Xoom, the iPad 2, and the next App Gold Rush

I knew, of course, that when I picked up a Xoom something else would get announced shortly after.  Naturally, Apple did not disappoint here.  I'd considered getting an I pad last year but wanted to see what 2011 might bring.  March is barely a whisper of Spring and the tablet wars are truly underway.

The have been two interesting trends since Apple's announcement. One is the coverage of what the iPad 2 didn't bring to the table: no Retina, no Thunderbolt, no USB, no SD slot, no 4G.  Hardware-wise, the new iPad's real trick is to maintain a bit of parity with the Xoom while cutting into the price point.  And of course, now you can get the still quite attractive original I pad for even cheaper.

But still, I don't think I've seen quite so many articles following in the heels of an Apple announcement which points to all the things Apple didn't do, instead of what it did.  Sure, the magnetic cover is slick ... but give me the pixel density of Retina, or at least the resolution of the Xoom instead.

The other trend is the rather palatable, though predictable, word from the Apple camp of ... so what?  It's still going to be the hottest thing since sliced bread and everyone will want one.  And, they're right - Apple me brilliant in its conservatism here, leveraging their excellent hardware profit margins and superior software suite to push their platform.

Did I say superior software suite? I did, but before the Android mob shows up on my doorstep - let me just say I love my Xoom and have zero regrets in purchasing it.  My iPhone is perfectly sufficient for my iOS needs, and I've had a blast with the Xoom so far.  But that's not to say Google can simply dismiss the iTunes factor, or that Motorola can really compare the current stock of iPad apps with a handful of apps geared for the Xoom.

But like I said in the last post: we don't have a mobile landscape, we have a tsunami.  Android tablets will sell and as that market grows larger it will attract more developers.  Google, or Amazon, or someone will realize the next app gold rush is starting.  We may be living in Apple's Post-PC world, but it's a world whose rules are becoming more strongly defined by software instead of hardware ... and Android as a lot of resources for delivering software.

Hardware: Xoom Review

I picked up a Xoom last week to expand my development options. Since I've already got a dual booted MacBook and an iPhone, the Xoom neatly rounds out both tablet and Android projects.

I had a tweet recently knocking the pricing and Verizon's fee to enable WiFi. The former turned out to be about $400 less than had been rumored, and I know it isn't a common opinion - but I think it's actually slightly competitive. More expensive than the iPad, but also more powerful ... the real problem is that the WiFi only version isn't out yet and Verizon needlessly tacks on another $20 to get you on their network.

It will be interesting to see how it sells. Most reviews have been positive, but most also mention that a certain company based in Cupertino might be making an announcement soon. Still, the Best Buy I went to said nearly every unit had been pre-ordered.

Pricing aside, let's take a quick gander.

The Good
Firstly, it really is a well put together device. It feels solid, has a hefty feel without feeling like you have to start lifting weights to carry it. The size is a great intersection of space and yet feeling comfortable. You get a mini USB, a mini HDMI, AC and headphone outlets out of the box - for some reason the microSD slot is disabled at the moment, but promises another storage option down the road.

For some people, the real attraction will be Honeycomb, Android's first real tablet OS. Combined with the Xoom's hardware, the OS really does sing. While the screen isn't quite as sharp as the iPhone's Retina display, browsing and email feels nearly akin to using a laptop. The UI has some quirks, but in general is very friendly and feature rich.

And from a development point of view, I compiled a quick AIR Hello World app and deployed it to the device effortlessly. Compared to iOS development, with the wrangling of certs and provisioning devices - it's simply night and day. Android is a very developer friendly OS, Honeycomb is well suited to tablets, and this tablet has some great hardware. In short - it's a very attractive device to develop with.

The Not So Good
Hardware wise, probably the only miss are the speakers, which carry too much vibration at louder volumes. They're fine for system sounds and listening to things around the medium range.

Also I found the cradle oddly difficult to work with - hard to determine where the connecting ports were.

Sadly, there's random bugs here and there. Widgets seem to occasionally take dirt naps if they require online connectivity. I've had a couple of browser crashes. Probably the most odd: I had the Xoom emit a strange hum if it was on the cradle and a system notification sound went off. There's no deal breakers and in general the experience doesn't feel overtly buggy - but you do get the impression that maybe some things still need a few round of testing.

The difference between the iTunes platform and not having the iTunes platform is palatable. Apple has made it so easy to purchase and consume media - Google and/or Amazon really need to take notes.

The Bad
If there's any real crime here, it's the fact that the device is sufficiently powerful with a well designed OS ... and yet there's so little content that even approaches showcasing the device. A couple impressive games have hit, and Google Earth is always a crowd pleaser ... but there's only a handful of apps really designed for the tablet screen and less that really take advantage of the hardware and software features.

Probably the two biggest criminals here are Facebook and Twitter. I find it rather astonishing that Pulse could take an app and so well adapt it to device for launch, and yet two of the most popular websites in the world cough up the same UI for phones.

