It took a little bit to get used to, and I’m not too keen about the “trim” grab bars, especially because they can position themselves under the import video buttons, and don’t seem to auto-scroll when they’ve reached the edge of a screen, but in a word, it’s capable, and I’m sure you could come up with some simple stuff to prototype ideas in a pinch.

The whole “mobility” of the idea dies after you shoot and edit some video for a little bit, only to peek at your battery gauge and run to grab your charger. Since I keep one at my desk at work, it let me fiddle with the editing features while I was waiting for our projects to compile.

Geeky tidbit, 01022010 is a palindrome.

Enjoy!

For starters, with the help of Delicious Library 2, I put together a small page of all the games I’ve amassed in my library. I’ll be using this to keep track of the games I’m currently playing, books I’m currently reading, etc.

I’ve also been quite active on Twitter as of late. I generally use it to post things going on with/around me (as I have Twitter updating my facebook status), pass along links people post at work, and discuss the game industry and current events. With a bit of tinkering, I found a WordPress widget to include my five latest tweets, and I styled it to my liking.

Lastly, I updated the links present above my tab, to include some links, including my LinkedIn page.

Should be posting soon, but no promises.

A quest in the recent WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture? To which the answer is simple: Sure they should. In fact, I’ll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.

The article is thought-provoking and a quick read. I have to say, if games can spawn healthy debates about interesting and important issues in society without breaking the player out of the box, I’m all for it.

Coming up this week (hopefully) my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge and Psychonauts.

On top of being a panelist and talking with quite a few people, I was asked to be a judge in the $1500 elevator pitch competition. Having participated in one myself, I was thrilled to be able to be a judge in the event; knowing how exciting and fast-paced these tend to be. Out of the fourteen teams that participated, we had an incredibly varied group, both in age and ideas being presented. There was very little time for us to approach all the competitors afterward (and absolutely no time for reproach in between the pitches), and I am still bursting at the seams with tips on how some of these teams could have outdone themselves and improved their pitch.

The Presentation

Dress the part. This doesn’t mean that you are required to wear a suit of some sort, however if your business proposal is a formal business that expects that attire, then you should be in it. Nice jeans and a clean shirt work for a more informal business proposal. Two years ago, a woman wear an entire chef’s outfit for her restaurant pitch. It was memorable and played to her strength, which was perfect.

Know your lines. This goes for any business pitch, but even more so for an elevator pitch. This isn’t a speech you are reading to the judges, its a one-act play that you are putting on to entertain, inform, and amaze. Memorize your talk, and keep a set of your talking points (not your speech) handy, if you were to lose your place. I absolutely hate it when people are reading off a paper for me, it feels like a lack of preparation. Memorizing what you are going to talk about shows preparation, and confidence.

Know your limit. These competition rules that you are entering are passed out and posted much in advance. In conjunction with my last bit, you should not go over the allotted time period by more than missing your “thank you”. It’s important to get everything you have to say about your product and why the judges should give you the money above the other equally qualified competitors.

Don’t be a statue. Avoid sticking yourself behind a podium unless required to do so. Get out in front of it, be active and move around while giving your talk (but don’t pace). You should be so energetic in your talk that you need to have duct taped your shoes to your legs else you would be jumping out of them. And most importantly, smile! An average idea will seem less mediocre to the judges if you are doing back-flips in your presentation over your idea. However, there is a line in this matter, be careful not to cross it.

The Content

Attach yourself to the product. Why should you be working on this product/invention/idea? Give a one sentence kickoff some point to show that you belong doing what you’re doing. However, I absolutely do not care what degree you have, whatsoever. It does not make you better in my eyes that you have a college degree, or an MBA, or an MFA, or a PhD (unless you are the leading expert in your field). People have been incredibly successful with much much less. I get incredibly irate when people waste their breath to even throw that out in any presentation. When I would pitch UtiliTeam to people, I simply pointed out that I was a “Computer Science student and most importantly, a gamer”. There, I establish that I am a geek, and that I play video games. So of course a tech start-up focusing around video games is a legitimate place to find me. Find something that shows that you belong, that you had a connection to this idea more than a money making scheme. By relating yourself to your market, or your product, you instantly make yourself appear more knowledgeable about what you are presenting.

