SteveStreeting.com

Yay, I can finally join the not-so-exclusive club of having my first 360 die, with the ever so fashionable E74 error code. I don’t have a launch machine, whose failure rates are legendary, I have the 2nd revision (’Falcon’), and it’s about 18 months old now.

The ‘Falcon’ chipsets are not supposed to be quite as error prone as the launch machines, but still the failure rates are above what is usually expected of consumer electronics, so I seem to have fallen into that statistic (no official numbers, but thought to be around 16%, or 3-5 times the expected average). The issue is usually the GPU lifting off the motherboard because of excessive heat - the ‘Jasper’ machines dropped the die size of the GPU so this was less of an issue, but the ‘Falcon’ machines only had a die shrink on the CPU - which helps, but not as much.

I knew when I went into this that the 360’s thermal design was poor so I’m pretty resigned about it; it was always a risk, and the RRoD extended warranty made me feel content enough to take that risk given the rest of the deal. Of course, this isn’t the RRoD, but luckily Microsoft just recently added a clause to the extended warranty to cover the E74 error too (which is apparently very similar), so I’ll get it fixed for free. I’ve already logged it, just have to wait for them to send me a box. I also might be able to borrow a ’spare’ from my brother-in-law in the meantime, although I’m travelling next week anyway so I won’t miss it so much in the short term.

Thank goodness for swappable hard drives though - a friend’s PS3 died recently (YLOD) and it was only then that I discovered you can’t move your hard drive to a new PS3 without losing all the data on it. For me, being halfway through Fallout 3 that would suck on a planetary level.

Too many rant posts lately, let’s talk about something positive. I’m still really enjoying Fallout 3, it’s far, far exceeded my expectations and I really can’t believe it was made by the same company that created the cookie-cutter, sprawling yawnfest that was Oblivion. Now, being a veteran of the series (Fallout 1 and 2 were some of my favourite RPGs of all time, along with Planescape: Torment and KOTOR), to some degree it’s nothing new - they have clearly lifted a great deal of the style and content directly from the originals, but the fact that they’ve managed to do this without trampling over my treasured memories of the original is a revelation. If there’s a canonical example of how to remake classic franchises, this is it.

It’s not perfect - I think the half-realtime, half-action point combat basis doesn’t work that well, making the VATS part too strategically simple to justify itself as a turn-based system, and the real-time part a second-class shooter, but it’s by no means a deal-breaker. The original series’ turn-based combat system was often tedious (e.g. easy fights) but like in the sequel, it was just something you could live with because the rest of the game was so great. I still think the KOTOR system (pause & queue up as many actions including movement as you like, ‘action points’ are used up when you unpause) is best way to combine making strategy available without forcing it to be used all the time, and I hope in subsequent Fallouts they refine this some more; I’d prefer it went in that direction rather than trying to be more of a shooter, but unfortunately I think focus groups might push it the other way.

I just encountered the Republic of Dave (spoiler alert in link) which made me laugh a lot, and I think epitomises the Fallout experience; slightly tounge-in-cheek, character-driven, quirky stories. More please. If only someone could recapture the spirit of Planescape: Torment in a remake like this - a bit harder though, considering the novel-worthy amount of text in the original game which these days would no doubt have to be replaced with voice acting and cutscenes. But, I wouldn’t have said they could recreate Fallout effectively before playing Fallout 3, so maybe it’s possible. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever come close to the depth of Torment since, either in narrative or dialog. It’s the only game I know whose plot (whichever route you pick) could be translated into a book and stand up to scrutiny. And the genius of making player death not the end of the game, and even integrating death into the solution for some quests, was staggering. There really was no other game like it, before or since. Maybe that’s the way it should stay, but I’d love for someone else to really reach in an RPG like Black Isle did here. Fallout 3 is definitely a step in the right direction, and gives me faith that the best RPGs might not stay in the past forever.

A few days ago, Yahoo! announced that they would be shuttering the venerable GeoCities this year. “So what?” you might well ask - GeoCities is after all an ageing service from a bygone era, and apart from some nostalgia and perhaps some data that some people might have had parked there for a while, most people won’t really notice it’s passing.