Or in other words...
Having a Xoom right now is a bit like owning a Porsche that you can only drive in a parking lot. There's nothing about the hardware or software that I think is really a strike, or at least nothing which seems significant in a sea of positives. It really reminds me of the early days of the iPhone, when the App Store was first getting under way and development was still fresh. It's like that but - but imagine if Apple had started with the iPhone 4.

That might, and likely will, change quickly over the next few months. I feel I can recommend the device, but I understand why all these reviews mention that the iPad 2 is likely to be announced soon. There isn't so much of a mobile landscape right now as a tsunami, and the only thing that is really certain is that it's going to be an interesting year. With just device alone, we're going to get Flash and an AIR update soon, 4G compatibility and ... hopefully better apps.

Game Play: Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

I played the first Mass Effect briefly on a friend's 360, and while saw that it was clearly polished wasn't entirely sure what the real appeal was about the extremely popular title.

That's because you can't play a Mass Effect title briefly and get the real appeal. In fact, if I have any real complaint about the recent PlayStation 3 port of Mass Effect 2, it's that they won't be porting the first one.

Mass Effect 2 is a Bioware RPG through and through, and so players familiar with Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic know the basic score: a streamlined experience tailored around gathering characters into your party and selecting a couple of them to bring along with you on missions. There's a morality scale, there's a grand story, there's a lot of memorable NPC's to meet and interact with.

Kindly, though, the morality scale is less black and white, less "save the kitten" or "kill the kitten" - and feels more like changes in the style of the player than really building "the ultimate hero" or "the ultimate villain.

If anything impressed me about Mass Effect 2, it was how it managed to avoid pitfalls similar titles fell into. Take Fallout 3 for example. Fallout 3 could also be considered an open ended RPG based heavily on decisions made by the player. Mass Effect 2 has one huge advantage over Fallout 3, however, which trumps any other comparison:

Mass Effect 2 does not consistently crash. In fact, I think it crashed once on my during my entire 45+ hours of gameplay. Once, Bethesda, once... which is technically one more than it probably should be two less than an average Fallout title might accomplish in a single night.

Outside of that, Mass Effect 2 requires less wandering - and oddly enough, felt more like a shooter hybrid than the Fallout 3 titles. I never once felt the need to forcibly pause Mass Effect 2's action (though it does pause to let you select new weapons and use powers).

More interesting to me is Mass Effect 2 was also far more enjoyable than Dragon Age - at least for myself. As I wrote in the past, Dragon Age has serious balance issues which more or less beg for you to refer to wiki articles on how to "correctly" play the title if you don't want to get stuck in a dwarven dungeon getting devoured by some monster boss (still a bit bitter about that one). I never had that instance with Mass Effect 2, never felt like I had to be cautious in where I went in the galaxy, I simply explored and adventured and upgraded my party.

So this is a game that had none of the technical issues of Fallout 3, or New Vegas ... and had none of the frustrations I found with Dragon Age. In short: it was freaking awesome. I'm considering a second playthrough before Mass Effect 3 hits the holidays, which I rarely take the time to do anymore (even with Demon's Souls - and some would argue that was the point of that game).

Highly, highly recommend.

Game Play: Minecraft

I had peered over the shoulder of other Minecraft players via tweets and YouTube videos and to be quite honest, had no idea what big deal was all about. If you've been living under a rock, Minecraft is an indie sensation; grabbing awards and selling like hotcakes. And when you first look at it, it looks basically like a game about punching blocks.

And even once you first jump into the game, the game seems like it's just basically about punching blocks. You may have seen videos about people creating enormous towers and elaborate traps, but you've got a fist and mountain full of dirt to get through and little idea of what else is out there. Then night falls and there's a lot of groaning going on and a pretty good chance you might just die.

Maybe it's a sign that gamers have gotten so used to in-game tutorials and intro level handholding that there's an expectation that you simply shouldn't need documentation anymore, but trust me when I say the first thing you'll want to do in Minecraft is read the tutorials to get a grasp for the basics of the game, how to build important little things like torches, and surviving your first night.

Once you've gotten past that step, and especially if you're a child of the Lego generation - there's a good chance you'll be addicted to the game right away. Minecraft is essentially a lightweight RPG for the Lego set, where mining for materials means that you can control the world more and more - and eventually you'll be trying to do things like carving out an underwater observatory for simply no other reason than to see how what it's like when you're done.

The mechanics of the game are, to be honest, quite fascinating. It's not questing as much as exploration and the risk to reward ration is heavily tied to investment in time rather than loss of save points or experience. I've been playing the game quite a lot and really my most horrible fate to date is losing a diamond pickaxe while I was trying to tunnel a water plume from the ocean to my dungeon's floor. It's annoying - but it really just means I have to go find another diamond vein somewhere. The monsters, part of the creatures called mobs in Minecraft jargon, are more parts of the environment than encounters - they're something to be tamed just like that landscape you'd rather seen turned into a castle. The emphasis on the sandbox nature of the game is important, and really what makes it shine.

