Top of Cool

Xbox 360 E3: Day 1

5:55pm I am now home from work. I’m about to begin downloading E3 content from Xbox Live via my Xbox 360. My wife is rather annoyed, since she was trying to watch some episodes of Angel. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to download since the 360 doesn’t allow for background downloading or even queued downloading. This particular hole in their featureset is proving to be very annoying at this stage.

6:00pm Logging into Xbox Live… Oh yeah! I’d forgotten that I had queued up the Stranglehold trailer when I had come home for lunch. I better watch it now.

6:02pm Nice! Looks to be a video game version of John Woo’s Hong Kong flicks. It specifically made allusions to Hard-boiled. One of my personal faves!

6:04pm Man, this downloading is going to take forever. I started downloading the Bullet Witch trailer. I have no idea what “Bullet Witch” is, but we’ll see… whenever the download finishes on my subpar 640k DSL connection.

6:09pm Yawn… Guess I’ll go read some Order of the Stick while I wait.

6:38pm Bullet Witch trailer finished… Meh. The trailer was all in Japanese, but the gameplay itself looked like the same crap you’ve seen in every other modern-day supernatural 3rd person shooter. Next up is the trailer for “Rain.” Time for more waiting…

7:18pm Oops… fell asleep there for a minute… Rain trailer… Meh. What I really don’t like are game trailers that have a bunch of pre-rendered garbage and two seconds of gameplay. Kind of like this trailer. And the game play looked like a Splinter Cell clone with crappier graphics and a bunch of cliche zombie stuff going on.

7:40pm Gah! I can’t handle this anymore… sitting around waiting for a bunch of crap to download, while unable to actually use the console in any way shape or form. Day 1 is over. Final Review: Meh. MEHHHHHHH.

7:41pm Oh. Sounds like the Sonic the Hedgehog trailer just finished. Guess I’ll watch it before resuming viewing of Angel episodes. Something about Chaos Emeralds and Iblis Triggers. Maybe that means something to someone. Good thing they included it in the trailer, then. Wait, wha? Oh good… Shadow’s driving around vehicles with rocket launchers. Good job on continuing the cycle of crap, Sega. I’m done… until later then.

E3: HD-DVD over USB on Xbox 360

This is cool and not cool at the same time.

I’m excited to be able to have a console that will allow me access to HD-DVD content. I’m definitely not excited at the prospect of having to buy a Microsoft-branded accessory to make it happen.

I hate Microsoft’s accessory strategy for the 360. It seems they’ve taken a page out of Sony’s playbook when it comes to console accessories. They don’t allow anyone else to produce wireless controllers AT ALL, and then they charge $50 for something that is rumoured to only cost $11 to manufacture (not counting marketing, development costs, etc.) $100 for a wireless adapter? Um… I recently bought a USB wi-fi adapter for my laptop that set me back all of $20. I could go on and on. I can’t think of a single Microsoft accessory that isn’t horribly over-priced. Oh yeah, and they don’t seem to be allowing 3rd-party memory cards either. So, as a result, you have to shell out $40 for a 64MB memory card. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

So, yeah, I won’t be looking forward to see what exorbitant price Microsoft will be charging for HD-DVD. It won’t be pretty…

E3 is here. And so forth…

I love E3. I hate not being at E3.

I love reading news on E3. I hate blogging about E3.

I hate blogging about E3 because I feel like there is little that I can contribute towards the E3 zeitgeist. Maybe that is my own lack of confidence in my ability to write something interesting when every other blog seems to sum up my feelings on various E3 happenings pretty well.

Hmm. I dunno. If I were actually at E3, then perhaps I’d feel like I had something more to contribute.

Which makes me want to be at E3 that much more.

Anywho, this week is E3. Let’s see what happens.

Carnival of Gamers! Wiiiii!

Sorry… bad pun… I’ll apologize for that, right now.

In any event, the latest Carnival of Gamers is up. I just read the notification in Bloglines, so I haven’t read any of the articles. Looks like a lot of good stuff though. I can’t wait to dig in…

In other news…

EA’s stock took a nose dive, when they announced fiscal Q4 losses. I wonder when they’ll start firing people again.

007: License to Suck

I want to touch on two things here. First, I think the new Bond looks like a drug addict. Second, I think the news that EA has dropped the Bond game license is really good news. Activision will be picking up the license, now. That in and of itself isn’t super great news. Activision hasn’t really proven itself capable of doing well with certain licenses, case in point: Star Trek. What I think is really outstanding is that EA seems to be actually following through on this whole reinvention phase they’re going through. They really meant it when they said they were going to rely less on licensed properties, like Bond and Lord of the Rings, and release more unique games.