Paint a picture. Not literally, unless it involves your idea, but you should be giving a clear and concise picture to the judges. In the time that you have, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What problem are you looking to solve?
• Who are you looking to target?
• Why will your target market want your product, or how will you create a need?
• How will your idea make money?
• How will your idea grow through it’s success?
• What makes your idea unique?

Save story time for later. A few people will tend to try to tell you a heart wrenching story about their lives and how they overcame adversity to get to the point where they are today. While it may be a great story, the judges want to hear a great idea that has the opportunity to turn a profit. If you waste your time telling the judges how tough your life has been, you will either lose their attention, annoy them, or simply waste time you could have better spent talking about what makes your idea better than the others. And since you are being timed, this is an important decision to make. Stories should be kept to ways your product or idea has or will change someone’s life.

Attack your weaknesses. There are some business ideas that are amazing, but have some outright questions that will be asked immediately after your pitch. You should be able to identify these big questions, and answer them in your pitch. For example, this young lady had a great idea for a cafe in which pets and owners alike could be eating together. The cafe would provide healthy food, and a welcoming environment to like minded people to mingle and meet. Great idea, absolutely nothing was said about the sanitary issues that come with bringing animals into a eating establishment. What happens when an untrained animal does number one or two on the floor? What about bugs (fleas/ticks/lice)? This isn’t limited to this sole situation too, but if you finish your pitch leaving the judges with more questions then you did answers, you need to rework your approach.

Get harsh criticism. Being optimistic is great, but you need to find someone who hates your idea, and can tell you why. Finding opposition to your idea lets you identify potential issues or holes your pitch may have, and you can learn what others are going to like or dislike about it. Don’t take one persons opinion for it, they might just not be in your market. The important thing is, don’t let a friend, or loved one lull you into a sense of security and perfection because they think your idea is better than sliced bread.

Be weary of your market. Judges at these competitions are incredibly weary of trends, and will avoid them at all costs. It is this reason why fashion pitches/plans tend to do poorly at these competitions. Woman no longer get a weekly perm, your hammer pants have been long since donated, and baggy pants went out of style years ago. Start ups take time, money, people, and its very risky to consider starting a business where the winds may have changed direction by the time the company opens it’s doors. You want to be careful that your idea is not focusing on a trend, or a trendy market.

Know your costs. This goes into researching your pitch, answering the questions before they are asked, but it came up a few times yesterday. People were offering to start up companies that had incredible start up costs, and the return on investment would be incredibly slow. While it wasn’t in the competition – take a gym start-up: not only could you consider something like “Curves for Women” trendy (which would be a red flag) but at the same time you need to buy a multitude of top-of-the-line very expensive gym equipment, and then you need to charge reasonable rates to get new customers in the door. One elliptical machine can be a few thousand dollars, and you want to charge $240 a year. Either you have a very small gym to start off, or you have to expect to turn an entire town into customers before you break even in a few years.

While this isn’t a surefire way to win a competition, and it isn’t nearly everything that you need to cover when considering a pitch, it should put you in the right mindset for planning for your next pitch or business plan competition. Hopefully you find this helpful – and good luck.

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to re-play through Half Life 2. When I first bought it, I had gotten through a good portion of the game but I must have stopped and gotten focused on something else, as I didn’t remember *any* of the Citadel. Hopefully I can get through Episode 1 and 2 in the next few days, along with the BK:N&B demo with a friend.

Also, LittleBigPlanet is going to change the way we think about games. The game is a damn platform – the best description I’ve read thus far is: “a YouTube for games.”

