Spontaneous Monotony

Apple (the computer one - suppose it needs stating given BBC Chav News’ blanket coverage of Paul McCartney’s divorce) recently varied its trademark to cover:

toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The fanboys (and, more depressingly, some proper tech news sites) have made the quite superhuman leap from this to the assumption that Apple is making a games console - ignoring the far more plausible conclusion that Apple has simply amended their trademark to reflect the fact that the iPod now plays games, and prevent anyone from using ‘Apple’ to market any competitor devices.

Aside from the basic principle that the most obvious reason is usually the correct one, there is a very big reason why Apple wouldn’t make a games console: they have no real games experience. When Microsoft decided to make the Xbox in 2000, they already had behind them several years of making the OS of choice for games developers as well as making a great number of computer games themselves. Apple has neither of these. Most of the games on OS X are ported after-the-fact by the likes of Asypr, or run the Windows version in the not-really-brilliant Cider emulation layer (for those who haven’t heard of it, this is little more than a Mac port of the Cedega emulator which does the same job for Linux*.

I fail to see how Apple can jump from this state of affairs to making an honest-to-Jebus games console. Leaving aside the lack of games experience, Microsoft had to sink billions of dollars into the Xbox program to get it off the ground, and Apple would be starting from scratch in the same way - though without the huge cash reserves a behemoth like MS has at its disposal.

*Let’s not get into the whole Wine Is Not an Emulator argument, it’s tiresome and misses the point entirely. The central purpose (certainly of Cedega - there is more of an argument as far as Wine itself is concerned) is to run programs which have been compiled for Windows, on Linux - the job of an emulator - rather than compiling Windows source code in a Linux-compatible fashion.

The Xbox Originals program is currently one of the most hotly-debated topics among Xbox 360 owners. Some see it as a valuable way of getting hold of new games that you simply can’t get anymore. Others see them as overpriced (£10.20) re-releases of old games that you can get cheaper in your nearest game shop’s second hand bin. Personally I have never bought second hand products, and since I got the 120Gb hard drive upgrade for Christmas I’ve been itching to find something substantial to put on it. In a manner more typical of public transport, two somethings substantial have turned up at once.

Monday will see the release of Ninja Gaiden Black (what other games would call a ‘Deluxe Edition’ - NG plus its addons) and Sid Meier’s Pirates! for the usual Xbox Originals price of £10.20 (1200 monopolist points). Decisions, decisions - although in a world which contains Assassin’s Creed I suspect that Pirates might win. Especially since the 360 is still stuck in the 1995 one-at-a-time downloading method. Seriously Microsoft, my Asus Eee (which, beautiful machine though it is, is not going to win any awards for power) can download multiple files simultaneously, so please get your fingers out and bring the 360’s downloader into this decade before it finishes!

 Source: 1up.com

The end of last year saw the launch of two new PC shooter games: Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. Both were heavily marketed, both received great reviews from the gaming press, and both bombed in sales terms. The reason? They required ludicrously powerful PCs to run. The inability of developers to write code to the capabilities of customers’ machines, rather than expect customers to upgrade their machine every ten days to suit their games, is the reason why so many people are deserting PC gaming for the consoles.

It isn’t that newer graphics and better games can’t be done on a set hardware specification - just compare the graphics on late PS2 games to games launched with the console. Hell, even compare 360 games now to 360 launch games. Assassin’s Creed > all, and PGR4 has substantially improved graphics over its predecessor. As I say, it isn’t that better games can’t be produced without increasing hardware requirements, it’s just that the upgradability of PCs makes developers too lazy to actually bother to do it.

Which makes the subject of this post all the more surprising. EA, normally considered the Barad-dur of the churn-em-out gaming sector, has come up with something truly original. Take the well known and (at least until the last spyware-ridden outing) loved Battlefield series, give it simple cartoon graphics and a game engine that will run on just about any computer. Give it away for free, and make money by selling purely cosmetic (ie no gameplay effect) customisations for characters and putting ads in the menu screen like Xbox Live does. A Fifa version of the concept has apparently made them million, so now they’re trying the concept on us violent Westerners.

The official site is up but is little more than a placeholder at the moment because they’ve sold the unveiling to the March issue of Games for Windows (out February 12th in the US, I don’t have a UK date for it yet). Roll on the summer!

 EDIT: Forgot my most important tip; MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO THE GAME HALF AN HOUR BEFORE THE APPEARANCE. Even when the servers work during these events, there is usually very serious lag which may prevent you from connecting if you leave it any later. Just connect, zone to your district of choice and then go do something else for 25 minutes.

The showpiece grand finale of this year’s Wintersday festival in Guild Wars is almost upon us. For those of you who weren’t playing the game last year (or had better, alcohol-related, things to do on New Year’s Day :P) I’ll give a brief rundown of how it works.

The finale happens in the ‘primary’ towns of Tyria and Elona - Lion’s Arch and Kamadan respectively (well, when Prophecies was simply known as ‘Guild Wars’, Droknar’s Forge was actually the primary town but that’s another story). Sorry Factions users, but you get the Dragon Festival instead of Wintersday. Anyway, the appearances are the usual every three hours starting from 8am GMT. The two gods (Grenth and Dwayna) hang around giving out presents - the ’special event’ items you probably have a zillion of from event quests and games anyway - for about 25 minutes, then they give out a hat. The difference between Wintersday and (for example) Halloween is that the type of hat you are given will depend on the god who ‘wins’ your district of the town by having the most followers gathered around them. To remove the unfair randomness, and ensure that people are able to get the hats they want, players have a tradition of making odd-numbered districts Grenth and even-numbered districts Dwayna ones.

Remember that if you are in a high-numbered district, server lag/staging can mean the event doesn’t start right on time (sometimes as much as 10 - 15 minutes later). Don’t worry about this, it is entirely normal and will not make you ‘miss’ the event. In fact, if you are lucky enough to get into a lower-numbered district, you can even use this to your advantage by ‘zoning’ to a higher numbered district which gives out a different hat as soon as you get your first one, and get two hats in one outing. I did this last year entirely by accident (was zoning to Kamadan to see a guildie, who was in d53).

Also remember that LA and Kamadan give out different hats - last year the former gave out the traditional santa hats/antlers (Dwayna/Grenth respectively) while the latter gave out Freezie Crowns and Jester Caps. So if you want to get all the possible hats you will have to attend four events - unless you use the zoning trick.

Useful links

• Wintersday finale appearance times (official wiki)
  
• Guild Wars network news - ArenaNet haven’t run even the smaller events (like the Dragon Festival) this year without massive server issues, and Wintersday is bigger than any of those. Leave yourself an extra event slot or two spare in case their network goes toes-up again.

BT have never really had ‘fans’, being the former monopoly telecoms provider and generally charging more than competitors for their internet service (in between making questionable use of their near-monopoly against said competitors). However, until recently their saving grace has been that the internet service is generally fast and reliable. Unfortunately it has been deteriorating rapidly in recent times. Many BT IP addresses are listed on spam blocklists (I’ve had quite a few ‘email not sent’ messages to this effect from my mailserver), and in the past week or so BT’s network has simply stopped connecting anyone to NCSoft’s network (their websites, as well as the Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa games). Perhaps it is in fact the reverse - due to the aforementioned spamlistings, servers in between BT and the destination are discarding connections due to security concerns? Either way, BT’s fault.

Problems with the distance from the telephone exchange, or with the weather, are understandable if irritating. What isn’t acceptable though is for the actual service - connecting the paying customer’s computer with whatever servers he or she wishes to access - to be so indefensibly dire.