In the same article is news about the upcoming Superman Returns game from EA.

Meanwhile, Warner Brothers and EA have delayed the Superman Returns game from the theatrical release date in June to the DVD release this fall. The film is slated to open June 30.

I like this returning trend of delaying games until they’re better. It used to be this was the norm in the indutry, until all the heavy hitters were more concerned with getting a game out before a certain date, than whether the game was finished, case in point: Knights of the Old Republic II. Now, we’ve seen this happen with Heroes of Might and Magic V and a few other titles from Ubisoft. A game that has really shown some benefit from this practice is Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for Xbox 360. The Xbox version was craptastic, but the 360 version was delayed from its original status as a 360 launch title and has now become one of the platform’s strongest offerings in the FPS genre. It is easily good enough and fun enough to hold everyone over until Halo 3 comes out.

Anyway, the general trend seems to be that more of the high profile games are becoming much better in terms of overall quality. Yay!

My Bloglines widget

I have created a simple WordPress widget to display my own Bloglines subscriptions. Feel free to download it and use it on your own blog. It has a simple configuration form so that you can set the widget title and enter your Bloglines username.

If you aren’t familiar with WordPress or Widgets, WordPress is the content management software I use to display all of our wonderful weblog posts. A widget is a kind of “plugin-within-a-plugin” that allows me to quickly customize the content of my sidebar.

Download: My Bloglines widget

Also, if anyone has any bugs and/or feedback about this widget, please send me some email at finster [at] gmail [dot] com and please include “Bloglines Widget” in the subject.

Nintendo Wii: Proof that Marketing people are STUPID

I read this on the “Game Over” column over at CNN.com.

“I think people have to look back and let it settle in,” [Perrin Kaplan, Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for Nintendo of America] said. “I’m sure people felt the same way when Google was named – or the iPod. Napster. Yahoo. There’s a whole host of unusual names that have become a part of everyday conversation and I think they’re viewed now as unique.”

Okay, see, the REST of America was actually USING the internet when those companies became popular, and we REMEMBER. If Google changed it’s name to “Hoohoo Dilly” then maybe you have a point, but Google, Napster, and Yahoo didn’t start out with a cool name that encapsulated their corporate world-view of the gaming industry and THEN switch. Revolution is a name that demonstrates a clear direction and everything that Nintendo has done since the Revolution was first announced has supported and strengthened the validity that yes, this console WILL BE a Revolution.

Now, a bunch of marketing people that obviously try too hard to be relevant, have decided that it’s more important to be unique just for the sake of being unique, than to have a Revolutionary concept. I seriously can’t express how these idiots could get it any more wrong than they did.

The fact that NoA’s chief marketing weasel is “sure people felt the same way” about Google… AND IPOD?

Perrin Kaplan needs to be fired. And whoever else thought up this awful “Wii” concept.

And… it looks like the rest of the blogosphere is feeling the same way:

The ButtonMasher, Penny Arcade, Space World, I could go on and on.

I’ll just end with Tycho’s astute observation:

Nintendo clearly felt the name was so cryptic it required a Rosetta Stone alongside to contextualize it, which doesn’t really speak to its deep strength or intuitive character.

Worst Name Ever

I just typed the title to this post using the comic book guy’s voice from The Simpsons.

Wii?

The Nintendo “Revolution” is being named the Wii?

I’m trying to contact TopOfCool.com’s Japanese correspondent to see if Wii actually means something interesting in another language.

Update: Wii means nothing in Japanese. So, it’s official. Worst. Name. Ever.

Update 2: Apparently, in the UK, “to take a wee” is popular vernacular for “urinate”. Next time, Nintendo, just call it the Puu.

TopOfCool.com On The Road

I haven’t really taken this whole blogging thing seriously. I mean, I see guys like the dudes over at damnedmachines.com going to E3; Brinstar at acidforblood.net went to the GDC.

I am obviously not really into this whole thing unless I, too, am attending trade shows and getting inundated with marketing gewgaws.

So, to help myself overcome this lack of in-depth… schmoozing… I am going to set a goal to attend one of these events next year:

• E3
• GDC
• Sandbox Symposium

That’s all I can think of at the moment. There might be some random Microsoft-sponsored events that might be worth attending as well. I think there is some big DirectX conference for game developers that Microsoft runs in Vegas. That might be interesting.

Anyway, this stuff gives me something to save my money for.