My relationship with brick-and-mortar retailers is a bittersweet one, at best. I am opposed to a lot of the sales policies these stores foist upon their staff. I find that most of the reps are trying to push products that are not necessarily the right fit for a customer, but are driven more by what ever they need to move out of their inventory that week. Sometimes that is what is on sale, even if another product would better fit the specific customer's requirements. Sometimes it is not even what is on sale. One of my most memorable (negative) experiences was when the Circuit City in Monterey tried to sell me a cheaper TV, even though it did not have the dual-tuners I wanted; it had PiP, but it did not have a second tuner, so the way to get the second picture in was to pipe it in via an attached VCR. I was thankful they were trying to save me money, but I had to dig into them to get the specific details on the two models that were under discussion to ascertain that the less expensive one was not what I actually wanted.

I have found Best Buy and Circuit City to be no less guilty than one another when it comes to these types of policies, so in general I have recommended that people not ask the sales reps for help until they are in the vestiges of making their final selection. In general, I advise that you should never walk into one of these stores with an actual intention to buy unless you have already done a good deal of research on the web and are reasonably well versed in the topics at hand. Either that or take a friend (like me) into the store with you who can advise you, and then be present with you when you enter into discussions with the sales rep. With regards to computer specific choices, my recommendation in this vein is always generally stronger, as I find the sales staff to be poorly educated and trained when it comes to being able to articulate to a customer the specifications of a given PC or peripheral. The last time I went in to Circuit City (to buy a KVM switch) the first sales rep took me to a monitor cable. When the answers to questions are more complex, like explaining whether or not a consumer-level user will see any difference between Vista 64-bit versus 32-bit, you can pretty much forget it. And I have also not been very impressed by their ability to explain the differences in HDTV specs.

That all being said, I am not happy to hear about the closing of 155 Circuit City Stores around the country. First of all, Circuit City is to Best Buy as AMD is to Intel, or as ATi is to nVidia. The presence of a persistent competitor who, while never really quite winning any specific round, serves to keep the market goliath honest. I never really understood how Circuit City was managing to hang on, but then I also do not understand how and why there are Radio Shacks still around.

But I am most disappointed in this turn in the manner in which it affects me directly. My local store is one of the ones targeted for closure. Now if there were going to be a big fire sale like there was when the CompUSA stores closed (a fire-sale I missed out on since there are none here), I would be less broken up. As it is, Circuit City is just going to divert inventory from closing stores to the ones they are keeping open.

This will have a severe impact on the local electronics market here. With Best Buy being the only other big-box retailer in the county limits, that store is pretty much free to do whatever they choose to do with the absence of competition. While the baseline for Best Buy prices are established at regional and some at national levels, individual sales practices are managed in-store. Without the customer's ability to drive down the street and buy the same product from Circuit City, I am concerned over the changes that this will bring.

Perhaps more importantly, I am a convenience shopper. If a store has a better (more easily navigable) parking lot, or if the traffic pattern entering the store is easier to negotiate, I might go there rather than put up with the inconvenience of getting into the other store. My time is more precious to me than money. This is the case with my local Best Buy, whose entrance off the main drag immediately precedes the westbound on-ramp onto one of the most congested bypasses. This area is clobbered at the end of the workday and every weekend. I avoid it at all costs, and only go shop at Best Buy during lunch during the weel or first thing when it opens on Saturday, the latter of which is still not a traffic-free time period.

Add that the Best Buy is in the opposite direction from home if I am leaving work at the end of the normal workday. The Circuit City is on my way home, and on the right side of the highway. No muss, no fuss getting in or out. And there are places to grab something to eat. Little else is more fun than going to make an electronics product purchase and grabbing food to chow down before the unboxing.

I am not a proponent of the way BB or CC do business in general, but having two retailers in town from which to procure the tools of my hobby was a good thing. I do not always have the time to wait for something to be shipped from an online vendor due to my travel frequency. Further, with certain bulky products, like monitors, it is sometimes a more economical choice to buy such a device locally and not pay for additional shipping charges. With them here, I could choose the option; I had some freedom of choice to use them as I saw fit or not. Now, one of those is being removed, with no likely successor.

