So yeah, I was looking at that new gameplay demo of Assassin's Creed, and I have a serious problem with the game.

The problem is this: why on earth isn't this game in my hands right now? :o

Seriously, I need it. Now.

2007 just can't come fast enough.

;)

I'm playing Doom. On my Xbox 360. Right now. And I have the goofiest grin on my face. :D

Wow, that was a horrible press conference. I'm still a little stunned and disappointed at what just happened.

Ken Kutaragi just got up on stage. Hundreds of journalists in attendance and millions of fans around the world had waited since E3 2005 for this keynote. It was to be Sony's coming-out party. After the letdown that was E3 2006, this was Sony's Last Chance to make a huge splash before its vaunted PS3 launched. We expected the works; oodles of huge game demos, a bevy of trailers, massive new feature announcements.

We wanted to see how games had taken advantage of the tilt-sensitive controller in the four months since E3. We wanted to hear about how the PlayStation Network Platform would bring PS3 online gaming up to par with Xbox Live. We wanted to see lots of near-final builds of games we will be buying in two months.

What we got was a long, boring speech about how PS3 could become great sometime in the future, when Internet speeds are a lot faster. :roll: Oh, and they showed videos of Ridge Racer 7, Final Fantasy XIII and Afrika. That's it.

No demos, no announcements, no features, nothing. Just a long diatribe about the potential of the PS3.

Well, in the words of one immortal fanboy, "I don't want potential. I want the goods! Show me the money!"

Seriously, it's getting to the point where it seems like Sony doesn't want the PS3 to be successful...

Microsoft is firing on all cylinders. It's got massive games like Chromehounds, Dead Rising and Saint's Row. It's got Madden 07 - Hi-Def exclusive on Xbox 360. Xbox Live is packed and rocking. Xbox Live Arcade is doing its thing, with games like Texas Hold'Em. And it's only going to get better leading up to the holiday season, with hit after hit. Splinter Cell Double Agent. Rainbow Six Vegas. Gears of War. Forza Motorsports 2. Lumines Live. Fifa 07. Pro Evo Soccer 6.

We've got the Xbox Live Vision camera coming out in a week, with higher-capacity memory cards (256MB) and hard-drives (60GB) to follow. We've got the HD-DVD peripheral for HD movie love (that's just in case you weren't already watching HD movies courtesy of Windows Media Center Extender.) We've got force-feedback wireless steering wheels coming.

And even when you're taking a break from the games, Xbox Live Marketplace has you covered, with Artist of the Month and more conten than you can shake a stick at, premiering every day. Full-length TV shows, exclusive sneak peeks, videogame show coverage, music videos, downloadable content for games, skins, themes and icons galore... the list goes on.

And it's all in glorious Hi-Def with stunning Dolby Digital surround sound.

The best part is you can walk into a store and buy one right now. No waiting till March 07, no fighting long launch lines or fincky pre-order lists, no waiting for the mythical "second shipment" and no paying an arm and a leg on eBay. It's there waiting for you right now.

All you have to do is Jump In.

In case you had forgotten, Microsoft had pledged to make its entire Xbox catalog backwards compatible on the Xbox 360.

They'd better hurry it up; by they time they're done, no-one will care anymore.

Here's the latest list of games to receive the Backwards Compatible treatment. As usual, the same mix of past hits and forgettable games, with the notable exception of Lego Star Wars II, which hasn't been released yet.

It's only notable, however, because it represents the possibility - however slim - that Microsoft will begin certifying games as being backwards compatible upon or shortly after their release, instead of sticking them in the long queue for the BC treatment.

But I'm still waiting for Beyond Good & Evil and Psychonauts to be made backwards compatible.

From Gamingbits.com:

From a review in OXM (rating Lumines Live 8.5):
"You'll be prompted to buy the Puzzle/Mission Pack (400 MS Points extra)" once you start "getting on a roll with Mission Mode".

Also, in the VS CPU mode, when you are "knee-deep" in the VS CPU mode, "you'll be blocked by signage declaring: 'You need the VS CPU Pack (300 Points)."

On the surface of it, this sounds bad. It looks like Q? Entertainment is looking to extract more and more Marketplace points out of us by charging us to continue the normal course of gameplay. Indeed, GameSpot ran with a somewhat alarmist headline in its Rumor Control column; "Lumines Live! will charge for advancement in game?"

Uh, not so fast chief. As they say, "the devil is in the details."

First of all, longtime Lumines fans will know that the main single-player mode is "Challenge" mode, where you play endlessly until you give up or lose. There is no mention of any seperate charges to play that mode.

