Dubious Quality

Party, the Third

Eli 6.0 had a birthday party at school today. This is his third birthday party in four days, and is all part of the Bataan Birthday Death March.

Gloria made cupcakes for all the kids and teachers, almost forty in all. She made both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes (at five, there's no point in making any other flavor).

We're sitting in tiny chairs eating pizza with the kids when Madeline walks up. Nominally, she's Eli's girlfriend, although that designation can change hourly. "Hi, Eli's Dad!" she said brightly, as she went to the sink to wash her hands.

"Hi, Madeline," I said.

"I got a chocolate cupcake," she said. "It tasted like CARDBOARD."

I almost did a spit take. Gloria was laughing so hard that I thought pizza was going to fall out of her mouth.

A few minutes later, Arjun Z walked up. "The cake was very tasty, thank you," he said, and walked off.

"I guess he got one of the vanilla ones," I said.

Henry, the boy sitting next to me at Eli's table, looked up at me. His mouth was wide open and it was absolutely jammed full of chocolate cupcake. "These are DELICIOUS!" he said, spraying crumps in a wide arc not unlike a rotating lawn sprinker.

Four kids in the class had their last day today, because they were all moving up to first grade. His teacher (Ms. Ali, who is a very kind woman) had each child sit beside her, and all the other kids would take turns saying something nice to the person who was leaving.

Eli got quite a few "I love you" and "you're my best friend" comments, which were very nice, but my favorite was something one of the boys said to a girl who was leaving. "You're my best friend--on Earth," he said.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:01 PM

Eli 6.0!

That's a picture with his friend Lewis at his pajama birthday party Saturday at Turnkey Party Warehouse (complete with inflatable slides and whatnot).

Since it's Eli's birthday, here are a few stories I've collected over the last few weeks.

***
This is what a standard conversation with Eli is like.

We walked out of McDonald's after Saturday breakfast two weeks ago and it was raining. Again.

On our way to the car, Eli said "Dad, what if I had a rain machine that could rain UP? My rain would stop THAT rain."

"Or maybe you could have a giant wind machine on your back," I said. "Then you could just lean over, point your butt at the sky, and the wind would blow all the rain back."

"Yeah!" he said, sticking his butt toward the sky and wiggling it. "Or maybe if I was as tall as a giant, I could reach up and just push the clouds away.

Then we talked about people who drop their cellphones in the toilet while they're peeing. We're worldly.

***
Eli went to the bathroom yesterday and came out shaking his hands back and forth wildly, flinging water everywhere.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"AIR DRY!" he shouted.

***
Last night, Eli was playing up in his room.

"Mom!" he said, clomping down the stairs.

"I can't find my red dinosaur."

"Did you look for it?" Gloria asked.

"Yes," he said heavily. "Well, look for it again," Gloria said.

"But Mom," he said, "I already looked for it again."

"Well-played," I said.

***
Eli, even at five (now six), is a notorious tightwad.

Last Tuesday he wanted to go to Dave & Buster's for dinner. He doesn't care about eating at Dave & Buster's, though--he just wants to play the games, collect tickets, and get some kind of toy.

"We went to Dave & Buster's just two weeks ago," I said. "I'll tell you what--for every dollar of your money that you chip in, I'll put in five dollars of my money."

I knew he at least had some change in his room, and I suspected that he might also have a dollar bill or two. He looked at me with mock regret, raised his hands, and said, "I have no money, my friend."

posted by Bill Harris @ 7:29 AM

Console Post of the Week

I think the big picture this week is price cuts.

Sony may have enough 60GB units in warehouses to feed the U.S. until October (or longer), but it's completely infeasible to jack the price back up once those units run out.

Note that while I say it's infeasible, that doesn't mean it's impossible, because Sony has displayed a curious inability to think logically for well over a year. Even they, though, have to see the handwriting on the wall.

In this case, the handwriting on the wall is their recently released quarterly earnings report. The gaming division lost another $237 million dollars, which Sony's chief financial officer, Nobuyuki Oneda, said was better than they expected. Here's what he said in reference to PS3 sales:
"Actually, because the number of units sold was not as high as we hoped, the loss was better than our original expectation," he said.

How many PS3's does Sony say they sold in the last quarter? 710,000. That's a ledge number for Sony executives.

Sony also did something very interesting in their latest earnings report--they're now listing units sold for a quarter as opposed to units shipped.

Why did they do this? Well, because it gave them an opportunity for padding, I think. This analysis is going to be kind of a labyrinth (in a shitty, free-blog kind of way, mind you), but just stay with me, because there are some very, very interesting bits of information at the end.

Data points:
--they claim that they've sold 4.48 million PS3's worldwide (by the end of June--source here).
--they expect to sell 10.29 million units worldwide in the next three quarters (same as 4.48 source above).
--Sony shipped 5.5 million units by the end of their fiscal year in March 2007 (source here).
--they plan to ship 11 million PS3's this fiscal year (same source as above).
--the PS2 sold 2.7 million units in the fiscal quarter ending in June.

This isn't part of the analysis, but it's absolutely stunning that the last gen PS2 is outselling the PS3 by almost a 4-1 margin.

Let's look a that 4.48 million claim first. If they sold 710,000 units in the last quarter, that means they had to have sold 3.77 million units by the end of March.

Based on NPD numbers, the PS3 had sold 1.2 million units by the end of March in the U.S. In Japan (remember, Sony just cracked 1 million units there a few weeks ago), the number at the end of March was roughly 850,000 (maybe even less).

So to get to 3.77 million units, approximately 1,720,000 units had to be sold in the rest of the world. No problem, because the PS3 launched in Europe/Australia/New Zealand in March, right?

That's right--they did. And Sony trumpeted the news when sales for those territories reached one million units.

In June.

Here's your quote:
David Reeves, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president and CEO, today confirmed that “Early last week we went through [a sell-through of] the one million mark on PS3. And we did that in nine and a half weeks.”

So what does that mean they'd sold in those territories by the end of March? Based on information here, I think 700,000 would be a decent (and possibly generous estimate).

That leaves them a million units short of what they're claiming to have sold.

Japan's numbers are relatively airtight. Sony themselves gave the numbers for the PAL territories, so they must be close. The U.S. has NPD numbers, and even if they're off, it's highly unlikely that they're off by more than 10-15%.

So who bought those million units? Canada? Don't think so.

Like I said, I think this was a one-time opportunity for Sony to "adjust" their numbers--the discrepancies are absolutely gigantic, so enormous that it's obvious.

Let's give them a half-million unit bonus and say they've really sold four million units. They'd shipped 5.5 million units at the end of March, and they're supposedly shipping 11 million units this year, so I have to think they shipped at least 2 million units in the June quarter.

That means that, even with generous estimates in Sony's favor, they have roughly 3.5 million consoles in inventory at retail worldwide.

They claim that they're going to sell 10.29 million units worldwide in the next nine months when they're selling 240,000 units a month right now.

Um, okay.

There are only two possibilities here: either Sony has one of the most massive misses in the history of the financial markets, or the price on the PS3 plummets over the next nine months.

Microsft believes that Sony is going to create a "low-end" with a 40GB hard drive, no integrated WiFi, no memory card reader, and no backward compatibility for $399. Selling by Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.). At least, they bet N'Gai Croal that it was going to happen.

This would not be an unreasonable strategy on Sony's part. But it needs to happen before Thanksgiving, or they'll miss a ton of shoppers who bought everything early.

Last Sony note. Hotshots 5 released in Japan last week and sold in the neighborhood of 200,000 units. It will be interesting to see if that drives PS3 sales up to the 35,000 range (or even higher), and if sales stay up there for more than a week.

Wait, one more. Jack Tretton gave an interview last week where he said that the PS3 was "surf and turf" (lobster and steak) and the Wii was a "lollipop."

Yes, and they've dropped 10 million lollipops on your lobster in nine months. Oh, and they don't have 3.5 million lobsters in the kitchen, either.

On to Microsoft.

Rumors of a 360 price cut to $349 on August are starting to appear credible. Scanned Circuit City and Toys R Us ads allegedly show the deal, and it's clear that Microsoft needs to take a pricing action here--the PS3 has "clearance pricing" on the 60GB units, and questions about reliability are still dogging Microsoft on a daily basis.

Here's the question, though: does this mean Microsoft is shipping the 65nm units now, and will we actually get any confirmation when this starts happening? There's just no way to tell, and if I was considering a 360 purchase now, there's no way in hell I'd want one of the "old" (aka "shitty") units.

There's no question, though, that Microsoft desperately needs a price cut. The 360 had very strong momentum last year at this time. This year, they've got an outstanding game lineup coming up, but they've been leaking air for months.

Peter Moore proved last week that not only Sony executives act like dickheads in interviews. Here's an excerpt from an interview with GameDaily Biz:
BIZ: It's a bit ironic, because when MS first got into the console business, critics laughed because MS is a software company at its core. It's not in the business of creating hardware. Now the company has discovered some faulty design in its 360 hardware, seemingly proving the critics right. What do you say to those critics?

PM: Those critics need to do their homework and look at some of the hardware product failures that this industry has seen in the past 30 years that maybe have not got as much publicity...

BIZ: You're saying that this is not an unprecedented failure for a video game console?

PM: Probably the size of it may be unprecedented, and certainly the financial implications, but if people say that previous consoles have all been perfect and not had failure rates, then they need to go get a history lesson.

That's great stuff. Thirty years? Seriously, is he so desperate that he's going back to 1977 to find a data point he can use? What, did the Atari 2600 or the Odyssey 2 have reliability issues?

Peter, we're not saying that other consoles were perfect and didn't have failure rates--we're just saying that the 360's failure rate is, oh, QUADRUPLE any other console in history.

At least.

Oh, and when people don't want to answer questions directly, one of the easiest ways to obfuscate is to misrepresent the question. Like you did.

Last note on Microsoft: Oblivion, with full language localization, released in Japan last week, and it will be interesting to see how many units it sells.

Lastly, here's a note on Nintendo. Skip Key noticed that Nintendo's earnings release included the projection that the Wii would sell 16,500,000 units in this fiscal year (which ends in March 2008). Backing out their first quarter sales of 3,430,000 units, that means they project selling 13,070,000 units in the next nine months.

Skip believes this indicates that a price cut for the Wii is coming. I don't agree--at least, I don't see it coming before early next year, at the soonest. I think it's more an indication that Nintendo believes that demand is basically still bottomless.

What it does mean, though, is that Nintendo is seriously ramping up production.

Finally (good grief, these console posts have gotten long), here is some additional information from Andrew Herron, who e-mailed me last week about the insane prices of consoles in Australia:
The Australian price of the Wii is A$400 (for the purposes of a true comparision with the price of the PS3, which is A$999. What's amusing is that with the weakening US dollar that now translates into US$353 for the Wii and US$883 for the PS3.

Remember, Sony is claiming that they're not cutting the price in the PAL territories. That's a staggering amount of money to spend on a console.

I believe the 360 Pro is A$599, in case you're wondering.

Andrew also mentioned that inventory was not the reason that retailer Harvey Norman hadn't been carrying the Wii (although they're in negotations now to do so). Take a look at this excerpt from an article over at Smarthouse (November 2006):
One of the hottest products in town the new Nintendo Wii will not be on sale at Harvey Norman Australia's biggest CE retailer after the Japanese games giant Nintendo pulled the plug on the mass retailer because they were asking for too much margin.

In Australia CE manufacturers are being asked to give Harvey Norman a floor margin of 17% on a product or service. On top of that they also want an additional margin of around 25% for meeting targets. In addition they also want money from vendors to advertise in their catalogues as well as up to $10,000 for an internal product training system.

What a difference ten million units make. I guess even Harvey Norman's finally figured it out.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:05 AM

Jennifer Lin

Neil Yamamoto sent me several video links a while back, and there was one I didn't listen to until today.

Much to my good fortune, it was mind-blowing.

The video is a performance by pianist Jennifer Lin, who was fourteen at the time this was filmed.

That's fourteen, as in eighth grade.

It's a performance at TED, and around the sixteen minute mark of the video, she has someone from the audience pick out five notes at random from a set of index cards. The notes are read out loud, Lin thinks for a few seconds, then improvs an absolutely astonishing piece of music.

The video is here, and in addition to playing three other pieces ("Bumble Boogie" at the end is incredible), she also speaks for a short while about the process of creativity and composition.

A note: if you want to move around in the video (there are no controls apparent), just move your cursor into the video--then you'll see a list of sections and you can move forward or back as you wish.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:18 PM

Friday Links And Your E-Mail

It's a gigantic mess o' stuff this week.

First off, several of you (Charlie Rosenbury was the first) e-mailed me about the story I posted this week about Jonathan Sullivan's daughter Chloe. Believe it or not, a fictional "Chloe Sullivan" is also a character on Smallville (a series about the adolescent life of Superman). Here's a note from Jess Moran:
Chloe Sullivan is a main character in Smallville, a TV drama about Clark Kent/Superman before he donned the cape and tights. In fact, Chloe is in love with Clark Kent through most of the show. That three year old Chloe doesn't like Superman at all struck me as funny. Also, Chloe develops superpowers of a sort due to exposure to Kryptonite.

I hope Chloe doesn't miss out on superpowers.

A very interesting e-mail, from someone who wishes to remain anonymous, contained some additional comments on the post I made about The Athens Affair last week. In short, it's not the first time something like that has happened, and the precedent was "The Black Chamber" in the 1920's. Here's an excerpt:
Funded by the Army and the State Department, MI-8, was disguised as a New York City company that made commercial codes for businesses. However, their actual mission was to break the diplomatic codes of different nations. A mission they were initially quite successful at completing, breaking codes from several foreign countries.

This organization was led by Herbert Yardley, who wrote a book about the program in 1931 (it had been shut down in 1929). It was an international bestseller and caused quite a scandal.

Here are a few links if you want to read further on this:
Wikipedia Entry
National Security Agency Museum
Yardley's Book (Amazon Link)

Devon Prescott sent me several links to the story of a man who almost no one in this country would recognize, even though he's done more to alleviate world hunger than almost anyone in the last century. His name is Norman Borlaug, and he both developed high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat as well as founding the World Food Prize, which is the agriculture equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

In recognition of his achievments, Borlaug has won the Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal--a hat trick that has only been accomplished by four other people.

How important has Borlaug been? He's been credited with saving the lives of as many as a billion people.

Links for more information:
Des Moines Register
MSNBC
The Man Who Fed the World (Amazon link)

Vahur Teller sent in a link to a singular event in Estonia: a festival that commemorates "The Singing Revolution," and if you've never heard of it, here's a description from Wikipedia:
Night after night, since 1987, a cycle of singing mass demonstrations eventually collected 300,000 Estonians (more than one-fifth of the population) in Tallinn to sing national songs and hymns that had been strictly forbidden during the years of Soviet occupation, as rock musicians played. The Singing Revolution lasted over four years, with various protests and acts of defiance. In 1991, as Soviet tanks were rolling throughout the countryside in an attempt to quell the Singing Revolution, the Estonian Supreme Soviet together with the Congress of Estonia proclaimed the restoration of the independent State of Estonia and repudiated Soviet legislation. Estonians stood as human shields to protect radio and TV stations from the Soviet tanks. As a result of the revolution, Estonia won its independence without any bloodshed.

How incredible is that?

The Singing Revolution is commemorated every few years with a festival, and here's a link to this year's event: Song Festival. 7% of the population of the country turned out for this.

Here's one more related link, to a 1989 demonstration called the Baltic Way. Here's a description:
"Baltic Way" (also Baltic chain, Estonian: Balti kett, Latvian: Baltijas ceļš, Lithuanian: Baltijos kelias) is the event which occurred on August 23, 1989 when approximately two million people joined their hands to form an over 600 kilometer long human chain across the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). This original demonstration was organized to draw the world's attention to the common historical fate which these three countries suffered. It marked the 50th anniversary of August 23, 1939 when Soviet Union and Germany in the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divided spheres of interest in Eastern Europe which led to the occupation of these three states.

600 kilometers long! The full Wikipedia entry is here.

Now, some quick hitters.

Sirius sends in a link (via Slashdot) to an article that describes, in algebraic terms, a Möbius strip. Read the abstract here, and if you don't want to get your math on, a more accessible explanation is here.

Sirius doubled up this week with a link--put down your lunch--to an article titled "Larvae Take Up Residence in Man's Head." The article is even more disgusting than the title, and you can read it here.

The best part? The infestation was caused by flies, and his wife's name--is Midge!

DQ reader Damon Caporaso, who saw my note on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, sent in a link to a review of the book at his site (Fantasy Book Spot). Read it here.

From Taylor Materna, a link to an article that explains what many people may have previously suspected: the Grim Reaper wears fur. His name is Oscar, he's a cat, and he can (seemingly) identify with unnerving accuracy when elderly patients in a nursing home are near death. Read about it here.

Lastly, Michael O'Reilly sends in a link to an article by an ex-Rockstar employee about life at the company. It's an interesting read, and it's here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 10:31 AM

Rock Band: The Possibilities

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about Rock Band and how it appears that it's changing the paradigm for music games--or, rather, how it could.

Guitar Hero appears to be traveling the annual sports game path, with a new release every year. And that's going to be very profitable for Activision, at least for a while.

Far more interesting, though, is what I believe Rock Band may be doing. I strongly believe that this is not going to be an annual release game

Instead, it will be a music MMO.

Don't call me crazy just yet. Let me explain.

Guitar Hero is incredibly popular. It would be suicide to compete with an established series on the same playing field. Sure, Harmonix took the code with them, but how many people know that besides us?