So today I am casting a forlorn eye about my little bat cave, at the bits and pieces I have purchased from the local Circuit City in recent years, and even some non-local ones:

Sony Alpha a350 dSLR Camera and Starter Kit
8-Port LinkSYS Switch
80GB Apple iPod
NetGear Wireless USB Adapter
LinkSYS USB Ethernet Adapter
iPod Shuffle
Toshiba M305-S4819 Fusion Satellite Laptop
20" LCD TV
A couple of USB drives and Compact Flash Cards
Sony Earbud Headphones
HP DV-9000 17" Multi-Media Laptop

So, admittedly, with the exception of the camera, and, arguably, the TV and the laptops, most of my purchases from Circuit City have been the small-stuff, and usually it is the emergent stuff, like when something breaks and I need to get a work-around or replacement. In contrast, my Best Buy purchases over the last few years here have been:

Gateway P-6860FX Gaming Laptop
Gateway C2618 Tablet PC
D-Link DIR-615 Wireless-N Router
A few DVDs and DVD Wallets
LG 19" LCD Monitor
Sony DSC-S750 Compact Digital Camera
SkullCandy Metallica Headphones
Maxtor OneTouch Mini 100GB Portable Hard Drive
SimpleTech Cayenne 250GB Portable Hard Drive
Dell XPS M1330 Laptop
32" Westinghouse LCD HDTV
Toshiba Satellite 15.4" Multi-Media Laptop

Hmmmm...so one could argue that when I really need something major, I brave the traffic and head down to Best Buy anyway. Well, I still like having the option of going to Circuit City. Truth is, I do not like going to either one, but if I have to, I like having two choices instead of one. My fallback choices have been Wal-Mart (inconvenient to get to and a horror for shopping at) and Target (the most convenient of any of the four options to get to, but a limited selection), so I reckon those will have to be my Best Buy alternatives for the time being. So, in a few weeks I will bid adieu to an organization that I will, in its final hours, begrudgingly call a friend. Circuit City has kind of been like my Newman. That guy who you do not like to really hang around, but that you have to admit sometimes comes in handy, and maybe even useful. Best of luck to you guys, and maybe we'll have the opportunity to meet again someday.
- Vr/Z.>>

The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium (mouthful) is about to go on travel again. Going through some of my digital archives tonight, I stumbled across my notes from last year. While I was shopping for a small portable computing device that would eventually become the Q1b, the Ultra's predecessor in my collection of mobile gadgets, I apparently was running across enough variables that it made sense to type some of them out.

Here are my notes from the days leading up to the purchase...

"UMPC Buying Decision Notes
5/26/07
* Newegg has the Samsung Q1P loaded with Vista for $1149, $30 cheaper than the same version loaded with XP.
* TechforLess, via Amazon.com, has the WinXP version (Q1p, 1GHz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD) for $1027.34, $122 cheaper than the NewEgg price.
* supposedly new Samsung Q1's will debut starting in June, tech specs at this URL:
http://www.gottabemobile.com/SamsungQ1UltraUMPCSpecsAndPricing.aspx

.....the $1149 SKU gets you the 60GB HD, all of them have the same processor speed and come equipped with the same RAM, the $1149 SKU comes with WinXP, while the others have Win Vista, I can't see paying $300 extra for +200MHz in processor speed and +20GB of HD space, esp since I've decided I'll be using this device in conjunction with my MacBook, which has a 120GB HD, and I have the Maxtor 100GB Portable drive - you know, another question is will these new SKU's fit with the USB keyboard and case that I've already ordered? If I don't see solid, trustworthy benchmarks of these new Intel Ultra Mobile Processors that establish proof that they perform better than the current Q1 SKU's, I'll be sticking with a legacy model."