The only charges they talk about are for "Puzzle," "Mission" and "VS CPU mode." The unique thing about these modes are that they are composed of discrete "levels" that must be played one after another. "Puzzle" mode makes you create a single-color block pattern to solve the puzzle, "Mission" makes you perform a specific task in the game, and "VS CPU" makes you fight a succession of CPU opponents, each with their own skin, music and avatar.

Each puzzle, mission and VS CPU level has its own skin and music. So it stands to reason that Q? would make additional skins and music available to play in those modes. And seen in that light, it's no wonder they want to charge for them.

Hopefully the main game will include a large selection of skins to start off with for your approx. $15.

Predictably, Madden 07 gets mediocre scores. 8.1 on current-generation consoles, and 7.9 on the Xbox 360.

If this is all we can expect from Madden, the next three years are going to be very long for NFL gaming fans.

It's the perennial signal that the videogame holiday season is about to start. Every year in late August, a new Madden game is released. And tomorrow is it for Madden 07.

At this point, I'm supposed to talk about how Madden has become a yearly rip-off; about how EA is obviously cashing in on its exclusive NFL license without actually making the game better. And I'd be right to say that; Madden 07's new features (apart from the standard roster updates) include Lead Blocker Controls, a Mini-camp mode and a Madden Gamer Points feature. That's it. For those small upgrades, you will pay up to $60. And if you want the "Hall of Fame" edition with a bonus making-of DVD, you will pay $10 more.

Anyone with a brain could see this coming the second EA announced its exclusive deal with the NFL. Back then, I'd hoped that EA would use its exclusive deals with the NFL and ESPN to create new, truly interesting game modes such as a virtual online league. But I was also afraid that, with no competition, EA would just get lazy and slow with the updates. Unfortunately, it appears EA has taken the latter route.

But seriously, who can blame them? Madden tops the US game charts every single year (unless a game like GTA or Halo 2 launched that same year,) and EA doesn't really have to do much work on it to build a new version, so the investment in the game is minimal.

The thing is, Madden enjoys a huge fanbase in America, gamers who don't just buy the game year after year, they actually play the game, every night, year after year. These are hardcore Madden players, people who probably only buy two or three games every year but, attracted by their love of NFL football or by their desire to keep up with their friends, make Madden one of those games.

And for those people, $50 or $60 isn't that bad for a year's worth of enjoyment. Sure, the new game is almost the same as the old, but for the hardcore fan, the roster updates and the  new gameplay featureiare things to be mastered. And the opportunity to master them is well worth the $50/$60 a year asking price.

For the rest of us, it's not enough. And the real problem is we don't have any other choice for our NFL gaming fix.

So on Thursday, Sega released some new content for Chromehounds. They’ve released content for the game before, but the difference this time was that the content actually cost money. Several individual components for your mech, each costing on the order of 100 points (about $1.25) each. Here is the complete list:

• Light arms 01
• Heavy arms 02
• Light arms 03
• Light arms 04
• Spacer 01
• Light arm s05
• Spacer 02
• Generator 01
• Spacer 03
• Color Pattern 03

Predictably, the Xbox blogosphere was not amused. Gamers complained loudly and vociferously on Major Nelson’s blog, where the content was unofficially announced, and pundits all over the web promptly cried foul. How dare Sega charge $1.25 for a new cannon? Not a set of new cannons, no, just one new cannon; the entire set costs about $11 in total.

Well, here’s the reason why: because Sega can. Simple economics; the price is whatever the market will bear, nothing more and nothing less. The problem here is this is a new market, and Sega doesn’t know what price it will bear yet. And in such situations, common sense dictates that you price the item as high as possible. It’s a lot easier on consumers if you start with a high price and discount it later instead of starting low and going up.

And what are consumers to do? Simple. Look at the content, see if it is worth it, and if it is buy it. I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to buy or not.

What I will say is that should not dismiss the Marketplace or microtransactions out of hand because of a few pricing experiments such as this and the infamous Oblivion Horse Armor Pack. To do so would be to ignore a valuable resource. However, what we can do, at least a little bit, is take control. We can shape the prices we are willing to pay for different types of content. All it takes is a little thought before you hit that “Confirm Download” button. Think about whether the content is worth it to you, and make the purchase decision based only on that.

Above all, don’t buy content simply for the sake of being a completist. If you do that, you give control back to the publisher, who would love nothing more than to continue supplying you with a neverending stream of minor content packs in exchange for your Marketplace points.

1080p does not matter. Here's why:

There are a number of facts that must be grasped first:

1. All digital displays are progressive scan by nature.
2. Virtually all film releases are shot at 24 frames per second and are progressive scan.
3. 1080i delivers 30 frames per second, and 1080p delivers 60 frames per second.
4. All HDTV broadcasts and virtually all games will be limited to 720p or 1080i for the foreseeable future.
   