From a hardware standpoint, there has been a massive speculation about Microsoft’s latest console, the Xbox 360. With varying reports saying that their latest console showing anywhere from 16% upwards to almost a 60% failure rate. When the Wii launched, it’s update service was bricking a small number of consoles. There were a few recalls/fixes for some major game accessories as well – Nintendo sent out a batch of straps and wiimote sleeves for added protection, and Rock Band’s guitars were suffering from issues with the whammy bar. I’m sure I’m missing a few on this list, and I am only going back a few years in terms of hardware issues.

I guess I should give some slack to the issues that have spawned up in the manufacturing process, as there will always be a small failure rate for any mass produced product. Bad CDs will be made, and defective consoles will get out there, and it will normally be a small majority (with the exception of the widespread issues with the 360) who have the bad luck and inconvenience to deal with the problem, and get a replacement.

However, I’m not so quick to hold my tongue on software releases, as there is a bit more involvement of putting together the game from start to finish, then declaring a product gold, and sending it out for mass duplication. From conception to gold, it’s all input: the development process, the investors, the studio, and your distributors.

For instance, I searched Kotaku for “bugs”, and “issues”, and I came up with a few recent games with some slightly annoying to fairly serious issues:

GTA IV (PS3)- Crashing/Freezing and multiplayer issues

Castle Crashers – Online play issues causing players to lose their entire save files

Bully: Scholarship Edition (360 Port) – Freezing Issues

Guitar Hero III (Wii) – Mono sound in a music game

The list goes (The Orange Box (PS3), Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, Battlefield 2), and I only went back a few pages for each search to get a broad idea of what’s come up recently. Some of these issues are near unforgivable, so glaring that it would seem that any competitent programmer/tester should have been able to see the issue from a mile away, and have made note of it before this was released to the masses. When you look back, how many consoles had recalls, or huge defects, or games went out so buggy that they were unplayable? While it wasn’t something that I noted when I was that young, it seems like the rate of failure and growing issues post-release seems to be coalescing at an alarming speed.

Before I piss off any game studio employee that may be scouting this blog to check me out for employment, I don’t outright question the quality of the employees that are creating and testing these products. In one hand, the problem lies on the gaming community. Gaming as a socially accepted hobby has become much more mainstream than it was twenty years ago. The competition between genres, studios, and product sequels is so fierce as new features, upgraded graphics, larger environments, and hours upon hours of gameplay are crammed into the products that it is forseeable that losing sight of anything is not possible — but probable. And why is there such a frenzy for all these additions? Consumers flock to the shiny, new features that are released. Media tends to highlight games with something new to offer, rather than focus on simple design and elegant gameplay. Because of this, studios can’t ignore what is inevitably required of them, and the laundry list of things to add piles up fast. The involvement of people in one major game release jumps into the hundreds, development cycles jump into multiples of years, IP and projects change hands as publishers, producers, marketing and corporate execs clash heads over features, content, the release timetable. And none of this aids in speeding up the release of the game by any means.

All of this is beyond me, and far removed from my biggest issue that has been plauging the industry lately. When it comes to games released in the past five years, I have grown increasingly sick of companies using the internet as a crutch for their development cycle. It seems that games now have a release schedule that extends far beyond going gold, and the definition of “gold” is almost unquestionably turning into “beta”: A studio finishes a game to get as complete as they can, to get as close as they can to the wishes of their higher-up’s for both the feature set and the timetable requested. The game is then packaged and sold to millions in its released locations. The developers then field the mass of bugs and issues that come up with the game, and release a patch over the ‘net shortly thereafter to fix what has come up. With PC games, this is okay – you can’t expect a developer to be able to test every driver, every setup that exists out there. But consoles? Come on.

As much as I am giddy for LBP’s release – they are only going to be releasing the online “create” functionality down the road. While their marketing spin on it almost makes sense (give the gamers time to actually learn the tools before you go working with others), it doesn’t remove them from hitting the principle problem.

