A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Howdy y'all. I've been quiet on LJ, even though I've been melting my keyboard under the fury of my frantic typing into Twitter, so feel free to read my recent stuff there. I've been far too deep into the end-of-year gravity well action playset to organize my thoughts into more than 140 characters at a time. (Or, sometimes, more than 280.) I have no doubt that I shall return presently.

However, ahkond recently expressed surprise at my tweeted assertion that I found the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2 more fun to play than the PC version, and I wanted to write up a deeper examination of my reasons in a longer format. So, yes, the rest of this post is video-game neepery, and you will probably want to skip it unless you're into that sort of thing.

Earlier this month, Valve hosted a special TF2 free-play weekend, and I jumped right in, blessing my good fortune that it happened right after I had set up the used PC I'd recently bought from a friend. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that, for one reason or another, the game didn't work very well on my machine. Simply put, my framerate was either rather bad or completely unacceptable, depending upon how many other players were in my immediate vicinity.

Several friends, hearing my dismay over Steam-chat, suggested various fixes: What kind of video card had I installed? Was I running all the latest drivers? Did I google to see if my particular setup need some more patches somewhere? Perhaps I could try playing with some of the game's graphics-quality sliders?

After spending a couple of hours in frantic configuration-wanking abandon, I paused to catch my breath, lift my head, and look down the road. What looked back at me were the dully glimmering eyes of a hundred yaks, all lined up, waiting to be shaved.

Now, I am totally down with people who can get into the sub-hobby / metagame of keeping their PCs up to date with the latest bits n pieces of hardware, drivers, and operating system patches necessary to keep them aloft for another month or two. If that works out for you, then by all means, please pursue it with all due relish.

But, look: A key reason that I enjoy playing video games on consoles (and not PCs) is the same as a key reason I do all my work exclusively on Macs (and not PCs): I don't want to think about any of that stuff. The thought of having to think about any kind of low-level hardware configuration, and the mid-level firmware and software diddling that necessarily comes with it, makes me shudder with dread. I can just feel all the tufts of matted yak-hair scratching against my skin. Ugh.

TF2 is a great game, and it is a shame that I can't currently enjoy its more recent features, since ol' Valve isn't hurrying to add them to the Xbox version. But I am so not into the idea of paying dollar-sign question-mark question-mark question-mark, and burning up gord knows how many hours from my life, just to bring one of my secondary computers the ability to play a game which, er, I already own a perfectly good copy of for my game console. So, yeah. No.

(Also, it happens that I learned to play modern FPSes on the two-stick, two-trigger console controller, and so am quite comfortable with their use, to the perpetual befuddlement of my WASD + mouse-using friends. So be it!)

I'm going to be online for some Xbox Live shenanigans at 9PM eastern tonight. TF2 and Castle Crashers are likely to be played, and maybe some Carcassonne. Feel free to join me! Note that I'm going to concentrate on how player-herding menu options work at least as much as on actually playing any games... this is a research trip!

Microsoft's having a sale on these two downloadable games for Xbox 360. Assault Heroes, a top-down shoot-em-up with Robotron-style controls, is ~$3.13 (i.e. 250 Microsoft Points); and Catan, a very nice port of Settlers, is $6.25. I already own the latter, and just picked up the former, because hey.

Both support network play, so If any of y'all would like to Xbox Live either game up with me, give a shout.

Gee if only there were some web-based service I could use to announce that I own and enjoy a certain game, and wish to play it online with others. I know, right?

(Yeah, I should make a Gameshelf post about this. I should made a GS post about a lot of things. Doo dee doo.)

Also on sale for $6.25 is Boogie Bunnies, which is Snood except cuter and stupider. I wasn't blown away by its demo, but if you want to play a, er, Snoodlike on your high-def TV and you have 500 Microsoft Points burning a hole in your Microsoft Points Containment Unit, go for it.

I am looking to build a contact-list of folks who may be interested in being the first betatesters for a major new Volity Games project.

It is not a game, or a thing for game programmers; it is an entirely new service that our company will run, separate and different from anything it's done previously. It does carry Volity Nature, though, in that it's all about improving the landscape of online, multiplayer games, and helping like-minded game-players find one another.

Specifically, we are looking for current users of the Xbox Live online system. For the most part, this means people who play games on a Xbox 360 console. We're especially interested in folks who have a "gold" XBL membership, permitting them to play multiplayer online games via the Xbox. If you happen to use Xbox Live with an original Xbox console, we'd also be interested in hearing from you.

The first wave of testers should be willing to not just use our service, but to also find ways to break it, and write up critiques about how it could work better. If you think you may be interested, please write me at jmac@jmac.org, or comment on this post. Feel free to share this request with people who you think would be good, smart testers. People who are on my XBL friends list will be getting an email about this from me sometime in the future, regardless of how they respond to this post (but feel free to comment anyway).

We haven't announced the project yet, or released a date when we'll begin testing, but it's near enough to now that it's time to start gauging the size of our initial tester pool. After the first testers have been crawling around a while and we've banged out the biggest lumps in the system, we'll start being less coy about it and commence letting more people on board. Watch this space.

Yeah, so I dropped a sawbuck to change my Xbox gamertag (username) away from my real name. (If I understand correctly, current Xbox-friends needn't adjust anything to compensate.) While the tag now points at my domain name, it adds just enough abstraction-distance to make me comfortable while staying within a global namespace I don't feel silly or false in using.