Almost no one. They're going to see "Guitar Hero" on a box and that's what they'll buy. And I fully expect Guitar Hero to outsell Rock Band this fall by 3-1 or even more.

Harmonix knows that. But if they're smart, it won't matter.

Rock Band, from everything Harmonix has said, is going to be a new way to experience music. It's a game, but the focus isn't on "game," it's on "music."

In other words, Rock Band is going to be a different experience than Guitar Hero, and I expect the Rock Band community to be more deeply involved with the game than the GH community.

Which brings us back to MMO.

Here's what I see Harmonix doing. First, they offer a monthly subscription fee for all downloadable content released that month. In addition, they'll have "special" tracks available only to subscribers.

I'd pay $19.95 a month to get a decent amount of downloadable content and some exclusive tracks. I know a ton of other people who would, too.

Two words: revenue stream. It's an MMO revenue model without having to maintain servers. Which, in a financial sense, is a beautiful, beautiful world.

With that revenue stream, do some easy expansion of the Rock Band world. Add some online lobbies with a few distinct subject areas, where people can meet and (if they choose) go play together. You can meet a session player there who will help you get past a particularly difficult song, and maybe in exchange you give them "status points" or something for their reputation.

For players who have a cumulative career score (all instrument scores combined) over a certain threshold, they might have an elite lobby available only to them.

The reason these lobbies could potentially work so well is that they're not random. People have a common interest and a common purpose. And the more time that people spend hanging out in the world of Rock Band, the more dedicated they become to the game. Time well-spent creates loyalty.

Oh, and if you're one of the top players based on your online scores, you could order official "elite" merchandise. It wouldn't look like a stupid-ass Madden ring, either.

I'm barely scratching the surface here, but the possibilities are almost endless. There are so many cool things you can do to make the game as much of a lifestyle as WOW seems to be. And if you get even 100,000 players into the subscription community (which I think is a very modest goal), with a $19.95 monthly subscription price, it's a revenue stream of almost two million dollars a month.

A la carte pricing would still be available for almost all of the downloadable content, for people who didn't want to subscribe. But it would be cheaper, obviously, to subscribe.

So you've got a two million dollar revenue stream plus all the revenue coming in from single download purchases. And that's with a subscriber base of only 100,000. Focus on the music experience and the future of the game would be very, very bright.

I've really done an inexact job of laying out my thoughts on this, but if I did it fully, it would be so long that no one would bother finishing (if, in fact, anyone bothered finishing this, either). So let me close with a few albums that would be my personal favorites to include as possible downloads:
1. Combat Rock, The Clash
2. Texas Flood, Stevie Ray Vaughn
3. Making Movies, Dire Straits
4. Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones

Obviously, there are several thousand other choices, and I left off Dark Side of the Moon because I don't think it would really be playable, but those would be my top choices. And I'd add Revolver or Rubber Soul, but I don't think the Beatles will be "gettable."

I'm very much looking forward to November.

posted by Bill Harris @ 1:30 PM

What a Week

In what has been an absolutely horrible week to be a sports fan, I think the biggest story has slipped under almost everyone's radar.

We all know that Michael Vick is under federal indictment for his alleged participation in all kinds of heinous acts involving dogfighting. You can see a description here as well as the full text of the indictment.

Federal cases result in guilty pleas or convictions about 95% of the time, to the best of my knowledge. In other words, Vick has much more than his career (which may be over) to worry about--he could be looking at some serious time in a federal prison.

As I've been following this case, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop--that shoe being that Vick isn't the only professional athlete involved in dogfighting, and isn't the only NFL player. Clearly, there are others, and more than a few, but the NFL is desperately trying to avoid that issue, because it would be reflect incredibly negatively on the league as a whole.

So far, they had succeeded. Then Deion Sanders wrote a column for a southwest Floria newspaper on Sunday. And Deion was stupid enough to tell the truth.

The column is being widely represented as a defense of Michael Vick, but that's not really accurate. Sure, it's nominally about Vick, but if you read it more closely, it's really about something else. Look at this excerpt:
I believe Vick had a passion for dogfighting. I know many athletes who share his passion. The allure is the intensity and the challenge of a dog fighting to the death. It's like ultimate fighting, but the dog doesn't tap out when he knows he can't win.

It reminds me of when I wore a lot of jewelry back in the day because I always wanted to have the biggest chain or the biggest, baddest car. It gives you status.

"I know many athletes who share his passion." There's the dirty secret, and now it's out, if anyone's paying attention.

Sanders isn't defending Vick--he's defending dogfighting.

I love how he says the "allure" is the "intensity and challenge of a dog fighting to the death." I guess you should know about death, Deion, because the last time you tackled a guy in the NFL, he died of shock.

This whole thing is so sickening it's just beyond words, really.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:59 PM

All-Pro Football 2K8 (360)

These are easy impressions to write, really.

I'm not going to discuss the lack of modes in the game--we all know that already. I'm just going to discuss the one mode that IS available--season mode.

Before going into detail, though, here's the general tone: both geniuses and idiots worked on this game. The best moments are stunningly, wonderfully good, and the worst moments are bad enough to make you rip your hair out in frustration.

It breaks down very simply though.

For starters, the interface. It would be embarrassing in a freeware game, let alone a major release with a $59.95 price tag. It's just crap. Visual Concepts, when 99.9% of the world uses the "start" button to bring up menus, you're not being anything but goofy by using the "right stick flick" method. It's terrible design and it's completely unnecessary--you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

The interface is so incredibly bad that it killed my enthusiasm for the game before I even got to the game.

When you start actually playing, though, it's all different. Yes, the player models are too thin, but I never notice once they start moving, and when they move, the animation is glorious. It's the best animation I've ever seen in a sports game, period.

It's not just the regular animations (which are stellar). It's quarterbacks stumbling when they pull away from center, or punters slipping when they catch a snap in the rain. It's the incredible variety of tackling animations. It's the way players will take a second or two to gather themselves before getting up after a big hit. It's the way that players engage each other at the line of scrimmage. It's how players run to the line of scrimmage when running a no-huddle offense--not all at once, but individually.

One animation hitch: on incomplete passes, the ball bounces around for far too long (and off far too many players, frequently) before it hits the ground. Note to developers: incomplete passes should not deflect like the magic bullet in the Kennedy assassination.

Overall, though, the animation is fantastic. I played NFL2K5 for at least a hundred hours, and this animation far surpasses 2K5, which was already outstanding. And here's something to cry in your beer about: it's not like they worked on this game for three years. This is what 2K6 would have looked like if the NFL and EA hadn't screwed us over with an exclusive license.

Even after a three-year wait, though, it's still a visual feast, and even the stadiums join in, because they're spectacular, with tremendous amounts of detail.

Smart? Most of the time, the A.I. is brilliant. Blocking A.I., in particular, is superb. And the game models certain behaviors far better than I've ever seen. For instance, if you want to throw on the run, you better have that skill--if you're Len Dawson (who was about as mobile as a sofa during his career) and you try to throw on the run, almost every throw wil be off-target. The A.I. even seems to call a better selection of plays during the last two minutes of each half. It's not great, but at least it's not brain dead.

And there's one, glorious new change: kicking. After I've bitched for years about how kicking meters should have disappeared as soon as analog gamepads were invented, it's finally happened. To kick in APF2K8, you pull back the right analog stick to initiate the snap, then move the stick foward in conjunction with the kicker's leg.

Beautiful.

It takes a few minutes of practice to adjust, and they could have easily gotten rid of the aiming arrow as well (by having us use the D-pad to change the kicker's alignment), but it's still excellent.

In general, the on-field action is filled with outstanding and memorable moments.

Then, as always with this series, we come to the Achilles Heel.

In NFL2K4 and NFL2K5, the end-of-half and end-of-game A.I. was either a gamekiller (2K4, which had the worst of end-of-game A.I. I've EVER seen in a sports game) or just poor (2K5, which seemed like a big upgrade in comparison). Now you'd think after Jeff Thomas shot his mouth off with the infamous "Just play the game and shut up" quote, they'd make sure that the end-of-game A.I. would be at least competent.

Unfortunately, if you thought that, you were wrong.

In only half a dozen games, I have seen repeated, absolutely egregious use of timeouts. Horrific. The A.I. seemingly has no idea how to use them properly in the last two minutes of a half. It's excruciating to watch, and in single-player mode, it may well be a gamekiller--too many critical moments in a game take place in the last two minutes for the A.I. to be an incompetent duff.

It's not like using timeouts properly is that difficult. It's just one of those things in this series that has been broken for years and never fixed.

If you play online, with friends, then the timeout A.I. is inconsequential, and this game will hold up for a long, long time. If you want to play single-player, though, it will drive you crazy--or, at least, it's driving me crazy.

Do I think season mode in APF2K8 will be better than season mode in Madden? Yes--I would be amazed if Madden were better. Is it worth paying $59.95 for what is essentially a mode instead of a game? That's a much tougher call, and because of that, I'd recommend renting first.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:23 PM

NCAA Football 08 (360): Impressions (#2)

I've played through my Junior season in Legend mode. It's still very interesting, and there are quite a few outstanding moments, but there are some missed opportunities as well. Here's a rundown.

On the positive side:
--turning off the announcers really helped me appreciate how good the crowd sounds are in this game.
--the stadiums just look phenomenal, even with the reduced graphics quality (which was worth the tradeoff, because the framerate is much improved). They did a particularly excellent job conveying the massive size of the stadiums.
--while the animations aren't of the same quality as All-Pro Football 2K8, they're significantly improved and quite good in general. Most notable area that needs improvement: defensive backs need to be tracking the ball with their head, not with their eyes in the back of their head.
--generally, the A.I. uses its timeouts in a reasonable manner.
--the BCS standings calculation, in my limited experience, has been much more accurately replicated.
--like I said previously, I can only speak for the MLB position, but the camera is totally playable and much, much more immersive than the ONE camera in Dynasty mode.
--playing as one player is really, really fun.

On the negative side:
--a bug: all my Legend games are starting in the mid-to-late afternoon. Every single one for three seasons, which is a huge drag.
--another bug: sometimes the sound will reset to a much lower volume during a game, and it stays that way until you reboot.
--two primary gameplay issues: too many interceptions and too difficult to run (on default All-American settings). I'm going to fiddle with these for the next season and see to what degree they can be improved.
--the wind rarely blows strongly. Playing as Texas Tech, the wind should be whipping across the plains on a regular basis.
--in Super Sim mode, change of possession plays don't pause for your input before the game continues. This means you see something flash up quickly and then you're on the field, wondering exactly what happened.
--the holder for field goals should not be looking back at the kicker when the ball is snapped. It happens often enough that it's not a rarity.
--the ESPN.com features have a clunky interface and aren't nearly as much fun as the Sports Illustrated covers use to be.
--in Legend mode, it's very easy to interfere with a pass receiver and not get called for interference.
--the "Pontiac Game Changing Performance" play is often completely meaningless to the outcome of the game. A little thing, but you notice.

I'd also like to a few changes for next year. I know it's highly unlikely that any of this will happen, but here goes:
--if I'm only controlling my player, then why are there still catch circles and that little yellow circle to signify drops? The graphics are good enough that we can see what's happening--we don't need those artificial visual clues. Same thing with the big-ass clown star at my feet--you could just change the color of my shoes or something without drawing me so far out of the game.
--I understand why my assignment is diagrammed on the field, but let me turn it off once I understand what I'm supposed to do. There's no reason to still have it up during the play.
--it's time to convert to big-boy timekeeping and add an accelerated clock feature. Don't make me play 5:00 quarters to get an accurate number of plays--that's totally goofy.
--it would be a significant improvement to Legend mode if mini-games were tied to the "evening events." For instance, when you see a message that a coach made you go to the gym for mandatory weight training, use something similar to the Combine weightlifting mini-game in Madden. Do that with as many of those evening events as possible and wind up with half a dozen mini-games or so.
--make practice meaningful by making it possible to improve your ratings based on your performance, even after you're first string on the depth chart.

I see more and more people complaining about this or that in Dynasty mode, which I'll probably be starting next week, but my experience in Legend mode has been tremendously enjoyable.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:39 PM

Superhero Chloe Saves The Day

DQ reader Jonathan Sullivan's daughter Chloe is three, and he sent in this story after reading about Eli's "vacation" to South Korea:
Chloe is very into superheroes right now; Spider-Man is a particular favorite, as are Batman and Supergirl (but not Superman -- she says he's "a bad guy," for reasons unknown and, perhaps, best left unexplored).

Last Sunday, she was showing me a tiny pocket Bible her grandmother had purchased her. It's a regular Bible, so there are no pictures to match the text and she can't read any of it. There is, however, a flyleaf page with some pictures of Jesus in the traditional pose -- little kids around him, He's holding a lamb, He has the non-lamb-holding arm extended in a friendly benediction. The illustrator clearly drew from the "hippie Jesus" school of drawing, because He's got longish hair and a look on his face that is completely mellow.

"Look, it's Jesus!" Chloe said.

"Cool. What's he doing?" I asked.

She looked at it, a little puzzled.

I tried to be helpful: "Is he teaching the kids?"

She thought for a minute, and then said the single most amusing thing I'd ever heard come out of her mouth: "No. They tied him up. Spider-Man's going to save him, and then they're going to eat that sheep."

Anyway, she could tell that I thought this was incredibly funny, so she's been making up stories involving Jesus and His SuperPals™. During the last week, I've heard gripping tales about how Batman and Jesus fought a dog, how Jesus punched a guy who stole Supergirl's purse, and how Jesus and his unidentified friend went fishing, but the friend left because "he didn't like Jesus." No word on whether Jesus' fishing buddy is Aquaman.

I don't consider myself a paragon of Bible learnin', but I'm pretty sure I haven't seen those before.

If I start using the phrase "and then they're going to eat that sheep," don't be surprised.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:14 AM

Total Pro Golf 2: Indie Postmortem at Gamasutra

Gary Gorski has a long feature over at Gamasutra about Total Pro Golf 2 and the development process. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it's a terrific game, and it's interesting to read about the kind of evaluation they went through between the first and second games.

Fair warning: I get mentioned, which is the least interesting part of the article. Otherwise, it's a good read, and you can see it here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:11 AM

Console Post of the Week (Supplemental): Apples and Oranges, Plus June NPD Numbers

Take a look at this story:
Microsoft's growing troubles with the Xbox 360 video game console appear to be catching up to the company. Sales of the gaming machine plunged 60% in the fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft disclosed Thursday.

In its earnings statement for the quarter, Microsoft said it shipped 700,000 Xbox 360 units during the period, compared to 1.8 million in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2006 -- a fall off of 61%.

This is one of the sloppiest pieces of journalism I've ever seen. In the second paragraph, Microsoft says it shipped 700,000 360's during the fiscal fourth quarter of 2007. They shipped 1.8 million in the same period last year.

Remember, Microsoft says it SHIPPED that many units.

In the first paragraph, though, the author of the article says "sales of the gaming machine plunged 60% in the fiscal fourth quarter."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It's apples and oranges. What this actually means is that Microsoft really did stuff the retail channel between comprehension at the end of last year, and their shipments are much lower because there was a gigantic inventory overhang to work off.

Oh, and it means one other thing: Microsoft is trying to drain the retail inventory swamp of the "old" units--you know, the ones that have catastrophically high failure rates. Even if the new units aren't being manufactured in quantity yet, there's no reason to keep shipping what they know is likely to break.

Having said that, let's look at the June NPD numbers, then try to do a real comparison:
Wii: 381,780
PlayStation 2: 270,760
Xbox 360: 198,440
PlayStation 3: 98,470

I believe June was a 5-week data month, so the PS3 is still chugging along at 20k units a week. Like I said, I think that's the floor for them in terms of weekly sales at $599, so it will be interesting when the July numbers come out in a few weeks to see the effect of the "closeout" pricing on the 60GB model.

In terms of NPD numbers, the 360 is actually down 33% for the fiscal fourth quarter. Even if Europe had a substantially steeper drop, at most I'm guessing they're down 40-45%. If Europe dropped at the same rate, then they're down a third.

And having said that--Microsoft, WTF are you doing? Do you think you can afford a sales decline like that?

I've been thinking about all this, and here's what I believe is a reasonable explanation. Microsoft knows their sales have dropped sharply, but they didn't want to cut prices on the console until they'd fixed the design flaw. Until then, they'd just be churning consoles with an incredibly high failure rate--it would be a financial disaster.

Once they believe that the inventory pipeline is full of the new units, that's when they'll want to cut the price. And you know they must be busting their ass to get as many redesigned units into retail as possible before Halo 3 ships on 9/25.

I've been shorting Nintendo in these weekly posts, but I've got a few items this week.

First, thanks to Stefan Stirzaker for the news that one of Australia's largest retailers, Harvery Norman, is negotiating with Nintendo to carry the Wii in its stores. Harvey Norman is the leading retailer for the 360 and PS3 in Australia, but didn't carry the Wii at launch--in part, due to inventory availability.

A note of comparison (sent in by Andy Herron): the Wii is $350US. The PS3 is $867US ($999 Australian). Ouch--if you think people aren't going to want to buy a $599 console in the US, how many are going to want to buy what is nearly a nine hundred dollar console?

Next is a link sent in by Steven Davis to an article where Japanese television executives are blaming the Wii for--well, here's an excerpt:
...Japanese TV executives are claiming that Nintendo’s Wii is responsible for a major decline in television viewing figures during the economically critical “golden hour”.

Not one show on any commercial station managed to attain more than a 9 percent share of audience viewing figures last week, something that hasn’t happened for nearly twenty years, The Times reports.

