NBC's Heroes

I caught the last 15 Minutes of Heroes Genesis Part 1 and I think I'm hooked. I think I've got something to try to "watch" on Mondays now that Hell's Kitchen is on hiatus...

I was afraid that Heroes would be even more of a soap opera than Smallville, but it seems to be very "comic book"-like in a few interesting (probably, subjective) ways.

On a completely different matter, I still can't get over Wednesday's lunch. We went to Pomegranate in Redmond, and itb is one of the few restaurants in this area where I feel like I got what I paid for. It was awesome fresh gourmet fusion food, with a watchable kitchen even.

The Lost MMO Generation: The Tragedy of Mythica

One of the guys that I've been playing boardgames with on Tuesday nights was wearing a Mythica t-shirt. I did a double and triple take, trying to place it, and then it hit me. Many people probably know by now that I love the story of the "lost MMO generation". It's a parable of corporate risk aversion that just speaks to me, particularly because its an area of work that I have interesting aspirations towards.

Brief recap on the tale for those that don't recall: Once there was a company that had become extremely risk adverse named EA. EA had two MMO projects on store shelves at the end of an MMO generation, and in a period where many more were planned and/or under development. EA lost a good amount of money on a very niche/cult MMO (Motor City Online) and instead of blaming poor planning decisions (seriously, EA, how many NASCAR-dads were interested in MMOs at the time?) they marginalized and down-played the near success of their richer MMO (Earth & Beyond) and blamed the market for their problems. "The market just wasn't big enough and wasn't expected to grow". This move surprised and frightened two mainstream publishers to renege on their plans, effectively dropping several years worth of innovation out of the market.

I generally focus my version of the story on Ubi-Soft, who in my mind made the crazier decisions (their investments were roughly 98% (Uru) and 87% (Matrix Online) ready for live play), because their MMOs were the ones that had me most interested, and I was more involved in Uru's community than any of the others (speaking of which, I'm still hoping for an early Uru beta pass...).

Mythica was the bigger, more notorious, of two Microsoft ...

Fragments from a Fragmented Time: Games, Work, Games Business

• I've been playing Advent Rising, finally taking the plunge now that it is on Steam. Technical glitches aside (I'm rather amused by the incorrect ordering of shader effects, where the cursor ends up below some of the shader effects and other effects overlap in funny ways), the game is almost what I was looking for. The gameplay doesn't get too much in the way of the story, even if there are gameplay elements that I would have restructured for the story and story elements I certainly would have restructured for the game (the game lacks that perfect balance between cutscenes and in-scene/in-action story elements and there are many things that are action that should be cutscene and many more cutscenes that should be action sequences, or even just cut). I find the skill-based action RPG levelling funny. Nothing like the "You've now jumped enough to be Level 3 in Jumping" interruptions for pure "Why is this in the game?" amusement. It doesn't add a huge amount to the game, particularly because truly new powers are developed not through "levelling" and instead through story points.

  Quite a few people complained that the game is quite a bit unbalanced in the favor of the player's characters. Several abilities make it very possible to quickly beat up on large numbers of very powerful foes. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense and it makes it more fun for me than having uber-challenging fights. First of all it makes a lot of sense from the story's perspective (you play the "chosen diety" of an alien race). Then there's the fact that I'm personally just playing the game for the story and don't want the gameplay getting in my way.

  With that ...

Digital Distribution Tidbits 2: Steam Powered Death Match

I'm a huge fan of digital distribution, and now it seems finally approaching not just the mainstream (game portals like Shockwave, Yahoo or MSN Games have long been in the mainstream), but starting to approach the "mainstream" of game publishers. I mentioned Windows Marketplace just recently. I heard an interesting date to watch that website, but I'm not certain it is correct and much less certain I can talk about it. I also mentioned that Ubi-soft has at least one upcoming game hitting Steam.

Steam appears to finally be paying out for Valve. So many people mocked Steam early on (I was one of the very early people to plug my CD keys into Steam and stop patching the old way, and I remember some of the funny things people told me when I decided to do it). So, Pop Cap already has games on Steam and Majesco just recently added Bloodrayne 1 & 2, as well as Advent Rising. Psychonauts is supposed to follow in October!

Meanwhile, GameTap has announced that Sam & Max Episode 1: Culture Shock will be launching October 17.

I think there is going to be some very interesting competition over the next few months as all of the players start to really build libraries: GameTap, Microsoft's Marketplaces, Nintendo's Virtual Console Service, and Steam. I've already started making game purchases based upon what is available on GameTap as I browse the Xbox Live Marketplace, regardless if the game might be an easy way to get achievements...

Sony just announced a joint venture with Xfire for Xbox Live-style messaging. I'm wondering how they plan to compete with the digital distribution centers on the 360 and Wii. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they made some sort of crazy deal ...

