Live Mesh

As I said in the last post, the Microsoft employee meeting acts as a showcase for new technologies brewing at the company, and what I saw yesterday was pretty cool.

Windows 7 looks awesome and there were some peeks into Office 14 and Live services that looked cool, too.

One sweet thing you can get your hands on right now is something called Live Mesh. You know those online storage services that give you a certain amount of gigabytes of Web storage so you can backup your files and access them from any computer? Well, Live Mesh takes that concept to the next level through an applet that lets you seamlessly swap files between Mesh-enabled computers.

Here’s how it works: first, you sign up for the Mesh service, on mesh.com. A free account gives you 5 gigabytes of online storage, with the option to pay for more, and if you already have a Hotmail or Windows Messenger account, then it’s as simple as plugging in your existing username and password.

Mesh.com then gives you a minimalist page with a few large icons, one of which is “add device”. Click that, then you’re prompted to download a small (I think it was under 2 megabytes) app. That pops a Mesh icon in your system tray and lets you create Mesh folders on that computer.

Sign in to mesh.com and repeat that “add device” procedure on each PC you want Mesh-enabled.

In my case, the end result is that I have “work” and “pictures” folders on my work and home PCs. At home, I dragged some photos into the pictures folder, and when I checked my work computer, boom, there they were. Likewise, I can drop a few documents into my work folder and have them be automagically synced to my home PC. Pretty slick.

As the guy demo’ing the product said, to much applause: “No longer do I have to e-mail myself the files I need.” Amen to that.

It’s simple and cool. What more do you need than that?

One final note, on presentation. It was clear that 1) the people demo’ing the various products cared deeply about what they were showing, and thought it was cool and 2) the problems they addressed may not have been of global import, but they were things that mattered to people’s everyday lives. Things like ignoring e-mail threads that digress into irrelevance, things like eliminating tenacious but impenetrable able error messages, things like enabling side-by-side browser windows for easy comparison.

This is the same tactic Steve Jobs has used to such amazing effect at Apple events. Many of their hardware and software upgrades are incremental, yet he talks about them with such conviction, and they solve problems that his target audience is so passionate about, that every presentation seems like the most amazing ever.

Say what?

Yesterday was Microsoft’s annual employee meeting. These things have the reputation of being equal part religious revival and product showcase, and this year’s didn’t disappoint on either front.

 

“The Office” star and Seattle nataive Rainn Wilson did a commendable job as MC, punctuating droll observations about Microsoft with explosions, breakdancers and a world-record-setting paper airplane toss.

 

But the funniest moment arguably came when Microsoft’s chief guru Ray Ozzie addressed everyone. At one point he talked about the negative forces arrayed against Microsoft and said something like, “There will always be the cynics, the skeptics, the cookie lickers.”

 

Cookie lickers?

 

Everyone in my vicinity processed that for a second, then we all turned to one another and asked, “Cookie lickers? Did he just say ‘cookie lickers’? What does that mean?!” We were abuzz with cookie-licking speculation, and as far as I know, nobody has figured out what exactly he meant.

 

The only thing I can figure is that it’s a reference to “Oreo lickers”, those who just lick the cream out of an Oreo without consuming the whole cookie. I should go watch the video of the event and see if there was some context I missed the first go around.

Rock Band 2 tracks

I bought Rock Band 2 yesterday, my resolution to hold off a month until the bundle of new instruments was released lasting all of two hours.

Veryinitial thoughts: I loved how it quickly and seamlessly integrated all the tracks I’d downloaded for the original game. I haven’t yet transferred the songs that were on the Rock Band 1 disc, but the download transfer came off perfectly.

However, I’m a tad disappointed that the avatar creator didn’t get updated with more detailed models or additional choices. It’s basically the same graphical look as the original.

Of course, the real star of the game is the setlist. I’ve only played the first couple venues, but here are my impressions:

FAVORITE SONG SO FAR: “Alive” by Pearl Jam. One of the best tunes from the grunge era, the note chart on this song is interesting and rewarding.

FAVORITE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN SONG: “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. An angry yet catchy song from a grrl punk band out of Olympia, Washington, of all places. Wikipedia says they hit their heyday about the time I was in college, but I somehow missed them entirely.

