Haibane.info

Category: Games

  • gaming in the cloud

    Brian drew my attention to this:

    Just announced at this year’s GDC, OnLive is an on-demand gaming service. It’s essentially the gaming version of cloud computing – everything is computed, rendered and housed online. In its simplest description, your controller inputs are uploaded, a high-end server takes your inputs and plays the game, and then a video stream of the output is sent back to your computer. Think of it as something like Youtube or Hulu for games.

    The service works with pretty much any Windows or Mac machine as a small browser plug-in. Optionally, you will also be able to purchase a small device, called the OnLive MicroConsole, that you can hook directly into your TV via HDMI, though if your computer supports video output to your TV, you can just do it that way instead. Of course, you can also just play on your computer’s display if you don’t want to pipe it out to your living room set.

    When you load up the service and choose a game to play (I’ll come back to the service’s out-of-games features in a bit), it starts immediately. The game is housed and played on one of OnLive’s servers, so there’s never anything to download. Using an appropriate input device, be it a controller or mouse and keyboard, you’ll then play the game as you would if it were installed on your local machine. Your inputs are read by the plugin (or the standalone device if you choose to go that route) and uploaded to the server. The server then plays the game just like it would if you were sitting at the machine, except that instead of outputting the video to a display, it gets compressed and streamed to your computer where you can see the action. Rinse and repeat 60 times per second.

    I know Shamus is distracted right now but I can’t wait to see what he thinks.

  • Woot! Wii Fit in stock at Amazon.com

    I’ve been trying to get a Wii Fit from the local Target for weeks now but just could not get my hands on one. It’s as popular as the Wii itself was when it first came out; now they routinely have 3-5 Wiis in stock but the Fit is sold out within minutes of new stock. On a lark, I gave Amazon a shot this morning and found to my astonishment that they had them in stock! I grabbed one immediately and it arrives on Wednesday. I look forward to being serially abused by my new electronic master forthwith.

    Wii Fit! Woot!

    wiifit

  • They don’t make goblins like they used to

    Simulation by Mike Hensley of Hackslash.com
    Simulation by Mike Hensley of Hackslash.com

    (Source: Hackslash.com, via Rampant Coyote)

  • Talisman video game cancelled

    Looks like there won’t be a video game adaptation of fantasy board-game classic Talisman after all:

    one of the biggest problems with a game like Talisman relied on social exchanges that a video game couldn’t necessarily guarantee. “Whether it’s the taunting of the person sitting to your right or the planning of what the players should do next, it relies on people sitting together and talking,” Boye said. “If you’ve played online games lately, you notice that not all players use their headsets. Social games like Talisman rely on that aspect, so if the people in your match aren’t going to use their headsets, the social aspect of a board game gets completely drained and becomes a slog as you could be sitting there for five minutes waiting for your next turn.”

    Wouldn’t the same argument apply to Dungeons and Dragons?

    Not that I have time to play either board games or video games, actually, but I was a big fan of Talisman back in the day. It helped to have a friend who was so into it that they spent all the money on the expansion sets 🙂

  • convenience vs cost

    In an ideal world, you pay more for increased convenience. Want to save money? mow your own lawn. Have no time? Pay the local kid $20. etc.

    This dynamic seems to be inverted online, however, especially with regard to digital content. Here, you pay for decreased convenience – a good example being DRM restrictions on video games, where legitimate, paid users of a game like Spore must suffer through all manner of annoying restrictions and installation limitations and game activations and whatnot. Meanwhile, anyone who downloads the cracked version off the torrents for free, gets a clean, enjoyable gaming experience unmarred by all the nonsense. Therefore we have the curious situation where anti-piracy policies serve to incentivise piracy rather than prevent it[1. Shamus Young’s ongoing DRM rants are the definitive explanation of this dynamic. I think he needs to write a book.].

