with a five-hour drive from South Texas, and my wife and I jumped around the dial, listening to Broadway tunes, oldies, old-school rap alt-rock, Motown, Martha Stewart Living, the Raw Dog uncensored comedy channel and lots and lots of Kelly Clarkson. Installing the unit only took about 20 minutes, and although I do have some unsightly wires hanging around my dashboard, it’s no bother. (If my wife signs on, she’ll probably go with a professional install.)
If it sounds like I’m gushing, it’s because it’s been a while since I’ve been so blown away by a new piece of technology. Yes, I miss KUT, but other than that, I don’t regret signing off on endless commercials, bungled local traffic reports and music that is as repetitious as it often is irrelevant to my day. $12.95 a month seems like a small price to pay to avoid all that.
Stern’s going to get a lot of people to sign up for Sirius, but it’s going to be the deep variety of content and the seamlessness of the equipment (my receiver can be taken from the car to the house with just the unplugging and plugging-in of two wires) that’s going to keep people on it.
As for me, you can give me dirty looks about Howard Stern all you want, but it was Martha Stewart who gave me a great idea for a brown sugar ham glaze that I might just try out.
Most inherently inaccurate pairing of dancer and song on the debut of “Dancing with the Stars”:
Lisa Rinna / “Natural Woman.”
Ooh, Microsoft, you got dissed! By AOL!
Microsoft, you got told, bad! AOL sent you an Instant Message and you clicked on the button that said, “AOL has sent you an Instant Message. Do you accept?” and then it told you, “Sorry, AOL picked Google.” It was cold!
They gave you the hand! They said “See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!” They stuck a sign on your back that said, “Not Google. Kick me,” and you walked around and didn’t figure it out until someone kicked you!
Someone knocked on your door, Microsoft, and you went and answered it and nobody was there. And then when you asked, “Is that you, AOL?” It totally wasn’t because AOL WAS OUT WITH GOOGLE! Oooh, burn!
Check it, Microsoft. You were like, “AOL, I love you!” and AOL said, “Yeah, uh, that’s cool, but let’s just be friends.”
And then you went home and watched “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and you cried all night.
Then the next day, you were at the mall and AOL and Google were totally kissing by the Sbarro’s and you started crying again. And then Yahoo! walked by and pointed and laughed at you. And then you dropped your calzone.
Dang, Microsoft. You need to get it together. I’m embarrassed for you, dog. I’m only telling you because we’re friends. People are talking. Not me. I’m not like that. I just thought you should know.
The four-person video game review crew (myself included) put together a year-end video game guide that ran in today’s paper. It covers an awful lot of ground considering we’re all pretty casual gamers, and I’m pleased to be in such good company as Joe Stafford, Dale Roe and Tim Schmelter.
The austin360 version has some longer pieces (bonus!) than the statesman.com and print versions, including some ruminations on the year in PC, Nintendo DS and Xbox games from Tim and I.
Got other picks for best games of the year? Post them in the comments here.
My “Tech-cessories” gadget gift guide story ran today in Life & Arts — it says a lot about our tech culture that the add-ons to some our gadgets can cost several hundred dollars. But I tried to keep most of the categories (except “Splurge-gone-wild” ones) to under $50.
Interesting note: the Griffin iTrip, which my brother has used since last Christmas, is giving out, much as both our iPods are suffering from battery wear-down. While frustrating, it shows that we use both our iPods and iTrips near constantly (we both have pretty long commutes). I’m not sure that the $99 battery replacement plan is worth it on the iPod side, given that Apple’s ever-accelerating pace means your iPod itself may not be worth $99 a year from now, but the iTrip is at least not that expensive to replace, and you can get the new LED one that I mention in the gift guide. That’s my plan when my iTrip gives up the ghost on the road.
Stay tuned tomorrow: our big annual videogames gift guide (which also serves as a kind of year-in-review) runs, with rundowns from myself, Dale Roe, Tim Schmelter and Joe Stafford, runs in the Statesman. We cover games for PC, PSP, DS, GBA, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PS2. That’s a lot of acronyms. See what titles we thought were the games of the year.
Radar Magazine is folding, which seems like news to a lot of folks except Radar Magazine itself, which doesn’t have the news on their (amazingly lifelike, but probably fake) news ticker.
Well, there goes that snarky, yet revealing (and as a bonus, admittedly juvenile and fatuous) profile of [Insert celebrity name] I was planning to free-lance for them.
Web site redesigns are a tricky thing because no matter how good your new design is, regular visitors are going to complain that they liked your old design better. For those visitors, it’s like going to work one morning and finding out that all the roadways and directions have changed. It takes a little while to get your bearings.
Fear of that kind of reaction, I suppose, it’s what’s kept my personal Web site to the same strict design for five years with minimal changes.
Not so with statesman.com, which just this evening relaunched. To my virgin eyes, it looks… bigger. Don’t you think? It feels as if the page is larger somehow even though it’s in the same-sized window as what I was looking at on the site earlier today. Things don’t feel as jammed and crammed in the content areas. Although I’m wondering about how just when you scroll down to get away from that holiday Dillard’s ad, boom! there it is again on the bottom left, the same impossibly happy family following you like a haunted painting.
I very much like how the blog list names just hang there in space and when you click on them, —whoosh! — a panel comes down showing a photo (not a great photo, in my case, but a photo) and the latest blog entry. It’s like I’m a magic trick, and I think I like it.
As of this writing, austin360.com has not unveiled its new design yet. It’s backstage, primping and flexing in front of the mirror, ready for its high society debut, I’m sure.
So sue me. I’m excited.
“Ha ha, technophiles.
“Where’s your iPod now? Can you use it to scrape your car, which is under an inch of ice? Did your satellite radio warm you up on the way home?
“Hey, you know that Xbox360 you wrestled with other shoppers to get during the Thanksgiving week retail wars? Did that help you get home all right with all the ice and the sleet? It didn’t? I’m surprised to hear that. I thought that was one of the features Microsoft promised to bundle into it.
“How about that slick driveway that caused you to fall and split open your pants? Did your podcast warn you to watch out for that? No? That’s too bad.
“Anyway, have fun with all those technology toys of yours. I’m sure they’re keeping you very warm today against the primal cold. Hope you remembered to TiVo tonight’s weather forecast, because I’ve got some more goodies for you tomorrow.”
Love, Mother Nature
Yes, you too can re-publish old “Simpsons” videogames. Or how about “Bubble Bobble?” for $5,000? Some of the “Double Dragon” games?
It’s all part of a sad Acclaim bankruptcy proceeding. It’s enough to make a videogamer feel really, really old.
Link via Glark at Videogamey.com.
Gamers in recent years have come to expect bundles packages when new videogame systems launch. If you’re not high up on a pre-order list, often it’s the only way to get a hot new console in short supply (like, say, the Xbox 360). Bundles usually consists of accessories and the less-popular launch games that might not otherwise be purchased by a discriminating early adopter. Some of the bundles can run as high as almost $2,000.
Well, Best Buy got caught with its holiday undies down after reports its handling of the 360 launch was riddled with inconsistent pricing, including the dreaded bundling of the much-wanted new console.
A leaked memo sent to Best Buy employees (according to Inquirer.net) tells employees of the retailer that such forced bundling is inconsistent with its practices and that the company will allow customers to return unwanted parts of purchased bundles.
Let’s hope EB Games, GameStop and other stores will get the message about console bundles.
Intel’s announcement of partners for its new PC entertainment platform (wait, isn’t this about five years too late?) called “Viiv” (pronounced to rhyme with “live,” “jive” and “hive,” since it’s running on a Windows-based platform) will apparently do for home entertainment/PC interoperability what the Centrino chip did for Wi-Fi.
Wait, didn’t you hear? Intel is taking credit for the wireless revolution! Says Kevin Corbett, an Intel vice president in charge of content services, “We basically accelerated the heck out of Wi-Fi (with Centrino). We plan to do the same thing around digital entertainment.”
Huh. And here I thought cheap routers, Internet cafes, Starbucks and non-profit free wireless groups accelerated that growth.
In any case, Intel’s plan sounds an awful lot like what Microsoft is trying to turn its Xbox360 console into. (It didn’t quite work out that way for the original Xbox, but that console wasn’t built for High-Definition and video streaming.)
This AP article emphasizes the relationship Intel has formed with struggling TiVo Inc., but what’s promised doesn’t sound very different from TiVo’s own “TiVo-To-Go” technology or its recent announcements about making TiVo programs available to iPods and Sony PSPs.
Journalists love including anything TiVo-related in stories because it’s one of the few continually evolving technologies that readers seem to really grasp. Yeah, this Intel thing is pretty boring and complex, but check it out… it’ll have TiVo! TiVo, people! You can spend another few hundred or thousand dollars to watch “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” in whole new ways! It’s a great day for technology!