FAVORITE FORGOTTEN SONG: “Hungry Like the Wolf”, by Duran Duran. Loved this staple of 80s rock when I was wearing topsiders and turning up the collars of my pink Izod shirts in middle school. Forgot how really good it is.

SONG I HATE THE MOST, SO FAR: “PDA” by Interpol. Unquestionably the worst piece of whiny emo garbage yet to be released on a music rhythm game. Yes, worse than My Chemical Romance. Even worse than AFI. Yes, that bad. If there was a way to delete songs from the game, this would be the first one to go.

Anybody else out there play the game yet? What are your thoughts on the songs?

Don’t bother me, I’m Sporing…

I picked up Will Wright’s latest game, Spore, yesterday. Wright created SimCity, one of my favorite PC games of all time, and The Sims, the best-selling game of all time with approximately 100 jillion copies sold. This is one story that I really wish I had remained a reporter long enough to cover. The reason is that Wright is supposed to be a brilliant guy, even a genius. He’s one of the gaming industry’s true deep thinkers and intellectual lodestones. He not only has an unsatiable appetite for knowledge, but he processes that knowledge in weird and wonderful ways. His creations are Miyamoto-like in their ability to extract something fun from the mundane.

In Spore, you start out as a microscopic organism and eat and discover your way up the evolutionary ladder, moving onto land, forming tribes, creating a civilization and finally conquering the galaxy. Not surprisingly, the game has been getting a lot of attention from the science press, who see a good cross-over story when they see it.

One of the best articles has come from Seed, which asks, “If this is the ultimate evolution simulator, why does it feel so much like intelligent design?” The answer, of course, is that while the game is inspired by science, it is in the end a game that is supposed to be fun. (Though not directly addressed in the article, I would add that publisher Electronic Arts, which delayed the game a couple times, really needs it to be a hit, so making the game as approachable as possible makes good business sense. Wright himself alluded to that in this Q&Awith MTV Multiplayer.)

I really liked this bit about people designing genitalia-inspired creatures:

For game designer Frank Lantz, it’s this evolving ecosystem that is the perfect example of the game’s ability to be science rather than teach science. Initially, it was living, bouncing models of the human reproductive organs that proved wildly popular — a trend quickly dubbed “Spornography.”

“Here’s a game — supposedly about evolution — in which sexual reproduction is tastefully absent,” says Lantz. “And then as soon as the editor comes out, there’s this enormous Cambrian Explosion, a Burgess Shale of digital erotica. And then those images were really good at reproducing themselves as players sent links and images around to each other. So, it turns out that sex is good at reproducing itself. How funny and ironic is that?”

The kicker line is great, too:

This isn’t a game for re-educating the intelligent design proponents of the present; it’s a game for inspiring the intelligent designers of the future. Because, of course, if you zoom back one more level from Spore and the computer screen which hosts it, what do you see? Yourself.

One other interesting twist to the buzz around the game is the reaction it is getting on Amazon, where reviewers pissed off over the draconian copy-protection have driven the game’s rating down to a single, solitary star.

I was going to break it down but why tell when you can show?

 

 

 

 

 

The bizarre twist on this is that EA was once on the other side of a similar campaign last holiday when the sci-fi epic role-playing game Mass Effectcame out. (The game was published by Microsoft but EA ended up buying the studio that made it and thus ended up being on the frontline of this particular crapstorm.)

What happened was that Fox News did a totally irresponsible and scurrilous segment about the game, which featured a brief, PG-rated love scene of the main character bedding an alien woman. One Fox commentator said the game was like “Star Wars meets Debbie Does Dallas“. Fox had an author named Cooper Lawrence on the show to criticize the game for its shallow depiction of women, but when asked by the pro-game commentator Geoff Keighley, she admitted she hadn’t played the game.

What happened next was that hundreds of outraged gamers flocked to Amazon and drove down the rating of Lawrence’s book. She ended up issuing an apology (though Fox never apologized for its blatant and willful misreporting that would have been the cause of an embarrassing correction and probable probation for the reporter if it had occurred at Reuters) and the whole saga was chronicled by The New York Times. In one of those fish-that-got-away stories, I actually had a story primed and ready to go a full day before The Times, but a miscommunication with editors meant it was overlooked. Oh well.

