Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.
- Wyndham Lewis
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Random Quote
22 May 2005 -
Advertising in Games
22 May 2005There’s a really interesting Wired article today that talks about the rising occurence of advertising within computer games.
One recent innovation panelists lauded was Sony Online Entertainment’s "slash-pizza" command in the multiplayer online game EverQuest II. When players enter the command, they can order a Pizza Hut pie for delivery.
Another example is a partnership between Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and Ubisoft Entertainment in which players of Splinter Cell use a branded cell phone to get out of dangerous situations in the game.
What’s interesting is that they are thinking of games in the same light as they do TV shows, when it seems to me that the more appropriate parallel would be movies. Let me explain:
TV shows are peppered with advertisements because they are broadcast over a free medium, i.e., television airwaves, which everybody with a set has access to. Advertisements are pretty much the only thing that generate income for the TV shows’ producers. (The process is actually more complex than this of course, because there is also the issue of distributors and networks. For the purposes of this argument, I think that saying that advertising means revenue for the TV show producers is accurate enough.)
Movies, however, are a totally different animal. Their revenue comes from ticket sales, merchandise and later video sales and rentals. Their actual product is free of advertisements (with some small exceptions every now and then), because their revenue is protected by the fact that people have to pay to see anything.
Now the question would be, which of these two industries — tv or film — is the gaming segment most like? The answer, I think, is film. Most games these days take a year or more to develop, and when they are released, gamers pay a certain sum of money to be able to use them. If the game generates enough sales, the game developer recoups their production cost and makes a tidy profit on top. If not, the game studio is left to lick their wounds and look for another round of venture capital if they want to try again. Bigger game releases also make money through merchandise, and to a lesser degree, game rentals.
With that in mind, there are two reasons why I dislike the idea of running advertisements within games. The first is that, in this day and age where every game is pushing for "total user immersion," running ads would be like taking two steps backward. They’re distracting because you know you’re being sold something, when all you want to do is play. The second is that the gamers have already paid the "cost of admission" by purchasing the game. Forcing them to view ads that do not contribute in any way to the overall experience is being greedy.
Now, if advertising in computer games is inevitable (and it certainly looks that way), then I think games should be free, or nearly free. When these new, ad-supported games are released, you either download them with no cost to you, or go to a store and pay a few bucks to cover the cost of packaging and the actual disc, kinda like the way you buy Linux.
Of course, as a matter of principle, and because I happen to enjoy playing computer games, I’m completely opposed to the idea of running any kind of advertisements on any of the games I buy.
So no, I don’t want a Coke with my railgun, thank you very much.
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Samsung 40-inch OLED
21 May 2005
Samsung just debuted their first 40" OLED display (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) a couple of days ago. As you can see from the picture, the difference between OLEDs and LCDs is fairly huge, i.e., you can view OLEDs from even the most acute angle, and each unit comes with a cute model to help you show it off to your friends.This OLED sports a contrast ratio of 5000:1 (which in layman’s terms is the number of distinct gray tones it can display between full black and full white). Compare that to your average LCDs’ relatively modest 500:1 ratio, and you’ll see why these displays represent the cutting-edge of monitor technology.
Interestingly enough though, this model only runs at a resolution of 1280×800, which seems like a pretty big waste of 40" of screen width, imho.
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PalmOne LifeDrive
20 May 2005![0,1311,i=105240,00[1].jpg](/img/pics/0,1311,i=105240,00[1].jpg "0,1311,i=105240,00[1].jpg")
A review of PalmOne’s LifeDrive was published over at PCWorld a couple of days ago, and it seems the world’s first hard-drive-based PDA is off to a good start.I like the idea of having a big storage unit on my person at all times, although I’m not sure if 4gb is really big enough for my purposes. If you think about it, 4gb is an awkward size for this sort of thing — if you aren’t a media buff, anything over 512mb is more space than you’d ever need, and if you are, then 4gb is too small.
Photographers might have a use for it as a backup unit during shoots, but since it doesn’t look like it has USB hosting capabilities, it’ll be a complicated process getting photos from your camera and into the LifeDrive. Meanwhile, music enthusiasts will have gone for larger-capacity players and movie afficionados will almost certainly have chosen one of the many available PVPs. So essentially, the LifeDrive is for the consumer who isn’t any of those things, and yet has a need for the space that is often associated with those types of people. An in-between, entry-level kind of product.
Of course, the LifeDrive does have some nice connectivity options to offer (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB 2.0 all come standard), so there’s that. I suppose the best way to look at this device would be as a PDA with lots of space, instead of a "convergent multimedia" solution. At US$500, you’d have to ask yourself just how important that extra storage is to you because if it isn’t, you’re better off grabbing something else.
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Netscape 8, Bit-Torrent 4.1
19 May 2005Lots of new software coming out this month, with Yahoo Messenger, Netscape and Bit-Torrentallcoming out with spiffy new versions of their respectiveapplications. Ialready wrote about Y!M 7 earlier today, and amcurrently goofing aroundwith Netscape Navigator. (I’ve yet to try thenew Bit-Torrent though,mostly because I’m unsure how to test out thenew features.)
Netscape8 takes a page from Opera’s book and offers a dual-browserexperience,i.e., the security of Mozilla with the compatibility ofInternetExplorer. Unlike Opera however, you can configure Netscape torememberwhich rendering engine (IE or Mozilla) is more appropriate fora givensite, so you don’t have to keep toggling between the two enginesas yousurf. The IE compatibility even allows you to install andcombineIE-only browser bars (which is something I personally tend toavoid).
Thereare lots of other small UI enhancements that I foundto be prettyuseful, for example, there are lots of different settingsfor thetabbed browsing component, such as double-clicking the tab-barto opena new tab, and double-clicking a tab to close it*.
