MMO news from Sony Fan Faire

Just finished watching the live stream of the SOE Conference thingie from the Sony Fan Faire in Vegas. I didn’t take notes or anything, but here’s what stuck in my head:

Free Realms has a new soccer minigame incoming, as well as full progression for the two driving games, along with customizable cars and garages for the latter. Beyond that, a new desert area, the home of the dwarves, is incoming, and a new combat job (Druid) as well as a level bump for all jobs (how much wasn’t mentioned).

Oh, and you can get you avatar put onto a CCG game card (a real one, sent to your house). Kinda neat.

The next EQ2 expansion, Sentinel’s Fate, is due out in February 2010 and will raise the level cap to 90. It adds a bunch of areas that have EQ fans all giddy, but I never got very high in EQ so I didn’t make much note of them. But Halas is being added as a new newbie island. I wonder if you’ll have to swim back and forth in the frigid waters to get to it?

Nearer term, the next Game Update is going to have ‘auto-mentoring’ which will allow you and friends to access any content and be mentored down to where you can get adventuring and achievement experience for doing it. So I guess it’s time to stop working on those gray quests and just let them sit for a few months until we get the next update.

Previews of The Agency and DC Universe Online showed us nothing we haven’t already seen, and there was talk about a new EQ Expansion (the 16th!), Pox Nora, and some weird SWG expansion that adds undead for October.

I’m sure all the real news sites will have much more details by tomorrow at the latest!

Australian internet filter could block gaming

If you’re a gamer, or just an opponent of censorship, you should go read Stropp’s post on an alarming issue being considered by the Australian government.

Sorry to be so brief and cryptic, but I’m at work and anyway I’d rather you got it from the source.

Ack! And now his site is down… someone must be sending mega traffic his way. Hopefully it’ll be back up soon.

The jist of the post is that the Australian government wants to put in internet filters that will prevent Australians from playing online games that aren’t rated (which is many/most of them). Big brother is watching, Down-Under.

Grand Slam Tennis & Wii Motion Plus

I wanted another game that got me off the couch and using the Wii Motion Plus, and my choice was a tennis game or a tennis game. After checking around it seemed commonly accepted that EA’s Grand Slam Tennis made better use of the Wii Motion Plus than Sega’s Virtua Tennis did.

Now you may have heard people saying that the Wii Motion Control-scheme in Grand Slam Tennis is horribly broken. Or you may have heard that the experience is sublime and anyone who doesn’t think so needs to Learn-2-Play.

As is so often the case, neither extreme stance is accurate. In practice, there is some skill and methodology involved in playing Grand Slam Tennis. If you pick up the remote and start swinging like you would a tennis racket, you might run into some problems, which is frankly unfortunate. Ideally a game like this should be as naturally tennis-like as possible.

To get the best experience, you have to make a deliberate effort to “return to center” after every swing. Hold the remote level and in front of you between each swing and the game works pretty nicely. Aiming feels very natural; if you’ve ever swung a tennis racket you’ll be able to aim in Grand Slam Tennis. Top and backspin works more or less accurately too, with the caveat that every swing has to move forward. If you try to ‘cut’ a fast shot (by which I mean swinging the racket almost vertically and letting the speed of the ball rebound the shot) the Wii will spazz out. It doesn’t understand what you’re doing. I also haven’t had much luck with overhead shots. This is a game of forehands and backhands. Lobs and drop shots are cheaply accomplished by holding down the A or B button.

Grand Slam Tennis has 3 difficulty levels, and the option to play with or without the Nunchuk. With it, you control the movement of the player with the analog stick. Without it, the AI takes care of moving your player side to side, and you send him to the net with the Up on the cross-button, and back to the baseline with the Down. I’ve had a lot of trouble doing this as it seems once you’ve given the order to charge the net, the AI isn’t going to move you laterally until you get there.

So I’ve mostly been playing a baseline game of tennis where I limit myself to fore and backhand shots. And when that’s working, it feels absolutely great. But too often you run into shots you want to make that the game won’t understand, or you forget to ‘center’ and the game gets confused and hits a backhand when you wanted a forehand (or vice versa). Or just swings way too early.

You can play as a pro, or create a player. The stylized graphics look great on the Wii and I found I did a better job of making a player who looks like me here than I did in the much more complex character creator of Tiger Woods.

The campaign in the game is odd. You have major tournaments that are surrounded by strange satellite events where you can win abilities to improve your player. (e.g. Beat a Pro to get their ability.) Then you enter the tourney and if you lose, you’re done. On to the next tourney. So far I’ve been in Australia, France and England, and I’m too much of a non-tennnis fan to tell you the names of any of the tourneys beyond Wimbleton.

