Gaming Signal: June 2006 Archives

Tuesday June 27, 2006

Gaming News Tidbits for June 27, 2006

It has been a while since our last gaming tidbits post and there has been some interesting news items floating around the web/blog-sphere-thingy. As usual, I will interject my own freaking opinion where needed and give our loyal readers an opportunity to lash back at me. This way we continue to maintain that animosity that is a bastion of the Signal Blogging Network (combine that with the SFSignal copyright on undead time travelling entities and we have a big thing going here folks). Without further ado...

Giant in the Playground (Order of the Stick comics) and APE Games are delivering a card game!!! Nuff said - go read the press release darned it!!!

NCSoft has laid off some folks in thier Austin facility. The number is listed at about 70 folks out of a total workforce of 300 or about 23%. The news indicates its mostly QA and Game Master positions that have been eliminated, but does this mean that some of the NCSoft titles are not doing as well as expected? I know that Auto Assault was not a game that I had any desire to continue playing, but Guild Wars still seems to be doing well. I wonder how the other titles (City of Heroes/Villans and others) are doing.

A partial list of Wii launch titles have been announced. I think its a pretty good list to start with being that there is both a Zelda title and a Metriod title available at launch. This console will probably be one of the first next gen consoles I will pick up.

Mythic is picked up by Electronic Arts. While I appreciate that this is a good thing for somebody at Mythic, I just can't help but feel a bit sad that it is happening. Honestly, I have always liked the work these guys have done from my time in Dark Age of Camelot, and I wonder what the impact of this will eventually be.

Used Gaming as a business model is discussed over at Opposable Thumbs on Ars Technica. Its an interesting article in that it really discusses some of the elements of used gaming and how stores like Gamestop/EBGames will take in a game for $5 but then put it on the shelf for $20. I do understand that is how they make thier margins, but its not always such a good deal when you look at the fact that not all games come in thier original box (where do these original boxes go darned it) or instructions - unless you buy from Gamefly.

Chuck Klosterman of Esquire asks the question about Video Game Critics, and John Scalzi steps up with an answer. I do agree with some of Mr. Scalzi's points (mostly in the arena about most reviewers suck), and I think another issue is critics in other areas have a huge breadth of experience that allow them to really discuss the work within a given framework. Many gamers just do not have that breadth. Both articles are worth a read I think...

Blizzard is adding paid character transfers to World of Warcraft in the near future. The details are a little slim and are coming out slowly, but soon gamers will be able to jump servers with a bit more ease for a cost of about $25. I think this is a great marketing move for Blizzard and will allow them to continue to maintain thier dominance over the MMO market - sorry that was a total fanboy type comment. Honestly though, the price is at the point where it should prevent server jumpers, but low enough to allow folks to move to a common server with thier friends.

In game ads can be both a positive thing and at times a negative thing. For the postive end, it allows folks to play games like Anarchy Online for free, but then the downside rears its ugly head and you have to click on an in-game ad to complete a quest. I do understand the need to generate revenue to continue to create content, and honestly there are a few ways to do this. This is the route that AO has chosen to do it, and for many Asian MMOs they use micropayments for items. I am afraid that will be the route some of these games will take. My hope is that for games that integrates ads to help mitigate development costs, that this will not be a common theme. So to clarify, free games with ads - click throughs are somewhat acceptable. Non-free games with ads - click throughs not acceptable at all.

"Broken Poll" (cue snickering)

So as those few readers that have looked, the stupid poll is not working again. I know these things are free, but darned it!!! Free Blog Poll will no longer acknowledge my query, and therefore I am unable to actually give statistics on how many folks would buy a console that is unable to play used games. I do know that a few folks indicated that is an acceptable situation, and I wonder why they make that statement. I mean honestly the lack of used games makes the rental market a little more difficult and you would be required to buy all your games new. I for one just see that as a bad precedent since I could not even gift games I have completed to friends. It is an interesting situation, but one that I think is still being felt out by both console manufacturers and publishers. I, for one, hope that used gaming stays as part of the market since I am so far behind on my gaming that it is impossible to acquire some titles new any longer (Psychonauts) in some locations.

Anyways, I will get a new poll up on Friday and hopefully it will become a much more routine thing (I hope!!)

Friday June 16, 2006

Microsoft's audio player?

Apparently Microsoft may not be working on a portable game player, but instead working on a portable music player instead. I could imagine they see Apple leveraging it's iPod and iTunes into Mac sales as a threat to the Windows business. But more likely they see a great opportunity to sell more software - in this case music - through their existing channels (through Windows Media Player.)

The most interesting part is the idea that it might be sold at a loss by the retailer (in this case Amazon), in order to generate the music sale. Or potentially, you can buy the player pre-loaded with music (although I worry about getting it out of the player, we'd have to see how that worked.)

