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 MegaCon 2010: Loading Please Wait (2010-03-14)
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Last year Scott and I wandered up to Orlando for a Saturday trip to MegaCon just to see what in the hell was going on there and we essentially did the same thing this year while our friend Cody tagged along. Immediately on arrival we noticed a key difference from the previous year (I'm not talking about Cosplayers seemingly wearing less and less each Con). The line to get in was longer than the time it takes to complete a Gran Turismo game and about as enjoyable as repeating endurance races. Finally, we found our way to a faster and shorter line outside that only took an hour of our day. Later on we found out that the lines were so long because there were 3 other conventions happening at the same time, one of which was a cheerleading convention that was epic because it's always fun to see normal people who don't know what the hell is going on and gage their reactions.
After all the unnecessary line hopping and time wasting we were finally able to go where we boldly went before the previous year. On average MegaCon draws about 30,000 people over it's 3 days of operation. This was evident by the amount of densely packed people and vendors on the floor. There seemed to be more this year than last year but one thing about MegaCon is they always seems to have several exceptional vendors that we end up talking, interviewing and/or befriending. One of which was a group of 10 or so Sci-Fi enthusiasts who have created a series called "Star Command" which consists of full episodes and shorts that puts a comedic and more realistic spin on deep space starship travel. The basic premise is that the USS Lee is falling apart and it's captain is a disgraced loser but they somehow are able to stumble their way into surviving in the end. You can check out their web series at the Star Command website and I suggest that you do. Anyone who appreciates Sci-Fi will appreciate this. At some other point in the day (it all blurs toghether) we also ran into a rather interesting tabletop RPG called Shroud of the Ancients. I say interesting because the game itself is very versatile from the shape of the dice to the rules of the game. For example, there are no classes, no levels and no limits (WOW players QQ) but the game is still D&D compatible as well. Shroud of the Ancients has been recognized at Dragon*Con and is close to debuting as a full versioned game sometime soon. For more on this go check out Shroud of the Ancients website.
There are still a few more vendors I want to mention but there's more on that later. The highlight of the Con for all of us was the panel with Nichelle Nichols who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek (you may have heard of it). Besides being in the same room with her, which was amazing, she was hilarious when answering questions about how she came to be Lt. Uhura on the show and it was certainly fantastic. Before she even started taking questions she moved the table that she was sitting behind so that she could sit on it and be more visible to the audience instead of being segregated and tucked away. It also took 3 people and several minutes to do so which I found very amusing. She answered questions like how Uhura got her name and what it was like to work with Gene Roddenberry, what her favorite episode was etc. When time was up she even told the convention staff to give her an extra 5 minutes to finish what she was saying. I'm going to be a little selfish here and not go into detail about what she actually said and no we didn't film the panel so if you weren't there then QQ. We do have several pictures of her that will be available on our facebook page soon if not already.
Either before of after Nichelle Nichols, Scott, Cody and I had the pleasure of talking to Matthew Grand of EARTHBOUND COMICS. We had a very interesting conversation with him that ranged from comics to his doctor's note that legally allows him to be mean to others (I'm jealous). What originally caught our eye is that the characters are a bit different from your average superheros and supervillains who live in New York City. Many of their characters are more Florida themed such as Cat 5 who is a sexy female superhero who can control the wind to create hurricanes. One of her enemies is Bull-shark who as you can imagine is well....a bad-ass Bull-shark with a nose ring and all (that seems like something we Floridians can all relate to). There is also a ghost pirate that was pretty cool and many more. Having lived in Florida off and on my entire life I am glad to see that we can have some superheros and supervillains of our own too.
Lastly, I would like to mention the SUPERHUMAN EXPERIMENT. These talented men and women are local to us here in Largo and they have created a comic that makes superheroes possible in everyday life and this unique comic may very well change your perception of reality. You can look forward to hearing more from them in the future.