At this point I was struggling between three variants of the Q1: the top of the line 1GHz Pentium M model, the 1GHz VIA C7 processor model, and the Celeron-powered version. Having been on Celerons before in my days as a computing apprentice, I had no desire to go back to that point in time. However, I was concerned about battery power, so I eventually went with the Q1b, whose VIA C7 processor consumed power at a much slower rate than the Pentium M. Almost a year later, I even splurged for the extended battery, but shortly thereafter decided to go ahead and upgrade to a Q1 Ultra.

Man, was buying thiat thing hard. Prices on the web were all over the place, changed daily, and the multiple models did not help. Frequently, on any given day, you would find the lesser specced models available at prices higher than a more powerful version, although the more powerful version would be out of stock. Despite all of the negative press that UMPCs get, the Samsung Q1's were disappearing faster than I could track them, and as inventory became short on certain days, prices were jacked higher. Many days as this went on, I had to make the decision to wait until certain models came back into stock, or pull the trigger on a higher priced model.

At precisely this time, Microsoft was also doing what it could to further "encourage" buyers to adopt its 6 month old OS, Windows Vista. So Q1 models equipped with XP were often found being sold at a higher price than the Vista model with the same specs. Since I was skeptical about how these things would perform, I was insistent that mine run XP.

You can also see that I was aware of the coming of the Samsung Q1 Ultra. At the time, they were known to be debuting armed with the Intel McCaslin processor, which has turned out to be an interim, bridge solution, until Atom could be prepared. Again, it is so interesting how history plays out in the digital market. The market for computing devices even smaller than ultraportable laptops was about to boom. MiDs (Mobile Internet Devices) which have yet to really hit the market in force and take off, were predicted to be the killer system solution most consumers would go for. Intel knew they had to make a chip that offered sufficient power to render a complete computing experience in a mobile environment, but VIA's more energy efficient chips offered nearly the same power as Intel's offerings at the time. Intel never intended for the A110 McCaslin processors to be their flag-bearing mobile device processor (although you could not tell from all of the marketing hype being spewed). While Intel put McCaslin on the market with claims of its impending domination in the marketplace, in reality they just meant it to allow them to hold position against VIA's processors while they raced to complete Atom and get it to market before VIA could leap frog them with a processor that maintained their energy efficiency edge, but also upped its processing power.

I am not sure how or where VIA got derailed. Near as I can tell, their Isaiah processors are still not present in the market in volume, if at all, with most OEM's who are using VIA procs continuing to choose variants of the C7-M, built on the Esther architecture.

While my analysis was ok back in 2007, the future turned out a bit different. I wound up with a Q1b with 40GB of hard drive space and 512MB of RAM. The Q1 Ultra that replaced it jumped to 80GB of hard drive space and 1 GB of RAM. While I struggled to find a Q1 for a reasonable price without the "XP" tax applied to it, by the time the Q1 Ultra hit, Microsoft realized that it was better to give the customers in this niche market a choice in OS without penalizing them for picking XP. When I bought my Q1 Ultra, Atom was still not ready, but Intel kept up the trench warfare against VIA by getting its Core Solo processor in a version of the Q1 Ultra, profoundly trumping VIA's available processing power in a UMPC-accommodating package.

While my standard travel kit was the MacBook and the Q1 for a few months, I eventually abandoned that configuration. Today, the Q1 Ultra goes out either by itself, or as a backup to the Gateway to come off the bench when the GatewayFX's battery runs too low or if the laptop is too big itself for me to open it on the plane. As notebook hard drive capacities have increased, I have dropped the Maxtor 100GB Portable hard drive from my standard outfitting for most trips.

The keyboard and case bundle that I'd ordered for the Q1 wound up not being compatible with the Q1 Ultra. The keyboard worked fine, but the case's retention clips were for the Q1's rounded corner form-factor, not the Q1 Ultra's more squared-off body shape. I wound up selling them both (the keyboard and case) with the Q1 when I offloaded it. It was therefore good that I followed my own advice from the notes and went ahead with the purchase of the Q1 then, so that I did not eat the cost of the case and keyboard. I now have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the Q1 Ultra, and just slip the UMPC itself into the soft cloth-case that it came with for travel.