Executives are now suggesting it is the Wii that is largely responsible for the decline in prime-time viewing figures.

The full article is here.

Marc Klein sent in a link to an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, who is just as fascinating as always. You can read the interview here, and it reminded me of another difference in terms of how Nintendo and Sony are handling public relations: Nintendo's developers seem to give far more interviews than their executives. With Sony, the executives do all the talking, and seem to far more adept at jamming their foot up their asses.

They do it so often, in fact, that it seems to have become a hobby.

One last note. We've heard over and over and over again that no third-party Nintendo games are going to sell. Here's the list of the top ten console games in the NPD game sales in June:
--Wii Mario Party 8: 426k
--Wii Play w/ remote: 293k
--Forza Motorsport 2: 197k
--PS2 Guitar Hero 2 w/ Guitar: 197k
--360 Guitar Hero 2 w/ Guitar: 177k
--Wii Pokemon Battle: 157k
--Wii Resident Evil 4
--360 The Darkness
--PS2 Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2
--PS2 Transformers: the Game

I saw somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that Resident Evil 4 sold about 150,000 copies.

It's clear from those numbers that Wii owners (remember, still only about 60% of the installed base in the U.S. compared to the 360) want to buy software. And unlike the Gamecube generation, no one seems to be complaining about the support offered by Nintendo.

If third-party developers are whining that Wii owners won't buy their software, maybe they should put out some decent games.

That's a "them" problem, so to speak. Not Nintendo's.

posted by Bill Harris @ 10:05 AM

June NPD Numbers

Wii: 381,800 units
Xbox 360: 198,400
PS3: 98,500.

That's a five-week data period, I believe, not four, so PS3 and 360 sales were essentially flat from last month (on a sales per week basis), and Wii sales were actually down slightly.

Analysis will be up tomorrow morning.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:42 PM

South Korea and Newton Van Tootin

Eli 5.11 (version change on July 31), has been away from school for four weeks, all of which were jammed with various summer camps. He won't be going to this school in the fall--he'll be going into first grade--but he wanted to go back for a few last weeks (mostly, to get a birthday party at school, I'm guessing).

So last Monday, he went back to school. I always pick him up on Mondays at noon and take him to lunch, and when I walked out to the playground, his favorite teacher rushed up to me. "I am SO jealous about your vacation!" she said. She was just beaming. "South Korea, parasailing, skydiving--it sounds fantastic!"

Hmm.

Eli waved at me and started walking over. In the meantime, I saw his other teacher, and she said "Well, Eli had quite a summer vacation!"

Eli hugged me from behind, and we started walking toward his school building. I said "Buddy, what did you tell your teachers about a vacation?"

He immediately looked a little embarrassed.

"South Korea?" I asked. "Parasailing? Skydiving?"

"Um, yes," he said, with a sly little smile.

That's right. My son (and your Internet-adopted son) convinced both his teachers that he went to South Korea on vacation, and got to parasail as well as skydive. Even better, he drew a picture of himself parasailing (with a giant rainbow behind him) during art class. It's on our refrigerator now.

I explained to him that he had to be careful about who he tried to fool with made-up stories, but the whole time I was fighting my face, because I was a split-second away from bursting into laughter.

I told this story to my boss, and it was a good thing I did, because he told me a story about his brother George, when he was still a boy in the 1950's.

In the summers, George went to an exclusive boys sports camp in Mount Ida, Arkansas, called Ozark Boys Camp. My boss's dad was a printer, and he did all the printing for the camp, which he bartered in exchange for a camp session each summer.

This camp was a big deal, so renowned that kids actually came from outside the country just to attend the camp.

When George was twelve, he went away for his four-week session at camp, and when he came back, he told his mother that a Dutch boy had come to camp that summer.

A boy named Newton Van Tootin.

Van Tootin's father was an actual prince, and when Newton flew to the U.S., he was accompanied by both the family chauffeur as well as the family chef. Each afternoon at 3 p.m., his chef--driven by the family chauffeur--would arrive at the camp and give homemade ice cream to Newton and all his friends.

George's mother believed him.

A few months later, his mother saw the camp director at church. After exchanging pleasantries, this conversation began.

"I heard all about the Dutch boy," said the mother. "That must have been very exciting."

"Dutch boy?" asked the camp director. "We had several boys from France, but I don't remember anyone from Holland.

"You know," said his mother. "The one who got ice cream every day from the family chef."

"What?" asked the camp director.

"His father was a prince," said George's mother. The camp director just stared at her with a blank look on her face. "The Dutch boy," his mother repeated. "Newton Van Tootin."

The camp director smiled. "Did George tell you this?" He asked.

"Why yes, he did," said George's mother, and the camp director burst out laughing. It seems that George had quite a reputation for being a prankster at camp.

This, obviously, secured him a spot in the Hall of Fame.

posted by Bill Harris @ 10:04 AM

Console Post of the Week: Microsoft

I've been thinking about the scenario of a full Xbox 360 recall over the last week, and I've come up with one more potential scenario.

A voluntary recall.

Don't want to send in your 360 for replacement? Fine--you still get the three-year warranty, and if it fails, it can be replaced then. If you do want to get it replaced with one of the "newly unshitty" units, though, you contact Microsoft, they check the serial number, and if your unit qualifies, it gets replaced.

The best part of this scheme, for Microsoft, is that they don't have to contact customers--we get the choice, but we also have the responsibility of contacting them.

Plus, if they announced this at, say, the end of January, it wouldn't cut into their holiday sales, and nobody's going to buy a console in February, anyway. If they get flooded with replacement requests in February, it's no big deal.

That seems workable compared to any other scenario I can envision.

The one downside in a profitability sense is if they just wait for consoles to fail, the BOM is steadily moving downward on the unit, so replacing one in June is cheaper than replacing one in February, for example.

As class action suits rain down on Microsoft, I think some kind of recall becomes a more likely possibility. And a voluntary recall would blunt critics quite effectively.

If you want to know some of the potential numbers involved, take a look at this outstanding analysis by DQ reader Skip Key, based on information revealed in the Microsoft conference call:

We know that $1.057B of that operating loss for the quarter was the one-time charge due to the warranty. So without that, the operating loss would have been $142m, which would put them well on the way to profitability, I'd think.

We also got further information on the $1.057b charge. It was about a 50/50 split on charges based on the existing warranty, and forward-looking charges, which they'd already announced. But the interesting thing was that 35% of that number is for 'existing inventory writeoffs'. And one of the analysts asked about that in the q&a section of the webcast. The inventory writeoffs are for returned 360s that can't be refurbed profitably. So that gives us approximately $370m in returned 360s that are essentially going to be junked.

So this gives us a pretty hard baseline for RROD (red ring of death) returns. Let's say that a core 360 without drive, controllers, etc. costs $250-$300. I bet it's less than that, but that's a good round number. So basically you'd be writing off any unit that cost more to refurb than that. At $300/per, that covers 1.23m xboxen. At $250/per, that covers 1.48m 360's. So using these figures somewhere between 10.6% and 12.7% of all shipped 360s were returned under warranty with this problem, junked so badly they couldn't be refurbed. What percentage of all the returns for this is that? Half? If it's half, we're right in the 21-26% return rate that I figured they had, and within spitting distance of the anecdotal 30%.

The main other interesting thing was the forward looking statements. For every other division they were projecting revenue increases for FY08 that varied by 1-2%. IE, they'd project a 12-13% revenue increase. But for the Entertainment division they projected a range of 10-19%, which is huge.

This got brought up in the analyst Q&A. And it was confirmed that the wide range on the guidance was because they didn't want to tip their hand on 360 pricing strategy. So lets take that 9% range and shrink it to 7%. As I figure that, they basically see that 7% range as the difference between different price cuts. 7% of revenues on this year is ~$426m. At this point, I doubt that they do a price cut before Thanksgiving, but I'd be shocked if they don't do one then. If the cut is in November, that leaves 8 months in the fiscal year. My guess is that this $426m range represents a $100 range on possible price cuts, which would imply that they expect to sell about 4.2m units from November through June. So what level of price cuts would give them 500k/month sales? I don't think $50 would do it. $100 might. So this probably represents that they plan to cut between $50-150 or between $100-200 on the price, probably after Halo 3, but before Christmas.

Let's take a closer look. Key points:

--$370 million of the $1.057b charge is for returned units that are just going to be scrapped instead of refurbed.

--I think the $250 BOM estimate is probably closer to correct (at this point) than $300, so the 1.48M (let's just round up to 1.5 million) number is probably the best estimate. So Microsoft is scrapping, potentially, a million and a half units.
--Microsoft gave a wide range on guidance for the Entertainment division so that future action on prices couldn't be divined by the guidance. So they are planning a pricing action, but the range makes it impossible to nail down with any certainly.
--Skip mentioned that a $100 price cut might get the 360 to 500k units a month in sales. I think it might double holiday sales, but expecting a permanent doubling of the weekly sales rate is less likely.

Here's the most interesting part of the analysis, and it's quite fun to speculate here. If the BOM for the 360 now costs $300 (which I think is fairly close), then it means that (Skip's calculation) about 1.25 million units will be scrapped, based on the $375M that's set up for "existing inventory writeoffs."

If the installed base is around 10 million units at this point, that projects to a staggering failure rate. Remember, they're not scrapping all returns, just the ones that can't be refurbished profitably (red ring of death units). Skip notes that even with a very high writeoff rate of 50% of returns, for example, it would mean that the overall failure rate (on a customer basis, not a unit basis) would be at least 25%.

Incredible. That's so far past "nightmare" that it doesn't even slow down as it passes nightmare.

Tomorrow, Nintendo.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:37 AM

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows

I finished The Deathly Hallows Saturday night and it was terrific, a sensational end to the series. There were a couple of things I wish had been handled differently, but after reading these books for a decade, I was fine with whatever J.K. Rowling wanted to do.

Literary critics seem to enjoy savaging Rowling's writing ability, but I think that's totally unfair. Maybe they would be less critical if her books had sold 5,000 copies instead of 500 million. I don't think it's a sign of low ability that she wrote books that everyone could read, including children. All I know is that I've never looked forward to individual books more eagerly than hers, and during a story that spanned a million words over seven books, I was totally entertained for about 999,000 of them.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:05 AM

Lawsuit Ahoy!

The Console Post of the Week will be Monday. I have a ton of data points to work in, so I'm going to spend more time writing it than usual.

And in a non-gaming note, I swam today for the first time after surgery two weeks ago. I was only allowed to do 400 yards, but I still really enjoyed getting back in the pool, even though it hurt a bit.

Attention seeker Denis Dyack, founder of Silicon Knights, is now involved in a lawsuit against Epic, creator of the Unreal 3 engine. Here's an excerpt from the complaint (thanks Gamasutra):
The suit initially alleges that: "Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic’s other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games."

"Sabotage" is an ugly, ugly word.

In essence, what they're alleging is that Epic used an advanced version of the Unreal 3 engine to develop Gears of War, but purposely withheld this version for months from engine licensees.

Here's another excerpt:
A key point of contention is the E3 demo of Too Human, which was not well received - the suit alleges: "The final development kit for the Xbox 360 was released by Microsoft in early September, 2005, meaning that Epic was obligated to deliver a fully operable version of the Engine to Silicon Knights by no later than March, 2006."

"That delivery date is significant, since compliance by Epic would have given Silicon Knights time to prepare an appropriate demonstration version of its Microsoft Xbox 360 game, Too Human, for the very important industry trade show, E3, two months later in May, 2006."

It continues: "Epic apparently was able to achieve a very useable version of the Engine for the Xbox 360 – the version that it kept to itself, for use only on its Gears of War game (as discussed below), to the detriment of Silicon Knights and Epic’s other licensees, as set forth in more detail below. Epic’s plan to avoid its obligations and hoard all of the necessary functionalities not only harmed Silicon Knights and all of Epic’s other licensees in the industry, but also gave Epic a clearly unfair advantage in the industry."

This guy's starting to sound like Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, demanding the key to the strawberries.

This is the same Denis Dyack, mind you, who already bitterly complained about the E3 evaluation process, claiming that it was unfair to his game, which was greeted with a giant sucking sound.

It is unknown whether Mr. Dyack would have bitterly complained about the evaluation process if his game had been awarded Best In Show.

Here's Dyack's problem right now, though: in the interview where he bitched about E3, he was blaming someone else for something that already gone badly. By suing Epic before his game ships, he's making us all assume that Too Human is about to go badly.

That seems to be a very poor marketing strategy.

Oh, and if you were looking for Too Human this month, don't bother. EB Games now has it listed as a 1/1/2008 release, which is only a placeholder date. That just means the game isn't shipping this fall and no new ship date has been announced.

That's not a bad move, because with the games it was going up against, it was going to get absolutely crushed. Then I guess we'd get a scathing interview with Dyack in which he bitterly complained that the release schedule was unfair.

Having said all that, I'm not saying the lawsuit is without merit--I'm not in position to even comment on that. But Dyack is getting a reputation as a whiner the old-fashioned way--by earning it.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:19 PM

Friday Links!

A monster post today. Say good-bye to your morning at work.

The most interesting link today comes from Jess Moran, who sent me a brilliant article from Vanity Fair about Didier Drogba, a soccer player. Here's the opening:
A single soccer match achieves what five years of combat and negotiations could not: an apparent end to Ivory Coast's civil war. The man who brought the warring sides together was not a politician or a gun-toting strongman, but Didier Drogba, the star striker for Ivory Coast.

The story is fascinating, and you can read it here.

Cliff Eyler sent me a link to an article about evolution and butterflies. In short, the response of a particular species of butterfly to a parasite appears to have produced the fastest evolutionary change ever observed. Read about it here.

Here's an amazing link from Steven Davis: a how-to guide to building your own Enigma machine (it's called "Enigma-E"). I know, that sounds crazy, but just take a look and you'll be convinced. It's here. There was also an eBay auction this week for a fully-functional, museum quality Enigma machine this week, but it's been pulled.

Steven also sent in links to a story about the differential analyzer (an analog computer) used by Barnes Willis in WWII. It's the only original, complete differential analyzer in the world, according to the story, it's a great read, and you can find it here, along with an explanation of how differential analyzers work here.

Intel has introduced a new stepping for Core 2 Duo processors with absolutely insane pricing. They might as well be giving them away, and thanks to that crazy pricing, I'll be building a new system within about a month. You can see all the processor and pricing details here.

Roy Scorup sent in a link to an article about the recent flooding in China--which has displaced TWO BILLION rats. Don't be eating your breakfast while you're reading it, but it's fascinating and it's here.

Grifin Cheng sent in a link to an article about a new focusing technique called superlensing. Here's an excerpt:
Light cannot be focused on anything smaller than its wavelength—or so says more than a century of physics wisdom. But a new study now shows that it is possible, if light is focused extremely close to a very special kind of lens.

Read it here.

Sirius sent in a link to a remarkable article about what may be a new species of chimps. Oh, and they like to eat lion meat. It's a bizarre story, and you can read it here.

Here's an excellent sports link from Will: the Wages of Wins Journal. It's written by three economics professors (who also wrote The Wages of Wins book) who apply economic and stastistical issues to various sports topics--often, and most interestingly, the question of player value. It's a very good read, and you can find it here.

Jesse Leimkuehler sent in a link to an article about the strangest sights in Google Earth, which you can see here.

Rob sent in a link to an article about eight scientists who may dramatically change our lives in the future. Very interesting, and you can read it here.

From Doug Walsh, a link to a news story about a toilet paper thief who was arrested. Her last name, of course, was Butts. Two-play drama for your reading pleasure right here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:10 AM

Mythos (a note)

DQ reader Simon Caters e-mailed with a very good point about Mythos (which I mentioned as flying under the rader yesterday):
...the new definition of “flying under the radar” now includes multi-page spreads in PC Gamer ( http://www.hellgateguru.com/2007/06/contentpalooza-pc-gamer-touches-mythos-and-likes-it/) and Games for Window Magazine (June 2007 – pp20-22). And both multiple page stories made reference to Fate.

I started laughing when I read his e-mail, because he's right. I remember reading those previews and promptly forgetting about them, even though I was very interested in the game. So Mythos hasn't been flying under the radar, really--it's been flying under my radar.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:12 AM

A Note

For the first time in quite a while, I've gotten fairly behind on e-mail this week. Recovering from surgery, writing posts, and two new football games have almost done me in.

In a good way, obviously.

What's really done me in, though, is that for the last ten days I've been re-reading all the Harry Potter books in anticipation of the final book on Saturday. I finished Half-Blood Prince tonight, so I'm ready to go, but adding that to everything else was a backbreaker.

So if you haven't gotten a reply from an e-mail, it's coming. I'll be reading the new book almost non-stop until I finish it, and then everything will quickly get back to normal.

Seriously, though--two new football games, a new Harry Potter book, and a British Open all in the same week. It's got to be one of the greatest entertainment weeks of my life.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:33 PM

All-Pro Football 2K8 (360)

I was hoping to have impressions up today, but I need to wait until I spend a few more hours taking a look. Parts of this game are absolutely phenomenal--the animation, for example, which is the finest animation I've ever seen in a sports game (and a significant upgrade from NFL2K5)--and other parts are an absolute mess (the front end, which would embarrass a freeware program, is a good example).

I could get past the off-field issues, because the on-field action has generally been spectacular, but once again, the Achilles Heel of this series has reared its ugly head--game management in the last two minutes of a half. I've seen some A.I. decisions that have just been drop-dead stupid, and I want to explore this a bit more before I write up full impressions.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:43 PM

Mythos

Fate was one of my top five PC games of the year in 2005. It has been described as a Diablo "clone," but that really doesn't do the game justice--it was quirky and full of personality, and it was just impossible to stop playing.

