Creative, Artistic and Geeky Cake Designs

Over at Web Urbanist, they have a list of 20 Creative, Artistic and Geeky Cake Designs. I know what kind of cake I want for my next birthday :D

Warioland - Shake It Up

I love how the Wii changes the way games are played. The tilt controllers, nun-chucks, etc really make you interact with the game. I watched a promotional video for Wario Land: Shake It! which really made me want to play it right now! If ever a full-body Wii controller could be used, this is the game to use it on. Wario Land: Shake It Promotional Video on YouTube

XBox Media Center (XBMC) Released For All Platforms

From LifeHacker:

The popular open-source media center application Xbox Media Center (XBMC) has rolled out the first beta release of XMBC Atlantis, which brings XBMC to all platforms. That means XBMC now runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, the original Xbox, and even your thumb drive or live CD. Despite its beta status, this release brings XBMC even closer to cross-platform bliss—including iTunes and iPhoto integration for XBMC on your Mac. The new release also boasts a killer new HD skin, so keep reading for a closer look.

XBMC is free, works on all platforms. This release is currently in beta, so you may see some bugs. That said, so far it's been running like a champ on my machines. If you give the new XBMC beta a try, let's hear how you're liking it in the comments.

XBMC ‘Atlantis’ Beta 1 released - now serving all common platforms Download XBMC [XMBC.org]

Sad News - Glider Agrees to Pay Blizzard $6M in Bot Lawsuit

MDY, the makers of the World of Warcraft Bot Glider, has agreed to pay Blizzard $6M in the on going lawsuit brought by Blizzard. MDY realized it could owe more in damages following Janaury's (2009) trial, so it proposed this agreement. From Virtually Blind's article on the MDY v Blizzard Case:

This judgment does not entirely conclude the matter. Issues still slated for trial in January include whether MDY’s sales of Glider violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and whether MDY’s owner Michael Donnelly can be held personally liable for the $6,000,000 judgment.

Beyond trial, of course, there will almost certainly be an appeal to the 9th Circuit on the issue of liability, which would negate the stipulation, and thus the $6m damages judgment, if MDY prevails.

It's a sad day for us all when corporate interests override a person's fair use rights on his own computer.

World of Warcraft Credit Card

The World of Warcraft Blog brings news of a Visa credit for World of Warcraft players. First National Bank of Omaha is offering a Visa credit with a World of Warcraft background. Using the card will earn you extra game time in WoW.

The World of Warcraft Visa card is available to U.S. residents with a World of Warcraft game account, putting one percent of every dollar spent on “qualifying purchases” toward time in the game and giving cardholders a free month of play the first time they use the card. The cards are available in 13 different and very sexy designs, with detailed artwork featuring the game’s various races, including Night Elves, Tauren, Dwarves, Trolls and of course, Orcs and Humans.

It may seem like kind of a weird rewards program, but with 11 million subscribers, many of whom would leap at the chance to publicly declare their WoW allegiance - not to mention the potential for free play time - I think it’s a brilliant move. Even more importantly, it’s yet another sign that gamers are being recognized as adults, and taken seriously for the “cultural demographic” they represent. Of course, laying down your World of Warcraft Forsaken Visa may not get you taken seriously by the maître d’, but sometimes legitimacy has to come one step at a time.

Will Spore DRM Become EA's Rootkit Moment?

With the news coming out that some purchasers of the video game Spore have filed a class action lawsuit against EA for its inclusion of SecuROM DRM, it's reaching the point where you have to wonder if this is becoming EA's "rootkit" moment. The parallels are there. Both involved an overly draconian form of DRM that severely limited how a "purchased" product could be used. Both involved hidden files installed on a computer -- and both resulted in massive backlash from consumers, and a very slow response from the company. And, of course, the rootkit resulted in class action lawsuits as well. At some point, perhaps, companies will start to realize that treating your customers as criminals is probably a bad idea.

EA Loosens DRM on Spore

The LA Times reports EA has decided to loosen the DRM restrictions for Spore after being stung by a siege of criticism from gamers who took issue with the copyright restrictions the company placed on its Spore game. EA agreed to up the install limit from 3 times to 5, claiming they may also make exceptions in some cases, and also released a patch allowing for multiple user names. While it's nice that the company finally responded, this is still a pretty weak response and doesn't address the core issues. The real problem here is the use of DRM in the first place. Companies should not be treating their customers as thieves and pirates - it only makes the customer want to be a thief or pirate. Cliff Harris conducted an interesting experiment, where he posted an open forum asking why people pirate games. The response? Purchase cost of the game is the first reason, followed by the quality of the game (the less quality, the more likely it is to be pirated instaed of being bought), and third was because of DRM. People don't like DRM, we know that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.

