Viewing entries posted in June 2009

E3 Day Zero Thoughts Posted on 2 June 2009 | Tagged , | Comments (16)

Like many good events, the official start of the Electronic Entertainment Expo is merely a formality - the numerous announcements surrounding the games industry start trickling in the build up. The day before the official opening is the real start of E3 - Microsoft, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts had their press conferences today, so there are already a number of large, potentionally industry changing, announcements out there. Below I have listed my thoughts on the one's that hold the most interest to me.

Firstly, the PSP Go rumours that had been going round the net were finally proved true when a leaked edition of Qore confirmed the news early. The PSP Go is a new model of PSP that drops the UMD drive for flash based internal storage (expandable by memory stick) and all digitally delivered content, along with a smaller form factor. To me, this serves two purposes - firstly, moving to all digital content is where we should all be heading. Most people moved from CDs to MP3s a long time ago, and it's about time we did that for games as well. The inconvenience of physical media compared to downloadable games is pretty huge, and the portable space avoids the problems of Internet bandwidth and storage space that restricts the mainstream consoles. It also helps alleviate the huge piracy problem Sony are facing with the PSP. Secondly, the PSP Go is about capturing a more casual market. By doing away with clunky discs and reducing the form factor, you alleviate some of the inconveniences that the core market might be willing to overlook, but the casual won't. The Nintendo DS and the iPhone have shown that there is a huge casual market out there to be won - whether Sony will be able to take a slice of that pie with the PSP Go will be interesting to see.

Monkey Island has long been one of my favourite gaming franchises. From the moment when I stuck in that floppy disk into my Amiga 600, and decided that I wanted to be a pirate, I knew I was in point-and-click adventure heaven. The genre has sadly all but disappeared these days, but Lucas Arts have given us some hopes with two new Monkey Island projects. The first, and by far the more interesting to me, is a special edition of the original Secret of Monkey Island. It looks to be very faithful to the original, with updated graphics and voice overs. Unfortunately for me, the only announced platforms are XBLA and PC - I lack both an Xbox 360 and a PC suitable for gaming, but I will find a way to play this revisited classic. It's worth it, even if it was just purely for the sword fighting insults. The second Monkey Island project is a new five part episodic title in the franchise, entitled 'Tales of Monkey Island. Not quite as excited for this one, as the later Monkey Island games weren't full of full blown awesomeness like the earlier titles, although still quite good. Only announced for PC and Wii (curse you fractured game market!), I will most likely find a way to play this one too.

Just a brief one, Wipeout HD has an announced expansion named 'Fury'. There goes another large portion of my life gone to high speed racing!

That accused count down on Kojima Productions site finally ended, and with it an announcement came at the Microsoft press conference of a new title in the Metal Gear franchise, called Metal Gear Solid Rising. Metal Gear sits with Final Fantasy for me as one of those must-play franchises, and I am absolutely nuts about it. This new title stars Raiden, the effeminate protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 2 that everyone loved to hate on (mostly because of his insufficiency compared to the awesomeness that is Solid Snake), who got a ticket into the cool club in Metal Gear Solid 4 by becoming a bad ass cyborg ninja. Not much more information is available at the moment. It's only been officially announced for the Xbox 360, though with the lack of the word 'exclusive' at the Microsoft press conference, it's pretty safe to bet that it will appear on the PlayStation 3 as well. Metal Gear Solid has been a Sony exclusive for a long time now, it becoming multiplatform, joining Final Fantasy XIII, is telling of how expensive games are to make these days, and the general industry move away from third party platform exclusives.

The last announcement that piqued my interest was Microsoft's 'Project Natal'. In a nutshell, this is Microsoft's answer to the Wiimote. Traditional controllers scary away the casual market with their I-have-to-push-what-button-whereness. The Wii has proven, with some clever controls and clever marketing, that if you can provide an interface that is easy and engaging the casual crowd will flock. Wanting that market, Microsoft have revealed their answer - basically an EyeToy, but with a lot more impressive tech behind it. In many ways, the best controller is no controller, so all input is done by body movements picked up by the camera, and voice commands. Whether or not this will be successful will depend on a few things - firstly, whether the tech is as impressive as Microsoft are claiming it is. Secondly, it is up to the developers to come up with clever uses for this new technology. You only have to take a look at some of the early games using the PlayStation sixaxis controls to see that it's very easy to fall flat on your face when dealing with new control systems (I'm looking at you Lair). Thirdly, it'll need a good marketing campaign. Nintendo already had a strong presence in the casual market with the DS when the Wii came out, and followed it up with a strong marketing campaign to promote their slightly silly name to the masses who were yet to be taken in by gaming. I'm doubtful whether Microsoft, with it's reputation of stiff corporate-ness and core gaming market target, will be able to replicate this. Maybe I'll be suprised.