Omar’s handy guide to recording three items at once on a two-tuner TiVo:
Tell TiVo to record a second item when you already know it’s set to record “Smallville” on Thursday night. Perhaps “The O.C.,” which your (hypothetical) wife watches.
When TiVo tells you it’s already set to record something, widen your eyes in surprise.
Curse.
Check TiVo’s To-Do list. Realize that it wants to record “The Daily Show” again even though it’s a repeat and you have it set to only record new episodes of “Daily Show.” This is the only show TiVo does that with, which drives you nuts.
Cancel “Daily Show” recording.
Go back to schedule a recording of “The O.C.” This time TiVo obeys.
Tell TiVo to record “Everybody Hates Chris.” TiVo will ask if you want to cancel “Smallville.” You wish you could, but watching “Smallville” is part of your job, so sigh and tell it not to.
Remember that you have two things to record at 8 p.m. as well, but the extra two minutes you tell the TiVo to record at the end of some shows so you won’t miss previews for next week’s episode make this a physical impossibility in TiVoland.
Curse, more colorfully this time.
Decide to deal with your 8 p.m. traffic jam later. Besides, nobody ever died from missing “The Apprentice.” That you know of.
Try to reason with your wife that “Everybody Hates Chris” is so much better than “O.C.,” especially lately. Lose argument when it becomes evident you aren’t even watching “O.C.” anymore.
Confirm for your wife that you didn’t secretly switch TiVo recordings to cancel “O.C.”
Record “Everybody Hates Chris” on the other TiVo, the one in the other room hooked up to the tiny TV that you’re convinced makes the show less funny to watch.
[Note: If you don’t have a second TiVo, replace Step 13 with: 13a. Don’t record “Everybody Hates Chris.” Hate yourself the next day as you hear your wife watching Marissa and Ryan break up for the 135th time.]
I’m reading a book called Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution right now, which takes an interesting approach, in its New York Magazine-style vignettes about shapers of the videogame industry.
One of the later chapters is about the staggeringly expensive and difficult development of Microsoft’s Xbox — the timing is good to read this now, in the days leading up to the Xbox 360 launch. Even if parts of the book feel about three or four years too late, this chapter at least provides a nice framework for understanding one of Microsoft’s biggest current investments.
I was invited to speak to a classroom of St. Edward’s students by one Mr. Michael Barnes today and in the middle of boring the students to absolute death about my myriad middling accomplishments (seriously, folks, I could see myself taking years off their lives like some sort of public-speaking incubus), I asked a simple question, “Do you read blogs?”
I waited long enough to make sure the blank stares weren’t residual from the rest of my speaking so far, but it was true. None of the 20 or so students said they read any blogs. They read news online and one technologically advanced (for, oh, about 2003) student says she even does RSS feeds. But personal blogs with the self indulgence and the flower backgrounds and the linking to the “Which ‘Friends’ character are you” tests? Not so much.
Way to break it to me this late in the game, youngsters. We in the journalism game are always the last to know.
When I see a press releases or news items in my inbox that contains the following techno-buzzwords, my mouse finger immediately moves toward the “DELETE” key (note — these words can be combined to make even more boring phrases):
MMORPG
Tech-savvy
Proprietary
Security-enhanced
Solution
Wireless
Hotspot
Must-have technology
Functionality
iPod-compatible
Anything to do with awards for blogging
Mobile
Storage
Microsoft
I’m no closer to buying a cell phone than I was in my last entry. The more research I do, the more mind-bogglingly complex a decision it seems.
And a two-year commitment for most good deals on cell phones? Man. Talk about commitment issues. I think you’re sweet and sexy, Motorola Razr, but I’m not sure I’m ready to get married to you just yet.
To add to my confusion is the realization, after struggling to call in by dictation two recent concert reviews, that I may need something more robust for sending text in on deadline. A Sidekick, maybe? A Treo 650? A Blackberry, even though I’m partial to Palm and Danger’s less corporate-seeming interfaces?
I still want: something small that I can fit in my pocket. But now I think I might need something with a full keyboard. Decisions, decisions…
I’m getting a new cell phone.
My Sprint clamshell phone, which seemed so edge-of-chic three years ago, now is a scuffed, scratched-up, barely-working mess. The little shoulder with the antenna broke off and it’s been super-glued back several times.
When I bought the phone, I loved taking it out to make calls because it looked like I was holding an artifact from the future. Now, when I take it out, I try to duck into a bathroom or cup the diminutive device with my hand so I don’t show people my scarred and ugly mobile handset. Sometimes I’ll open my phone to make a call and a ringtone will play that cries, “I’m hideous! Look away, look away!”
My house in New Braunfels has terrible cell service. Though my phone is battered, it’s not li’l Samsung A500’s fault. My wife and dad, also on Sprint, have the same problems in our home, which seems to sit on some sort of Micmac Cell Phone Coverage Burial Ground.
I think the best solution is to switch to another carrier, and as such, I’ve begun my search. Oscar, who sits next to me at work, suggested I try Lower Your Bills.com, a truly excellent site that has great deals on everything from mortgages to satellite TV. Their cell phone section is juicy, yet long-lasting in taste. I found a good deal on a Cingular Razr phone (in black + headset!) for free after rebates with a $39-a-month plan. Downside? It requires a two-year contract.
So as soon as I borrow a phone from somebody and test out Cingular service in my house, I’ll let you know if I jump on the deal.
This one goes out to Sarah, who shares my love for the fetid undead.
Maybe it’s not love, exactly (does loving the undead constitute unrequited necro-fascination (parenthetical within a parenthetical: I’m not going anywhere near the word “necrophilia” here. Well, except for that I just did) or is it just the opposite?).
Nevertheless, we have great affection for those who are not dead and seek the brains. If you’re a videogame player, and you share this predilection, you’re in luck. Not one, but two zombie games are in our midst.
“Land of the Dead — Road to Fiddler’s Green,” based on the George A. Romero movie, is out now and I know very little about it except that it’s a movie-to-game adaptation, which usually means it’s undead in a whole other way. One other note: When your game is called “Land of the Dead,” do you really need to add “Road to Fiddler’s Green?” You add that, you might as well be talking about a “Wallace and Gromit” title.
More promising is “Stubbs the Zombie,” published by Austin’s own Aspyr games (we’re thinking that name’s not a coincidence). This game is getting pretty great reviews and I’m looking forward to spending some quality time raising a zombie horde of my own. That’s what weekends are for.
If you’re into portable limb-losing, you could hang in there for “Infected” which involves global viruses of the sort that turn mankind into the shambling brutes.
Keep it up, game developers. Bring ‘em on. More braaaaiiiinnnss!!!
I’ve been a bit remiss on keeping my geek ramblings up to date. I blame a crush of work activity, an all-day barbecue and late-night cake baking, plus the fall TV season. It does shame me to admit as much. I’d much rather say that I was building a water-cooling solution on my PC so that I could overclock my processor far past the heating limits that humans dare, or that I was busy with “Quake IV” (I haven’t seen “Quake IV” — it might be made out of maple syrup, and I wouldn’t know it), but none of that would be true.
This blogging time-lag means I missed commenting on last week’s Apple announcement about its new video iPods. My brother and I, who both have the 4G iPods surgically attached to our hands most hours of the day, suddenly want the foul things removed. Who wants this thing that only plays music? With a monochrome screen? Are we not far descended from apes? (Or, er, an Intelligent Designer?) If you tempt us with on-the-go episodes of “Lost” will we not pine?
For users who’ve been downloading whole seasons of “The Simpsons” via BitTorrent, the iTunes video movement presents a bit of an ethical dilemma. Continue downloading stuff in legally questionable ways, or plunk down $2 per program? (At 22 episodes per season, that’ll cost you as much as the DVD set for most TV shows, without benefit of extras of a video format you can play on your big-screen TV with any degree of quality.)
Right now, the TV offerings on the iTunes store are slim (“That’s So Raven,” anyone?), but make no mistake. This announcement is huge and if other networks hop on board, it will change the TV industry as surely as Apple has transformed the landscape of music.
As most techheads have pointed out, there are a few other problems: apart from the tiny screen, there is the matter of converting videos to the iPod format, something a lot of casual users won’t have the patience to do. Battery life for playing videos is significantly shorter than for playing music (we’re talking 2-3 hours). And the iPod Video apparently ditches the FireWire connection, which I’m not alone in preferring to USB But that’s pretty nitpicky.
The other interesting tech news this week is the dust-up between the videogame comic strip Penny Arcade and one-man anti-videogame crusade Jack Thompson. What started as an exchange of e-mails and phone calls has exploded spectacularly into threats of lawsuits, a very funny strip (warning: profanity), $10,000 charitable donations, the distancing from Thompson of a major game violence opponent and a call for police to arrest the hooligans who would dare to donate in someone else’s name.
It was one thing when Thompson was crusading against specific games and instances of violence, but Thompson has shifted his rhetoric to belittle gamers in general, in so many words: “To be fair, though, you can’t expect a bunch of gamers to understand the satire if they think that Jonathon Swift, the author of ‘A Modest Proposal,’ is the name of a new Nike running shoe…”
Nice spelling on Jonathan Swift, Jack.
