Recently in Rants Category

We live in a rather strange era where social networks seem to be on the rise, but where nobody seems to know how to properly build one yet.

Years ago, before the hubbub about Web 2.0 stuff, we had people thinking of how to make money out of the websites - and this invariably meant that no money was made out of the websites, because you can’t make money out of nonexistant websites. Now, we have websites, but development is still hampered by people who want to figure out how to make money out of the situation.

Sometimes, you just can’t make money off of core functionality. And this is the annoying truth behind social networking. This is not a problem in itself, because you can make money out of other things. The problem is when people say “we can’t make money out of that” and refuse to build the core functionality to begin with.

This is almost like having a power company refusing to sell electricity because they’re still busy figuring out how to profit from selling wiring services. The real power companies wouldn’t worry about wiring; they get profit from selling power to the consumers. They don’t need to care about who wires the houses as long as they’re wired according to the standards.

The new version of Xbox 360 dashboard is here. The new graphical style is fairly good, and the only thing I was really psyched out - the new voice chat codec - turned out to be a good improvement. Instead of completely garbled speech, I can make out individual sentences sometimes. Solid improvement, there. Now all Microsoft needs to do is to teach people to speak clearer and understand that incoherent roaring sometimes doesn't take the point across. But that's hardly Microsoft's worry.

However, what really baffles me is that the overall design of the other parts of the Xbox 360 UI haven't changed. They actually took a few steps back.

I think Wii's user interface gets one rather important issue seriously: Important things in the user interface should be right at hand, while the less important things should be buried in logical and comprehensive menus. Xbox 360 dashboard, by comparison, seems to assume things are good as long as they're found somewhere, in somewhat related place. Grouping things that are related sounds good, but that's not the same thing as making often used things easily available.

When using Xbox 360 dashboard, you think in terms of what goals you're aiming for, what group of actions the action you're going to do is in. The next step is that your brain develops a pattern and you no longer look at the menus: "To get to the cheevos, hit up, right, A, then keep pressing right...."

User account management group is a good example. Why do most people use that group most of the time? Maybe change their avatar or theme, or see their achievements. So adding a new entry in the first damn menu in the lists that says "Change Gamertag" isn't very helpful; there's already a bunch of entries I don't use regularly in this menu, and adding one more just doesn't help the situation. Sure, people change their gamertags all the time. Like, every day. They definitely need that function much more often than viewing their achievements. Rrrrrright. Before you can browse to your achievements, they added account management as a new freaking page along with online safety. That's three pages you need to flip through before you get to your achievements, as opposed to one general menu. Online Safety isn't even something you need to muck with often; I imagine most people pick their settings and they're done with it for life.

Which leads to an interesting conclusion: Things aren't quite as customisable as you imagine they should be. I like looking at the achievements more than I like twiddling with my online safety settings - I guess I should be able to move the online safety settings out of view so I can get to the achievements easier.

The lack of customisation is almost laughable in My Community. They added a new entry called "Video Kinect" right on the beginning. Kinect isn't out yet. After that, you get to avatar store, Facebook, Halo Waypoint, Twitter and Game Room. It's hilarious because that's just about the exact opposite order of frequency what I actually use; I don't use Facebook and use the avatar store somewhat rarely, but I use Halo Waypoint and Game Room, and Twitter to some extent. Why can't those three bubble to the top, because I actually use those things more?

In conclusion: Stuff is still broken, and adding more stuff in the problematic areas is exactly the opposite of what should be done to fix things. But thank you, Microsoft, for the new voice codec. Voice chat might actually be usable one day.

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks bloom is just awesome. It's the single best thing in video game graphics these days. For all I cared, they should stop improving graphics hardware, because it's fairly self-evident that nothing will ever displace bloom as the most awesome advance in video game graphics. Take any boring ol' scene, add a little bit of bloom, and boom! Instant awesomeness.

I just like subtle but effective effects.

This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.

Here's a bug report I filed a while ago. It looks like the game developers are acting on it. I sure hope things do get improved.

But I'm getting cynical on the topic.

Game music doesn't get enough attention.

Sure, you always hear how Nobuo Uematsu's stuff sells like popcorn. But now, I'm talking about slightly less known music.