It's also interesting to look at Minecraft's roots - the game essentially takes Infiniminer, which was intended to be a team game about, well, mining blocks and building things, to solve the complexity issues around Dwarf Fortress, a game about mining, crafting and defending yourself.

It's a relatively untapped subgenre of the sandbox variety - very different from the GTA concept of simply running around a moderately fixed environment. But the appeal is now officially undeniable, and I'd keep an eye out in this space in general.

Obviously, highly recommended.

TV Watch: Persons Unknown

We stumbled onto Persons Unknown in a way similar to how we found Harper's Island in that it's a recent TV offering we got through Netflix Instant. Having just completed a run last August, it's already on Instant in what might be a bid to get some support for a second season.

Having just watched the last episode recently - I wouldn't hold my breath.

Persons Unknown is a clearly a post-Lost vehicle, shoving random people into a bizarre situation against a somewhat ambiguous and nameless enemy. Instead of an island getaway, our heroes get stuck in a town in the middle of nowhere where they are essentially the only residents and leaving seems impossible.

If you don't want any spoilers, then let me just summarize with this: if Lost's great trick was to convince viewers that the writers were going to explain themselves for six seasons - that's clearly one more trick than Persons Unknown is capable of performing, as you'll find yourself questioning the plausibility of mere scenes, much less the entire season. While the acting is generally pretty good, nearly everything else about this show falls apart after the first few episodes.

For example: in a scene later in the season a character rallies the rest to try and leave the town. He does this by whistling, after which every other character in the town opens the door from a different building and starts to follow him in a group. Why were they all waiting in different buildings for a whistle? We do not know.

Which is just one example of lazy writing which culminates in the season finale, which is quite possibly one of the worst ever written.

Really bad spoiler alerts. Seriously, if you don't want to know what happens in the finale stop reading now.



Ready? Ok.

Having escaped the town (warned you), the previously imprisoned hijack a van and then subsequently crash. That's actually the event which leads to the finale, but what occurs in between the van crash and the finale is potentially the worst plot hole in TV history. Drive a truck through it? You could fly Darth Vader's personal Star Destroyer through this. One character ends up back in San Francisco. She at least has the excuse that she can't remember what happened. Two others appear to have stolen a car and are driving somewhere around San Francisco. Where they got the car or how is left up to your imagination. Heck, even why the car eventually breaks down is - though I guess you assume they just ran out of gas. A fourth ends up back in the hands of the enemy.

But these are just the opening wounds to the big one: two characters end up in Morocco. Yes, two of them made a transatlantic flight and are hiding out in Morocco even though another pair can't even keep a gallon of gas in a car. There is no explanation to this, nor is their any explanation as to how they are eventually re-captured (again, warned you).

The entire scene stinks of needing to shove the two characters in somewhere and thinking this would look really cool and never giving it any more thought. In other words, it is completely brain dead.

At best, Persons Unknown offers a few decent twists and decent, if completely wasted by the end, premise. At worst, it reminds how good Lost fans really had it.

Obviously - not recommended.

Game Play: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

I was somewhat surprised when I finished Assassin's Creed Brotherhood last night, and I think if I pulled up the game right now I'm still at like 62% "synchronicity", which is apparently Assassin's snarky way of talking about "completion". I had gotten so used to mixing up story missions with wandering for side missions - but the way the last few missions were structured ropes you into a more linear path. Once you've recovered a certain spherical MacGuffin, it's rather off to the races.

For me, the Assassin's Creed franchise is starting to feel a little like Dynasty Warriors. Some of the hardcore gamers might take that as a knock, but The Girl and I played the living hell out of those games. That was until the PS3 generation and I think while I was playing like, Dynasty Warriors Monopoly or something, I realized that there was very little new here and while I still liked the core mechanics - I was already getting somewhat bored with them.

Ubisoft is making a noble attempt to keep the gameplay fresh ... but before we get to the new mechanics, let's look at what is similar here. Your main avatar gets knocked down, stripped of all his cool gadgets, seems to forget previous tricks and has to start from scratch rebuilding himself and the area around him. To do this, you'll jump around some occasionally overly convenient areas, punch, stab and kill. Often by leaping on someone's head.

And that all still works. Well, mostly at least. The rebuilding mechanic is rather flawed, I think. You spend money to rehab shops the Borgia have, for some reason, shut down, and in return you get part of their income. I didn't know that this was Extortionist's Creed as well, but there you go. The real end result of how the shops are laid out is that towards the end of the game you'll have enough money to buy the Colosseum three times over but still can't find a damn blacksmith when you want one. There are other excuses to spend money, like buying the Colosseum or repairing old ruins ... which really just give you more racket money.

