Technology Demos

Personally, I love the concept of a technology demo. It shows what could be done with a product or an idea. It's a proof of concept. What I find amazing is the fact that Nintendo has turned these into a profit margin. It seems that they have decided to push the envelope not with high quality, well designed games that have folks really re-thinking how they play, but with gimicks and technology demos of what could be done.

Last week my wife bought Wii Fit. My overall impression is actually positive for the product, but right now I want to focus in on and be really critical of what it is - it's a technology demo. The "trainers" are horridly underdone - and I don't just mean the graphics, which are bad in almost every way. They aren't animated for the most part, heck their lips don't even move, and the backgrounds look like they are from a PSOne, not a current generation console. The balance board is sometimes slow to respond, and the software could do more to determine how well you are doing with the pose, but it doesn't seem to. It also is horrid for motivation. The first thing it does is it weighs you, and figures out your BMI. It claims that around 22 is "optimal", and tells you that while doing the tests, but it's also records that as borderline obese (you figure that one out). During the tests it asks if you easily trip while walking, or if you have problems standing up. Overall I'd say that the overall tone is "demeaning". I'd guess that at least 2 out of 10 households that play this are going to bring it back to gamestop as used within 6 weeks because they aren't having any positive effects from it, and the self image of their child (or themselves) is horridly impacted.

Down to the workouts. The yoga is good, and you do feel some good initial burn from it. The pushup-plank pose really gives me a chest workout so far. My big gripe here is that you can't configure a 10 or 15 minute workout and just go through the poses. To do 10 minutes of working out takes a good 5 minutes of downtime between poses to go through their stupid slow talking and menus. There is very little to help folks trying to learn on what they should do, like don't work out the same muscle group every day, but try to break it up (legs one day, chest/arms the next). The mini-games are good, but they are mini-games, and everything requires unlocking. Whoever came up with the idea of unlocking basic fitness routines should pretty much be shot.

Maybe someone will take the balance board idea and come up with a really solid workout routine around it, one that's can become almost a personal trainer for folks. The concept is there, the technology demo I'm sure will sell well. Now maybe a real top-notch studio will do the actual work. Maybe they can get a sponsor of a real fitness guru to go through the workouts, and then you can get a varied and healthy workout. Hasn't happened yet on the Wii, though. Then again, maybe it'll need to be mimicked by the other two systems to be taken seriously...

Adversity

I'm not 100% sure if I should feel as relieved and happy as I do right now, over something as trivial as what I did this week. The "adversity" was something normally I'd just roll my eyes about, honestly. I decided instead of spending over $1,000 on a new PC system this year as a reward from a good bonus check and the new stimulus program, that I'd try to just get what I really need to push my existing system for another year or so. So I bought a new case, some additional fans and CPU heat sink, and a new hard drive. What I figured is that if I could overclock my existing A64 3000+ a fair amount, as well as re-install the OS and put it in a case I didn't loathe, that it could easily do what I wanted it for another year - namely do some media serving to my 360, and play World of Warcraft.

So I picked up a new CoolerMaster case, which I adore so far btw, a nice CPU heatsink, and a 500gig 7200RPM SATA drive. My existing copy of XP has been on this rig since 2005, and is installed on a 120g UDMA133 IDE drive. So I figured by putting a fresh copy of XP on a new drive, I'd be golden. I had a copy of XP MCE 2005 I picked up a while back, so I figured I could play around with Media Center to the 360 while I was at re-installing so after putting the new hardware together I started there. Got everything installed, and as far as I could tell, everything was running fine. Try to load up WoW, and the frame rates would drop off. Spent literally days fiddling with it, but always came back to if I launched up the copy of XP on the IDE drive, it ran fine. Tried new drivers, old drivers, drivers that I had on my IDE drive still... always came back to bad frame rates.

