The Richter Scale^®

During lunch with my 9 year old son and a couple of his friends a few days ago, I suggested that next time he plays Star Wars Battlefront II, perhaps he might want to try it on the Xbox 360 as another compatibility update had been made available by Microsoft to allow that Xbox game in particular to run on the Xbox 360. I explained that this might improve the graphics quality of the game play (which, in my opinion, is the only serious weakness of the Xbox version of Star Wars Battlefront II).

I asked him if graphics quality was important to him. He was quick to answer that the graphics didn’t matter much - the particular game was what mattered, and more specifically, the saved profile data (an issue I addressed back in December). After all, the original Halo didn’t look any much better on the Xbox 360 than it did on the Xbox.

I decided to see for myself if there was any difference in graphics quality running the Xbox version of Star Wars Battlefront II on the Xbox 360, much to the annoyance of my son, who felt that my tinkering was eating into his game time.

The difference was stunning. Whereas on the Xbox everything (even with component video out) is kind of blobby and pixelated, Battlefront II felt almost crisp running on my Xbox 360 (using a VGA cable for a high resolution display on my TV). And, amusingly, all my son’s preconceptions about how graphics quality was not important flew out the window. On the Xbox 360, playing four player split-screen is actually rather usable (vs. nearly unusable on the Xbox), and that’s really important to him.

So, now my son will only play Star Wars Battlefront II on the Xbox 360. But Halo is still played on the Xbox, since that’s where all his saved game data resides. I found this an interesting commentary on relative values of data vs. presentation, especially considering it comes from a nine year old. But I agree with him.

At many tradeshows, vendors are often willing to give away samples of their products or at least sell them at a much reduced price, for a variety of reasons.

For example, when it’s the end of the show and they don’t want to lug everything back to the office or even have to pack it all back up. In this category, I happened to stop by the stand of MCA / Manhattan Cellular, a French company which makes incredibly nice looking leather cases for mobile phones, iPods, and Sony PSPs. After admiring their wares (which they were slowly packing away since the show was closing in less than a half hour, and getting ready to walk away, the beautiful French woman doing the packing asked me if I wanted one or more of the cases. I ended up walking away with a great white leather case for my video iPod, and several PSP cases (one for each of the kids and PSPs in my family - mine, my son’s, and my daughter’s). I am staring at that nice iPod case here in my hotel room as I write this entry.

I also ended up buying a collection of Pelican (hardened plastic) cases that Pelican staff didn’t want to ship back to their office, at about 60% off list.

Another reason a company might part with their wares is because you have a need, and ask for a sample.

Again, I experienced this twice. My issue was that my new Sony VAIO TX-690P notebook needed to have its system restore data backed up onto two DVD discs, and I only had one in my hotel room. At an evening event I came across Imation, a well known maker of computer media. When I explained my plight they were nice enough to open up a package of DVD-R media and give me a disc. They also gave me their press kit on one of the cool USB flash wristbands they are now producing, as well as a sample of their new scratch proof CD-R media. And yes, the Imation ForceField CD-R media really does appear to be scratch proof.

However, I found I goofed - what was back in my room was a DVD+R blank, and not a DVD-R as I originally thought. While it might not make a difference, I figured the Sony DVD writing software for generating the restore discs would prefer consistent media types, so the following day I stumbled across Sky Media Manufacturing, which produces color displays (LCD and Plasma) as well as blank optical media, under the Swisstec name (CompUSA sells their products, although I had never heard of them before). I asked if they might have a loose DVD-R disc, and they just gave me a package of 20 of them instead. Greatly appreciated. And thanks to Imation and Sky Media, I was able to safely back-up my new notebook that same evening.

Exhibitors also give away product for special performances, typically during presentations they are giving. Such performances including yelling the loudest, jump up and down the most, parroting answers to posed questions, or doing other embarassing things. Occasionally just being at the right place at the right time works too, but that’s rare. There’s also the not-so-rare raffle drawing.

