The Richter Scale^®

Over the last few days, I’ve done a bit more in the realm of comparing current generation console output (e.g. PS2 and Xbox) with nexgen Xbox 360 output, and I must say, although in some games it’s subtle, the Xbox 360 does win hands down.

But I think that’s only because I am taking full advantage of the output quality potential of the Xbox 360 on my HD-ready TV, a 62” Samsung DLP.

My Xbox and PS2 are connected to my TV via component video (my GameCube uses S-Video), and are set to be aware of 16:9 format output.

But in planning for the arrival of my Xbox 360 I went and bought an Xbox 360 VGA cable, which outputs analog video at potentially high resolutions via a 15-pin VGA connector to any type of monitor which can support such a connection. I did not use DVI because my Samsung progressive scan DVD player is already connected to the DVI port on my TV, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a DVI switch box. The VGA cable worked great.

After organizing my Xbox 360 into my entertainment center (it sits on top of my PS2) I configured the Xbox 360 to output 1360 x 768, which is higher than the DVI connector to my TV supports. This does produce a very crisp picture compared to what I see on the Xbox or PS2. My wife even commented that the fog and snow effects in Call of Duty 2 looked realistic (high praise from her).

That said, I think a real HD-capable TV or monitor is a necessity to make an Xbox 360 useful. It’s a waste to use an Xbox 360 via composite, S-Video, or even component connections as you are still basically resolution limited, at least in comparison to the resolution potential available via the VGA cable.

But an HD ready TV with PC inputs will run you at least $999, plus another $40 for the VGA cable. Makes the Xbox 360 a pretty pricey toy.

Being a gamer, it’s not unusual that both my kids are into video games too - I let them play with all my toys. Many an evening we’ll play together before it’s their bed time. Games we frequently play include Champions of Norrath (both versions) on the PS2, Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox)(nice to finally be able to have more than two players - up to 4 in a cooperative mode!), Halo 2 (matches), and some various party games on the GameCube and Xbox.

That said, the Xbox 360 launch titles were a major disappointment.

Most of the games were definitely age inappropriate for 8 and 10 year olds, and I draw the line more liberally than some parents - shooting games are fine if they don’t involve modern age humans shooting each other. Games with bad language are also right out as are really bloody gore-filled games. Under those rules, Halo 2 is in, but any version of GTA, Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake, is out. So are GUN, Condemned: Criminal Minds, and perhaps Perfect Dark (need to play that more to make the call).

And, as my kids and I are not major sports fanatics, the bevy of Xbox 360 sports games at launch was pretty uninteresting (although I still ended up with all of them).

That pretty much leaves Kameo and King Kong. And neither of those allows for more than 2 players, and in Kameo, the cooperative mode is a reward for achieving levels in single player mode, and not a given right as with most other co-op games I’ve played of late.

Again, Microsoft’s proclamations during the Spring of 2005 at GDC and E3 about the Xbox 360 being a system the whole family will enjoy seem to fall flat, at least for now.

Sure, I’ve looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace and seen I can download a bunch of games, but of course, then I’d have to pay for them, and wait for the tedious downloads ("broadband" on Bonaire means “occasionally faster than a dial-up modem” - huge difference to what “broadband” is in the U.S.). And I didn’t get my Xbox 360 to play effectively 2D games with cute graphics, or slightly improved remakes of games I used to play in the arcades a couple of decades ago.

I’m hoping some game developers out there are working towards filling the multiplayer family gaming vacuum for the Xbox 360.

I’m pretty sure I was the first person on the island of Bonaire to have an Xbox 360. It arrived at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, November 24th (not a holiday on Bonaire, since the island is Dutch, not American). I had ordered the high end “all inclusive” Omega pack from GameStop.com a few months back and had it shipped to my in-laws in New Hampshire. They received it on Tuesday, November 22nd and turned it right around to ship to me on Bonaire via FedEx. Not the cheapest way to go, but certainly the most efficient (other than flying it down in person).

After we had finished Thanksgiving dinner, my kids and I set the console up. I plugged it into the VGA/PC connector on my Samsung DLP display, attached the wireless adapter, turned it on and lo, it worked!

However, the set up was horribly tedious, as I decided I wanted to have the thing configured properly for Xbox Live as well. If this is Microsoft’s idea of a console for the masses, they haven’t a clue as to what the masses will put up with to, I think. My 10 year old daughter finally gave up watching me enter data via the on-screen keyboard and went to bed. My 8-year old son, bless him, was patient enough to bear witness to the completion of the set-up and even play a game with me.