You can see the game's website here.

The game was created by Travis Baldree, who left Wild Tangent in 2005 to join Flagship Studios (Hellgate: London). At Flagship, Baldree was asked to create a game using the core technology of of Hellgate: London, but on a smaller scale, specifically to test the online component.

I probably butchered part of that description, but I think that's essentially what happened.

The game is called Mythos, and it's in beta now. Two DQ readers (at least) are in the beta, and their impressions are highly favorable. There's also a thread over at Octopus Overlords that includes impressions as well as participation by Travis Baldree himself. The game's website is here, and you can see screenshots there as well.

This game has really been flying under the radar, but based on the excellence of Fate, I think it has tremendous potential.

posted by Bill Harris @ 11:53 AM

The Windbreaker of Pwnership

Pwnership, old-school.

posted by Bill Harris @ 11:43 AM

Impressions: NCAA Football 2008 (360) (with a note about All-Pro Football 2K8 (360) as well)

It's been three years since I played a great football game.

Just for reference purposes, here is a list of the football games I considered great in their time:
TV Sports Football (Cinemaware, Amiga, 1988).
Front Page Sports: Football (Sierra, PC, 1992)
Front Page Sports: Football Pro (Sierra, PC, 1993)
NFL Gameday (989 Sports, Playstation, 1995)
NFL 2K1 (Sega, Dreamcast, 2000)
ESPN NFL 2K5 (Visual Concepts, Xbox, 2005)

Tecmo Super Bowl isn't on the the list because it was far less of a simulation (although it was really fun).

The point, though, is that I've played almost every football game that's been released for the last twenty years, and I've listed six as "great" titles.

In other words, it's a high bar.

So when I say that I strongly believe that NCAA Football 2008 AND All-Pro Football 2K8 might both get added to that list, I'm as surprised as you probably are.

Let me tell you how much I've played and what I've done in both games. It's still early, but I am deeply impressed by both.

Since I got NCAA on Saturday night (thanks JT!), and I've put in 6+ hours at this point, let's talk about it first. I'll have All-Pro Football 2K8 impressions on Thursday.

You guys know I'm a big Dynasty guy. I really, really enjoy the recruiting engine in NCAA (I've said before that I think it's the single best feature implementation in a team sports game), but the on-field action has never had the same quality (which I've written about in detail before).

This year, though, I decided to take Campus Legend for a spin first. I created a middle linebacker, and the game took me right to the high school playoffs.

I figured I'd be playing Dynasty mode in thirty minutes.

Here's how Legend mode basically works in-game. When you're on the field, the play is called for you, and you can't make changes. You also can't change your player, so if you get beat, there's no pressing a button and automatically changing to the player closest to the ball.

If your ass gets beat, then it gets beat.

The first thing I noticed, though, was that the camera angle was playable. In Madden last year, the camera angles in Superstar mode were shanked beyong belief--totally unplayable--so having a workable camera angle was not a given.

The camera is much closer to the field. Much closer. And because of that, the action feels much more intense.

The second thing I noticed is how difficult it was to play as a middle linebacker (All-American difficulty). Read a key wrong, get out of position, and you're done for the play, because you just don't have enough speed to catch up. It's the thinking man's position on defense.

The third thing I noticed was how excellent the sim options were. When you're not on the field, instead of the game playing in hyperspeed or something, you have multiple options: you can sim until you're back on the field, you can sim play by play (with a nice graphic overlay that is basically a drive chart with a play-by-play outcome in text), or you can watch one play at a time.
You're watching from the sidelines, though--literally. The camera angle is a few feet above what it would be if you were actually standing on the sidelines.

Giving us multiple options in terms of what happens when we're not on the field is good design. And it means you can sim play-by-play as long as you want, then watch a critical play or two near the end of drives. It's terrific.

The high school atmosphere was terrific, too, with small-town fields to play every game but the state finals. The finals (I was in a Texas high school) were in Austin at the University of Texas, which is a 90,000 seat stadium, and while the stands were full (not realistic, although 45,000 have attended high school games, believe it or not), it just felt exciting, not like a gaffe.

I had a huge number of scholarship offers, but I wanted to go somewhere and work my way up. Texas Tech (great offense, lousy defense), offered to let me come in as 3rd string, which was perfect, so I went there.

Once you're enrolled in school, you see a calendar view of the schedule. Monday through Friday, you have an afternoon practice and an evening activity (you can sim through them if you prefer).

Practice consists of ten plays, and by making plays (for a middle linebacker, it's tackles, sacks, forced fumbles, etc.), you earn points. You'll be told how many points you are away from the next level in the depth chart, and when you've earned enough points, you move up.

Ten plays is the perfect length of time, and the practices are fun, although you'll probably start simming them after you become a starter.

The evening activity consists of a situation where you have to choose a course of action. Not every night--some nights you just hang out in your dorm room and study--but quite often, you'll be given a choice. For example, you might need to choose between playing basketball with your friends or staying in your dorm room to study. Study, and your GPA gets a boost. Play hoops, and some of your physical attributes might increase, as well as your popularity.

You might also get hurt.

It's not complicated, but it also only takes a few seconds for each night, and I've enjoyed making decisions about the situations they present you with. It could be more fleshed out, but it's a good effort.

When the season started, I was still third string, and for the first game, all the action I saw was on special teams. I ran my ass ragged on the kickoff and punt teams.

This was also the only time the camera confused me, because when you turn to run downfield on a kickoff return, for example, the camera swivels to stay behind you, which means you're looking away from the defense until you turn back around. This is totally confusing at first, but as soon as you remember that left-trigger makes you strafe, you can turn the camera around whenever you want.

Before the second game, I managed to move up to second string, and I still played on the kickoff team but not the punt team. I also managed to get in a blowout for a few series in the fourth quarter. It was easy to notice the difference in speed and size between high school and college players (I noticed it right away in the first practice, actually).

After the fifth game of the season, I finally earned enough points in practice to start. No more special teams, either--when I got promoted to starter, my special teams days were over.

Playing as a single player, in a college atmosphere, is incredibly intense. It's amazing, really, how focused you have to be, particularly as a defensive player. Tech's defense is not good, and I had to make plays to stop drives. Make a mistake, and I didn't have five all-conference players to cover for me.

We played UT near the end of the season, in Austin, and UT was rated #2 in the country. Seriously, I was amped for the game. And we jumped out to a 13-0 lead. It was freaking great, and I was playing really well--I had four tackles after the first quarter, and seven at halftime.

In the third quarter, it was 13-7, and UT was on our three-yard line. Second down. They ran an option play, and I stuck the quarterback right between the numbers. I mean, I tatered him.

With 90,000 people in the stands, I'd just saved a touchdown and put a brutal lick on their quarterback.

The next play, I was assigned in man coverage to the tight end. Right before the snap, I cheated over just a couple of steps toward the middle of the line--I expected them to run the ball up the gut. The quarterback took two steps back and threw a strike to the tight end--my assignment--and they scored.

If I stop that play, it's going to be 13-10, at worst, and we would have still had the lead. Instead, UT took the lead, and they wound up going on to win the game.

That was the single most important play in the game, and I blew my assignment.

And it was great.

There's no sense of that kind of responsibility when you're calling plays, and always auto-switching to the man with the ball. You can always make it up later.

This time, though, I had to go to the sidelines and watch my offense puke all over themselves. I was totally helpless.

What you also get a strong sense of is how often you can influence a play without making a tackle. Sometimes just occupying the right space at the right time is enough to disrupt the flow of the offense, and disrupting the flow can blow up a play. It's a subtlety that video games almost never capture, but it's captured extremely well here.

During the season, I saw the offense score two touchdowns in 90 seconds to win a game that we had no business winning, and also saw them not even get a first down for the first quarter and a half against Oklahoma (I actually muttered "bitches" after their fifth three and out in a row). I have never--never--seen a game capture the "boom or bust" essence of Tech's offense that well. At times, it was downright uncanny.

I've always said that great sports games involve variety inside repetition, and my first season in Legend mode epitomized that. It was a phenomenal experience. I've had so much fun in Legend mode (now in the third game of my sophomore season), that I still haven't touched Dynasty mode.

The game looks much better than it did in the demo, by the way--surprisingly so. The animations have also improved significantly this year (particularly when players engage--I've been very impressed). The game also feels polished, and I can't remember the last time I said that about an EA Sports game.

Here are a few notes about exactly what I've done.
--I turned off the announcers. I'm on the field--not watching on television. It makes the game much more intense.
--I'm using five-minute quarters. If you're playing mostly on special teams and simming 90% of the plays, it will give you about 130 plays a game. If you're starting, it will give you about 115-120. That's below the real college average of around 140, but I prefer the slightly streamlined version.

If you're wondering why five-minute quarters work in this mode, it's because no time is taken off between plays except for pre-play time at the line of scrimmage when you're on the field.
--I adjusted some of the kicking sliders, and I think these are significantly better.
CPU and Human power on field goals=30
CPU and Human accuracy on field goals=60
CPU Punt power=60
Human Punt power=40
I haven't actually tested kickoff power yet, but it's too high. You might try 40, which would probably be about right.

Games in Legend mode, if you're not watching plays when you're off the field, take about 25 minutes (if you're simming play-by-play). That's if you're starting and it's not a blowout, because if you're way ahead or behind, you may get pulled from the game (another nice feature).

So far, it's been a thrill (another word I rarely use). I can easily see myself playing just this mode for 50+ hours, trying out different positions and playing through careers.

There's another 50+ hours, at least, in Dynasty mode. Or more.

By the way, the guys at Blog for the Sports Gamer are going to be putting up impressions, and they're always thorough and generally spot-on. Bill Abner has already noted that he really likes the changes they made to recruiting, which is a very good sign. Take a look at what they've put up so far here.

I'll be spending quite a bit of time in Dynasty mode, but it may not be for a week or so. Right now, I'm having too much fun to change over.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:22 PM

The Athens Affair

While I work away on NCAA and APF2K8 impressions, here's something to keep you busy.

Nathan Weber sent me a link to a story about something called "The Athens Affair," which I hadn't even heard of before. Here's an excerpt:
On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy.

...Even before Tsalikidis's death, investigators had found rogue software installed on the Vodafone Greece phone network by parties unknown. Some extraordinarily knowledgeable people either penetrated the network from outside or subverted it from within, aided by an agent or mole.

The perpetrators haven't been caught, but this article details the investigation and the methods they used. It's an absolutely fascinating story, and you can read it here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:14 PM

Microsoft

I certainly didn't see this coming (thanks Gamespot):
...Peter Moore, corporate vice president of the entertainment and devices division of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, is quitting.

Electronic Arts has confirmed to GameSpot that Peter Moore has been tapped to become the new president of EA Sports. The move will put Moore in charge of one of the top third-party publisher's four divisions, which were established in a recent company-wide reorganization.

That certainly doesn't sound like a promotion.

I don't think it's unfair to make the assumption that Moore was forced out, but here's an interesting question: was he forced out because he was too slow to respond to the 360 reliability issues, or was he forced out because he pushed through the warranty extension to three years for the red ring of death?

Moore's departure comes as Microsoft continues to be hounded by reliability issues and questions. EB Games Australia recalled every unit they had in stock (see here), which, while it apparently wasn't related to the design issues that have allegedly been fixed, is still incredibly embarrassing. Also, the mainstream press is still hammering Microsoft about reliability, so it appears that the warranty extension has done little to make the bad press go away. As an example, here's an MSNBC article (thanks Sirius) and an excerpts:
Charles Rittlinger, of Wichita, Kan., bought his Xbox 360 last November. He waited a full year to buy his machine, and knew all about the hardware-failure problem, well-documented on the Internet by frustrated gamers.

When his own machine failed, Rittlinger discovered that reports of the Xbox 360 failure rate stretched well beyond the vocal hardcore gaming corners of the blogosphere. When he took his faulty Xbox 360 to UPS to return to Microsoft, he says the person at the counter had processed many similar returns.

Even the driver that returned the repaired Xbox 360 to Rittlinger's house was in on the joke, saying "Xbox calling," when he delivered the replacement unit. Luckily, the new unit is functioning just fine.

Since the Xbox 360 is such a complicated machine, there is no discernable method for consumers to spot a potential problem. Though the consoles coming off production lines now may be problem-free, what about the tens of thousands of units currently in retail circulation? Even if the new warranty will cover the red ring failure for up to three years, who wants to view their $400 Xbox 360 Premium as a ticking time bomb?

"Ticking time bomb." They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but that sure sounds bad to me.

N'Gai Croal had a provocative column last week where he opened up a new can of worms: what about a total recall?
Did Microsoft's zeal to have the Xbox 360 both launch first and turn a profit--after the first Xbox launched second and lost billions of dollars--cause it to cut corners in a headlong rush to market, resulting in the current debacle? What, precisely, are the factors causing Xbox 360s to fail? What is the failure rate? How many devices have been returned thus far over the flashing three red lights? Was Microsoft aware of the magnitude of this problem before it launched the Xbox 360 Elite?

In the absence of full and forthright answers to these questions--answers that are critical to restoring consumer confidence in the Xbox 360--it is our firm belief that Microsoft should strongly consider a product recall, or at the very least, offer to replace those machines whose batch numbers indicate that they were manufactured before the design flaws were corrected.

Given that the failure rate for the 360 may well be north of 20%, that's not an empty idea. Has there even been a consumer electronics device that has had failure rates this high? Ever?

So could you do it? That's very hard to answer. In theory, you could clear and replenish retail stock first, then start a rolling recall of all units in the field. In the meantime, you'd replace existing units that failed in the field with the new design.

Yes, that would guarantee that people would be bricking their units to get the replacement, but so what? They're getting replaced anyway.

With approximately 10 million units as the installed base, and another 1+ million units in inventory worldwide, that's at least 11 million units to replace--and you have to keep selling the new box at the same time.

It would take a year, at least, just to manufacture the needed units, let alone do the replacement.

The cost? Staggering. One billion dollars looks very cheap in comparison.

It should should give you some idea of how serious this reliability problem is that I believe Microsoft may well have given this idea serious consideration. That they were willing to extend warranties to three years for their major failure issue also might be a clue as to how desperately they want to avoid a recall.

posted by Bill Harris @ 5:15 PM

Gaming Notes +1

Sorry, meant to include this with the gaming notes post this morning and just forgot.

Tim McGuire has been keeping me updated on an issue with Battlefield 2 that has been ongoing for over a month. Battlefield 2 has a detailed rank and rewards system (a primary feature of the game), but players are no longer getting points awarded properly after a round. Some servers work properly, some don't, and it's a giant train wreck in general.

That sounds like an obscure issue, but not if you're a hardcore player of the game, and Battlefield 2 has some extraordinarily dedicated players. EA's claimed on more than one occasion that the issue has been resolved, but it hasn't been--there are large numbers of people still having the same problems.

To make things even worse, even the Battlefield 2 forums are having issues--the primary post about stats issues has to be periodically "re-opened" as a new post. Just that single thread would be several hundred pages long if it hadn't been split up.

So if you're thinking about buying Battlefield 2--or playing it--you might monitor the forums here until the issue has been resolved.

posted by Bill Harris @ 4:28 PM

Walking With Dinosaurs

If you've seen the BBC documentary Walking With Dinosaurs, I'm sure you remember the spectacular nature of the program.

Doug Walsh e-mailed me with the news that there is now a stage show version of Walking With Dinosaurs, and it looks absolutely incredible. FIFTEEN life-sized dinosaurs, including a brachiosaurus that is 45 feet tall and 75 feet long.

There's a newspaper article here, and the website is here. If you want to see some video, go to the website main page, choose "The Dinosaurs", then choose "Video." Quite a bit of the video is fluff, but the sections where they show the dinosaurs are freaking unbelievable. They use a combination of robotics and puppetry, and the movements of the dinosaurs are shockingly good.

This show is apparently starting a two-year tour of North America, so while only about a dozen dates have been announced so far, there should be quite a few more added.

I can't wait to see Eli 5.11's face when he sees dinosaurs face-to-face.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:25 AM

Gaming Notes

If you ever wanted to know why Dwarf Fortress is such a completely wonderful game, here's your chance to find out. The Something Awful forums played a succession game (each player playing for one year), they wrote up their individual exploits, and it was all packaged into a single archive. You can read it here (thanks Sebastian).

I know the interface is clunky, but Dwarf Fortress has more imagination in its making than any game I've ever played. If you want to see the game's website after reading the story of the succession game, then go here.

I don't think I've seen anyone mention this, but Circuit City is selling used video games on their website. Take a look: used games section. They'd mentioned doing something like this a while back, but then it had dropped off the radar. This has the potential to be very disruptive to Gamestop/EB, not to mention that the gaming industry can't be pleased.

Jason Price of Talk Strategy sent me the press release of what looks like a very interesting DS game. It's by Atlus, and it's called Draglade. It's a rhythm fighting game--the weapons themselves (via a typically convoluted back story) emit sounds.

This would sound insane, and I guess it is, but it's by Atlus, which means it should be extremely deep. The press release is here.

There's an article in the Seattle Weekly about testing video games. It's messy, but there are interesting sections, and you can read it here.

DQ Fitness Consultant Doug Walsh is into driving games like I'm into team sports games, and he's written about DIRT and its problems here. I've played DIRT, and enjoyed it, but driving games for me are a diversion--I'm not a driving grognard. Doug is, and his analysis of the issues for high-level players is interesting.