Spore - Day Two

As promised, I played Spore again, yesterday. I played for about six hours total, taking a 5-10 minute break every hour (gotta stretch). Reviewing my first impressions of Spore, I have some updated observations: Cellular - I still enjoyed this level quite a lot, mostly because the game play is different from the other levels. I can understand, though, why they limited the time on this level. However, I still think you should be able to earn some extra DNA after you beat all your goals. Creature - I went the herbivore route today. It's definitely easier to make friends when you are a herbivore. I could have written the Spore equivalent of "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This level was definitely more fun for me the second time through. Tribal - I started right off making friends with the new tribes. I still ended up destroying two tribes, though (they smelled funny :P ). My strategy improved for picking off the opposing tribe. I had improved my stealth rating in the Creature level, and it paid off. You need stealth for food raids. I decided to raid all the food of a tribe, then kill it's gatherers - it was a resounding success. To me, this is still the most difficult level, but I think the funness improved the second time through. Civilization - Because of my previous actions, I started the civ level as a religious city. I found out that religious vehicles can indeed attack military vehicles (but economic vehicles apparently cannot). Because I was social this time through, I made treaties with three other cities. At one point, I had two cities helping me capture a third city. I did find a small bug, though. I had asked Yellow to help me attack the Blue city. Yellow and I both bombarded the city, with my military winning and seizing control of the city. After the cut video, I become the owner of the city. However, Yellow is still attacking the city! I had to install all the gun turrets in the city for defense (I didn't want to directly attack Yellow, yet). My turrets killed the Yellow tanks, and everything went back to normal. Galaxy - I played galaxy for about 90 minutes. This level is very different, but fun all the same. I know understand why you control the spaceship the way you do (using the scroll wheel to ascend/descend). After playing the galaxy level, it makes sense. It's not cumbersome, like I thought yesterday. I didn't finish galaxy. I accomplished 2 of the 10(?) goals. This level definitely needs more time than the other levels. Maybe I still don't quite understand it, but I found making money to be much more difficult in this level. Overall, Spore is a great game. I'm going to raise my rating to a 4.5 out of 5, now that I understand the reason for the decisions the developers made. One final note, about the DRM. I haven't tried to make a backup of the game, yet (I make a backup of every game, in case the disc breaks - I've had several break or become too scratched to use). One thing I did like, though, is that I don't need to have the disc in the CD-ROM drive to play the game. I HATE when the company requires that.

