Mile Zero

July 23, 2010

The Internet has many virtues (and no small number of vices), but its most surprising effect has been the way it has made research both easy and addictive. While you have to be critical of what you read, of course, at no other time in our history has it been easier to scarf down information like a big bowl of knowledge-flavored ramen.

But this is mainly useful for certain types of knowledge--mainly intellectual, abstract data. For example, when I was in high school I decided to learn how to play the harmonica, which is not a skillset that you can really pick up from written description (although I certainly spent enough time on the HARP-L list, just in case). Likewise, I may have mentioned my recent interest in breakdancing--you can watch a lot of videos and read a lot of forum posts, but I think that's a relatively ineffective way to learn. I don't mean to say that online communities for these activities are useless, because they have value in other ways. But for concrete tasks, you can't beat physical instruction.

So anyway, I'm kind of intrigued by Kinect (and, to a lesser extent, the Playstation Move/Eye or the Wii remote/balance board combinations). We have been working for a while now toward a world where we can query the Internet's store of information based on a macro-level location in space and time, via smartphones. Inventions like Google's local search, and to a lesser degree Foursquare or Yelp, add geographic location to human input. Kinect and its brethren, on the other hand, are attempts to turn the perspective around: interaction based on the topology of the user's body itself.

These early attempts are primitive. They'll be used in crude ways, for gaming and parlor tricks, and they'll have limitations like Kinect's inability to handle prone positions and relatively low resolution. But think of the potential here one that's only hinted at in Harmonix's Dance Central. Among other things, real motion interfaces are a first step toward extending the tremendous communication and educational value of the Internet out into the realm of physical movement. Imagine an educational program for athletic skills that could see your movements, compare them to a model, and tell you how to correct them--or a video chat session with a teacher who could walk "around" to critique your technique in 3D space. Even if it were non-interactive, this could have real advantages--I'd love to have a clean motion-capture of Vic Wooten's slap bass technique to study in slow motion. And surely there are commercial applications, like virtual dressing rooms or telepresence tourism.

Thanks to some literal handwaving, the vision of motion control since Minority Report has been to provide a fancy, grand gestural control mechanism for data manipulation--because there's a problem we've all had, right? In much the same way, the current focus on camera-view augmented reality ignores its real, current applications in relatively dull location-sensitive mapping, probably because most critics are more interested in the human-machine interface than the way these new technologies shape our culture. But surely we should have learned by now: in the age of networked communcation, it's the mundane social uses--chatting, teaching, and sharing--where innovation will get really interesting.

November 5, 2009

Last week I got a used copy of Excite Truck in the mail as a trade, but life's been busy, so I didn't get around to popping it into the Wii for a few days. When I did, while I enjoyed the game itself, it was with the bittersweet realization that this is the first time I've turned Nintendo's little white box on in many, many months.

It's true that I'm gaming a little less at the moment than I normally would--breaking practice is taking up a lot of that time--but that doesn't explain it. It's not the graphical difference between the Wii and the XBox 360, since I could honestly care less. And it's not the network infrastructure, although Nintendo's take on multiplayer is still shamefully backwards. The explanation is simpler: there's nothing decent to play.

When the Wii has good titles, they're very good. Metroid Prime 3, No More Heroes, and Super Paper Mario all come to mind. I've played through all of those. And I own a Wii Fit board, so it's not like I haven't done the crazy lifestyle game thing too. But two years into owning the console, it seems to have hit a drought. I can name plenty of XBox or PC games, either recently released or on the horizon, that I'm anticipating. But I've only got two on Wii (NMH2 and Muramasa) for which I can really say the same. And I've played all the GameCube games that I wanted to play. At this point, what's left? Apart from Excite Truck, the only reason I turn the Wii on is if I left my smartphone in the other room and don't want to get up to watch YouTube or check an IMDB entry.

At its introduction, the Wii was meant to be a new paradigm for console gaming: family-friendly, cheap, innovative, and a bit silly. It lived up to some of those promises, and then just seems to have completely lost momentum. Was it too weird for third-party developers? Too difficult to write ports? Or just abandoned by the manufacturer? I don't regret the purchase, I'm just kind of saddened by the neglect. We've already got one Dreamcast, I can't keep collecting "wacky" consoles forever.

May 14, 2009

The Xbox is broken. Again. Nicely done, Microsoft. Just in time for my week off.

At least it's not another Red Ring of Death. In fact, it's something more frustrating: the disc drive has gone bad. Since we probably use it for playing DVDs as much (or more) than playing games, it kind of puts a cramp in our entertainment options. The only other DVD player hooked up to the TV is the PS2, which was apparently designed by utter sadists--there's one button on the controller that, for some unexplainable reason, stops the movie instantly. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't located right next to the button for selecting menu options, or if Sony didn't feel like labeling the controls using cross-region hieroglyphs. Invariably, Belle and I spend fifteen minutes restarting whatever we want to watch after getting the two confused.