Anyway, it looks like the mob has turned against EA. Amazon ended up deleting the bulk of the negative reviews for Lawrence (though it looks like many have returned over time), so it will be interesting to see how they’ll handle this. On the one hand, it seems to be a legitimate gripe with the product. On the other, it’s clear many of the “reviewers” haven’t bought the game but are just parroting details they read elsewhere.

Game reviews

Dubious Quality has some thoughts on whether game reviews are disproportionately favorable. He gathered some data on review scores from major sites like 1UP and GameSpot and finds that 50-60 percent were positive. He questions whether the games are really that good, with the subtext being that game review sites are under pressure to deliver positive reviews because they rely heavily on advertising from game companies. There’s no question that business concerns sometimes influence coverage, and industry insiders have gone on record many times confirming instances where that has happened.

However, there might be an additional factor that skews the results of such analysis. That is simply that the sample of games reviewed is probably not representative of all games out there. Take film. Ebert and most major newspapers don’t review all movies, they just review the handful their readers are most likely to be interested in this week.

By the same token, gaming sites review titles that that their readers are most likely to consider playing. Ebert doesn’t review direct-to-video “Little Mermaid 16: Ariel’s Facelift”, and most game sites don’t review “Lawnmower Tycoon” or “Diaper-changing Madness!”.
 
For example, there are supposed to be 1,000 games (retail and downloadable) out on Xbox 360 by the end of this year. If you figure that 200 games have yet to hit this year, there should be about 800 already out. Yet Metacritic only shows 449 reviews. Here’s the breakdown:
 
100-90: 14 games
89-80: 91 games
79-70: 123 games
69-60: 95 games
below 60: 122 games
 
If you take anything below 70 as unacceptable, then 48 percent of the game reviewed fall into that category. If you count 80 and above as where your gaming dollar is best spent, then 23 percent of games are worthy of your consideration. That suggests that as a whole, the industry-wide curve is more of what you’d expect — a very few GREAT games, a good selection of GOOD ones, a big band of MEDIOCRE ones, and a whole buttload of BAD ones.
 
Finally, I’d point out the obvious point that, as much as reviewers try to quantify their thinking with scores, it’s still an inherently subjective art. There are games I enjoyed immensely that only scored in the mid-70s on Metacritic, and there are some that won universal praise and high scores that I just didn’t get. Same with movies.
 
In the end, I wonder if we’ll see some sort of shakeout in the review industry where a handful of guys and gals elevate to become the Roger Eberts of the medium. I don’t agree with everything Ebert says, but he’s a consistent enough personality that you can read his reviews and decide for yourself whether or not you’d like a movie, regardless of the direction his thumb is pointing.

Pros and cons

A couple quick observations about living a post-journalistic life. 

First, it’s weird being cut off from the firehose of news that Reuters reporters drink from in the newsroom. Not only are CNN and CNBC playing, but press releases pop up in constantly, you have real-time stock prices, and you see the latest headlines — lit up in red caps — constantly scroll down your screen.

As much as the Web has done for spreading news more broadly and giving people quicker access, relying on even aggregator sites like Google News or Yahoo News for the latest breaking story is like viewing the world through one of those fisheye security peepholes.

A couple of examples. When Apple last reported earnings, I checked Yahoo News 15 minutes after they reported and all that was up were short stories of a couple paragraphs. I know that for a major company like Apple, Reuters would put out 15-20 headlines, have five paragraphs out in five minutes, followed by a 6-8 paragraph update 10 minutes later.

The other example was the Olympics. At Reuters, I could sit at my desk, punch in “OLYMPICS”, hit F9 and have every Olympic story instantly pop up. That’s for every sporting event, every political story, every color story, any story that had an OLYMPICS tag on it. NBC’s official Olympics Web site got lots of praise for its breadth and depth of coverage, but it couldn’t hold a candle next to the comprehensive file any reporter with a wire terminal has at his fingertips.