And of course, you can imagine it will be loaded with DRM...

MAD Magazine and Gaming

The folks over at Destructoid have taken it upon themselves to scan and post MAD Magazine's latest article titled 50 worst things about video games. I have been looking through it and I will say they have really nailed a bunch of nitpicks we all have with the industry.

Thursday June 15, 2006

Gaming Tidbits: 6/15/06

The Wii will have a built-in feature allowing you to create a characture of yourself to use in various games.
Some guy ended up scoring a huge number of rare Nintendo games at a garage sale by a former Nintendo America employee for $40 - like this copy of Starfox Weekend Competition which sold on eBay for $250. Would I really want a 16-bit game today? Hmm...
Sony has recently pointed out that the PS2 is outselling the XBOX 360 by selling 470k per month versus 250k per month for Microsoft. Also, the PSP continues to do very well, selling 160k units in May. Of course, Nintendo sold 146k DS' and 152k GameBoy Advance's in the same period. But what was more amazing to me was the DS Lite - it sold 136k US copies in its first 3 days of availability. Wow.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently defended the Wii name to the business press in Tokyo, stating that the GameBoy name was also questioned and yet caught on well. And as usual, Nintendo does not intend to lose money on the Wii at launch. He also stated that he expected small independent game developers to be able to launch games on Nintendo's online service for the Wii for around $5 each (no news on if a similar service would be available for the DS.)
And finally, although this is pretty old news, author Dean Takahashi in his book The Xbox 360 Uncloaked states that half the 360 team has moved on to developing a handheld device to compete with the PSP. With the kind of sales Sony is seeing here this frankly doesn't surprise me, but we'll have to see what the content will be before I rush to stating it's a good thing or a bad thing.

Tuesday June 13, 2006

Is Steam WAY Too Hard For Mere Mortals?

So Half Life 2 Episode 1 came out last week so I re-installed Half Life 2 on my system, fired up Steam and got a Steam Busy error. After fooling around with it for about 1/2 hour I went out to the Steam site and found that there are pages of reasons that Steam might not work on a system. I went through all of these, including making sure the right ports were open (I even bypassed my router and went directly to the cable modem), restarted Steam, ran (and passed) the online Steam port test. I still don't know what the problem is, and so filed a support issue.

Now I might not be the sharpest pencil in the jar, but if I can't figure this out, I'm guessing there are far more novice gamers than me who cannot. Heck, I've spent 2 hours on this already. Should it even be necessary for me to go out to a forum to get this fixed? Is it unreasonable for me to expect that it should just work?

I like the idea of episodic content, and I also like the idea of being able to download it, so long as it's seamless. This, however, is crazy!

Thursday June 08, 2006

It's Funny Because It's True

The Pwned Life is a hilarious mockumentary detailing the lives BF2 soldiers lead, as told by the soldiers themselves and with actual combat footage. I'm still laughing. Their home page can be found here. Whose up for some BF2!

Monday June 05, 2006

Gaming Tidbits - 06/05/2006

Since Tim, the loser, is on vacation, it's up to me to provide you with some serious gaming tids. Without further ado:

Brian Anderson and Adam Thierer both have similar takes on the politcal abuse gaming has been taking recently. Both take politicians to task for being knee-jerk reactionaries, too willing to believe that all games are similar to GTA and not willing to ask parents to bear more responsibility for what their kids play. I know I don't allow my kids to play anything rated more than 'T', and 'T' only after I've seen how it plays (Super Smash Bros = Ok, GRAW = not so ok). What I find interesting is that all of the sex and violence in games can be found on TV (and on the news no less) and we don't see as much outcry about how CSI caused some kid to go shoot people. Apparently, only Doom or GTA has that kind of power.

It seems the latest BF2 patch is a bit unstable. Several clans and sever operators are threatening to boycott unless BF2 is fixed. Haven't we seen that before? Any played any BF2 recently and can comment? And why is it that some of the bugs have not yet been fixed?

I think we know why fixes to BF2 are lagging, BF 2142! Check out these new screenies. I'm looking forward to this, the next installment in the buggy, unstable BF series.

Finally, a game Pete can, errr, get behind!

40-boxing WoW?

From the WoW forums comes an interesting discussion on the feasability of 40-boxing the game. That is, one person controlling 40 characters. Insane? Maybe. Impossible? Maybe not.

And over on Terra Nova, the discussion keeps going, suggesting that if you did this you're probably playing a different kind of game (more like an RTS) than you are an MMORPG. Imagine if you could mod WoW to the point where you controlled all 40 from a tops-down view and could click and move them that way?