Finally, folks might just give you a product because they are giving everyone products. Typically this only works if you’re among the first ones there, as no matter what the product is, if it’s free, it’s soon gone. I don’t recall having good enough timing for anything like

And all that is in addition to other interesting hand outs, like pens, prop-up plastic things to hold up your PMP or MP3 device, the occasional t-shirt (not so many of those this year), pins, buttons, and notepads, never mind bags to carry brochures and stuff in. I hesitantly accepted a $5 Starbucks gift card from one vendor at a press event, and completely bypassed another stand where cash bribes (not much, just a few dollars) were being proffered - cash crosses the line into the tasteless and unethical if you ask me.

While at the Las Vegas Hilton last month, after the Sony Keynote, I was wandering about to a meeting when I stumbled across a vending machine selling tech toys. I thought this was incredibly apropos considering it was during the Consumer Electronics Show, and figured it had been planted at the Hilton for just that reason.

While discussing the machine with my fellow bystanders, a couple of folks from Zoom Systems wandered up to service the machine and restock it, and we learned that this machine was one of approximately a dozen deployed throughout Las Vegas, and that product was selling rather quickly too. The Zoom Shop vending systems had been in place for a number of months already, as well.

So what goodies did I find in the Zoom Shop machine? Well, for starters, iPod Nanos, video iPod, headphones, arm clips, power supplies, and Sony PSPs. And not discounted as best I could tell.

A very cool idea, but the biggest drawback I see is as the vending systems didn’t sell digital music or PSP games, a purchaser would be left with a cool toy and nothing much to do with it for a bit.

Last year at CES, Powergrid Fitness introduced a couple of devices which replaced the typical game controller for a console like the PS2 or Xbox with a workout intensive resistance device. I was sore the next day after only about a 10 minute work out on one of these on the show floor at the time.

Problem with those devices was that they were large and expensive. You’d need a small room set aside just to use the exercise device in. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with that concern, as the company has now developed a much smaller, portable version of the exercise machine, and will be selling it in select Best Buy stores starting in March 2006. The new device is called the Exer-Station and will retail for just under $200.

The ExerStation works by converting pressure on the center vertical rod into joystick data. The responsiveness of the ExerStation can be adjusted to require almost no pressure to get movement in a video game, to excessive pressure for a real workout. The harder the user pushes, pulls, and leans the controller rod, the greater the movement on screen (since it translates to a greater angle on the “joystick”. All the various controller buttons found on a typical game controller are integrated into the handle.

At CES Unveiled, where the ExerStation was shown, they were using Blood Wake on the Xbox as their demonstration platform (Blood Wake was widely panned, but I enjoyed playing it when it first came out), and it was a good fit.

Powergrid Fitness claimes that the ExerStation can increase a person’s metabolic rate five times that of resting leel, and can burn 350 calories an hour. The device is (or will be) compatible with the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. Xbox 360 support is being investigated.

The ExerStation is 2 feet tall, but rather compact, and very easy to set up from what I saw. But in my use I found that it was a bit cramped (no doubt the result of my being 6’ 3” tall - not exactly average or petite). Likewise, I found the controller too close to my body - I would have liked some adjustability in the ExerStation. Also, the based platform the rod is mounted on had sharp corners - a sure way to leave permanent dents in one’s thighs (or worse). However, I was assured that this was still a prototype and that greater ergonomics would be in the final shipping product.

Seeing as I am a video game junk and an exercise slug (I think slugs actually exercise more), the idea behind the ExerStation certainly appeals to me.

In the hopes that this could be my exercise panacea, I’ll add the ExerStation to my wish list as well, and once I get once, I’ll post a more in depth review. I’m already thinking of the great response to my wife complaining about my spending too much time playing video games - “But honey! I’m exercising! You want me to be healthy, right?”

The Consumer Electronics Show starts this week here in Las Vegas, and I
will be providing occasional coverage from the show floor during the
week.

Pictured below is the scene at Las Vegas’ McCarron airport.

My daughter has been playing Kameo on the Xbox 360 for hours (with the occasional cry for help when she gets to a boss she can’t beat by herself).

Today, when she went to play Kameo, she discovered that all her work had apparently been wasted. The Kameo save game had disappeared. 