To close us out, I would say that MegaCon was fun and worth going to this year as I expected it would. However, I felt like the panels were a little disappointing compared to last year's but there was certainly not a lack of interesting people to see and talk to which is a big part of what makes a Con successful. Hopefully, if we go back next year there won't be 3 other conventions going on at the same time but I'm curious to see if the volleyball and cheerleading conventions will ever come back after this again. Don't forget to check out the video chronicals of our misadventures on YouTube here.
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MegaCon:
MegaCon 2010: Loading Please Wait
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 PlayStation's Home is Still not Big Enough (2010-03-14)
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Jack Buser, Playstation Home's Director was Sony's first proverbial foot forward for the final day of GDC 2010 panels, stating that the virtual community's worldwide userbase now stands at a cool 12 million. To put how truly pathetic that number is into perspective, Xbox Live had around 10 million users in ... 2008. The population has grown by two million users since December 2009, and is double of what it was in June of last year.
Buser expanded on the stats, pointing out that these numbers aren't based on one-off visits; according to Sony's data, 85 percent of users who create a Home avatar return more than once. The average citizen, he said, spends an hour in Home each visit. So needless to say there are 12 million people bored enough to kill an hour of their time on PS Home.
While Buser's talk was primarily aimed at developers interested in developing in-Home games, he spoke on what to expect in terms of Sony's strategy for the service in 2010:
You're going to see us really embrace this idea of total game integration" to "really extend out the experience of your games.
He used the Home presence of Sucker Punch's inFamous as an example, saying that we can expect to see more spaces, minigames and tie-in content timed alongside game launches this year, and that "it's an incredibly important part of Sony's strategy." Will this new strategy help PS Home gain more frequent users or will it continue to be a feature that people use once and then completely forget about it... like John Mayer to Jessica Simpson.
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Joystiq:
PlayStation Home population at 12 million
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Modern Warfare 2 DLC: The Better Stimulus Package (2010-03-14)
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We may have to wait until March 30 for Modern Warfare 2's first DLC, the "Stimulus Package," but thanks to an Xbox Live Marketplace listing for the map pack, we get to know just how much bang we are getting for our buck. The blurb reveals the pack will contain "5 additional action-packed maps," including three all new ones (Bailout, Storm, and Salvage), as well as two remakes from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Crash and Overgrown).
Bailout is said to be "a multi-layered apartment complex," while Storm is described as "an open industrial park littered with heavy machinery, and Salvage is "a snowy junkyard fortified by stacked debris and crushed cars." Presumably, if you're reading about the details of unreleased a MW2 map pack, you already knew that Crash is a "war-torn urban environment" and Overgrown is set in a large dry creek. That being said we don't know how much buck is required to get this seemingly awesome bang. Is this a little teaser for the MW2 players out there, so they can drool in anticpation for these new maps? Probably, and most definitely. Another little fun fact is that Xbox Live users are actually going to get this DLC package 30 days before PS3 users. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Or just eradicate it with a tactical nuke.
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Joystiq:
XBLM listing reveals 5 maps, 2 CoD4 remakes in MW2 'Stimulus Package' DLC
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Dice and Battlefield Building (2010-03-14)
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EA DICE has been a fairly prolific developer during the current console generation, developing both a high-profile title based on original IP (Mirror's Edge), as well as ones based on established franchises like Battlefield. EA was searching for a way to capitalize on the downtime between these blockbuster releases - a game which would be relatively quick and painless to create - while still standing up to the quality standards set by their previous releases. So mommy and daddy loved each other very much and the idea for Battlefield 1943 was born.
Battlefield 1943 producer Patrick Liu explained the studio's unique design philosophy while making the game, which boiled down to "make the game as long as resources last." They maximized the amount of content they produced under this strategy by settling on the somewhat smaller scope of the game early and focusing on recreating the Battlefield experience to adhere to that scope.
