Just when I was beginning to think that creative game marketing was dead, along come Sega with My Big Ball, or as they call it, “The true adventures of Chad, the guy who was so into Super Monkey Ball Deluxe that he decided to live in a ball.”
Whatever you think of Super Monkey Ball, that’s some very cool advertising. I love the Swim Meet one.
I just read on the BBC about San Francisco’s new Walk of Game, the gaming equivalent of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. It’s interesting to see some of the greats of gaming being recognised publicly with their own stars, and also that despite it being outside Sony’s Metreon Center, no Sony products or alumni were recognised – Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario, Link, Sonic, and Halo were the honours this time around.
It’s never going to be on the scale of the Walk of Fame and Halo seems like a bit of a misnomer, but more recognition for the greats of gaming outside of private award shows can only be a good thing. Even better when it heralds a new Sonic game, Shadow The Hedgehog.
The revelation of the Xenon specs will no doubt herald the beginning of the new console wars, just as the flames of the current one are beginning to fade. Sony have been brash about what we can expect about the capabilities of PlayStation 3, although some have been cautious of their “Cell” and “Blu-Ray” buzzwords after the failed promises of the PS2. Wasn’t it supposed to be your home media hub, capable of rendering Toy Story in real time? Unsurprisingly some were let down when it turned out to be more like an overclocked Dreamcast.
If these specs are to be believed, the Xenon is going to have insane amounts of processing power. A Power Mac G5 with dual 2.5GHz PowerPC processors wipes the floor with pretty much anything on x86 systems, so when the Xenon has three 3GHz ones it could be phenomenally powerful. Toss in a graphics card a whole generation ahead of the current best PC card and 256MB RAM (it doesn’t sound like a lot, but the Xbox could do a lot with 64MB) and we could seriously be approaching the level of raw power needed for photorealism. The difference between the current generation and this could be like comparing games on the PS1 to Xbox.
What I do find strange is the potential for bottlenecks. The power of those processors is immense, but it’s never even going to break into a sweat with what a next-gen X800 and 256MB shared RAM can throw at it. It might hold the advantage of being able to crunch massive numbers for things like realistic physics engines and dynamic lighting while leaving all the graphics to the GPU, but I still just can’t see that much power being utilised. It’s also going to carry the issue with multiple processors becoming exponentially more difficult for developers to take advantage of and that is, therefore, going to take even more power away from independent developers and shift it into the big boys like EA. That’s not good.
The decisions to plump for standard DVD-ROM instead of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and to drop the standard hard drive are fairly baffling, too. DVD is going to struggle to accommodate the textures that they’re going to be pumping out for this stuff, as well as the inevitable HD video content, and loses out on an obvious selling point of being able to play those new hi-def movies. With HD-DVD using Microsoft’s own video codec it seemed like an obvious choice, but maybe not. Of course, with DVD writers being widespread it’s also going to cause piracy issues.
The hard drive was one of the most popular features in the Xbox, allowing saves without memory cards, custom soundtracks, faster load times, and content downloads, so losing it is huge. When it’s not standard it won’t be supported (look at the PS2 hard drive), and when the PS3 will almost certainly contain one they seem to be making an odd concession to Sony by giving them a nice advantage. An HD is so cheap now that it seems idiotic not to throw it in, but we’ll have to see if Microsoft has thought of an angle that is invisible to everyone else.
With the Xenon and PS3 obviously packing such power, it seems impossible for them to be able to pack them into the standard £300/$300 price bracket. Look at those dual-2.5GHz Power Macs – they cost £2,000, and there’s no way that a console can sell for that price. Anecdotal evidence holds that Microsoft lost $700 on the sale of every Xbox at launch and I seriously doubt that they can afford to do that again. I’d prefer to pay more for the console so that they can make a profit on it and sell games cheaper, but that doesn’t mean that I’d buy a £1,000 console.
I guess “wait for E3” is going to be the answer, as usual.
The first feature to be ported from the old version of NekoFever.com has been completed. It’s the full story of how I came up with this web handle that no-one except me seems to get the reference to. I guess nobody’s quite l33t enough for me.
I had a visit today to the Southern Daily Echo as part of my course today, and I have to say I was very impressed with it. It’s not the dingy little office that you imagine for a provincial paper.
In amongst a cluster of industrial estates, it occupies its own compound complete with two of what look externally like warehouses – one is a printing facility and the other is the actual Echo office. We couldn’t go into the printing area because the insurance company didn’t like the possibility of forced amputations, but the office itself was a combination of plush management offices (seriously, they were like the ones you see in movies – all floor-to-ceiling windows, mahogany, and leather recliners) and an absolutely cavernous open-plan newsroom that could easily contain a few hundred people with their own terminals. It even has its own archive library.
It hasn’t made me any more inclined to work on a newspaper, but it’s certainly improved my perception of them. I can’t imagine what the facilities of a bigger national newspaper are like.
I’ve had a few days to play around with my new camera, the Panasonic DMC-FX2, and overall I’m very impressed. The first thing I should say is that I’m not hugely knowledgeable about the technical side of photography, despite that fact that my father is a photographer who thought digital photography was a form of blasphemy until a while ago. Therefore these impressions are from the perspective of someone who wants to pretty much point the camera at something and take a picture. I can handle tweaking ISO settings and choosing which flash I want to use, but that’s as far as I’m going.
When I was shopping for a camera my specifications were simple. First of all it had to take nice shots – I’m not technical with them but I know a good photograph when I see one, and it had to take nice shots, or at least ones that would need minimal tweaking to look good. The second was that it had to be small since the main purpose of buying it was to take it to Japan and the last thing I want to do is cart some great beast around with me just so I can take some snaps to send home.
I knew that the DMC-FX2 fit the bill, having played around with the 5-megapixel DMC-FX7. It was certainly very small and the image quality is about as good as you can get from an ultra compact without spending vast amounts of money – I only spent just over £200 on the camera and a 1GB SD card to go with it. The picture gets slightly grainy in low ambient light when it sets itself to ISO 400, but that’s inevitable in a camera where you can’t tweak some of the more advanced settings. In good light or within flash range pictures are detailed and give natural colours, and when I tested the macro mode I was amazed with the amount of detail that it captured.
Reviews of the camera have generally been positive and I can appreciate why. If you just want something to drop in your pocket and take some nice pictures with you can’t go wrong with this or its bigger and more-expensive brother, the DMC-FX7. Just make sure to get a bigger card than the included 16MB one: they might as well not have bothered with that.