There’s also a lite fitness option where the game tracks (roughly…it doesn’t ask your weight or age or anything) how many calories you’re burning while playing. You can set a daily goal and try to play enough every day to meet it.

So is it worth getting? With caveats, yes. You have to go into this with your eyes wide open. If you can work with the limitations of the software, you can have plenty of fun. But if you want a perfect experience, wait for Grand Slam Tennis 11 or whatever next year’s iteration will be called. I hope that Wii Motion Plus controls continue to improve and become more natural and less fussy.

Here’s a video showing what I mean when I talk about ‘centering’ between shots. Thanks to the dude who made this; it saved me lots of frustration.

Changes coming to LOTRO’s Epic Chains?

Thanks to Ethic for bringing this to my attention.

In a LOTRO dev chat hosted at Warcry, the follow exchange happened:

WarCry: Meeko: Any chance that some of the epic instances in volumn 1 will be eased as not so many people are around to group with who are interested in doing them… or a way to hire npc’s to help complete them in future?
Orion: Funny you should ask this. Book 8 will see the first change along these lines. Chapter 11, Orthongroth is already set this way. Moving forward – post Book 8 – we are taking a different approach. My recent work has been focusing on providing both solo and group version of the Epic instances to allow players to choose the way that they want to complete the overall epic story.

Full Transcript

Orion is Allan Maki, who I find variously attributed as a Content Designer and a Community Manager for Turbine.

I’m pretty excited about this. I’ll admit at this point I play LOTRO as a single-player game, just to get lost in Tolkien’s world when the mood strikes me (the beauty of a Lifetime Membership). I’d love to do the Epic Instances alone, where I could take my time and enjoy everything that’s happening instead of skipping through in-game cut scenes and quest verbiage so as to keep up with whatever manic group of power-levelers I happened to have PUGged with.

Bring it on, Turbine! Can’t wait for more Epic Instance to offer a solo version!

Active Day 30!

So today was Day 30 of my EA Sports Active 30 Day Challenge. I wish I could say it felt great, but it didn’t; I was just having one of those off days, and so was Active (exercises I never have a problem with weren’t registering properly). I toughed it out though, as I’ve had to tough it out about 5 other times during the month. I wish I could figure out what leads to these really low energy days, so I could stop doing whatever it is that causes them!

Of the 3 goals that are automatically set for you (you can change them, of course) I hit 2 really quickly… easily within the first two weeks of the program. And the third I never hit. 🙁 It’s a goal of spending X hours with Active in 30 days, and I only got 96% of the way there.

I’m going to take 2 days off, and start another 30 Day Challenge on Light. I’m going to use a stronger band to increase the challenge of the upper body stuff. The lower body stuff is still enough of a struggle that I think I can get plenty more out of the Light program (my body and running do not get along well). I want to get where I can do all the running in a workout at “Perfect” speed, for one thing, and my left leg in particular got hurt 3 times in the 30 days, so I think it needs more work at Light. I’m in this for the long haul.

I bought a box of Pilates bands at Target for $10 or so, but they’re a little short. I can use them for bent over stuff, but doing overhead presses just seems impossible with them. You can feel when these bands ‘run out of stretch’ and that’s what happens when I try to use these bands in overhead workouts. I think I’m going to buy a 2nd box and just tie them together. If the knot is always between my feet it should be fine.

Fitting the workout into life continues to be a challenge. On workout days we don’t get to dinner until nearly 8 o’clock, which really cuts into free time, but I guess that’s a small price to pay in exchange for not being a decrepit old man in a few years. 🙂

The weight loss isn’t really coming too consistently yet. I tend to go down during the week then shoot back up over the weekend, so at least I know where to focus my attentions. Too many opportunities for snacking on weekends, I guess.

This will probably be my last Active blog post for a while. It’s all fairly routine at this point and I don’t have a lot more to say about it. Maybe I’ll check in after my next challenge, or if something dramatic happens.

Overall, I’m a big fan of the program even if it isn’t perfect. It’s better than any other ‘home gym’ solution I’ve tried, at least for me.

Wii Motion Plus (and Tigers Woods PGA Tour 10)

So my bundle arrived today, and I played 18 holes of the new Tiger Woods with the Wii Motion Plus. This post is going to focus on what the Motion Plus brings to the table.

