ArsTechnica has a longish review of the new XBox 360 (link). Of course I’m most interested in the Marketplace, and so from the article comes this bit of relevant reporting:

First, all of the games are Live aware, so you can send and respond to messages and invitations from every game. The older system had that though, but the fact that this feature is now universal is a nice touch. The real draw here though, is the Marketplace.

In theory the Marketplace is a shopping area you get to through the dashboard that allows you to access all sorts of content.

Microsoft now has a direct window into your living room, and not only that, they have a way to sell you any kind of content they want. Songs? Videos? Movies? It’s all possible.

All in all though, you can’t help but think that the Marketplace is the future of gaming. You can get content for your games, try your hand at some old-school shooters, or demo the latest game before you plunk down your US$60 at the store for it. It’s all here, and it’s easy to get into and use.

That makes two for two.

With all the grumbling about XBox 360 glitches and hardware problems, this review over on G-pinions of the interface and user experience is what I was afraid was being drowned out but is what I’ve been most hoping to see. From the piece:

The whole setup sounded like a gimmicky moneymaker when they first started talking about it – and it is – but it’s so great because everyone wins. I get the best purely arcade experiences I’ve had in a decade, relatively inexpensively, Microsoft gets to make some of their hardware losses back, and independent developers get to share their efforts with the world without the hassles of traditional distribution (and hopefully get a small piece of the pie and be able to make more games).

It’s only one commentary so far, but hopefully there will be more. This one does enthusiatically discuss “Achievements” (the XBox 360 built-in reputation system), but I really want to read more about the Live Marketplace.

via Wonderland

Back when I was working on an indy videogame I realized that playing catch-up to all the talented code jockeys out there made no sense; not when the future of programming seems less about cooking spaghetti and more about going to a buffet (translation: writing lines and lines of code versus integrating pre-coded modules into a framework). I always figured the day would come when the code would be effectively irrelevant and content would truly be “king”. And BusinessWeek has an entry today on the U.S. Air Force commissioning a system that ushers that day a little closer. Follow this link to read about “WarCon”.

It was only yesterday that I was adding a comment to one of Chris Anderson’s “machinima” posts. I’ll just quote my comment here:

Chris wrote: The problem with standard machinima based on first-person-shooter game engines is that you’re painting with an incredibly limited palette, both in terms of the characters and settings and in what you can do with them.

I disagree. It’s not that the tools available in FPS’s like HL2 or Doom3 are more limited, but rather that most users either don’t have the ability to use them at those levels or can’t justify the time to create that content. There’s a reason videogame production costs are going up.

There’s nothing stopping me from taking real CAD geometry and mapping it onto game assets, either as normalmaps or perhaps “relief” maps (link). Nothing stopping people from creating other high-quality assets like character models, animations, and skins; the tools are readily available. So the pallete isn’t limited, it’s just that working at those levels is extremely time-consuming and such an effort is difficult – at present – to justify.

That’s what a product like “The Movies” is really offering: ease of use. It’s paint-by-numbers compared to creating paint from raw materials. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom3 provide amazing opportunities for indy filmmakers (here’s one example I outlined for some B-movie filmmakers over a year ago: link). Give it time. A few Long Tail niches will be fusing soon enough and when that happens there will be sufficient incentive for creators to put in the effort.

Well, lookie what Wired (of all places) has posted today: an article on a documentary that’s using a game engine to provide visuals. From the story:

The documentaries for the first time will also attempt to portray real World War II veterans as they appeared in the war.

Gearbox took photos of some of the World War II vets interviewed for the show, and re-created them in the game as they looked when they fought in Normandy as young men of 18 and 20 years of age.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Courtesy of the Second Life forums comes this link to a Business 2.0 article, “The Virtual Rockefeller“; another article about dealing in virtual real estate. Nothing all that much new in the article to be honest, but I do wonder if the grand piano mentioned is one of Sue Stonebender’s creations (for those unaware, Sue would be Sue Braiden, columnist for the CBC). People would be surprised at the real life people they can meet in a virtual world. I know Robin Williams is an avid gamer. Wonder if he’s around.