The Borgia Towers were, I think, a better twist. In order to remove Borgia influence, you have to assassinate a captain and burn his tower down. Essentially a free mode assassination mission which actually makes it easier to get other missions done. They were fun and I actually felt like they were having an impact.

I was also constantly baffled as to why the game doesn't have a "restart from checkpoint" option. If I die, I can "restart from checkpoint" - but if I want to restart from just the menu, I have to go all the way to beginning of the mission? Could I just get a "die now" option?

One big addition to the game is the ability to find and train new assassin's. Most of this is split into two things: a zero player style admin game where you send guild members off to far away lands to earn XP and the ability to hit a shoulder button and rain fiery death from the sky. OK, the death isn't really fiery so much - but the general outcome is that guards get their ass kicked to some varying degree.

The training aspect is nearly non-existent. You can upgrade their weapon points. Or armor points. It doesn't really matter since it seems to have no impact on their success, so just auto-upgrade anyway. You can also change the color of their costume, but it only does anything on the admin screen - anywhere else they always wear white. You know the chance of success of the mission and making sure mine were 85% or above - I never failed one. The "brotherhood" in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is an interesting twist which adds some value, but has little meat on it.

If anything, the big addition here is multiplayer. And I have to give Ubisoft credit here - Brotherhood's multiplayer is a very bold concept. It's the kind of thing I wish more games would attempt instead of just jamming multiplayer deathmatch into every concept. You play as an Abstergo/Templar trying to kill other Templars is an area populated by NPC's. You get a PC target as your prey, and usually you are someone else's target as well. You need to spot your target with a proximity indicator and their behavior while trying to blend in well enough (or run fast enough) to avoid your potential killer.

It's actually rather brilliant, especially for a console title. It mostly works really well, though I think the team versions muddy the waters a bit. My only complaint is that once that fresh gameplay smell wears off, it feels a little redundant. Spawn, walk, run ... stab or run away. Repeat.

But honestly, that's not surprising. The game should be praised for trying something different online, which is why I think everyone should go, buy it and try it out. I'd love to see another iteration of this concept.

So short version: the game is still one of the few that makes me enjoy jumping puzzles while playing it - at least most of the time, and it will always be fun to stalk some poor sap from a rooftop. That said, I'm not overly inclined to go get closer to 100% synchronicity now that the main story is over. I may finish off the Temple missions, though the reward of some new suit of armor I'll never actually wear has little shine to it.

Short, short version? It's good - and if you're a Creed fan you've probably already played it and are about to send me an angry email about how I didn't refer to the Colosseum as "Colosseo" or some such.

But for next one, the franchise really needs to crank it up notch.

Game Play: GoldenEye 007 (Wii)

The original GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 was such a high watermark that it still pales over console shooters today. The game's level design, pacing, weapon selection and multiplayer modes still impact designs today, but perhaps most importantly was the game's ability to tell a story despite the constraints of the cartridge based format. Gamers who played the game will still remember scenes where they dropped in on guards, protected Natalya from swarms of soldiers, and stormed after Trevelyan ... a far cry from the "find the red key" norm from shooters of the day.

Eurocom was responsible for The World Is Not Enough also on the the N64, one of the few games not done by Rare or ex-Rare developers which clearly had learned from the earlier game. So if any company other than Rare could take the original classic and update it for the Wii, it would probably have been them.

GoldenEye on the Wii follows the same basic skeleton of the original game while adding in-game cinematics, more expansive and detailed levels, more modern weapon selections and online multiplayer. The port is carefully done, with an emphasis on the elements from the original and maintaining new versions of scenes fans will remember while making sure the game doesn't feel out of date for the Call of Duty crowd as well. The result is possibly one of the best shooters on the platforms which can take advantage of modern design while making sure fans of the original can keep their nostalgia safe and secure. It is quite probably the best the Wii gamers could have asked to have.

The online mode is decent by most standards, but top notch for a Wii game ... the platform still struggles for a definitive online experience. I'm not sure I'm a fan of it having experience levels considering how much fun the original was to play with proximity mines and other gadgets out of the box, but again the online manages to capture much of the same pacing and fun of the original. Technically my only complaint with it is that the spawning logic on some of the game modes seems off ... hard to build up a solid defense when you're getting placed far away from your goal. Still, the only real problem is that aren't enough people playing it.

I hate to say it, but I would love to see a Sony Move version of the same game with updated graphics and PSN support. Games like GoldenEye and Red Steel 2 shows that good games are still quite worth playing on the Wii, but the console still shows a serious technical divide when you compare it to the other platforms.

Highly recommend however.

Early Look: DC Universe Online Beta (PS3)

It shouldn't really be surprising to anyone that currently DC Universe Online is a buggy mess. For one thing, it is technically a beta ... but also a beta of an MMO from SOE, who doesn't exactly have a long track record of deploying stable products in their first iteration or so. Take Planetside, for instance, where I routinely spawned into walls.