That's me for pre-E3 thoughts. Day one is tomorrow, and I'm hoping for some cool announcements from Sony (my choice of console for this generation was a PlayStation 3). おやすみなさい！

The Wave is Upon Us Posted on 2 June 2009 | Tagged , , | Comments (53)

<p>ひさしぶりです！ It's been a long time since I've used this thing, and I figured it was about time to get the ol' blogging wheels a spinning. Heck, my traffic is actually increasing, due to some mystery of search engines and lucky posts. As I am at a loss as to what information I could possibly bequeath upon the blogosphere that isn't out there already, I've decided to make this much more of a personal outlet - who knows, surely someone out there will find this useful interesting entertaining. Today, after hearing a bit of buzz about this "Google Wave" thing, but completely failing at finding any coherent information about what it actually is, I watched the hour and something talk on it. And gee, this thing might actually take off! Before explaining what Google Wave is, let me first describe the problem (at least for me) that it solves. Right now, I have a multitude of options when it comes to communicating with friends, family, colleagues, clients and assorted others. Instant messaging being the first and most immediate option, it's normally a good first option. I check if the person I want to message is online on one of a multitude of different systems - right now I'm signed into ICQ, MSN, XMPP, Facebook chat, AIM, and during working hours I'm on Skype. If they're online - great, send them a message. If they're not, well I can leave them an offline message - maybe. That depends on the service I'm using. A lot of people don't sign in to IM very often, so perhaps it's best to send an email. So, load up my email client of choice (Evolution, if you're interested), write a message, and off it goes. Email gets confusing quickly though - it has no real support for threading, and as soon as you add multiple people into the conversation, all hell breaks lose. This happens surprisingly often, usually with large threads about what and who and where lunch is with a ragtag group of friends and friend's friends. Already you can see how the wide variety of options of online communication, each with it's own different restrictions and short comings, and I haven't even touched on my use of Facebook and Twitter. Google Wave aims to consolidate all these different forms of communication into a single method - it calls these communications 'waves'. In it's simplest form, a wave is a real time forum thread. You type, and anyone who is part of the conversation can see you typing. You can reply to what other people have said, invite new people to the wave, insert images etc. Pretty much all standard stuff, albeit more real time and slick than what you're used to. It's what's layered on top of this that makes it interesting. Firstly, users can edit what other people have written - of course this is annotated with who edited it to prevent confusion. This allows a wave to act as a forum for collaborative editing, and comes complete with a timeline allowing you to see who edited what when. Then there's the extensible architecture, which allows you to embed a wave anywhere, and embed pretty much anything you want in a wave. Examples of extensions went from as simple as a spell checker (a very good one I might add), to an application for organising who is and isn't coming to an event (my lunch email issue is solved!), and a chess game (okay, not the most useful example, but fun!). My explanation barely scrapes the surface of how cool Google Wave is due to my suckiness at explaining things, so if you have a spare hour or so, check out the video. An hour might sound like a long time, but there's just so many cool features to show. Here's why I think Google Wave will succeed:

  • It solves a real problem. Google didn't just make this because they could, it solves a real pain point.
  • It has the backing of Google. There are very few companies who have the resources and influence to push something like this through, but Google is definitely one of them. It's exemplary public image will help here too.
  • It's an open standard and federated. Google were clever enough to see that if they wanted this to be a success, they couldn't run a dictatorship.
  • It's open source. You can set up a wave server using the same software Google runs. There's no point having an open standard if it's too hard to implement (see Office Open XML).
  • It's extensible. By allowing other developers to extend the protocol, it opens up a world of possibilities. See Facebook (I'm talking about the handful of useful apps here, not the hundreds of useless quizzes and werewolf wars.)
I, for one, welcome our new Wave overlords.</p>