iPhone does not blow PSP/DS "Out of the Water"

Today Apple held an event featuring their iPhone OS 4.0. Apple nerds and fanboys flocked to Apple’s headquarters to hear all the latest, greatest, revolutionary, awesome, far better, original features included in the the update. Features include multitasking, folders, enhanced mail, iBooks, enterprise, and iAds, but none surprised me more than Game Center. Game center is a social gaming with matchmaking, achievements, leaderboards, and friend invites. We’ll call it Xbox Live for the purpose of this post.

The fine folks at gdgt.com live blogged the event and quoted Apple saying that they have over 50k gaming titles on the iPhone OS. Apple continued to say, “If you look at dedicated gaming devices like the PSP and DS, this just blows them out of the water”. But it just doesn’t. You can not compare numbers of games available to “the water”.

There is No "Perfect" Social Network

It depresses me to no end that social networks cannot get some of the simplest things right. What makes it more frustrating is that they are the simplest fixes, so simple that some people think they can make their own and manage to mess something else up. Lets just run down some of the more popular social networks.

Facebook

The way they handle photos is ridiculous. They are called FACEbook and they can’t get his right. It used to be that photos were a major focus of Facebook, thus the name. But they have not iterated on it in ages. With more and more devices taping into Facebook’s API, you would hope that they would be presented with higher quality photos, but that’s just not the case. Facebook in Boxee or on the Xbox 360 present the crappy low resolution photos that are on the main site. There should be an option to display the original uploaded photo.

Most Anticipated Games for 2010

ITS TWENTY-TEN! Okay, yeah it has been…for an entire month (and then some). But with Microsoft’s X10 event going on right now, I decided to share what my most anticipated games for 2010.

Games are in no particular order

• Battlefield Bad Company 2
• Blur
• Crackdown 2
• Medal of Honor
• Dead Rising 2
• Batman: Arkham Asylum 2
• Perfect Dark (XBLA)
• Halo: Reach
• Brink
• Split/Second

There’s probably more that I’m missing and you bet your bottom dollar that there will be more to add to this list after GDC and E3. This is gonna be an awesome year for gaming, especially after all the good games of 2009 got delayed to this year.

Spotify Is Spot-On

This article assumes you know what Spotify is…[Wikipedia entry]

People in the UK have been able to get Spotify with no questions asked for almost a year and are always raving about it. I decided to give it a shot, with the work around that TechCrunch posted. It is great. There are only a few things that I can complain about, but some of those aren’t Spotify’s fault, but rather the record lable’s faults. I have a playlist of a little over 500 songs that I searched every song in said playlist. 388 songs were available in some fashion. Of those missing, most were to be expected. The Beatles and AC/DC are usually not found on services like iTunes, so why should they be here? Led Zepplin and Metallica are very strict on who they let distribute their content, so again, I was not expecting to see them in Spotify. However there were some shockers. All That Remains and Three Days Grace have one album, but none of their newer stuff. Pendulum and Red Hot Chili Peppers had a few albums, missing some popular stuff.  Fat Boy Slim and Rammstein were absent. There were a few surprises, like a surprising number of movie soundtracks. The program itself used 0% of my CPU and used only 100MB of RAM, which is more than Foobar2000, but is by no means a hog. But its fast, I mean FAST. A search query will give you results in under a second. Streaming a song after clicking it is just as fast. When you click things, they happen. If only some music players could do the same (I’m looking at you iTunes).

There are a few things (other than the selection) that I wish they would fix. Currently, there is not way to search an existing playlist or artist page. The ability to narrow results further than what they give you would be an excellent addition. I find myself wanting a predictive search,  which should help me with spelling search query’s. They need to add global hot keys for switching songs. I don’t want to focus the app to change songs. They should also add a feature to change the default sound device. All major media players allow this, even Windows Media Player. I would like to see a recommendation engine for songs you’ve played. All the cool kids are doing it these days. The only bad thing I have found with Spotify, is that an advertisement on the “Home” page can include sound, which will play alongside your music.

Spotify will be an easy recommendation to anyone once it takes the journey across the pond.

Modern Warfare 2 Blues

One of the main problems of the PC version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (besides the name) is the lack of dedicated server support. They introduced “IWNet” which is a matchmaking service like the console versions. Infinity Wards reasoning is to create a simpler experience for the average user. The reasoning is sound, but the execution is not. Why piss off over 200,000 people when you can have the best of both worlds.
It is peer-to-peer hosting, there is already host migration. My solution is as following:

• Keep the dedicated servers with the same functionality as Call of Duty 4
• Have the matchmaking service look for an empty server with a ping close to the average ping of the matchmade players.
• Set the server’s settings, maps, and mods to defaults.
• If the server owner wants to use custom settings they connect and the current game migrates to a new dedicated server.

