Halo Wars (Multiplayer)

From my perspective, the only difference between an AI and a 14-year-old American is that the AI is polite.

I think this is what impressed me about Halo Wars. This is a game, like all of the Halo titles, that is clearly built for multiplayer. Around half of the game's achievements are multiplayer-only achievements. And yet, when I firmly informed the game that the "multi" part of the phrase "multiplayer" would be performed entirely by the game's artificial intelligence, it shrugged, started the game, and began duly handing out achievements.

I prefer playing bots. I really do. Not just because on average the XBox Live community is a cesspit of pre-pubescent homophobia and racism which Halo enthusiastically scrapes the bottom of, but because bots offer a more meaningful experience. They play at a level of skill determined by me and they make decisions based on fixed rules, which means that I learn faster by dint of being able to try different things in similar situations, and I can accurately judge my skill gain as while I am getting better they are verifiably remaining the same.

When I say that I want to play multiplayer, sometimes I genuinely mean I want to play with other humans. This is the case with most every co-operative game, and also with rare competitive exceptions like Soul Calibur and Call of Duty 4. But mostly it means that I want to experience the multiplayer content. I want to capture a flag; I want to get a killstreak; I want to narrowly win a hotly contested deathmatch. Experiencing the content is different from experiencing the competition. I don't need to feel like I won teh internetz. I don't need to beat any other real people. I could be the world's worst player and still enjoy beating some bots.

Requiring you to be beat real people in order to experience the thrill of beating people is like a driving game that puts you in control of a real car in a real race against real drivers. It's certainly an experience but to a large extent it's redundant. The very attraction of games is their ability to simulate scenarios and experiences that may otherwise be too difficult, improbable or outright impossible for us to enjoy in real life. Defeating Sephrioth in Final Fantasy VII is not any less enjoyable for the knowledge that Sephiroth is not the avatar of a Minnesota high school student.

It's particularly an issue when it can be hard to identify an AI. In Halo Wars, if you have the chat turned off, the only way you could tell a human player from their gameplay is when they make a mistake. The only signs of human intellect to be seen are indecision, ignorance, and poor judgement; without them it's anyone's guess. AIs here are functionally interchangeable at all but the highest and lowest levels of play.

So in short I had a blast with the multiplayer component of Halo Wars. It was exceptional. It turns out that the average denizen of the gaming internet can indeed be replaced by a machine to the benefit of the world in general. For perfect realism I suppose there should have been an "AI will randomly quit mid-match" check box, to be toggled on or off, but in general I can't help but think that an MMO where all the other players were AIs might be something of a hit.

How To Buy A 360 Jasper

If you're an uber-gaming-geek you'll probably be aware that Microsoft has started to manufacture a new GPU for the XBox 360. It's called the Jasper (in contrast to the current GPU, the Falcon), and it's marginally quieter, significantly cooler, and exponentially less likely to result in your 360 suffering the Red Ring of Death. It also ships with the New XBox Experience already installed thanks to some brand-spanking-new onboard flash memory.

The Jasper's only just starting to turn up in stores; if you're buying a 360 over Xmas you'll probably end up with a (crappy old generic) Falcon, as the boxes aren't differentiated in any particularly obvious way and I'd bet money on salespeople not knowing what you're talking about. The only way to beat the system and take home a Jasper is to be Clued In (TM). Clued In people are the best kind of people.

Bill at Dubious Quality offers the following advice on snagging a Jasper:

Can you tell from looking at the box? Possibly, and here's all the information I can give you.

1. On the outside of the box, the bar code sticker will include a "team" and a "lot number." The team must be "FDOU," and the lot number must be "843x" or higher. Please note that finding an 843x unit doesn't guarantee it's a Jasper, but any lot numbers below almost guarantee that it isn't.

2. The power supply is 150W, with an output of 12.1A. By comparison, my repaired launch unit has a 203W power supply that outputs 16.1A. Falcons have a 175W power supply and output 14.2A. The problem, of course, is that you won't know what the power supply is until you open the box.

3. If it's an Arcade unit, the features comparison on the side of the box must list "256MB" as the memory. The new Arcades come with 256MB built-in flash memory instead of the 512MB flash memory. All I've seen reported so far as Jasper units are the Arcade models, so it might be another few days (or weeks) until they start showing up in Premiums and Elites.

You can read Bill's full post over at Dubious Quality. (link)

Lips First Impressions

SingStar is easily the worst game I ever played on the PS2. Yes, worse than Paparazzi. The whole SingStar franchise is a shameless attempt by Sony to bilk non-gamers out of their money based on the assumption that the average Sue won't realise they're paying full price for $20 worth of development. There's no game elements, there's very little coding, and it's hard to tell the difference between "playing" and watching a non-interactive karaoke DVD.