I’d say that the very public unraveling of Thompson and all the free press Penny Arcade is getting for this stance against him is… well, for us illiterate videogame-playing thugs, positively Swiftian.
Just one facet of the genius behind Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park” and “Team America” is that as well as they know how to push the boundaries of taste, humor and crude animation on television, they are wisely restrained on the DVD sets of “South Park.”
The co-creators do “Mini-commentaries” on each episode of the series, sticking around only for the first four to six minutes to remember choice bits from a particular show or just goof on the origin of the idea for a last-minute save — many “South Park”s are completed the same day they air on Comedy Central.
Parker and Stone say that anything longer than short commentaries would be boring for even fans of the show and they stick to their guns; when they realize they’re rambling on, they stop short and move on to the next one.
If the handsome six volumes do not best “The Simpsons” in longevity, they at least make the argument that “South Park” rivals Groening and Co.’s show for sheer laughs and brilliance; even if many fans gave up on “South Park” soon after the shock value wore off.
Some choice bits from the just-released “South Park — The Complete Sixth Season”:
More thoughts on Google: The Great Bloatening from The Associated Press.
Reuters says that Google is quietly developing a secure Wi-Fi system called “Google WiFi” where, I’m guessing, you’d go to your favorite Wi-Fi hotspot, log into your special Google-secure line, and then do your Internet browsing and naughty e-mail securely as the information sent to and from your laptop is encrypted by the service.
This is not only a smart idea, but just another brick in Google’s Great Wall of Development and Acquisitions. If you’re paying attention, it’s becoming obvious that Google is on the road to becoming a lot scarier and pervasive than Microsoft in a much shorter time. With a few smart acquisitions, such as their purchase of Blogger, Picassa, Deja’s Usenet archive and the digital photography firm Picassa, Google has diversified a nice little software house for itself.
Last month, the company even announced plans to launch its own instant messaging and telephony service, “Google Talk.”
When you go to Google’s suspiciously simple home page, you can click on “more=>” and find a page loaded with all the fingers that Google has in various technological pots.
Google has wowed us with its Google Maps and Gmail, beating Internet also-rans like Yahoo!, Mapquest and Microsoft’s own Hotmail at their own game.
Google’s soaring stock prices and insanely high market cap seem unreasonable, but the truth is, this is a very smart company making very smart and bold moves. If anything, this company might be undervalued.
I imagine a possible Google future where they are The Company, a giant, all-encompassing vessel for all things corporate, sort of like “Mom’s Friendly Robot Company” from Futurama. You know you’re doing something right when you’re the most oft-used company-name-as-verb on the Net.
Microsoft’s new photo sharing/display software “Codename Max” is live and ready for trial downloading.
I just saw it today, so I haven’t had time yet to take it for a test drive, but it’s going to have to be one amazingly remarkable piece of software to take the place of Google’s excellent Picassa2 freeware program on the PC side and Apple’s iPhoto on the Mac end of the pool.
One thing wrong with the “Max” page is that I’ve read it three times and still don’t quite understand what “Max” is. Is it just for presenting and sharing photos, or is it a way to organize and print them as well? Guess we’ll have to make the leap of faith on downloading the thing to find out.
If you’d like to let me know what you think of “Max,” please post a comment below.
Incidentally, what’s up with that second button under “Sharing is good?” The one that looks like this:
Doesn’t that look suspiciously similar to Blogger’s logo?
It sort of hurts my head to think too much about Microsoft and Google. I mean, what to make of the news that Microsoft and AOL have some sort of partnership in the works to rival the other big Internet companies in some sort of bloody bits and bytes deathmatch? It’s too big for me to imagine, even. It’s global corporate warface.
It makes me think of a ravaged-cicuit future where leather-clad geeks ride souped-up hybrid-fuel mopeds across the desert, pledging their allegiance to The Great Goog or King Gates as they text message each other the location of the nearest water-‘n-Wi-Max oasis. (Did I mention that water and Wi-Max are the two most precious commodities in the future?)
See? That’s what makes my head hurt.
(“Max” link courtesy another Omar with a tech blog.)
Lest you think this blog’s sole purpose is to kiss Apple’s shiny, white plastic exterior, I’ll tell you about a huge, huge blunder Apple made last week that could taint its reputation among a very large group of people in a way that even shiny new products won’t fix.
The latest version of iTunes, 5.0, which features a handful of new features and a slightly modified interface, is causing huge problems among Windows XP users.
I’m one of them. I installed the new version Sunday, thinking it would copy right over my 4.9 version of iTunes seamlessly, just as past upgrades have, keeping my music library intact and starting up without incident.
Instead, the software update crashed my computer, then would not start after I rebooted.
For those of us who made the leap to iTunes before buying an iPod, it was a huge leap of faith. Like a lot of Windows users, I was perfectly happy to listen to music with a combination of XP’s built in Windows Media Player and the infinitely skinnable Winamp.
Migrating all my music over to iTunes was a testament to how good Apple’s interface was and how much faith I put into the stability of the software. I transferred about 6 or 7 hundred MP3s and started the laborious process of ripping CDs into iTunes. I subscribed to Podcasts with the last version and made it my only music player after I got an iPod.
Now, it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t listen to music. And I couldn’t go back to Winamp or Windows Media Player because most of my music was now encoded in Apple’s proprietary AAC format, which won’t play in other music programs without some serious fiddling.
I hunted online and saw that I was far from the only person having installation problems with iTunes in Windows. (The upgrade on my iBook was fine, by the way. This seems to be a Windows/iTunes problem for the most part, although some Mac users are not without upgrade headaches.)
One of the suggestions on the Apple forums was to revert back to iTunes 4.9 until the dust settles and a more stable version of iTunes 5 is released. But it’s not easy finding a copy of 4.9, which has been cleared off of Apple’s and most downloading Web sites.
I did find 4.9 somewhere, though, and went through the process of uninstalling iTunes and re-installing the older version. Unlike some users, this solution worked for me.
What didn’t work so well was keeping my music library intact. iTunes couldn’t find my music. I re-directed it to the right directory, but my list of podcasts, playlists and information for at least 100 songs that I’d entered manually was now completely gone. I searched for a back-up. There was none.
Of course, it’s my own fault for not creating a copy of my library information before uninstalling iTunes 5.0. And I know that.
But for many people who have experienced this installation nightmare (and many of those people are novice users who chose iTunes and the iPod for their simplicity), iTunes 5.0 is not going to be remembered kindly for the foreseeable future.
Quick update: Barton Creek’s Apple Store is still selling iPod Minis. A rep says they’ll keep selling them until Apple stops sending the products.
Sure, sure, sure, Apple came out with its iTunes-enabled phone, woop-woop. We expected that one.
Less expected is that it only carries 100 songs (significantly fewer if some of them are “Bohemian Rhapsody” or one of the longer suites from “American Idiot”) and it doesn’t look anything like an iPod, for better or for worse.
Disappointed? Yeah, me too.
The news that I can’t seem to find anywhere but on Apple’s Web site itself is that the new, bite-sized “iPod Nano,” which holds up to 1,000 songs — and comes in these colors: black, white — seems to be completely replacing the more varied iPod Mini line, which apparently is no longer being sold on the Apple Web site. If you want a Mini, I’d get down to the Apple Store, like now, to pick one up before they’re gone for good.
Apple recently started giving them away with computer purchases and I picked up a pink one for my wife. That Nano looks tiny enough to lose easily and nowhere near as cool as the brushed steel look of the Mini.
I’m not real clear on what Apple’s thinking here, but both of these announcements feel a bit like a step back, or sideways, or slipping laterally on a banana peel. Have we learned nothing from Target’s ad campaigns? Color sells, Apple! Why not an orange iPod Nano?
Reader Lori writes in:
i am just about to take the Mac plunge, even shopping at the Barton Creek store like you. Tell me: 1. Was it hard to switch to Mac from PC? and 2. Why did you get the iBook and not the G4? How much is the Office Suite after the trial period? Oooops that’s 3 questions. Thanks for your article, Lori
So far, Lori, it’s been pretty easy to switch over. The iBook recognized my home wireless network before it even finished booting up the first time, so getting online was a breeze. The laptop can read CDs and DVDs burned on my desktop computer and most of the applications I’m using (Safari for Web browsing, iChat for instant messaging) are pretty similar or compatible with what I was using before on a PC. (Firefox for browsing, AOL Instant Messenger for chat; iChat works with AIM accounts.)
Word, PowerPoint and other Microsoft files come up just fine with the Mac version of Office (See more on that below).
One of the first things I used the notebook for was to transfer wedding videos from Mini-DV tapes on a digital camcorder to DVD, so burning CDs and DVDs is so far no problem with the iBook’s Superdrive.