On the plus side, I came to realize a couple weeks ago that my evenings and weekends are completely mine. I’m not expected to know what Apple, or Sony, or EA is up to on a Saturday night, or any night. For the first time in 12 years, I have a clear separation between work life and home life. As a reporter, your job doesn’t entirely end when you leave the newsroom. You always have to be ready for the late-night call from an editor or overnight staffer saying that something on your beat has just happened.

In China it could be even more nerve-wracking because we’d take turns at weekend and evening duty and you’d never know what would happen — the central bank could raise interest rates, an earthquake 1,500 miles away could kill 10,000 people, a high-ranking official could be brought down on corruption charges.

Not to say I don’t ever work evenings or weekends, but it’s for stuff you know is coming down the road, crunch periods with long lead times, like E3.

It’s something I think I can get used to.

A few new games

I clocked some quality gaming time over the weekend, only I wasn’t spending it playing blockbuster retail games. Instead, I grew obsessed with two recent downloadable Xbox arcade games: Castle Crashers and Braid.

Plenty has been written in the past couple weeks about these two games, since Castle Crashers was one of the most anticipated arcade games to be released this year while Braid ended up being the best-reviewed arcade game of all time (Metacritic has it at 93, just a point below Halo 3 and a point above Guitar Hero 2).

A friend asked me to pick which of those games he should download. I told him that’s a Sophie’s Choice and I wouldn’t make it. He needed to knuckle down and buy both of them as they are both immensely rewarding in vastly different ways.

Castle Crashers is a button-masher in the tradition of great side-scrolling arcade brawlers like Golden Axe. But it is infused with a Sunday comic-strip aesthetic, a basic but rewarding leveling-up and skills system, deep co-op play, and fantastic tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s so far provided hours of thumb-blistering fun for me and Harlan.

My only complaint would be that some boss battles are pretty tough, and losing them means going back to the start of the level. Also, there are quite a few cool items for sale at the various stores sprinkled throughout the world, but I find I’m always blowing by hard-won gold coin on health potions, and thus am never able to earn enough capital to invest in any of the high-end goodies.

It’s hard to imagine a more different game than Braid. That’s not much of a statement as nothing is really at all like Braid.

At first blush, it’s easy to mistake Braid for a simple side-scroller, like some broody Mario who wandered into a Degas painting. Like a Mario game, the controls are dead simple: left control stick to move and the A button to jump. Only here there are no double-jumps, no wall-climbing, no special moves. Oh, there is one twist, and that is that you use the X button to rewind time. Rewind one second or the entire level, it doesn’t matter.

It’s really easy to imagine this game mechanic incorporated into something like a Mario game. Super Mario Time Traveler or something. Wiggle the Wii remote and send Mario back in time! Braid avoids this cutesy setting in favor of a moody, wistful story about a boy named Tim who wishes he could undo a mistake that cost him the love of a princess. It’s a story that is completely at one with the distinguishing game mechanic of rewinding time.

Instead of just having the player make Tim traverse each level, avoiding obstacles and dispatching enemies, each level in Braid has one or more puzzles that require manipulating time in increasingly subtle and complex ways. There are no tricks or cheats or shortcuts. Just Tim, you, and that X button.

Braid has won widespread praise and is being held up as the latest evidence that, hey, games are too an art form! The unity of Braid’s story and gameplay nicely support the idea that the art of video games lies in the aspect of “agency“, or decision-making and being in control.

Still, I can’t help but think that Braid wouldn’t be getting nearly the accolades it has if it didn’t boast one of the most evocative visual and audio aesthetics of any recent game. If you’ve played Braid, imagine the game re-skinned with a “typical” garish arcade-game palette and accompanied by electronica or thumping techno. Throw away the tragic-romantic story and replace it with a generic one about a space commando using his time-warp cannon to navigate alien landscapes and find all the pieces to the Morgatron 3000 ray that will save his planet.

It might still be a fun and cool game but I bet it would score at least 10 points lower and quickly get lost in the shuffle. Instead, every element of the game stands out — the gameplay, the graphics, the story and the music, and it’s Braid’s polished whole that adds up to an amazing experience.