    A similar dynamic applies to anime, except that instead of invasive DRM you have simple expense. This is partly due to region-coding, which maintains artificial price differences between markets. It’s also due to the increasing cost of producing anime, which gets passed on to the end user. Price is not a barrier for people with steady jobs who enjoy anime as a hobby, but this probably doesn’t describe the target demographic very well. Another problem with paid, legitimate anime is that it comes mostly in DVD form, which is physical media. As such, it must be carried around, doesn’t fit in your pocket, can only be played on specific hardware and displays (ie, a TV with a DVD player attached), might scratch, etc. Even if you circumvent the expense issue by paying for a service like Netflix (which is not free, but significantly cheaper than buying anime outright), you still hae these physical media headaches to deal with. Even a completely free solution like Hulu.com ties you down, as its DRM keeps you locked into your web browser. Meanwhile, users who simply download fansubs get all the benefits – free, totally portable digital content – and even some extras (eg. superior subtitle quality). Again, the incentive on the end user is to encourage downloading rather than paying.

    So the question is, who perpetuates this imbalance? Is there a way to get users to pay for convenience again? The power seems to be solely in the hands of the publishers here. There’s already a set of concrete suggestions for the gaming industry, which are eminently reasonable but probably will never be embraced. A similar set of suggestions could be crafted for the anime industry as well, but I’ll leave that to otaku who have more knowledge of the industry itself than I do.

    Speaking as a consumer though, I can define convenience that I’d pay for. I currently pay Netflix $20/month, so that’s a good guideline for a budget. If I could purchase entire seasons of a given anime for $10, or individual episodes for $1, and have these come in DRM-free files that I can freely reburn to DVD for home viewing or convert to any intermediate format for whatever digital player I might choose, then I’d never need to download again. I would also pay an extra $.50/ep or $5 per season for quality fansubbing. Note that if the anime studios went DRM-free, and completely outsourced subbing to the fansub community, then the latter coudl legitimately charge for the service (which would be a true value-add).

    Of course, the scheme above means someone could just seed the files they buy out to torrent. But so what? That’s what happens now, anyway. at least with my scheme, people like me pay more in. Revenue will increase, and that’s the bottom line.

  • Line Rider redux

    All you Apple devotees rejoice – Line Rider is coming to iPhone and iPod Touch:

    The new version of Line Rider will be available on iTunes for $2.99 and will feature the ability to upload and download tracks on the web at the official Line Rider Web site http://www.linerider.com. Created in September of 2006, Line Rider was an immediate online sensation with millions of players worldwide and thousands of videos posted on YouTube.com showing off users’ “custom” Line Rider tracks.

    “We have over a million visitors to LineRider.Com every month and our strong and vocal audience has been asking for an iPhone(TM)/ iPod Touch(TM) version of Line Rider ever since the touch interface was introduced,” said Brian Fargo, chief executive officer of inXile entertainment Inc. “Line Rider is a natural fit for the iPhone as mobile users will be able to share their tracks and ride the lines almost anywhere now.”

    I am still amazed at the sheer artistry and artisanry of the Lineheads. When does the Wii version come out? Or the DS?

  • Scrab again: Wordscraper

    OK, forget what I just said. Scrabulous is back! Well sort of – Scrabulous v2.0 is rechristened Wordscraper, and boasts just enough design changes to throw a wrench in Hasbro’s case for infringement. Behold:

    Scrabulous 2.0: Wordscraper. Looks familiar... but not too familiar.
    Scrabulous 2.0: Wordscraper. Looks familiar… but not too familiar.

    The differentiation has both superficial (circular tiles, random/userdefined placement of the bonus squares) and game mechanical (tile point values, tile letter distribution) elements. Whether that’s enough to keep it alive from Hasbro’s lawyers is an open question. I love the fact that you can define your own board, however. My only gripe is that they didn’t save any games from Scrabulous, but I suppose that was necessary since doing so would require the “Scrabble classic” board, whose layout is probably part of Hasbro’s copyright. I’d like to have at least had the chance to restart games in progress, though.

    I guess the appeal of Scrabulous was indeed the wordplay and not any actual loyalty to Scrabble per se. It’s like you’ve driven a Ford Mustang all your life and then one day you try a Corvette – if you like Mustangs, then you won’t like the Corvette. If you like driving sports cars, though, then it doesn’t matter how you get your fix[1. I am sure that people who actually know something about cars, or mustangs or corvettes, are gasping in horror at the sacrilege of my analogy].