So last night, after reading more tips of things to play around with on the official WoW boards, I decide one last time to wipe the drivers and try using the latest and greatest from nVidia. I noticed that I may have downloaded the nForce motherboard drivers from the wrong place, as my old nForce3 is listed in their "legacy" driver section, so I get those instead. I re-download a fresh copy of the newest Forceware drivers as well. After a few bumps in the road, needless to say the Ethernet chip on the motherboard overall is a very unhappy camper in this setup anymore, I get the system back up and launching into WoW. And the frame rates are solid. They aren't perfect mind you, I get 20-40fps on average in most zones including the most notoriously lagging ones, and the UI doesn't slow down so I'm not typing and waiting to see what I type.

And so, I'm happy. Simple pleasures I guess, but it's nice to take a mountain that you know you can climb and make it to the top.

Over-Stimulated

So, after having my 360 for almost a year now, I have amassed a pretty decent collection of games. The one thing that I've noticed, is that a large majority of them are rated "M" (for Mature). When you look at the commercials on TV for games, most of them state "Rated 'M' for Mature" in the commercial, while they are showing cool graphics and/or cutscenes. The question to me doesn't become are we creating a society where women are beaten and children are killing chilren - we've had that for decades now. The question is what are we glorifying to our kids throughout ALL of society.

Now, I'm not saying I will buy GTA IV or whatever, but I really have reservations with Glenn Beck's comments that it is creating a better killer. I think the research was solid, the facts pretty straight, but the premise was failing. Because GTA makes you press a button on a controller and watch in third person the reaction, instead of making you fire a realistic weapon in first person, I'm not sure I can buy into his strangely anti-military, right wing fear of Big Brother concept that video gaming is making our kids to be killers. Better tacticians, maybe.

Whether we want to believe it or not, video gaming really is more of a litmus test of our society than an actual change mechanic. How many of the top selling games that come out each month are inappropriate for someone 8-14? How many movies are PG-13 or higher? How many of the "glamorous" TV shows are TV-MA? How many books on the shelf are to the literary level of a street worker, and become NYTimes best sellers or whatever?

We as a society want to wage wars on so many things, but we spend way too little time wanting to spend time looking at our own self indulgence. Video games aren't the evil of the world, neither is TV or movies. A "Big Mac" isn't going to kill you. Having 37 of 'em in a month might, though.

Maybe if we'd spend more time diversifying ourselves, instead of indulging on the mental mush candy fed to us as a whole, we'd be a much different society. But then again, who ever said that the Enemy ever wanted us to be spiritually and mentally fed? It's like Hanzel and Gretel at a spiritual and cosmic level...

Job Abandonment

Going to be brief on this, mostly because it has me worked up enough to babble but not enough to really rant fully on. I really don't get why folks would want to abandon their job, and at least not do the right thing and at the very least email someone (HR, their boss, a friend in the company) that they are leaving.

By leaving with no notice, and leaving clues that folks have to figure out the person that is hurt the most in the end is really yourself. Friends you had can be put off that you just left, past employers wouldn't re-hire you or give out a good reference to a new job. When a new employer checks with HR at the old job, they'll find out you were terminated for job abandonment, and may pass over hiring you.

It definitely feels like to me that it must be a personality thing or something. Guess it's one of those neurosis I can be glad I don't have.

The problem with DRM

Okay, there is no one "problem with DRM", besides that it is DRM. The problem with DRM is that the way it exists is really worthless.

Let's take an example of a system that I think is awesome, but flawed - Amazon Unbox. The biggest issue with DRM is that it cannot handle exceptions that happen in real life. I personally have an unbox account, and I had it linked to a system where the HD is now longer viable, I cannot load the operating system such to "uninstall" my copy of unbox and release the license. Thus I have content that I cannot use on one of my allowed machines, because that machine is no longer viable.

The second is the thought of $1.99 for broadcast shows. Why in the world has no-one thought about adding in-show adds to these, and requiring you to re-download new adds every number of views to continue watching the shows? I mean, it's a great concept to be able to get the ultimate "on demand" for shows you like, but I'm not going to honestly pay $1.99 to watch something I can DVR technically for "free". If I really wanted to watch that old episode of Babylon 5, for example, I'd rather just buy the DVD and not have to deal with download DRM in the mix.

