DOOM Resurrection only $2.99!

Doom Resurrection is a first person shooter from the folks at id Software, makers of the Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake and now Rage series of games.  It takes its cues from Doom 3 in particular, which was best-known for being a graphical revolution when it debuted on the PC back in 2004.  Resurrection uses assets from that same game but, as you would expect of the iPhone, doesn’t look quite as good.

The fact that it’s an FPS has been misleading to some, because it’s one of the multiple “on-rails” games that have found their way to the iPhone.  That being said it’s a full-featured experience that doesn’t borrow levels from its previous PC counterpart, and even though it doesn’t look as good as that game in particular, it’s one of the most impressive visual showcases on the platform.

Doom Resurrection was previously priced at $9.99, but at $2.99 it’s a steal.  Hurry though, this is a QuakeCon exclusive deal that will end at noon tomorrow (August 16th).  It’s worth noting that id’s iPhone version of Wolfenstein 3D is also on sale for only $0.99.  Links to both can be found below.

iTunes – Doom Resurrection

iTunes – Wolfenstein 3D

Google’s Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple Board of Directors

This is a very interesting development given very recent conflicts between Google and Apple/AT&T.  Sure, Steve Jobs has stated that Eric’s resignation was a mutual decision made by both companies because Google’s encroachment on familiar territory is becoming a conflict of interest.  Still, Android has been out for some time, so why now?

One of the biggest stories last week was Apple’s denial of the Google Voice application on the iTunes app store.  The dispute has since been consumed by the gaze of the FCC to determine if this choice was made by AT&T moreso than Apple, or if AT&T in any way influences the content found on the App Store.  If that’s the case, as it may very well be, the ruling could be important for a couple reasons.

1. Consumers have one more reason to detest AT&T
2. It gives no logical support for the claim that the denial of Google applications has anything to do with Schmidt’s descent from the board
3. Consumers have one more reason to dete….oh, I already said that one

Honestly though it doesn’t sound like Apple’s style to bend to the will of AT&T.  They love their products enough to say something to the affect of “Listen, we have a product that has made you millions, you think this app conflicts with your service then tough cookies – we’re working on a Verizon version of the iPhone anyways.”  I’m getting off-track here.

Does this departure setup a feud between Apple and Google?  The two companies have seemed almost philosophically aligned for some time now, and most pundits don’t really consider Android or what we know of Chrome OS as major threats in their individual markets (phone and PC operating systems).  All this time it has been Microsoft who has been desperately trying to compete with the big G, and just when it seems that they’re making a solid go of it the focus might be shifting towards an Apple/Google main event instead.

There is one area in which the philosophies of Apple and Google conflict, however.  Openness.  It’s been proclaimed that this might be the achilles heel of Apple.  Google always happily opens up their projects to developers while Apple severely shies away from such behavior.  Sure, the iTunes App Store is extremely successful, but the only complaint we seem to hear about weekly is that certain apps get shot down for seemingly silly reasons, and of course Apple’s proprietary take on their hardware and software is always criticized.  If Apple had the market share Windows does, they’d have one of the worst monopolies we’ve ever seen.

The only thing we could possibly say Google has a monopoly on is the search engine market, but with Bing approaching 10%+ market share that’s not as much of a compelling case.

Apple’s Keynote at Macworld ‘09

This year’s Apple keynote had a lot riding on it – firstly because Apple announced that it would be their last at a Macworld event, and secondly because Steve Jobs bowed out from doing the presentation which left Phil Schiller holding the bag.  As always there have been a ton of rumors leading up to the event (including seemingly outlandish claims of an iPhone Nano, or a tablet computer of some sort), but I don’t really want to spend much time on the speculation.  I wrote a post a few weeks ago stating what I thought would go down and I have to say I’m pretty happy with my predictions.

The first thing Schiller announced was a new version of iLife.  iLife ‘09 looks to be a solid follow-up to the famous Mac suite even though only a few applications were demonstrated.  He started with iPhoto, which now lets you sort and categorize your images in a few new ways.  The first is called Faces, and what it does is scan your iPhoto library for, believe it or not, people’s faces.  This is all done with face recognition software, and it lets you group photos by the people in them.  For example if I had a bunch of images of my niece Lilly I could have a Lilly section of my iPhoto library.  The second new categorization feature is called Places.  Places lets you use geo-tagged images (or images tagged manually) to group photos by the place from which they were taken.  If you recently took a trip to Dublin, Ireland for example, all of those images would be grouped in the Dublin section under Places.  They also announced that you can now easily upload your photos to Facebook or Flickr, and your Facebook friends can even tag your images with the people that are in them, and that information will be synced back to your iPhoto library.