So when I spawned into floor while playing DCU, I was hardly surprised. Course, this is now many years later and I would thought SOE would have had a few new tricks to keep this kind of thing from happening. Other common issues: sound will disappear, you'll occasionally be unable to jump into a new zone (including logging out), odd delays between doing damage and actually seeing the effect, graphics detail jump here and there (DCU uses the Unreal Engine - though it seems to vary between UT2004 and UE3 sometimes. I think the detail settings are TBD), random complete lockup, mission items may be missing, etc. etc.

If you squint really hard and ignore the bugs, what remains is a fairly by the numbers MMO experience. The character creation is quite decent, perhaps not quite as impressive as City of Heroes, but offers a gamut of physical options for your comic avatar. You can create a hero or villain, and select a specific mentor - all of which will guide the missions you get out of the gate. Power selection is fairly shallow, you select a power base (Fire, Sorcery, Ice, Nature, Technology, etc.), a weapon (from hand blasting to massive hammers), and a movement type (flight, acrobatics or super speed).

Much of the game feels like a fantasy MMORPG with a comic book theme and the action setting set to high. That might sound like a bad thing, but it's really not and offers a solid and familiar core to the gameplay. You do gather gear as you go along, but you can equip the gear without having to change that carefully selected appearance of your costumed crimefighter. You can swap out the appearance of your gear at any time without having to change what you actually have equipped, making it easy to toy around with the look and feel of your character. You select a gear palette when you create your character which all new gear conforms to - meaning that even that Amazonian helmet might suit your wardrobe.

If I ignore the complete lack of stability - my real complaint about DCU is that I've actually found it very hard to engage many things which warrant the MMO side of the equation. Sure, when I'm running around Metropolis there are umpteen other heroes fighting around me - but often that's a liability more than anything else as they're in competition for the same rats I need to kill for my "Kill Five Rats" mission. At least on the console, the interface for creating groups on the fly seems clunky at best and my time waiting outside zones for a party only ever resulted in one invite ... and then the zone itself was crashing.

DCU does have the ability to create quick groups for instanced quests, such as the "Alerts" - where Martian Manhunter will teleport you and a few other heroes to a specific location. While this could potentially create some greate Pick Up Game potential, I would generally teleport into a location unable to find half the party and on one Alert, kept getting trapped in a room with no doors (literally).

It's bizarre to me that I can load up Borderlands - also on the Unreal Engine, and grab a pick up game in minutes, and the experience is seamless ... and yet DCU is an actual MMO and I've spent 99.9999% of my time solo on it. As a solo RPG, it might be worth the price of admission without the monthly cost, if made to actually work, but I'm certainly not getting anything from the game I'd pay monthly for right now.

If they make the game stable, look a bit better, and fix the grouping - DCU might be a big draw for MMO fans on the console. You can see the potential in the game right now, but there is plenty of work to be done for sure.

What Sucks In Black Ops (And Most Online Shooters)

I had been playing with "tips & tricks", or "notes" or "thoughts" on Black Ops, but honestly nothing will really sum it all quite like of stuff that sucks about the game.

Conditional: It's a pretty great game, and honestly these are complaints not really aimed at it specifically. It's not like the game crashes repeatedly at a crucial moment unless you wore the right in-game hat or anything (because that would just be insane). No, some of these things have been true since I was an admin on a Counter Strike server so, so, so many years ago.

Second conditional: Many of these things are resolved by having a solid set of people (or even a clan) to play with. But most aren't completely.

But that doesn't change the fact that they suck.

Lobbies Suck
Once, there were dedicated servers - and they were good. Well, mostly good - but the nice thing about dedicated servers is that once you found one you liked you could stick with the same crowd every time you wanted to play - day or night. Our Counter Strike server was a full blown community where you could easily find people you were comfortable playing with and then chat with them on forums after the game.

Lobbies, on the other hand, are nothing more than random groups of people. The connections suck and honestly the whole system rewards you for jumping from one lobby to another lobby often during a game session to get into existing games quickly - and before the you get the dreaded dropped connection.

Oh, right ... speaking of:

Server Disconnects Suck
With dedicated servers, it was very rare that the game dropped you. You may have dropped from the game, or your cat might have kicked out your cable or whatnot ... but the servers were usually up and running. With the peer to peer lobby system, all it takes is a drop between you and random user 22, or maybe random user 22 decides they doesn't want to be on the losing team anymore and drops out - taking the ball, the game and the whole enchilda with them.

It's double annoying since games like Black Ops make tracking experience and stats a big portion of the game - and you may play through 90% of a match only to have the connection pulled out from under you. Ironically in what is probably an effort to punish players who drop out early because they're losing, nobody keeps their score in this case.

