Project Cafe Speculation

Since we're a couple days away from Nintendo's presser at E3, I'm calling last chance to speculate on what Nintendo has up their sleeves with "Project Cafe" that hasn't already been leaked.

The most fervent rumor discussion is around the controller, which is supposed to be some kind of tablet with a 6 inch screen, buttons and a d-pad on the side, and tilt sensors and the like.

Anyhow, here's my prediction:

- Nintendo will claim the controller can also play stand-alone games.

- They will position the controller as being a "tablet that comes free with your console" and will show some entertainment functions for it

- The 'comes free' is a bit of a ruse, as buying a second controller will have a hefty price tag

- They will put on a brave face about the 3DS and that business being alive and well

Over time, though, I believe they see the writing on the wall about their hand-held businesses being commoditize and subsumed by phones and tablets, and so this is their attempt to in turn commoditize those businesses. I think its a weak attempt to do so, but there's some logic to the strategy and should allow them to circle the wagons with their core base.

It'll be interesting to see whether Nintendo can pull off yet another hail-mary pass (like they did with the Wii and the DS).

A belated E3 2010 post

E3's been over a little while, but work's been *crazy* lately so I'm only now getting around to posting some thoughts.

The show got big again this year. Not much sign of recession other than on the faces of some friends who's studios either were casualties or are still standing after a grueling year. Signs seem to point to things being up though, and that's a good thing.

Short version of E3 was absolutely nailed by Penny Arcade and by Zero Punctuation:

So, E3 in short form:

Motion Control: MS and Sony *finally* show up with their Wiimote-killers. Sony's is a Wiimote with better accuracy (camera input to add some multiplayer capabilities) and MS's is the more ambitious Kinect. Why did it take so long? Because both companies went through the Five stages of competitor acceptance: "It'll never work", "It's a fad", "It's a novelty that appeals to a niche", "well, they'll never beat our installed base numbers", and finally "holy crap, we need to build us a wiimote!". Add product development on top of that, and you get five years of Nintendo first-mover advantage.

Ironically, there was a bit of ho-hum as maybe people are tiring of Wii style motion control and were hoping for dramatically better but didn't see it? At the very least, the hype has subsided from "In the future all games will be played this way!" to "It's good for some types of games"

Stereo3D: Sony's doing stereo on TVs with glasses, tapping their performance headroom to engage with developers and to the full cinematic immersive thing. Nintendo on the other hand impressed folks with the 3DS, which is using a lenticular filter/display to do no-glasses, single-player viewing.

One interesting point that I haven't heard anyone talk about (which I should do a longer post on at some point) is that the type of content that will lend itself to the handheld Stereo3D (DS, plus people are talking about doing this on phones, etc) will likely be different content. Rather than think stereo3D movies like Avatar, think macro-lens style close-ups of small objects.

I'll have to think about what that means for developers. Also, it makes me wonder where on the spectrum PCs will end up. Are they single viewer devices?

Onlive: There stuff looked good. Lots of interesting features that are one-up over consoles (e.g. jump in/out of spectator mode). Of course, the real question is how it runs in the field.

Favorite game of the show: A toss up between Pacman: Battle Royale (Warlords meets Pacman for a 4-player competitive arcade deathmatch), and Miegakure, a brain-twisting FOUR-dimensional puzzle-platformer. There’s a video here, but you won’t get it until you play it (and even then, it’s doubtful!)

Best graphics of the show: Many people claimed PS3’s Killzone 3, but I thought that was mainly cinematics and presentation. Personally, I thought Mafia 2 on PC was outstanding. I heard that Id’s Rage was awesome as well, but didn’t get to see it.

Best Game that wasn’t on the showfloor: I went to the Indiecade BBQ on Thursday and got to playtest Chris Hecker’s SpyParty , and even this early it’s a temple-sweating, nail-biter, multiplayer game.