Spore - First Impressions

Yesterday, I played Spore for about seven hours total, mostly straight through. I took an hour break about four hours into play to eat and do some household chores. Spore has five levels of evolution: Cellular, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Galaxy. Each level has a series of goals you must accomplish to reach the next level. I completed the first four levels, and played about five minutes in the Galaxy level before I had to quit. Spore is definitely a different game. I found it to be quite fun, and think this is one of those rare games that would interest both boys and girls. I especially enjoyed the creature creator, and having the ability to design and modify my creature. Below are my impressions of each level: Cellular - For me, this was one of the funnest levels, but also the shortest. I completed the cellular stage after about 25-30 minutes, and now that I know how to do it, could complete this much sooner, I think. This is unfortunate, because I thought the cellular level was very enjoyable. My only other complaint is that once you reach your evolutionary goal, you stop being able to collect DNA points. You can still hunt/eat and you can mate, but anything you kill or eat does not go to your DNA bank. However, this appears to only be true on the cellular level. Creature - Once I understood what needed to be done, this was fun, also. I spent about 10-15 minutes trying to understand how to make friends with other creatures. In this level, you either need to make friends with creatures or make them go extinct. As you progress in this stage, you gain intelligence. That increased intelligence allows you add one or more creatures to your party. These can be creatures from your nest or from the befriended creatures. My creatures were more specialized for combat, which made befriending other creatures a little difficult. I made a few friends early on, but afterwards my dancing/posing/charming skills weren't high enough. When you try to make friends, you have to repeat what the other creatures does. For example, the other creature might do a little dance, so you push the dance button. Each creature in your group does the dance, and the more who dance the better you impress the new creature. However, I noticed that as I progressed, the new creatures would call his nest-mates over to dance with him. This makes it more difficult to impress them, because you need a higher skill of dancing to impress 2, 3, or 4 creatures. Don't get me wrong, this level was a lot of fun. You definitely should explore the map, as I picked up a LOT of body parts. I played this level for about thirty minutes more after I reached my goals, just so I could find new body parts (and earn more DNA points). This is the last level you can modify the base creature, so you want to find everything you can to make him the best. Tribal - This is definitely the most difficult stage. You start with a tribe of five creatures. You must make peace with or exterminate five other tribes. You must also assign food gathering tasks to some of your tribesmen. Finally, you must construct buildings so your tribesmen can use weapons, musical instruments (for making peace), and fishing tools. The first time I tried to make peace with another tribe, I found the instructions VERY confusing. The in-game instructions really did not explain to me what I needed to do. To make peace, you need to construct buildings that make musical instruments (horns, marachas, and pipes). You bring the chief and at least one tribesman with an instrument (best to bring all three types) to the new tribe. The new tribe will tell you (with pictographs) what they want to hear. Once you understand how to do this, it's very easy - much easier than making friends at the creature stage. I befriended three tribes, but two tribes tried to steal my food, so I decided to wipe them out. This is a LOT more difficult than you think. Each tribe has basically the same number of people. When I started my war campaign, we all had 12 people. The problem for the warrior is that you must leave at least one person (two is best) to do fishing and food gathering, and at least one more to protect your food from wild creatures. So, now you are invasion of 9 (at best) against 12. I found two strategies that seem to work for this. The first one is send people, one at a time to raid the food of the rival tribe. You want to send a stream (like five), one after another (not all together). Expect the first one or two to die - they are the diversion anyway. Tribes need food to create new people and to buy/repair buildings. I also found that during combat, you can send someone to raid the food, and the raider will be successful 90% of the time. The second strategy is one of attrition. I created two groups of warriors. The first group being the largest (five or six). Send the first group to the edge of the tribe. When a tribesman comes near, begin the combat. You want your five or six to distract the tribe, so let them fight all the people. Next, send your remaining soldiers to attack a building (or raid the food). The goal is to destroy the chief's hut, but the hut is very strong. One tribe I fought, I had to destroy the secondary buildings first to wear down the tribe's food supply. When they were finally broke, I was able to destroy the chief's hut. Civilization - Once you get use to the camera controls, this stage is more like an RTS (real time strategy) game. I found this level to be very fun. I played it for quite a while, mostly to experience the different methods of taking over the other cities. For this stage, you must unite the planet, which is covered by your race. You can convert the city by religious, military, or economic means. Economic takes the most time, but works best because there is no damage done to the new city (and you earn more money in the process). Religious works second best (and was a lot of fun to watch in progress). Religious takes the same time (or maybe faster) than military. However, a religious vehicle cannot fight a military vehicle. So, if you keep military vehicles around your cities, you can ward off a religious attack. Also, religious attacks don't harm buildings, except for the entertainment structures. The military attack is your standard military campaign. Build five or six tanks, send them to bombard the next city. However, you destroy all the buildings in the city. Sometimes, you even destroy city land, which means less space available for your structures, when you take over the city. Once you take over all the cities on the planet, you advance to... Galaxy - I only had a few minutes on this level, so not many thoughts. I went through the ship flying tutorial and started on the tractor beam mission before I had to stop. Flying the ship is not as easy as it could be. You control the ship with the mouse, but to ascend/descend, you use either the scroll wheel or the +/- buttons (btw, + goes down, - goes up). Maybe I will understand the reasons for this as I progress into Galaxy, but for now I'm wondering why the ship can't be controlled like the flying mounts of WoW - mouse point up to ascend (or press jump). Overall, Spore is a great game and a lot of fun to play. I'm giving it a 4, out of 5. I'm wondering how re-playable this is (for adults) once you complete the galaxy stage. I may amend my score based on what I find. Read my follow up post - Spore: Day Two

Spore

Woot! Spore finally arrived! I'm driving my wife crazy talking about how I'm going to spend the weekend playing Spore. I installed Spore, this morning. Installation went very smooth. Took about twenty minutes. I did notice after the install that I had an icon on my desktop for the EA Downloader, but the icon for Spore was missing. Huh? I actually had to browse to the install folder and manually add the Spore icon to my desktop. Maybe it's just a problem in Vista? I know a lot of people have rated this 1 star on Amazon. If you read the posts, you'll find the reason is because of the draconian DRM. I agree that EA should never have DRM'd Spore. In doing so, they are actually inviting crackers to circumvent the DRM. I've heard that the DRM crack for Spore is now the #1 download on the Pirate Bay. Maybe other companies will take notice.

Congrats to EA...

Source: UserFriendly.org

A Lesson on Gaming With Kids From Wil Wheaton

Wil Wheaton (of Star Trek TNG fame), has an interesting idea for playing games with kids. The original idea is great when you're just learning a new game:

Rule 17a is a house rule we invoke when we're learning a new game. It basically states that, at any time, a player can say, "You know, I just realized that I did this stupid thing that I wouldn't have done if I had a little more experience in the game. I'd like a do-over." If the majority of the players agree (and we always do) then we just back up a little bit, and play on. It reduces the risk of doing something bone-headed that you can't ever recover from, and it keeps the game fun.

