Category: Gaming

Consequences, memories, and making an impact

Posted on by Nimgimli

Warning: This is going to be one of those rambling, stream-of-consciousness posts. A few different ideas have been thrown at my head recently, and they’re all twisting together in my brain, and I have to write my thoughts down to sort them out.

First, Ysharros wrote about wanting her actions to make a real difference in an MMO world: Persistence: ourstory

Then Ascii Dreams wrote about Permadeath (which also touches on emergent gameplay), which got me thinking about risk in MMOs.

In my comments on Ysharros’s post, I first wondered how developers could build a game in which every player can have a measurable impact on the world, and still remain fiscally solvent (the devs, not the players). But as I navel-gazed on Ysh’s dime, I started to wonder about what matters more: our actions having an impact on the MMO world, or our actions having an impact on us?

I decided that I, at least, don’t really care if my character’s actions change the MMO world as much as I care that my character’s actions leave me with rich memories of virtual adventures. I can remember adventures and exchanges from launch-era Ultima Online and EQ1 – things that happened 10+ years ago. But I remember very little from my time in Warhammer Online or Age of Conan, games I played in the last year. Nothing worth remembering happened in those games. I mean, I remember playing the games, of course, but I have no “Tales of Adventure” that I could share with you.

Again in the comments at Ysh’s, Tesh suggested that killing Onyxia when hundreds of other groups had already killed her is a weak substitute for telling your own unique stories, and yet one of my most recent “Tales of Adventure” comes from a similar (lower level!) encounter in WOW, and that was fighting General Drakkisath in the pre-Burning Crusades days. As a hunter, it was my job to ‘kite’ Drak away from the battle so that the rest of my comrades could take down his minions before fighing the General himself.

A zillion people had done this before me, and yet (in my mind at least) it remains one of my “Tales of Adventure.” And why is that?

Consequences.

I knew if I failed, Drak would return and wipe out my comrades.

For 99% of the things I do in MMOs these days, failure brings with it consequences so light as to really not matter. And that’s how I’ve wanted it. Wandering into the wrong area in UO and being ganked and stripped of everything I’d worked so hard to acquire was not fun. Dying in EQ and losing a level was not fun.

And yet those were the games where real memories and adventures were formed.

As MMO players, we argue against anything not-fun. We want insta-travel, hate death penalties, don’t want to grind, don’t want to have to spend hours at a time playing in order to accomplish anything. We want everything convenient and risk-free and for the most part, developers have obliged us.

And what we’re left with is games where we don’t have stories worth telling because nothing we do entails risk, and without an element of risk, a story isn’t worth telling. Without adversity, there can be no heroes.

I’m not arguing that grinding is adversity, or that having to run 10 minutes is, either. No, but these ‘features’ are deterrents. If we know that failing means having to grind for another hour (or even run for 10 minutes) to get back to where we were, then suddenly failing has real meaning, and from the real meaning comes emotional involvement.

I don’t know what the solution is, or if this is even a problem for very many people. I think back on my “Tales of Adventure” and I’d love to experience that kind of intensity in my gaming again, but I’m not willing to put the rest of my life in a box in order to obtain it, and that is surely what I was doing back then. UO almost cost me my job and my relationship. Kiting Drak only happened because I was unemployed. These days, when I can only squeeze in an hour to play an MMO in a given evening, I don’t *want* to have to spend it grinding or running around.

And yet, the games feel like games now, not alternate worlds of adventure. And damn, do I miss being a hero.

Persona 3, and quality English localizations

Posted on by Nimgimli

After finishing Infamous (should I bother to review it at this point? I really enjoyed it, but so much has already been written) I was in the mood for something a bit less…frenetic…as my next single player game. Angela got me Persona 4 last Christmas, but it has been collecting dust ever since, because I wanted to ‘finish’ Persona 3 first.

I put ‘finish’ in quotes because when I went to find my saves I realized I’d barely scratched the surface before I’d drifted away the last time I was playing.