I mentioned during the Microsoft E3 post that they were introducing a four-button controller that I referred to as "My First Imitation Wii Controller"--but without motion sensing. I thought a four-button controller could be introduced to non-gamers as an easier way to play (take a look at a picture here), but Leo Tan e-mailed and correctly noted that the controller is only being packed with "Scene It?", so it may just be a novelty item.

I'll be picking up All-Pro Football 2K8 shortly, and should have impressions up tonight or tomorrow. Look for NCAA impressions later today.

posted by Bill Harris @ 7:31 AM

Order Your Championship Ring Now

From Gamespot:
Today, EA announced it has struck a deal with Jostens, the Minneapolis-based jewelry giant that specializes in graduation rings but has also crafted 27 out of the 41 Super Bowl Championship rings. Under the program, titled "Ring of a Champion," Jostens will begin making custom-designed, Madden-themed rings that reflect the skill level of a specific player of the sole officially licensed NFL game.

...players will progress through five different skill levels by performing various feats of virtual athleticism. Once they reach level three, they will unlock a design feature "embedded" in "next-generation console" versions of Madden and will be given a code that will give them access to the Ring of a Champion section of Jostens' Web site. Players will be able to choose from "three unique ring designs" which can be customized with any of the 32 NFL team logos, a variety of colors, and other elements on the rings' tops and sides. Those players which unlock "epic achievements" in Madden will unlock more ring-customization options.

Okay, that is the stupidest damned thing I've ever heard.

Except that it's not.

I'm writing a long post on the potential of Rock Band this week, and one of the specific things I was going to mention was this exact scenario--if someone finished the game on expert, particularly if they finished two different instruments, the game should generate a code that would access a website where you could order exclusive Rock Band gear--t-shirts, jackets, whatever. The gamer would still have to pay for the merchandise, but he wouldn't even have access unless he was in a very elite class of player.

There's a reason that I have an authentic Carolina Hurricanes jersey in my study--I won the Stanley Cup in NHL2K3 on the highest difficulty rating, it was incredibly gripping, and I was thrilled. That game was probably the most mentally challenging sports game I ever played, and when I won, I felt like I'd really accomplished something.

Sure, it sounds goofy to say that game could give me that feeling, but that's what great games do--they give us special feelings. So this whole thing sounds hopelessly cheesy at first, but only if it's a game you don't care about.

I don't like how they're doing this in a design sense, though. It should be tied to winning the Super Bowl, either on the hardest difficulty level in Franchise mode or by being a star player on a Super Bowl-winning team in Superstar mode. In other words, it needs to be as much like real life as possible. Don't tie it to a discrete series of mini-games or something like that, which sounds like what they're doing.

This concept is going to be very big within a few years. Microsoft should have jumped all over this, and I've talked about that--how they should have allowed people with the highest gamer scores to buy jackets and merchandise that designated them as superstars or champions or whatever. It was perfectly lined up to do that with the achievements system, but Microsoft just didn't connect the dots.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:20 PM

NCAA 360. And Pie.

Local reader JT and I are a loosely-formed early release gang for NCAA.

Yes, as Flight of the Conchords made clear just a few episodes ago, "two" is technically the smallest number that can comprise a gang.

Last year, we found the game at a Blockbuster in Pflugerville (incredibly, that's not misspelled) four days before the official release. This year, he'd been checking retail locations, while I focused on Blockbuster stores. We also both monitored the Operation Sports "hunting" thread closely.

By Saturday, I'd given up on getting the game early. Most of the stores that had widely broken street date last year (I'm talking about you, Target) seemed to have a much tighter handle on operations this year.

Saturday afternoon, though, after seeing a message on the OS boards that someone bought the game in San Antonio, JT sent me this:
I’m on my way. Will contact you if I get it via cell.

San Antonio, in case you're wondering, is 100+ miles from where JT lives. I'd thought about driving down there, but realized that the "auto screw you" function would kick in when I was at the register--the clerk would realize that they shouldn't be selling the game, he'd hand my money back, and my head would explode.

Almost two hours later, though, I got a phone call. JT had to endure two clerks arguing about selling the game while one of them was holding his cash, but he managed to get out of there with the game. He was sure that was the last copy they were selling.

When he got back into town, he met us at Z Tejas by the Arboretum, which is where we'd gone for dinner.

So I've met JT in-person twice in two years. In parking lots.

That's how I got the game on Saturday night.

On to part two, which is about pie.

We had a long and wide-ranging conversation Saturday night at dinner, but I forgot everything except what I said about Bill Clinton: "Bill Clinton's mistake, with men, was not just cheating on his wife. It was cheating on his wife with a fat chick wearing a beret."

Z Tejas has this dessert called "ancho chile pie," and it's basically chocolate pie with just a little bit of heat. It's wicked, wicked good, and we almost always order a piece to share.

We ordered the pie and I got up to go to the bathroom. When I come back, the pie was there, and it was already missing a huge chunk.

"Look at that pie!" I said. "It looks like it's been hit by a shark! Did he tear out a piece of the table, too?"

"Oh, stop it," she said. "It's just a little bite."

"Okay, let me explain something about the pie shape," I said. "A single 'slice' of the pie has a 'point,' not a two-inch wide gash. A little bite? This pie's been strip-mined."

"You are totally ridiculous," she said. "Here, I'll show you." She got two forks and started to angle them from the remaining pie into the missing space.

"There you go," I said, when the forks indicated a large chunk missing.

"Oh, that's wrong," she said, narrowing the gap.

"There's a reason that the people who cause traffic accidents don't reconstruct them," I said. "That's the job of the police. Seriously, based on how you've moved those forks around, if you ever ran over a pedestrian and they let you do the chalk outline, it would be the size of an elf."

On the way home, we went to a Randall's grocery store. There are two primary grocery franchises in Austin--Randall's and H.E.B.

I can't stand H.E.B. She can't stand Randall's.

I can't stand H.E.B. because they don't have my staples. They don't have Cinammon Roll Pop Tarts, and they're always out of Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt. The stores are always crowded and you're always waiting in line.

Gloria dislikes Randall's because it's superior in absolutely every way to H.E.B., and she can't stand to to be wrong.

So we picked up two boxes of my Pop Tarts, and as we headed down the salsa aisle (note to salsa manufactureres: if the product label on your jar says "Destiny brought these three ingredients together in a smoky rendezvous," I will not be buying your product. Your salsa wears a beret.), Gloria saw all these sauces and things she wanted to try.

"Load up," I said. "Welcome to the world of flavor."

"Stuff it," she said, grabbing a jar of honey and ginger chicken marinade. Ginger, by the way, does not wear a beret.

"It's just better here," I said, as we walked down the almost-empty area in front of the checkout stands. "Better selection, better cared for, better service"--we walked past a bread table--"better bread."

"The bread is not better," Gloria said.

"Clearly better!" I said. "Crusty, bursting with flavor. We're buying a loaf and you will EAT YOUR WORDS."

"Oh, shut up," she said.

"EATING!" I said.

"You idiot."

"YOUR WORDS!"

So a pretty typical Saturday night for us.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:11 AM

Summertime

NPR recently had a wonderful episode of This American Life today called "Notes on Camp." The stories were outstanding (as they always are on this show), and you can hear the entire episode here.

One of the things that really struck me was when they said that the world was divided into two kinds of people: camp people and non-camp people.

It struck me because, for one summer, I was both.

As a kid, I never went to a camp. I may have had a chance at one point and turned it down--I don't remember. But after my freshman year in college, when I was trying to find a way to avoid being home for the summer, I saw a flyer on our campus bulletin board for a camp counselor position at a summer camp in Massachusetts, in the Berskshire Mountains.

Camp Greylock.

The flyer made it sound like fun. I'd never been in the mountains before. I'd never been to Massachusetts before. Plus, I played tennis more than well enough to be an instructor.

Of course, I wound up teaching baseball instead (for which I was totally unqualified), but that's a different story.

How I got accepted, I'll never know. But I did, so I packed up my stuff, flew to New York City (and saw the Marine Air Terminal, which was absolutely remarkable), and flew a parakeet into Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Let me insert at this point that I was absolutely the dictionary definition of a rube. And for a visual point of reference, I was 6' 1" and weighed 140 pounds. With a full beard. I was the pretzel stick version of Grizzly Adams.

The fellow who picked me up at the airport stopped at Friendly's on the way to the camp. That was my first experience with a Fribble, which (back then) was a giant milkshake. He told me that I'd barely be able to finish it (he was right), but by the end of the summer, I'd be knocking them back with no problem (he was right).

There were dozens of stories from that summer, but I want to tell you about three of them today.

The first story was that Tim Taylor's mother was totally hot. He was the softest, whiniest kid in our bunk, but on parent visitation day his mother came (by herself, and no wedding ring) and she was just hot beyond words. I was desperately hoping for a moment straight out of The Graduate (actually, I was hoping for more of a Summer of '42 moment, but without the dead husband), and I knew that mathematically there was at least a one in a million chance that it would happen.

The long odds, not surprisingly, did not come through. Somehow, though, it makes me feel better today to know that the odds of Tim Taylor's mother seducing me weren't one in a million. It was probably one in a thousand, which means my chances were a thousand times better than I thought.

Second story. I came from the Jethro Tull/Yes/ELP school of music. When I got to camp, though, which was dominated by counselors from New Jersey and New York, they were all listening to the same thing: Billy Joel.

That's right. The Stranger was on every car stereo, in every boombox, on every radio station. It was super-saturated on every single speaker in the camp. I think that was one of the first moments when I understood just how different it was to be from New Jersey than it was to be from Texas.

I'm not sure it's really that different now. But it was back then.

Third story. Every camp has a superstar, and our superstar was Eric Grand. He was ten years old, and he was a Beatle--he even had Paul McCartney's haircut.

Everyone loved Eric Grand--campers, counselors, nurses, the camp director. He was a perfect kid--intelligent, polite, and funny. He was also a phenomenal athlete, by far the best athlete in the camp in his age group.

In a digital world, Eric Grand was a one.

Zero was in my bunk, and his name was Eugene Goldberg. He had big eyes and big ears. He said "f---" when he got mad, which was all the time. He wasn't very smart, which wasn't his fault. He didn't have any friends, and I'm not sure he cared.

Gene (his nickname) was famous, actually. He'd been sent home from camp the summer before, an unprecedented penalty, for saying "f--- you" to a counselor. He was unanimously regarded as the worst kid, by far, in the 9-10 age group. He was, in short, the worst kid in the entire camp.

He bunked right next to me all summer long.

It's hard when you're nineteen and you're responsible for a kid like Gene Goldberg. He's not fun. He doesn't improve. He doesn't seem to care. He had no clue about appropriate behavior. Most of the time, he was totally sullen and defiant. Sometimes he was just a little ball of hate.

One of the things I did that summer was start a little running club. I don't think I had a very good attitude that summer--I felt uncomfortable and anxious too often--but I would run at 7 a.m., before breakfast, and fifty kids or so would run with me. I'm not sure how long it lasted--I think I stopped doing it after a few weeks (bad attitude), but I remember that Gene Goldberg was one of the kids who always ran.

I noticed because Gene really didn't want to do anything, usually. He wasn't fast, but he showed up, and that was something.

After four weeks of camp, there was a Parent's Visitation Day. Some kids had cried for the first week of camp because they were homesick, so it was a big deal for them to see Mom and Dad.

This was when I discovered that Tim Taylor's mom was hot.

More importantly, this was also when I saw Gene Goldberg's parents yell at him. None of the hundreds of parents at camp that day yelled at their kid, but they did.

When I saw him, just a little kid, kind of twisting around in place as they berated him, I realized why Gene Goldberg was so damn angry.

I treated him better after that day. I'm not sure he even noticed, but I saw him differently. I tried to talk to him more. I realized that what he did, in many ways, really wasn't his fault.

At the end of camp, we had Field Day (or something--I forget what it was called, exactly). Field Day was like a camp Olympics, and there were competitions in almost everything.

After a long day, the very last event was a "long distance" run. It was three laps around a clearing, and the entire race was about six hundred yards long.

There were at least thirty kids in this race, but the counselors were joking that there was no reason to even run this race, because Eric Grand was standing near the front, and in addition to being the nicest, best-looking, most popular, most athletic kid, he was also the fastest. By far. He'd already won four events earlier in the day.

Obviously, with Eric in the race, it was going to be a rout.

The starter blew the whistle, and off they went. Eric Grand took off with his beautiful, gloriously perfect stride, on his way to glory.

Except that he was behind Gene Goldberg.

Gene had sprinted like mad from the moment the whistle blew, and even though he ran like he was carrying a large boat anchor, his top sprinting speed managed to get him just in front of Eric's easy stride.

This was going to last for about ten seconds, obviously.

At the end of the first lap, though, Gene was still in front, with Eric right on his shoulder. The other kids had already started to drift back. It was comical to see how much more effort Gene had to expend to stay two feet ahead of Eric, but he did.

Eric still looked like he was coasting, ready to turn on the gas at any moment.

At the end of the second lap, Gene Goldbert was still in front, hanging on like a scarecrow in a hurricane. His eyes were as big as cantaloupes. He looked like a cartoon character whose body was about to explode.

He looked at me as he went past. He didn't look at someone near me. He looked at me.

As they they ran down the backstretch of the course that, for the first time in his life, everyone was cheering for Gene Goldberg. We were shouting ourselves hoarse, screaming, imploring him to hang on.

Eric was still right on Gene's shoulder as they turned the last corner, but he didn't make a move. He didn't know how to come from behind, how to dig deep. Gene Goldberg was willing to suffer, to hurt, to win.

And then Gene Goldberg started to pull away. His lead went from one yard to five yards, to ten.

Gene broke the tape and was mobbed by everyone, including me. I know it's hard to think of a nine-year-old as being a hero, but it was a heroic effort. It was mythic. Twenty-five years later, it remains as one of the most electrifying moments in my life.

When Gene saw me, he just yelled "I WON! I WON!" I don't think I've ever been prouder of somone.

What I remember from that night is that Gene Goldberg was laughing. He was happy. For the first time that summer, and maybe for one of the first times in his life, he was just a happy, goofy kid. He was still talking about the race when it was time for lights out in our bunk, and for once, we just let him talk.

It sounded good.

I don't know how Gene's life turned out. I hope that race was a defining moment for him, a moment that he used as a foundation to be happy and at peace. A simplistic notion, to be sure, but one that is still deeply felt.

There are times when life, even for a boy, is all about earning something that can't be taken away.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:31 PM

NCAA Football 08 (360)

I've got NCAA. I'll tell you how I got it on Monday.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:59 PM

Console Post of the Week, In Which Sony Raises the Jackass Bar to Unprecedented Heights

Funny thing about me--about us. We don't like being lied to. I object to that.

Another funny thing--hubris and arrogance never end well. For an individual, yes--it can get you elected President--but for corporations, not so much. When a corporation is all wrapped up in hubris and arrogance, it almost never ends well.

It's not going to end well this time.

Sony, in what seemingly was the first rational moment they've had in months, announced on Monday that they were cutting the price of the 60GB PS3 model (in the U.S.) from $599 to $499. They also announced a new 80GB model that would be introduced at $599. In an interview with N'Gai Croal of Newsweek, Jack Tretton (CEO of SCEA) had this to say about supply of the two units:
In terms of supply, I think we'll have aggressive supplies of both. We made a much more calculated bet as to what consumer demand would be when we initially came out with the Playstation 3, between the 20 gig and the 60 gig, because we had gotten a lot of retailer feedback. In this instance, we're going to kind of going to go in with a pretty robust supply of both and let the consumer decide, and then we'll adapt supplies accordingly. So I would say it's probably from a supply standpoint equal, initially, and then we'll adjust based on consumer demand, and we'll adjust production beyond that.

Four days later, Tretton's statement is revealed as a bald-faced lie.

From Gamasutra:
A spokesman from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) has confirmed to Gamasutra that the 60GB hard drive version of the PlayStation 3 will be phased out in the U.S., with no plans to replenish stock once current supplies run out.

The surprising news first came to light in an online interview with SCEE president David Reeves, in which he suggested that the 60GB version would cease to be available by as early as this month. This despite a $100 price cut for the console only having been announced on Monday and Sony proclaiming greatly increased sales as a result at its media briefing on Wednesday.

Gamasutra has confirmed the story with a SCEE spokesman, who indicated that “The US are currently transitioning from the 60GB to the 80GB mode of the PlayStation 3. When stock of the 60GB model runs out it will no longer be available in the U.S.”

WHAT?

So this isn't a price-cut. It's a clearance sale.

It's hard to dance around this, so I'll be blunt: these guys are pricks. They've consistently acted like this for almost two years. It's not an accident, it's not by chance, it's not one rogue executive. This is just the latest in an incredible series of gaffes.

It's beyond comprehension, really. Sony basically tooled the entire press corps covering E3 with a "story" that was a complete misrepresentation. Do they think that's going to help them in the future?

Oh, and here comes the non-denial denial. From Next-Gen:
SCEA has denied 'inaccurate' reports that its $100 price cut on the 60Gig PS3 is simply a move to clear stock before offering solely the higher priced 80Gig version.

A spokesperson for Sony in the US told Next-Gen, “"As announced this week, SCEA's product offering in North America consists of a 80GB PS3 available in August at $599 and a 60GB PS3 available now for $499. We have will have ample supplies of both models to meet the needs of our consumers for the foreseeable future."

Exactly. You have stock in both models for the "foreseeable future" because even if the price cut permanently doubled sales for the 60GB model, it would take 2-3 months to run through the bloated inventories in the U.S.