Best Random Art Encounter: I was walking down the street after dinner and happened upon The Vader Project

It's not the size of your installed base, it's how you use it

This was an interesting graph up on Joystiq, contrasting the growth of installed base between platforms.

While interesting, it's not exactly intellectually honest. For one, the iphone saw a lot of hardware refresh with the same customers upgrading to the 3G/3GS,so some of those are repeat users. Yes, it's still units sold, but for purposes of installed-base discussion, this is relevant.

For another thing, if you are going to talk "consumer tech", then you need to look at other cell phones, DVD players, etc. If you are looking at game platforms, then include the gameboy, the Windows PC. etc. Not sure any of these numbers would beat that curve, but it's worth including (though this example shows that the GBA beat the Wii's growth curve in its first 10 quarters. hmm...). Finally, the attach rate and SW ARPU would also be apple to oranges.

Still, even with all these caveats, it's an interesting chart to consider.

Bunch'o'Game mini-reviews

I've played a bunch of stuff recently that I haven't posted on. Here goes:

• Mirror's Edge (360): I picked it up on a whim, and am liking it much more than I expected. If Portal is a 1st person puzzle game, then ME is the 1st person platformer. Recommended.
• Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (360): It's Guitar Hero, so you know what to expect, and can check the song list online. I do think the mixing in of video interviews with the band kind of breaks the fiction of the game, but the fiction was always only a thin glaze over top of the game itself, so not a big deal. Recommended only for die-hard GH fans. I do like the latest GH: Metallica ad though!

• Tomb Raider: Legend (360): It's tomb raider. You know what to expect. It's fairly well done as far as TR goes. C'est tout. I wouldn't recommend unless you are a die-hard TR fan or have never played any of the TR games, in which case you should play at least one.
• Shawn White Snowboarding (360): Controls a little finicky, but I rather enjoyed it once I got the hang of it. Multiplayer is fun as well but a bit non-intuitive as to how you initiate events and the like. Only recommended for fans of finicky extreme sports titles like SSX or Tony Hawk, etc.
• Sway (iPhone): A fun little physics-driven touch-interface platformer. I've spent a surprising amount of time playing it. Recommended.
• Half Life 2 (360): I went back and played through the game since I'd never played Episodes 1,2. Amazing how ground breaking a title it was at the time of it's launch. Highly recommended.
• Wii Sports (Wii): Fun for the kids. Recommended
• Wii Play (Wii): Pretty crappy. Got it for the extra controller, but the mini-games in it are really aweful with only a couple exceptions. Not Recommended.

[update: Forgot to add two titles]

• Peggle (360 arcade): Every bit the fun of the PC original with two plusses and one minus: Multiplayer modes and achievements are great adds, but the controller is a step backward for those that have played it with a mouse before, making that decathalon challenge pretty tricky. Recommended.
• Biology Battle (360 Community games): I spent some time playing some of the community games at GDC and afterward. I have to do a lengthier post about community games in general, but for now I'll just recommend the trial of this game to decide if it's for you. It's a great little shooter along the lines of Geowars but with differences enough to make it distinctive. Recommended.

I'm old!

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. Busy week at work and I haven't had time.

In other news, I turned 40 yesterday. Ugh. I'm old.

My darling wife arranged for us to go hot air ballooning (have wanted to go for some time) but Oregon weather predictability being what it is, we couldn't go and had to take a raincheck. Oh well.

She also got me a Wii, so I'll be catching up on a bunch of games on the to-play list (Boom Blox, Galaxies, World of Goo, etc) over the coming weeks.

Wiishy washy

[Note that the Wii will go down as history's most pun-friendly console. Anyhow.]

I noticed that Gamastra has a piece up asking some analysts about whether the mediocre quality of titles on the Wii is an indicator that Nintendo should enforce a higher level of quality.

The analysts seem to all miss the point of the question, or at least interpret it as "what does nintendo have to do to sell more titles", which is not the same thing.