Anyway, last night I started a new game, and was reminded how good a PS2 game can look when played on a PS3, with its ‘upscaling’ and smoothing of the graphics. Such a shame that news PS3s no longer have PS2 emulation. Let’s hope the rumors of Sony bringing that back are true.

The opening of the game really sucks you in with its mixture of fmv-anime and in-game cut-scenes. The voice acting is pretty good and the translation is excellent, at least so far. And I picked up on some nuances that I’d missed the first time I played. So I’m glad I started over, even though the task of completing the game is a bit daunting. At least this time I’m playing in the living room, where I can just kick back on the couch and relax to play. Was in the office last time, sitting in a desk chair, with the PC seductively calling to me to log into an MMO.

But musing about the localization got me thinking back to the days of Working Designs and Vic Ireland. Back in the 16-bit days Working Designs was THE localization shop, and Ireland was quite active on GEnie and CIS, the closest thing we had to ‘social media’ back then. He always struck me as a really nice guy, very passionate about games and very appreciative of the fans of Working Designs.

These days, Working Designs is gone (I think?) and Atlus seems to sit on the throne of best localization house, and I generally really enjoy what they do (though I’m not sure about NeoSteam, their MMO). I have quite a collection of their games, many of them unplayed, just because this kind of game often doesn’t stay in print for very long. Pretty soon I’ll have enough video games to last me, quite literally, for the rest of my life. Weird thought, huh?

Life being as full of coincidences as it is, today GameSetWatch has a short interview with Vic Ireland. He has a new company, GaijinWorks, established in 2006, and they’re doing 3rd party localizations but Ireland hopes to start publishing under the GaijinWorks label in the next 18-24 months. Let’s hope he does!

Anyway, it’s an interesting read if your a fan of Japanese RPGs and are curious to know a little bit more about the business end of getting them translated to other languages/cultures:
GaijinWorks’ Ireland Talks Licensing, Hope For Publishing Return

Oh, and GSW’s sister site, Gamasutra, has a related article that may be of interest as well (I won’t get a chance to read it until tonight, but didn’t want to leave it out of this post): The Business Of The Japan Niche

Aion verdict — no preorder (for now)

Posted on by Nimgimli

This morning I jumped back into the Aion beta, and after an hour or so, logged out. I’ve decided not to do a pre-order at this time. Which is odd because yesterday afternoon I almost did pre-order. I’m glad I slept on it. Here’s why:

First, the level 10 experience has been a *bit* of a disappointment. I have Ascended. I am now an immortal, ageless being with angel-like wings, dwelling in a city in the heavens. Great tasks await me. One of the first? Go kill some over-grown snails.

Huh? Now I said in my last post that I don’t mind “Kill 10 rats” quests, but when that phrase is taken literally, I do mind it. The critters I was sent to kill were about a foot high and looked about as threatening as your average garden snail. And why did I have to kill them? Because they’ve been eating too many scallops.

I can stomach (barely) doing this kind of ultra-trivial, non-heroic quest at level 1, but not after I spent a day getting to level 10 (granted it wouldn’t take a day to do it if I wasn’t a lore-reader).  To be fair, there’s a rebel faction of people I have to kill 10 of, and that’s fine. And there are lots of quests available and I haven’t checked them all out. But the one that happened to be at the top of my journal was kill 10 snail-like critters that I forget the name of.

This wasn’t really the reason for me deciding not to pre-order. It was just the factor that snapped me out of my ‘crush’ on the game and helped me to see it more objectively. It’s a pretty, polished game (with great music) but there are other pretty, polished games out there that don’t require me to throw down $50 just to get started playing. And we all know that MMO clients drop in price, often to $0, pretty quickly. I do intend to try Aion, but probably not at launch.

Second factor: Timing. The Champions Online open beta starts in August, with a launch of September 1st, I do believe. Aion is launching on September 22nd. Aion is a fantasy-based MMO in a sea of fantasy-based MMOs, whereas Champions is a Superhero MMO, and the only other (mainstream, at least) one of those we have is City of Heroes. The general buzz I’m getting on CO is that it’s a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to trying the beta of that, and hope to find myself playing at launch. Which means Aion will launch during the free month of Champions Online, which creates quite a conflict, given my limited play time.