    So, lets scrape!

  • scrabble fabulous

    It was inevitable that Scrabulous would get yanked off of Facebook eventually, so I didn’t even rouse myself to note the fact of it when it happened a couple of days ago. I admit that I was rather peeved at Hasbro, mainly because I was doing rather well on the games I had in progress – including a bingo I had spent over a month nurturing towards revelation. Still, I don’t exactly have any loyalty to the brother Ajarwal, who were making a comfortable $25k a month for their (obvious) copyright violation (moral soapbox: when I violate copyright, I don’t profit off it!). So, I figured I’d give the Official Scrabble App a try. Here’s a screenshot of my game in progress:

    the official app
    the official app

    Overall, it’s a slick application, with everything that Scrabulous had except for support of the alternate dictionaries and Challenge mode. I did prefer Scarb’s less-flair aesthetic, it was a cleaner looking app, this one goes for a lot of the 3D tile effect which makes the screen look too busy. The focus should be on the grid, not the tiles or the players etc.

    Also somewhat irritating is the fact that the game is segmented so that only US/Canada players can play each other, and international players can only play themselves, with no crossover. This may be due to some licensing thing but it really is a drag. I don’t know if its a limitation most people will chafe under, but it’s something that does affect me, and feels really arbitrary. This sort of limitation is why sometimes it’s better to go the unofficial route.

    Anyway, if you need a fix of Scrabble, you can still get one, and that’s what matters. I do wish they’d tone down the interface a bit though. They should hire these two brothers in India I know about who have some experience in that regard…

  • I am the Wumpus

    I just came across the Tales of the Rampant Coyote blog, written by Jay Barnson, an old-school gamer since the Ultima days. One of his posts really caught my eye, a description of the old game for the Commodore 64 called, “Hunt The Wumpus”. I LOVED that game. In essence, it was a logical puzzle. I’ll let the Coyote explain:

    You started in a room in the cave complex of twenty rooms, each room connected to three others. In two rooms, there were bottomless pits. If you moved into those rooms, you lost the game. In two rooms, there were “Superbats” that would pick you up and drop you in a random room if you moved into them. And then there was the Wumpus.

    You were armed with a few arrows that could shoot through five rooms (changing course as they flew). If they went through your own room (since they could circle around, in theory), you shot yourself and the game was over. If they went into the Wumpus’s room, they killed the wumpus and you won. Otherwise – if you missed the Wumpus OR walked into the Wumpus’s room, he’d get up and move (or stay in the same room). If he ended up in the same room as you, he’d eat you and you lost the game. You could also lose the game if you ran out of arrows.

    You could hear the bats if you were next to a superbat room. You could feel a draft if you were next to a bottomless pit room. And you could spell the Wumpus if you were in a room next to him. So the game was basically a randomly changing logic puzzle where you’d try and triangulate the positions of your goal and the threats.

    Oh, yeah. And it had no graphics at all. You had to draw yourself trying to figure out the topography of the map.

    good times, especially when you got eaten by the Wumpus, because the entire screen would fill with blood (ie, the screen wiped solid red, which was about the limit of computer graphics at the time). It was a frustrating game, but it was great.

  • tomorrow is free RPG day

    attention all gamers – your local gaming store will likely be hosting free RPG day tomorrow:

    Much like its predecessor Free Comic Day, it is a day when the lions of the industry (and a few smaller presses) all send out free, smaller versions of their most popular lines to give folks a chance to check them out. Participating FLGS (Friendly Local Game Stores) will be giving these out (while supplies last) as well as running many of the games they receive. But it’s on a first come first serve basis, and each store will have different criteria for how they’ll give them out – so be sure to call your FLGS in order to find out when and how these will be made available. Some may be one to a customer, while others may require you to play in the demo of the game you’re getting. Others still might be throwing them at passers by just to get them out of their store.

    Massawyrm has more details at AICN about what specific games will be given away – including a D&D 4E module, The Treasure of Talon Pass.