Thanks to WoWInsider for the news.

Sunday June 04, 2006

PSP2 to drop UMD?

The net is abuzz with rumors that the next generation handheld from Sony will eschew the UMD media and in fact come without any external media at all. Instead, all content will be purchased online from the Sony HUB and stored on the the build-in drive (and further speculation here has the internal space being either a 4GB or 8GB of flash memory or an internal 20GB hard disk.) No specs are of course available and this is likely all speculation, but it would certainly demonstrate the next move towards a robust digital distribution mechanism for games.

Contrasting this is another rumor that Sony will create UMD-RW's and drives - and build this into the PSP2. I'd love to see this, but it would be in extreme contrast to the closed-system approach Sony has today with the PSP and UMDs. Being able to create your own UMDs would allow homebrew on the PSP and Sony has certainly not been interested in that.

Personally, I don't see either one of these rumors holding water in the long run. If there's a PSP2 it will have to come with some significantly new hardware too - especially faster processor and improved graphics engine. I also doubt most folks are ready to move entirely to digital distribution instead of buying games in the store.

Further credit to the 1up podcast for its tip on a UMD-less PSP potentially in the works.

Saturday June 03, 2006

REVIEW: God of War for the PS2

My Rating
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Really strong action adventure game with a deep plot, innovative gameplay, and a fantastic blend of action and puzzles.
PROS: Very fun puzzles, exciting combat, the best graphics I've seen on the PS2, and 'hard but not impossible' action. The RPG elements are well integrated and allow you to customize the play to your style just enough. The sound is great too - both the action sounds as well as the score.
CONS: Bloody to the extreme (even the game designers seem to make fun of it at times); so fast a start it can leave you wondering what is going on; the boss fights can get a bit tedious.
BOTTOM LINE: A cross between the best of Tomb Raider, elements of Zelda, with some Mortal Kombat thrown in with a great story - what's not to like? Took about 10 hours to finish on Medium difficulty and was well worth the $20 price tag. Anybody with a PS2 needs to play this one at least once.

Friday June 02, 2006

POLL RESULTS: Your Next MMO?

Here are the results of the latest Gaming Signal poll.

QUESTION
What will be your next MMO purchase?

RESULTS

(8 total votes)

Considering how long this poll was up, I was hoping that we would have gotten a few more votes, but I do understand that SnapPoll was down for some time. The end result of everything seems indicate that folks may check out the Mythic offering or just not play any MMO's which is not such a bad thing.
Be sure to vote in this week's poll on second hand game availability and console purchases.

DRM: What is it good for!

Come on - you can finish the statement with me, "Absolutely nothin'!". Whew, do we all feel better?

In all seriousness, Digital Rights Management (or DRM) has spawned lots of controversy both here on GamingSignal as well as in the online community in general. The idea behind it is simple - provide the owner of content (that's you) the ability to use the content you purchased according to the rights given to you by that purchase. In other words, it lets me use the thing I bought in the manner the provider intended. It has restrictions, sure - but those restrictions are supposed to be in the areas outside of the scope of the intended use. And as you can imagine, here is where all the problems begin...

You may think that DRM is in the future - that we haven't seen it in use yet but that it will become a factor in all our lives once BluRay or HD DVD comes of age. Well I've got news for you - you're using DRM today whether you know it or not and DRM has been around for years. It's also going to be in use in the future without question. Let's explore the topic a bit and see how things have progressed. I'll also give my views on where we need to go.

Does anybody remember those parallel port dongles that had to be attached to your PC to be able to use certain software like AutoCAD or Wordcraft? Well, that's a form of DRM - it was a way to physically lock usage to whomever owned the dongle. This worked, sort of. I remember having all sorts of printer compatibility problems with dongles. I also remember seeing dongle emulation software out there that provided a, um, work-around. USB dongles are still in use today (unsurprisingly in products from Autodesk.) Did dongles help? Yes, they did and do help - I'd argue that today's solutions are surprisingly difficult to crack and are working for folks like Autodesk. Of course, I remember once when the dongle got fried in a lightning storm and we were without use of the server software we needed for days until a replacement could be obtained, but otherwise it worked. Do I want dongles in the future? Actually, I sort of do - see below.

DVDs contain a form of DRM. DVD content is protected with a system called CSS - you can only play it back on players who have paid a fee to the DVD Consortium and gotten a license. This means that every DVD player in the world has a mini decryption key and decryption engine inside capable of descrambling the data. It also means the player manufacturers have agreed not to include certain features, such as the ability to extract a pure digital feed of the film that would allow a high resolution copy. Did this form of DRM work? Ultimately no, it didn't. It caused all sorts of troubles for consumers who couldn't playback DVDs on their home PCs without purchasing software to do so, despite the fact that the technology was physically all there - I had to buy a DVD playback program in order get the license and thus a decryption key.

