Game net distribution 'lift off'
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Steam, the online distribution platform for videogame content, signs up more than 13 million users.
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Video games are going the same road that enterprise software is increasingly taking: free software, paid services.
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End of operator exclusivity Four of the largest mobile games publishers (EA, Glu, Gameloft and I-play) have agreed to launch games simultaneously on all the UK networks, removing one more avenue for network differentiation and, hopefully, reducing customer confusion.â¦
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One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL.  There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success.  Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages).  To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.
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Tycho:  I don't know whose fault it is exactly, mine or theirs, but I won't be installing Vista anytime soon.  I would like some crazy shit to happen when I minimize something don't get me wrong.  I want my windows to go Waja-wajow(!) is possible.  But if there's a great reason to "trade horses midstream" or whatever the going metaphor is I haven't discovered it.
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PC World has posted a news article claiming that the highly anticipated game Halo 2 for the Xbox has been released on the net. &quot;Microsoft confirms that a pirated copy of Halo 2 for Xbox in the PAL video format
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Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
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Blizzard makes noises about cracking down on real-money sales of items from the virtual World of Warcraft, but such transactions may impossible to stop. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Internet service providers have to walk a fine line between fairness and profitability. Users want maximum service, and are entitled to honest contracts. Maybe there's a way to help everyone at once.
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BetaNews is reporting that the auction site will be dropping Microsoft&#39;s .NET support somtime in January 2005. &quot;Auction site eBay announced to members on its Web site Wednesday afternoon that it will drop
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A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization "feature" of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.
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Hammer to crack SMB nut NetApp is bringing its StoreVault line for small and medium-sized business to the UK in a distribution deal with storage specialist Hammer.â¦
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According to reports, copies of the eagerly awaited Halo 2 Xbox game made an impromptu debut last night on Usenet groups and pirate sites.
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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Plan promises downloads of up to 3mbps to lure in gamers and other high-bandwidth users.
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Tycho:  As suggested by Gabriel's recent communique, pokemania is not only going strong but has burst, like some foul canker, and the infection has spread.  It's true that I have built a so-called "Leaf Deck," but this is because I was fairly certain they would beat me up if I didn't.  Now he's hauling in his case of Next Quest figurines each day, as I myself once hauled a tacklebox of Necrons, only I need to stress that it was more awesome when I was doing it, because Necrons are unkillable harvesters of flesh and not some kind of weird fox or living scarf.  It's absolutely fucked that I have spent almost fourteen years trying to reveal the subtle glories of table gaming, only to be cast down time and time again.  However wise my counsel, it apparently lacked that crucial munchkin component.    After I completed Half-Life 2: Episode Two - perfectly acceptable entertainment, but nowhere near the revolutions found elsewhere on the same platter - I started to wonder how they would deliver the third episode to the same platform in the next year or so.  I doubt they'll have another four games to accompany it, but who knows:  they're a bizarre company where extraordinary things happen.  Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Episode 3 might look pretty nice on there together.  On the PC, of course, one simply clicks a couple times to get whatever they want, and then leverages Valve's fairly incredible community implementation to get things done.  You could accomplish all of this using only the tip of your nose.      On the Playstation 3, even with Valve's distaste for native development, there's already several precedents for direct delivery of individual titles.  On the 360, where Arcade is Microsoft's only concept for delivering titles in their entirety, the hundred and fifty meg limit falls hard around some titles, hemming them in.  But there's a weird (read: psychotic) eyelet where where larger-form product can escape: as content drops for retail titles.  I was surprised that there was no option for this in The Orange Box itself.  Now that Valve is in a position to write a game once and then compile it to different platforms, a retail release - called "Steam," and including two or three catalog titles - could be delivered as an anchor for their considerable franchise power almost in  perpetuity.  After years of fairly positive digital delivery experiences through Steam, I have to say that I found purchasing a Valve product in a retail context almost unpleasant - and not just because it entails hauling around my considerable bulk.  Retail has been a raw deal for a long time now in developer terms, and I avoid it whenever possible.  I should solicit another piece by an insider here for the post, and I know just the guy.  When he breaks down the way royalties work in the industry, you'll be surprised it isn't just Electronic Arts that's left, selling Electronic Arts games in EA branded stores.
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To each his own, but I love eye candy.  When I heard that you could get the 3D Xgl and Compiz environment running on Ubuntu/Kubuntu dapper (my default distribution), I immediately searched the web for instructions.  Most of the instructions take a reasonably timid approach, which gets your 3D environment running in a test console (the second display, or :1).  I'm more adventurous, however, and I immediately went for a total replacement.  What follows are instructions for doing the same.