All in all, it seems to be a fairly solid browser, and the only thing that Firefox seems to do better is having lots and lots of free pluginsavailable.It still isn’t smart enough to make use of the Favoritesfolder providedby Windows though, which I always find fairly annoying.These browsersall spend so much time trying to push standards andcreate a seamlessuser experience, and yet they keep insisting onmaintaining a separategroup of bookmarks per browser. I currently have5 browsers installed onmy PC and trying to keep my bookmarks currentbetween them has provenimpossible. Yeesh. Thank god for iRider, eh?
*Apparently, this is a standard Mozilla feature.
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Yahoo Messenger 7 Beta
19 May 2005The popularity of Skype (arguably the best software-only voice solution I’ve ever used) has competitors scrambling to debut their own entries into the voice-communication field, and once again the folks at Yahoo lead the pack with the beta version of Yahoo Messenger 7.
The beta pack is a 9mb download that overwrites your current YM installation. It’s fortunately not as finicky as the v5 to v6 upgrade (which required some people to delete their entire Yahoo folder before reinstalling), so reverting to v6 hopefully won’t mean losing all your Message Archives.
It’s worth noting that YM has actually had a voice-chat interface for quite some time, but they hadn’t really given it much prominence until now (it was previously only accessible within the Chat window’s menu system). With v7, you can initiate the voice-chat right off the bat, without opening a text-chat window first. I haven’t had a chance to test the performance (since none of the people in my address book have the new version yet), but I can definitely say that it’ll take a lot more than a few interface changes to approach the voice quality standard set by Skype (and VoIP in general).
For example, in the previous version of YM, voice-chatting with local clients was alot harder than voice-chatting with foreign ones because the data had twice as much cable to travel through (bouncing from Manila to the US then back to Manila with every exchange). Conversations were choppy and only barely intelligible. Skype’s perfomance, in contrast, was very impressive: only slightly worse than using a regular landline, and actually better than your average cellphone conversation. I assume that it opens a direct connection to your contact’s machine, similar to how Ventrilo works (only without the complicated client-server setup).
Other little additions include drag-and-droppable file-transfers and some small integrations with Yahoo 360 (mousing-over a contact’s name lets you jump to that person’s 360 page, if any).
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Episode III
18 May 2005I think the prevailing opinion among my own small group of friends upon seeing the last Star Wars movie was that it "could’ve been a lot better," but I also think that this entry is the strongest in the prequel story arc. That’s not saying much of course, when you consider that Episode I had Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best, the two most annoying actors in existence, and Episode II was highlighted by wonderfully stilted dialogue like "I hate the sand, it’s coarse … and rough … and gets everywhere."
None of the three recent Star Wars films have even come close to the standards set 2 decades ago by Episodes IV or V. If George Lucas has achieved anything with this batch of 500-million-dollar duds, it’s that he’s proven conclusively – three times in a row, no less – that even the heftiest effects budget will never ever substitute for a good solid story. (Wachowskis, are you listening?)
I can’t think to say anything else about this film that a hundred others haven’t already whined about in some other shape or form, so let me just sum it all up by saying that, as far as I’m concerned, Star Wars ended back in ‘83 with Return of the Jedi. Refusing to acknowledge Episodes I through III as valid entries in the saga is just about the only way I can keep thinking about Star Wars as a "good series."
*I started a thread at Highfiber collecting the other members’ thoughts, check it out here.
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Episode III Countdown
17 May 2005In less than 12 hours, I’ll be seeing what may be the last Star Wars movie ever (although the chances that the franchise will continue post-Lucas are fairly high … yeah, this is me wishing him dead again). The blogosphere is all abuzz with the prospect of this final entry in the saga, and it’s hard not to get a little excited. Fairly lengthy review later, fingers crossed.
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GuildWars
15 May 2005
Adventuring can be a most tiring endeavour.I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Guildwars the past few days, which is this new game that’s supposedly going to change the face of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games).
Because I’m not much of an RPG fan (I’m into real-time games like Quake and Warcraft), it’s been really slow-going so far. Still, I haven’t had a new game in months and you can get Guildwars up and running in less than 20 minutes if you have a fast connection, so I figured, what the hell, might as well give it a shot. (Basically, you buy the game license online, then download the game components as you play. Really handy when there aren’t any copies available at any of your local shops.)
So far, I really suck at it. And by "suck," I mean, really, really badly. The closest thing to an RPG I ever played was Diablo 2, and only then because it was Blizzard game, so I don’t exactly have what you would call "prior experience" in RPGs.
So I’ve basically been spending the last three or four days learning really newbie-type things, like Attribute assignment, Questing, Item Creation, and a whole bunch of other concepts that most other gamers probably just breeze through. Probably the hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you can’t control what your character does beyond pointing him/her at a specific target and choosing some spells to cast. You can’t dodge around, or fine-tune your position, or aim for the vitals, or any other "skill-based" things. Wrapping my mind around this concept is proving to be pretty challenging, because I’ve got about 5 years worth of first-person-shooter reflexes that are completely wasted on this game.
My character, Mr. Horatio Mangina, is a level 9 Elementalist Monk by the way, in case anyone is interested. (So if anyone out there actually plays this game, hit me up for a few quests or something when you’re online.)
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XBox 360
14 May 2005![officialxbox3601[1].jpg](/img/pics/officialxbox3601[1].jpg "officialxbox3601[1].jpg")
I’ve never used a tri-core processor running at 3.2GHz, but something tells me that’s going to be pretty friggin’ fast. Throw in a detachable 20Gb hard drive, a 500Mhz graphics processor and support for ethernet, wi-fi and up to 4 wireless controllers, and you may just be looking at the baddest game console ever built.
The Xbox 360, which was unveiled yesterday in the US, will be available in the 4th quarter of this year.