Notice, though, that they're not specifically denying anything. If they planned to keep selling the 60GB in the U.S. after existing stock ran out, that's what they would have said. This is a good rule of thumb: when a company denies something without denying anything, that's not a denial.

So what we're really getting in the U.S. is a 20GB larger hard drive, but removal of hardware backward compatibility. At the same $599 price point.

It boggles the mind, really. I don't think these guys collectively could run a Subway franchise competently. I don't mean Subway, the corporation--I mean a store.

I'll have Microsoft and Nintendo news on Monday.

posted by Bill Harris @ 1:04 PM

Friday Links!

Many enjoyable time-wasters for you coming up, but first, a request for a quick favor.

Mike Crassweller, long-suffering reader since 2003, has created a web page titled "Top Six Best Sites for Windows Skinning." This is useful information, since Mike is active in the skinning community, but there is another reason to ask you to click on the link and view the page: this is part of a contest over at "OnMyList," and Mike's in the lead to win an iPhone. The contest ends Saturday at midnight, and if you'd like to either get informations on Windows skins or just help Mike out, then go here and thank you in advance.

Please note that this does not mean I'll be doing this on a regular basis, so being in a contest to win a priceless My Little Pony or a signed copy of Paul McCartney's Someone's Knocking At the Door is highly unlikely to be mentioned.

Seriously, I have this section of my CD collection that I labeled "Shitty Paul McCartney Solo Albums," and it's almost a foot long. Every few years, I read "his best solo work in nearly two decades!", forget the height of that bar, and buy another one (I did just a few weeks ago).

But I digress. On to the links.

Here's one of the most fascinating articles I've read in a long time. Here's an excerpt:
For male sparrows looking for a mate or trying to defend their turf, it pays to keep up with the times and latest musical hits.

A new study finds that female white-crowned sparrows pay more attention to new bird songs than vintage tunes, and that other males find the oldies much less threatening.

That just blows my mind. Here's the link (thanks Sirius): bird songs.

John Willcocks sent me a link to an article at The Escapist titled "Legally Insane: A History of Jack Thompson's Antics." For Jack, crazy is the new black, and it has been for decades. Read it here.

From Keith Ganey, a terrific link to the prehistory of Monopoly, focusing on "The Landlord Game," which was originally invented in 1904 by a Quaker named Lizzie Maggie. It's a fascinating read, and you can find it here.

From Cliff Eyler, a link to a story about the mapinguary, a beast of the Amazon that may or may not be real. Great article, and you can read it here.

From Grifin Cheng, a link to a story announcing the discovery of water vapor--in a planet outside our solar system. This is only the second time for such a planet has been found, and you can read about it here.

From Jessie Leimkuehler, a link to a picture of the surface of Mars. What makes this picture so stunning, though are the tracks--the tracks of the rover Opportunity. So Mars is (at at its absolute closest) 35 million miles from earth, and we can see tire tracks (the picture isn't being taken from Earth, but still). Freaking unbelievable. See it here.

From Jeff Pinard, a long (but worthwhile) link to an article over at The Consumerist about Geek Squad, the "specialty" Best Buy tech guys. It discusses in detail what's apparently happening when you take your computer in for repair, and believe me, it's not pretty. Read it here.

From David Gloier, a link to a creature called the "octosquid" that was pulled up from 3,000 feet below the sea this week. The picture is amazing, and you can see it all here, and another story (thanks Sirius) is here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 7:03 AM

Lunch, Guitar Hero III, and Rock Band

I had lunch with John Harwood today.

John was the genius who found Guitar Hero II for the 360 almost a WEEK early. John is in the top 1% of all scores on the campaign leaderboard. I'm in the top 2% (or was--it may be 3% now).
Point being, we've both spent hundreds of hours playing Guitar Hero. Combined, you'd be hard-pressed to find two people more crazy about Guitar Hero than us.

We spent the whole hour talking about Rock Band.

Just a few months ago, we both had Rock Band firmly in the "unknown" category. Now, I'm not even sure that I'm buying Guitar Hero III. John is, but I have doubts he'll even work through career.

Why we've changed our minds is worth discussing, because these two games will be chasing huge, huge amounts of consumer dollars this fall.

Let's go to Guitar Hero III first.

This may sound silly, if you haven't played the game, but Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II were as close to "pure" experiences as anything I've ever played. They conveyed, using a game, a phenomenal musical experience.

By musical experience, I don't mean to imply that playing Guitar Hero was like playing a real guitar. It wasn't, obviously, but it did provide an intense, focused way to experience music. The game channeled you, quite subtlely, into an incredibly intense place.

To play at the highest levels, the game required technique. It required skill. It really didn't require any knowledge of gaming at all. There were lots of funny, clever bits, but it wasn't really about gaming at all.

So what did Activision/Red Octane decide to do with Guitar Hero III? They decided to "game up" the game. In that single decision, they told the serious player that they fundamentally had no understanding of what the game was really about.

Boss battles? With power-ups? The horror. Take a look at this video, but be ready to cringe. "Whammy" power-ups? "Amp overload?" Your notes can actually disappear during this goofy battle.

So instead of a "battle" being decided with skill, it's going to heavily involve knowing when to use f-ing power-ups? Oh, the humanity. And I assume that the player-versus-player multiplayer battles, since they're described as "action" based, will include those power-ups as well.

Like I said, those kinds of additions, instead of more music-focused ones, demonstrate very clearly to me that they just don't get it.

So what does Harmonix do with Rock Band? Is there any goofy bullshit, any power-ups, and "battles?"

No. Just music stuff. A ton of career modes, a drum kit controller, vocals. Music, music, music, music, music, music.

Music.

At E3 this week, Activision announced that they'd signed a guitar player.

Slash.

Slash can play, no question, but he's also the closest you can get to a living cartoon character--stovepipe hat, bushy curls, ever-present cigarette danging from his mouth. And you can battle him! Ooh, use the whammy, use the whammy!

Two days later, Harmonix announces they'll have downloadable albums, and oh-by-the-way the first album is by The Who, who feature not only one of the greatest guitar players of all time (Townshend), but also one of the greatest drummers of all time (Moon). Oh, and the album is going to be one of the most intense albums ever recorded--Who's Next.

Sorry, smoking cartoon guy. Get off the stage, bitch.

It's more than that, though. It's the drum kit, which looks absolutely, incredibly cool. I'm probably more excited about having a career as a drummer than I am about a guitar career, and I don't even like drums that much. It's about being able to have a band.

What it's mostly about, though, is seeing that the people making the game so obviously respect the musical experience.

I'm going to write next week about some of the possibilities we discussed for Rock Band (John had a ton of great ideas), but that's it for today.

posted by Bill Harris @ 1:31 PM

Preserved Baby Mammoth Found

This is so amazing that I'm practically giddy--not schoolgirl giddy, mind you, but the more dignified kind of scientist giddy:
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The discovery of a baby mammoth preserved in the Russian permafrost gives researchers their best chance yet to build a genetic map of a species extinct since the Ice Age, a Russian scientist said on Wednesday.

"It's a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition," said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science's Zoological Institute, which has been taking care of the mammoth since it was uncovered in May.

When they say "perfect condition," they're not exaggerating. The pictures are just astonishing, as well as a video, and you can see both of them here.

Here's more:
Tikhonov said the fact the mammoth was so remarkably well-preserved -- its shaggy coat was gone but otherwise it looked as though it had only recently died -- meant it was a potential treasure trove for scientists.

"Such a unique skin condition protects all the internal organs from modern microbes and micro-organisms ... In terms of its future genetic, molecular and microbiological studies, this is just an unprecedented specimen."

That's great, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean cloning:
But Tikhonov dismissed suggestions the mammoth could be cloned and used to breed a live mammoth. Cloning can only be done if whole cells are intact, but the freezing conditions will have caused the cells to burst, he Tikhonov.

Someday, I'm hoping. Someday.

posted by Bill Harris @ 11:17 AM

Football Notes

Copies of NCAA are slowly trickling into the wild, as the OS "hunting" thread is ablaze. Also, roster master Fairdale Kings will have a copy of the game today, and if you know FK, that's a huge plus for anyone who wants to play with real player names--there may well be "real" rosters available by the middle of next week.

Here's a bit of news about All-Pro Football 2K8: accelerated clock is in. That's a huge plus, and well done on the part of 2k Sports.

Operation Sports also has a 2K8 Q&A that they're updating throughout the day (they have the game). Excellent impressions and notes on features, and you can see it here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 11:11 AM

Are You Kidding Me?

Take a look at this (thanks Gamespot):
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--The Battle of the Bands is officially on. Yesterday, the Neversoft-developed Guitar Hero III revealed the python-enthused former Guns N' Roses fretter Slash would rock on a variety of unlockable guitars. Today, original Guitar Hero developer Harmonix fired back with the announcement that it will offer not just hit singles for gamers to play, but entire full-length albums from multiple labels.

The first band to receive the digital conversion will be classic British rockers The Who. Gamers will be able to form a virtual cover band playing guitar, hitting the drums, and singing along to the band's widely acclaimed 1971 album Who's Next.

An argument can easily be made that Who's Next is one of the ten greatest rock albums in history. Oh, and with one of the greatest drummers in history.

Oh, and ALBUMS? Are you freaking kidding me?

Here's more:
Harmonix also announced the first 15 songs from the retail edition of Rock Band. A glance at the list reveals a wide array of rock subgenres and decades represented, from David Bowie and Black Sabbath to The Hives and The Strokes. The first 15 songs from Rock Band are listed below, with the new songs in bold:
Artist - Song (asterisk indicates a cover version of a song):
The Who - "Won't Get Fooled Again"
Mountain - "Mississippi Queen"
*David Bowie - "Suffragette City"
Black Sabbath - "Paranoid"
*Blue Oyster Cult - "Don't Fear the Reaper"
The Ramones - "Rockaway Beach"
Rush - "Tom Sawyer"
*Bon Jovi - "Wanted Dead or Alive"
Nirvana - "In Bloom"
Stone Temple Pilots - "Vaseline"
Weezer - "Say It Ain't So"
Foo Fighters - "Learn to Fly"
The Hives - "Main Offender"
The Strokes - "Reptilia"
Queens of the Stone Age - "Go With the Flow"

Unbelievable.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:55 PM

E3 Post #3: Nintendo and Sony Take Turns Announcing Nothing*

*with the exception of a new PSP, which looks quite tasty but isn't the focus of what I cover.

I think the theme coming out of these E3 press conferences is that the "new" E3 isn't very important.

The single most important thing Nintendo announced was a game called "Wii Fitness," which will sell five million copies worldwide while gaming industry analysts scratch their heads in total confusion.

You're laughing as you read that, but just wait.

Apart from the redesigned PSP (I quite liked it), Sony's biggest PS3 news was not a new exclusive, but the news that they hadn't lost the exclusive for Metal Gear Solid 4. Tretton also announced, breathlessly, that sales in the U.S. had doubled since the announcement of the price drop.

Holy shit. They are in the toilet.

Do the math. That's not a permanent bump--yes, it's definitely going to increase sales, but that first week (and first month) is going to be higher than what happens afterwards. So, flushed with success, Tretton seems to not understand that doubling 80k monthly sales gets them to---160k.

For one month. That's a peak.

Which is nowhere for a company trying to sell 100 million units. For Sony, that's Suck City.

That means the "settled" effect of the price cut will probably boost them from 20,000 units a week in the U.S. to 30,000. In other words (like I said a few days ago), a closer last.

Disaster.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:03 PM

E3 Post #2--Microsoft Press Conference: Has Anyone Seen the Bridge? Where's That Confounded Bridge?

Sony stumbles into E3, covered in their own puke, croaks about a $100 price cut, and collapses. When they roll over as they dry heave, their head winds up under Microsoft's steel-toed boot.

So what does Microsoft do?

Nothing.

Incredibly, Microsoft did absolutely nothing at the E3 press conference to press their advantage. No price cut. No stealth price cut. No new exclusives.

No future, strangely, as the focus of their presentation was that all (well, almost all) of the games they were showing were coming out by the end of 2007.

It's easy to see what they were trying to do--focus on the crushing number of excellent games that are coming out for the system in the next five months--but good grief, give us a taste of the future, at least.

Oh, and they introduced a four button controller that they should have just gone ahead and called My First Imitation Wii Controller. Except it doesn't have motion sensing.

Blech. It would have been one thing to swing and miss, but hell, Microsoft didn't even take a swing.

They may well still hammer Sony this fall, but they could have "more bettered" hammered them with a price cut.

Three words: "press the advantage."

And Nintendo? Nintendo is long, long gone.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:23 PM

The Eagerly Awaited Urinal Links Post

First a trickle, then--well, you know.

Before the links, a moment of pure mathematics from long-time reader Geoff Engelstein that is the stuff of urinal legend:
As a (nerdy) youth I spent idle moments, umm, doing my business figuring out the fewest and greatest number of people that could be at N urinals such that no two are adjacent, and any new person would have to stand next to someone else. In case you are curious:

U-Min = N/3 (FRU)
U-Max = N/2 (FRU)

Where U-Max and U-Min are the greatest and least number of people you can have at urinals with no two adjacent and a new person forced to have a neighbor. N is the number of urinals and FRU means round fractions up.

So if there are seven urinals and two are in use, a third person will always be able to find a 'private' urinal.

Okay, that would be the greatest t-shirt ever:
U-Min = N/3 (FRU)
U-Max = N/2 (FRU)

Now, here are the links (submitted by many, but hopefully not "the great unwashed," so to speak):
The Urinal Game, a quiz you can take about your urinal selection skills.
Male Restroom Etiquette, a wonderfully clever YouTube video. Also, a brilliant use of the phrase "lavatorial discomfort."
Another Urinal Test
Wikipedia Entry for "Urinal"
Dave Barry's Complete Guide To Guys (Amazon link), which includes a detailed urinal selection guide.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:11 PM

Microsoft

I'll have more about Microsoft's E3 press conference this afternoon, but in short, it was two hours of not much--no price cuts, no huge game announcements, no signature moment, really.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:32 AM

NCAA #1 Arrives

The annual frenzy each year to find NCAA early has officially commenced, as user "CAJUN COMMISH" over at the Operation Sports forums has been verified as the first end-user to have a copy of the game. He got the game a full week before the official release date.

The threads about finding the game early are always funny and entertaining, so if you want to take a look, the "hunting" thread is here (73 pages and counting!), while the impressions/questions thread is here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 4:16 PM

NCAA Demo (360)

NCAA has always looked very bland to me compared to the ESPN/All-Pro series or even Madden.

And it still looks bland.

However, there are a nice number of positives this year, and overall, I'm pretty pleased with what I saw in the demo. Animations are actually better this year, which is huge, and the framerate is absolutely rock solid.

To get to that solid framerate, I think the crowds don't look as good as last year, but I'll take that tradeoff any day.

And while I say NCAA looks bland, I always spent far, far more time with it each year than Madden. The recruiting engine has been so solid for so long--it may well be the single best feature in an EA sports game, at least over the last few years.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:11 PM

I Have Enough Urinal Links Now, Thank You

I meant to put up a post with all the links you've sent me about urinals (history, selection strategy, etc.), but the pain train has hit me pretty substantially since last night, so I won't be writing it up until tomorrow.

It will be, I'm certain, the most comprehensive urinal links post ever. Look at me--throwing down the pee gauntlet.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:58 PM

E3 Post #1: Sony

I think some perspective would be interesting.

After Sony announced the $100 price drop (North America only, allegedly), SCEA President Jack Tretton sat with with several people for interviews. One was N'Gai Croal (here), and Tretton said something in that interview that I couldn't get out of my head (bold for N'Gai's question, italics for Tretton's response):
You and I spoke extensively before, during and after launch about the value proposition that the PS3 represented: Cell, Blu-Ray, the built in hard drive and backwards compatibility. Why do you think that the perceived value of PS3 was unable to overcome the high launch prices?
Well, the value message is one that is extremely easy to appreciate once you understand it. I think the challenge is providing that education to consumers in a typical retail venue. There's so much for them to absorb before they can appreciate the value, that it's more of a challenge than we faced in previous generations.

I've been thinking about that quite a bit, because something important was in his response. Today, it hit me, and it explains quite clearly why the PS3 is failing: Sony has created a "value" product for a "cost" market.

Yes, the PS3 is "quite the value" for the new price of $499 (and, according to Sony, was "quite the value" at the launch price of $599). But has a $499 console ever succeeded? No.

Don't e-mail me about the Neo-Geo. It was awesome, but it was a boutique console, essentially. If the PS3 winds up being a boutique console, Sony executives are going to be flinging themselves off buildings.

Look, if you want to sell 100 million units of a consumer electronics device, you don't have time to "educate" the consumer. Most consumers can't be educated, anyway. It better be damned obvious, it better be cheap, and it better be on the shelf.

For the sake of perspective, let's take a brief look at the history of the PS2.
Launch dates:
--March 4, 2000 (Japan)
--October 26, 2000 (U.S.)
--November 24, 2000 (UK)

Shipment milestones:
10M--March 24, 2001 (12+ months from Japanese launch)
20M--October 10, 2001 (6+ months)
30M--May 9, 2002 (7 months)
40M--September 19, 2002 (4+ months)
50M--January 16, 2003 (4 months)
60M--September 9, 2003 (8+ months)
70M--January 14, 2004 (4+ months)
100M--May 19, 2004

That's right--they hopped from 70M to 100M in just five months, apparently.

Price reductions (North America):
$299.99--October 26, 2000
$199.99--May 14, 2002 (18+ months)
$179.99--May 13, 2003
$149.99--May 11, 2004

All the shipped units number came from an SCEE document, which you can see in full here.