First the hardware. You’ve no doubt seen it by now. It’s a module that adds about 1.25″ to the length of the Wii Remote (WiiMote). It comes semi-permanently attached to a WiiMote Sleeve. You stick the front end of the WiiMote into the sleeve, thread the strap through a slit in the back of the sleeve (the strap stays attached to the main WiiMote, not the Motion Plus) and then kind of pull on the sleeve to stretch it a little in order to get the Motion Plus to slide into the Nunchuk port. There’re buttons on either side that you need to press in order for it to engage, and there’s a lock on the back of the thing for once you get it attached. And of course there’s a passthrough Nunchuk port on the bottom, with a ‘cap’ to seal the port. The cap attaches to the Motion Plus with a cord, and you thread that into the Nunchuk cable for security (since the main cable is no longer close to the Nunchuk).

Attaching/detaching the Motion Plus just takes a minute, which is good since the WiiMote won’t fit into a charging station with the Plus attached (I’m assuming most regular Wii owners have broken down and bought a charging station by now…if not, then I see no reason why you wouldn’t leave the Plus attached all the time).

OK so how does it work with Tiger Woods? Well, the game plays MUCH more like real golf. You don’t pick a shot type (full, chip, etc) from a menu. Instead the way you swing the WiiMote determines what kind of shot you make. If you turn your wrist while you swing, you’ll hit a fade or a draw shot. There’s no way to put top or backspin on the ball via motion controls, though. You still need to use buttons for that.

In order to swing, you have to point the WiiMote at the floor and hold down the B button (this is true with or without the Plus). This means you more or less have to be standing to play. I tried sitting in a chair and dangling my hand over the side, and I could swing (awkwardly) by making a short fast arc; this is a tad disappointing — I was hoping the game would require a full swing, but we’re not that far yet. The game plays better using a full swing, and for the most authentic experience, hold the WiiMote in a more-or-less proper golf grip and swing that way (the extra length of the Plus actually helps with that, giving you a bit more to grab onto).

Playing that way, Tiger Woods is tough on the most ‘realistic’ settings! I was hitting 8’s and 9’s on par 4’s in my first round. It’s been a few decades since I played real golf, but when I did I had trouble with a persistent slice. And the same was true here. I found doing a full swing with one arm was a nice balance of emulating real golf and having better control. Serious golfers might do better with a two hand swing, though.

And then there’s Disc Golf (guess they didn’t want to pay for the rights to the name Frisbee). Picking up the Frisbee and throwing it feels very, very natural. (You can play without the Plus but it feels stiff and kind of limited.) I really wish I could just turn the golf aspect off and run around the course flinging the Frisbee around for a while. It controls just like a real Frisbee. Tilt it left or right to curve, a bit up for more loft, etc.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the Wii Motion Plus. It really does enhance the Wii experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers do with it.

Active Day 22

Today was Day 22 of my 30 day challenge in EA Sports Active.

First a recap. On Sunday, I pulled/tore something in my left calf during the “warm up” portion of the workout. Nothing terribly serious but I kind of limped/hobbled through the workout, then limped through the rest of the day. Happily yesterday was a rest day.

One of the few complaints I (and many others) have about Active is that the warmup and cooldown periods are so short as to be useless. The warmup when I hurt myself consisted of, Exercise 1: RUN! with the trainer urging me to pick up the pace, which I did, and suddenly it was like someone drove a knife into my calf (the pain eased a lot fairly quickly, but that first ouch was intense). Active needs both some stretching exercises built in, and a longer warm-up, at least. Maybe in the expansion coming this holiday.

So today, my calf was still tender but I finally did what I’ve *known* I should be doing all along. I stretched first. Angela helped me out there as she used to do martial arts and knows all kinds of stretches from doing them. And what a difference that made! I was so much more limber, and exercises like the side lunge with toe touches became pretty easy, and touching the floor with the tip of the remote was a cinch (without stretching I’d get about as far down as my ankle).

Luckily today was heavy on upper body stuff, so it was easy on the hurt calf. I still jogged very slowly on the final ‘cooldown’ run, just to be safe. So it wasn’t a particularly strenuous workout, but it felt really good, and I felt really good after it.

I’ve got a bit more than a week left in the challenge and I’m not sure what the program will point me towards when its done, but left to my own devices, I think I’ll re-do the 30 Day Challenge on “Light” difficulty, only using a Medium weight elastic band to increase the difficulty of the upper body stuff. I know there’s a fine line between being careful and slacking, but I am nearly 50 and horribly out of shape. I can not yet do the “Long” running sections at a “Perfect” pace (when I started I couldn’t even get up to a Perfect pace, now I can do about 1.5 laps at it…the program wants 2.5) and I figure a second time through Light will help me get up to speed on that. At the same time, the upper body exercises with the Active band have been so trivial that I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress with my arms/shoulders, so doing those all again with a store-bought medium band might get some development going on there.