And especially music very close of its native format.

The bug report above is for Battle for Wesnoth, one of the coolest strategy games I've played, and also one with some amazing music. (Check out Zhay Music - some really cool music that has been used in some other open source games too, like Adonthell and such.) It's a great game, yep. But when you load up the .ogg files from the music directory to the music player - whoops, you see the exact same mind-numbing problem you see with commercial games.

Stated plainly: the tagging sucks. It sucks in free games, it sucks in commercial games, it's pretty damn awful in some really high-budget games.

Now, I think Nobuo Uematsu makes pretty good music (not the best game music ever, but definitely from the better half). But I really how the big gears behind Square's music soundtrack machinery crank out what I, as a game music consumer, really like: Distinct tags. Identified songs. And most important of all, distinct song names.

Whereas here, I'm looking at a bunch of files pulled out of Warcraft III. The game had a couple of different composers. The good news: Songs have distinct names. The bad news: Not all tracks have artist names. So here I was: "Ho-hum, this bloody well sounds like Glenn Stafford to me, say, 75% probability. Damn, it does sound like Warcraft II, at least!"

And now, here, I was with Wesnoth. Currently, 12 music tracks. Few have really good tags.

Title: battle for wesnoth - strategic plot
Artist: http://zhaymusic.com/

This is not what your mother would want you to send to AudioScrobbler. This would, however:

Title: Strategic plot
Artist: Joseph G. Toscano
Album: Battle for Wesnoth

Why do I care? Well, primarily thanks to me using AudioScrobbler now. I just heard how some people have noticed how people start paying attention to what they watch on TV when TiVo builds a profile of them. The same with AudioScrobbler: I don't want crappily tagged music appearing on my Last.fm profile. Before, it was just a little bit of internal crying and whining in silence when I couldn't even find the damn artist for the track, let alone figure out a good name for the track; Nowadays, it's a frigging public issue. I want to show the world that yes, I listen to this particular game's music, I like the composer of this track, blah blah blah. I can't. The music isn't identifiable.

We just need the game music tracks to be properly identified. All I ask is for some distinct names. If I see yet another track titled "Title screen" I'm going to explode, or just get annoyed anyway. And if you have six composers on the project, tell us who did what. Grr.

Now, it'd be cool if I could find out who the hell composed the title music of Deus Ex...

End of rant.

Update: Scary how some things get uncovered if I try hard enough. Deus Ex musicians are unmasked. =)

Here's something weird. I happened to find an old issue of Finnish computer magazine Hakkeri ("Hacker"), which was published in mid-nineties by Casamedia. I used to be a regular at the CasaBox.

This particular issue was 1/94. It had weird game-related news like "Doom has been released" and "A new version of the Commodore 64 emulator has been released". (Umm, yeah. The new version of "the Commodore 64 emulator". In retrospect it's pretty hard to guess which emulator that was, but I take an educated guess it was CCS64. There pretty much weren't other C64 emulators then! [Or was it this? My memory is a bit hazy.])

The most important thing, and probably the most educational piece of news in retrospect, was, however, an article titled "Commodore takes it like a man."

"...if the numbers have any other basis in reality aside of the market leader's hallucinations, the company seems to be doing just fine... ...the current sales... are approximately 30,000 per week, the total being close to 400,000 units already... ...is selling up to four times more than Sega's similar offering. The company has... heh, a 'problem': [David Pleasance says] 'Our problem is that we aren't manufacturing enough of the machines [to meet the demand]...'"

Sounds interesting, huh?

Now, you may think that's just a typical marketspeak, and you may have heard similar speak from most of the major console manufacturers of the day when they spew ramblings of their own consoles.

The bit I omitted in the dot-dot-dots was the fact that they're talking of Commodore CD32.

Which, you may be aware, didn't quite live up to the hype what comes to the sales. (Nor, exactly, did Sega CD, but that's just a small detail.)

People, please, remember this. Don't believe the hype. Here we see a company spinning "yeah, we're doing fine", and if you look at them a decade later, the frigging company doesn't even exist.

This is exactly why I hate the marketing bullshit that's being spewed around the new consoles. I hope this small example was enlightening enough in this respect.