Anyhow, I think it important that someone (even little-read moi) note that this is the other side of the coin to the opinions a while back about Microsoft's process being too rigorous, too difficult, slightly too soul-crushing, etc.

You can't have it both ways folks. Quality takes work and time.

Holy Hockey Sticks!

Casey just pointed me at this:

Holy balls.

For all the poo-poo'ing of the PS3 (I'm as guilty as anyone), you have to give them credit for chugging along and selling units as well as 360 did through launch, despite being last 'next gen' console to the party.

Nintendo's graph is, well, phenomenal. For them anyway. Whether it's good for *games* in general is debatable. They get credit for tapping the untapped segments of the market, but I still agree with Chris' rant on the console's shortcomings.

Hacker Wiizardry

Apologies for the title. I am as prone to Wii-puns as the rest of the blogosphere.

A number of people pointed me to Johnny Chung Lee's youtube vids. Lee has done some interesting hacks with the Wiimote, and posted vids of them along with explanations. They include:

Interactive Whiteboard:



Minority Report-style finger-tracking:



VR headtracking:



These are all very cool, yes. But the real lesson to take away here is that this is what happens when you base your products on open standards (Wiimote uses bluetooth to communicate). This in turn is predicated on not selling your HW at a loss, which means you have to be damn sure people aren't using it for something other than its intended purpose, but that's the subject of another post...

One does wonder whether the folks at Nintendo are benefiting from these vids in some way. If I were them I'd be replicating the experience and doing some game jams around them to see if they have legs.

"Not just lying.... lying through theatre"

Unbeleivable.

The Wii and The Unhandy Valley

With Pax in town, I went into the city last night and hooked up with Jane, Casey, Andre and some other folks for good ol' geeky conversation.

A particularly entertaining piece of the evening for me was watching (sometimes facilitating, sometimes instigating) an argument between Casey and a guy (forget his name) from Nintendo, about the Wii and more specifically about it's controller.

Casey was expressing a complaint about the Wii controller that he was having trouble articulating. His point was that while it may sense motion, and that may be useful, he was dissatisfied with it because it didn't do what it *promised*.

As of late, I've been finding myself often, in discussions with coworkers, developers, other industry folk, coming back to this point about what it is that you promise the customer. It's a kind of very high-standard, high-level litmus test that you can apply to any product offering you are working on and see if it passes a straight-face test.

Anyhoo.

Casey's point was that Nintendo was directly or indirectly promising something with the Wii controller that ultimately it didn't deliver. That users expect it to sense position AND motion, but because it's only the latter, then have to get 'trained' on the device. Wii tennis, while fun, has that moment for everyone where they say "oh, I get it, it's not really like a racquet".

Further underlining the point, I added that in Wii sports baseball, it expects motion, not position, and thus bunting isn't an option. I can't just hold up the bat in the right place and let the ball hit IT.

The Nintendo guy couldn't quite grok why this was an issue, which is when I made what I think is a clever analogy:

Similarly to how there is an "uncanny valley" that refers to how, as artificial representations of humans illicit an aversive response as the approach - but don't reach - realism; I beleive there is an "unhandy valley" that occurs as methods of input to a simulation approach their real-life equivalents - but don't quite reach it.

Anyone who's tried any of the VR simulations of the past decade can attest to this, only most of those are disconnected enough that they don't approach the valley. I think the Wii controller gets near enough (or to Casey's point, sets the expectation that it gets near enough) that people have this disconnect on their first try with it.

Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii and Wii sports is good ol' fun. But there is that training step, and within it, a little bit of disappointment that it wasn't really magic after all.

I do wonder, as these types of controllers improve (position + motion, lower latency, higher precision, etc, etc), will consumers grow more enthralled with them... or will we find that the valley runs deep and wide?

