Grummz' Grumblinz

Last night, I went to a Cinepolis deluxe theater for the first time to see The Hobbit. My wife and I had been meaning to see it for some time and I was really excited.

It was also my first time to a deluxe theater, and we were a little apprehensive about the cost. “Would it be worth the extra couple bucks?” I have to say, after sitting through a 2 and 1/2 hour movie, the answer is yes. What cinched it was the fact that my wife, who has arthritis, was actually able to sit through the whole movie without being in terrible pain. We’ll be seeing all our movies there from now on (Skyfall is next on our list…having kids means you see movies late, if at all).

As for The Hobbit, much has been said about its novel use of higher framerates to achieve a different look. To many people, 48 frames per second (movies are normally 24), made the film look like “video” or too “real life” and felt it detracted from some aesthetic qualities of film. I have to agree…at least at first to anyone not used to the effect.

You see, Imee and I have been watching all our movies and TV at home, on our 240hz Sony TVs. These TV’s interpolate motion to create higher framerates. And, like The Hobbit, it can be jarring at first. But we’ve been watching movies on our TV like this for a year now, and we’ve grown not just accustomed to it, but actually prefer it. Yes, there are some terrible panning artifacts and we initially felt everything looked like “cheap video”, but now when we try and go back to regular framerates, things now look incredibly soft and blurry to us. 

I think it might be a case of not realizing something has improved and just focusing on what is different. Just like how you never notice how much sharper Blu-Ray is until you go back to your old DVDs. So, being accustomed to it, we didn’t notice anything strange when we saw The Hobbit in 48 frames per second. No cheap video feeling, no “fake” feeling…just awesomeness. And it was awesome. Sharp, crisp images, beautiful landscapes and fantastic, more life-like 3D. I think it will be hard for us, personally, to go back to 24 fps movies. 

So how about the movie itself? Hmmm. I liked it, but did not love it. For one, I felt it was too long, and that taking a short novel like The Hobbit and stretching it into 3 movies was a mistake. The entire first hour I alternated between muttering “I can’t believe how boring this is” to “this is like a long, tedious version of Time Bandits.” I was not entertained in the first half of the movie, with its plodding pace and odd segways into material not found in the original novel.

The second half was very entertaining and epic, but I could not shake the feeling of “I’ve seen this all before” as scene after scene just reminded me of something similar in the Lord of The Rings movies (which I had just started watching again). What bothered me even more was how fantastical some of the action situations and escapes were. Some of the highest action moments reminded me of how Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull broke my immersion with the whole “hide from a nuke in a fridge” stunt.

Some of the CG work didn’t feel consistent either. Gollum was incredible! But Gollum’s amazing level of CG and animation work just highlighted how poor I thought “the Pale Orc” badguy was rendered. His level of detail paled in comparison and his expressions were wooden and game-like compared to Gollum. At least his Warg was extremely well done.

Finally, I really hated all the sequences with Radagast the Brown, who does not make any appearance in the actual novel. For me, this was almost to The Hobbit what Jar Jar Binks was to Star Wars. Why they had to make such an important wizard such a bumbling, confused and laughable character is beyond me. One wonders if Peter Jackson, in taking so many liberties with The Hobbit, now feels he is the official writer and re-writer for all things Tolkien and can do as he pleases…even when the results never match the brilliance and themes of Tolkien’s incredible world.

In the end, It was a very well done film…that was in no means bad and in many ways great, but left me feeling a little sad and empty.

Quite an interesting change of position…is Warface performance driving this mood swing? Cavat Yerli totally is making “all the new games we’re working on” F2P, er, except by “all” he “some” and more like “five years” from now.

In August, Crytek CEO, Cevat Yerli,  had this to say about F2P:

“Right now we are in the transitional phase of our company, transitioning from packaged goods games into an entirely free-to-play experience.

“What this entails is that our future, all the new games that we’re working on, as well new projects, new platforms and technologies, are designed around free-to-play and online, with the highest quality development.”

This is what he said today on Rock, Paper Shotgun:

RPS: You’ve been all about free-to-play lately, so will the next Crysis be designed around that? 

Cevat Yerli: It’s too early to say [whether the next Crysis will be F2P]. I don’t think F2P’s a mutually exclusive way of looking at things. I mean, the future is definitely free-to-play, but likewise, retail can co-exist with it. Premium games can be free-to-play. When I said free-to-play’s gonna be our future, I meant that and I hold to it. But I didn’t mean it for tomorrow. When I say there will inevitably be only free-to-play games, I mean that there might be ones where you can just download them with an free-to-play business model, or you can go to the store and buy it for $60. So that’s what I meant: there’s gonna be free-to-play available, which brings the entry level down to zero from a price perspective.

But if people like packages or they want to go to the store for a special edition with a nice statue or whatever, then they’re going to get that experience. Because that’s how games still are for at least another five years. But that amount is fading off every year. So fewer and fewer people are buying packaged goods, and at some point, it’ll just be people downloading games and streaming them.

