PlaysForSure officially dead
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Microsoft is getting rid of the PlaysForSure brand used to identify digital media devices and services that are compatible with one another, and rolling the requirements into its Certified for Vista program.
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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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Tycho:  I don't know why I get my hopes up reading shit about "broken street dates" online, I'm perpetually disappointed by the results.  I got a game on the actual ship date five years ago, and it's made me into some kind of Goddamned optimist.  There are scattered reports that people have picked them up, and you may invest your time in this way if you are desperate, but I apologize for wasting your time.  (CW)TB
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A clumsy, YouTube-centric campaign to promoted the flagging PSP platform fails. Or does it? In Game|Life.
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All your media are etc.... Mobile World Congress Microsoft is proudly showing off its PlayReady technology at MWC, but woe betide anyone who describes it as a DRM platform.â¦
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Gabe: Well we had ourping pongmatch with Sucker Punch last Friday and I must say things did not go well for us. The Sucker Punch Rockets lived up to their studio's name and left us with a big old purple shiner. Already there is talk here in the office that our glorious victory march through the game industry is now looking more like a trail of tears.
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Service will stay when admins are at play CommVault today is adding a web-based subscription backup and troubleshooting service to its Simpana software suite.â¦
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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Blog: Both FeedBurner's Stats PRO and MyBrand are no longer paid services.
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Overture for update error don't impress Chinese customers whose systems were downed.
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Q. Recently, I received an update for the Windows Media Player, and now my player will not work.
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The search provider has decided to end its music service, opting instead to send its business to Real.
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Found in the search marketing forums: Why PR Doesn't Count Anymore; Which Comes First - Content or Design?; If Google Died Tomorrow; and more.
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With the last remaining label of the big four to join the online retailer's new music store, it could be argued that DRM is essentially dead.
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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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Announced one year ago at 3GSM in Barcelona, PlayReady is Microsoft's DRM solution for mobile content providers. Now one year later, more partners have announced planned deployments...but it has seen no rollouts yet.
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It may be several more weeks before the 2004-05 NHL season officially dies. But barring an utter collapse in the resolve of locked-out players, any real hope the league will play this season disappeared yesterday.