• I’m surprised we didn’t see any announcement from Microsoft regarding a larger hard drive. If the last couple days are any indication, we sorely need it. Especially those poor users who have Final Fantasy IX installed on their hard drives. All two of them.
• Another surprising no-show is the alliance between Microsoft and DirecTV. Maybe Microsoft was holding out to see if Sony was going to say anything about their Live Connect functionality in the PS3. Since they didn’t mention any DVR functionality, perhaps Microsoft held off for a future announcement to counter anything Sony comes out with.
• A quick gaming press update. Gamespot is still the winner of the show, but it seems like the grind is catching up to them. Absent were any staff video blogs from yesterday. 1UP too, as there was no promised 1UP Yours podcast on my virtual doorstep this morning. Yeah, I know the press function was last night, but even in my line of work someone has to stay with the ship.
• An idea for the gaming press next year – mandate each of your staff to make a video blog every day of the conference; write a blog post every day of the conference; and participate in daily panel podcasts. Like I said yesterday, the sites are all set up to be organized by game title, which is good for reference, but like any book the index comes at the back. The table of contents actually tells the reader the central outline and flow. Create that table of contents in the form of highlights or show milestones (i.e, press conferences, chapters organized by booth/publisher/developer/platform). Make the blogs and podcasts an integral part of that outline – they are definitely required “chapters”. Don’t make me come out to L.A. next year and show you how it’s done.
• How the hell did Kotaku and Joystiq get to be so popular? They both report the same news in the same way – like they want to be Penny Arcade but can’t draw, so they just editorialize (yes, that’s a real word) each story. Ha ha, you’re funny. The real joke is that you get press passes to all the major gaming events and waited hand-over-foot by publishers because you get site traffic. The joke is on all of us, apparently.
• Lumines Live is a brilliant marketing move by Microsoft. Not only will they sell tons of copies over Xbox Live, but they can use it as a trojan horse to push advertising in the form of their partnership with Warner Music (and what happened to Epic? That’s a Sony company, by the way…). Want to plug that new Bjork album? Just release a skin as a new level over Xbox Live Marketplace. And remember, for those who played the PSP version, it’s not just about the backgrounds, music and block styles. Each action by the player solicits a sound that adds to the music. Like Rez, the player is essentially creating their own mix from a song template. So really, each skin can be completely personalized to a particular artist. Personally I can’t wait.

Interesting!

In the planning for a future installment of Search for the Perfect Gamer Girl, I was going to nominate Jade Raymond from Victor Lucas’ Electric Playground (and a secret – I was saving her to go up against another Electric Playground alumni as the Perfect Gamer Girl). Well, I got busy and less horny and abandoned the series, for now. Maybe we’ll see that matchup sometime in the near future.

But then I see Jade has turned up in an interview on Gamespot. Apparently she works for Ubisoft as producer of the announced PS3 title Assassin’s Creed. Now I’ve read her bio and knew she worked in the gaming industry, but I didn’t buy it. That would be a hard sell for anyone who listened to her gritty interviews:

“So you are the developer of [insert title]. Tell us about that.”

“So you can go online with [insert title]. Tell us about that.”

“So it sounds like I have no idea what I’m talking about. Tell us about that.”

That last one wasn’t a real quote.

But apparently she does have some brains, or maybe some executive was won over by her model good-looks. I’ve never seen her from the waist down, so who knows if she hit the Twinkie bar, but from the neck up she’s Jadelicious.

Aw, hell. This turned into a full-fledged Gamer Girl profile anyway. I give her a 9.5 out of 10.

As I was getting constantly bumped from the Marketplace and XBL Arcade servers yesterday, I thought of a brilliant idea that Microsoft needs to adopt – not just for E3 content, but if they want to deliver any substantial content in the near future.

That idea is BitTorrent.

How difficult would it be to implement a peer-to-peer protocol that would use clients to seed the content throughout the network? Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t want to monopolize Joe Schmoe’s bandwidth, so there could be restrictions, like it couldn’t access seeds unless that client was:

• At the 360 Dashboard, and;
• Was not utlizing any bandwidth-dependent functions, such as voice or video chat.

Other than that, if the client has a file, it should be able to become a seed. Obviously the main XBL servers would need to be accessed to verify the purchase of premium content, as well as host the master content catalog. But once a client requests something from that catalog, it will search the network for seeds.

This would have solved my problem yesterday, since everyone was basically downloading the same stuff (Halo 3 trailer, UNO).

There you go, Microsoft. Feel free to use this, my only payment would be to be invited as a corporate guest for next year’s E3. Easy enough – that can be written off, right? Now let’s make it happen!