Sure, it’s not perfect. The price, at just shy of $2800 is extremely high. You can get better specs for cheaper, and you can get a DVD drive in any other laptop that’s not a netbook.

So why do I love this thing so much? It’s because its the closest thing I’ve seen to a PC manufacter trying to do something different. Different enough that the Blade reminds me more of a Mac than it does a PC, in all the good ways: build quality, thinness (thiner than my Macbook Pro!), and the innovative Switchblade UI (SBUI).

You have to understand, I’m a Mac whore. I buy everything they make and own just about every laptop they’ve ever made. As of this moment, I have around five Mac laptops and 1 iMac. But as much as I love the Mac, my favorite games are on the PC (Firefall, Mass Effect, etc.)

I have also owned a lot of PC laptops…top of the line models from many name brand vendors, gaming vendors too. None of them give me the “Mac” feel…except the Razer Blade. It’s attention to detail is outstanding. The case feels solid, pure metal, and with a trackpad with its own built in display and OLED keys that is in the PERFECT position for slower paced games like Diablo 3 and ME3 (I use a Microsoft Arc mouse for gaming).

All the other PC laptops I’ve owned have felt cheap by comparison. First off, the 17” models from other manufacturers are huge, hulking monstrosities, encased in pastic that creaks under the weight they were clearly not designed to handle. The power supplies are huge, heavy and make already heavy laptops a problem to carry (one even broke the strap of the “official” backpack of the manufacturer as I was going through an airport). Razer’s powerbrick, on the other hand, is small, slim and leightweight. Why can’t other manufacturers besides Apple and Razer get this down? Razer’s laptop is also super light, without compromising rigidity.

Another cue Razer has taken from Apple is the display. Its crisp, sharp and with excellent edge to edge visibility. I’ve had laptops from others that have a viewing angle so narrow, that I feel like I need a bite bar and head harness to strap my head perfectly to the center of the screen so I can see all the rich colors in the games I play.

The Razer also comes standard with an SSD, which is quiet and fast. But the real star here is the SBUI. You see, the Razer has a full blown, mobile phone quality, multi-touch display for a trackpad! Now, one thing I worked with Razer on during the prototype stage was making sure the trackpad works with gaming. You see, the dirty little secret that other trackpads have is that you can’t game on them…they have a driver that assumes that when you are pressing keys, you won’t be needing to say, swipe the pad with your finger, and therefore renders them useless for gaming…try pressing “W” to move foward in an FPS while at the same time swiping your trackpad to turn left and right…does not…work! Razer made sure this worked on their Blade, as well as tuned their keyboard to make sure keys don’t lock each other out and are low latency to boot. You can actually GAME on this without a mouse. Just ask my 8 year old son, Alex. He owns people as a recon in Firefall with just this setup on a Razer Blade.

But the trackpad is also a high resolution display, and also has two banks of five keys right above it that are OLED enabled, allowing you to customize the icons ON THE FRICKIN KEY ITSELF! This is vastly untapped potential here. The default apps its comes with don’t do that great a job of demonstrating the potential, but here at Red 5, we are doing some serious research into making this work for Firefall. Imagine being able to display the minimap on the display, instead of on your valuable screen real-estate, or to divert chat messages to it. At the very least, you can map all your favorite keys to those gorgeous display buttons. We’ll  see, we’re still experimenting.

Power-wise, its plenty enough for Firefall, which can be pretty demanding at its higher settings. It runs Crysis, Skyrim and other games really well. It’s not the fastest, for sure, but its *plenty* fast for gaming at medium-high settings.

Finally, the thing is rock solid. All my other PC laptops have died…seriously. I’ve had one fail within a year to charge its battery (even with a new battery), and I’ve had blue-screen, overheating and multiple failures with another vendor *repeatedly*…in fact, I’ve had four laptops from that same manufacturer fail on me. The Blade, however, keeps on ticking.

So, Razer, thank you for being such a great partner, and for making the Blade. I can only hope you will find a way to reduce the cost of this magnificent laptop so that there can be no excuse for any gamer not to own one. And if anyone is looking for a great laptop and who knows what I’m talking about when I say “Macbook quality,” look no further. Your laptop awaits.

www.razerzone.com

I don’t hate consoles. I just don’t see them as offering as much as PC games, tablet games and more. My idea game machine is something I can take with me, and then hook up wirelessly to any TV or monitor I am near. Airplay from Apple, but without the lag and a universal standard for all displays.

The graphics power of these gaming tablets would increase every six months as new models come out, not every 5-6 years as current consoles are locked into. It will also be open, so that anyone can create games for it, and not have to give most of your money to the console platform holders. Games would also be MUCH cheaper. Free in many cases, or about $9.95 - $19.95.