I don’t know if it was a software glitch, or something accidental her brother might have done when playing Kameo himself, but regardless, the save game for Kameo has gone missing. Poof. And my daughter is rather distraught.

I have Googled to see if anyone else has had this problem with Kameo, and found nothing. So maybe this is an isolated incident. Or maybe I’m the first to publicly post about it. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I guess I need to start instituting an Xbox 360 save game back-up policy. Sad that it has come to this. Yet another thing that potentially limits the market potential of more advanced console devices to tech heads instead of ordinary people.

UPDATE - 12/18/05: I’m glad to report that this is not a game problem. My son admitted at dinner last night he was trying to start the game when he accidentally deleted his sister’s saved game. Now the question is whether or not forcing him to play Kameo until he gets back to where his sister had gotten to is considered punishment or a reward for poor judgement.

I’ll admit right off that my on-line gaming experience on consoles is limited, mostly by choice. Most of the on-line gaming I’ve done has been on the PC (with City of Heroes/City of Villains being particular favorites). I tend to like cooperative play more than things like death matches, and I prefer typing my communications to my team members instead of speaking them (since my experience in voice-enabled console gaming is that many players are pretty crude, never mind I hate having to listen to people coughing, snuffling, and snorting among other things).

However, yesterday I found myself up at 4am for some reason, so after playing a bit of Perfect Dark Zero in solo mission mode, I decided to check out Xbox Live play with that game.

I should point out that I spent a couple of hours a couple of weeks ago doing Call of Duty 2 deathmatch play on the Xbox 360 and found the experience to be pretty horrible when more than 3 or 4 people were in the match. Performance got worse than sluggish and my character’s position kept resetting.

The PDZ Xbox Live deathmatch experience was MUCH better than that in Call of Duty 2, although it took numerous tries to get connected to a game in progress because I kept getting the commonplace “You Have Lost Connection to Match” error message. At one point there were about 18 of us playing a team deatchmatch game. Responsiveness was great, even on my relatively slow connection here on Bonaire.

I even got my headset out. Found that the Brits playing the game were a lot more likely to actually use the headset as a way to coordinate game play. But most people appeared not to use their headsets at all. It did make the game more interesting when the headset was used properly, but things deteriorated when the “cougher” came on-line.

If anyone’s up for some on-line play when I’m on, my gamertag on the Xbox 360 is “BonaireGamer”.

I had the Media Center Extender running on my original Xbox some months ago, though not soon enough as it took Sony forever to release an update to bring my VAIO desktop (purchased August 2004) up to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. However, I have pretty much never used it since.

And I suspect it may end up being the same with the Media Center Extender on my Xbox 360.

The reasons for this are simple, but I will point out that they may not apply to everyone.

First, I don’t use my PC for much MCE video recording - I generally don’t record the over the air programs or the ones from the TDS (terrestrial digital service - like DirecTV, but land based instead of satellite) because the quality of the signal isn’t great on either, and because I don’t have any easy way for the MCE PC to switch channels on the marginally better TDS system (none of the remote controller set-up options works for the custom Zenith set-top box).

Second, on the rare occasions I have used my PC for recording programs, they are programs I would rather my children didn’t have access to (think HBO or Showtime programming in the 9pm and later time slots and you’ll get the idea). While I know there are parental controls available on the Xbox 360, they do not appear to apply to the programming I’ve recorded from our local TV signal sources. I don’t need my children asking me why all those people on the shows I recorded, like Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t! on Showtime, or Entourage on HBO, swear all the time. A similar issue applies to my photos - I don’t want non-family using my Xbox 360 to be able to view all the photos on my network storage - nothing embarrassing there, but there are about 15,000 images from the last three or four years, and some are more personal and private than others.

Third, video over the Xbox 360 wireless connection is poor and unsteady. I know they warn you about it, but the five-port Ethernet switch in my entertainment system is full (Xbox, PS2, GameCube, networked Onkyo receiver, and the network connection), and I didn’t want to bother adding another switch.