Adding insult to injury, the Xbox is less than a month out of warranty, so I'll have to pay for repair. It's a testimony to the quality of the software that I'm actually going to do so, instead of donating my game library to charity and sitting the rest this console generation out. But for three reasons, I'm giving it a shot once:

1. It's more expensive to replace it with other devices. The repair is $100, which is what we'd pay for one of those lovely Roku Netflix boxes for the streaming functionality I enjoy so much. And we'd still need a DVD player that's not reminiscent of an Ikea assembly process, preferably one that upscales. All told, we'd probably have to spend another $70 for that.
2. We've got an investment in it. I could probably live without a lot of the games, but we're still bullish on Rock Band parties. We may have to drug Wallace heavily, but one day we swear it'll happen.
3. Getting rid of stuff is a hassle. Giving up the Xbox means finding a home for all the games, the extra hardware, recycling the broken console, etc. Preferably, it means doing so without helping Gamestop or some other retailer line their pockets on used merchandise. It makes me tired just thinking about it. As annoying as Microsoft's repair process might be, it's generally a pretty smooth ride. I guess they've had enough practice.

That said, this is strike two, Xbox. Don't think I won't replace you with a lava lamp and a Betamax deck if it happens again.

December 8, 2008

It took a broken console for me to work out exactly why playing shooters on a thumbstick gives me hives.

With the XBox out of commission, I went back and finished Darwinia, Introversion's charmingly odd RTS. Darwinia uses a kind of FPS-like control system: the mouse moves a cursor around the screen, rotating to keep it close to the center of the view pane, while movement is controlled using the standard WASD (or in my case, WAXD) keys. In perspective, the game reminds me of Black and White, but without that game's idiotic mouse-only policy. Remember movement in B&W? In order to travel somewhere, instead of using a perfectly-reasonable autoscroll, players had to click-and-drag, like moving Google Maps, but without the ease of use or search function. Doing that for an hour at a time was an exercise in repetitive stress injury.

Darwinia, being far more sensible than B&W, uses the same basic principle that shooters use for movement and selection/aiming: it creates a direct connection between mouse's physical movement and the onscreen change in view arc. The reason this works is because computer users have been training for it during the entire life of the GUI. When the mouse moves a certain amount, the cursor moves correspondingly (factoring in a natural acceleration factor). In 3D space, the entire view moves instead of the cursor, but the relationship between physical change and virtual shift is preserved.

Compare to aiming with a thumbstick. Now, if you want a certain amount of change, you can't move the corresponding amount with your hand. Instead, you have to hold the stick in the desired direction for a variable length of time, then ease it back into position as you reach the target. If the target is moving, you can't follow its movement directly. You have to match its vector, both in direction and in amount (scaled to the bounds of the joystick).

Is there a way to solve this, and to make console shooters less tank-like? Probably not. You can't link movement directly to thumbstick position, because there's no way to reset the view center (you can't pick up and move the stick to its new position like a mouse). One fascinating idea I've seen is to replace the thumbstick with a trackball--as a long-time Logitech Marble user and RSI victim, I heartily approve of this idea. It will, of course, never happen, even though it would be tremendously awesome.

But short of reinventing the hardware, which no-one but Nintendo seems interested in, designers can at least minimize the annoyance. I noted, while I had a working XBox, that I found Gears of War much less fiddly than most shooters on the platform, probably because its emphasis on cover lowers the importance of precise aim. Gears gives much higher priority to movement, where consoles have an advantage in analog control, for getting behind cover and spraying suppressive fire. It also uses the cover mechanic as a way to guide players into a two-level stick sensitivity--when popping out for aimed shots, the view zooms in to make up for the stick's imprecise movement. Finally, the art design in Gears strongly supports the "feel" of its control: tank-like aiming seems natural given the hulking, ungainly build of Fenix and the other characters, in a way that it feels unnatural for most nimble FPS protagonists.

The best argument I've seen for why mouse hasn't been added to XBox, given the USB ports that could obviously support it, is that it would segment the player population: mouse users would have an clear advantage over the others, an advantage they would have effectively gotten by paying for it. It's unbalancing to give players with more money a leg up, and I can see why they want to avoid it. But when I'm playing the single-player campaign at home, I'd like to be able to do it in comfort instead of fighting constantly with the controls. The inability to do so is a constant source of frustration. Of course, this is a microcosm of the entire console-vs.-computer debate--my preference for an adaptable, hackable platform explains why I identify as a PC gamer in the first place.

November 26, 2008

Oh, how nice! Look what Microsoft got me for the holidays: a broken XBox.

No, really. You shouldn't have.

November 19, 2008

With the new XBox experience (will not capitalize!) out, it seems appropriate to put this back up in case anyone's looking to fill out their fancy new friend list.

My impressions, after 15 minutes of flipping around in it this morning, is that it's certainly a bit easier to use but still a little sluggish in places. I haven't had a chance to look at the new Marketplace yet, but I didn't spend enough time in the old one to feel one way or the other about it. The new avatars are a welcome addition, if a bit generic, with a lot more options than the Wii version (but a lot less ability to abuse the toolkit, too).