I'm sure some of you are now saying, "but wait, I can rip DVDs to my hard disk without loss of quality - how is that possible?" It's possible because somebody cracked the encryption used and as a result pretty much all DVD content is now available without protection somewhere on the internet. Note that if you live in the United States (or the European Union I believe), use of a program to decrypt a DVD to your hard disk is against the law. The problem is - should this use be against the law if I have no intention of doing anything with the content of my DVDs besides making them available on a home media server or for playback on my PSP/iPod? And here's what the nasty part of DRM rears its ugly head - current restrictions make this sort of usage either illegal or a violation of the license agreement.

So we have 2 bad things up there with DVDs - the content owners lost control of their content and consumers have to suffer with restrictions on use that they overall shouldn't have and don't like. Thus, to me DVD DRM is inherently a failure.

We currently have HDTV broadcast out over the airwaves and through cable TV - a fine high-resolution data stream of movie content. This content is protected by a simple form of copy protection known as the 'broadcast flags.' The flags allows content so marked to be controlled by the devices that can demodulate the HDTV stream. For example, the flags might allow the content written to other media (like a DVRs hard disk or an HD VHS) but only once (this is how movie content is routinely set.) It might also prevent all such writing of the content (I'm personally not aware of this ever happening, but it very much possible.) Overall I bet most people don't find this form of DRM restrictive and yet the content owners seem moderately happy with it. So this is one that works, mostly because the content owners have allowed the use that consumers want.

Moving along to the future, here comes BluRay and HD DVD. The DRM in both is similar to DVDs but significantly more complicated and subject to reliability concerns. They purport to allow users to make copies of the content for use in devices like portable players, as well as do a better job protecting the content. I hope they do - but let's take a look at one tiny aspect of the standards. The content you buy (the movies) now contains some interesting new things - along withe movie and extra bits you want to watch, the media also includes code your player has to be able to play. This code (itself encrypted of course) can then analyze the movie and make sure it is the official version and prevent playback if it doesn't like what it sees. [Note that I haven't found what language this code is in, but as all BluRay players have to include a run-time version of Java for its menus, it may easily be some form of interpreted language like Java. If anybody knows, please fill me in.] For BluRay (and not HD DVD) the media can also contain new encryption algorithms - including ones required for the media content to be played. This allows new content to be protected by new algorithms in the event that the initial algorithm is compromised. And finally, each disc includes a new list of allowed providers and allowed players, thus giving the consortium running this standard the ability to shut down providers they no longer trust or disallow players they no longer trust.

OK - I'm scared just reading what I wrote, and frankly I'm saving you from the most gory details. Can I really trust Disney to distribute quality code for my player with my new HD copy of "Chicken Little"? What if somebody decides the player on my PC is untrusted and suddenly I can no longer playback new content?

To me the future has to revolve around some form of content locking. That is, it needs to be locked to me in some useful way. An example of that would be locking it to my online registration, say a Microsoft Passport. Microsoft proposed exactly such a concept with it's Windows Live ID with the example of allowing me to lock my version of Bejewled I bought for one cell phone to automatically be unlocked on its replacement by logging into my Windows Live ID. Now that's DRM I can use!

But what about those devices that aren't online? That's where I think the dongle might make a reasonable return - allow me to put my licenses onto a USB dongle from my PC and move them to the other devices in my home. Think of a SecureID or ActiveKey solution but for home use. I just plug it into my BluRay player when I buy new content and it's locked to me - I can take that disc to my PC and plug in the dongle thus allowing use (including ripping down for my iPod or PSP, of course.) Given how cheap a USB interface is and how cheap the devices are, I can't see how requiring it on all my media devices is a problem. If I lost my key - no problem, I just buy a new one and move all my licenses from my online ID into the key for the next time a device needs it.

OK - that's a long post with lots of commentary - at this point I'll stop and let the rest of the rascals here chime in with mistakes and boneheaded thinking on my part .

Thursday June 01, 2006

Sony Is On Crack

Sony's Phil Harrison (whoever the hell he is) gave an interview with German publication Der Spiegel. In it, he said the following:

We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other [home] computer functions," Harrison explained. "The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC.

We don't need the PC? WTF? Can the PS3 play Wow? No! That's a true killer app for the PS3. No WoW, no replacing the PC.

Seriously, what the hell are they smoking over at Sony? The PS3's OS is Linux based, so what apps, exactly, will they use to overthrow the PC as the computer of choice (sorry Mac people)? I think they ought to bundle whatever crack they have at Sony HQ with the PS3. That would ensure the PS3 selling out for a long time.