Got all that? Good. Now lets go into the explanation.

Movies

Take a movie. It's 24 frames per second, progressive scan. This is the nature of how movies are shot on film today. Just about all movies are shot this way; the only exceptions are films where the director or producer wants to make an artistic statement. But if you saw it at your local multiplex, it's in 24fps progressive.

Now, let's put it onto a disc so we can sell it. First, we scan each individual frame of the movie, one by one, at a super high resolution (far higher than even 1080p.) This gives us a digital negative of the film, from which every digital version of the film will be made (this means the HD, DVD, On-demand, PPV, digital download, digital cable and PSP versions were all made from this one digital negative.) We'll only concern ourselves with the HD version for now.

Because it's HD, we'll take the digital negative and re-encode it in MPEG2, .h264 or VC1 at 1920x1080 and 24 frames per second to match the source material. And this is how it is on the disc when you get it from the store, whether it's Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

Once you put it in your disc player to view the film, a number of things happen.

1080i/1080p
Because the film is in 24fps, and 1080i is 30fps, every second the player has to come up with 6 additional frames to make up the gap. It does this through a process called 3:2 pulldown whereby 4 film frames (1/6th of a second of the film) are processed to create 5 video frames (1/6th of a second on your TV screen). Just exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this post (click here) but the important thing to realize is none of the picture data is lost during this process; just re-formatted.

Now, here's the crucial difference between 1080i and 1080p, as it relates to movies. With 1080i transmission, the player interlaces the frames during the pulldown and sends the interlaced frames to the TV set to be deinterlaced. With 1080p transmission, the player never interlaces the frames. Click to see how deinterlacing works. Regardless, you will get the exact same result. The only exception is if you have a crap TV that doesn't deinterlace properly, but chances are that TV won't support 1080p anyway.

So 1080p doesn't matter for movies.

Television

Television is a little different. Television is typically not shot on film, it's shot on video which is a vastly different technique. While movies are almost always shot at 24fps, standard-def NTSC TV is shot at 30fps interlaced, and HDTV is shot at whatever the production company decides, usually 1080i at 30fps, or 720p at 60fps, depending on the network. What, no 1080p? Nope. Why? Bandwidth.

The American ATSC standard gives each broadcaster 19.4Mbps to transmit video for each broadcast channel. Broadcasters are free to transmit as many streams as they want as long as the total bandwidth for all the channels does not exceed 19.4Mbps. Consider that one 1080i stream compressed using MPEG2 at decent quality takes up about 12Mbps. Now consider that an equivalent 1080p stream will take up twice that bandwidth. You can see why nobody does 1080p, and this situation will not change until a new encoding standard arrives, which won't happen for at least another decade.

So 1080p doesn't matter for television.

Games

Ah, now we come to the heart of the matter. Games. The reason why there will be very few 1080p games is a simple one: lack of memory. All graphics cards, including those found in Xbox 360 and PS3, have what's known as a frame-buffer. This is a chunk of memory set aside to store the color information of every pixel that makes up a frame that will be sent to the screen. Every single calculation the graphics card makes is designed to figure out how to fill up the frame-buffer so it can send the contents of the frame-buffer to the screen.

Time to break out the calculators, because we're doing some math.

A 720p frame is 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels high. That means one 720p frame contains 921,600 pixels. Today's graphics cards use 32-bit color for the final frame. This means each pixel requires 32 bits - 4 bytes - to represent its color information. 921,600x4 = 3,686,400 bytes or a little over 3.5MB.

A 1080i frame is 1920 pixels wide by 540 high. That's 1,036,800 pixels, 4,147,200 bytes or a little less than 4MB.

Now, a 1080p frame. 1920 wide by 1080 high. 2,073,600 pixels, 8,294,400 bytes, a smidgen less than 8MB.

Ooh, but the 360 has 512MB, and the PS3 has 256MB for graphics. How is 8MB going to hurt? Oh, it hurts. Graphics cards will have several internal frame-buffers to handle different rendering passes, and each one requires memory. And the textures and mapping surfaces all have to fit within that same memory space. In the case of the 360, there's also audio and game data fighting for the same space (though the "space" is twice as big on Xbox 360.) That's why GTHD looked like crap, because in order to get it running in 1080p, they sacrificed most of the rendering passes and other effects.

This is why the vast, vast majority of Xbox 360 and PS3 next-gen games will stick to 1080i or 720p.

So 1080p doesn't matter for games.

In conclusion, 1080p does not matter. Period. If you think it does, you're just buying in to Sony's marketing hype.