Sierra Kilo

Back in the days when Twitter and Facebook were fledgling social networking sites (2006-ish), I posted on my weblog more often. Like the way my brain sometimes works, it’s a mish-mash of all kinds of thoughts and ideas. Mostly games, gadgets, and other random thoughts. Well, recently I’ve been wanting more than 140 characters to express my thoughts, so I thought I’d throw a few of these thoughts back on here. This will probably be boring for most of you, but if you’re interested, sit back and enjoy the read.

First up is a thought spurred on from a friend’s Twitter post. He mentioned wanting a “cyborg communications tooth”. I think that is totally feasible with today’s technology and can’t understand why someone hasn’t done that yet. My daughter wears cochlear implants, so I’ve seen a few different hearing solutions. Bone Conduction is used in several applications such as SCUBA diving, construction, aviation, military, hearing aids, and even bluetooth hands-free devices. It basically converts sound into mechanical vibrations and sends them to your inner ear by conducting the sound over solid bone. It can also do vice-versa and send your speech to a microphone the same way. Ever notice how your own voice sounds different when you listen to a recording of yourself than it does in your head? Well, why can’t an implanted tooth do the same thing? Power requirements (batteries, charging, etc.) aside, the device components could surely fit into the form factor of a molar or two. Were it not for the batteries, Eleanor’s implant processors could fit on a disc the size of a stack of 3-4 quarters. I’d gladly trade a crown for a bluetooth.

Buy stock now. Apple sent out press invitations to an event on January 27th. The rumor is that they’re announcing a new device. Speculations are that it’ll be a tablet form-factor with a 10″ touch-screen, like a large iPhone (whose screen is 3.5″). The majority of the rumors are saying that it’ll fit in the market between a netbook and a smart phone. They’re saying the OS will be a scaled-up version of iPhone OSX, but not a full-blown version of Mac OSX. That’s very disappointing to me, if true. I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone: full-feature and some-feature. I can’t see having a mid-feature device that fits a niche in my computing needs desires. If, however, it was a full-featured OSX device, I would probably carry it around like a purse man-bag organizer! Here are my biggest problems with the idea, though: Typing full emails, weblog posts, or documents on my iPhone is like shaving with tweezers. Your goal is to spell a word, maybe write a sentence, but not a full paragraph. Touch-screen smart phones have catapulted the success of the microblog (Twitter/Facebook) due to that fact. I can type fast on a keyboard, enough to write this post (complete with HTML tags). I wouldn’t attempt to do this on my iPhone. If an Apple tablet makes writing something like this easy, then it’ll do well. Another rumor is that it will have Ink-based input. Mac OSX has had Ink-based input available for a while. If that’s built-in, it could go a long way toward easy input. I’ve always wanted an Apple Newton MessagePad (nearly bought one in High School with my meager funds), so a true tablet with a stylus piques my interest.

On the gaming front, I’ve been playing a ton of Modern Warfare 2 on XBox. It’s a mind-numbing, frustration release, much like those squeeze dolls where the eyes pop out. It has a fun leveling mechanic and different challenges for when simply eliminating other players gets boring. My favorite is the “Cruelty” challenge, where you have to kill a player, pick up his weapon, then kill him again with it. It sounds easy, but most of the other players are significantly better than me, so it’s pretty difficult. Plus, you can’t just track down individual players very easy, so finding them the second time is difficult. The challenge mechanic is one that I seem to enjoy in several games, including those on iPhone. I’ve recently looked into the OpenFeint framework for iPhone games. It’s supposed to be like XBox Live for the iPhone with friends, chat, and challenges. Sounds like very fun stuff. The problem with the iPhone platform is that it’s not very good at heavy processing, so things seem a bit slow at times.

Ditto… except…

WoW character recustomization is one form of RMT* that I find acceptible, however. It does nothing to affect gameplay, so let the newbs swap genders and get DragonballZ haircuts all day long (their micropayments may even help subsidize an eventual monthly payment decrease).

Character Transfers are another form of RMT that I’m not opposed to. The only exception would be if the game used a finite material-like system (like UO’s original system) where transferring a character with items could throw off the balance by removing material from one “shard” and adding it to another.