But nevertheless, it’s important, and people who get carried away with putting a dollar value on the current favourite websites of the day (e.g. Facebook) should take careful note. GeoCities was huge, really a sensation at the time, before many of the people raving over Facebook now were online, or perhaps even born (scary). It was easily as big culturally as Facebook at the time, which is why Yahoo bought it for almost $3 billion. I bet they regret that, because what happened was exactly what will continue to happen in this sort of space - things changed. New technology comes along, new techniques, new fashions, and the old sites are abandoned like burning ships incredibly quickly, until as happened this week (perhaps a little overdue in fact), the charred, lonely hulk sinks beneath the waves.

The issue is that these sites are not really ’sticky’ on an individual basis. There’s really very little investment needed to use them, so getting up and moving somewhere else really isn’t much of an issue. Sure, with social networks the main ‘index of stickyness’ is your friends list, so people tend to stick where their friends are, but really, I don’t see this being a major barrier in practice, because by nature most of the stuff on there is non-critical and for fun, and these things are often follow generational ‘clusters’ - the students in the 90s were all on GeoCities, now they’re all on Facebook. Where will the next set be? I wouldn’t for a second assume they’d stay in the same place; they’ll want sites for their own generation, not the last one.

The eventual destiny of GeoCities should be a significant warning to anyone thinking of paying top-dollar for web companies that have no business model beyond casual eyeballs, and rely on fashion to drive that attention. Fashion changes, and you really don’t want to be stuck with $3bn worth of brown corduroy flares (assuming that they’re not fashionable right now - I can’t keep up! )

Ok, this is very, very bizarre. Having bought tickets for the last 2 years, I got an email letting me know that the local summer-time comedy festival was returning this year, so I went to take a look at the lineup. The stand-up lineup looks pretty good, I recognise a couple of the names, and in any case it’s good to see people  you haven’t come across before.

But, the main thing that gave me a “WTF?” moment was the banner in the middle, claiming that Spinal Tap were coming over on the 7th June, as part of their tour for the 25th anniversary of their 1984 spoof rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. Dude, no way! I’m looking for the catch here, but it would seem that in fact, the appropriate response is “Way”.

I’m in two minds about this though. On the one hand, it would be very cool to see these guys in person - This Is Spinal Tap is a cult classic. On the other hand, it has been 25 years (wow), I’m not sure if seeing them now might be a bit disappointing, and they’re holding it in what is essentially a tiny venue, for only £5 a head. Maybe that’s part of the joke (given that TIST is all about a band with delusions of rock stardom that never quite make it), I don’t know. I guess it can’t hurt to go and see since it’s that cheap!

Since the ticket office doesn’t open until Friday, for now there’s nothing to do but celebrate the classic scene:

I picked up on this via Gringod’s twitter: Windows 7 will have an XP Mode, a virtualised environment but with the added bonus that it doesn’t create a new desktop, just virtualised application windows inside Windows 7 that are actually running on an XP SP3 VM.

At first it all sounds pretty damn good, paving the way for MS to ‘do an Apple’ and redesign things more fundamentally without having to worry about being backwards-compatible forever. However, there’s a catch - XP Mode will only be available to licensees of the Professional edition of Windows 7 or above, it will be missing from the entry-level versions. Gah.

Rant mode: all these versions of Windows are bloody stupid. It’s a client operating system for feck’s sake, it’s not an enterprise application where people have wildly different requirements. It sits on a bloody desk doing work for one user at a time, how realistically do you imagine that those tasks are highly partitionable? You know the argument that with Linux, things are too complicated because of the fragmentation? Well, then why are MS deliberately doing the same thing to their own product? It beggars belief.

The argument may be that only businesses and professional users need this backwards compatibility, to which I say total hogwash. I just can’t believe you would come up with basically a silver bullet for finally breaking away from the legacy of poor Windows OS design, and then say you won’t include it in every box, thereby leaving a class of users without the option to rely on that facility as a bridging point. You think only businesses have legacy apps? As a software guy, it seems a stupid decision motivated by the bean counters who want to find new and inventive ways to upsell to customers. The baby is most definitely surfing away on the bathwater.

For God’s sake MS, make this a standard feature. It looks excellent, but locking some customers away from it totally undermines it and just looks like greed. And really, think seriously about unifying your client OS offering into one product and limiting your bizarre urge to partition everything into 20 confusing editions to your higher-end server / developer products.  A client OS should be a standard, simple affair.