• Lumines Live will be the next Geometry Wars.
• Did anyone catch that the Halo 3 demo was done with Xbox 360 hardware? They actually had the demo realtime behind closed doors. Pretty sweet.
• G4 sucks. Officially. Again. Kevin Pereira is an annoying talking head that needs to be fragged, Doom-style. His smiling mug wants to make me puke. And nice of G4 to lay off their personalities who actually care about games and replace them with Olivia Munn, who demonstrated her Brain Age of 88 when she was asked what she thought about her first E3. I swear I saw the wheels spinning on live TV last night. Oh yeah, and the endless babble of Adam Sessler during interviews, Morgan Webb pretending she’s a gamer, and Kevin’s endless decible-crunching spew of cliche made me regret tuning in last night. I haven’t watched G4 in about a year, and thankfully I was reminded of why so I won’t make that mistake again.
• Interesting how there was no mention of integration between the Wii and the DS. Perhaps Nintendo gave up on that experiment? Meanwhile, Sony is showing they will blindly follow what the other game companies are doing by repeating their old mistakes. PS3 integration with the PSP, controllers with motion sensors. A $600 price point – Trip Hawkins is laughing somewhere right now. What’s next, a robot?
• Speaking of the PSP, I’m surprised it was basically a no-show at the Sony press event. I want to hear more about downloadable PSOne titles. Hell, they should have made it available to everyone live at the press event. Even still, I want to hear what titles will be available, and at what price point. Or downloadable content of any kind – and please take off the resolution restriction on downloaded videos!
• Gamespot has the best E3 coverage thus far. IGN seems to be on vacation. And 1UP is smart by coming out with nightly podcasts of wrap-ups, but their site is so poorly designed it’s nearly impossible to find any content besides what’s thrown at you from the front page. I’d like to search the blogs based on staff and/or developer, and I’d like some federated (big word) search so I can scan the news stories. But I can only search “Gamers”. But it’s nice to catch the podcast on my way to work, instead of getting Gamespot’s streaming videocasts blocked by my employer. Gamespot has a nice new feature for subscribers in beta called “The Rail”, which basically streamlines the top stories – news, previews, movies – all in a nicely wrapped slideshow. This is probably the closest someone has come to presenting the avalanche of news stories in a presentable fashion. Most other sites organize based on title, and that makes reading the headlines a chore. Kudos to Gamespot!
• Is it me or does the show feel like it’s already over? Like last year, the announcements coming from the actual show feel like Kentia Hall – you know, the stuff no one cares about. A new Golden Axe? Who cares!
• Microsoft needs to think about updating their Marketplace interface for next year if they decide to provide E3 content to Xbox 360 owners. A little organization, perhaps a new blade just for E3, would be nice. Instead I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon bouncing back and forth from the XBL Arcade download section to the Marketplace section, getting constantly disconnected. And along those lines, let’s add some more servers to the infrastructure to handle the load. I still don’t have UNO. Bastards…

I saw this over on Xbox.com’s E3 coverage. Looks like Hellgate: London is coming to Xbox 360, although I can’t find any mention or announcement of it anywhere.

Sony had everything to gain and still found a way to lose. I’m not used to the favorite squandering an opportunity like they did last night. Today’s press conferences were much much better. Nintendo was smart to hold price and date information on the Wii, in order to take some wind out of Sony’s sails this Fall. And I’m totally buying one. It’s not so much the software as it is the brilliance of the hardware. Wii Connect 24 is so great it’s almost obvious – pushing content rather than pulling from the client. Especially what I’m going through right now on the XBL Marketplace, I can’t even connect. It will be nice to just wake up and have new content on my Wii. That sounded weird.

Microsoft proved that it’s all about the games, and man did they roll out a killer lineup. But someone screwed up – Peter Moore is going to be ticked off to hear he got the GTA tattoo for nothing, since it’s going to be released simultaneously for the PS3 as well. But looks like they read my blog on episodic content, because they’re following my concept line-by-line. Buy the retail product, supplement with downloadable content without ruining the experience for those who opt out.

So that’s it. The show is over for all I care. Microsoft kills Sony, and now I have to clear some space in my basement for doubles tennis on the Wii.

But the moral of the story is, it won’t be Sony.

I’m not a fanboy. I own lots of consoles, and buy them for the games, not the name. But in this day and age when money can be tight, I made made my investment in the Xbox 360, mainly because I had made the decision to buy an Xbox a generation before it. The PS2 has the best catalog, it is backwards compatible with original Playstation games, and I had every intention of buying one until the realization set in that money might be better spent elsewhere. I think my wife actually said that. Anyway…

I was thinking of pre-ordering a PS3, if not for its backwards compatability with all previous generations. But for $600? Hell no. Even if I wanted a Blu-Ray player so badly, I still wouldn’t shell out that kind of money until it was a proven format. But that’s not the stinger.

Gamespot reports the cheaper PS3 is crippled. No HDMI, no WiFi, no memory stick inputs. Even though it might play games the same, not having the ability to save them is kinda a buzzkill. Most importantly is the lack of HDMI, because that means I won’t be able to watch Blue-Ray movies, as the format requires that input for digital copy protection.