Those are incredible numbers, particularly when you remember that the PS2 was severely supply constrained during the first year, so the shipped number essentially represented the sold number. Plus, for the first seven months, the console was only available in Japan!

So it was roughly 25 months to get to 30 million units shipped. Price cut, and 30 million more units ship in the next 18 months. Staggering.

60 million units shipped in just over three and a half years? Are you kidding me?

The PS2 was at $199.99 eighteen months after launch in North America. The PS3 will be at that price point after what--four years? Why would anyone believe the PS3 is, in any way, similar to the PS2?

Here's the answer: because Sony told us it would be. And most of the gaming press is so cowed that when Sony says the PS3 eats burgers from the year 2050 and shits pure joy, they just write it up.

So when you read all of the analysis from industry pundits about how Sony can "recover" from the last year, don't let yourself be fooled. There is no recovery, not to the level of dominance the PS2 enjoyed.

Sony isn't going to win this generation. They're just hoping they won't be last.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:54 PM

I Never Get Tired of 'Man in Lawn Chair With Helium Balloons' Stories

BEND, Oregon (AP) -- Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks -- and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.

Destination: Idaho.

With instruments to measure his altitude and speed, a global positioning system device in his pocket, and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as ballast -- he could turn a spigot, release water and rise -- Couch headed into the Oregon sky.

Nearly nine hours later, the 47-year-old gas station owner came back to earth in a farmer's field near Union, short of Idaho but about 193 miles from home.

Read the full story here (with an excellent picture).

posted by Bill Harris @ 10:59 AM

NCAA Demo Is Out

The NCAA demo for the 360 is out and you can find it on the Marketplace. I'll be downloading it shortly.

I'll have many links to urinals going up later, thanks to a flood of submissions from you guys.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:15 AM

The Urinator: Theory and Practice

I took Eli 5.11 to Dave & Buster's last week.

Before we started playing games, he said he needed to pee, so we went to the bathroom. There was a row of five urinals, and they were all empty. Eli walked straight to the last one, against the wall.

Wait a minute, I thought. That's textbook urinal strategy.

If you're a guy, you know what I'm talking about. There is a standard strategy for selecting which urinal to use. In its most basic form, this strategy can be boiled down to a simple rule: don't get surrounded.

That's why selecting urinal #5, against the wall, is textbook. It guarantees you one side of privacy, plus (and this is important) it makes it highly likely that #4 will remain unoccupied, because any guy walking in is going to choose #1 (closest to the door, with the little privacy extender), and the guy after him is going to choose #3 (the last urinal with open space to either side). So unless there's some gigantic flood of customers into the bathroom, you're guaranteed privacy on both sides.

It's like chess, but with pee.

"Eli, why did you choose that urinal?" I asked.

"Because it was the most private," he said.

Bingo. Genetic urinal knowledge.

We decided to go eat, and the Margaret Mead in me decided to investigate further. "Okay," I said, lining up sugar packets in a row, "if we had five urinals, and two of them were being used--"

"Hold on," Eli 5.11 said. He grabbed two packets of Equal (blue) and put them in position next to the sugar packets. "So these are the guys," he said, setting up the table like this (ignore the dashes--they're just to create space):
X-----X------
1--2--3--4--5

(For orientation purposes, remember that beyond 5 is the side wall. #1 is the first urinal when you walk into the restroom.)

"All right," I said, "one and three are occupied. Where do you go?"

"That's easy," he said. "Five."

"Okay," I said, rearranging the packets. "Let's say that two and four are being used."

"Still five," he said.

Nice.

"Five and four are occupied," I said.

"One," he said, without hesitation. My son is a pee strategy genius.

"One more," I said. "Two and five are occupied. Where do you go?"

"One," he said. "There's that little wall that comes out." The privacy extender. Well done.

"Last one," I said. "Let's say that urinal one doesn't have the privacy extender, and three and four are occupied. Now what do you do?"

"Ooh, that's a tough one," Eli said, considering the packets on the table. I think I go with number two." His first strategic blunder, seemingly. That situation requires use of the first urinal.

"Why would you go there?" I asked.

"Well, I'm so small compared to a grown-up," he said. "Somebody walking in wouldn't even see me standing there." So he knows all the rules, but there are auxiliary rules when you're five.

The waitress walked up right then. "Oh, what are you guys doing with all those sugar packets?" she cooed.

"Talking about urinators," Eli 5.11 said.

"Oh, that's so, um, cute," she said, sprinting away in horror.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:16 PM

Don't Cry For Me, It's Inguinal

Gloria's suggestion for the post title was "The Girl From Inguinal."

Surgery went very smoothly on Friday, and even though the doctor said I'd be falling asleep in the middle of a sentence, I wasn't really that sleepy. I answered a few e-mails, sat on the couch for a while, and since he told me to use pain medication liberally the first few days, took a Vicodin.

That was about 3:30 p.m. The prescription said I could take two at once, but I didn't want to be completely knocked out, so I just took one.

At 7 p.m., I felt a bit of pain coming on, so I took one more. I'd eaten beforehand, because I didn't want to have any stomach problems.

At that point, everything was going great. Smooth sailing.

At 7:30 p.m., I was so nauseous that I literally couldn't move my head. It was an awful feeling.

Which lasted for twelve hours.

No sleep Friday night, just feeling like I was going to throw up any second. Which I would have gone ahead and done, but the thought of using those "heaving" muscles (some of which had just been cut) was enough to make me hold off. So I watched a documentary on Atomic Bomb testing on the Discovery Channel (excellent), a horror movie about cockroaches (can't recommend it), and "The Babysitter's Club" (after not sleeping for a full day, this was surprisingly entertaining).

At 6 a.m., I broke down and called the doctor. For some reason, calling in the middle of the night seemed like bad form (I know, that's incredibly stupid, but I thought it was going to stop any minute, and thought that for the entire twelve hours).

After some anti-nausea medication, I started to improve. Bad, bad night.

So I stopped taking Vicodin, and even though they wrote me a prescription for Darvocet, I wasn't willing to even try it, because I didn't want to take a chance on getting sick again. So I've been taking the anti-nausea medication once a day and regular Tylenol for the pain.

Which has worked really well, much to my surprise. High pain thresholds have many benefits.

I even drove to lunch yesterday, which I'm pretty sure was ahead of schedule. So I wish time would pass a little more quickly, but other than that, I'm fine.

I'm behind on e-mail, but I'll be catching up over the next couple of days.

posted by Bill Harris @ 10:26 AM

Sony Confirms Price Cut

I was officially nine days early:
FOSTER CITY, Calif., July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), Inc. today announced a new 80GB model of its PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(TM)) computer entertainment system. Beginning in August, the new PS3 model will be available in North America for a suggested retail price of $599/$659 CND and will be sold with the popular online-enabled racing game MotorStorm(TM). In conjunction with this news, the company also announced that effective immediately, the current 60GB PS3 model will be available in North America for $499/$549 CND, or $100 below the original launch price.

That's the official Sony press release, and it amazes me that they put the price cut information AFTER the new model information. For the last year, they've been remarkably clueless on a regular basis.

Next-Gen queried Microsoft about possible price cuts, and here's how they responded:
"Microsoft has not made any announcements regarding a price cut on Xbox 360," a rep told Next-Gen in an e-mail today.

In other words, Microsoft is definitely cutting the price on the 360. If they weren't, the response would have been "there are no plans..." The non-denial denial is almost always a "yes." My bet is still that the Elite goes to $399.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:16 AM

Note on NCAA Slider Project

That (surgery) all went very well, seemingly, and before the Vicodin kicks in, let me add a note about the upcoming NCAA slider project.

Here's the deal: if one of you guys finds the game before next Friday, and you can buy a second copy and ship it to me, I would really appreciate it. I will (of course) pay for the game and any shipping charges you incur.

This would enable me to get a huge head start on sliders. Plus, and I'm not sure about this, the Supersim option in this year's game might enable me to generate stats based on the in-game engine in just minutes per game, which would save a huge amount of time.

Here's the flip side of my request: if I'm lucky enough to find the game early locally, I'll buy several extra copies and have a quick contest. Winners will get the game shipped overnight.

So one way or the other, I'm hoping that at least a few of us will be playing the game early this year.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:43 PM

Update to Console Post of the Week

From Reuters:
TOKYO, July 6 - Sony Corp. has no plans to cut the price of its PlayStation3 (PS3) at present to pep up demand and counter surging sales of Nintendo's (rival game console Wii, Sony's president said on Friday.

"At present we have no plans," to cut the PS3 price, Ryoji Chubachi told Reuters in an interview.

That's impossible to believe, but that's what he's claiming.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:54 AM

Console Post of the Week

This week, I had this entire post written--Wednesday night. Because I'm going in for surgery this morning, I was going to get everything organized the day before, and I figured hey, what could possibly get announced on Thursday?

Seriously. That's what I thought.

Of course, what got announced were the biggest stories related to Microsoft and Sony for quite a while.

The single worst thing that can happen to a company with a gaming console is for people to stop talking about the games. Nothing else could be worse. And for the last several months, people have spent far more time talking about reliability (360) or price (PS3) than games.

In the console market, that's death.

So, on the same day, both Microsoft and Sony tried to stop the bleeding.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they were extending the warranty of 360's to three years for the "red ring of death" failure. That's all consoles--new, old, whatever. And if you paid for an out-of-warranty repair (me) because of the red ring of death, you get reimbursed. Full details are here.

Microsoft is also taking a 1.05-1.15 billion dollar charge to earnings.

Think about that for a moment. Essentially, Microsoft is reserving $100 for every console that's been sold since the system launched. I know--that's for future warranty extension as well--but it seems reasonable that Microsoft wouldn't be doing this unless they'd solved the problem. So the vast majority of the $1B charge is for existing consoles.

So that's 11 million consoles at $100 per=$1.1 billion.

The good news: that's a hell of a stand-up response by Microsoft. Unprecedented, really, although it's also entirely correct to say that the failure rates are also unprecedented.

The bad news: that $1.1 billion charge may well mean that there's not going to be a price drop.

Or does it?

Here's a quick analysis. iTrackr, until just a few weeks ago, showed a decent supply of the "Elite" units ($479) in retail inventory. Now, availability has plummeted to 9%.

We know that demand for the Elite hasn't been high, because it really hasn't boosted Microsoft's monthly NPD numbers to any degree. So there's not much demand for a product, but suddenly it isn't available.

In other words, Microsoft has apparently stopped shipping the Elite.

Why would they do that? Well, the best answer I can think of is because they're going to use it to replace the Premium unit and sell it for $399.

What happens to the Premium unit? I think it makes perfect sense for it to go away. Microsoft is selling tons and tons of crap via XBL Marketplace, and they want everyone to have as much space on their hard drives as possible. The Elite replacing the Premium and assuming the Premium's price point makes sense.

What about the Core unit? I have no idea. That unit never made sense to start with.

Let's wander back to reliability for a moment. Just how bad were the failure rates? No one knows for sure, but Daily Tech has an excellent article that alleges somewhere around thirty percent. Which is incredible, if true.

Here's a question: why haven't any of the hardware sites put thermal probes into a 360 and measured how hot it gets during operation? It would be particularly interesting if you could do that to a PS3 and Wii as well and compare the temperature differences during different operations (and durations). I'd also really like to see the temperature difference between putting the console in an enclosed stero cabinet or having it in the open.

And as soon as Microsoft starts using the 65nm CPU, a temperature comparsion between the new unit and the old one would be very helpful.

If you're wondering why that whole "thermal probe" line of reasoning is shoehorned in there, it's because I wrote it before Microsoft announced the warranty extensions yesterday. But I still like the idea, so I just jammed it in anyway.

Sony has finally responded, too, although it hasn't been officially confirmed yet. It was first reported in the DVD Talk forums that an upcoming Circuit City circular listed the PS3 at $499 (a $100 price drop).

"Speedy 1961" should get special mention, because, to the best of my knowledge, he was the first person to break the story. Well done.

A few hours later, GameDaily BIZ reported this:

...a merchandising manager (who wished to remain anonymous) at one of the world's biggest retailers has confirmed to GameDaily BIZ that the price drop is indeed retail-wide and it's scheduled to take place on July 12, although the first wave of ads to promote the PS3's new price won't kick in until Sunday, July 15.

Well, damn it. I said end of June and I missed it by 12 days. And if I had any common sense, I would have expected it at E3, not before. Good grief, that was pretty obvious.

We all knew this was coming, though. You can't make 900,000 units a month, sell 250,000, and make that math work anywhere but Crazy Town.

Here's Sony's problem: they needed to cut the price, and I assume they cut it as much as they could (financially speaking), but their backs are hard against the wall. The 360 has outsold the PS3 by a 2-1 margin the last two months, and with the killer game lineup Microsoft has this fall, does anyone expect this margin to narrow, even with the price cut?

Let's say that the price cut permanently ups their sales by 50% (I think that's unlikely, given that it's not even a 20% price cut, but let's be generous). 50% would be a HUGE permanent bump.

And what would a 50% sales increase in the U.S. do for them? It would take them up to 30,000 units a week.

Which is nowhere, relatively speaking.

Do you know what this price cut does for Sony? It makes them a closer last.

I'm not saying it's a bad move on their part. What I'm saying is that the initial bill-of-materials for the system was so incredibly expensive that it overwhelms every strategy Sony can devise. No matter how many monkeys Sony executives pull out of their ass in interviews, the cold, hard monthly sales numbers indicate a system that is tanking, and a $100 price cut isn't going to change that.

If the situation ever does change, Sony will start talking about monthly unit sales. Not revenue, not percentages, not comparisons between dissimilar situations. They won't need to do any of that, because the monthly unit sales will be the only numbers they need. When they start doing that on a regular basis, the landscape may be tilting in their favor.

Until then, it's safe to ignore anything they say about sales, because it's all meaningless.

The biggest risk for the PS3 right now is not a lack of consumer support, though--it's a potential lack of developer support.

Think I'm crazy? Consider this: software projects and development resources must be planned and allocated 12-18 months in advance--often, even longer. If you're a developer, you're looking at a worldwide installed base of a little over 3 million units--but at unknown number of those units aren't used to play games.

There's no way to quantify that number, and that's a problem. But if you look at monthly software sales in the U.S. and Japan, very few PS3 titles are even in the top 50.

Plus, the PS3 is selling the fewest units.

So it's the most expensive console, it has the smallest installed base, and it's selling the fewest units worldwide. Seriously, with those numbers, how stoned do you have to be to make PS3 development a priority?

What that means is that Sony can essentially forget about exclusives unless they're a Sony-developed title. And if any version of a game is going to get delayed, or cancelled, it's the PS3 version.

That's already happening--lost exclusives, delays, cancellations. And Sony's risk is that this trend is going to pick up speed, which would cripple them.

Let's quickly move on to Nintendo. Here's your summary: they are kicking the crap out of everyone.

I expect to have multiple E3 posts next week, even in my post-surgical state. Hell, writing on pain medication may be an improvement.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:46 AM

Links!

For your reading pleasure, as always.

Mike Kolar sent me a link to a new gaming blog called "Law of the Game." It's a gaming blog, but from a legal persective, and the author (Mark Methenitis) is an excellent writer. You can read it here.

Matthew Sakey has a new installment of Culture Clash--this month, about gaming industry executives and the (surprise) stupid things they say in interviews. Here's an excerpt:
In the simplest terms, there are high-ranking people in the industry who have quite clearly lost the ability to think about what they say before they say it.

It's hard to be more accurate than that. Read it here.

There's an interesting article over at National Geographic on swarm theory, which you can read here.

The BBC reported this week that a secret chamber has been found inside the tomb of Qin Shihuang.

Qin Shihuang, as I've written about previously, was protected in death by the Terracotta Army, and if have no idea what that might be, then you're in for a treat here.

The full BBC article is here.

Steven Davis sent me a terrific link to a discussion of how color was used in ancient architecture (in reference to the 3D model of Rome I linked to last week). It's a totally fascinating article (with links to other excellent articles as well), and you can read it here.

This week's issue of The Escapist has an excellent article by Kieron Gillen about Lego Star Wars, and you can read it here.

Keith Ganey sent in a link to a binary marble adding machine. It's beautiful and very elegant in a mechanical sense, and you can see it here.

Daniel Willhite sent in a link to an article about a crazy biologist (who sounds totally entertaining). Here's an excerpt:
A Russian biologist has been trying to recreate a fully fledged Ice Age eco-system in a remote corner of Siberia, complete, if possible, with woolly mammoths.

...he is turning 160 sq km of Siberian "desert" back into the teeming wilderness of the late Ice Age, complete with grazing pastures and animals that have not been seen here for millennia.

Read the story here.

Jessie Leimkuehler sent in a link to a mind-blowing article about--well, just read the opening:
It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say.

Like I said, mind-blowing, and you can read it here.

Here's a second link from Jessie--a link to a picture of the moon Tethys. What's amazing, though, is looking at the western side of the moon. It's got a dent, which is the impact basin Odysseus.

Sirius sent me a link to an article in the Washington Post about the domestication of cats. Why were cats attracted to us? Because we had the food. Read about it here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:20 AM

Pre-Console Post of the Week Update

Lots of "pre" action today.

Microsoft, in a fairly shocking move, has just extended the Xbox 360 warranty to three years for failures due to the "red ring of death." Here's an excerpt from Gamespot:
Today, Microsoft announced that is once again revamping its warranty scheme for the Xbox 360. After mounting anecdotal evidence of the system's failure rate due to the dreaded "red ring of death" (three flashing red lights on the console's front panel), the publisher is changing its warranty to cover systems affected by the red ring for three years from the date of purchase. Any console which suffers the aforementioned failure--and only the aforementioned failure--can be returned to Microsoft for repair for free, as the warranty also includes shipping charges.