I’d been tipped off about this possibility a while ago, but couldn’t say anything until now - Runic Games are now OGRE users and have been beavering away on their new game ‘Torchlight’, announced this week:

In case you didn’t know already, Runic formed from the ashes of Flagship Studios, and includes members of the team that worked on Diablo and Diablo 2; games which I personally enjoyed but which my brother in law almost worshipped - he still plays the second one now. Torchlight is along the same kind of lines as I understand it, except that it will come in two forms - a single player game later this year, and an MMORPG in future years, and is being published by Chinese online publisher Perfect World.

Congrats to Runic on their reveal this week, and we wish them the best of luck with the game - it’s already looking great. We’re also very happy that such a veteran team is enjoying using OGRE, enough to put one in only their second public screenshot

In a past working life, I used Oracle a fair amount - I used Oracle 7 through 10, and they were pretty decent products. The lineup was pretty simple back then - Oracle was the gruff, stoic mercenary who didn’t talk much and cost a fortune, but had it where it counted - if you could get him to do what you wanted; SQL Server was the approachable and gregarious rogue who was a jack of all trades and came fairly cheap, but had a habit of disappearing into the shadows or asking for more money at more sticky moments; and MySQL was the happy-go-lucky bard who was just along for the ride, happy to work for free so long as it was all just a jape and no-one asked him to do any real work.

How things have changed; SQL Server has got more mature (and more expensive), Oracle has bristled with ever more confusing add-on components while the core has got cheaper, MySQL has become a much more serious contender for many businesses and has already been swallowed once recently by Sun for an insane $1bn. However, that’s all going to change again now that Oracle is buying Sun, and thus with it, MySQL. So what does this mean for MySQL?

A lot of people are saying it’ll be curtains, but I’m not so sure. Oracle has already chowed down on several other open source vendors in this space, and perhaps surprisingly not much has changed. In 2005, they bought Innobase, a Finnish company that produced the transactional back-end for MySQL, InnoDB. So essentially from 2005 Oracle controlled the most important part of MySQL anyway, certainly from the perspective of increasing its business use. And yet, really not much happened, except for some rumblings in the community and some uncertainty around MySQL 5 (which was no doubt Oracle’s intention). Then in 2006, Oracle bought Sleepycat, which produced Berkeley DB, an open source embedded database. Again, this continued pretty much unchanged afterwards. So, what will they do with MySQL now?

I’m not even sure it matters. Because the reason that Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB and Berkley DB were effectively a non-event for users is that they were both open source. No matter what Oracle did, it couldn’t change that - if they try to change the license from future versions, a fork will just appear instead and people will move. The key people involved in the project would just leave and work for whoever ends up running the fork (probably a startup) - after all, most of the time these people were in the startups that created it. There is actually not that much ‘control’ at all that you gain from purchasing an open source project like this - you get the copyright, so that means you’re the only one who can change the license for future versions, but the open source license can never be revoked on existing versions. You might own the rights, but you don’t own the customers.

So really, it makes very little sense for Oracle to try to ‘kill off’ MySQL, or to cripple it somehow. With Inno, the one thing they had in their back pocket was the Hot Backup, which was a closed part of the code, but because it’s not the majority of the product there’s nothing to stop someone else developing an equivalent - most of the time the only reason people don’t is that while the company plays fair, there’s no need to. If it’s a higher-end add-on, people tend to accept that the originator company can sell a minority of their product as an add-on, it’s “fair” given all the code they’re giving away as open source. But, if the company acquiring them then tries to exploit that, say by making it prohibitively expensive or withdrawing it completely in order to try to make the core open source product less attractive (maybe in favour of their own proprietary product), then you can guarantee others will enter the space to resolve the issue.

It’s a perfect example of why open source is a hugely valuable insurance policy to anyone using it. Even if mergers and acquisitions change the priorities of those who control the code, the kinds of forced switching and upselling that typically occurs to customers in the proprietary space (I’ve had this happen to me several times) in the wake of such M&A activity just doesn’t generally happen so much with open source products - because if vendors inconvenience their customers, they really do have the viable option to go elsewhere. As it should be!

