Microsoft rolls out its “YouTube of games” at GDC

A lot of news came out last week as a result of GDC, otherwise known as the Game Developers Conference. Microsoft had a nice keynote presentation of sorts, where they announced among other things their new integration of XNA developer games into Xbox Live. if you don’t know what XNA is, it’s basically a development kit for Xbox Live arcade games. They make it so game developers (mostly indie companies) can develop a game for PC and quickly port it over to the 360. The tools include all of the functionality you need to have an Xbox Live Arcade game, and if you’re so inclined you can check them out here.

Why this is important to gamers is that we’ll be seeing a lot more games on Xbox Live in the future as a result. Even though the service doesn’t roll out until this holiday season, there are already some demo games up on Live that I encourage you to try out. Because the XNA developers community is easily accessible to most would-be developers (entrance is only $100 annually and the tools are free) we can hopefully expect a whole new batch of fresh games with unique gameplay and original ideas because of this announcement. Here’s how it will work.

Say I’m an independent game developer, and I have this really cool idea for an Xbox Live Arcade game. I download the XNA tools, create my game, and then submit via a peer approval process. This is one thing I didn’t really understand about the whole deal at first – one of the biggest problems about getting a game on Xbox Live Arcade has always been the ridiculous amount of Microsoft certification a game would have to go through before being put up for download. So before I would finish a game, submit it to Microsoft, and then maybe see the game on Live 6 months later. At the same time you don’t want any schmuck uploading bad code directly to Live and bringing down the service. So instead, the developer submits his work to a “jury of his peers” as it were, basically the XNA developer community gets access to my game and puts it through the ringer before it can be seen on Live. That way all of the kinks are worked out before users get to play it and the process is sped up at the same time. Okay, great. I’ve developed a game and submitted it to XNA for review, and now it’s been put on Live for people to download. What’s next?

A couple of things. I mean, you could stop there without a doubt but why would you want to? The XNA tools make it so that you can easily convert your game to a PC-playable version if you would like to do that or, alternatively (and this is what really piqued my interest) you can port it to the Zune. Now, I’ve been sort of vocal about my opinions on the Zune. I think it’s a highly underrated device that kicks the pants off of its competition (remember, the Zune 80 is meant to compete with the iPod Classic 80GB, NOT the iPod Touch) and so I was already set on picking one up sometime this Spring. This announcement only solidified my decision. You mean I can play the same arcade games on my Zune that I have on my Xbox 360? Bank.

Now Playing:
Juno Reactor Vs. Don Davis – Burly Brawl
Mass Effect, Hellgate: London

The beauty of Akismet.

Man, I can’t believe I didn’t catch on to this sooner. This blog tends to get hit hard by spam…it started off slow, maybe one or two messages a day, and then it ramped up to around 15+. The good and bad thing about that is that I can halt comments from being posted until after I’ve reviewed them. This is great because anyone who reads anything here doesn’t have to look at Viagra ads, but bad because the process of marking a comment as spam and then banning the IP address that posted it is long and arduous. It got so bad that I eventually had to set up a different folder in my email client that I automatically forwarded all messages from my blog into, otherwise my mail was 75% comment spam.

It got to a point where I was fed up and started to look for a good spam plugin for WordPress. Of course like any internet user these days I just googled “WordPress spam plugin” and the third result was on the WordPress Codex written by the WordPress crew themselves. They enlightened me to a little plugin that is installed by default with most WordPress installations called Akismet, and said that it would more than likely dodge most comment spam. I went ahead and activated Akismet (for WordPress users, it’s as easy as logging into WordPress and then going to the plugin tab) and since then I haven’t seen a single piece of comment spam.

I’m pretty excited about this. I’d say at least half of my interaction with the blog was getting rid of comment spam as opposed to writing posts so this will be a time saver. My only problem is that I tend not to get a whole lot of comments of the genuine nature so I’m not sure if Akismet is just going crazy blocking everyone’s comments or if it really is doing its job. If someone (or multiple someones) could do me a favor and leave a comment I’d really appreciate it! Help put my mind at ease. =)

Now Playing:
Dropkick Murphys – Get Up
Mass Effect

Thunderbird/Mail.app + IMAP = Bliss

For a long time I’ve been using email applications via a web browser. In fact, for the most part aside from when I almost had to, I would never use an email application (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app) in order to manage my email. I’m writing this post however, as a changed man truly enlightened to the benefits of using an email management application on my desktop instead of in the browser.