When the McCaslin processors hit, the benchmarks did not prove more than marginally encouraging. In most applications, McCaslin was only slightly faster than a VIA C7 or an Intel Pentium M. In fact, in the case of the Pentium M, McCaslin was sometimes slower. It did offer more battery power, but I did not find this encouraging. If I have more battery power, but the computer is so slow that I wind up getting the same amount of work done as I would have on a faster PC that had less battery power, then it is just a wash.

So, I did stick with my Q1. For about a year. Then the Core Solo powered Q1 Ultra arrived. That's what I'm rocking these days, but I would have never predicted it based on the way things looked in lat spring of 2007. Just one of life's little quirks, I guess.

Movie: Traitor
Video: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Album: Mercury Falling, Sting
Inner Rockstar: John Williams
Karaoke Song: You're the One I Love, Jesse Powell
OnLine Game: Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (XBox 360)
OffLine Game: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)
System: PSP / MacBook

Interesting Link 1: PS3 and PSP Firmware Updates

Interesting Link 2: Dead Space Review

Interesting Link 3: Terrence Howard off of Iron Man 2

I spent the weekend hiking, watching movies, and getting acquainted with my new Acer AspireONE netbook...

Mott's Run was a nice little hike. 3 miles and reasonably well cared for, although there were a handful of fallen trees that had not been cleared. The only point where this was a real issue was on the short spur out to the Old Silo. The spur was not marked, which I found strange because there were plenty of signs marking other divergents off the main trail. I think I was pretty sure where the spur was, but there was a fallen tree and a caution ribbon tied off to the tree marking where the spur began. I thought better of trying to make it, particularly since I had just discovered the sole blow-out on my right hiking boot. I may venture back to the area as the park office itself rents out john boats and even motors if desired, so I may try and get a group together to head out there for a day of boating.

I spent most of the rest of the weekend catching back up on movies after a short NetFlix hiatus. I've been watching the Die Hard series on the Blu-Ray box set I bought earlier this year. I've been through Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. I also watched the third disc of Season 1 of The Tudors, and started Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children tonight. The latter is as strange and convoluted a story as is present in a lot of Japanese created video games. Unless things get clearer, this film is headed for a one or two star rating in my NetFlix profile. I always try to support video game based movies, and I have been trying to get over my inherent disinterest in Final Fantasy canon this year. However, a game movie should not require you to have played the games in order to make sense out of the movie.

My best leisure time return on investment has been received from setting up and using my Acer AspireONE, which arrived last Wednesday. The little lappy that could is a pretty decent joy to work on. Let me start off with some of the things I have not enjoyed.

I tend to gig the MacBook Pro for its inordinately large palm rests. In sharp contrast are the palm-rests of the AspireOne, which, in order to keep its size down, are virtually non-existent. I have also had a few issues which I can only suspect are driver or OS based. The major one is that I can not see my new Linksys DNS-343 NAS from the One's network interface. I can see every other computer on the network, and I have tried disabling any firewalls that are running, including the Windows firewall. No joy. In most cases, on various PCs with various operating systems, I can always see the drives in the NAS via My Network places, though in most instances it is not until after I run the Easy Setup utility that I can map the drive to the My Computer zone and actually see the sizes of the hard drives. But on the AspireONE I can not see the drives at all. I'll be using my network access to other PCs and the Maxtor One Touch mini 100GB drive as a work around. There is also a glitch with the SYSTRAY, as when I enable certain icons to be displayed in the SYSTRAY, they do not always appear. The one that that has a noticeable impact is the Power Status icon, which will prevent me from seeing the ONE's battery status if I can not get it working consistently. It appeared tonight after several attempts at toggling it off and back on via the Windows Control panel. Hopefully it will stick around. Another minor irritant is that when you use the FN key to raise and lower screen brightness, you get no indication of the brightness level on the screen, so you just have to keep hitting the up and down brightness keys to be sure you have set the screen to minimum or maximum brightness.