One major annoyance was that I could not use an existing Passport.net account when setting up the system, and woe to anyone ordinary mortal who only has one e-mail address and an existing Xbox console that they have registered. I happen to run a web hosting provider and have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses I can use or generate, but that’s a rare thing out there.

The other annoyance was that using an on-screen virtual keyboard is a royal pain in the butt when having to fill out page after page of forms. Would have been a lot nicer to either be able to plug a PC keyboard into the box and type on that (and it may be possible to do it via the USB connectors), but no suggestion was made by the Xbox to do so. Or, alternately, allowing one to do all the data entry on a PC via a web site, and then just punching in a few codes on the Xbox 360 to finalize the set-up. But I persevered and got it done.

Of the dozen and a half games I got with the system, my son decided that we should try King Kong (I pretty much ruled out Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, Condemned, GUN, and Quake 4 as being inappropriate for him) as our first game. The graphics were pretty decent, but not awe-inspiring. I had configured the Xbox 360 for the highest resolution the DLP display would support, and it did a good job crisply filling the display (although the Samsung DLP does not show PC output as completely full screen, for some reason - there was a small black border all the way around the image).

We didn’t play for long as my son had school the next day (as my wife came to remind me at 10pm).

I stayed up and playing about a half hour each of Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, GUN, and Quake 4. Enjoyed them all in various ways. However, Microsoft’s highly touted efforts back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to make the use of the controller, and more particularly, the use of particular controls universally the same across games apparently didn’t make it to production. Everyone of the five games used different variations of buttons to fire various weapons, etc. Movement seemed to be the only thing more or less universally constant, but that tends to be the case on other consoles too.

I must say, I love the responsiveness of the new wireless controllers, and the wireless-ness is great too. But the “Charge & Play” cable idea just plain sucks. I don’t want a cable connecting my wireless controller to the Xbox 360, plus it never seems to charge the battery to the point of getting a green “I’m fully charged” light (and it doesn’t consistently charge the battery when the Xbox 360 is off). The suggestion in the documentation to use a quick charger for the rechargable battery is a good one, but no one is selling these quick chargers!

Anyhow, the next morning I got the Media Extender functionality running, but not without further hassles, like having to reinstalled aspects of Media Center Edition 2005 on my Windows MCE-based computer. The link the Xbox 360 provided for the MCE extension software for my PC did not help.

I’ll have many more comments forthcoming, but in summary from initial impressions, the Xbox 360 is not worth the high premium one presently has to pay. The graphics are good, the game play is good (for the few Xbox 360 games out there now), but the game selection is poor (especially for games kids can play), and set-up is horrific (if you want Xbox Live).

On The Richter Scale, I give the Xbox 360 a 6.5 out of 10.0.

I just posted a copy of my most recent TechWatch article, entitled Battling For The Sacred Living Room over on my articles site.

The article discusses the attempt by the big three game console makers - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - to justify having next generation consoles be the center piece of the living room, and why they still have a long way to go to make that happen, including still not understanding how to market to the people that really run the home, namely the wives, mothers, and other women co-residing with game-addled males.

I’ve just posted two of my articles from the May 23, 2005 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch (where I play the role of Contributing Editor and Senior Analyst) over on my Richter Scale Article Site:

- Next Generation Console Support Strong - Provides an overview of which games publishers were willing to publicly commit to providing for the next generation video game consoles from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

- And Then There Were Ten... - An analysis of why the next generation game consoles and game pubishers might have problems meeting sales targets because of competition from older generation consoles as well as other home entertainment hardware and media.

As a point of reference, I only publish my articles from TechWatch online only after a newer edition of TechWatch has been released - thus, as today the June 6th issue was released to TechWatch subscribers, I’ve posted my articles from the May 23rd issue.

I enjoy playing video games as much, if not more as my kids. I also review dozens if not hundreds of titles a year. So, I tend to be the one in my family to determine (with occasional spousal collaboration) which games are okay for my kids to play and which are not.

My son is 8, and my daughter will be 10 in a couple of weeks, and both have excellent hand/eye coordination and have the potential to become excellent game players, although my daughter gets bored more easily with games where the plot or story isn’t obvious or well intertwined with the game play.

While in some cases I use the ESRB rating on games to determine suitability, most often I first play the games I let my kids play, or at least read some reviews on the games to see if they would be suitable for my kids to play.