So I got to spend some time with Lips last night.

Lips is SingStar, as done by Microsoft. It's basically a glorified karaoke box, where songs play and lyrics appear on screen, and players sing along into a microphone.

The short version is that Lips is 100% better than SingStar, but still only 75% as good as the vocalist portions of Rock Band.

There are a lot of pluses. The included track list is a bit on the short side, but has zero filler - every song is a bona fide karaoke hit. The Australian version features honest-to-god Australian content, including classics like "Khe Sahn" and John Farnham's "The Voice". I find it very hard to say bad things about a game that includes "Walk Like An Egyptian" and "Bust A Move".

The microphones are also pretty sweet. They're wireless, you turn them on just by shaking them, they have some sort of motion detector inside, and they light up in unique colours to identify which player they're bound to. Once Rock Band patches to support these things they are going to be the vocalist peripheral of choice among gamers I know.

Unlike SingStar, Lips is an actual game. You earn points for your performance, and rank up over time. You earn medals for such things as perfect pitch and steady singing, and of course being on the 360 there are achievements to be had. There's not a lot of structure to the experience though, and you can't set or change the difficulty, so your tenth hour of play is going to be more or less the same as the nine that came before it. There's no unlockables, bonus content, or customisable avatars either. I didn't get the chance to see whether there were online leaderboards but the scoring system seemed fairly loose so I don't know whether global competition would be worthwhile anyway.

Probably the strongest feature is the multiplayer. Any song can be sung two-player, and you can start a song single-player and have a second player tag in halfway through just by shaking a microphone. There's not a lot in the way of duets present (in fact there may be none, I didn't immediately see any) but you can still belt out something like "Call Me" or "Stand By Me" as a duo. In addition, there are a bunch of competitive modes, such as one where you attempt to push the other player off a virtual stage by virtue of your superior performance.

Lips' last feature is more of an afterthought. You can theoretically import any MP3 from your music collection into the game, which sounds awesome, but of course they're not pitch-mapped and the game doesn't display any lyrics, so it's really no different to just playing one of these songs on your sound system and singing along. The game doesn't even download album art or anything so you're not likely to have a lot of fun with this option.

All in all, it seems that Lips is a karaoke game that doesn't insult its target market. There's a lot of room for improvement, but if you're the sort of person inclined to drop money for this sort of product, Lips is one of the best options currently available.

New XBox Experience

The new XBox 360 dashboard is here, for those who connect their consoles to the intertubes, and it's mostly an improvement. I guess.

The marketplace is much easier to navigate, which was the main focus of the upgrade, and it sure is nice to see the cover images for games float past as you browse them. It's also great that you can go from the data of a game you've played directly to the DLC for it.

On the other hand, Avatars are pretty underwhelming as there's not really anything you can do with them and everyone's tends to look pretty much the same. Plus at this stage the whole update is buggy as hell, reporting non-existent connection problems when browsing online content and suffering massive black-screen delays when exiting from some game titles back to the dash. The change-your-avatar system is poorly integrated, requiring the system to apparently load a dedicated application, and the dashboard automatically opens to the "Spotlight" channel instead of the "My XBox" channel which for some reason irritates me.

In game the changes are a mixed bag. The XBox Guide now opens in the middle of the screen instead of along the side, which is just stupid, especially if you're watching video. To make up for that, its functionality is vastly expanded and pretty much contains the entire old-style blade menu, which means you can view achievements for other games and browse DLC without exiting what you're currently playing.

There's the much-vaunted party system, too, which lets you keep up to eight players linked together across multiple games. I don't play a lot of Halo or Gears so I don't really have much occasion for eight-player gaming. Originally you were going to be able to watch NetFlix video as a party, but Australia didn't get NetFlix and the sharing functionality was ripped out anyway, which is a shame because as far as I was concerned that was going to be a killer app.

All in all it's much of a muchness really. In its current state it's pretty unexciting; it'll depend on where Microsoft takes it from here whether all the effort was really worth it.

Real-Time Censorship

Disturbing news, everybody!

Microsoft have patented a technology for real-time audio censorship. The technology analyses recorded or live transmitted speech to look for "undesirable" words or phrases and render them inaudible. Which means you can swear all you want, and the person on the other end of the line will just wonder why you've suddenly gone quiet.

Microsoft obviously intends to turn the thing loose on XBox Live, so that young babies and suchlike will be protected from the ravages of the 14-year-old vocabulary, and as a togglable option that's probably something that everyone on that community can benefit from.