Even the game I’m playing a lot of now, “World of Warcraft”, comes on Mac/PC discs, so I’m not even missing a beat on my game playing.
The Mac has a setting to file share with your Windows PC, so I’ve been able to copy over files I need through my network. So far, I haven’t found anything I can’t do on the iBook that I was doing on the Windows PC except for a few game titles that haven’t made it to the Mac world yet.
On No. 2, the iBook is actually a G4 computer. If you meant why did I get it instead of the Toshiba 14-inch, it was mostly because of the price and rebates offered, but also because I was ready to try owning an Apple computer in addition to my Windows desktop.
No. 3: The student/teacher version of Microsoft Office (which I can pretty much guarantee is all you need as far as Office goes) is $99.95 after a $50 rebate. If you have a student or teacher in the family, that’s your best bet. If not, the full version is $399-$499 depending on whether you get the “Standard” or “Professional” edition.
If any other readers have questions about anything tech-related, comment here. I’ll be happy to reply myself or research it if I don’t know the answer to your question.
The laptop search is over. The winner is Apple’s iBook G4 14-inch notebook.
It had stiff competition. The Dell m700 was my favorite of the also-rans, but its screen was just a hair too small for me (despite its undeniable brightness and sharpness) and the price it would have cost to outfit it with a DVD burner and other goodies to match the iBook’s feature would have priced it about $500 more.
I also looked at some 14-inch Toshiba models. I was looking for a laptop with a screen smaller than 15 inches, which seems to be the standard now. My last laptop (which is getting some cosmetic surgery before I donate it to my shutterbug father-in-law) had a 15-inch screen and it was so heavy it hurt to carry it around after a while. But the Toshibas I saw would have cost more when factoring in the 3-year warranty plan I added to the iBook and when it came right down to it, I liked the idea of having a Mac in the house to complement the two desktop PCs my wife and I own.
The iBook won not only on price, but also on the extras deal being offered (a free iPod mini as well as $100 off an HP printer, both offers my wife and I took advantage of), and on the amazing amount of software that comes preloaded onto these things right out of the box. OSX: Tiger has proven to be even more amazing than has been written; the Dashboard and Spotlight features are innovations that Microsoft would be smart to steal (er, borrow?) for its upcoming Windows XP successor Vista.
You get a month-long trial of Microsoft Office and the iLife software, including iTunes, iDVD, the built-in mail and address book programs and the great Safari Web browser make having to buy a lot of extra software a moot point. I haven’t found anything software-wise I can’t download for free as shareware that I might need for my new Mac except World of Warcraft,” which runs just fine off the Windows/Mac hybrid discs I already owned.
So, not to sound like those annoying Apple “Switch” ads, but everything about buying my first Mac, from finding info about it online to making the purchase at the Barton Creek Apple Store was so smooth and heartening that I’ve found myself giving my Frankenstein Windows PC in my home office dirty looks from time to time. “Why can’t you have a shiny white exterior?” I’ll ask. “Why can’t you Plug-‘n-Play like you’re supposed to instead of giving me weird USB errors and deleting my files?” My wife hates it when I talk to the computer out loud like that.
Pac-Man recently celebrated his 25th anniversary, which begs the observation: He has to have come down with TMJ by now, don’t you think.
All the chomping. Repetitively? He’s gotta be in pain.
So what’s the deal with the firmware upgrade for Sony’s PSP?
The hardware patch, announced a month ago, was at once a promise of good things to come (a real Web browser! More online options! Full-screen video!), but also a slap at homebrewers developing their own apps and emulators for the PSP and breaking through its apparently paper-thin tamper protection.
(The homebrewers didn’t take long to bust through 2.0, though.)
The debate today is whether Sony has actually released the 2.0 firmware in the U.S. CNET’s Robert Dubbin doesn’t seem sure himself even though he found the release online, going so far as to post a screenshot of the Sony download page.
What is clear is that 2.0 won’t be the last update of the PSP. Expect future homebrew-zapping firmware updates, which game experts anticipate will be required for playing future PSP games.
GoDaddy.com’s president Bob Parsons went on the attack Saturday over a CNET interview with Network Solutions CEO Champ Mitchell.
At issue are domain name renewal rates, the number of clients each companies has and the future of domain registrations and associated services.
Exciting stuff, I know.
The timing is interesting for me because just last week, I transferred and renewed a domain name out of Network Solutions to GoDaddy, still best known for their Super Bowl ad, for the same reasons Parsons cites in his blog. $34.99 versus $8.75 a year was not really much of a choice for me.
And just as I was transferring the domain name out, Network Solutions’ obtuse control panel caused me to change the DNS name server to point to an “Under Construction” page, their default when you make changes to your site (in this case, I was “Unlocking” my domain name so it could be transferred).
Which would be fine except that when I tried to the change name serve back, it wouldn’t go through. I called customer support and was told that the domain name settings are now locked until the transfer is complete, causing my personal site to be down for about a week. Thanks, NetSol!
Point being Network Solutions had a good long run as the largest domain registrar with an entrenched base of users who were too lazy or too afraid to jeopardize making their sites go down even temporarily to debate the high price of domain renewals. That policy seems to have finally caught up with NetSol and, judging from other Web site owners I know, this is the year people are finally jumping ship.
Apple’s new mouse, dubbed “Mighty Mouse” sounds fantastic.
But it looks a little … um … what’s the word? Nipply?
Yes, that’s it. It looks like it has a nipple. A tiny, gray, itty-bitty nipple that, to hear Apple tell it, can scroll in all directions and is “perfectly positioned to roll smoothly under just one finger.”
Ahem.
Apart from the, um, thingy, it looks as if the mouse is outfitted with multiple erogenous zones that you can “Click,” “Squeeze,” “Roll” and “Scroll.” Just don’t let your boss see.
When you stand the mouse up as on the top of this page, it also looks like an albino Marshmallow Peep, one with an antenna coming out of its head and one staring eye. Could you love a one-eyed Peep?
I think I’ll go to the Apple store and see if this mouse puts me in the mood for geek love.
Don’t worry. My current four-button Trackball mouse won’t get jealous. We have a strictly platonic relationship.
The HDTiVo went and died on me.
It wasn’t a sudden, painless death. It didn’t grab itself and go, “Numb arm … NARM!” and fall over. Instead, shows began stuttering a little too frequently when we watched them. Things that were supposed to be recorded were only captured for the last eight or nine minutes, suggesting the power went off at some point or that the TiVo reset itself for some reason.
Then it stopped responding to the remote in some instances, or slowed down to a crawl.
I did some TiVo forum researched and saw the symptoms for what they were. The hard drive was failing.
Which is not surprising given that the HDTiVo records constantly, on two separate tuners, more or less 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It records even when you’re not watching, filling its buffer and hard drive all the time. That can’t make for a long-lasting hard drive and I don’t believe the unit runs any kind of hard drive maintenance on itself regularly.
A little more than a year since a sizable chunk of change was put down for the unit, it’s increasingly clogging up, choking on its own recorded shows. You can unplug the thing and start it back up and watch about 15 minutes of something before it starts gumming up again, stuttering and going unresponsive.
The technical support person suggested it might be the video cable to the TV, which she assured me, can cause the hard drive to stutter and act funny, probably by some elaborate means of alien electromagnetic telekenesis.
I made sure to get an extended warranty when I bought it; anything that expensive that runs on a hard drive probably won’t last forever. The good folks at DirectTV are sending a replacement unit this week, and we’ve pulled the standard TiVo from the bedroom to move up to The Show, the major leagues of living room TV watching.
The worst part is losing all the shows on the HDTiVo that we can’t transfer over to the replacement box. I’d wanted to catch up on “House” and “Veronica Mars” to see what all the fuss was about. Old episodes of “Tom Goes to the Mayor” from Adult Swim that I wanted to see. Nearly half a season of old “Bernie Mac” shows that never got watched. The “Dancing With the Stars” finale that my wife and sister-in-law had planned to examine, Zapruder-like, to figure out what really happened to make Kelly Monaco win. (I suspect, though, they were more interested in watching in slow-motion HD the sinewy moves of Mr. Alec Mazo.
Luckily, this happened in the summer, so except for mourning the loss of episodes of “30 Days” and my sister-in-law’s workout shows, it really could have been a lot worse. We could have lost the final episodes of “24” if this had happened two months ago.
DirectTV didn’t have a lot of sympathy about my lost shows; they offered a service credit of what amounted to $2.50 or a month of Showtime. Tough choice, that.
In any case, HDTiVo buyers beware: the hard drive is put under an enormous amount of strain and if you pick up one of these, you should definitely be picking up a warranty that goes past the standard one year.
Success!
The careful, surgical procedure of replacing my C: drive with a more technologically corpulent 160 gig drive took a little bit (all right — a lot ‘o bit) longer than I expected, but the fact that it works at all is still a wonder to me. Messing with anything that involves the transfer of delicate data so large it can’t be easily backed up always makes me a little wiggy, so I took careful baby steps to ensure that nothing would be damaged.