VOIP Sucks
I know I've harped on this before, but dear god almighty is VOIP the most wasted technology on the planet. At it's best I occasionally hear useful tips from someone on my team. There's a chance of like 1:1000000 that might happen. There's nearly a 1:1 chance that I will hear random music, someone's kids, their dog, their significant other yelling at them, heavy breathing, or whatnot. Also common is just idle chatter between two players who know each other ... which is usually not rude as much as it's just completely unnecessary background noise.

At it's worse? You might get berated by a player who got killed in the first two seconds of the game. Or sexually harassed by another player. Or threatened, or called any number of pretty impressive insults. And if you aren't the target of all this - you still get to hear it.

I've actually started syncing my bluetooth mic, muting it ... and then setting aside on the floor. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - every online game should have a fast "mute all" option.

And actually, Sony and/or Microsoft should offer teamspeak options at the OS level. Every game should have "talk only to people on your friend list" as a possibility. That way I only talk to people I care about, and nobody has to listen to me do so...

Campers Suck
And I'm going to do everyone a favor here and define a camper as:

A person more concerned with their kill to death ration than actually playing the game.

Honestly, I'm not even going to get into the argument about whether it's bad pool to hide in a fern for five minutes during team deathmatch. However, when I run pass someone hiding in a fern for five minutes while trying to cap a domination point, the urge to TK rises. "Hiding in a fern", mind you, is different from "sniping in a fern" - the distinction is that a sniper will take out opponents in my way. Hiding just makes you decoration.

Matchmaking Sucks
Honestly, Black Ops handles it better than most. However, sometimes when three people drop out right before a match begins and you're stuck with 3:6 for the first ten minutes, or when all the other team is on the same prestige clan, etc. - it sucks the fun out of the game.

Worse, I used to consider it a cardinal sin to drop out of a game which I knew was doomed. Honestly, if I'm in a lobby with a bunch of people yelling into their mics, hiding in ferns and probably ready to drop their own connection ... I'm pretty willing to bail and find a real game.

Knife Fights Suck
Knife attacks have somewhat annoyed me since Counter Strike, and they occasionally still annoy me today. For one thing, in a semi-realistic military shooter - killing someone with a quick swipe of a knife is pretty unrealistic. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people dying in a modern gunfight from knife attacks are probably statistically low.

But worse is that the mechanic is flawed. OK, if you sneak up behind me and stab me in the back ... you win. If you rush me and I miss you you completely and you stab me ... you win. But there's just no way in hell someone should take three bullets and still get to stab someone and get an instakill from point blank range. At the core, these games are gunfights - and guns should trump knives.

Game Play: CSI Fatal Conspiracy

I'm not entirely familiar with the shovelware genre in general, so perhaps there is a subculture out there of people who are used to franchise cash ins which they might find appealing, but I'm going to have to guess there probably is not.

In some ways, the gaming community should see the release of this game's demo as a kind of blessing. It's a free package which shows just how bad gaming development actually can be. Thought Doom III was bad? Ha. If you put Fatal Conspiracy on a spectrum of bad to good, most of your least favorite games would probably not even be visible on the other end.

Start with the production value, or the complete lack of it. Most of the menus and images look like they were designed and developed by someone putting their first website together. I honestly can't tell if the voice actors were used to deliver dialogue, because the sound quality is so uneven that I couldn't tell if that was Marg Helgenberger doing a bad Willows impersonation or somebody else.

If you squint enough that the poorly formatted menus don't annoy you into oblivion, you can stumble around the lackluster interface which appears to be specifically designed to slow the user down and confuse them. Possibly the most important thing to do in the game - investing evidence for "trace", either stopped working for me completely during the demo or the secret combo of buttons to get it working again was lost on me.

If you're a fan of the show, you should hate the game. If you're a fan of self-flagellation, then this might be the game for you. Games like this make me mourn what has become of the adventure genre in general, and despair for where it might go.

RCN Chicago's Idea Of Service

Excuse the local PSA for a moment, Cathode readers - though I suppose RCN internet users of other markets may want to pay attention anyway...


For awhile now, The Girl and I have had some troubles getting high quality video running on the old Roku. For the longest time I figured this was just a technical issue with the old wifi, and so I strung 300 feet of ethernet to plug it all in directly from the source so that we (and in particular she) could appreciate some quality entertainment.

I pay for 10mb service from RCN here in Chicago, which is far and above the connection speed Amazon recommends. This is a service that RCN widely advertises here in Chicagoland.

Problem? They can't actually deliver on that service. When we tried to rent an HD movie from Amazon, we simply couldn't watch it in anything less than a couple of dots after some time ... in other words, we rented an HD movie only to watch in blocks.

Why?

Heres why:

Now, while this is off my iPhone and off WiFi - it's not like I was taking this reading from the street or anything. Sure, I would expect some degradation from WiFi and whatnot - but ... this reading is showing a 0.66 download speed and the lesson here is simple:

RCN was selling a 10mb service. From WiFi I was getting less than 1. When I looked at the wired connection? I was getting about 2-3. Sometimes less. The speed is utterly unreliably and usually under 5.