All of these issues are relatively minor for the added capability the One provides in my kits of available travel devices, namely, a full function PC in a trim package that has a full keyboard. I have all of my custom apps installed, as well as all of my MP3 files loaded. I do not intend to use this machine as an iTunes authorized PC, so it is just the MP3s loaded now, which is the same as I have the COMPAL IFL-90, Toshiba M305, and Samsung Q1 configured. The Atom processor is reasonably capable, although I do get some latency when I try to multitask with Windows Media Player running. I have also not yet watched any video on it yet, so reports on that capability will come later. I have spent several hours with it camped out on the couch, mostly doing research on the Tudor dynasty in conjunction with my viewing of the Showtime original series. I have MS Office, including FrontPage, loaded as well, but have yet to actually make any changes to the main site with the One.

It is also a fingerprint magnet, especially on the lid. Prints do come off with a meshed screen-cloth, though. The speakers are plenty load while camped out directly in front of the screen, which is wonderfully bright. There was a small amount of crapware loaded. While it had to be removed, it was nowhere near the volume of goofy apps that were installed on either the GateWay FX or the Toshiba M305.

This is going to be a great PC for travel, and will complement the Gateway well when that machine's bulk will not allow me to pull it out on a plane. I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.
- Vr/Zeuxidamas.>>

Human beings are predominantly motivated by pain...we exert most of the effort in our daily lives in the attempt to avoid it. That is why some Game Over screens are so annoying. It is the extreme negative input that designers seek to force us to avoid seeing those words and hearing that music. Humans are also motivated by pleasure (although I would contend not as much as by the desire to avoid pain) and game designers and console manufacturers have figured this out as well.

And so, for this generation of consoles, Microsoft introduced the phenomenon now known as Achievements. Sony has also adopted this mechanism, albeit two years late, titling it Trophies. While Microsoft has been lauded for the introduction of this delightful pip on the gaming scene, and many gamers cite the availability of achievements as a reason they would go with the 360 version of a multi-platform title, it has not been without its negative effects.

The nice thing about having a gamerscore is that you have a yardstick to measure the approximate value you have reaped out of a game. That's the most adult-way I can think of looking at it. In most cases, your Gamerscore is just used as a chest-thumping marker gamers point to to indicate how good they are. However, how high your achievement-generated Gamerscore is has little to do with your actual gameskill, and more to do with your play-style, is what I find to be the norm.

There are several ways to go about achivement farming. A lot of people download every XBL Arcade game that becomes available. This is a good way to boost your gamer score on the cheap, without seeking the achievements available in games that retail for $60. Another way is to borrow and rent every title that you can, whether you actually want to play the game or not. You plug through as much of the game as you can during the time that you have it, racking up as many achievements as you can and then returning the game. A more expensive way of doing this is buying the game, doing the same thing as you do when you rent or borrow, and then trade the game back in right away to maximize your trade-in value and buy something else.

The final method is to go online into a private match with friends and have them allow you to do the things required to score a particular achievement, like score 100 kills in a single match. You would go into a game, set the timer to be long enough to allow the 100 kills, have each other meet at a designated place on the map, and then spend the next however long it takes killing your buddy 100 times.

I get less wrapped around the axle when people are doing this last method just for the gamerscore. Since I discard gamerscore as any actual measure of a gamer's skill, honor...whatever you want to call it. I consider it completely reprehensible when they apply the method to ranking up in a game that has its own online ranking system, or, as is the case in Chromehounds, a team-based leaderboard. This type of behavior breaks the game, and devalues the money I spent acquiring the title.

In the beginning, I talked about the human psycholoigical response, I guess you would call it, to achievements and the fact that it sometimes encourages players to acquire the 360 versions of game titles (although more and more titles on PS3 are releasing with support for similar functionality). I am one of those people who does find enjoyment in achievements, and who will buy a 360 game version of a multi-platform title because of achievements (but also because of the ability to play on XBox Live vice the Playstation Network). But I do not believe the deliberate methods of banking achievements is what Microsoft had in mind or intended when they implemented the gamerscore system.