It is defiantly possible to integrate dedicated servers into matchmaking. Why Infinity Ward decided to not do this and gimp the PC version is beyond me. Hopefully, game developers see this fail and can implement a system like the one I mentioned or something even better.

Key to Netflix's Successful Future

Netflix is a great service, (or so I’ve heard) and I wish to experience it for myself, except there are a few things holding me back. Apparently Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, thinks that DVD has two years left. As the Yahoo article says, he failed to state what would replace DVD. If it is Blu-ray, then he is stupid. There is no way to get everyone with a DVD player to replace it with a Blu-ray player. A more realistic idea is streaming. Everyone I’ve talked to uses the streaming more than the physical media they get in the mail. That is fine, except they need to support surround sound. Seriously if it is meant to be a DVD replacement, at least have support for 5.1. It doesn’t have to be Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA (it would be nice) but it does have to support basic 5.1 Dolby Digital. At some point in these two years, they are also going to have to support 1080p resolutions and a higher bitrate. In the next two years, residential bandwidth is only going to increase, why not take advantage of it? Even if you have to buffer for a few minutes, that is still faster than a few business days. And while were at it, might as well have some of those bonus features, like a secondary audio track for commentary.

How Android can beat the iPhone

People talk about how an upcoming phone will be “an iPhone killer”, however, I believe that the phone is only half the task. The other half is the service. You can have an amazing phone on a crappy network (the iPhone and AT&T) or you can have a decent phone on a great network (some could say Palm Pre and Sprint).

We are on the brink of a new generation of phones with LTE and WiMAX, both offer speeds that I can only dream of. LTE capable of doing 320Mbps down and 80 up, while WiMAX can do 144 down and 35 up. My amazing cable internet can do 5 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up, just to put things into perspective. The iPhone 3GS has the ability to get 7.2Mbps, but ATT has not enabled that yet for the US. With Sprint testing WiMAX in several cities right now and with Verizon planning on testing LTE by the end of the year, its only a matter of time before phone running Android will have a WiMAX or LTE connectivity.

Why Bing isn't teh Suck

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.com took note to everything that Google did, and improved on it. For example, no one says, “Let me search that”, no one, everyone just says “Let me google that”. Google became a verb. A verb with two syllables. Microsoft saw opportunity, and when they decided on a name, they nailed it. Bing. One syllable and can be used as a verb. “Let me google it” or let me “Let me bing it”. Its just quicker, and isn’t that what we are going for?

Bing’s slick UI brings incentive to come back. They have a new image everyday on the home page. How often does Google change? Once every holiday then back to the same old Google. Bing also brings a chance that your picture will be the picture of the day, and it will come from Facebook. The UI is indeed more intuitive and easier on the eyes, but it also offers a better use of web page real estate. The links to all the other parts of Bing’s ecosystem are right at the left of the search box, or at the top of the page once you’ve searched. Very noticeable and useful if you are involved in any part of Windows Live system.

So hats off to you Bing team and who knows, maybe you will take down Google’s monopoly of a market share (currently at 90%).

1 vs 100

Last night was the US’s first night with the beta for Xbox’s new “Primetime” game show 1 vs 100 (Canada was able to beta test a few weeks prior). In 1 vs 100, everyone is competing for prizes. The One is a randomly selected player who is competing against the mob, 100 other randomly selected players. The crowd is everyone else, in last night’s case, over 50,000 people. Everyone gets asked the same multiple choice question (or in some cases, multiple guess) and get rated on the speed of answering the question and whether or not the answer is correct. Members of the mob get “knocked out” if they get a question incorrect. The One’s job is to keep answering the questions right and to hope that the mob gets eliminated. Different Microsoft point values get set depending on how many mob members are left and the One can choose to take the money if they so choose. However, if they answer incorrectly then they get nothing and the mob gets the points. The top three crowd players get a prize at the end of the game. Questions range from questions about Twitter to questions about rappers in a recent Burger King commercial. There is no system of difficulty in questions as we found out, an impossible question would be followed by a simple one. All in all it makes for a different style of game show and I find the interaction makes it more fun. Good job Microsoft, you won E3 and created a real gem with 1 vs 100.

1 Year Later…

Its been a year since I’ve last updated the blog, and nothing really happened. As far as video games are concerned, I got Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, and Left 4 Dead. All great games, however I only play Rock Band 2 on a regular basis, so much of a regular basis that I have worn out the drums and have ordered a set of replacement pads from GoodWood Mods. I just got them so I am still testing it out. I have noticed that it doesn’t register every hit, which is annoying because it will be impossible to 100% or full combo a song. Hopefully it is just an easy fix I need to make.