Restrings and color customization is also an acceptable form of RMT for me unless the customized form of the item is also available in the loot pool. If colored armor sets are available in drops, they should not be available via RMT because they represent a player’s “hard earned effort” to collect said armor. Another form of this is organizations. If I am a member of the Order of the Blue Star, I wouldn’t mind paying for a cloak bearing my guild’s crest.

Any form of RMT that is visible in-game to other players should be flagged as such (possibly by a badge next to the player’s name or in his profile). This could do several things: advertise that the red armor set is only available via RMT, advertise that the player is a lazy, spoiled rich kid, advertise that the player is narcissistic, or advertise that the player is very centered on roleplaying.

The key to incorporating RMT in a game is to not spoil the core gameplay by tipping the balance toward the RMTers.

* For the uninitiated, RMT = Real Money Trading – a form of virtual economy where players can spend real money for virtual goods/services in a game.

I want DiceWars (single and/or multi-player) for the iPhone! Multi-player aside, this is a great casual game. I’d also like to see some kind of turn-based multi-player game for the iPhone. Something that would email/text you when it’s your turn and skip your turn if you haven’t taken it in a certain amount of time (4-6 hours?).

A few friends and I play on the web once in a while, which is great, but it might work better with shorter turns on a mobile platform. If your turn could be played in about 60 seconds and you were notified on your device that it’s your turn, it might work better for my friends and I.

We played a lot of Risk (aka “Rikks”) in college, but now that we’ve all got our own thing going on (work, wife, kids, etc), it’s difficult to get everyone together. A turn-based “play-when-you-can-but-don’t-hold-everyone-else-up” game is what could work for us.

So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Life has taken its toll on one of my creative outlets. I’ve found that sometimes it takes too long to write something meaningful and organize my thoughts. Even my Twitter-ing has slowed. Anyway, on to the post.

So the iPhone 3G comes out next week (11th). I won’t be busting the door down, but I plan on purchasing one shortly after the release (probably over that weekend). While I like the customizability of my WinMo T-Mobile Wing, I’ve found that it is a bit slow and cumbersome. I like the fact that I can write .Net applications for it, but I’ve only written a few and hardly use them. Plus, the one I use the most, I’ve basically rewritten as a JavaScript web-app anyway. I’m sure I’ll use the web browser a bit, but I’m curious about how I’ll use the iPod functionality and how quickly the GPS novelty wears off. Geocaching will be fun and I might create a few caches myself initially. Geotagging pictures is an interesting concept, but, honestly, who’s interested in exactly where I take pictures? I’ll probably watch my podcasts on it, maybe audiobooks, but I love my 60GB iPod for carrying my music. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is on order with Amazon and so far is looking like August for shipping The wife and I played with a coworker of hers and his wife over the weekend and had a good time. I DM’d 2nd Edition for the first time in probably 10 years. My descriptive skills need a little work, but I was able to wing it pretty well with a dungeon I threw together sometime in college (about 10 years ago). For the 4th Edition game, I might put a good interwoven plot together. Laura played a tree-hugging druid, but I think she’d get more out of playing a slightly-evil rogue (my favorite, too). It’s so much fun to cause strife in an imaginary environment when you have to be so good in real-life.

I also installed Vista Ultimate on my “server” box at home. I wanted to play with the Media Center Extender functions with my XBox 360. So far it’s crashed a couple of times and rebooted itself (probably driver issues). I see why the Vista Nanny is getting so much press. As the saying goes, “At least she’s pretty.”

So, after the kid was sick, the wife was sick, I was sick, trying to catch up on work, prepping and stressing for daughter’s upcoming Cochlear Implant surgery, falling behind on mowing the lawn and watering plants, etc. I find that the site’s been down for a week. It looks like everything’s back up and maybe the well-oiled machine will continue to churn after all.