Weight-wise I’ve been all over the place, according to the Wii Balance Board and Wii Fit. I was losing, then one day it said I’d gained 1.8 lbs, then the next day another .4 lbs, then the day after that it said I’d lost 1.5 lbs! Averaging it all out, I don’t think I’ve lost anything, but I haven’t changed my eating habits significantly, beyond snacking.

I’m not too upset about that, though. This first 30 Day Challenge is more about making a habit of working out. Getting myself and Angela used to the new schedule, getting used to having pleasantly sore legs and sort of being more aware of my body. If I lose weight, great. If not.. well I *know* I’m feeling more limber and my legs feel stronger, so the program is having a positive impact. The weight can come later after I’ve laid down the foundations of a healthier lifestyle.

Could Natal be Microsoft’s 32x?

Engadget ran a post today quoting EA VP Patrick Soderlund as saying “…we’ve maxed out the 360…” Now obviously this is a statement open to all kinds of debate/interpretation, but for the sake of this post, let’s assume this is true and that developers have squeezed all they can out of the 360.

We know that Project Natal requires more CPU cycles than the Xbox 360 can muster (while still running games) so it needs a separate processor. At E3 this took the form (as I understand it) of a fairly typical PC stashed under the table. The final product will apparently come with the sensor and a box of some kind that’ll hold the hardware required to drive Natal.

So what happens when Natal is idling? That processor is sitting there doing nothing. But does it have to be that way? If the interface between Natal and the Xbox is fast enough to act as an input device, is there a way for the XBox to offload some of its slower processes to Natal? Could Natal act as an off-board brain for the 360, extending its life by a few years?

Sega tried this with the 32X years ago — an add-on to the Sega Genesis that never really caught on. But it didn’t have Milo pushing it into homes.

This is just pie-in-the-sky thinking on my part, and I don’t know if any of the processing going on inside the 360 is time-insensitive enough that you could offload it through a USB cable to an external device. But it’d be a nice ‘bonus’ to adopting Natal — getting a speed boost as well as motion controls.

Motion Controller Wars

So now that all three of the major console makers have some kind of motion controller system, I figured I’d stick my oar in and give my thoughts on what each platform offers. Major caveat: I’m not at E3. I’m basing all the following on what I’ve read, and building on the hard work the professional gaming press is doing in LA.

Nintendo (Existing):
When the Nintendo Wii initially came out, it offered 2 weeks of great fun followed by a period of “This is it?” for a lot of early adopters. Playing Wii Sports was awesome, but once that was out of the way, a long procession of games with ‘forced waggle’ followed, and many gamers quickly tired of randomly shaking the controller in order to accomplish anything.

Eventually the waggle-wave cooled a bit, and games started coming out that used motion control where it fit in naturally (e.g. pointing, or a quick flip to reload a gun), and standard controls for the rest of the game. Suddenly the Wii was interesting again, and I actually grew fond of the nunchuk/remote combo for controlling games. Having the controller essentially broken into two halves made gaming very comfortable.

Nintendo (Wii Motion Plus):
Next week, the Wii Motion Plus comes out. This is supposed to add more precision and 1-to-1 correspondence between controller and on-screen presentation. This means we’ll have to get up off the couch again. When Tiger Woods 10 is played with the Wii Motion Plus, you’ll have to actually do a full swing of the virtual club, rather than a quick pendulum motion with the WiiMote. At least, that’s my understanding. Hopefully the Wii Motion Plus won’t set back the state of Wii games by very much.

At this point, the Wii is essentially the ‘base line’ of motion controllers. Both Sony and Microsoft seem to be leap-frogging Nintendo in the motion controller arena.

Microsoft and Project Natal:
Microsoft really wowed audiences with its controller-free motion control system. A sensor bar consisting of an IR camera, an RGB camera, and a microphone sits in front of (or on top of) the TV and reads the movements of players. The IR camera actually measures heat, and via heat, distance from the TV. The microphone is for voice commands.

Folks who’ve tried the system say it really works. The neatest demo I saw was a version of Burnout hacked so that the player steered just by holding his arms out as if they were on a steering wheel. When they turn the imaginary wheel, the car turns. Sliding their foot forward and back controlled acceleration. Very neat tech demo.