Some decisions made under this philosophy include making ammunition and health auto-regenerate, cutting down on tiresome resource runs back to your home base. This decision led to others, including the removal of the medic and engineer classes. It also let them focus on perfecting a handful of maps and gametypes, which, while iterated from previous installments in the franchise, also saw major adjustments in 1943.
The result was a project developed by a team of fifteen series veterans at once, at one-tenth of the cost of a full DICE game. The game broke day one, week one and month one downloadable sales records. It's no surprise that Liu expressed interest in developing more "games of this size and scope." When handled correctly, if you couldn't tell, making these "mini games" has proved quite profitable for EA. Just for you math junkies out there the average video game costs $1,000,000 to over $20,000,000, so a tenth of 1 million would be $100,000 - talk about pinching your pennies.
Another game quite similar to Battlefield 1943 would be Battlefield Heroes, which believe it or not was also developed by EA. Battlefield Heroes takes a more cartoony approach, graphically speaking, as opposed to BF 1943's more realsistic character models. Also, BFH is only available on PCs (not Macs). Both games contain vehicles for both land and air but one of the bigger differences between the two games would be that BFH is free to play but has an in-game store where you can purchase weapons, outfits and the like. On the other hand, BF 1943 is a one-time purchase game and you play for as long as you want, using relatively whatever weapons you want. I wondered to myself which game inspired the other and I am assuming that BF 1943 (released 07/08/2009) was inspired by BFH (released 06/25/09), or perhaps BFH was just a test for BF 1943 that ended up being more successful than EA thought, so they kept the game running. Another piece of interesting info is that BF 1943 will be coming to PCs sometime this year. So does that spell death for BFH or will EA try and get as much money as possible and keep bother games running so long as they arent bleeding money? My guess would be that they will keep both running simply because it's all about the money. Or, if one of the games will be dropped by EA it's going to be BFH but only time will tell.
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Joystiq:
GDC: EA DICE on building a bite-sized Battlefield
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Sony Reintroduces PlayStation Motion Controller at GDC with More Tech Demos (2010-03-14)
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Sony's GDC panel "Introducing the PlayStation Motion Controller" (E3, Part 2) was exactly what you would think it is: An introduction to the newly named Move peripheral. David Coombes, Kirk Bender and Anton Mikhailov showcased impressive tech demos, tech demos, and more tech demos - many of which demonstrated the Move's incredible precision along with its low latency. One of the more eye-capturing demos showcased full body tracking using an on-screen body puppet, similar to one of Project Natal's tech demos.
Thanks to the panel we learned that body tracking is made possible by combining the Move and PS3's head tracking capability. According to the presentation, the PS3 can also detect faces, going so far as to identify individuals through face contour and feature recognition. The software will be able to recognize gender, age, smiles and when eyes open and close.
Coombes explained that all the calculations necessary to handle image processing are done by the Cell CPU, which apparently excels at the doing floating point calculations. The raw data can be processed incredibly quickly by the PS3, taking "under a frame" to translate to a game experience. And while Mikhailov didn't reveal how much of the CPU's overall power the Move controller requires, he did reveal that the memory demands are truly "insignificant," 1-2 MB of system memory. That's pretty insignificant, especially with that 70MB Sony has freed up, so needless to say the consumer won't need to worry about upgrading their memory if they plan on buying the PlayStation Motion Controller.
After seeing pictures of the controller itself and its counter-part it just seems to me that this is a Wii-mote (for your butt) taken to the next level. My next question is will Sony and possibly Microsoft try and dip their hands into the causal gamer cookie jar that Nintendo seems to have a hold on? Or will they continue making the same types of games they've grown accustomed to, leaving an entire demographic untapped. In my opinion, this could spell death for the Nintendo Wii especially if the Wii fans are given the option to get the same types of games the Wii utilizes, but with better graphics, like Ghostbusters. Making Nintendo cry Wii Wii Wii all the way home.
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Joystiq:
PlayStation Move: the everything you need to know post
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