The ScooterBlog

I’ve began to embark on playing MLB 09: The Show, as my baseball game of choice this year. Based on the first few practice rounds and games I’ve played, I have no reason to feel disappointed about this. The game does a great job portraying modern-day 2009 baseball, and even the World Series Baseball 2K9 series looks to do a pretty good job of this.

That all said though, as time goes on, there is only so much you can do with the current-day game and current rosters. A direction in content that I’d like to see these games go is backwards, into the history of the game, allowing gamers to better re-create the history of our national pastime, both in players and venues.

THE PLAYERS – How cool would it be to, with a click of a mouse, be able to go back in time and play baseball with rosters from any past year! Simulation games and sites have already been able to harness history to create these mythical matchups (Baseball Mogul, WhatIfSports.com come to mind), so why not bring it to a fully interactive next-gen game.  MLB 09 does get closer than most games on this front, allowing user-created rosters to be traded about over their site. The only problem is that any roster traded assumed a 30-team league, which makes re-creating any season before 1998 challenging, if not impossible. Maybe it needs to be amended to allow create-a-teams, or create-a-seasons. I know some things can’t be re-created, but flexibility would allow quite a bit to be.

THE SEASONS – To that same effect, baseball was played differently even 10 or 20 years ago. Doubleheaders were normal fare, even scheduled. Four-man rotations were a normal occurrence, and the season didn’t last as long as it did not. Heck, no baseball game has ever managed to conquer a season-long weather pattern and (God forbid) rainouts! I would love to see a completely wide open customization of schedules and seasons made available, so that you could go back to a 16-team 154-game season if you so chose, and allow for slider adjustments specifically for certain types of play, like four-man rotations. Maybe someone can fork out a few thousand bucks and get a Farmer’s Almanac license deal in there too, I bet they’d dig it!

THE STADIUMS – This is the one feature I could see being included as downloadable content, and for the record, if it’s done right, I’m cool with it. You can of course play all the modern parks every single year, but how much fun would it be to go play in classic stadiums … ANY of them! I realize that this is a huge undertaking for any developer, considering that over the past 20 years, I’d venture that 80% of the stadiums are freshly built, and the remainder have had some refurbishments (like a Wrigley Field, sans lights … hey, games called by darkness!!). But, if there were stadium packs, and even like in old PS2 Madden games, create-a-stadium options with a fancy owner mode, imagine the realism you could attain.

Let’s face it, history makes baseball what it is. That’s why people get so bent out of shape about the steroids scandal, it messes with that history in ways that are hard to undo. That said though, there’s no reason that technology can’t help bring history to the current with video games. The tech is already in place, it just has to be nearly pushed into one interactive package.

Last Saturday, I had the chance to attend a little video game show held close to the OSU campus area called CORGS-CON 2009. It was being held at the undercroft of a church in the area, and didn’t have a terribly impressive web site. So, it was hard to gather what kind of show it was going to be and how many people would be there. The only part I knew is that I was going to meetup with a couple of friends from Cincinnati making the trip.

As it turned it, it was very much just a swap meet with a few minor events (a couple of high score contests, a quick presentation or two) mixed in. Due to where it was and the cramped atmosphere of it, I made a few laps around the 20 or so vendor tables, picked up a couple of sweet deals, and headed out to hang with said friends from Cincy for the rest of the day.I got:

* Street Fighter PS2 Ken Joypad for $5 (in the box, looks great)

* Atari 2600 Slik Stik for $3

* PS2 to XBox/GC Controller converter for $2

There were maybe 8 or 9 vendors there, and the room was crowded, but that’s more because the room was really small. Nonetheless, I’m glad I went, and I think it could be something that can be built up much more as time goes on. Hopefully, all of that will prove true.

I love my original mode Acer Aspire One, it’s an extremely versatile netbook that offers few things to complain about. Those things that do exist aren’t really surprising either, but I thought I’d go into a couple of them, based strictly on the fact that I tried these, and it was obvious I was pushing the machine and its Atom processor too far!

• VLC 1280×720 Playback - There is a myriad of reasons that this probably didn’t work. Not only did it stutter badly because the CPU was spiked, I was also trying to play this over a WLAN network! Grant you, Wireless-G can push some data, but it just can’t do both. My recommendation is to keep the video you play on this to DVD sizes or smaller, the Atom processor just isn’t powerful enough to decode much more than that.
• TV Tuner – It’s not because it could not process the analog stream (I did not even try HD ClearQAM Digital). It’s because it can’t handle this AND timeshift. Some of this is my fault as I replaced the hard drive built in with a 60GB OCZ Core V1 SSD, which is formidable in the AAO, it’s not made for the random and quick writes and re-writes of the timeshifting features of both the built-in software OR Windows Media Center. What’s worse, there isn’t a way to turn them off! So, through the limitations of software to just serve basic purpose, this really doesn’t fly on here.
• Gametap – This is a video card limitation, and I need to beta test it more, it’s been awhile since I’ve tried this. GameTap requires a full implementation of OpenGL 2.0, which the Intel Integrated Wireless doesn’t do. There’s probably a middle ground here that I haven’t found, as I suspect many of the games, emulated or not, will do fairly well on here.