RCN admits this is a problem on their end - but their technical support says that the "capacity upgrade" has no estimated time of delivery. Which is interesting, since I had an estimated time of delivery expected from me when I signed up for the service, although it has been over two weeks now and RCN has shown absolutely nothing from their part for the same. The best I can get, in fact, is "no estimated time of delivery".

So RCN in Chicago advertises a service to which they can apparently not technically deliver - and just tonight I got an email from The Girl that not only was nothing new being done about it, but that our service was actually completely down for the entire night.

Utility companies need to be made accountable, because they will for sure not it for themselves. I would encourage anyone to check their Internet connection compared to what they pay with a simple run of Speedtest.net - but especially if you have RCN in the Chicagoland area. If I'm getting this level of service, there's a good chance you are too - I'm pretty certain few people in the Wrigleyville area are getting what they actually pay for...

And for the record - RCN customer service has been abysmal. I've been hung up by the automated service twice and left on hold for nearly a half hour at least once. I've never gotten a straight answer as to the problem or when RCN will solve it - leaving me to wonder if they're even capable of fixing the issue at all.

Anyway: here's the PSA ... we live in a world where we may pay for exacting Internet service which we only use at certain times, but that fact does not change the fact that we have a contract with a company to deliver that service. I don't care if you pay for speeds to deliver pictures of cute kids or to achieve a better frag count online ... you pay for it, but sadly only you will police it. Nobody on this planet will check to see if you're actually getting the net service you pay for ... there is no regulatory body for it in existence. It's just a contract between you and a business.

Which is why the Better Business Bureau is probably my next step. RCN's response at this point is completely atrocious - and I worry not just for the fight I've got with them, but the fight many of their customers may not even realize they are entitled to have.

First Impressions: Call of Duty Black Ops

Faithful Cathode readers know that I was somewhat torn about the release of Modern Warfare 2.  In one hand, it was a slick looking military shooter with some brilliant cinematic scenes and lots of stuff blowing up.  One the other hand, it felt like it was written by a frantic monkey with homicidal tendencies and the entire No Russian controversy was clearly absurd sensationalism.

Black Ops sees the franchise in the hands of Treyarch and the early review is that they've handled it quite well.  I can't speak to the single player campaign yet, going to crack that open over the weekend - so it's difficult to say how reviews claiming it is "the best story in the series" compares to, well, actual storytelling - but I can be hopeful.

Multiplayer is still the tightly designed gameplay that military shooter fans have grown to expect.  There's little variation here from past editions - thought I have to say that I often forget how important it can be to play the same online game as a few hundred thousand other people at the same time.  Stability still seems to be a bit of a concern, and can certainly be annoying when you've had a particularly good round and get dropped - but hardly a big deal when you can just jump right back into another game in about a minute.

In the hours I spent in the game, I tended to drift to the more "strategic" game modes.  I never seem to do well point wise when it's pure deatchmatch, but I am glad to see objective based game modes which actually work.  I still remember back in the CounterStrike days how nearly every game, no matter the mode, descended quickly into Team Deathmatch - and there's occasionally the same here, but for the most part you have a game which helps team quickly organize for specific, simple goals, and it just works.

Tentatively a huge thumbs up - I'm willing to say this may be the game I wanted Modern Warfare 2 to be.

Game Play: Neuroshima Hex (iPhone)

This is a post a long time coming. As a huge Neuroshima Hex fan, I was impatiently waiting the release of the iPhone version of the game since I first heard about it. My expectations were pretty high: it is a fast pacedturn based game, very strategic and dynamic, played out on a board of specific height and width - in other words, a nearly perfect candidate for the iPhone's touchscreen.

I couldn't have been more pleased with the results. The guys at Big Daddy's and Portal Publishing took the effort to heart and have created a highly polished, extremely authentic, and insanely fun portable version of the game.  As of the latest version (1.01 I believe), the bugs are quite few and the only one that really comes to mind is the ability to crash the game by flipping back and forth between menus at the wrong time during a battle.  Trust me, that doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it might sound and actually only turns up as minor inconvenience from time to time.  The game saves the game before every turn, so even if you have to go dash off to that meeting - everything will be waiting for you when you return.

While geared mostly to fans of the game, the developers do provide an introductory video and explanations for all the tiles.  If the game is intimidating to new users, that's probably more to do with the unique ruleset of Neuroshima rather than any fault on the development team.  I actually feel like I know the game much better now having played against the computer with the core set of rules.

So the only thing I want now is more, more, more... the expansion sets, the iPad support, online play, etc.  But for now, I think the dev team deserves a well earned lager and a couple rounds against Moloch.

Fallout: New Vegas ... A Game So Buggy Good Luck Finishing It

This is a follow up to the post from Friday which noted that while Fallout: New Vegas is pretty fun, it's also full of bugs which are completely ridiculous for a console game in this day and age. I challenged anyone to find a buggier game in the history of the console.