Next up was iMovie.  iMovie now incorporates a lot of the features that many people were upset about it missing from iMovie ‘06.  It uses the same interface, but it incorporates a timeline and lets you do some cool new things as well.  First off, you can now drag and drop clips together without having to split each clip individually.  For example, if I have one clip that I want to play in the middle of another, previously I’d have to split the second clip and put the first in between the two parts of the second.  Now I can just drop the first right into the second without splitting anything, and iMovie does the work for me.  It also lets you use just the audio from your clips, letting you mix bits and pieces of audio from your entire recording.  Add to that my favorite feature, image stabilization (it will come in very handy with the Flip Mino HD) and iMovie ‘09 seems to be a very solid upgrade.

Garageband ‘09 was also shown, but I don’t really use that application too much so I figure I’ll just stick to what interested me for the sake of brevity.

Next up came iWork ‘09, and iWork.com.  iWork.com is an online sharing service that lets you share your iWork projects with your friends or co-workers, and is platform independent.  The interface looks just like the iWork app itself, and it enables discussions to be held on the status of the project, or comments to be added if there are changes to be made.  As far as I know however, you can’t actually edit the documents from iWork.com, just view them.  Right now the service is in beta and is therefore free, but Apple is planning on charging for it down the road.  I don’t think that’s a very smart decision because it seems to be the sort of feature which, if bundled with the purchase of iWork ‘09, could be the factor that persuades unsure users to go ahead and purchase a copy of the suite.  As a separate charge it might end up being unsuccessful in the long term.

Obviously iWork.com is just the beginning.  Each of the apps in the iWork suite (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) will see significant updates for the ‘09 release.  Pages is getting a feature similar to WriteRoom’s which lets you have full-screen text editing, as well as a new outline mode and more templates.  Keynote has new transitions, and even does automatic animations with a feature called “Magic Move.”  With Magic Move you can have an object on one slide, and then the same (or more) object(s) on the next, and Keynote will automatically animate these images from slide to slide.  Apple has also added a new app to the iPhone app store called Keynote Remote.  This application lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote for your keynote presentation, letting you switch between slides from the device as well as view presentation notes.  It’s odd to think that my favorite feature from the iWork ‘09 suite would be an iPhone app, but this is it.  Finally, Numbers is getting more formulas, advance charts, and of course additional themes.

Next up came the 17″ Macbook Pro unibody.  This announcement came as a surprise to no one.  Much like the other Macbook updates, the Macbook Pro 17″ will finally get that nice aluminum and black bezel design.  It also comes with either a glossy or matte screen, and it packs a whopping 8 hours of battery life.  The only downside is that the battery can’t be removed, a major gotcha for a lot of folks out there.  There isn’t much else to be said about the 17″ Macbook Pro, except that it’s $3,000 so I’ll never be able to afford one. =)

Lastly and, in my opinion anyways, most importantly, was the announcement that iTunes is finally going DRM-free.  As of the keynote there were 8 million songs switched to DRM-free, with the promise that the entire iTunes library would also be by the end of the year.  The only problem is that Apple seems to have buckled to the record labels in order to get this deal done as now their music will have variable pricing.  Some tracks will cost as much as $1.29, while others will be as cheap as $0.69.  Phil Schiller assured the crowd that there would be many more 69 cent songs than dollar 29 ones, but only time will tell if he was being truthful.  In the meantime I’m going to scope out some of the albums I’ve been meaning to purchase to see if I an get a DRM-free deal on them!

iTunes 8.0 Gridview and Genius Playlists

I wrote a post earlier this week in which I ran through some of the new features in iTunes 8.0, particularly Genius playlists, but I figured today I’d make a couple videos to show what I was talking about a little bit better.  Without further ado:

iTunes 8.0 – Grid View

iTunes 8.0 – Genius

Apple’s “Let’s Rock” iPod and iTunes Event

I was very interested to see what sort of new products would be unveiled by Apple on Tuesday, and I have to say, there’s some interesting news based on what they showed us.  If you were following any speculation leading up to the event then there isn’t much in the way of surprise, but what I’m most interested in is the way they’re trying to market some of their products moving forward.  Let’s start with iTunes.

