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.

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.

• 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.

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

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

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.

• 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…

Halo 2 comes out on the same day. I think it’s fair to say that you’ll be seeing some reviews of kickass games.

You see, I purchased a package, that was only “Half-Full” and this made me, as my friends like to say, a sad sad panda. Half Life was the best game ever when it was made. Half Life 2 has been a long time coming and I can’t stress enough that the anticipation that turned to dissapointment last night was in the league of mental torture. I can only hope the following confession to come is more humerous than not.

My only salvation, last night, was to drown my sorrow away in a CS:S binge session, an entire evening of beholding the new elegant Source engine mixed with the frustration of getting beat up on by Counter-Strike junkies that have played long after I stopped a couple years ago. You see, I am a recovering Counter-Strike-a-holic and this used to be my life. I know what people who play video games constantly think like and what they dream about (playing video games, actually). I did not write that bio, by the way. The night was something of an experience for me, and I can only imagine the feeling was something akin to what heroin addicts feel when they find the “really good junk”. As the boys from Penny Arcade would say, Counter-Strike:Source is shit-hot.

On an even further tangent, this was the first real site I ever designed. I didn’t even know what a blog was back then, but looking back, it’s quite amusing.

I highly recommend the Steam service as it’s very fast, and does an excellent job of managing all those pesky cd keys. It even downloads and patches your games AND mods, includes security modules a la punkbuster, and will even allow you to play your games on any computer you go to (but not at the same time). Go get it tomorrow.

Honestly, I’m attempting to figure out how in the hell trackbacks and pingbacks really work. Currently, I’m a bit baffled. Stay tuned for an update with an update to how it actually works.