I'm going to up the ante on that. I think Fallout: New Vegas may be the buggiest game ever released.

On any console.

Ever.

My evidence? I can't finish the game. I've tried previous saves, I've tried cleaning the disc, I've tried giving the PlayStation 3 a good old reboot, I've tried moving to other locations and then back - but I can't get into The Strip. The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen. And where do I need to go to finish the game? The Strip. Is there any other way to get there? No, Bethesda didn't have any of the locations in the The Strip as a named location. You can't even go directly there via fast travel, you have to go to a gate first and the walk in ... which is where every thing just fades to black.

And that's it. I've played this game for hours, I've gone on dozens of quests and in an effort to stop the game from crashing I decided to just sprint for the finish line and get to the end of the main storyline. But I'll never get that. This is how the game ends for me:

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That Bethesda has released a game of this low quality is bad, but it's equally bad that the gaming media has decided to give them a pass. IGN rates this game an 8.5, or "great". Really? Let's recap.

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That is not a great game. I might be able to give it a good, but a game that can crash consistently after only running for thirty minutes or less with nor rhyme or reason is probably barely worthy of even being a good game, even if everything about the gameplay was stellar.

So Bethesda: don't count on me buying any DLC for this game. Hell, don't even count on the disc ever gracing my console again. And if any game from Bethesda ever has a review with the word bug in it again, I don't care if the rating is off the chart - it's not a purchase option for me. I'd be irate if this was a PC game, but on a console? This lack of quality control is simply idiotic.

Gameplay: Fallout New Vegas

I'll start with a confession: I've been playing the hell out of New Vegas. And I could rattle off all the reasons why that is so - except none of them would surprise you if you have already played Fallout 3 in the last two years. Bethesda has managed to sneak in a few new details, most of which add at least a few new concepts - most of which are pretty sound but don't really do anything to change the core gameplay from when Fallout and Elder Scrolls first got mashed together.

And there have been many, many reviews which have mentioned all of that, and how wonderfully the mechanics hold up over the last couple years. So lets' talk about something else.

Let's talk about just how often this damn game crashes, and how completely wrong that is for a console game in the year 2010. The level of instability that this game has is so far off the charts compared to every single other title I have ever played on the PlayStation 3 that I challenge any other blogger or gamer to argue the case that this is not the buggiest release in the history of the console, with the only other contender being Fallout 3 or the even buggier DLC for Fallout 3.

Let's talk frequency: Nightly. At least once a night that I've powered this game on, it has crashed. Let's talk severity: It completely locks up the console, requiring a manual reboot. Let's talk about predictability: There is none. You'll just be walking down the street, turn and look at something and ... bam. Instant lockup. I've had it happen at least once in between locations, causing nothing but a black screen to stare at me while I wondered if I should wait or go reboot the thing again.

The only saving grace is the frequency of the saves in the game: it does an autosave when you change locations or when you sleep. Course, the location autosave may not work correctly if the game crashes at the right moment, so unless you remember to save after every important action - you might be completely hosed anyway. I've lost hours of gameplay by not being absolutely draconian about saving after key points, a habit I've now fallen deeply into for the sake of my own sanity.

And it's not like the game itself is spotless. I walked right past a quest item because it was buried mostly in the ground ... not in "oh look, buried treasure" kind of way - but rather a "model was graphically blended with landscape" kind of way. While talking to a major game character, the conversation was stopped for cinematic animation ... which was blocked because the character for said animation was stuck on a chair. There are times when VATS goes completely on vacation. I'll be swarmed by evil poisonous creatures and tapping the shoulder button like a madman, and absolutely nothing happens.

So it's hard for me to be excited about things like factions, weapon mods, reloading benches or the nifty new companion wheel (though, it is kinda nifty) when I know every time I load the game, I'll end up rebooting my console. I said this about the Fallout 3 DLC, and I'll say it again: this is why I left PC gaming for a console. That Bethesda has had two years to work the kinks out of the engine and it's just as buggy as it ever was tells me one simple thing:

Bethesda needs to ditch this engine. While playing New Vegas, I was also playing the new Borderlands DLC and realized: it looks better, plays faster and never crashes. Yeah, I know it doesn't have the same dynamically loaded overworld that Fallout does, but these are things engines like Unreal and Id's latest have been working on. The Gamebryo engine has always been a burden on Bethesda games, it's never been able to deliver the same graphical quality of contemporary engine and apparently porting it to the consoles saddles the consoles with PC level bugs. It's ridiculous that in a two development timespan that Bethesda has released a product with this few updates, that looks exactly the same as the game before it, and is buggy as all hell.

Is the game fun? Yes. Does it offer hours and hours and hours of play? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yes. Well, if you liked Fallout 3.

Does that justify the level of instability in this game? No.

There, quite honestly, is no justification for the level of instability in this game.