iTunes 8.0 was officially released Tuesday, as always a free download, and it brings some new functionality to the old standby application which the bulk of people turn to for their music management.  Firstly, you get a new gridview for music that’s very similar to the layout of the stacks gridview.  Really this was sort of already implemented into iTunes with the App Store though.  If you have downloaded any applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch you’ll have noticed that the applications tab basically lists your installed mobile apps in a gridview.  Take that feature and apply it to your music albums and you get the idea.  They also brought NBC back to iTunes so if you’re hankering for some new episodes of The Office this Fall you can get them from iTunes for $1.99 (standard definition) or $2.99 (high definition).  Apple has also figured out how to make the high definition content viewable on your computer so if you don’t have an Apple TV you won’t be left out.

The most important feature added in iTunes 8.0 is Genius.  Genius does its best to create playlists for you based on certain songs in your music collection, similar to how Pandora or Last.fm work.  So for example, if I’m listening to a Deftones song and I would like to make a playlist of 25 songs that Genius thinks is similar to it, I click the Genius bar and bam – all of the songs that are similar to my Deftones track are ready to be played in succession.  The only downside is that, since Genius is only limited to your iTunes library (despite making recommendations from the iTunes store) you won’t get as many accurate matches as you do from Pandora or Last.fm (services which pull from their own, expansive libraries of music).  Right now I’m listening to a Genius playlist based on the song by Deftones called “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event,” a relatively mellow song, and so Genius has pulled in 24 other songs it thinks are similar.  Some matches are spot on like A Perfect Circle’s “Vanishing” or Team Sleep’s “Our Ride to the Rectory,” while others are a little more questionable.  For instance, how is DragonForce’s much heavier “My Spirit Will Go On” or “Storming the Burning Fields” similar to “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event?”  Both are heavy power metal songs where as, like I said, “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event” is a melodic and atmospheric piano piece for the most part.  Intriguing to say the least.

Still, Apple promises that as more and more users use Genius it will become smarter over time (it makes records of everyone’s iTunes libraries anonymously).  I still wish there was a way to approve or disapprove matches though.  In any case Apple’s event on Tuesday wasn’t all about iTunes – there was plenty of iPod news to go along.  First off, to no one’s surprise, they showed off the new version of the iPod Nano.  Gone is the “iPod Phat” design from last year and now we get a nice tall, skinny version of the tiny player with a nice curved design and widescreen display.  The Nano even has some accelerometer functionality.  Steve Jobs showed how you could shake the Nano in order to initiate a shuffle of your music!  As cool as it sounds I think this feature might suffer from the Nintendo Wii complex; that is it sounds cool in theory but is anyone going to want to shake about their MP3 player in public?  The Nanos come in a plethora of new colors as well, ranging from professional-looking black and aluminum to  the more fun pink, orange and (my personal favorite) green variants.

Next up is the iPod Touch.  Now, I just got an iPod Touch not too long ago so I was sort of hoping in the back of my mind that the updates wouldn’t be too significant.  Needless to say I’m a little disappointed.  Aside from getting a much-needed price drop the Touches were also graced with a bit of a hardware design and new hardware features that I’m envious of.  The most notable features are the new volume rocker and external speaker, two features that I’d honestly love to have on my 1st generation iPod Touch.  The physical volume rocker is kind of obvious – it would be nice to be able to change volume without having to even take the device out of my pocket – but the external speaker is a justified phenomena that you might not understand unless you have an iPod Touch or iPhone.

I’m not sure if the same is true for most iPod Touch users but I find myself carrying mine without headphones.  There’s so much you can do with the iPod Touch that doesn’t require them that I find myself content to just browse the internet, check my email and use applications rather than listen to music or watch videos.  Still, it’s that one time when you’d like to have your headphones with you and you don’t that makes you realize how important the external speaker is.  For example, what if you want to watch a YouTube video?  You don’t really need great sound to watch a YouTube video, just something passable.  However if you’re like me and you tend to leave your headphones behind then you’re kind of stuck.  The external speaker is perfect for that.  Basically what it does is make the iPod Touch more of a portable computer than just an iPod that also has computer-esque features.