There is that point in some upgrade processes, though, where you feel things are going awry and you try to work your way back to what you had before, never mind that shiny new piece of hardware, like panicked swimming back to the shore after your toes stop touching the sand below.
At one point, I thought my original C: drive had failed completely, dying just minutes before it was to pass on the discy torch. I cursed my silly hubris and worked in a frenzy just to get my computer back to the state it was before I’d started messing with it. I restarted again and again. I jiggled stuff. I used the “Bang the side of the case” method.
It turned out to be a bad power connection. Swapping some cables around fixed it and then it was back to tempting the fates.
Then there was formatting the new drive and transferring all those megabytes of music, text files, Windows errata… I left it like that overnight, lying in bed and imagining the hum of ones and zeros traveling through one cable, through the motherboard and up through another cable and to the data’s new home.
Then I woke up and the transfer (using the Seagate drive’s handy built-in disc utility, not the more expensive software packages I mentioned yesterday) was complete. I set my BIOS to boot up from the new drive, switched some power cables around inside the case to disable the old C: drive and watched Windows start up smoothly and without incident.
ITunes music still there? Check. Internet still working? Yep. Second hard drive recognized as D: and E:? So far so good.
Then it was time to eat breakfast and head to work, my version of a morning jog around the block completed.
Let’s all agree: mail-in rebates stink.
I had to put aside the laptop search because there are simply too many choices and I’m not a good impulse buyer. I’ll tell you about my adventure looking at Dell laptops at the mall in a future entry.
But what’s occupying my mind now that I’ve put the notebook search on hold is upgrading my desktop’s hard drive. I’ve got two 40 gig drives in there and space is getting a bit cramped, what with my iTunes taking up a huge chunk of space and “Battlefield 2” and “Half-Life 2” taking up some of the rest.
Swapping hard drives always scares me, but there are plenty of good pieces of software you can use the make the process easier and ship your data over to the new drive. (Most hard drives sold today come with some sort of software package to do just that.) It’s a lot easier if you can have both drives attached at the same time, or transfer to an external drive, then port your data back to the new drive.
I found out my motherboard has Serial ATA capabilities, which is a slightly faster standard of hard drive that involves a much neater, thinner cable, and the ability to combine SATA hard drives for much better performance.
This seems like the answer to my hard-drive dilemma. I’ll just slap the SATA in there and transfer my stuff directly from the IDE C: drive and boom, space dilemma solved. At least that’s the plan.
I found a good Seagate drive offer at Fry’s, but here’s the catch: it’s a great price, but only if you factor in the $60 mail-in rebate being offered. For techno nerds who shop at Fry’s regularly, you know that mail-in rebates are a huge pain, even when you fill them out relgiously and mail them in. You wait. And you wait. And sometimes, you don’t get anything back, as happened to me once with an Xbox joystick. So I did a search on rebates for this hard drive, and the feedback from Internet nerds was not good.
So I called CompUSA. They usually have a generous price-matching policy and I’ve bought things there on a price-match from Fry’s. I asked how they handle rebates on a price match. The helpful lady said that they usually price match the initial price and give you a CompUSA gift card for the rebate amount.
Your choices: Wait endlessly for a mail-in rebate that you may or may not ever get, or get an instant gift card that you can use on the spot for something else.
I think CompUSA wins this round.
(Edited to add: maybe CompUSA is better off avoiding mail-in rebates altogether.)
Dear TiVo:
I know you’re trying to make money, but we’re still not going to watch commercials just because you slap a logo on them. If anything, it’ll make them easier to fast forward through.
And what about this:
The new commercial strategy is the latest attempt by TiVo to generate ad revenue for the company, which has yet to turn a profit since its founding in 1997.
How sad is that? Maybe you should invent a TiVo that has a little tip jar attached to it or that can go online to let people contribute through Paypal donations.
Sex and money might be constants in news, and I guess this one falls under “Money,” but how is it news that people with DVR’s skip commercials?
If someone invented a car that allowed you to drive past traffic when you see it coming up, wouldn’t you use that feature if you bought the car? Even if it meant you’d miss out on all those exciting billboards along the way?
What’s surprising is that TiVo and other companies haven’t fought harder to re-incorporate that long-lost feature found on ReplayTV units, the one that skips past commercials for you automatically.
We’re really not used to hearing the words “Apple” and “monopoly” in the same sentence, but here goes: Is Apple becoming a media monopoly?
Clearly the company has become the king of the MP3 player and music downloading businesses and, oh yeah, they also make personal computers. But in just the short time that they added support in iTunes for podcasting, making it as easy as a few clicks to subscribe to free updated-on-the-fly audio content, they’re already changed the face of this form of broadcasting, putting a strain on servers and creating a run of new subscribers for the nascent medium.
Everything Apple touches, at least in the realm of its iPod product line, seems to turn to gold, even if sales of their iPods seem to be slowing down a bit.
Not to worry. Apple will just put color screens on all their regular iPods and lower prices again.
One thing Apple is doing very right with podcasting is to hop on the technological bandwagon just as this “new” form of broadcasting (which is little more than sticking audio files on the Web and making a widget that downloads them for you automatically) is getting some buzz. Apple looks like it invented podcasting when in fact it’s just lucky that the word “Pod” happens to be part of the name that stuck to the practice.
Adopting an existing technology as your own and making yourself look like a pioneer — sounds a bit like Microsoft, doesn’t it?
Walt Mossberg weighs in on the Slingbox, which lets you watch TV (or TiVo, or anything else you’ve got hooked up in your home theater) from remote computer or (coming soon) a portable device. (Previously written about here.)
It seems like an awful lot of trouble, not to mention expense, for a device that can’t record what you’re watching or let you timeshift it on the fly.
Unless you’re trying to watch a live broadcast of a game or the Oscars, you might be better off using a free streaming service like CraftyTV. “Desperate Housewives,” “Chappelle’s Show” and the second season of “Arrested Development?”
Dude, what more do you need?
For those worried about its legality, though, here’s the disclaimer: “If you wish to be a viewer of this website you must meet the following requirements before you watch: 1) You own the program(s) on DVD/Other legally obtained form of media. 2) You receive a cable/satellite/antenna feed with the program(s).”
You do own all those episodes of “Chappelle’s Show” right? Legally? Yes? Wink wink? Nudge nudge?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the limits to which we’ll put up with the inconveniences of technology — when things break down, crash or simply don’t work the way they’re supposed to.
Long beyond the days when the slightest unforeseen letdown in a product meant taking your receipt and marching right down to the Montgomery Ward’s for a refund, we’ve evolved to the point where dropped cell-phone calls, Windows Blue Screens of Death and automated telephone menus that point you to purgatory (where no live voices dwell) are a matter of course.
We pay, more than we ever have, for devices and services that rarely work exactly as they’re meant to. Twenty years of personal computers that crashed, lost our documents and couldn’t decipher word-processing documents composed on other computers’ operating systems.
The one device we let slide the most? Cell phones.
We lose calls constantly, have conversations that sound like they’re taking place on an airport tarmac and endure very … very … slow Internet features.
For the privilege, we pay high monthly bills full of mysterious and myriad fees that would send a tax accountant into fits of rage and upgrade our phones constantly, signing ridiculous one- or two-year commitments to stay loyal to the same phone company that’s giving us such shoddy service.
Ah, but it’s easy to blame the cell companies. They’re charged with deploying new technologies over a vast array of handsets and making sure all those phones work over enormous coverage areas. It’s not an easy task.
But the cell phone business is still one where the massive amount of cutthroat competition among the major carriers still hasn’t resulted in what would be the Holy Grail for most casual cell phone users: a phone that never drops a call.
The other day, I had a freelancer call me at work from a cell. The call dropped. They called again. It dropped again. The third, fourth and fifth times they called, I couldn’t even hear their end of the conversation. On the sixth try, they explained that their cell phone wasn’t working properly. By the 10th call, we decided to migrate over to e-mail.
Who puts up with that?
We all do. Because a non-call-dropping cell phone doesn’t exist and no carrier will promise to sell you a phone that will deliver that kind of service. The best they’ll do is refund the cost of the dropped call, a process that requires another potentially dropped call to make the refund request.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, I live in New Braunfels, and the call phone service out here is pretty awful.
Let’s take a little poll here, just for curiosity’s sake.
What’s one piece of technology that you absolutely couldn’t do without?
Now don’t be cute and say “toothbrush” or “fire.” Let’s keep it to things invented sometime in the last 50 years.
Feel free to be cute in any other way.
Use the comment feature below to post your answer.
Did you see the “King Kong” preview last night?
Internet sites are
But this is Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson we’re talking about here, that hobbitty Oscar winner who’s risking falling very hard on his face with this remake.