One more somewhat important thing – Sony seems to have eliminated the vibration function from their controllers. And they’ve obviously replaced it with a motion sensor function that will be completely useless to me because that requires me to play my games upright and not in a comfortable reclining fashion that I prefer.

So $500 for the priviledge? No thanks Sony. My second console will be the Wii.

So as part of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace blitz, they will be providing tons of new content throughout the week in the form of themes, pictures, demos and trailers. And taking a look at Major Nelson’s blog today, it sure looks like this has already started.

The problem is, it’s a free week for Xbox Live, so everyone and their mother will be downloading this content. And the fact that you can’t do anything with your Xbox 360 while downloading content, well, quite frankly it’s going to suck. Poor download speeds, tons of stuff to download, 24 hours in a day. Do you expect me to use this for gaming at all? Or maybe sleep? I guess I could nap in between downloads.

You suck Microsoft. The two things people wanted out of Xbox 360 was background downloads and/or a download queue; and the ability to pause, rewind, fast forward video content on the 360. Twelve hours of downtime last week and you couldn’t even squeeze this stuff in.

Good in theory, poor in execution. Thanks, Microsoft.

Yuji Naka has left Sega to form his own development studio. Good for him. It’s about time – Sega’s been keeping him down for years with failed franchise titles. Can anyone tell me when the last good Sonic game was released? Sonic DS probably.

It’s too bad it had to end this way. This does not bode well for Phantasy Star Universe, with recent delays and now Naka-san leaving before the title is finished released. It will be interesting to see if he can take some of his IP with him, like Burining Rangers or NiGHTS. Otherwise, we may never see sequels he himself would be proud to release.

In other Sega news, they are continuing their strange release schedule by making VF5 (that’s Virtual Fighter 5 for newbs.) a PS3 exclusive. I can see their boardroom meetings where they discuss the company’s strategic goals: “How do we increase market share? Let’s release all of our crappy games cross-platform, and give our best games limited exposure” (not a real quote). Now, I can see why DOA (that’s Learn Your Fighting Games if you don’t understand that) continues to be exclusive to Microsoft consoles – because Microsoft wants it that way. I’m not sure with Sega’s last generation release schedule if this is an exclusive deal or if it’s just a lack of management accumen at the house that Sonic built, but judging from the last generation, the reason is probably just as random. Pretty soon we’ll be able to buy Sega from Sammy for pennies.

And just a quick thought. Yuji Naka has garnered the attention at Sega for the past couple of years, which might not be quite that earned, but does anyone ever wonder what happened to Yu Suzuki? Was it the expensive failure of Shenmue that caused his fall from grace? He’s not even as close to the VF series as he once was. Strange. I think he should be the one leaving Sega, there’s probably some greener pastures out there for him. And I’d love to see another Shenmue.

I’ve been seeing a lot of deals lately on Xbox Live subscription cards and kits. I myself jumped on the $30 13-month subscription card from ToysRUs.com just a few weeks ago. But after recent news from Sony and the build-up into this year’s E3, that $30 doesn’t seem like such a good deal after all.

Sony has already announced they will be launching an online service along with the PS3 hardware launch later this year. And they tried to pull the rug out from under Microsoft by saying they will be providing an integrated online gaming service with free online multiplayer gaming free, without subscription fees. Of course, we all know that Microsoft charges us $50 per year for the same priviledge, many of us Gold members paid through 2006 (I’m actually through January 2008).

It stands to reason Microsoft will need to do something in response to this move by Sony. They can no longer hold onto the vision that people are willing to pay for the priviledge of playing online. After all, Silver accounts already allow us to go online for free, exchange messages, and download free and premium content, so the only major difference between the two is online multiplayer.

What is interesting is that these “deals” might just be retailers clearing their stock of the pre-paid subscriptions in advance of an anticipated announcement at E3. Retailers know these things way in advance – they usually have input into final decisions, and no doubt they were in the room when Microsoft decided to make their stock of pre-paid XBL subscriptions “worthless”. And retailers usually have a good track record of keeping secrets, but this move of liquidating product can definitely be construed as chatter.

So what can, and most importantly will, Microsoft do? The theory is that Microsoft will make Silver accounts multiplayer enabled. It’s an easy change to make; Major Nelson mentioned on one of his podcasts they simply had to change a flag during one of the free Gold weeks to allow Silver accounts to play online. And no free nights and weekends only stuff either – Microsoft needs a level playing field if they want to compare apples to apples with Sony’s online service.

Of course, that’s going to piss off a lot of people who have paid subscriptions in advance. Microsoft has a few of options to make everyone happy:

• They could make premium content downloads free for Gold subscribers
• They could include MMO fees in Gold accounts
• They could offer some sort of free marketplace points or a free game for those who already paid for a Gold account

One thing is for sure – there will be some announcement at E3 regarding some change to Xbox Live. The recent 12-hour downtime wasn’t just to prepare for new downloads and web messaging, there’s some major architecture change that will impact users of the service.

Stay tuned…