At some point the content providers need to find a better way to provide their content to bring about new revenue models, instead of trying to shove unproven and ineffective ways to bring folks to content down the consumers throat, while having the old models be painless and relatively simple to keep using.

Game Saves

Back when I first got my NES, Zelda had a battery in it, so you could save your game as you went through the adventure classic (somehow I never really have felt that the Legend of Zelda was a RPG). Since those early games, the concept of game saves has been important. Up until the release of theSegaCD, game data was saved on the cartridge itself. If you rented a game from the video store, you lost all your saves when you returned it. Also with age you run into the issue that you loose your save games when the battery eventually dies. With the SegaCD, internal storage appeared: This is great for the rental concept, but horrid for the worst case scenario that your system dies and you have to replace/repair it. Luckily my original SegaCD and Saturn both are still in great working condition!

The PS1, N64, DreamCast PS2, and GameCube all had the concept of memory cartridges. These are neat because you can manage your saves individually. The Dreamcast actually made your VMU into it's own gaming peripheral, allowing for mini-games on the device. While cool, these were typically expensive propositions that were an additional charge you had to get when buying the system. Yeah, the Dreamcast was a low $99 at one point, but you had to get a $20 VMU and a $50 game just to do anything with the system!

In today's generation storage is by default again on an internal platform. For the Wii this is much like it was for the Saturn of old - an internal flash drive. Enough storage for a few things, but not for extra content. The PS3 and the 360 both use the internal storage for gaming and multimedia as well as game saves, and add an extra bit of goodness called DRM (or Digital Rights Management). This means that your save game cannot be used by someone else that logs into your system, and vice versa. Now not only if your system's hard drive dies do you perhaps loose your saves (and purchased games!), but you cannot use your game saves as you wish with your friends per se. With the 360 there is a bit of reason for this, as there is an "achievement score" that could be "fluffed" by sharing game saves that had certain achievements either easily in grasp or completed for you. That said, is my gamerscore my "fun-o-meter"?

I'm wondering if there is a holy grail of game saves, and if there is if we'll ever see it? Ideally what I'd love to see is that DRM goes away on game consoles, and the USB ports on these systems are allowed to be used for copying of game saves. Although I'd assume that it's mostly a pipe dream.

Arcade Perfect

The Sega Saturn was released on "Saturnday" - May 11, 1995 - in the United States. The system was arguably the most powerful of the 32-bit generation. The sad thing is that this machine literally produced "Arcade Perfect" representations of some of the hottest games on the market, but in many respects was a complete failure. Personally I think Sega bought into the hype that everything had to be 3D, and allowed the system to get bogged down into a type of gaming that just couldn't be matched on the hardware. It was Sega's "Strike 2", after the failed genesis add-on "32x" was canceled quickly after release amid a torrent of bad hardware and limited software releases. Even with the release of what I consider, as well as many others, the best software for the system, Sega canceled the Saturn in 1998. Games such as Panzer Dragoon Saga, which I actually happen to have played at one point and I'm almost sorry I sold, showed the versatility of the system.

To me, the Saturn is one of those systems that wasn't given a fair enough chance to survive in the US. Panzer Dragoon Saga was technically released after the system was canceled in the US, and as such saw a very limited run. The various Capcom games that were released as "Arcade Perfect" in Japan never saw the light of day in the US at all. It's really a shame that it's considered a bad console, as it had a lot to offer. By all accounts it was a difficult system to program for, but the quality games that were made definitely were silky smooth on the system.

I finally found all my old games for the Saturn over the weekend, and got a chance to reconnect with "Bust a Move 2", "Marvel Superheros", "1942" and I attempted to get "Marvel vs StreetFighter" working, but it looks like my 4-in-1 cart needs to be replaced.

It's just an amazing system, with games that many never will know how good they ran in a home console, or how impressive it was to get that kind of system in the home.