XNA needs IronPython (Snakes on an Xbox!)

I've been thinking since the announcement of XNA that XNA should announce "official" support for at least one more language. I love C#, but choice would be great, particularly if that other language was something more dynamic and scripty, because a well supported IL-targetted script language would be the perfect peanut butter in XNA's C# chocolate. Think about how many games need some sort of quickly updatable scripts to test functionality or to handle functionality that changes with the game/story and how often those scripts are in brittle mini-languages. If it is IL-targeted you should be able to get the best of both worlds: interpreted within the game engine at run time or compiled as a part of the game engine with the same source for both cases.

Then it hits me just now that all of the recent versions of IronPython are written in C#! Thus, if all they are going to let compile and copy to the Xbox is C#, then I can throw in IronPython into the middle of my game code (or as my primary game code) and then use python scripts as embedded assets. I'm thinking that attempting an IronPython build may be the first thing I do when the XNA Xbox support is enabled later in the holiday season. (Will Snakes on an Xbox be a hit this holiday season?)

Again, it would be really interesting to see some sort of official support for other languages considering the multi-language aspects of the CLR. For those not as interested in Python, there are some other interesting languages out there written in C#. (For instance, Boo and Nemerle off of the top of my head.)

Viva Pinata

The Viva Pinata cartoon show starts tomorrow at 9:30 on "4Kids TV", aka Fox. I've been watching the episodes available on the Xbox Marketplace, and its an amusing kids show with a great animation style and some very weird jokes and puns. Viva Pinata is one of the most interesting announced holiday releases for the 360 and I think that I'll probably buy it.

Higher One is Stupid

While I'm on the subject of spam I figured I might as well rant about the spam that has me the most pissed off. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it has certainly become my opinion that any company that specializes in College Students as its sole business market seems to think students are gullible hamsters. The formula appears to be: 1) act "hip" and act as if you are interested in helping the student, 2) promise free things, 3) use lots of fine print, 4) treat your targe demographic like the idiots they will be if they don't see through your ruses, 5) profit!

Higher One is a fake bank (they are FDIC insured, but you tell me how many supermarkets have their ATM machine) that pretend to be a student-friendly financial helper. Just like the veritable tons of Willamette spam that I receive... They one-up the Willamette spammers by the fact that they sign contracts with Universities to take over residual disbursements and thus get a nice lock on captive audiences. They "kindly" offer you several (the list had a dozen) spam lists. Do I look stupid? I get enough spam from bots that I don't need people to opt me in on my behalf. Sure they were kind enough gave me the chance to opt-out, but only by unchecking each individually. At that point alone I would have taken my business elsewhere had I the choice. (...other than changing universities and moving to a different state, but I'm a bit locked in at the moment.) Don't get me started on the overly complex email confirmation, either.

The key thing that pisses me off the most is how unnecessarily difficult they make opting out of their goofy but "easy" OneAccount. Every single email ...

So Sick of Stock Spam

I really wish I didn't have to see another "Penny Stock", "This Stock is a Jumper!" or whatever spam messages again. One of the ones I've been seeing a lot of is for the fake/non-existent/who knows PetroSun Drilling. Am I the only one that thinks about Solomon Petresun when I hear this company name? If you are too lazy to read the Wikipedia article, Petresun was Earth's Emperor for several lifetimes/generations (in the Starsiege mythos) coming off as both an obsessed nutcase ex-scientist, a bringer of destruction, and a leader of relatively stable periods inbetween punctuations of extreme chaos.

(I really need to stop commenting on the spam I see, but it is so much a part of the culture that we live in that it is hard not to comment on it... Drupal had a rough time with the attack of pagerank spammers that follow, and hopefully this site will do much better.)

Digital Distribution Tidbits

Dark Messiah (from Ubisoft) will be available on Steam (it is in the Source engine, for those that don't know, and is a weird FPS in an old school RPG setting). Windows Marketplace is relaunched out of the labs just in time for the Vista RC1. Marketplace includes this new Digital Locker system in coordination with major digital distributors. Digital Locker offers the same promise/protection that Xbox Live Marketplace kindly provides: if you pay for it, you should be able to redownload it.

Digital distribution is well on its way to the mainstream, and I'm glad for it.

Random Domestics

I lost one of my bottle openers... the LEO (Louisville Eccentric Observer) swag bottle opener fell off my key chain for what appears the last time, as I haven't seen it in a couple of days. It shall be missed.

I have a large stack of bowls in my apartment. My school set has 4, now somewhat chipped, bowls. The three bedroom apartment in the summer (same complex, same corporate housing supplied furnishings) had only 4 bowls for the three of us (I think we finally asked and got a few more towards the end). This two bedroom apartment has an excellent number of bowls for just me and even more spoons...