Don’t rely on the internet to release an unfinished, unpolished product. It’s your job to keep your feature set managable in the time that you require to finish it in, including proper time to thoroughly test the product.

Sony
With the announcements of an 80GB PS3 to be released in September, rumors coming in about a new PSP refresh, and LittleBigPlanet having a “release date” set for 10.21.08, I’m gearing up for my PS3 purchase to come in the next few months, and looking forward to it. The God of War 3 cinematic that they released looks pretty cool, but I’ll keep my reservations about the game until I see, or experience some actual gameplay to see how they made the transition to the PS3, along with a third creative director switch in the series. I’m mostly interested in the release of LBP, and look forward to some fun nights of playing it with some friends, but it looks like the PS3 is starting to *slightly* look up in terms of what game library is available, and some people taking the platform a bit more seriously (notably, id Software). With Bioshock getting some potentially exclusive content the PS3, I may have made up my mind for what platform I’ll be purchasing the game for, but I’m not entirely sure how different that will be from the DLC that’s available for the 360. More research on that later. In terms of PSN titles, I’ll be looking to get my hands on echochrome, which has been already released, and Fat Princess, which looks like a funny take on a team-based game of “capture the flag” (or chubby princess).

Microsoft
These guys made my week/summer with their announcements, and the ones that mattered the most didn’t really have much to do in the way of gaming. They’re putting together a slick new dashboard update for gamers, which shows a much slicker, simpler design that lends to a great polished look for the console. They kicked out a price cut for some of the current models, which makes the 360 more affordable for some, and they’re going to be adding “avatars”, very similar to what the Mii’s offer to the Live service. On top of this, the two biggest announcements that hit home for me was the fact that I’ll be able to turn my Xbox into a streaming device for Netflix’s Instant Queue service. While I’m not a current Netflix subscriber, this is the last thing I needed to push me off the fence to take the dive when this service goes live. I’ve been hoping to turn my 360 into a more media-oriented device, rather than just playing games, and this helps put it in the right direction, along with my rewiring of my stereo to get surround sound coming from the 360’s digital audio out. Lastly, Microsoft is going to offer the option in the future to be able to install your game directly to the hard drive, giving the disc drive a bit of slack, and potentially a longer lifespan, as well as improving the load time on some games. This seems to be very well received, even though Sony had beaten Microsoft to the punch on this feature, because Microsoft is making the feature optional, rather than mandatory. Soon enough, we’ll also be seeing The Behemoth’s next game: Castle Crashers. While I liked Alien Hominid, I’m hoping they release a game that myself and a few friends can get past the second level. (I mean really guys, tone it down just a smidge)
Wii
I don’t have much to say about Nintendo, other than the fact that this was incredibly disappointing for me. Watching the video of their keynote made me never want to play Wii Sports again, and while I’m interested to see what their MotionPlus accessory can do for improving game input, I’m reserved to see myself dropping more money on add-ons until I see a game worth buying it for. The few things that I’m looking forward to on the Wii sit on third party developers – MadWorld looks like it’s going to be awesome.

Other
In news outside of any specific “camp”, I’m looking forward to see what Bungie has to offer to the gaming community, and for us to find out who this Superintendent really is. I’m curious about Sonic Unleashed, but not very excited about this whole beast-at-night aspect of the gameplay. E3 is supposed to be the pinnacle of the gaming season, but it’s timing is seeing to be a rough time for studios to fit in new announcements, as they usually rely on more than five months to hype a new product before the Holiday season.

I’ve been thinking similarly along the lines of where console gaming has been taking the industry over the recent years, and wondering if we’re experiencing a similar response, are consoles the next step in gaming? Sure, there’s been a pretty defined split between the two throughout the past, with certain genres (most specifically FPS) generally being dominated in the PC market, while other genres would dominate the consoles (such as platformers, racing, sports, etc.). That line has become more and more split with the growing success of the consoles, and there aren’t many games for the PC that you can’t pickup for a console nowadays.