I picked up on the Gamasutra article about B-games thanks to Penny Arcade, and I found the debate fascinating. I’m a regular casual consumer of B-movies myself, thanks to the fact that the Sci-Fi channel shows them almost constantly, and their ability to amuse is seemingly inexhaustable. I also like the fact that you really don’t need to watch the whole of a B-movie to get something out of it, or even see the beginning or the end; you can have fun just trying to figure out the (usually awful) plot by just watching a 30-minute slot - in fact this is part of the entertainment.

So, B-movies are great because a) they’re highly amusing, b) they require little commitment, and c) they’re dirt cheap or free. So, why can’t this work for games too? Well, I think it can, and in some cases already does, but not without straying a bit further away from the centre ground of game industry. B-movies are made by people who are on the fringes of the traditional movie industry, and like art-house and international cinema, the fringes of the movie industry are far more developed than they are in the game industry right now. So actually, we’re not really talking about B-games per se; we’re talking about diversity and niche markets as a whole.

So how does diversity thrive? Most importantly, by lowering barriers to entry at all levels. Making games needs to be cheaper, quicker and accessible to all. The tools of the trade have to be widely accessible for little or no cost, they need to be mature and well understood, by a wide range of people from professionals, to students, to hobbyists, to retirees - everyone who wants to mess about in their garages (or in this case, home offices) for fun, education, and creative expression. With some variation on quality and scale, they all need to be using fundamentally the same principles and toolsets. Such openness and accessibility is necessary to create a melting pot of ideas and creativity that just doesn’t flourish as well  in a closed industry. It happened in the Super-8 generation, and look at all the great directors that nurtured.

I’m biased, but I think open source is simply the best way to deliver on this, hands down. Not just for people using the the open source projects directly themselves, but also in the lower cost commercial products they allow to be created with them, in the same way that cheaper manufacturing led to the higher availability of affordable camera technology for the masses to start experimenting with. Open source creates a ‘continuum’ of technology availability, allowing anyone to pick where they want to be on the scale of time investment vs. financial investment. Short on money, but have the time and energy to figure things out? Grab the open source components and build yourself a toolset. Got more money and less time? Supplement the base technology with packaged solutions & helpers - and those based on open source will likely be cheaper. Somewhere in the middle? Products built with open source tend to allow more granular decisions of that nature, not only because openness breeeds more competition, but also that the parts of packaged solutions are generally assembled from many interchangeable components, rather than being one big opaque tarball that you have to buy off the shelf, with limited choice & flexibility.

Publishing also needs to change, and that’s already started. To a degree the promise of the openness of digital distribution hasn’t delivered, since the majority of portals are still controlled by a small number of incumbents. The barrier to entry is lower, but it’s still out of reach for many - and that’s understandable from the perspective of those running the portal. However, what’s really needed is a greater range of portals catering to different audiences, user searchable portals in which quality rises to the top and is marketed on its merits rather than whether it is favoured by a portal owner. XBox Live Community Games tried to tap into that, but despite the positive step of letting the community rank content, it really hasn’t worked that well so far, due to the restricted toolset (XNA, no using native libs and little portability through which to maximise your tech investment) and almost complete lack of marketing; with most content there appearing like a second-class citizen. Apple’s AppStore has done a bit better - even though one company still controls the publishing decision, the toolset is less restrictive (you can use the full capabilities of the device, and use a far wider range of mature libs) and there’s greater perceived equality of content. Also, what the AppStore clearly showed is that people will happily buy ‘B-apps’ by the truckload if the price is right, and making them can be very worthwhile - provided it can be done cheaply. Cable channels also show that niche content can work, and will be paid for and enjoyed in small portions, so long as it’s part of a larger bundle. In all, I think there’s demand out there for a flatter, wider range of product than is generally sold right now, but we have to stop trying to shove it all through the single simple sales & marketing pipeline we use for AAA games.