After buying "gold" Xbox Live memberships for myself and classicaljunkie, I quickly concluded that having my full legal name being my handle wasn't at all like using a full name in an internet forum. Basically, when I would sit down to play Uno with XxHiReDhItMaNxX, WLD BLDOG 1980 and BLOODYSTOOL69 - or whomever - I would essentially be inviting them all to address me by my real name (out loud, via their headset mics) while their pulsatingly macho American handles kept me from doing the same. This made me feel more than a little creeped out, and reminded me of nothing so much as the time I lost my official plain-red Cohasset Youth Basketball League T-shirt, back when my parents had signed me up for basketball, and so I played a game wearing a red T-shirt my mom found that had my name on it, making me the only kid on my team wearing his name. This would be the last game of basketball I would ever play, my friends.

Oh boy! Rivet works much better in the new apartment, since now my sessile Mac is hooked directly to the router via Ethernet (thanks to dictator555's wire-running machinations, from back when she lived here). It didn't work at all when I was trying to play movies more than a few megs in size over my old 802.11b connection.

But now I can torrent down entire TV series upstairs, and then immediately play them on the downstairs TV via the XBox, without having to move or change anything. I just tested it on an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I grabbed some months ago, but haven't watched because it was too much of a pain. No longer!

Also can access my whole music collection from the TV. Yeah, totally gonna buy this.

The new Penny Arcade XBox game takes its gameplay cues from Final Fantasy, and is $20 despite being the first chapter of a downloadable episodic series. I find both of these facts surprising; I guess I was expecting something more like the Sam & Max games. Well, good for them that they're trying something new (sort of), but that's a double sawbuck I'm not spending.

What I really want is Sam & Max on my XBox. There are plenty of Googlable articles hinting at the advent of this very thing, and they're all over a year old. No idea if this means that good things are in store soon, or if it's a dead issue.

Oh but apparently there's a Wii version coming out. Cool.

After a week of consultation and thought, I've decided to pursue "Project X" at full tilt. This involves me creating a prototype game for the XBox 360 and then pitching it at Microsoft, as a candidate for their "XBox Live Arcade" service of smaller, downloadable games. Things have aligned in such a way that not doing this right now would seem very foolish. Over the last few weeks, and much faster than I anticipated, I got Microsoft's ear, and I earned the support of the rights-holders of the game I wish to adapt. I have the skills, and the time to do it. OK: let's do this, then.

Success, which looks not impossible, spells a significant amount of prestige and passive income. Yes this turf looks a bit familiar. Already the project is reminding me of writing the books, except that I'll actually enjoy the work, and the checks will be bigger. Much bigger, if everything falls out the way I hope, and I have good reason to believe that it really can. I mean, actual market research, with hard numbers. Good stuff.

I shall continue to avoid describing the particular game in public blogging, at least until the project pitch has been delivered, and its fate decided. At that point, on success, there would be great joy, a press release or two, and then six months of deep magicking. On failure, there would be surprise and disappointment, and perhaps a time of deep magicking anyway with an eye to float the title in the upcoming XNA Community Games thing. But the first route would be quite preferable, since it would include a great deal of support from Microsoft.

This project will happen under the Appleseed aegis. (I'm ramping up a DBA to use specifically for game publishing.) I'll look for ways to involve Volity, but Volity is not a deal-maker-or-breaker. No matter what happens, though, there's plenty of opportunity for positive blowback in Volity's direction.

I have been playing too much Half Life 2, during this, the first week (of two) I've set aside for the greater glory of Volity. Before putting it away one last time, I made sure to unlock the 5-point XBox achievement you get for killing a headcrab by throwing a toilet at it.

The story and structure reminds me a lot of Marathon. This is not a bad thing. I'm unsatisfied with the characterization of the protagonist, though. Judging from NPC reactions he's a brilliant and creative scientist, but from PC actions he's a silent, staring robot who is only able to follow orders and kill things: a standard-issue FPS dude. This same setup played into the plot of Marathon in a clever way, but here they just pretend it ain't so, nearly to the point of self-parody.

I was amused to find the turrets from Portal as enemies, and then meta-amused that I thought of them as such, since this game is two years older. (And the turrets are, sadly, far less polite.)

Other than last night's yuckiness I've been really enjoying my XBox. It's everything I hoped it'd be, from both fun-having and game-wonking perspectives. I have added my (cough) GamerCard to the jmac.org games page, and here it is again:





Yeah, "zendonut" was taken. I came up with that username when I was 28 (for my first AIM account) and while I still use it where I can, it may be the last silly internutty handle I'm capable of creating. I have so far run into nobody else using anything resembling their full legal name as their XBox handle, which makes me feel unique, and old, but not in a bad way.

My "vacation" failed to start last week, since my main active client had a bunch of revisions for me to make, which didn't surprise me. The work I have done went live on Friday, so we are now done-done and I hope to do interesting things starting today. (The client's already started to make new sales via the software I wrote, which makes everyone feel good.)

First, though, I spent the weekend sick at home, playing video games. Saturday classicaljunkie hung out and we played XBLA stuff together, and Sunday I spent alone playing Half Life 2, which is new to me. And, erm, I just played it all morning this morning, too. That's enough of that.

This is my first exposure to the current generation of digital gaming with a high-def display, sitting at the end of an intertube ready to pump more gamage at me whenever I wanted. I can see why someone could just sit and play forever. (Microsoft happily keeps your credit card info on-file after your first online purchase, so buying more downloadable gobbidge thereafter is as easy as pressing a button. They are bastards.)

I haven't played TF2 yet. I'm a little scared to. I had fun runnin around one of the maps alone just to check out the place.

The sickness was worrisome. After a month of masterful regularity, maybe the best I've ever had, I didn't go for five days and it was starting to hurt. Sunday I turned to a coordinated regimen of many things to get it all out, and it worked, and it was pretty awful. I am going to drink through this bottle of prune juice and hope that balance has been restored to the force. I have no idea what's going on.