Let me start out by saying that the two applications I use are Thunderbird on my Windows PC’s and the default Mail.app in OS X. Both are set to link into my Gmail account via the IMAP support that Google added not too long ago. Honestly, without IMAP I would be very remiss to make this switch at all. What IMAP does it makes it so any changes to your email in your email application will be instantly reflected server-side. For example, if I’m using IMAP and I delete a message in Thunderbird the message will also be deleted when I login to my Gmail account in Firefox. If I was using POP when I deleted the message in Thunderbird it would still be there when I logged into my account in Firefox. This applies to other things too of course – showing read/unread messages, an updated “sent” folder, etc.

So why Thunderbird and not Outlook or Vista’s Windows Mail? Well they’re slow. Thunderbird works well with IMAP and is basically seamless (same for Mail.app on the mac) whereas just trying to open a message via IMAP in Outlook can take up to a minute or two. I may not have had everything configured correctly though (and if I didn’t let me know how to fix this!). Another nice thing is that I can use the same version of Thunderbird on multiple platforms – both XP and Vista. Finally, Thunderbird has an add-on for a calendar, and then an add-on for that add-on to integrate Google calendars into the Calendar. So now I have my Google mail and my Google calendar in one spot, easily accessible.

Mail.app doesn’t have a calendar right in it, but of course the mac comes with iCal which also integrates nicely with Google calendars. One thing that Mail.app has is stylish looks. That’s not to say Thunderbird is ugly, but as it goes with most comparisons of applications between Windows and Mac – the Mac one is generally more pleasing to the eye. Other than that it does the same thing that Thunderbird does more or less.

So this is all well and good, but what’s the point behind making this switch? I’ll list some of the benefits. First of all, I can have my email program open at all times so that I’m constantly alerted of new messages without having to go back an check a web browser. Second, because my browser of choice on the PC is Firefox still, and Firefox tends to be a little bit of a memory hog when it’s open for any length of time, it ends up being a little easier on my machine. Finally, without having a local copy Google basically owns my email. What I mean by that is if I only interact with my Gmail account in a web browser my email is only ever stored up on their servers. What if the internet goes down? I’m basically up a creek. However, using an email application I can have a local copy that can be accessed even without an internet connection.

So give it a shot, you might just like the switch! It’s pretty convenient to have one application to go to to get all you need – new email messages, your calendar, even a to-do list, all without having to manage multiple websites in a browser. This is one change I’m glad I made.

PS - As my continued search for the perfect blogging tool on my mac continues I must let you know that this post was written in Ecto. So far I’ve tried MarsEdit and AirPress as well. The last client I know of that I want to try is Journler, but since it’s not really a dedicated blogging tool I’m going to assume that Ecto’s for me since it’s the one I’ve liked the best so far. If you know of another Mac-specific blogging client that’s Wordpress capable please let me know in a comment!

Now Playing:
Brad Sucks – Sick As A Dog
Mass Effect

Get Vent!

I was severely disappointed when, a couple weeks ago, Hellgate London’s developer Flagship Studios released a patch that broke the Xfire support for me. Other than that the patch was great, but one of my favorite parts of the game was that Xfire was integrated allowing for in-game parties to quickly and easily move to voice communication rather than text via the chat. Voice is vastly superior because it’s easier and faster, so this feature alone really made the game for me.

For some reason (and this problem still isn’t fixed for me as of February 17th, 2008) I can get into an in-game party and use voice chat but as soon as I leave the area I’m in I get logged off of Xfire and booted out of the voice chat. This also seems to happen for the other party members. Pretty lame, particularly for a game that touts its integration with Xfire. The solution? Well, after asking around in the in-game chat to see if anyone else was experiencing the same thing everyone was oblivious. They did have some advice though – “Get Vent!”