Three years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report predicting the rise in console success and the slowing of the success of the PC. I used some of this data to show the aggregate growth of online gaming as a whole for Zapdot’s business plan, hoping that they’d be wrong down the road. I was primarily a PC gamer then, and have my roots in gaming from the PC FPS (Rainbow 6, Quake 2&3, UT2K3, and CS and CS:S). Competitive gaming had bloomed on the PC platform, and has had some amazing appeal to network television through its success: from interviews to short segments, to full blown TV shows. Not surprisingly, PWC wasn’t off their marker three years down the road. While I haven’t had access to current numbers to correlate to their estimates, it goes without saying that console gaming is flourishing now, with thousands making the switch daily.

Wednesday’s Penny-Arcarde post made me revisit these thoughts, and they made some of the same arguments I’ve been barking at for awhile.

First and foremost, Computers have been always the best platform out there in terms of the technology that can be utilized for the games themselves. They have always looked better, provided more vast experiences in online play, and for awhile, put you in touch with a much larger community. The biggest selling point for me (and the deciding factor for most hardcore PC gamers) was the precision of input on the computers always trumped that of its console counterparts.

However, I’ve even found myself spending more time on consoles lately, and the answer as to why is pretty easy: comfort. I can sit down on my comfortable couch, and pick up a game for a few hours on my HD TV, enjoying surround sound if the system I’m in provides it. Moreover, the TV and surround system I’m using doesn’t have to be solely set aside for just a gaming system (or systems). With broadband I can just as easily play online with my friends as I could with my computer, with an interface that is centralized around the gaming experience

To get a similar experience on a computer, the price is higher, and includes more wires, more setup time, and potentially, a bit more of frustration and hassle. Tycho put it best, saying that someone who would prefer this simplicity doesn’t make them an idiot, it makes them pragmatic.

So take the PC Platform, and look at what made it better than the console system: online interaction, hardware, and input devices. These major issues are being addressed by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service is utterly amazing compared to what is out there right now. Integration with its games are near seamless, communication and community itself work very well, and with online collaborations like bungie.net to allow screenshot and movie sharing is a giant leap in the right direction. Sony had the right idea with the hardware, putting out the most powerful gaming console that the market has ever seen. This is effectively their biggest issue right now though, as it will take years for coders to even fathom the use of six cores to their benefit in game design. Regardless of this point, we’ve got the “power” concept that we are constantly revisiting in the PC segment being addressed and dealt with. Lastly, we come to the incredible precision that a mouse and keyboard provides to the user. I won’t go out and say that Nintendo has covered this angle, but they are pioneering the industry in the right direction. Nintendo had the melons to release a completely new form of input into games, and tear the industry away from the standard stick-button controller approach that it had been comfortably relying on for the past two decades. This input isn’t the best in the world for trying to convert PC gamers into a hardcore FPS shooter, but it’s a step in the right idea that we need to rethink the hardware we are giving gamers to interact with their virtual environments as they toil through them, and that we should take a direction that is not only fun, and simple but intuitive as well.

So I wouldn’t jump and say that PC Gaming is starting to see it’s demise, because the lines of what PC Gaming is has become more and more blurred, where the typical boundaries that defined PC Gaming has been adopted and translated into today’s modern day consoles. Furthermore, while a PC will be considerably more powerful than the latest console, console hardware specifications are catching up. I think (and certainly hope) that while games will still be available on the PC as time continues, we will start seeing a movement towards a better input system that potentially mimics or improves the PC’s dominating stance in this area, and a more unified console experience for gamers. As a whole, I think this generation is just the final step before we get to see the next evolution in games in how they’re delivered, played, and experienced by gamers.

But until then, I still need to decide if I want to buy Bioshock for the PC or my 360.