Every other task I’ve thrown at it up to this point, it’s done to my satisfaction. These are, of course, realistic wants, I don’t expect to be playing the Orange Box on this, and I don’t want to use it as an encoding box for anything. It’s a basic CPU, but with enough memory and a decent OS, can do great things. Anyone expecting more out of this in any netbook is nuts, and yes, that includes the $1,000 ones from Fujitsu or Sony, even if they have better displays, are smaller, and admittedly look cooler and smaller.

I’m still plenty happy with my Aspire One. My original model is down below $250 now, it’s worth getting. Really!

As I type this, I am watching one of the best things that sport has to offer … NHL Playoff Overtime! Not only that, but the best of even that, something you maybe see once every season or two … a Game 7 overtime! The Boston Bruins and Carolina Hurricanes are going at it, and as I type, they are 8 minutes in.

Most sports have overtime, and they almost all do in playoff games (soccer, we’re looking at you. Bring the Golden Goal back!). Baseball extra innings in the World Series and Game 7 is pretty intense and extremely rare (three or four times ever?), the NFL has had a couple of games to go double overtime in the playoffs, it has happened. But, there has never been a Super Bowl overtime game (and I want a small tweak in the sudden death rules anyways). And, NBA overtime games in Game 7 exist, but the five minute overtime period there doesn’t have quite the same bravado. Maybe the closest recent “extra time” instance that brought on legitimate great drama was the ‘08 NCAA Hoops championship, but the drama was just as much built from the 30-footer that took the game to overtime.

So why is NHL overtime so good? The never-ending play and the finality of it. It has the drama of a sudden death ending at a completely unpredictable time, but the nature of hockey allows for tremendous amounts of play, and interesting play at that. It also allows for amazing amounts of play, stuff you just do not see in any other sport. In no other overtime format, outside of baseball and pitching (and it’s more rare) does fatigue play more of a role.

I have fond memories of watching four and five-overtime games at 2:30 in the morning … on a work night! You can’t turn it off, you’re too afraid that you might miss something, and you fully understand you’ll be worthless the next day with no sleep!

Hopefully we’ll get a couple of these triple overtime style games this year, and even better if it’s a Game 7!

(From video games to social commentary in one post. Interesting!)

So it looks like, maybe, the hubbub on whether or not Miss California, Carrie Prejean, should keep her crown or not has subsided thanks to an actual decision being made; that she could. I don’t mind saying that I am very happy she is, and it has nothing to do with my own set of beliefs (which agree with hers, I am a Christian and feel strongly that marriage should be between a man and a women, call same sex unions something else.)

What it comes down to for me is a fact that was brought up by Donald Trump and is so true … it’s a different information world now than it was when these pageants started, and even moreso than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Even back then, you didn’t have the push of the Internet which can expose anything you have ever done, and the ability for one person, vengeful or not, to post information to take someone down from their highest point. In the modern day, celebrities and people who have some level of popularity attached to them are there simply to be knocked off the perch, and social networking tools and blogs have that power now.

Because of that, the whole idea of someone being a perfect angel that wins these pageants is flawed from the start. People are not perfect, and in the case of the pictures posted online, there is probably truth on both sides of the argument. That’s how it almost always is. It’s not a reason however to say someone cannot accomplish something of value later on, or have a stand on something be meaningless. So we have it established, yes, Miss California is not perfect. It’s no reason for her to lose the crown. People in places of high stature can be easily attacked now. It’s not an excuse, never should be, but when it’s to the point that the smartest people are the ones who don’t push to do something great (like be President?), it’s quite sad.

The point that took this whole thing to really being a mangled cluster-mess came today. Apparently, the top pageant official in California, a woman named Shanna Moakler, resigned over the mess, saying that ”I cannot with a clear conscience move forward supporting and promoting the Miss Universe Organization when I no longer believe in it, or the contracts I signed committing myself as a youth.”

Sounds nice, huh? Oh yeah, the picture on the CNN news story? Very glamorous. Maybe she’s someone above all of this reproach. But oh yeah, there’s this … near the bottom of the article, it mentions that she’s a former Playboy Centerfold. Wait, huh?!

So someone who has no problem taking nude photos is still talking about living up to the contracts they signed as a youth regarding how to carry yourself regarding representing your previous awards? It’s one of the most backwards things I’ve ever seen, and an obvious statement that it’s not about disagreement with the rules, it’s disagreement with the stance Carrie has taken on same sex marriage. Not that we have much reason to take any sort of purity these pageants claim to have seriously, but this is a major case of the pot calling the kettle extra-black!