And judging from the trailer, it’s going to be risky indeed. How so? Let me count the ways:
This new gadget doesn’t sound too different from what TiVo did with their TiVo-to-Go service (a feature still not activated on DirectTV TiVo boxes, I might add, grumble grumble…) or what Dish Network is planning with their ARCHOS media device.
I’ve actually taken TV shows with me on the laptop (you can DIY something like this with a simple video capture device for your PC or laptop and even burn that TV show to a DVD to take with you on a smaller-than-a-notebook portable DVD player) for flights or long road trips. It’s a nice way to rid yourself of the feeling that your TiVo is piling up programs that you’re never going to have time to watch when you get back home.
This problem with such devices is that it can take an awful long time to transfer a single show even on a fast home network. And if you’re capturing/burning TV shows yourself, it can be an adventure in converting to and from different file formats that may require buying several pieces of software.
TiVo is definitely on the right track with opening its features up to the dangerous and litigious world of networked PCs and laptops, but what’ll truly blow the field wide open is when Apple introduces its “iPod TV.” (Though you’ll never get the full effect of seeing Joey McIntyre shake his stuff on that little tiny screen.)
I think inside of two or three years, you might see more people watching their cable TV-recorded film version of “The Da Vinci Code” than reading the book on a flight.
Oh, Matt Groening, how could you?
My friend Shannon alerted me to what is quite possibly the cutest “Star Wars”-related Web site ever.
Don’t click if you have an aversion to amazingly adorable comic strips.
The analogy of plug-ins that block online ads as compared to big gaping holes in your newspaper seems a bit off, like one of those bad commercials where the voice-over says, “Does your cell phone service leave you feeling stranded?” and they show a guy in the middle of a dessert trying to get a drop of water out of a cactus.
Not that I’ve ever actually seen that commercial. Come to think of it, I should be writing commercials for a living.
But it is a danger to all the free, ad-supported content online, I agree. This whole free content thing (like, say, blogs published by newspapers, elbow, elbow) doesn’t seem like it can sustain itself forever if pop-up ad blockers and software that zaps in-page ads become ubiquitous.
The TV industry has reason to be scared for many of the same reasons; what good is a commercial that can be fast-forwarded through when everybody’s watching shows on their TiVo-like DVR machines?
(link via slashdot.)
Tom Merritt’s CNET column on the anxiety of installing a dish-based TV service will bring back the memory of old headaches for lots of satellite subscribers.
My journey from digital cable to Dish Network to DirectTV was full of hidden pitfalls and holes punched in walls. For the most part, the dish services are happy to come to your house, install a dish free of charge and run the lines you need for the set-top boxes you’re willing to purchase. Each company usually has deals going for free three or four-room installs.
As Merritt points out, where it gets complicated is that a lot of these boxes (the TiVo boxes, for instance) require more than two coaxial cables from the satellite, one for each tuner. (Which is how you get the great feature of being able to TiVo two things at once). Plus you might need another coaxial cable running to an antenna for over-the-air High Definition broadcasts.
So let’s say you have two TiVo boxes (in my case an HDTivo and a standard TiVo), plus you want a regular box in another room (let’s say a home office or guest bedroom). That’s five lines of service. Most of the dish systems available only have four cable outputs coming from that bowl sitting on the side of your roof.
That means you’ll have to step up to a multiswitch, a device that gives you a plethora of extra connections you can run wherever you like.
Most installers won’t just throw in that multiswitch. You either have to pay for it or get one and have the cabling set up yourself. And some installers will balk at setting up more than the lines required for the boxes you have. So forget about having spare cable runs in your hours for future expansion. And they almost always charge in the neighborhood of $100 if you need a decent antenna to pick up HD local HD channels.
We built a house in New Braunfels last year, and I kept a lot of this in mind. We had a home theater specialist install all the line runs we thought we might need later (including speaker wire runs and Ethernet cabling).
If you’re in the process of building a new house, definitely err on the side of over-cabling. A generation of wireless devices that might forego all this cabling is coming, but for now HD, satellite and Internet needs are going to require a lot more bandwidth than what wireless can currently do. It can be expensive, but you’ll save yourself a lot of grief and the pain of seeing ugly holes punches through your walls later.
If you’re switching to a dish service, make sure you let the company you’re dealing with know exactly what you need — make sure it’s on them to give you the cabling, boxes and connections you need at the time of the initial install. They’ll be a lot less likely to come back and do if for you later for free.
I’m in the market for a new laptop; I’d been borrowing one for a while, a very nice one, but the time to return it has come leaving me with The Blue Monster.
The Blue Monster, my aging Toshiba laptop, was quite the sporty notebook in its heyday. It had a shiny blue top not unlike a snazzy sports car and it had a decent graphics card that allowed me to play “Worms World Party” to my heart’s content.
By today’s standard, though, the Toshiba is huge, heavy and runs way too hot and far too slow. At some point, the “5” key came off and I have to keep popping it back in place when I open the laptop. The little grooves to keep it in there got bent beyond help and I’m afraid to use glue on it, so I have a key that slips off all the time and always ends up on the floor when I move the computer around.
Just before I switched over to the loaner laptop, the Toshiba made a terrible cracking sound when I opened it and now if you open the screen past an acute angle and toward an obtuse, the mechanism loses its grip and the screen falls back limply. If you’re Tom Cruise hanging from wires in “Mission: Impossible” (watch out for water guns, Tom), this might work for typing. Otherwise, it’s sad.
I’ve always been a “Better, faster, more powerful!” buyer of computer products, but a few months of toting a lighter, cooler notebook has converted me. No longer will I look for the brawniest, speediest notebook. Unless you play lots of video games on your laptop (and I count the number of times I’ve considered playing a game like “Half-Life 2” on a portable computer on one hand), why not get something that doesn’t put a cramp in your shoulder when you carry it to and from home?
I’m even looking at 12-inch screens. Again, I figured out that I don’t need a huge, 17-inch widescreen display on a laptop. My eyes are fine. I don’t need everyone on the airplane to watch the DVD along with me when I travel.
Although I’ve been an AMD devotee for years, I’ve gotta say those Pentium-M processors sure do run nice. They start up quick, run cool and speedy, and have great battery life. When you’re on a flight to New York and you run out of DVDs to watch before you run out of battery, you know you’ve got a winner on your hands (and in your lap).
The new blogs are here! The new blogs are here!
Oh, wow. Look at that. Nice ceiling! Very colorful mural up there. I like the sparklies particularly.
The photo, incidentally, is my mugshot for ¡ahora sí!, where I need to look all serious and editorly. Here, it feels like they ought to Photoshop a Bluetooth earpiece on me to demonstrate the ability to make annoying cell phone calls in a single bound.
So… this is the place for me to completely geek out and talk about things like HDTV, DVD, DVI, TiVo and anything else requiring excessive acronyms.
I’m hopeful that I’ll still get to occasionally talk smack about TV shows and music (I mean, you still need a techie device to watch and listen to those, right?), but mostly I’ll be asking questions like, “Why do I spend more money on component video cables than I put into my 401k per year?”
Least convincing argument yet to buy a big HDTV, from my dad: “You can see the stretch marks around Tim Duncan’s armpits!”
You could do many worse things to your iPod than installing upon it Gillian Welch’s very nice cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” (remember back from the days of “The Bends” when Radiohead did simple melodic rock?), which has become a staple on KGSR lately.
The woodsy cover of the song has yielded opposing opinions in my household, from “It’s nice” to “I don’t like her voice.” It is a bit “O Brother, Where Art Thom Yorke?” but I can’t think of a better example of why I like KGSR than Gillian Welch covering a prog-rock-but-electronica band from England.
Her Web site offers the song, recorded last year live in Minneapolis, for direct download (99 cents, cheap) and goes so far as to offer it to you in your choice of AAC (iTunes format), MP3 or FLAC format (best for listening to Roberta Flack songs). You can even pay for it with Paypal.
Go to the Download section and check it out under “Latest tracks.”
Would that all songs you like on the radio could be acquired this easily.
Even before you saw the sign that read, “Homestar Runner Live” on the marquee at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, you could tell you were in the right place when you saw the twentysomething computer-tech-looking digerati going through the front doors wearing T-shirts from the popular Atlanta-based Web site featuring retro toons that eschew Internet-level lewdness for the cute and clever.
The event promised a live confab with the Brothers Chaps, the creators, animators, voice talent and spinoff wizards behind such characters as Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, The Cheat and the ever-evolving half-man/half-dragon Trogdor the Burninator. (In a short time, Trodgor, in full meta mode, has gone from a Web cartoon character’s drawing to a videogame-within-a-cartoon, to a fake movie-trailer-based-on-a-videogame-within-a-Web-cartoon phenomenon. He was also mentioned on the last episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” something that still seems to blow away Matt and Mike.)