Third: Player stores. I mentioned these yesterday, and between then and now they’ve already gotten much, much worse. This is a personal peeve of mine — I just can’t stand the things. I’m going to wait and hope they get removed.

Fourth: The holiday rush of single-player games. I don’t only play MMOs — I love me some console games, too. And there’s a bunch coming out this fall that I’m interested in, starting in early October. So this kind of feeds into timing, too.

Fifth: Levels 1-9. It was fun doing these once, but I did every available quest in order to get to level 10. OK, it’s possible I missed 1 or 2, but the area isn’t big enough for there to be any substantial quest chains hidden. As an altaholic, that means for every alt I want to test out, I have to do the same exact quests again. I can see that becoming a real drag.

So for now at least, I’m not going to pre-order Aion. Hopefully I’ll get into future beta weekends and be able to level up my Gladiator a bit more and see more of the world, and if that happens I might change my mind. We’ll see.

First look at Aion: Better late than never edition

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I finally got into an Aion beta session, compliments of File Planet. I’d heard a lot of good things about the game and was looking forward to trying it out myself.

I rolled a fighter, my basic ‘go-to’ class for testing new games. I chose Elyos because I’d heard their side of the world was prettier. Character creation was pretty good. You can either pick from a selection of pre-sets, or customize your character via sliders. I did both, really. Used pre-sets then tweaked them.

So many people have covered the game that I’m just going to highlight some things that made an impression (for good or ill) on me. To lay the foundations of what Aion is, I’ll refer you to Tipa (A first look at Aion: The Tower of Eternity, Aion: The User Interface) & Stargrace (Aion Beta Impressions, Aion Beta Weekend – Round II).

So very briefly, I agree with the general consensus. The game feels like a pretty typical Korean game, but polished much, much more than most of the F2P games. It’s also very pretty, and yet runs quite smoothly on my good-but-not-great hardware.

My highest level character is now level 10. I wanted to get to 10 so I could see how the game changes when you “ascend.” I played the beta of Age of Conan and never got past level 20 and ended up wasting money that way. My understanding was that Aion changes at level 10 once you get your wings, so I wanted to see how much it changes. I’ve *just* made 10 so don’t really have a feel for the changes yet.

BTW, a quick word about beta-testing. When I’m selected for a beta, I try to be a good tester, trying to replicate bugs, playing in ways to try to break the game so I can report faults, and so on. When a publisher starts giving away beta keys in contests or (in my case) through a paid service (File Planet) all bets are off and I’m just playing the game as a demo to see if I’m interested in it enough to purchase.

So assuming you’ve read Tipa and Stargrace (or someone else) and have the basic idea of what the game is like, here’s my list of things I liked and didn’t like. We’ll start with the bad stuff first.

Things that bugged me:

Personal Shops: This is a mainstay of Korean games. A player can turn his or her character into a ‘stall’ to sell goods out of their inventory. This is fine in theory, but in practice what happens is you get areas that are just *blanketed* with personal shops. It isn’t so bad in the beta yet, but it will be after launch, I’m sure, if nothing changes. I really hope this system gets replaced with a centralized broker.

When you Ascend you get this very spiritual vibe from the game, that you’re going to this mystical place, and as soon as you arrive here’s what you see (click for full size):

stores

Name filters: I’ve seen a high percentage of names that annoy me. EasyHo and CMyTits and the like. We need some kind of name filtering in here. And if I were running the game I wouldn’t let names start or end in X. I’m so sick of XDethNiteX and the like (I made these up but in each case they’re similar to something I saw).

Class choice at 10: Running one guy up to level 10 was fun, but I’m not looking forward to doing it again and again as I try various ‘final classes’ to pick the one I want to play. My prediction is that within 6 months of release they’ll let you create a level 10 character once you’ve run at least one character through levels 1-9.