The criteria I use are ones that some politicians might find objectionable. There are “M” (Mature) rated games, like Halo and Halo 2, that I let my kids play (in limited amounts), just as there are “E” games I won’t (mostly because they are inane, such as Monster Rancher or Harvest Moon). Some violence is okay when it’s not against current day humans or against definable “good guys”, but foul language is not, nor is excessive carnage (e.g. Mortal Kombat, Tekken) or sexual themes (e.g. Leisure Suit Larry).

You may disagree with my approach, but at least I am involved in what my kids play at home. But my wife and I have recently learned that our level of involvement is quite unusual compared to that of other parents.

Case in point. Our son and one of his friends were discussing a game they played at yet another friend’s house a few days ago, and as they were getting into the details, I was getting this uncomfortable feeling about the game they were talking about. I started asking some more probing questions, like “do you play a bad guy?”, “do you shoot at police officers?”, “do you steal things like cars from other people?”, “do the characters swear a lot at each other?” - sadly each of my questions was answered with a “yes”. Turns out they had been playing some variant of Grand Theft Auto - a game that is definitely well against all the rules in our household for them. Further, it turns out that the child which owns this game, got it as a present from an aunt in France, and said child’s father just assumed it was “just a game”.

We ended up discussing this with the mother of child number 2, who happened to have seen her son playing the game at home when he borrowed it from child number 3, and she had similar misgivings, and had already called the father of child number 3 about the content and subject matter, but so far to no avail. Today is my turn to talk with him.

Laws in various U.S. states are being proposed to ban game sales of certain types of games to minors - I oppose these laws. Parents should take responsibility for what their kids watch and play instead of relying on politicians to raise their children for them. However, as I’ve learned, one must be vigilant not only with what’s played in one’s own home but also at the home of other children whose parents are either less involved, or simply too naive or ignorant to realize that dubbing something a “video game” does not mean it’s harmless and safe for children of any age to play without possible causing some real warped value system from coming into being, especially among younger children who may be unable to separate game play from current day real life.

One of the things that all of the new game consoles I saw at E3 had in common were wireless controllers for game play.

Having had experience with far too many wireless control devices over the years (e.g. remote controls, cordless phones, and real wireless game controllers), and now witnessing the intersection of such devices with children, I am convinced there’s a feature missing from these controllers.

I should point out that in the last few months, the remote control for my large screen TV has been found in three different bathrooms in the house, three bedrooms, the kitchen, and on occasion in the living room where the TV is. All thanks to distracted children or adults who wander off with it.

The feature I speak of is the “controller finder” - a mechanism where you can tell the game console hardware to go and make each controller, or a specific controller, provide some sort of audible tone to help you locate it. Making the controller rumble isn’t loud enough however. It needs to be higher pitched and unique - perhaps even a different tone for each controller so you can distinguish each of the, for example, seven in the case of the PS3, wireless controllers from each other. Heck, maybe you could even use the new Microsoft Xbox Marketplace to sell controller “ring tones” so each player can customize their controller!

I smell a patent application here…

eBay has been interesting to explore this week as all sorts of goodies from
E3 are finding their way on-line.

E3 Show Directories and Show Daily publications are selling for $3.99 and up.

Paper bags, available at the LA Convention Center by the thousands are being offered for as little as 99 cents apiece. Xbox water bottles and buttons are going for a similar amount.

But what has really taken eBay by storm are the so-called Limited Edition Xbox 360 Face Plates. There are dozens of these being offered, and almost all have bids on them starting around $100 and going on up to well over $200.

This is what these face plates look like:

Part of the Xbox 360 design is the ability to customize the look of the box, and that’s done by replacing the face plates. To commemorate the press launch of the Xbox 360 this past Monday, Microsoft created a limited edition, 5000 piece, numbered, E3’05 face plate for the Xbox 360. Everyone who attended the press briefing on Monday the 16th of May, got a little
card which could be exchanged for a face plate upon exit. Extra cards were available to those who lost theirs.

I ultimately ended up with three of the face plates (and no, I have no intention of selling them), as a result of friends who didn’t care for theirs. But here’s the point - there are apparently quite a number of enterprising media event attendees who are looking to profit directly from their participation in the Xbox 360 launch by selling their free swag to the
highest bidder. I can only hope that none of the people doing the selling are members of the press, although based on what I saw during the week of media attendees, I have my doubts…

At the current valuations per eBay bids (and I assume they will go way up in value once the Xbox 360 ships), these face plates, the whole load of 5000 of them, could be worth at a half a million dollars or more on the open market. That’s staggering, especially for something that’s just so much vapor at the moment. On the flip side, limited editions are meant to
be special and collectible. It’s just that I would rather at least see some charity at least partially benefit from the desire of people to spend money on these face plates than seeing individuals lining just their pockets.