I think one important thing to note about the new iPod Touch is how Apple has chosen to market it.  It’s no secret that the App Store is full of a bunch of different games, some of which are free and others that cost money.  Because of this they dedicated an entire portion of their presentation to showing off some upcoming games for the iPod Touch, and have labeled the iPod Touch the “funnest iPod yet!”  Sounds to me like they’re going after some of the portable gaming market.  Maybe they were inspired when John Carmack noted that Apple’s mobile offerings are more powerful than either the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP?  I think the fundamental difference between the iPod Touch and other portable gaming consoles is that Apple wants to sell hardware, not software.  Sony and Nintendo are glad that you’re purchasing their systems but where they really make money is on the games.  Is the same true for Apple?  A lot of the games, as I mentioned, are free or relatively cheap.  I’m not sure how that will figure into their strategy but it may have an impact.

Apple made some other announcements of course, such as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch firmware 2.1 release this week, the iPod Classic moving to just one SKU, a 120GB model.  Neither announcements are really that important I don’t think (the update is mostly bug fixes/Genius integration, and the iPod Classic is probably product phase-out).  So that’s it really.  No huge changes, just some expected news that was leaked by Kevin Rose and others well before the actual event in true Apple style.  There is one last part of the keynote I wanted to share though, and that’s Steve Jobs poking fun at some of the unrest about his health.  After WWDC questions were flying as to whether Mr. Jobs had been stricken with cancer again, and to that he simply replied “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  Well said, I think.

If you want to watch the keynote you can now view the quicktime version by clicking here.

Now Playing:
DragonForce – My Spirit Will Go On
Crysis

Digital distribution hits it big

This may be a topic I’ve already discussed, but since I can’t think of anything else to do a post about barring some sort of iMac/iPod Touch discussion (I’m trying to limit that to 1 post a week) I figured I’d comment on some of the latest developments. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and this article pushed me over the edge. Personally I think digital delivery of video games (Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network) and media (iTunes, Miro, Amazon MP3) is awesome. I’m not the kind of person who is too concerned about having a physical copy of my media because, in general, I interact with the bulk of it through digital devices anyway. As a result what it really boils down to is the convenience factor of being able to get games and media over the internet instead of from a store.

About a week ago on the 24th of July a brand new full-length game was released on PSN that I’ve been eagerly anticipating. A follow-up to a cult classic for the PS2 that never really hit it big in the US, is the survival horror game Siren: Blood Curse. Because it didn’t sell very well in the US, Sony has opted to offer it online only instead of putting out a physical copy. I know at least one person who was also looking forward to Siren but was turned off because of that. He’s a bigger collector than I am, so for him to get a game but not be able to add it to his physical collection was a letdown. It bugged him so much that he nearly imported the game from Japan but after calculating the cost found out it would be too expensive.

That’s one way to view it, but on the other hand what if Sony just decided to not release the game to the United States at all? Before digital distribution came along that might have been the outcome. That’s one great advantage, it allows games that might not have the popularity or funding to get a full physical release to make it to fans everywhere. Not only that but the digital versions are generally cheaper – in Siren: Blood Curse’s case the full 12-episode game is available on PSN for $40 (you can also purchase 3-episode chunks of the game for cheaper). The blu-ray version, as is the standard, costs $60. Not bad if you’re like me and never look at game manuals and usually just put a game into storage only to resurface every few months when you get the urge to play.

Sony had kind of a lackluster conference at E3 this year but one thing that impressed most of their fans was they showed that they’re making a serious push to bring original content to PSN. Not only full-length games like Siren, but smaller arcade games like PixelJunk Eden, Fat Princess, and Flower. All are original IPs that haven’t seen the light of day on consoles until now, and all are hotly anticipated after being demoed at E3. So as gamers we get new, unique content while the publishers have an additional income stream which is becoming pretty successful based on the article I linked in the first paragraph. If you don’t have time to read it I’ll give you the cliffsnotes: EA was able to make $90 million in the first quarter through digital distribution of their games. Not bad, eh?

Steam has been working under the same model for years now, so the medium is proven. Now with Netflix offering a streaming service for their movies, Apple rolling out the App Store to delivers games and applications directly to their mobile devices, and all of the major consoles offering some sort of digital distribution for games, it seems this is the wave of the future. I approve, how about you? Leave a comment and let me know!

Now Playing:
A Perfect Circle – The Nurse Who Loved Me
Halo 2, Trism