Fourth, while the music playback system on the Xbox 360 Media Center Extender is nice, once you get it to recognize and catalog music in locations other than the annoyingly default “My Documents” directory, the free remote (the short one) I got with my Xbox 360 has no apparent way to allow me to enter letters into the search fields for the artists or albums or songs I want, meaning that if I want to listen to Paul Simon’s music in my 400+ CD digitized collection, I have to scroll all the way down - a horribly painful and tedious process. Some letter/number keys on the remote would have been a useful touch. I also had the impression that the MCE remote control I got for the Xbox should work (per the configuration settings in the Xbox 360), but no joy there either. And I really have no desire to buy a more functional remote to make up for it.

And finally, I don’t want to have to keep my computer powered on all the time on the off chance I might want to watch a recorded movie or show, or listen to music. I already have a couple of file servers running 24/7 (main one is a Linux box with RAID-0, and the other is a very old PC running bare bones Windows XP for performing back-ups every night), and that’s enough. And I don’t want to have to boot up my PC just to watch some recorded video. Heck, it’s easier for me to just burn it to a DVD and watch it that way.

So, one of the big reasons Microsoft touts for putting an Xbox 360 in the living room “for the whole family to use” just does not fly in my household. It is nice for playing games though.

So, after days spent mostly playing my Xbox 360, my son asked me to play Star Wars Battlefront II with him on the Xbox, and after only a few minutes of gameplay it finally hit me how visually spoiled the Xbox 360 has made me. The Xbox connected via component video doesn’t even touch the Xbox 360 connected via the VGA/PC connection on my HDTV system.

Battlefront II in single player mode is okay and pretty playable, but in split screen multi-player mode, pixel chunkiness and coarse graphics (in contrast to the Xbox 360’s detailed high resolution output) really detracts from game play (never mind making it much more difficult to clearly see your enemies and navigate).

Having read recently about some Microsoft Xbox 360 evangelist commenting that the emulation of the Xbox on the 360 actually made Xbox games look better, I decided to give Star Wars Battlefront II a spin in my Xbox 360. Woe was me - the game is not yet support by the latest emulation code from Microsoft (list of what has been certified to work is here).

I am increasingly coming to appreciate the graphics capability and visual acuity the Xbox 360 provides. I guess you don’t know how good you have it until you go back to what you were using before.

I still have regular mini-frag fests with my kids and their friends over SystemLink on my office Xbox and the one in the living room, mostly playing Halo 2, and again, in single player mode (on my system - it’s usual 2, 3, or four of them in the living room on a single screen), that’s fine. Although some might question my gloating when I kick butt against a posse of 8 and 10 year olds (but I should note that sometimes they kick my butt too).

I definitely won’t be getting rid of any of my current generation consoles, but I suspect I will be spending more and more time with the next generation, including the Xbox 360.

At E3 in May, the big hullabaloo about the Xbox 360 was whether it was going to be backward compatible with the Xbox. There was cheering at the E3 Xbox 360 pre-launch when Peter Moore of Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 would in fact be able to play “leading” Xbox titles.

Now that the Xbox 360 is here, and the list of Xbox games it will play grows (and occasionally shrinks), does it really matter?

The reason I ask is that there’s no easy way to transfer saved game data between the Xbox and Xbox 360. So all the time and effort that I’ve invested in working my way through countless Xbox games is wasted on the Xbox 360, unless I want to redo all my hard labor on that platform. Heck, it’s just easier to keep my Xbox around and play that when I want, knowing that it is in fact 100% Xbox game compatible, than it is to bother playing Xbox games in my Xbox 360. This is one area where Sony got things right on the PS2 - it’s possible to use PSOne/PSX memory cards on the PS2. With the Xbox this is not viable, because the memory cards hold only 8MB, but one might have all sorts of downloaded (and paid for) level maps on the Xbox hard disk which consume a lot more than 8MB, so there’s no way to be portable without hacking the systems. And even then, it’s not clear that would work.

I would guess that where Xbox backward compatibility is important is to those who don’t own an Xbox in the first place, which I suspect rules out pretty much all current Xbox 360 owners, since fanatics and game jockeys are the most likely to have had the forethought or perseverance to have obtained an Xbox 360 at launch on November 22nd.

Time will tell if Microsoft’s backward compatibility effort bought them anything.