The second day of the E3 Expo exhibits was a bit disappointing. All I had left to cover was Kentia hall, which, as I discovered was basically the basement of the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC).

And it was to there that lesser known companies were relegated.

The companies in the LACC Dungeon seemed to be a blend of foreign software developers (Asian and Russian for the most part), smaller distributors of video game software and hardware, companies which specialized in DVD and CD media repair (I never realized there were so many of them!), alternative game controller makers, and a few random entities thrown in between.

Among the alternative game controllers was a mouse replacement which looks like a handgun - once I figured out where all the mouse button equivalents were in the demo FPS they had set up, it was pretty easy to use, and certainly more intuitive than a mouse. Company is MonsterGecko and the product is known by the innovative name of “PistolMouse”. Just make sure you don’t pack it in your carry on if you’re planning on flying.

Speaking of fake weapons resulting in one’s arrest at TSA airport check points, THQ was giving out toy hand grenades in support of their forthcoming title, Company of Heroes.

If you pull the tab on the top it causes the hand grenade to rumble. I asked the booth staff about the wisdom of handing out toy weapons in this age of excess paranoia at airports, and they just laughed it off. In face, I was told that the THQ media rep had one in his carry on and the TSA staff, once they realized it was a toy, let him keep it. The TSA folks I’ve dealt with in the past haven’t seemed quite as lenient. So, erring in favor of safety and wanting to avoid potential incarceration, I think I’ll be leaving this little baby for the maid at the hotel to clean up.

I’ll be adding more E3 and video game related commentary here in the coming days as I work my way through my notes from the show. Of course, some of my more in depth work will show up as articles in Monday’s TechWatch.

The industry sure has gotten bigger in the nine years since my last E3 conference, or at least the show floor has gotten bigger - now in three halls, with many thousands of attendees.

While this is supposed to be a show for the “trade”, a whole lot of pure fans with no obvious trade affiliation managed to get in. And some looked a lot younger than the required 18 year minimum age posted at the entrance.

In any event, after getting through the ESA presentation in the morning, and discovering the power outage, I hit the West Hall exhibits area. The lighting was subdued due to the power outage, which did not affect power to the booths, but did affect ceiling lights. The power finally returned at 1:21pm PDT, and there was much rejoicing, as the power outage had prevented the concessions from opening, many of the upstairs meeting rooms from being usable, and impacted the press room and press registration pretty badly.

The West Hall’s star attractions were Nintendo and Sony, each featuring huge tracts of booth space, many dozens (if not hundreds) of game demo stations showing the latest titles in development. Folks got to hold the new Nintendo Gameboy Micro, as well as scope out a variety of single and multi-player game titles.

I will skip over the various Nth generation franchise game titles, the “new” war gaming titles, and all the other standard genres, as you’ll undoubtedly be able to read about them elsewhere.

The most interesting non-standard things I found were a VoIP program on the Nintendo DS, the Video Chat on the Sony PS2 using EyeToy, and a preview of EyeToy Kinetics. The latter was something I think I could finally get my wife to use as an entry to possibly finding game consoles useful for more than playing DVDs or distracting her three children (my two kids and myself). EyeToy Kinetics let’s one use the PS2 with an attached EyeToy camera as an interactive exercise device, with exercises ranging from a sedate but rewarding Tai-Chi-like session, to a heart pounding aerobic kick boxing work out. Can’t wait until it ships.

There was no sign of the PS3 or the Revolution in action anywhere, however.

In the South Hall were Microsoft, Ubisoft, THQ, EA, and another half dozen major game publishers, also with huge booth space. Microsoft even had a bridge/walkway one could use to by pass the crowds checking out upcoming Xbox titles. And, tucked away in the back of the booth were a handful of Xbox 360 demos, running on development systems. Shown were Activision’s Call of Duty 2, 2K Sport’s Top Spin 2, and Full Auto and Condemned from Sega of America. The visual quality was definitely closer to that of a higher end PC, and better than that of a current model Xbox, but it was tough to tell more than that.

I had my own chance at using the Xbox 360 development platform at the Electronic Arts booth, where I played a short segment of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (and inadvertently hung the system when I press the Xbox 360 button on the controller (if you’ve seen pictures, it’s the silver button in the middle). This button will be used for pulling up the Xbox Live! and related menus, but apparently that wasn’t implemented on the demo system I played with.

I know I saw many more interesting and cool things, but my brain and body are a bit toasty from walking around all day with far too little food and water for sustenance. Once I revisit my notes I will post more.

Until Day 2....