His new idea, termed Rule 17b, is a great one for kids, but I think can (and maybe should) be used by everyone:

Depending on your kid, the game, and some X factor that I leave to you as a parent, you could give your child up to three "roll again" markers, like poker chips or glass beads or whatever, that she can use at any time to re-roll a particularly bad dice roll. They can use it whenever they want to, but once the marker it used, it's gone for the rest of the game, so your child will have to choose very carefully about when she's going to use it. This would be especially great with a couple of smaller kids, because the parent isn't put in the position of awarding do overs and giving the appearance of favoritism (raise your hand if you've ever had to untangle that Gordian Knot.)

I'm thinking that this could be a great idea for computer and console games. Maybe I'll consider adding it as a feature in one the games I'm working on.

Amazon Deleted Spore Reviews?

A lot of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly. When you try to shut down a large group of people who feel wronged, you're not just whacking the bees' nest with a stick, you're setting it on fire with a flame thrower. The folks who were complaining are only going to complain louder, and louder. Remember what happened when Digg tried to takedown the AACS crack? Whoever was responsible for removing the comments -- whether it was Amazon or EA -- they may find that the reaction to trying to shut down the angry mob is only going to make folks that much angrier, and alert that many more people to the problems they have with EA's use of DRM.

XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta Is Coming

I've been using the XNA Game Studio since the 1.0 beta. For those who don't know, XNA Game Studio is Microsoft's latest (and greatest) attempt to allow developers to create games for the PC, XBox 360, and the Zune. XNA provides several tools, the most important of which is to provide a wrapper for DirectX. For those of you who have written managed DirectX games in the past, this is a HUGE improvement. I've been using the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP since it was released. Version 2 only worked in Visual Studio 2005 (which was strange, since it came out after Visual Studio 2008 was released). Version 3 is great, not only because it loads in Visual Studio 2008, but because it allows me to use LINQ and has a host of new improvements. My only problem with version 3.0 has been the lack of an upgrade wizard for 2.0 projects. Yesterday, the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta will be released next week. My most anticipated improvement? The XNA 2.0 upgrade wizard. Some other features of the beta include:

Zune-specific features

• Support for the upcoming Zune 3.0 firmware - note that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP will not be compatible with the 3.0 firmware. My colleague Michael Klucher posted a summary of this issue on his blog, including steps to remove 3.0 CTP games from your Zune since they will no longer work with the 3.0 firmware
• Zune deployment from 64-bit OS's

Xbox 360-specific features

• Xbox 360 project templates are available
• Big button pad support

XNA Framework and Visual Studio features

• Rich presence, invites and join session in progress
• Content compression
• FBX importer improvements
• ClickOnce deployment for Windows games
• Project upgrade wizard to automatically upgrade XNA Game Studio 2.0 games
• Multiple content projects
• Cross-platform project synchronization

The Un-Green Revolution

I'm a big Green lover (ask my wife). I try to buy green products, organic foods, energy efficient appliances, etc. Almost a year ago, I upgrade my home PC. I love the upgrade (quad core CPU, 4G RAM, 756MB Video, 2TB SATA drives, etc). However, one thing that troubled me during the upgrade was the amount of power needed for the GPU (graphics processing unit, or the video card). I had been using a 500W power supply, but it never peaked over 250W. The new video card could put my whole system into using up to 850W! I even had to get a new UPS (uninterrupted power supply) because the old one couldn't put out 800W. Seems others are taking notice with how the GPU manufacturers are steadingly increasing the amount of power needed for their cards. We've almost hit a limit (for extreme PC's). The standard wall outlet has a finite amount of power it can supply. In fact, some new extreme PC's need a special wall outlet like you find for refrigerators and washer/dryers!

Can Blizzard Be Beaten? Maybe...

For those of you following Blizzard's many attempts to shut down botters, gold farmers, and the like through legal actions, you may be feeling a little despondent after the recent failure of the court when a judge agreed with Blizzard that modifying an program's memory is the same as copyright violation. There may be some good news. An unnamed party sued Blizzard for banning his account. Blizzard had banned the account for botting (a violation of the World of Warcraft ToS). The unnamed party admits he botted on the account. However, the party sued citing a decision in SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc, which basically says SoftMan had purchased software and not just a license. This will be interesting to watch in the future, as Blizzard contends we WoW players are buying a license, and not software. The difference is that if we buy software, we are free to modify the memory of the program on our own machine. Buying software means we bought a product, and have the rights and warranties of having bought a product. If we buy a license, we are bound by the items in the EULA and are prevented from accessing or modifying the memory of the program running on our machine. Buying a license means we bought permission to use a product, and have restricted rights and warranties. Since we have precedence of a judge ruling we actually bought software, I think this tactic could be used over and over with Blizzard. Blizzard does not want to have a recent court ruling agree with this previous ruling, as it would damage their case against MDY and other companies. If you've been banned recently by Blizzard, you might consider sueing Blizzard and cite SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc. The unnamed party from above got his account back plus a free year of WoW. It cost him court costs and filing fees (which amount to about one year of WoW service).