Whether it was or not, I enjoy achievements when they happen naturally. I very rarely do an achievement read-ahead (when you scroll through the descriptions of achievements for a particular game, either on the 360 or at a website). Therefore, I very rarely deliberately attempt to perform actions that will lead to achievements. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just want to keep in mind certain objectives that I should make an attempt to complete if they are able to be done in-line with my attempt to complete the game. But I feel that deliberately seeking achievements in the course of the first run-through of the title can lead to an experience that does not necessarily convey the story that is attempting to be told. Achievements to me are absolutely awesome when they just happen. When you complete a level that was extremely difficult and that you are just happy to have survived, and then the green ball comes up, it is like icing on the cake. I despise the feeling of completing a level that was hard, and then getting pissed because I was seeking an achievement and the ball does not come up, or even when it does, being focused on that instead of the experience of playing the game itself.

Achievements are great, but I do not want them to be a distraction to the gameplay experience. I also do not want them to dominate my online play, or for my online friends to be wrapped around the axle about us doing things to score achievements. Regardless, I think achievementn are here to stay. I certainly expect to see them in the next variant of the XBox. They are a singular mechanism that has had a great impact on the landscape of the creative effort of making games. I reckon I best figure out a way to deal with them.
- Vr/Zeux.

Because it is a day for a mandatory Blog post and I honestly can not think of much original content to write on. So, it is time to bore the world again with another "what I am currently into" type post...

Fortunately, XBox Live service was restored tonight. I was able to get on and play about an hour of Gears of War with the regular Wednesday night crowd from CAG. I was recently approved as a news writer for the site, hence the genesis of my tracking of the XBox Live Service issues in the first place. It is a pretty neat gig, and may spawn some other activities as well in pursuit of eventually getting a gig as a writer...somewhere...for someone...writing about something. Engadget is taking applications, but I just did not think that I was ready to pitch in on a more mandatory than voluntary basis for a site that is very competitive about posting first.

I recorded the 4th CAG Podcast with Greylock Sunday. Once available, I should be capable of posting it here. I have spent most of the first half of this week writing rather than doing projects in the network room. I am about at the point where I am going to be forced to install the NAS that I bought probably two months ago. Especially since my next task is my quarterly backup of my iTunes archive. I think one of the drives I have in the current two-bay NAS is down to about 100MB.

I wrapped up some time with Star Wars: Republic Commando Sunday night, and then got into N+ for the Nintendo DS. It is a wonderfully light bit of gaming fare, especially following some relatively serious strings of gaming in Rome: Total War, GRAW 2, and Rainbow Six III: Raven Shield, all for the PC. I am not a platform gamer by nature, but even I could not deny the sheer addictiveness of this game that combines the simplest mechanics of platforming with puzzle game devices (another one of my least favorite genres). That phase is complete, and now I am finally getting started with the single-player campaign in Call of Duty 4 for the 360.

And what have I been writing about, you ask, if I have not been posting it here? Most of my writing time has been spent posting news stories on CAG, some of which I have also posted here. Additionally, I've been pitching in over at Notebook Reviews Forums, helping out with people looking for budget gaming laptops, one who needs a cheap Toshiba notebook to replace his busted Dell, and another who was looking for guidance on how to archive emails in Microsoft Entourage for OS X. Quite a few of those, especially helping the guy out picking a gaming laptop, took quite a bit of research, so what I have not been doing a lot of this week is sleeping.

Speaking of which, I am going to start this archive backup, and then get some shut-eye. C'y'all latuh!!!

...and take care of you. I'm outta here.
- Vr/Z.