At the time this sort of infuriated me. Nothing like asking how to fix something that’s broken and being told to get an entirely different app for the same purpose when the first one should work properly. Still, after waiting all this time about a month later I said I’m sick of this and decided to set up Vent. Vent, in case you don’t know, is online “shortification” of the word Ventrilo which is a voice communication application for PC and Linux. It’s really common but it’s mostly used for larger groups of gamers, for instance guilds in World of Warcraft or clans in CounterStrike tend to use Ventrilo. It’s referred to as a voice server, and as such it’s really appropriate for 10 or more users at a time. Therefore for my small groups of players (sometimes as few as 2) it seemed like it wasn’t really worth the trouble. Still, like I said, I really wanted to have something to enable voice.

So I went about setting it up. It was actually pretty easy, and once it’s installed it’s kind of slick. My main concern with installing Ventrilo (particularly the server) was that it would be a resource hog and use up a lot of RAM but it doesn’t. I think Ventrilo Server took about 900k? I’m rocking 3 gigabytes so that’s not very substantial. Anyways, the installation! All you really have to do is download and install the server, edit the .ini file that is included to add the name of the server, default channel, passwords for users and the admin, and so on and then tell the other users to point their Ventrilo client applications towards the server’s address and input the name/password and you’re good to go. When it worked after only a few minutes of troubleshooting I was shocked. I started out by testing the connection from client to server on my own computer by running the server and client application at the same time then connecting to the server via the client, and when that worked, I tested it out with a friend. That worked first try and it’s been gravy ever since.

Despite my initial misconceptions (I had used Ventrilo in the past, by the way) Ventrilo has some neat features. First off, you can have multiple channels which you can think of as different chatrooms. For instance if you had a large group of users playing different games you could set up a different channel for each game so that all of the users can be connected to the same server why also having discussions in different games without any confusion. There is also commonly an AFK channel so people can show when they’re away from their keyboard. Another cool thing is that you can show your current iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player song next to your name in the voice chat room. I kind of discovered this out of the blue, it wasn’t really a feature I had known about previously, but I thought it was neat. If you’ve used Adium with its iTunes away message which shows what’s currently playing you’ll know what I’m talking about. Why you would want to listen to tunes while trying to voicechat is beyond me but it’s there if you need it.

So that’s it, I “GOT VENT!” Now I just have to build a larger community or something so I can really put it to the test. Until next time…

Now Playing:
Ian Gillan – Eternity (Blue Dragon OST)
Stranglehold, Call of Duty 4, Hellgate: London

Testing out MarsEdit

Alright so this is basically just a freestyle post, no frills. It’s 1:30AM Friday night and I’m struggling with a conundrum. I really want to start managing my blog on my Macbook in OS X, but I can’t find a good freeware blogging solution let alone one that compares to Live Writer.

The thing I like the most about Live Writer (and I know I’ve said this before…) is that it shows a preview of the page in the editor the way it will look on the blog once it’s posted. That’s a really nice feature. MarsEdit seems to sort of do the same, it tries its best, but it doesn’t really look like my blog in the editor. So far it’s easy to use though, so we’ll see.

So like I said this is just a one-off post testing out MarsEdit. I’m also considering trying out Ecto. The problem with both of these applications? They’re certainly not freeware. I suppose that’s just how it goes though. If nothing else I’ll get the most out of this trial while it lasts and then move over to Ecto – that should cover about a month’s worth of blogging, right?

E you later!

Alright so roughly a year ago I was huge into Justin.tv.  It was awesome watching his startup trying to make it, plus the voyeuristic appeal of watching him in his day-to-day struggles.  Eventually though it got old because most of the time I tuned in he would be at some Web 2.0 party in San Francisco where background noise would make things impossible to hear.  Since then dozens of new channels have started up on Justin.tv, so it’s obvious Justin and his friends were successful in completing their "youtube of lifecasting."

Even though I’m not interested in Justin.tv anymore I still sometimes run out of things to watch or listen to while I’m working/playing on the computer.  That’s where my boy Chris Pirillo comes in from the old Tech TV days.  Chris was a journalist back in the day who hosted Call for Help on the ill-fated Tech TV channel (probably my favorite channel in the history of TV – G4 just doesn’t compare) and now he’s doing his own sort of "lifecasting."  It’s not lifecasting in the Justin.tv sense…Chris doesn’t carry a camera around with him wherever he goes or anything.  Still, he has his office set up with several cameras which are streamed through UStream on his site.  Then, every night he does a nice little free tech support show where people who go to his site can call him and get some help with their tech problems.  It’s basically like a one-man Call for Help in 2008.