Unfortunately, just as seeing Dan Castellanetta will never approximate actually meeting Homer Simpson, Matt and Mike Chapman couldn’t possibly hope to approximate five years or so of continually churned-out animated entertainment in the two hours they were allotted to show a few clips, offer some funny behind-the-scenes live-action videos and take questions from the audience. The whole enterprise seemed to move a bit too quickly, too quickly even to show all the prepared clips. (Two bits of audience-participatory karaoke were thrown in. One was of a song from the duo’s mock-hair-band Limo(lightning bolt)Zeen. The other, the Strong Bad classic, “Everybody to the Limit ” was done complete justice by a woman from the audience.)
Still, even with a Homestar Runner puppet in tow and clips from Austin (highlights: Homestar Runner using the Frost Bank tower to trim his nose hairs and mistaking the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue for one of Joe Satriani), it didn’t carry the same magic as discovering the toons for yourself online and going through the brothers’ voluminous archives. Again, it’s not the Alamo’s fault or Mike and Matt’s. They’re just these two guys, in three dimensions. How can that compete with a dude in a Flash-animated Mexican wrestling mask answering his e-mail every Monday?
Sarah Lindner’s on vacation, so I can’t compare notes with her on the sheer bundle of narcissism and amazing jerkosity that is Jonathan Antin, the $500/haircut empresario featured on Bravo’s brilliant “Blow Out”, which came back for a second season starting Tuesday night.
Jonathan is launching a line of hair care products, and they have to be the best. No, you don’t get it, mister. THE BEST! Better! Best! Get to it, man!
Jonathan gets mad at chemists in Baltimore who don’t understand that in Beverly Hills, good won’t cut it. That conditioner has to be the conditioneriest conditioner that ever made a person’s hair go all creamy. BEST! MOIST!
When he’s not being amazingly arrogant to people trying to help (or people who are, God forbid, trying to show an actress jewelry or hem up a saggy dress on Golden Globes night), he’s being whiny and petulant, an overgrown girl-child with a put-on butch voice who purrs about how much he loves meeting hot women on the job (minutes before introducing his girlfriend).
Then he cries in therapy.
First of all; dude, you’re letting them film your therapy?
Second: DUDE! The Best!
Jonathan is an amazingly effective reality show star, a guy so full of himself that you watch just to see the psychic holes he tears in everyone else’s calm.
Oh, Jonathan. Cell phone-throwing, temper tantrum throwing, wussy tattoo-sporting Jonathan.
At being the conditioner that keeps “Blow Out” teased-up and frizz-free, you are THE BEST!
A few weeks ago, I was trying to explain to my wife who “Mr. Goodbody” was, in the children’s television sense.
I forgot that his first name was “Slim,” but I did remember the basics. Guy with a ‘fro wearing his organs on a skintight bodysuit explaining what your insides do. It’s not as easy to explain as it sounds. My effort began, “Well, he had this tight shirt. And it had his pancreas on it.”
My wife gave that look that she gives me when I blindside her with something from my deep dark past; she began to wonder what on Earth I was doing watching some guy’s painted-on organs on TV when I should have been out playing.
The good news is that Slim Goodbody (John Burstein, if you care) is making a comeback! That’s right! He’s ready to come back and freak out an entirely new generation of kiddies.
All I have to say is that when you put that much time and effort into the corporate entity that is “Slim Goodbody,” you’d better keep that weight down.
“Corpulent Goodbody” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I’m very, very behind on my TV watching (I’m about eight episodes behind on “24,” so even if you told me what happened on the season finale, I probably wouldn’t be able to put it into any kind of context), but here’s a quick scorecard for the finales I did see:
“C.S.I.”: I don’t even watch this show, but I had to see what Quentin Tarantino did with it. Ants are creepy, as are Web cams; combining the two? Genius! A very, very good two-hour episode with one very fantastic shot: the papers flying in the air after John Saxon goes Kablooey! I’m not sure what the regular “C.S.I.” viewers thought, but this nonfan was very impressed.
“Desperate Housewives”: So much better than I expected, with just the right amount of revelation and cliffhanger to satisfy everyone. An unexpected death, a solution to the season-long suicide puzzle that makes perfect and logical sense, and the introduction of some intriguing new characters. This is how you do a season finale and avoid the “Twin Peaks” curse.
“Lost”: Speaking of the “Twin Peaks” curse, this show is in serious danger of becoming a self parody if it doesn’t start to explain some mysteries, or at least introduce some new ones. I love seeing the flashback to characters’ previous lives, but the season finale’s, slo-mo plane boarding felt a bit forced. And what was up with those swarthy kidnapping pirates? Why did it remind me of David Cross’ Tobias character on the party boat in the “Arrested Development” pilot?
“Smallville”: This has been a pretty terrible season, so anything that was on a decent level of quality was automatically elevated to season-best status. Such was the case with this episode with a nicely done meteor shower attacking the town and Clark Kent uniting the pesky elements that have been the subject of many a meandering storyline for the past few seasons. In fact, one of the elements was used to stab former “Dr. Quinn” actress Jane Seymour in the chest. Oh, and I think we’re finally over that “Lana Lang possessed by a witch” junk.
“The O.C.”: My wife still loves the show, so I’m obligated not to trash-talk about it too much, but … WHAT HAPPENED?! Seth went from adorable to whiny, Ryan did a lot of nothing and Marissa became the most disjointed and depressing teen on TV. Even the usually spot-on Peter Gallagher was forced into a ridiculous almost-affair and spent the latter part of the season looking sad and conflicted about Kristen’s alcoholism. And the less said about George Lucas’ droning guest appearance (a droid would have done a better job), the better. Someone please slap Josh Schwartz around a little bit, tell him to stop worrying so much about what cool guest band will be appearing, and get “The O.C.” back on track. When Julie Cooper becomes your most interesting character, you know your show is in big trouble.
I never understood why people whittle; taking a knife to a piece of wood for hours and hours to make a duck’s bill or a scary wood figurine.
It just seemed like an inordinate amount of work for very little gain to me. Unless, of course, you’re in prison making a shiv. Then, I could see the utility.
Of course, the whittling people could find many reasons to think I get even fewer results from pursuits I spend a good deal of time on. Sure, video games. I’ll give you that one.
On Saturday, I even freaked myself out with the number of hours I spent doing something that was geeky even for my house. (You get a +3 savings throw against being called a geek in my home; +4 if it involves karaoke or “Dance Dance Revolution”) I spent the better part of a morning using my PC to interface with the two TiVo boxes in my house to download software updates in lieu of doing it over a phone line (which I don’t have; we’re all cell phone at home).
I first researched this a year ago before I made the DirectTV-TiVo jump; the TiVo box needs to make phone calls to order Pay-Per-View or to get software updates. Without a phone line, I didn’t know if I’d be able to use their TiVo box.
It turns out you can, with some finagling. First, you need a serial-to-stereo null modem cable, a wire you’ll only ever use for this specific purpose, and that you’ll need to get online or from a wiring savant at Radio Shack. Then you mess around in Windows XP for hours trying to get your TiVo to talk to and through your computer out onto the Internet, bypassing firewalls and networking settings. Then it dials out online and spends 45 minutes “Negotiating” the connection (especially if it’s been a year since you did your last update, which is the case with me).
If your’e lucky, it then downloads sweet, sweet update data. Then the TiVo restarts, installs its new updates from a separate disk partition and BOOM! You have a very, very small change in features. In this case, my standard TiVo box can now do folders (it can group, say, 21 episodes of “Smallville” into a single folder instead of showing them all in the Now Playing menu) and the menus themselves are a little faster.
The upgrade to my other box, an HDTiVo was even less noticeable; I’m not even sure what issues the latest updates addressed, but I’ve yet to see any major difference in using it.
What humbles me, though, is that my little mid-morning of moving set-top boxes around the house and connecting a cable to a computer are small potatoes in the world of Extreme TiVo Upgrading. People are swapping their hard drives for ones with hacked extra goodies, adding high-speed network connections where there aren’t any and adding enough store capacity to keep yourselves in “Simpsons” reruns for the rest of your life.
One guy, who doesn’t even consider himself a hard-core TiVo hacker, has got his TiVo networked and continuously online to display all the shows on his machine and even the ones he’s got scheduled to record.
So my little feat of upgrading magic, which manages to stump quite a few TiVo fans, is just a little bit of tech whittling; a lot of movement for just a few shavings off the home geek block of wood.
I’m sure the guy in prison carving the shiv is making much better use of his time.
There’s really only one response to the story of the kids who hurt themselves trying to make lightsabers with actual fuel in them that’s appropriate.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha!
Wait … they were critically injured?
All right. Sorry about that.
(Very quietly: “hee hee hee.”)
I’m not even sure I should be telling you this, because I can already see by that shifty look in your eye (er, the shifty click of your mouse button), that you’re going to beat me to them, but … here goes.
In 22 hours and counting, you will be able to order tickets to a presentation at the Alamo Drafthouse of Homestar Runner Live! featuring the creators of the indubitably addictive Web site of the same name.
I haven’t seen Star Wars Episode III yet, but if all goes as planned, I’ll have tickets for Homestar before I have tickets for Sith.