So maybe what's funny is that I only have one achievement in Halo 3. Or maybe it is funnier that I got it almost a year ago and since then...nothing, zip, nada. What is certainly not funny is that, apparently, a lot of other players are getting the same thing in online gameplay on XBox Live, and not just in Halo 3. Since the restoration of Microsoft's XBL service after its maintenance downtime yesterday, numerous players are reporting that they are not earning EXP in multiplayer matches. Originally thought to be isolated to just Halo 3, it is now apparent that this community was simply the one with the loudest volume of reports, likely due to the heavy numbers of players who probably went through some kind of psychedelic withdrawal from Halo 3 while the service was down Monday and were salivating to get back to it on Tuesday. Other games are now being effected as well.

Below is a Bungie Blog entry from Shishka, one of their employees working the problem:

"Users in Matchmaking since Xbox Live's recent downtime are noticing a lack of EXP rewards for their gameplay. Rest assured we're working on it right now.

Since Xbox Live's scheduled maintenance ended this morning, gamers playing Halo 3 have noticed that TrueSkill and EXP are not being rewarded properly (which is to say, EXP is not being rewarded at all). We are currently working with the Xbox Live team to identify and resolve this issue, and we hope to have you earning your EXP again as quickly as possible.

Note that this is not the same as an EXP ban. If you have been banned from gaining EXP for boosting as part of our recently evolved Banhammer, you will receive a message informing you so quite clearly from the game itself. If you have not seen this message (which reappears often), then you are not banned.

There is nothing further to add at this time, but I will update this post as updates are warranted.

UPDATE: 3:46pm PDT
Further investigation suggests that this is a larger problem with the Xbox Live service that is affecting more games than just Halo 3. We will continue to work with the Xbox team to resolve the issues, but ultimately the ball is in their court, and that rings true for more than just Halo fans."

I remember with not a great deal of fondness the XBL connectivity issues last year following the Fall Update, the release of CoD4, and the glut of new players hitting the service with Christmas gift-360's. Not a cool thing for another glitch, but I will be the first to admit that if services analogous to XBox Live were easy, then everybody would be doing it. Hopefully, they can just get it figured soon...especially before I jump on tomorrow night. I need all the ego-satisfaction that I can get when I am online, since I do not get much of it off.

Anyone been impacted by this in Halo 3 or any other game? What I am really curious about is how many XBox Livers maybe never even noticed it until they got wind of it on the web.

- Vr/Zeuxidamas

Forum check. Over at CAG, one of our members posted a request for views on Alex St. John's (CEO of WildTangent Games) recent comments on the console gaming industry. My response is posted. Before you go peep that, check out the bad of this particular CEO and his company. If you have his crapware installed on your retail-purchased PC, there are some pointers in the Wiki to get rid of it. After that, follow the chain, read the feed...

Follow up:

So, first off, here is St. John's comment:

At the New York Games Conference this week, Alex St. John CEO of WildTangent, claimed that both Microsoft and Sony are not developing next generation consoles. "Sony is not the company they use to be and the Playstation 3 is a market failure. Sony will never recover the billions they lost on the current generation of consoles. Sony says were not making another for ten years, which is code for we can never make back the billions on we lost on PS3, let alone convince our executives let's make one again. Microsoft has a hole mile deep dug in the middle of Microsoft's Campus to bury the billion dollars of broken Xbox 360's they got. The Xbox business is not a profitable business for them. It's only become incrementally profitable for them after many years, and billions invested..."(Alex St. John CEO of WildTangent)

And voila, my response:

I'll be one to jump in and say that the gaming industry is more vibrant now than it has ever been. St. John is one known to make controversial statements. While it is great that he has his own opinion, lone wolves do not make great harbingers of what the future holds (well...maybe sometimes).

The games industry has consistently surpassed financial markers and milestones in the lastf ew years, and more people are gaming now than ever, albeit due largely to the influx of more "casual" gamers, or at least the perception thereof (not claiming it is true, just claiming that the perception exists).

We are a ways off from a single-console future. While it may be seen that the market is currently stale, my own viewpoint is that this is only in comparison to 2006, when we had 2 very large corporate behemoths getting into the next cycle of platform introduction. I personally think Micrososft's next console iteration is well under development. They will have to make a very conscious choice as to when to roll it out, because the 360 is arguably doing well (with the billion dollar write-off on RROD debacle). That being said, I do not how many more features they can pack into it before it becomes bloated without going to a new hardware set.