I started to get into live.pirillo.com after he was on This Week In Tech last week, and I’m sort of hooked.  You can jump into the live IRC chat which is streamed along with his video and more or less interact with Chris and his devoted fanbase.  Give it a look, or heck, give him a call some time when he’s doing a show and maybe you can get some help!  I know that if I find myself on the computer anytime from 8 until I go to bed I generally have a browser open with Chris in it, plus an IRC client so I can jump into the chat if I have anything to add.

Now Playing:
Dropkick Murphys – Pipebomb on Landsdowne
Stranglehold, Mass Effect, World of Warcraft

Netflix movies on demand…

Alright so I started up my Netflix subscription again recently, and despite still not having received my first movie from them (Grandma’s Boy, in case you’re interested) I did have a chance to try out some of their "instant" streaming movies.  The selection isn’t that great but the two I’ve watched so far are Death Proof and Helvetica.  Two decent movies.  The important part though is whether or not these instant streaming movies are worth it or not.

If you could only get on-demand movies through Netflix I’d say no.  However, since with a subscription as cheap as Netflix’s  2 disc at-a-time plan you get unlimited viewing of the instant movies it’s pretty nice.  I’m constantly looking for something to listen to or watch whenever I’m behind my computer for whatever reason, so being able to set up a movie on one screen while I work on the other is pretty nice.  The quality isn’t amazing, but it’s not so bad you’ll notice most of the time.  If you’re used to online videos (things like Revision 3 or Mahalo Daily) you’ll be at home.  The movies play right in your browser, and can go full-screen without taking too much of a hit as far as quality goes.

I do have two problems with the service though.  First off, it only works in IE.  What?  It doesn’t really bother me that much because with a movie going in IE it’s not like I’m going to be trying to browse in the same window.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.  Everyone uses Firefox, so why limit us to IE?  It’s kind of annoying because I’ll be looking for a movie in Firefox then I’ll hit play, after which I’ll be greeted with a nice "you’re running the wrong browser for this" page.  So I have to copy and paste the URL to the movie I was going to watch into IE, and then I’m good to go.  It’s not a huge problem or a deal-breaker by any means, but like I said it just doesn’t make sense to me.  This is 2008.  Make it work in multiple browsers.

Next up is the relatively small amount of movies they have that work with on-demand viewing.  As of today when I’m writing this there are a little over 7,000 movies available for instant viewing, most of which are older classics or TV shows.  There also seems to be a lot of documentaries.  I suppose that makes sense because you don’t need a huge amount of quality in the output when watching a documentary.   Hopefully they’ll add some newer movies such as Grindhouse, which I think might be the newest movie they have in the instant viewing library.  We’ll see.

Now Playing:
Canibus feat. Luminati – Drama A/T
Mass Effect, World of Warcraft

iPod Touch and iPhone upgrades

For some reason Apple announced that the capacities of the iPhone and the iPod Touch would be doubled earlier this week.  The reason I say for some reason, is it’s hard to understand why they didn’t just announce this at Macworld.  You know, that huge event that is all about Apple products?  The one that was just a couple weeks ago?  Yeah, it’s odd.  Maybe the new capacities weren’t ready (if so, why didn’t they just do what they did with the Apple TV revisions and say it’s coming in 2 weeks?) or maybe Steve Jobs didn’t want to take attention away from the Macbook Air.  Regardless, if you find yourself interested in the iPhone or iPod Touch but you couldn’t see yourself committing to the rather miniscule capacities they came with originally (4 and 8 gigabytes for the iPhone, 8 and 16 gigabytes for the iPod Touch), you can now get hardware with at least twice the space.

The iPhone now has a 16 gigabyte version which doubles the size of their largest version up to this point, and the iPod Touch is getting a 32 gigabyte version which also doubles the highest capacity you could get for that device up until this announcement.  If you’ve read my blog for any considerable amount of time (and God bless you for doing so =P) you’ll know that the initial size of the hard drive on the iPod Touch was the main deterrent for me getting one to serve as my next MP3 player.  So now with a 32 gigabyte version, which is over twice the size of any MP3 player I’ve ever had, I should be happy!  At least that’s what you’re thinking.  I would be too, but there’s one caveat to this announcement – you’ll have to pay for the new capacity.