The Brothers Chaps have been in Austin before, but seeing it at the Drafthouse and paying for tickets as a means of paying homage to their intense genius just feels right in a way that thing like eating a whole bag of Funyuns just doesn’t.
I got hooked on their animated site about two years ago and perhaps the best Christmas gift I gave last year was a Strong Bad E-mail DVD set.
It’s tough to pinpoint what it is about their ‘toons that works so well, but I’d venture a guess that it’s a mix of their smarts and savvy combined with a willful innocence and retro-geek sense of temporal dislocation.
That and it’s very funny and very sharply done.
So. I’m getting tickets. Did I say 3:30 p.m. tomorrow? I meant … uh … 3:45. You should definitely wait until then to order online.
There comes a point where a soda is simply trying to do too much, to reach far beyond the confines of a humble 12 ounce beverage container.
That point is Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.
Dave Chappelle? Mental health facility? South Africa!?!
This story just got about 10 times more interesting.
It looks like the much-feared delay of the “Chappelle’s Show Season Two” DVD set has been a lot of worry for naught.
The forces that be had pushed back the DVD release in the spring when the third season of the show was delayed over production issues. Now that the show has been pushed back again, it followed that the DVD would be kept on the shelf again as well. (I love that Newsweek is reporting from reliable sources that Chappelle is “Trippin’.”)
Well, “Season Two” just landed on my desk today, sealed and beautific. I’m afraid to open it for fear that its DVD contents will somehow leak out, making it less funny than if I were to wait until it’s in closer proximity to my DVD player.
The DVD is due out May 24. According to a sticker on the box, it has two hours of bonus features on the three-disc set (hey, that’s one more whole DVD than was on “Season One”)! We’ll have a review of it for you that week.
Most exciting things about it: Two unaired Charlie Murphy stories and an extended Rick James interview.
If you want to make an 11-year-old happy, tell him that a van full of videogames and videogame systems is coming over soon and that he’ll be able to go in and play all afternoon. Just don’t tell him it’s not true. He’ll hate you forever.
My inner 11-year-old got just such a treat recently (without the cruel spectre of rejection to level it back down to reality) when Nintendo’s “Road to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3)” van came into our parking lot.
For a week, we coordinated this with Nintendo’s people. They assured us that a huge RV, the likes of which humans only imagined in the same headspace as futuristic space stations and furry robot dogs, would pull into the parking lot of our workplace and blow the thin membrane apart from our very minds.
That’s what we were told, at least. The reality is that the van was modest; you might have a larger SUV in your driveway. And while it did contain an abundance of videogames and videogame systems (at least the ones Nintendo makes), it was not exactly the gaming Valhalla we’d been expecting. It didn’t even have a Nintendo logo painted on it. If you walked up to the van on the street without going in, your best impression would be, “Beige!”
We went inside the van and it looked like this:
Pretty pretty pretty cool.
I was accompanied by our video guru, Jorge (a video for austin360 of our adventure should be up sometime next week), and by Matt Thompson and Tim Schmelter from austin360.
We all agreed before we even laid eyes on the games themselves that Nintendo’s got a tough row to hoe. They’re hitting E3 against Microsoft and Sony, two companies that will be debuting their next-next-generation consoles (the Xbox360 and PlayStation3, respectively) with new games, but no new hardware to show. Nintendo’s DS portable system came out last holiday season, but when you put it next to Sony’s recently released artifact from the future, the PSP, it suffers from debilitating portable envy. Nintendo’s next console, currently called “Revolution,” is not expected to be shown off at the expo. That’s got to sting a bit.
Once in the van, we previewed a baseball game, a dog simulation for the DS, “Donkey Konga 2,” two crazy-whacked-out action games and a few other DS titles (including a crazy Pac-Man drawing title) in the plush digs, which included a plasma screen, four Nintendo DS systems, four GameCubes and four sets of Donkey Kong bongos.
We didn’t get a ton of time with any particular title, but we got a general impression of Nintendo’s slate — as usual, it’s about quality over quantity. You’re not going to see a massive onslaught of games like you will for Xbox and PlayStation 2 this year, but the original games for the GameCube and DS should at least be interesting.
Here’s what Tim Schmelter had to say:
It’s not much of a stretch to say that “Killer 7” could easily become the “Sin City” of this season’s game releases. Gritty, quirky and hard to categorize, the preview we saw wasn’t without its faults, but what a package. Stylized graphics, sure, but the story features a wheelchair-bound hero who brings along an unlikely cast of heroes thanks to his multiple personalities. Powerups in the game come from draining blood. A blind gunman runs down the hall carrying his guns behind him in traditional Samurai-sword fashion. And at least one of the puzzles features the title of a Smiths song. It looks like this has the potential to kick nine kinds of butt, or to try so hard that it trips hard. Time will tell.
On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, Nintendogs is hands-down the cutest game to hit the scene since, well, ever. Anybody who doesn’t immediately turn into a cooing, Bambi-eyed fool after five minutes with the game should be evaluated for serious psychological disorders. That said, here are some fantasy scenes I’d like to see in Nintendogs, just to offset the cuteness factor a wee bit. Some of these scenes may actually exist in the final game, but the demo was played strictly for the “awwww” factor.
The puppies in the demo cavorted and frolicked, but never stopped to sniff each other’s behinds in time-honored “Hey, fellow dog, glad to meet you” fashion. A little butt-sniffing goes a looong way, to be sure, but it’s a fact of dog-owning, and the DS-owning tots need to learn about the harsh realities of life.
When you rub a puppy’s head for too long, it should bite you. Not one of those playful nips, either, but a full-fledged “Hey, are you trying to wear a bald spot on me?” kind of thing.
Naughty, growing puppy. Human avatar leg. I’ll stop there.
In case you haven’t heard, Dave Chappelle has done a Martin Lawrence and gone into hiding of some sort. This story from Variety seems to be the most complete in that it puts the idea out there that the halting of production of Season 3 of “Chappelle’s Show” (which had already been delayed) might have more to do with Dave landing in rehab than with any kind of contractual dispute.
My sources in L.A. say the rumor in comedy circles is that he indeed is having problems of a pharmaceutical variety.
I think he’ll be back sooner rather than later. He’s got $50 million good reasons to get back to work ASAP.
The other terrible side effect is that the much-anticipated Season 2 DVD has been pushed back again, depriving millions of college students of hearing that famous Rick James-inspired expletive phrase in surround sound. (Someone should probably tell Comedy Central’s Web site.)
Let us be frank without being hurtful: Award shows, unless you are winning an award, tend to blow.
And I say this with mad props to the tireless people who have to put on an awards show that, against the odds, has to try to be both respectful of the winners and entertaining to the non-winners (known to those who don’t care about respect as “the losers”).
I went to such an event Friday night, in a news capacity. I didn’t get a seat at a table for dinner, and I was there on a news mission, so I didn’t have to pay to attend. But the majority of the people in the room did, and man … it wasn’t cheap.
I’m doubly treading on tightwire here because it was a Latino event, one for which the proceeds go to a good cause. So to badmouth it, or the very good-hearted people running it, is to continue tempting someone Up There to electrify-impale you with a size-nine lightning bolt. It was event for the gente, and it’s impolite to say it’s anything less than spectacular.
But people, it was boring. BORING. And it wasn’t the event’s fault. Because all awards shows are boring. If the Oscars, with 1.21 gigawatts of celebrity power, a host like Chris Rock and Angelina Jolie in a long-slit dress can manage to bore everyone, what chance does your chicken dinner and salad at a local ballroom have?
I don’t think I’ve ever been to an awards banquet where by hour three, people aren’t shifting in their chairs, finding reasons to make long trips to the bathroom, suddenly remembering that the baby sitter canceled or looking for the nearest tall glass from which to imbibe on the road to Blottoville. Everyone looks great, but bored. All the gowns in the room sparkle, but the glazing eyes are all dull.
At the event I went to, a local performer got up on stage late in the evening and woke everyone up from the awards-show stupor. She sang and then ran through the crowd, dodging dinner tables as she went, clacking castanets like crazy, and making everyone suddenly believe that the night would eventually end. She was fantastic.
Which only made me wonder: What’s a nice, tall, talented performer like her doing stuck at an awards show like this on a Friday night?
I was going to write a sort of deleted-scenes take about my austin360.com review of the videogame “Lumines,” but then I realized that I had already written something linking to my review on two other blogs, and that to write about the exact same thing in a third, making it a total of four different online spaces for the same string of self-promotion in HTML has to break some sort of blogging etiquette barrier.
It at least is an act of modern autocannibalism, the blog-era equivalent of sending the same purple- prosed-upon love letter to a multitude of lasses from the same social circle back in Victorian times.
But probably a lot less classy.
Maybe it’s more like sharing your soda with three or four other people. Word suddenly gets around that you’re the guy who shares his soda with just anybody, and suddenly nobody wants to have a sip of your warm Pepsi.
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