It's one of those technologies, though, that could have a lot of horrible, horrible applications in the wrong hands. Can you picture the thing being applied wholesale to our phone system? To our television networks? Ars Technica have already seen the problem in their article, and they draw our attention to the love that regimes like that in China would have for this process. Picture a world where the word "election" simply can't be communicated over a telephone line.

YouTube already uses something similar for automatically detecting copyrighted material in uploaded videos, whereby videos that the algorithm thinks contains visual or audio information belonging to another party are flagged, and the onus is on the video uploader to prove that their work is original. The algorithm is, of course, secret, so the precise method by which it brands you a criminal is neither known nor open to criticism.

Naturally, you can't put the genie back in the box, and the development of something like this was more or less a cultural inevitability. Ultimately the only way that we, as a society, can see that this benefits us more than it harms us is by strong privacy laws, a free and intelligent ongoing political debate on the issue, and through the vigilance of each individual citizen.

Game Publisher Profit & Loss

Via Kotaku, profit and loss margins for the 20 top game publishers. On its face this reflects what might be thought to be common sense; publishers who produce quality make a profit, while publishers that make rubbish pay for it.

It's not quite that simple, of course. The numbers include hardware divisions, so Microsoft shows a large loss representing their ongoing efforts to advance their market share. I seem to recall that Microsoft actually posted their first games division profit last quarter so next year's chart might look very different. Sony, of course, were more focused on launching Blu-Ray than they were on winning the console war this time around so their massive losses are less of a defeat than they are an investment in the company's ongoing future.

EA have recently come out and said they made a mistake by not backing the Wii as the winner in this console generation; their somewhat blinkered focus on the PS3 and 360 hasn't helped them over the last year. Ubisoft, on the other hand, are doing quite well, probably deriving both from their excellent Montreal and Montpellier studios, and from the way they were astoundingly quick to fill the Wii market with shovelware.

Atari, Midway and Sega are all victims of their own poor quality titles. These companies couldn't find quality gaming if you shackled it to their wrist.

My guess on Take 2's dismal performance here is that it's got something to do with their ongoing legal troubles. Take 2 of course includes Rockstar, whose games sell like hotcakes but can't seem to stay out of court. It's probably also worth noting that the chart above caps out before the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 so the profits from that are obviously not included.

Namco, Capcom and Squeenix are all excellent examples of producing good games based on original IP on a regular basis. We like what they make, and we pay them money for it. Everyone's a winner.

Vivendi is of course just another way of saying "Blizzard and Sierra"; most of that profit you see there is World of Warcraft alone. Vivendi's now merged with Activision so it's not unreasonable to expect a monster result next year from the resulting juggernaut.

Konami's interesting in that it feels like it should be down next to Capcom and Namco but instead they're storming the market. It's especially interesting as this chart predates the release of Metal Gear Solid 4. Konami's doing unusually well for a company that's shown such partisan support for this generation's console loser, the PS3. Does anyone have insight as to what's going on here?

Disney comes as a surprise to hardcore gamers; this is mostly just licensed games being made dirt cheap and sold by the truckload. It's a bit depressing that this kind of rubbish is so very profitable. Disney does own a few smaller studios like Lumines creator Q Entertainment, though.

And finally Nintendo tops the chart; they're the only company currently making a profit (and a fairly massive profit at that) on their hardware division, through both the Wii and the DS, but they're also the major developer for both those platforms, and platform-exclusive games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy spent significant periods of time at the top of sales charts across all consoles. Nintendo was making a profit even during the lame-duck years of the Gamecube, and now that they've actually got quality hardware on the market they're unstoppable.

Halo 2 - Install First Impressions

I have my copy of Halo 2 for Vista, and immediately upon inserting the disc in the drive Microsoft's master plan for PC gaming becomes clear.

First up, there's Live. Halo 2 comes with a free 1 month Gold trial of the Live service that XBox users are already familiar with. This means you can access Live through your PC, and (I assume) play Halo 2 against Xbox or 360 owners.

You get the full Live experience - and by that I mean that Achievements, previously an XBox specific feature, are fully available for the Vista release of Halo 2. You can rack up your 1000 points for the game via its PC release. I haven't had a chance to test it yet but it looks like Live is fully interoperable between the XBox and the PC, letting you use the same account et cetera.

More impressive still is the option that appears as soon as you jam the Halo 2 disc into your drive: "Play Halo 2". That's right - not "Install Halo 2" - just "Play". Apparently it installs in the background while you start playing.

Sneaky old Microsoft - while they've been busy making consoles look more like PCs, they've also been putting in the work to make PCs look more like consoles. I'm impressed, and hopeful for what this kind of approach will mean for future PC releases.