Both the 16 gigabyte iPhone and 32 gigabyte iPod Touch are $100 more than the next closest capacity in the line.  The 16 gig iPhone is $499 (whereas the 8 gig version is $399) and the 32 gig iPod Touch is $499 (whereas the 16 gigabyte version is $399).  So for an MP3 player to get enough room to store the bulk of my music plus some video files I’d have to drop $500.  That’s $100 more than a Playstation 3, which plays video games and Blu-Ray movies, not to mention has wifi and bluetooth functionality, and comes with a FORTY gigabyte hard drive.  I don’t know, maybe I’m just being cheap but it doesn’t seem worth it.

Honestly after this announcement my first thought was that it would be really nice to pick up an 8 gigabyte iPhone for $399 since my area has coverage.  The only problem is that I just recently got a new phone and started a new contract under Verizon, so that probably won’t be happening anytime soon.  Of course by anytime soon I mean the next two years.  What would have been great would be if Apple pulled one of their classic moves where they roll out new products at the same cost as the old products.  I expected this to happen just because they’ve done it multiple times in the past, but no such luck this time around.

Now Playing:
Canibus – Liberal Arts
World of Warcraft, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Rez HD, Call of Duty 4

Rez HD – Best XBLA game yet

Last Wednesday Microsoft finally saw fit to give us access to Rez HD through Xbox Live Arcade.  Rez is an older game, first released for the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast and then later for the Playstation 2.  It never really received the attention it deserved because the game is pretty off-beat, and was one of the first (and it is still considered among the best) of the music-oriented games that we enjoy today like Rock Band.  That’s not to say you play Rez with the guitar, but the notable thing is that much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero (along with countless other music-oriented games from the past couple years) the gameplay revovles around music.

To the untrained eye Rez looks just like a standard on-rails shooter, but the important thing is that it is set to an awesome trance soundtrack that is added to by your actions in the game.  This goes along perfectly with the vector-esque graphics that are still pretty beautiful to this day.  Like I said above, Rez didn’t get much attention when it was first released for the PS2 because it came out right around the time when huge hits like a follow-up to the Metal Gear franchise was garnering a lot of acclaim.  Basically, it got lost in the flow of other quality titles at the time.  Not only that but at $50 Rez’s 4 levels was a bit of a value question for most gamers at the time.

That’s not the case anymore.  You can get a revamped version of Rez that has been completely re-optimized for high definition audio and video aptly named Rez HD for only $10.  What can I say?  The game’s a blast.  It’s based off of the principle of being able to visualize sound or music, and it really capitalized on that.  The levels are beautiful, fun, and energetic.  Plus there’s a cool "trance vibration" feature that allows you to use separate controllers as basically sub-woofers for the game.  I’ll expand more on that in a moment.  Oh, did I mention that this platinum title can be yours for only $10??  At the risk of sounding too much like a commercial, let me just say if you’re an Xbox 360 owner and you haven’t purchased Rez yet stop reading and go do so.

So this new Trance Vibration feature like I said, allows you to assign your extra controllers almost like subwoofers, thumping out the beat as you play.  How does this work?  Well all of the Xbox 360’s controllers have a nice little rumble pack in them, so Rez just times the controller to rumble along with the beat.  It sounds gimmicky but it literally lets you feel the music as you play which is important in a game as music-centric as Rez.  What I did was set up a second controller as the trance receiver (only one, but you can have multiple controllers do this) and I placed it behind me just below my neck.  Then, whenever the level got hectic I’d feel the beat of the song, or in actuality the game, thumping through my back.  It’s pretty awesome, you just have to try it.

So that’s it.  Rez didn’t get enough attention the first time around but that’s not the case this time – go get the game!  Show support for such a special title so we can see more of these unique games down the road.  I’m just hoping that this extra bout of attention might inspire Rez’s developer (also makers of Lumines for PSP and XBLA) to bring us a sequel.

Now Playing:
Poets of the Fall – Late Goodbye
World of Warcraft, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Rez HD