Lastly, culture. In the core game industry,  a common attitude among both consumers and developers is that if it’s not a AAA game, it’s not worth the time of day. That’s not a universal opinion of course, look at how well Popcap have done for example, but I think it’s fair to say that as an industry, there’s a huge amount of elitism and focus on what I would call ‘whizbangery’ (Oxford dictionary, please save some space for that one in the next edition). We need to adjust our thinking and stop considering ‘worthwhile’ to mean ‘big budget, movie-like effects, cutting edge tech, 200-strong art team’. If it entertains, there’s a market out there for it, so we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss games that don’t fall into a particular style & budget range. Provided the price is right (and the typical game price point is still far too expensive), people will pay for content that entertains them in one way or another, and that doesn’t have to be a 20 hour Hollywood-effects filled epic. B-movies make me laugh, and I’m happy to consume them within the commercial framework of my TV subscription, even though I would not buy a boxed copy of them, or even watch them all the way through. Games can absolutely explore such territory too.

I don’t play competitive multiplayer games very much, because I just don’t have the dedication to hone my skills to even the median average of the online pack, at least beyond about week 2 of a game’s release, but one thing that’s constantly annoying when I do is people who disconnect because they’re losing. Given that I don’t win online very much, I don’t encounter this that often, but on the few occasions where I’m getting the upper hand, there’s nothing more annoying than having people quit out on you mid-game.

I generally get my arse kicked in SFIV online (but I always stay to the end of the match even if my cause is hopeless - which in fairness it usually is), but I was glad to hear that they will be introducing penalties for quitters, in the form of ranking penalties and a publicly visible, prominent disconnect percentage. I applaud that - of course occasionally you’ll get an accidental or unavoidable disconnect, like an internet connection going down, or a fully laden tour bus crashing through your front room into your TV (it happens, so I’ve heard), but on the whole I think it’ll be representative and a good thing. When you choose to play online, you should be prepared to lose gracefully; I know I am, but then I’ve had practice at it, and I’m also British where being magnanimous in defeat is generally ingrained into your psyche from a young age if your upbringing was halfway decent. Good game old chap, good game. Tea?

I actually had someone rage quit on me in a Peggle game a couple of weeks ago. Peggle. How do you get worked up enough about that to storm off in a huff? Kids today…

For those who don’t follow these things, the new, free Left 4 Dead DLC drops next week, which does 2 things - it enables ‘Versus’ mode on the 2 maps where it wasn’t available before, and it adds a new gameplay mode called ‘Survival’, which is basically about holing the survivors up in one area of the map and throwing zombies at them relentlessly, with leaderboard scoring for the teams that survive the longest.

Valve have talked about it in their blog, and to be honest I’m really not sold on the whole idea. It basically turns Left 4 Dead into Gears 2’s Horde mode, or alternatively a final setpiece with no ending. Now, I love Horde - we’re still playing it right now, having bought the Combustible and Snowblind map packs recently, but it’s a different kind of game. One of the reasons I like playing both Gears and Left 4 Dead months after buying them is that they give me two different kinds of co-op experience - the former being really a kind of first person tower defense, and the latter being about being forced to make your way through a zombie-infected territory, despite the urge to lock yourself in a closet and barricade the door. The key thing about Left 4 Dead for me, is that every instinct tells you to hunker down, to make an area safe and stick to it, but in reality you know you have to press on into the unknown, leaving each place of relative safety that you created for yourself because you know it’s really just an illusion. I think it encapsulates the survival horror movie feel completely that way, and all without needing an explicitly laid out plot or silly cutscenes - the environment tells all the story you need.

Also, while survival mode might seem just like an extended end set-piece in the main game, but in the end set-pieces you’re just trying to hold out for rescue to arrive - it’s desperate, chaotic and insane but you know that maybe, just maybe if you hold out, you might be in a fit state to make that final mad dash for  the helicopter / boat / army transport with multitudes of baying zombies at your back. That’s the rush - that carrot of potential salvation is what keeps you going through the mayhem, that eventually, it’s going to end and you might just make it. I’m not sure that I’d be very motivated to just defend against hordes of zombies with no chance of rescue, with the only way out being death. Sure, I do that in Horde, but the question remains why I would choose to play L4D survival mode rather than Horde, since arguably they’re the same and the defense mechanics are more refined in Horde. I play L4D because it’s different, I’m not really that interested in L4D trying to provide a Horde-like experience, because I already have one of those, and it’s pretty damn awesome.

Well,  it’s free so I guess I can’t complain. I would much rather they spent their time on new levels though - which I would be very willing to pay for.