Isn’t this exactly the concept of what I’ve been touting? I’m glad to see somebody gets what I’m putting out there. Now, if there was only a game with this technology that I wanted to play…

I think the biggest news is the new Netflix player device. It allows you to view movies and TV shows from Netflix’s “Watch Now” collection on your TV. If you already have a Netflix account, the $100 device isn’t a large leap. There are 10,000 or so movies and TV series available. Unfortunately, I only have about 15 movies that I am interested in watching from that collection. I’m sure I could force myself to watch a few others, and I could continue Earth 2 instantly instead of getting the DVDs, but I’m currently satisfied. This might be a great option, however, for my parents. The $9/month plan allows one DVD at a time (all you can eat, but only one plate at a time), but gives you access to the “Watch Now” content through this device. HDMI output makes it simple to hook up to an HDTV for sound and video and it sounds like future HD content is on the way (although B-movies aren’t much better in HD, so hopefully they’ll get some higher-caliber content, too).

My brain is entering imagination time again. Here are the latest thought pellets: space colonization (recurring), alternate-reality steampunk, and parkour. In the shower this morning, I started imagining a story where an ex-military factory worker is woken by the door to his humble (Fifth Element-esque) apartment being busted in by government agents. He instinctively flees (parkour-style) through the dystopian city, enlisting his ex-military buddies and trying to figure out why the government is after him. Maybe I’ll actually start writing more of these ideas down one of these days.

…before jumping into things at work:

Laura broke my XBox 360 by trying to watch Disney’s Enchanted (now with “FastPlay” technology). A few seconds into the movie, it froze up. Subsequent reboots resulted in the dreaded “Red Ring Of Death“. Microsoft support was very eager to send me packing supplies, repair my problem, give me a month of XBox Live, give me another 90 day warranty on the repaired box, and give me a 3 year warranty against the “Red Ring Of Death”. So, we’ll be without a downstairs DVD player and no CoD4 or Rock Band for 3-4 weeks as we wait for the repair. I guess we’ll have to live with the Wii for games. I’ve been enjoying some Super Mario Brothers on 50 inches, though. It’s amazing how much you remember from back in the day. My brother-in-law remembered more than I did, though. He made it to the last level thanks to the secret warp zones.

I’m still waiting for that Mac Mini update to come along. It has been 281 days since the last update and the average time between updates is only 188 days, so it’s due. A processor, memory, and hard drive bump are all I’m asking for. A graphics bump that allows dual screens wouldn’t be bad, either. I’m anxious to set one up to handle podcast viewing, torrent downloads, webcam monitoring (I know that dog has parties when we’re not there), some DVR functions, checking weather, browsing the web, and handling some server-type tasks. Eventually, I’d like to set up some home automation functions for scheduling exterior lights and remotely controlling other lights (like turning on entry light via instant messenger so we don’t walk into a dark house). It’s always fun to tinker with stuff like that and it seems to be much easier on a Mac thanks to AppleScript.

I haven’t been playing much of Mythos, but I read the other day that they’re going to make it more MMORPG-y than it currently is. This might be to help differentiate them more from Dungeon Runners. There will be less instancing in common areas, allowing for players to interact more. I also hope they put some downtime activities in such as fishing, mining, farming, etc. As fun as it is to loot dungeons, I’d like to participate in the economy and display trophies (largest fish caught, largest melon grown, etc), too.

We’ve also been busy with Eleanor’s implantation. Research, tests, meetings, therapy, etc. She’s a smart little rascal and she’s a handful. We are usually running around chasing her, playing, learning, or feeding when we’re not working. We’re hoping all goes well with insurance and we can do the implants in August after our family reunion. Fingers crossed.

Is it just me, or does Massively’s article on social networking in MMOs sound a little like APG? Having a Wiki integrated into the game sure sounds like Web 2.0. Integrating existing social elements such as instant messaging is such a great idea, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done more often, and in the more popular MMOs. I don’t exactly see what integrating Twitter would add, other than having the game notify you that an in-game event happened (such as a plot-related “The redcoats are coming!” event, an interactive object “Ding-dong! Someone just rang your doorbell” event, or an automated “Your harvester is full” event). Having web-based interaction would be a great feature, though, as I’ve said before.

By way of my brother: Ken Levine And Co. At Work On New X-Com Game?

One big problem with this is that the best X-COM game was a turn-based strategy/action game. In today’s fast-paced gaming, turn-based strategy games don’t do so well. Why would 2k do a game like that? Or are they just going to use the brand? We shall see…