Things I like but that might bug others:

Resting: In order to regain health at any kind of reasonable pace, you have to rest. That is, sit down on the ground. And of course you’re vulnerable like that, so it suits you best to find a safe place to do it. This is a tiny bit old school, but I kind of like it.

Kill Ten Rats: Lots of ‘Kill 10 Lizards” and “Bring me 10 Lizard Tails” type quests, which I know the blogging community wants abolished for all time. These feel comfortable and easy to me, and I don’t mind them. YMMV.

Things I like:

Lore, Quest Text and Dictionary: Yes, I am one of those people who reads the text quest. When you do, certain words will be highlighted. Clicking on one of these words pops up a ‘dictionary window’ with more info, and in some cases, a “Locate” button which will throw a waypoint onto your map. Even if you’re not looking for someone, it’s a great way to remind the player who is doing what and why in terms of lore. There’s also some semi-hidden lore, like a FedEx quest that has you delivering the book, but if you stop to read the book it’s a folktale that helps make sense of why certain characters are doing what they’re doing.

Here’s a dictionary example:

dictionary

Map Overlay: Hitting M brings up a traditional map window, but hitting N brings up an overlaid map. This is something you see often in single player console RPGs, but it’s a nice addition to the MMO space.

Can you see the map overlaid on the world in this screenshot? The green dot with a yellow arrowhead is my location.

map

Sell all Misc: When you’re talking to a vendor to sell your vendor trash, there’s a “Sell all Misc” button that’ll deposit all vendor trash into the shopping cart. Armor, weapons, crafting materials, quest items…anything with any kind of use is ignored. It’s just the gray loot stuff that gets turned into coin with 1 handy click.

‘Gambling’ upgrades: Weapons and armor have ‘manastone slots’ and you’ll often find manastones to put in this slots. They’ll add some buff to the item. +10 HP or +12 Accuracy, that kind of thing. Adding 1 stone is always a sure thing. But if the gear has 2 or more slots, there’s a risk when adding additional stones. If the insertion fails, all the stones get destroyed. So you have to decide if you want to risk it. There’s an item that sells for 1000 coins that’ll break down a piece of gear into Enchantment Stones, which can also be added to a piece of gear, and the same applies here. Making a sword into a +1 sword is pretty safe, but if you want to re-enchant it to +2, you risk failing and wiping out the existing +1 enchantment. How far you take the enchanting is up to you (I’m sure there are some kind of limits) but it costs a lot to break down gear and I assume every level of enchantment has a greater possibility of risk.

Shared Bank: I only know this from a loading screen tip, but somewhere there’s a Warehouse and your warehouse is shared between all characters on an account. Not unique to Aion, but still good news.

Things I didn’t understand:

Inventory: Instead of an backpack, your inventory space is called a Cube. When you see an NPC who offers to upgrade your cube, he’s offering to give you more inventory space.

Power Shards: You equip these and…they do nothing. Because equipping them is only step 1. Step 2 is activating them (I believe B activates them). Once activated they’ll give you an attack buff (and make your weapon all glowy), but be warned, you burn through them FAST. I believe every attack uses up a Power Shard. I know the one time I used them I had 5 equipped and by the end of 1 fight they were all gone.

Well, this has gone on long enough. I’ve spent most of the day playing (and 1-10 are completely solo friendly, btw) and I’ve enjoyed myself quite a bit. I still need to discover more about what goes on at higher levels. I ran into an NPC that offers gear for some kind of trophies you get from PvP, and said NPC claimed that was the best gear a person could get. If that’s true and the main focus of the game at higher levels is PVP, I’ll pass. We’ll see though.

Also, haven’t really touched crafting, aside from harvesting various items. The harvesting side of things is similar to WoW or EQ2. Double click a node, and maybe get some materials, and maybe get a skill-up.

MMO news from Sony Fan Faire

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

Posted on by Nimgimli

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?

Posted on by Nimgimli

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!

Wii Motion Plus (and Tigers Woods PGA Tour 10)

Posted on by Nimgimli

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.

Could Natal be Microsoft’s 32x?

Posted on by Nimgimli

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.