brainscat.com

Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.

I just received an email from Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live!

Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.

I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.

I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.

Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.

In a recent interview J Allard (via Joystiq) claimed that the featureset of the 360 was designed to make modding unattractive and obsolete.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.

He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.

1. User plugs in hard drive via USB 2.0 or uses standard detachable HD.
2. Inserts game to rip.
3. Selects rip game from the menu.
4. Live prompts user for login, and game key, just like Steam does.
5. (Optional) User selects rip target drive.

Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.

Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.

Columbine survivor and friend of the killers and the killed gives his opinion on why violence in games is GOOD thing..

I just pre-ordered my Xbox 360 from GameStop and supposedly it’s coming in the first shipment of consoles. I remain skeptical, but I pre-ordered anyways because the down payment is refundable should I purchase a 360 somewhere else.

The only thing of substance in last night’s Xbox 360 party was the segment on the new Perfect Dark game. I learned Perfect Dark is pretty, that’s it. Nothing else. I guess if you hadn’t heard anything about the new 360 you would have also learned:

• 360 is white.
• 360 can stand on it’s side.
• 360 has different face plates.
• 360 has wireless controllers.
• 360 can go online…

All of these factoids are unispiring or are so vauge as to border on useless. They left out all the meat, and failed to show the world anything other than “more screenshots”. Microsoft really dropped the ball.

As an aside, I’m a Scoble-whore, because I use the word Scoble in this post (forgive me). Hopefully, he’ll see this and let the responsible party at Microsoft know how badly they failed to educate and excite people about what should be their newest coolest product. You had tons of eyeballs, you had MTV, and you filled up an hour with the amount of information that could have been printed on a brochure.

Props to Dan for the heads up. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to debut their new system on MTV instead of a major game convention, which as far as I know, is a first for a console manufacturer. Their choice to do this over MTV does make some sense though, as the next Xbox is going to be heavily marketed as a media center capable device.

On a quasi-related note… Does anyone know when/if MTV will show music videos again?

Hey all, Card Club episode 9 is ready for download. Yours truly even has a bit part in the show. Download it via bittorrent, or directly.

I’ve recently found a really informative podcast about poker called the Card Club which is put out by the Lord Admiral Group. I was a bit saddened to see, though, that they only had their three most recent podcasts available for download as they were concerned with bandwidth issues. Thankfully, Cincinnati Sean has graciously allowed me to create torrents of the first two public episodes. Give it a listen and see if you like it.

• Card Club Ep. 2 — Lord Admiral Radio
• Card Club Ep. 3 — Lord Admiral Radio

I’ve been playing Doom III off and on for a while and didn’t find it compelling enough to write a decent review. Michael Heilemann steals the words from my mouth, and writes his impressions in true blitz style. In short, “What he said.”

Pardon me, while I burst through alien enemies. I’m playing Half-Life 2, and save work, nothing else matters. Sure, I’ll post a review (probably on Monday) but given that I’m one third of a way through the game already, I’m confident enough to declare that this is easily the most engrossing game I’ve played ever.

Don’t expect emotional swings on the scale that movies can evoke, but be prepared to consistently and frequently notice that you’re empathizing with characters in the game. Prepare to be influenced by a characters furrowing brow, or pleading eyes.

Make sure you busy yourself by playing the game and reading Gamespot’s Final Hours of Half-Life 2. The article gives a ton of insight into decisions regarding HL2 but more importantly illuminates a lot of nuances in successful game and software design.

Last night, I finished Halo 2 on Heroic Co-Op mode.

• The pistol has been mega nerfed.
• Dual-weilding is a godsend when you’re surrounded by crap weapons.
• I am the sniping God. You must snipe in Halo 2.
• The spectre is a terrible vehicle.
• I never once used the gauss canon Warthog. Bummer.
• The sword is easily the best weapon in the game.
• Super dark levels aren’t fun, and are annoying.
• Production values in Halo 2 are amazingly higher than the first game. Huge exposition of the Halo universe.
• Single-player cutscenes have more info than Co-Op cutscenes.
• David Cross is the best scared marine you’ll ever hear.

Tonight, I embark upon Half-Life 2…

An anonymous wife confesses about her husband’s mistreatment at Electronic Arts. By way of Brandon who got it from Jason Olsen.

Get Steam so you can download the Source Engine SDK. Here’s the Valve announcement.

Wow, I’m a beta tester without a non disclosure agreement. Look forward in a couple days to a set of first impressions on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, their MMORPG.