But I have some concerns. First of all, how well is this going to work when I’m wearing a checkered shirt and standing in front of a paisley-print couch? [Update: After pondering this for a while, it occurred to me that this might not be an issue, given the IR camera. It could use the heat of you body to tell the difference between you and the couch.] The demos were done in an empty room with white walls. Apparently the system can adjust for lighting differences, so they have that much licked.

Assuming the tech works, is this what we really want? If you have a choice of playing air guitar Rock Band, or fake-instrument Rock Band, which would be more fun? Props are important; they give play a visceral feel. I find it ironic that when the PS3 came out with a controller that lacked rumble, they were heavily criticized for losing that feedback. But now Microsoft has a system that by definition has no feedback at all, and everyone is going nuts for it. Nintendo’s Wii Remote has rumble and a microphone and these aspects really add to the immersion. When you wallop a tennis ball with the Wii Remote, you hear and feel the impact of the racket hitting the ball. You won’t get that kind of feedback with Natal, nor is it clear how you’d move around using Natal. How do you get your on-screen character to run, turn (without you turning so you can no longer see the screen) or fire a gun?

So I think Natal will spawn a new genre of games that take advantage of the hands-free control system. But where I think Natal will have the largest impact is with the overall UI of the Xbox. The idea of never having to search for the remote is very appealing. I wave my hand to browser through video or music selections, then I say “Play” to begin playback. Now *that* is both radical and useful, and I’d really love to see MS license Natal to other consumer electronics manufacturers.

And then there’s Milo. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in Milo. The demo was a heavily scripted event (Molyneux himself apparently admitted that) that made the demo seem more than it was. One of the most interesting aspect of Milo was the facial recognition. A person could stand in front of the Natal sensor and say his name, then when he returned, ‘Milo’ could identify who the person was. That’s pretty neat. The bit where the player splashed around in the water wasn’t anything new: the Sony Eyetoy has been able to do that for a while (granted the fidelity was better here). The conversation stuff was the most scripted…apparently Milo ‘understood’ just a few questions: this is understandable. If Milo worked as well as he *seemed* to work (without tricks) then he’d be about as smart as the voice actuated and controlled computer on Star Trek, and we just aren’t there yet.

But what was really, really cool about Milo was the head tracking. As you walked around the room, the view on-screen changed to reflect how you’d see the virtual world from that new location. This is really huge because it allows some very cool ‘virtual 3D’ effects; I can’t wait for MS to roll those out (see the video at the end of this post for an example of what I’m talking about).

So Milo was a really fun tech demo with some really cutting edge aspects, some rehashed stuff, and some smoke and mirrors. But the aspects that people seem so excited about (talking to Milo) isn’t what was really cool about the demo.

Sony’s Wand System:
Lastly we have Sony’s wand-based motion-control system. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a pair of wands that include traditional controller buttons, and a light on the end of each wand. The Sony Eyetoy can track the lights with a high degree of fidelity. During the Project Natal demo, a player ‘painted’ by splashing buckets of paint on a wall. During the Sony demo, a player very legibly wrote his name on a virtual wall. That’s the difference in fidelity between the two systems.

In a lot of ways the Sony system seems like the Nintendo Wii Remote on steroids. A bunch of game applications immediately spring to mind. It has buttons so you can shoot a gun, and they could put an analog stick on it so you could move around a 3D space that way (a la the Nintendo nunchuk). The demo showed a very simple RTS game being played using the wands like a mouse. Let’s just pray that we don’t get a bunch of waggle games from Sony!

Really the three systems map well to now, soon, and future. Nintendo is the now solution. Depending on how much Wii Motion Plus adds, we’re all pretty familiar with what Nintendo can do. Sony offers the next step; an enhanced way of controlling your games that should be available and working well pretty soon (Spring 2010 they’re saying). And Project Natal represents the dreamy future. When Natal launches (my guess? sometime in 2011) it’s going to mean a rebirth of the Xbox 360 in much the same way that the NXE did. I don’t honestly see a lot of mainstream games supporting Natal, but I do see it refreshing the entire UI of the Xbox in remarkable ways, as well as adding a new genre: Natal Games.

Back to the head tracking issue. Here’s the video I mentioned. This fellow now works for Microsoft, but before he went to the big M he was hacking Wii Remotes:

*THIS* is the technology of Project Natal that I am most excited about!

UPDATE: GameSetWatch has a brief article up confirming that Johnny Lee is working on Natal.

UPDATE: Johnny Lee himself chimes in on his blog.