Obligatory (sparse) WiiWare commentary

If you heard something un-applish within this past week's din of prelaunch iPhone religious euphoria (seriously folks, it's not like burning tablets are scheduled to fly out of shrubs this week or something), that noise might have been Nintendo's beloved son, Reggie Fils Aime, announcing WiiWare, Nintendo's XBLA-like program for 3rd party downloadable games on the Wii.


Plenty of commentary so far (Dave and Ian both have good posts on the subject). Like both of them, I have a lot of questions and would go a step further to say that I think they either havent' thought things through entirely, or are being disingenuous in their promises.

I frankly do not beleive they can approach it in a way that titles are not vetted by Nintendo. They have stated that titles will need to be rated, and AO ratings would not fly, but I don't think that's enough.

Echoing and adding to the list of unanswered questions that David and Ian raised:

• What of content that might get an M or T rating, but that some groups would find offensive (e.g. Nazis), or for that matter, that some corporate groups would find offensive (would The McDonald Game fly?)
• If they aren't vetting concepts, then how are they prioritizing dev kits? From what I understand, there's a pent up demand for them, so how is this allocated if they have no idea what a dev is working on (or is this the real gating factor)
• If they aren't vetting concepts, but have the right to refuse games based on the above factors or other reasons, then might developers sink a couple hundred thousand into a game only to be turned away when showing up to Wiiware wanting to hang out their shingle?

I guess details will become clearer as we near the first release of titles, but I am skeptical to say the least.

Kickin' it old school

This video of seniors bowling on Wii is just awesome. Kudos again to Nintendo.

(Have to add this though, from a coworker: I like the last sentence in the article… “That isn’t the case with Millicent, his wife of 55 years. She sticks with bridge”. Hmm… I wonder if she plays on our site? )

Philosophical Mii

Funii...

Robin's Sims

Robin's game project, MySims, has been announced, and it looks totally sweet. Like syrupy sweet. It looks like everything is made of candy!

I know a game like this has a huge number of people on it, all contributing, but I have to say that I've never seen a game that just oozed one person's personality as much as this one does. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Either way I'm super happy for her and her team and am looking forward to playing it (might have to buy that Wii or DS after all. Have been holding out so far)

"we posted said email... and the internet imploded"

...Kotaku, on their posting an email from Sony's PR group, blacklisting them due to posting/commenting on rumors, and the subsequent fallout.

Sigh. Where to begin?

This post sums up the story from Kotaku's side. In short, Kotaku posted on a rumor of what may be in Phil Harrison's GDC keynote. Sony's PR freaked out, Kotaku stood their ground (way to go Brian C) and posted Sony's reaction to boot, and then the Internet imploded.

Presumably, at this point Howard Stringer got a call from Al Gore saying "leggo my Internet", and Sony backed off and apologized. The Internet is back up, and the various Brians and such at Kotaku can attend Sony's GDC functions and eat expensive puff pastries while getting dirty looks from PR guys in striped shirts.

OK, kids, what have we learned?

• Refusing to comment on rumor is moderately effective. It's neutral. Reacting to rumor this way is essentially the equivalent of posting a rehearsal of the keynote on GooTube. If I didn't feel confident it was true before, I sure do now.
• The internets & the press, *especially* the blogging press, love a good scandal. It's way bigger story than whatever your keynote is going to contain, and customers aren't going to like it.
• People at a big company can get so wound up about self-importance that things get out of perspective. The keynote will still go fine, and even if you yourself leaked what was going to be in the keynote, people would still show up to see it. Perhaps more so. Don't kid yourself. I personally doubt the value of 'the reveal' in this case. I think the keynote would get 10x coverage if they put out a press release that was 7 words long: "avatars, acheivements, more. Show up and see"

Now, PR fustercluck aside, the rumored Sony offering of 'Gamerscore + achievements + Mii's + Habbo Hotel' sounds pretty compelling. I'm looking forward to seeing it... and competing against it.

As my friend Casey once put it... "Now the dancing turns German".