The biggest feature that we'll use as a household will be the Netflix streaming. I streamed 5 minutes of a 30 Rock episode this morning and it looked great--better than what we see on cable, honestly, but that's not saying much. Not quite DVD quality, but close.

I'd hoped that the prime feature for us would be the hard drive install, so we could cut down on the disc-swapping between The Wire DVDs and whatever I'm playing at the moment. Then I remembered that there's still a disc-check, so we'll have to swap anyway. I guess it'll be a bit quieter, at least.

August 10, 2007

For my own reference: WiinRemote connects a Wii remote to a Bluetooth-enabled computer for manipulating the mouse cursor or keys.

Because I could buy a Bluetooth mouse, or I could just use one of the Wiimotes that we've got, and that we almost never use...

May 17, 2007

I can maintain the puns forever, Internet. Don't try to stop me.

Positives:

• All my Gamecube games run in progressive scan mode now.
• The controller generally works well, and while the batteries are not terribly long-lived, I think I'm getting good use out of them. I'll still switch to rechargeables when I get the chance.
• Internet channel! Belle thinks this is really dorky, especially since I keep my ancient laptop in the living room for emergency surfing anyway. But I love being able to turn on picture-in-picture and visit IMDB or Wikipedia while watching a movie, and the Wii's browser runs smoother than Firefox on my Celeron 366.
• Virtual console! And everything looks SHARP. I don't ever remember N64 games looking that good. I think they cheated a little on the emulation.
• Zelda is not awful. I don't have high expectations for 3D Zeldas, and Twilight Princess just barely clears them.
• Wii Sports is a pretty good workout. If I started doing this and DDR on a regular basis, I might actually get into passable shape.
• A side effect of the Home button is that you can pause anything, which is handy for those long cutscenes.

Negatives:

• If I open up the top panel to plug in my Gamecube controllers, the cat comes and chews on the plastic. That's not really a mark against the Wii, it's just really annoying.
• We keep the TV next to the front windows, and sometimes the remote gets confused by the light outside and goes crazy. I have to play with the blinds down. Belle would prefer I play Wii Sports with the blinds down anyway though, because it looks really stupid.
• The keyboard on the web browser is awful. You should be able to plug a keyboard into the USB slot. Also, there's not enough memory to load Pandora, which is too bad, because I'd love to be able to play my Internet radio through the TV (while we still have Internet radio).
• What's with the selection on the Virtual Console? Super NES games but no RPGs? Genesis but practically no fighters? Where's the NEO-GEO or CPS arcade boards? There's some weird stuff here, mixed in with the classics. And the slow release schedule is annoying.
• There's some issues in the UI that are strange, particularly with OK/No buttons that can't decide to consistently exist on the left or the right side of each other. I'm not sure, but this may be by design to keep you from accidentally confirming destructive options.
• Did I mention that the cat has tried to eat it? She chews on everything. We have got the weirdest cat on earth.

May 9, 2007

After several months of stopping in at retail outlets every now and then and being told "well, we had them just yesterday," I broke down and bought a Wii on eBay. It should arrive today or tomorrow. The eBay premium on this comes to about $50 after you consider sales tax, so it could be a lot worse, I guess.

I looked at the XBox 360, and it's still tempting. But it's a bit high-priced for an impulse buy, and there's nothing I'm really dying to play. The media center functionality would probably be more appealing if we didn't have TiVo and Netflix. And I'm pretty sure Belle and I will get more enjoyment together out of the Wii than we would another system (where it would basically just be for me).

I'm still just amazed by how scarce the units actually are. I'm no industry analyst, but it's been almost a year now and I still haven't even seen a box on the shelves anywhere. The hardware isn't that complicated, from what I understand. The Freakonomics blog thinks it might be artificial, but no-one really knows.

But what's undeniably true is that there's more than a couple thousand of them up on eBay at any given time, selling for (including shipping) at least 130% of the retail price. How that figures into the shortages is hard to say--two thousand isn't a very big number, spread across the whole country--but it's a little galling to see the grey market flourish like this.

April 14, 2007

To: SquareEnix, makers of Chocobo Tales
CC: Everyone else making games for DS

Dear entertainment software teams,

So, how about those minigame collections? I see that you've discovered them again. As long as they don't wear out their welcome, either in the individual segments or the overarching structure, I approve. But let me make a quick suggestion: any game, micro or otherwise, that involves scribbling furiously at the DS touch screen needs to be redesigned, ASAP.

Because while you may be thinking that this is going to be an enjoyable diversion, I'm thinking it greatly increases the risk of gouging deep scratches into the screen, and that makes me twitch a little. Repeat after me: the stylus was not meant to be used as a replacement for button-mashing.

Sincerely,

Thomas

Tip for protective DS owners: If you don't particularly care for screen protectors, but you need to pass one of these obnoxious minigames, a piece of scotch tape makes a fine temporary solution. Just lay it down across the screen, scribble away, and then peel it back off. This used to be the height of Macgyver-style cleverness back in the early PalmOS community.

Future - Present - Past