Mr. .NET

Phil has posted his experience with Pirates of the Burning Sea during the private beta.  I keep looking back to this game thinking the concept is great, but I haven’t had a chance to play it much.  During the stress test I managed to play it for about an hour before the server crashed and I was never able to get back on it.  Seeing Phil’s thoughts on it I might give it a few months to work out some of the issues before I pick it up.

While reading my gaming feeds last night I came across an odd turn of events. These articles came out in the opposite order; but you can see the quandary clearer if you go in this order:

40GB’s loss of backwards compatibility explained

SCEE managing director Ray Maguire said Sony will use the money it dedicated towards backwards compatibility to invest in new games or to perhaps lower prices so more gamers can afford to buy a PS3.

Sony considers selling manufacturing facilities to Toshiba

The second time in less than a month, Sony is supposedly considering selling its chip manufacturing plants to rival electronics company Toshiba. According to a report by Reuters, “Sony was in negotiations with Toshiba to sell its manufacturing facilities in Nagasaki, also in western Japan, for advanced microchips including the Cell microprocessor.” The Cell processor is a vital part of the PS3 architecture and is one of the costliest and most powerful aspects of the system.

So Sony is going to drop backwards compatibility because it costs too much. And they are supposedly looking to sell a chip manufacturing plant that makes the Cell processor to a rival so they can pay not only the manufacturing cost but an additional profit margin to Toshiba?

Of course there could be other advantages to the sale, consolidating Cell processor manufacturing to other facilities. The factory was losing money, so make the profitability someone else’s problem. But the juxtaposition of those two articles makes one wonder what else Sony is thinking, or not thinking as the case may be.

I think that the lack of backwards compatibility may cause less systems to sell. I picked up my PS3 in July when they announced the price drop. Since I’ve had it I’ve played, maybe, 10-12 hours worth of PS3 games…that could be really stretching it though. On the other hand I’ve played numerous hours of PS2 games on it, I played God of War all the way through (~10 hours), gotten through to Midea being stolen in DQ8 (~14 hours?), almost finished the prologue to Kingdom Hearts 2 (~6 hours). And thats just what I can remember.

First the day 0 wrap-up:

Last night was fun.  The TV in our room makes a horrible screeching sound so Adam hooked up Guitar Hero to the TV out in the hallway.  I met another developer, up from North Carolina, who is at his first GenCon since the last Milwaukee show.  While we were chatting a few more attendees had gathered to watch the GH goodness.  Then they started playing a very fun game called Apples to Apples…so we all joined in along with another player from Tennessee.

Day 1 wrap-up:

The day started early with a trip to the continental breakfast.  I had a banana and some OJ, I was hoping for a muffin, no luck.

Once we got to the Con we proceeded to the exhibit hall entrance thinking they opened at 10am.  Turns out if we would have read our program books we would have seen that there was an opening ceremony to kick off the 40th GenCon.   Some notable people in the gaming world showed up, including Gary Gygax.  No pictures because I was in a crappy spot to see the ceremony.

After the ceremony the exhibit hall opened and we headed in…first order of business for myself was to pick up a badge wallet and GenCon t-shirt.  While I did that Adam, Mary, and Kat headed over to the e-gaming arena where the Guitar Hero tourneys were going to be held.  I’ll upload a few pictures and videos later from it.  Adam didn’t win; he came in 3rd place after several great contests and some showing off (which I unfortunately did not get in the video).

After the tournament, we hit the city centre mall for some food and drink then went back to the exhibit hall.  I didn’t notice it until we left, but the hall space had expanded quite a bit from last year.  Its great to see more video game companies there this year.  Blizzard, Sony, NCSoft, the guys that do EVE Online, the guys doing the NeverWinter Nights 2 expansion (as well as The Witcher and some other title that slips my mind), Eidos, the company doing Fallen Earth, the company behind Sword of the New Age (complete with booth babe), the company behind Age of Conan.  Last year I only recall seeing Blizzard, NCSoft, the company that did NeverWinter Nights 2, and EVE Online.

The swag bag was great this year, Upper Deck included a starter box for the World of Warcraft TCG; a much better idea than including just a booster pack.

Time to head out to the Con again, will post later….assuming the internet is working.

I made it to Indianapolis in only about 3 hours. My group decided to meet at the Indianapolis Zoo, myself coming from Columbus, OH the rest of the group coming from Mt. Pleasant, MI.

The zoo was fun. I’m uploading pictures to my Picasa album if anyone cares to check them out.

Highlights of the trip so far…Kathleen slipped and almost fell into the shark petting tank. That was funny.

This picture didn’t turn out well, but the effect is great! We watched the dolphin show, which was fun. Adam recorded the whole thing so I’ll have to get the video from him.

The meerkats were fun to watch, I can see why they made a show about them. I’ve got a video of the pavlov effect, all of a sudden the meerkats that were just dispersed through the area all bolted to the door. A few seconds later a worker came out with food…a mix of cat food and meal worms. Yum..

We walked right past this turtle before I noticed it was a turtle…it looked like a huge rock. While taking pictures I saw other people do the same thing so I didn’t feel so bad.

More to come late, we’re about to leave for the convention center!

That is the conclusion in a FiringSquad article benchmarking the performance with and without Aero enabled. They even turn to AMD to find out just why this is.

Now if nVidia would just release the Vista driver for the 8800 GTS…

Update: I guess the next time I want a driver I should just blog it: Beta driver for 8800 series GPUs released today.

Tonight myself along with 30 other strangers met at the GameStop in Easton to pick up Nintendo’s latest offering: The Wii.

I started out this post by writing a couple of pages worth of text that read like a review. I don’t care to do that too much so I deleted it and will instead focus on the things that stick out in my mind about my 2 hour experience with the Wii.

My experience follows the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Normally seeing this kind of news would upset me, but it wouldn’t have taken 10 minutes on the part of an employee to avoid the whole problem.

Mayor to Bill Sony for Launch Day Costs

According to a local news station, Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, says he plans to send an invoice to the Sony Style store in Copley Place Mall for city costs incurred during the PlayStation 3 launch day.

Reports note that Menino says the city is not in the mood to pay for the 12 police officers that had to be dispatched to the Sony Style store at Copley Place. Rather than pay for the officers’ pay out of the city’s General Fund, Menino says he will be sending a bill to the Sony Style store.

So why do I blame Sony? Easy, every time I’ve waited outside CompUSA or GameStop for some big deals or preorders its always been done in an orderly manner. The stores execute this in two ways…first get everyone in a line, second hand out item vouchers to people in line in order. Can’t get a voucher for the item you want? Too bad, so sad.

Now this sort of easy process wouldn’t work in all cases. For example there would be a ton of work for any big-box store to do the same thing with all of the items they put on sale the day after thanksgiving. However, they can and should do it for the ‘big items’ that they know people are coming for.

I know the whole idea of these deals is to get people in the store so they’ll buy something else while they’re there…but sometimes you’ve got to realize that putting people’s health in jeopardy just isn’t worth it.

George Ettinger lets Jack Thompson have it after Thompson threatens legal action against Ettinger.

The link isn’t working for me right now; but it was earlier…hopefully its just a glitch. Found via the Gamer Andy RSS feed.

Courtesy of an IM from Cheez, Wii Games You’ll Never See

Cheez dropped a new rar of his source code tonight addressing a few problems that were in the first drop, and adding a few new features.

The game is fun; and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the levels will play out

Once you’ve played it, leave a comment on his site too!