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are clinging to old ideas. So long as they continue to do so, consoles are dead.

I completely deleted my Facebook page. I wasn’t comfortable supporting that company. They make tons of money selling your information, and therefore, no matter what they say, they can never protect your privacy. It’s a conflict of interest for them.

There are large, looming forces in the net that are trying to control your information, restrict what you can see, and choose what websites and products can succeed while charging you more and more for it. The 1% is coming to the net. We can’t let this happen to the Internet. 

I find myself going through that familiar feeling of not being able to tear my eyes off of something despite how terrible it may be. That is the situation with 38 Studios, which as of yesterday bounced a check on their loan repayment obligations to Rhode Island. The drama has all the twists and turns of a soap opera: famous baseball player’s fall from a great height, missing persons (the CEO), a media circus, Curt’s soundbites and video clip of his rushed departure for the EDC emergency meeting, government officials resigning, an angry mob of thousands (taxpayers), and new inexplicable developments hour by hour: bounced check, unpaid employees and website profiles mysteriously deleted and reposted.

But there is a huge, tragic, human cost to this. A very real cost. I’ve closed one game studio before (my first one out of school), and I watched as Red 5 nearly endure the same fate (I was not CEO at the time and removed from day to day operations). It’s probably one of the most stressful, horrible and gut wrenching experience I’ve ever gone through (and I’ve been through one armed revolution in the Philippines, and one border skirmish in Vietnam vs Thailand. *See Issue #5).

You can’t imagine the sense of loss, of all that hard work gone to waste, and the immediate survival fight or flight of “what the hell do I do now!?!” Nobody should have to go through that. I really feel for everyone at 38 Studios right now. Curt Shilling seems to be a genuine gamer, earnest in his desire to create something great and fun to play. At least that was my impression when I served on a panel with him at the Harvard Cyberposium. I don’t think he should have taken down his profile from the 38 Studios website, but perhaps that was a disgruntled and unpaid web designer.

He recognized a great game with potential in “Kingdoms of Amalur” and bought the studio. By all accounts, the series was well loved by many gamers, and managed an 81 on metacritic. It also only sold 400,000 copies across 3 platforms (PC, Xbox, PS3) EDIT: May be 1.1M, data is fuzzy, but that’s still low for a AAA title. Amalur, is a prime example of what I call the “shrinking middle ground” in gaming.

I won’t go much into it right now, but the current model favors games that can achieve sales through huge marketing, known IPs and gigantic budgets. Its the only way for games to get premium shelf space in game stores and websites, and its a game that only the biggest games can play. At the other end  you have small indie games that can do very well off of 400,000 in sales. In the vast middle ground, there are a ton of great games. But since the distribution and marketing model is so broken (and business model), they are disappearing along with the studios that made them. A big barrier is the $60 cost of entry. Gamers can’t experiment at those prices and try things. Games should have a zero cost of entry and a level playing field for distribution. Free2Play is just one potential model. Minecraft had another, with selling early access to the alpha and beta, and kickstarter is yet another model. These models allow us to try new ideas as developers without spending a ton up front, and allow gamers access to try a whole host of new, innovative ideas without having to spend much or anything at all.

As 38 Studios proves, we have to get out of this rut. Change everything, create fun.

After playing a bit more, turns out Diablo skills are not quite as linear as I thought. Each skill remains viable even  as you get new ones, powered up by runes as you go along. I’m able to mix and match the previous skills I’ve learned with new ones, to discover new combos. A lot of flexibly there. In D2, we had the issue where people would just dump all their points into one skill, and never use the others. This, I think, is better. 

So, its pretty weird playing Diablo 3 when working on Diablo 2 had nearly swallowed my soul. I have to say I’m having a damn good time as a Demon Hunter. The caltrop, snare and rapid-fire combo is very fun. I have a machine-gun in a fantasy game!

I’m only a couple hours in, about to kill Leoric. I am envious of all the achievements of my friends flashing by on the screen. It drives me harder. There is nothing like a leaderboard that *matters.* I don’t care how I rank among 3 million Diablo players, I love seeing how I’m doing against my friends.

The authentication bugs are a pretty big downer. I remember how hard we worked to sort the bugs out of WoW’s authenticator at launch. I had hoped they would just use the same, painfully proven and tested system. Seems they went with something completely new, which is baffling and frustrating at the same time.

I was worried before that the game wasn’t dark enough to feel like traditional gothic Diablo, but I’m pretty satisfied with the look, actually. The Interwebs were highly concerned with the look of D3, even threatening petitions and boycotts, but it seems they were unnecessary.  But if you haven’t see the non-Cow, Cow level, you have to check it out.

But for all its 3d glitz and glamour, playing D3 feels a little dated. Its not the isometric viewpoint…its something else. Perhaps after several God of Wars, I feel like combat could be so much more modern. Hmmm, God of War style online game…sign me up.