"As a result of what Microsoft views as an unacceptable number of repairs to Xbox 360 consoles, the company conducted extensive investigations into potential sources of general hardware failures," the company said in a statement. The three-year extension is for all 360s, and will be retroactively applied to every console bought since the 360 launched. That means anyone who bought a console in November 2005 will be covered until November 2008.

I've been slamming Microsoft for hiding when it came to failure rates. Well, this isn't hiding, and it's going to cost them a ton of money. They're not only going to have to absorb far more under-warranty repairs, but they're also going to have to reimburse everyone who's paid for out-of-warranty repairs. Yes, this only covers the red ring of death, but anecdotally, that seems to cover a high percentage of failures.

This is also very shrewd timing in a PR sense. No matter how many great games they showed at E3 next week, they were going to be absolutely torched with questions about reliability. In other words, the focus wasn't going to be on the games, which is a cardinal sin for a gaming console. Now it looks like it will be, and there is an overwhelmingly strong lineup of games coming out for the 360 this fall.

[update: the expected number on that "ton of money" is 1.05 to 1.15 billion dollars for "anticipated costs." Ouch. Thanks to Glen Haag of The Blog for the Sports Gamer for that information.]

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:10 PM

Badass Links

You guys sent me so many excellent links this week that I'm posting a supplemental links post this afternoon. All of these posts involve badasses.

First badass: William Kamkwamba, a nineteen-year old living in Malawi, who built a windmill to generate electricity for his family's home. His blog discusses both the windmill and a recent project to upgrade the wiring and lighting in the home.

That sounds dry, but it's not--it's very poignant to read the blog and see the pictures of his home. And he is doing so much with so little, which qualifies him as a badass in my book. The blog is http://www.williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/-- start from the bottom and read up. Thanks to Michael O'Reilly for the link.

Badass #2: a five-year old who pinned a rabid fox to the ground to protect six other children. It bit him (and it was rabid), but he held it down for over a minute until an adult could help. Rayshun McDowell=badass, and you can read about him here.

Badass #3: Tarn and Zach Adams, creators of the astonishing Dwarf Fortress, are interviewed on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call (hosted this week by Shawn Andrich, who is the Canadian flavor of badass). Julian Murdoch is the interviewer, and he does an excellent job as well. The interview begins around the 9:30 mark, and you can listen here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:51 PM

Leviathan

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America is one of the most interesting books I've read in many, many years.

Didn't know there was a whaling industry in America? Neither did I, but it lasted for over two centuries, and at its peak (around 1850), there were over seven hundred whaling ships. It was a huge part of American life, and this book is filled with an incredible amount of period detail, all beautifully woven into a narrative that makes it impossible to stop reading.

A few tidbits:
--"between 1768 and 1772...the sale of whale oil and baleen provided New England with its single largest source of British sterling...just over fifty percent."
--Nantucket declared itself neutral in the War of 1812 in an attempt to protect its whaling business.
--In 1849 (four years before Commodore Perry's arrival at Edo in 1853), the USS Preble sailed to Nagasaki to demand the releases of American whalemen captured after they desserted the whaleship Lagoda.

This is not a dry book at all. There are sections on whaling songs, scrimshaw (carving whale bones, some beautiful examples of which you can see here. There's also a section on the effect that the whaling life (years at sea, in some cases) had on relationships, with some very poignant period material.

Oh, and there's a whaling joke from the ninteenth century as well (I hope I remember this correctly). Corresondence was very erratic, obviously, when you were trying to send letters from a whaling ship back to the U.S., and just as erratic in receiving anything in return. So this is supposedly the exchange between a whaleman and his wife:
Dear John,
Where's the axe?

A year later, his wife received this reply:
Dear Nora,
Why do you need the axe?

Another year passed, and then John received this letter:
Dear John,
Forget the axe. Where did you put the shovel?

Whaling comedy.

If you have any interest in history, any interest at all, Leviathan is a wonderful, fascinating book. Oh, and here's an Amazon link: Leviathan.

posted by Bill Harris @ 12:29 PM

Rock Band Preview

IGN has a Rock Band preview, and they've added some confirmed songs to the final set list. Here's what's been confirmed so far:
In Bloom by Nirvana
Say it Ain't So by Weezer
Paranoid by Black Sabbath
Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who
Mississippi Queen by Mountain
Main Offender by The Hives
Suffragette City by David Bowie
Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult
Rockaway Beach by The Ramones

Nine songs, and all of them excellent (okay, "Main Offender" is borderline, but the manic energy in the song should make it fun to play).

Read the full preview here.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:54 AM

Surgery, Sliders, and Something

I'm going in for hernia surgery on Friday. It's no big deal--apparently, it's the oil change of surgeries. I'll be swimming again in two weeks.

No changes for you guys--I'll post the Friday links and the console post of the week before I go. By Monday, I should be grouchy but able to write again.

Like that's different from a normal day.

Also, the chances are very high that I'll be doing slider projects for both All-Pro Football 2K8 and NCAA 08. More information on that in another week or so.

About every three months or so, I list all the countries you guys are from. Sitemeter has an excellent feature where you can see a traffic breakdown by country. Here are all the countries listed from a two-day sample last week:
--United States (only about 70% of total traffic, though)
--Canada
--United Kingdom
--Australia
--Netherlands
--Ireland
--Austria
--Italy
--Germany
--Finland
--Hungary
--Japan
--Spain
--Singapore
--Brazil
--France
--Portugal
--New Zealand
--Argentina
--India
--Estonia
--Belgium
--Israel
--Czech Republic
--Sweden
--Denmark
--Norway
--Poland

About 8% of the traffic is either "unknown" or "miscellaneous country," so there are probably a few more countries in there as well. I really appreciate that you guys read the blog, and I'll keep writing it as long as you keep reading it.

posted by Bill Harris @ 6:00 AM

Unfortunate Juxtaposition Theater, Vol. 9

In case you've never heard of Floyd Landis, he won the Tour de France last year, flunked a drug test, came up with ridiculous excuses for why he flunked a drug test (although nothing, absolutely nothing, will EVER beat Tyler Hamilton's claim of a "vanishing twin"), and now he's fighting to clear his name by releasing a book to further his cause.

Take a look at this:

My first reaction to that cover is to look at the bottom (because of the size of the text), and it looks like Floyd's own book cover is calling him a liar.

Well-done, book cover designers. How positively word-clevering of you.

posted by Bill Harris @ 3:05 PM

The Darkness (360)

Every criticism I've seen in reviews of The Darkness is fair. It's uneven and ragged, and at times it's downright clunky. The character models often look plastic and the voice work is spotty. Your character becomes too powerful near the end of the game, and the narrative itself seems to falter in the last chapter.

In short, it's not good.

It's great.

Or, using the narrative style of the game itself: totally f***king great.

The writing is totally inspired, even in its absolute excess. Some of the cut-scenes are among the best I've ever seen in a game, creating an unbearable amount of tension. It's one of the very few games I've ever played where I started to identify with the character, where I wanted revenge as badly as he did. And for every bit of sloppiness, there's a moment that is so unerringly true that it's utterly brilliant.

Instead of trying to tell you why this game is so sensational, which would involve all kinds of spoilers, let me tell you how I played it, because I think that has quite a bit to do with how the game makes you feel.

First off, turn off all the lights. That's mandatory.

Second, turn off the music. This game can be tremendously, unnervingly creepy, and the music is just a distraction.

Third, stop using your guns. That's not always possible, but whenever you can, use your darkness powers instead. Oh, and since there is a kind of gun as one of the darkness powers, stop using it as well. Anyone who plays this as a conventional shooter is totally missing the experience.

All right, here's one little story, anyway. Your character's powers, literally, depend on darkness. They draw sustenance from the darkness (which you can see, and it is unbelievably cool). This means that as you move through an area, extinguishing lights can be a matter of life and death.

At first, this seemed very repetitive and kind of boring, really.

What happens, though, is that as the game sucks you in--and it does--you start to experience the game in a different way. Suddenly, I realized what it would feel like to be the prey, seeing light after light popping and knowing that someone, some thing, was coming for me.

What I felt, in that moment, was dread.

The Darkness makes me feel all kinds of things that I'm not used to feeling in a game--uncomfortable, pit-of-my-stomach things.

Like I said, the criticisms of the game that I've seen are all valid. It's just that great games rise above their shortcomings, and this game soars above them.

posted by Bill Harris @ 2:46 PM

Rock Band Video

Unbelievable. Just freaking unbelievable.

Rock Band video.

Yes, I will be playing the drums.

posted by Bill Harris @ 8:56 PM

They Say It's Your Birthday

They say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too, yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you

Gloria's birthday was on Saturday.

Allegedly, Eli 5.11 and I did a dance routine to The Beatles' "Birthday."

At dawn.

My awkward dancing style could best be described as Angry Bear Attacking Campers. So performing a dance routine was out of my comfort zone by say, one million miles.

Fortunately, no video of this performance exists.

By ten in the morning, we'd had birthday cake and done all birthday-related singing. Birthday parties happen early with a five-year old.

Gloria is convinced, again, that she has head lice, which coincides nicely with a birthday and other celebration activities. At one point, I was looking at her scalp under a light.

"Many things can cause an itchy scalp," I said as I shone a powerful flashlight into the maw of her scalp. "Why do you always zero in on our friend the louse as the most likely cause?"

"Do you see anything that looks like a little brown sesame seed?" she asked.

"No," I said. "But I do see something."

"What?" she asked, alarmed.

"Sea monkeys," I said.

Eli started laughing. "Sea monkeys, mom!" he said.

"It appears to be a zoning issue," I said, moving my fingers slowly over her scalp. "It looks like the area over your left ear has been zoned commercial, and they're all waiting for the mall."

Happy BIRTHDAY to YOU
Happy BIRTHDAY to YOU
Happy BIRTHDAY
Happy BIRTHDAY
Happy BIRTHDAY to YOU

Those were the lyrics of the singing balloon that we purchased for Gloria's birthday. It was the angry jazz singer version of "Happy Birthday", and Eli took great pleasure in playing the song.

Many times.

So many times, actually, that every time it started Gloria would groan, then start laughing.

On Sunday morning, there was this:

That's right--after several very enjoyable dry hauls, Eli 5.11 caught his first fish on Sunday. On the first cast of the day.

Seriously, that sunfish was freaking huge--for a sunfish. It's a misleading camera angle.

posted by Bill Harris @ 9:15 AM

Kwik-E-Mart

I mentioned a few months ago that a handful of 7-11's across the country were going to be temporarily converted into Kwik-E-Mart's as a promotion for The Simpson's movie.

Well, here's a treat. Fredrik Skarstedt e-mailed me with a link to a Flickr photoset of one of the Kwik-E-Mart's (in Burbank, California). There are a ton of high-quality pictures, and you can see them here.

Best merchandising ever.

posted by Bill Harris @ 4:50 PM

Ratatouille

I took Eli 5.11 to see Ratatouille this afternoon, and it's brilliant. The last animated film I saw that was this good was The Triplets of Belleville, and that was over three years ago.

Ratatouille is tremendously imaginative, very funny, and very warm. It looks spectacular, of course, but it has that special quality that was utterly lacking in Cars, and that special quality permeates the entire film.

After The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, Brad Bird is clearly the best writer/director of feature length animated films in the last fifty years. Maybe ever.

posted by Bill Harris @ 4:40 PM

Gaming Links and Notes

Next Generation has a detailed Fallout 3 story with plenty of information about the game. It will make you even more sorry that the game isn't coming out until next year, and you can read it here.

Oh, and if you haven't seen the most perfect piece promotional merchandise ever for a game, then take a look at the Fallout 3 lunchbox here.

Gamasutra has an excellent feature about the history of Zork. Read it here.

After reading quite a few NCAA 08 previews and not finding much useful information, Madden Matrix put up an excellent story with their impressions of the game from the June 12 EA Community Day. I found more useful details in this article than everything else I've read combined, and you can read it here.

Here's a new trailer for APF2K8, and it's the first time I've seen footage that made my anticipation go up instead of down. Watch it here.

I played The Bigs for a few hours yesterday (thanks Gamefly), and it's better than I expected. The game does a nice job of exaggerating the gameplay of baseball while still retaining some of the essence.

One design decision is a killer, though. There are a huge number of batted balls that deflect off fielders, and it's annoying as hell. It happens so often that it's incredibly distracting.

It's very surprising, though, that it does some things better than 2K7. For one, animations run at the proper speed in relation to each other, which 2K7 has a serious problem with. Actually, the animation in general (even though much of it is exaggerated, given the nature of the game) is better than 2K7. Far better framerates, too.

Post-patch, 2K7 is a much better play with the pole fielding camera. But they should look at every single animation speed and every transitional animation, because it doesn't work to have two almost-perfect animations joined awkwardly.

Plus, they need to focus on the pitcher's camera. It's great to have the catcher call the game, and it would be tremendous to play that way, but the animation of the ball in that camera view is absolutely terrible--the ball comes out of the pitcher's hand very awkwardly, and the ball has no "weight" whatsoever as it travels toward the plate. Having a ball travel in the correct arc is what establishes the animation as "real," and it's so poor from behind the pitcher in MLB2k7 that it feels like it came from Hardball II.

The view from behind the batter is much, much better. It's just that when your team is in the field, it's far more fun to play from that view.

I have high hopes for next year. I always do.

posted by Bill Harris @ 4:20 PM

Console Post of the Week

What a week.

Last week was a microcosm of what's happened in the last few months in the console wars. Let's take a look.

Sony's first off this week, and here's their big news: production problems with the PS3 have now been resolved.

Phew, what a relief.

Here's the quote (thanks Daily Tech):
“Production problems have now ceased, we're in full production as far as PlayStation 3 is concerned and there's a steady chain of supply in North America, Japan and Europe,” a Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. spokesperson said, as recorded by Compound Semiconductor.

Of course, there haven't been any production "problems" since early January, and the entire world is drowning in PS3's, but let's not let reality get in the way of anything Sony says.

At this point, if Sony is indeed running at "full production" (based on their earlier claims of 11 million units in the current fiscal year), then they're manufacturing 650,00 more consoles a month than they're selling.

Somewhere in Asia, in a warehouse (or several), Sony has 1-2 million PS3's.

Think I'm crazy? Sony's selling roughly 250k units a month worldwide, but let's be incredibly generous and say they're selling 300k. They're making 900k a month, though, if they're at full production.

Retailers can't take those excess units--they're stuffed to the gills already.

I'm just waiting for the story to break and photographs of PS3 warehouse row to get published.

In Japan, which no one seems to be talking about, the PS3 has imploded in remarkable fashion. The Wii has been outselling it 5-1 (or more) for months, and last week, when the very well-reviewed Folksoul was released in Japan, it sold 18,000 copies.

I said two months ago that I believed Sony would cut the price of the PS3 by the end of June. Since it's July 2 today, I was wrong. But Sony is up against the wall here, no matter how much they spin the disastrous numbers.

On top of all the problems they have right now, here's the biggest one, and it's the one nobody has even mentioned: how many years will it take to get the PS3 to $299? Remember, the Playstation and PS2 launched at $299. It would be a Christmas miracle if Sony gets the PS3 to $299 by December of 2009.

That's three years after launch.

December 2009 would also be 4+ years into the lifecycle of the 360. At that point, the 360 will be a $199 machine--at most. And the successor to the 360 will only be (in all likelihood) a year from launch.

When your BOM starts out $250-$300 more than the competition, your costs are going to be higher for the entire generation. And that's a killer.

There's more about Sony (developers are shifting resources away from the PS3 in Japan, and this fall's football games from both EA and Take-Two are running at 60fps on the 360 but only 30fps on the PS3), but that's for another week.

On to Microsoft, and they're treading in dangerous water.

There is an explosion of articles about hardware failure rates. Take a look:
One gamer on his twelfth 360
UK repair center refusing "red ring of death" units
Influx of units needing repairs blamed on modders?
1,500-2,500 units a day sent for repair in the UK

I'm not claiming that all of these stories are accurate, because it doesn't matter. What matters is that Microsoft has a PR disaster here, and as long as they refuse to address this issue directly, these anecdotal reports are going to dominate the discussion.

Everyone should be in love with the 360 right now. It's a poweful, high-definition console, Xbox Live and the Marketplace are fantastic, and the lineup of games for the rest of the year is incredibly strong.

Instead, all anyone's talking about are the hardware failures.

Let's move on to Nintendo, who has basically taken over the world at this point. Over seven months after launch, it's still difficult to walk in to a store in the U.S. and buy a Wii. By the time of the console's one-year anniversary in November, the Wii will have sold over 12 million units worldwide.

That is not a fad.

Here's a note from Steven Kreuch:
I was walking by the Nintendo store here in NYC and asked them when they get Wii's in... they said that they get them in every day, but you have to get there by 7:30 a.m. to get in line before the store opens at 9 a.m. That's right... there is still a line every day to get a Wii here.

N'gai Croal broke the story on Wiiware, which you can read here. Wiiware is a downloadable game initiative--not games from back catalogs, but new games, with a focus on making development affordable for smaller, independent studios.

Reggie Fils-Aime, who eats thousand dollar bills for breakfast, had an interview with N'Gai here. Reggie didn't mock the competition. He didn't brag. He just explained the vision that Nintendo had for Wiiware.

How refreshing.

posted by Bill Harris @ 7:24 AM