Sony's 10 year cycle is time on the market, not 10 years as their flagship console. That being said, it would not surprise me if the PS3 spends more than the market average on the market as such, if not significantly more. It has arguably taken more time than they anticipated for the console to hit on all cylinders with each faction of stake-holders: gamers, developers, publishers, and the media. I think they are, perhaps unfortunately, perhaps fortunately, in receive-mode as to when MS ups the stakes by rolling out their next platform.

Consumers are still spending tons of money on games, and no market will ever be "like it used to be." While this may be bad in some aspects, I can not say that I am having a bad time right now as a gamer. There are tons of options in platform, title, genre, interfaces, and most other facets of gaming variety.

As far as St.John's credibility, I think he can take a short run off a deep cliff...or however that saying goes. I am trying to remember the last blockbuster WildTangent game...or even the last good one regardless of revenue generation. Microsoft and Sony have lost increased scales of money on this generation partly due in part to the fact that the economy of scale of this market has so radically increased. 10 years ago, the US Gaming industry was one-third of what it is today, generating approximately 6.2 billion dollars in 1998. So naturally it flows that as front-end investment increases, so due the potentials of loss.

I am not ready to take as credo the CEO of a company that pre-installs on consumer PCs a portal application to his company that has been branded as malware and does not uninstall in some cases without the use of a Rootkit remover. St.John's own business model is one that is benefited by the perception that consumers do not want to pay increasing costs to get into a console generation, as his company is the predominant owner of most popular casual game sites and applications that do not require high-calibre PC hardware sets or next-gen consoles. They have had moderate revenue generated by the smaller titles they have released for XBL Arcade, but their big ticket is the subscriptions from users who log in via basic-user PCs that do not play new release PC titles. That and all of the advertisements that that vehicle allows WildTangent to bombard its users with and the revenue that generates. I can not buy into this guy being a credible spokesman for what the gaming industry is going to be in the future. Natch.

None of this is "hardcore gaming" snobbery, with a lean towards the belief that gaming has to be high-end, blazing frame-per-second, tera-flop processor generated billions of vertices and shades. Gaming is good when gaming is good, and I play PC games for years after release because I want to see how they look when I finally get a graphics card burly enough to play a game as it was meant to be seen some years after its debut. But I also thought that the consumer population was not ready to pay $600 for a game console. About that time people started lining up around corners from local Best Buys and GameStop's, and mugging each other for that console in the parking lot. That was before they started paying twice as much for the thing to scalpers on eBay. A lot of this was not good for the industry, but I am willing to bet that senior management at Sony and Microsoft (as well as the guys at Nintendo giggling while this is all going on, rolling in their piles of money), are more than willing to take a spin on the console pinwheel for the next next generation.
- Vr/Z.

Much thanks to Mulky Bros over at CAG for generating these thoughts.
- -Z.

Almost tripped right over this picture in the magazine...correlates with leaked pictures...but its placement in the mag indicates a higher level of credibility...could be a mockup, but I doubt they would have used the supposed spoof picture that is supposedly not the actual new MBP. I would think that if they ran this in the mag, with all Apple markings removed, it's gotta be because they actually have one in-house already. We'll see in a couple of weeks when the official announcement comes out. (Picture credited to Laptop Magazine, October 2008 issue)

Movie: Traitor
Video: Roswell, Season 1 (iTunes Video)
Album: Fallen, Evanescence
Inner Rockstar: DMX
Karaoke Song: Stand Up, Ludacris
OnLine Game: N/A
OffLine Game: Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed (PC)
System: Gateway P-6860FX

Interesting Link 1: HTC Touch Diamond Review on CNET.com

Interesting Link 2: Sony XPeria Demo Webcast

Interesting Link 3: GamesRadar Rock Band 2 Review