(I found these centerfold pictures. Some of them are quite a bit more racy than just Playboy quality stuff. How this is being a role model for young women looking to do “clean” modeling like pageants is beyond me. She was very attractive in them though … sadly, that’s probably the actual part that matters.)

Oh yeah. This same organization? They paid for a breast implant for Carrie before the Miss USA pageant. Wait, double-huh?! Nothing more on that needs to be said.

This whole thing can be put to bed by simply saying that one woman had a stand, said it in a very classy way, has been attacked since, hasn’t been perfect before, and is showing her own state’s organization to be the backwards mess that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Anytime that the most on-target person in a conversation is Donald Trump, someone should take note and say … triple-huh?!

This past weekend, I had the chance to meet up with my friend Stephen for him to get his DSi at 11:45 PM, their version of a midnight launch. While I’ve read about how lame most of them were (this one was dead too), Stephen got into some “interesting” discussions with the manager regarding such things as differences between credit card policy in-store and the actual cardholder and merchant agreements. It’s good to have a friend who has a lawyer wife and experience in video game stores, you get to find out just how much they try and get over, where when you know your rights, that just doesn’t happen.

The current thought out there revolves around Gamestop’s checkout system and their practice (which among video game stores is common) of opening a title for a display box and still selling it as new. This GameDaily article mostly works on the concept of the game being checked out and still sold as new. I can vouch that this was indeed the case when I worked at the chain, so it comes as no shock to me. Back in 2000, I could see this as being alright, although I agree with the article that it should get some sort of shop worn discount, even if it’s like 5 percent. But, with some technologies more prevalent, I do not believe there’s as many excuses for needing to open up a copy of the game, or even check it out, outside of one. I’ll mention that in a moment.

• We’re at a point in printing where color copies and inserts cost next to nothing. I understand that it creates a slighty higher burden to make sure that you do not have a box on the floor for a sold out game, but I think Gamestop can plunge for some computer upgrades to inform the employees of this, and an hour’s worth of pay for a part time dude to do the checking. This would not be costly to do now.
• High speed internet allows for information about games to be transmitted through computers and stations allowing a customer to get more detailed information about a game than what would have ever been available before. I’m surprised that more retail stores have not gone to more of a interactive kiosk approach to offering product information that’s more customizeable. High definition video reviews and previews are now normal fare, and that allows even a small business to provide an advantage over the big box retailer. Oh yeah, that connection? $50/month, very doable.
• Some level of digital distribution would allow this problem to take care of itself. If a retail store employee c ould download a time limited version of a game (this totally offers an idea for a new post) This would require more interactivity between the content provider and the big box stores, provided companies like Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo want these stores to be around in ten years’ time. That, I’m not so sure of.  Not to mention, any kind of digital system leaves a door open to piracy, although Sony and Microsoft must be doing something right. The PS3 remains mostly hack free, and the 360’s arcade service is intact.

So what’s the advantage? The ability to demo games in-store. When I worked at Game Junkie while they existed, this was something I was very happy they did, we pushed it pretty hard too, especially since no competitive advantages were ever expected for a one-off store offering nifty features. What about our tournaments? Store copies were permamently reserved for the games, and/or used games were used most of the time, and nowadays I’d expect that to be the norm, not the exception.

So long story short? I totally get where this was needed a long time ago. I worked for stores, I enjoyed this, and I do get the customer’s concern too. But, has technology simply led this to be an unneeded thing? Tell me in the comments.

What do you get when you combine a ridiculously good processor deal, a refurb HP computer that was even a good deal when I got it, and a complete lack of documentation or other efforts to try something on the Internet, anywhere, ever?!

Why, you get a fun project for me to try of course. This time, it was a CPU upgrade.

The A6442P HP Pavilion desktop wasn’t a slouch when I got it. It had 4GB of RAM, a 500GB Hard Drive, DVD Burner, onboard graphics (which got upgraded to a Quadro card real quick), and USB ports all over the place for $400. The weak link as it turned out? The nice, but not overly zippy E2200 processor. It’s 64-bit capable, and has “Core Duo” type architecture, but still gets the lame yet appropriate title of “Pentium Dual Core”. If you ever look as PassMark results, you’ll know why. It scores around 1,100. So,  for what you get in the package, and the fact it’s x64 out of the box, it was a nice find. But, it had room for upgrade.

Documentation on this sucker is hard to come by, but with a little bit of work, you can find system specs, and information about the motherboard. My initial research showed one very positive thing: this board supports far more than it’s outfitted with from the factory, including up to 8GB in RAM, and processors up to Core 2 Quad’s. However, they show support for Q9xxx processors, but not necessarily Q8xxx processors. So when Micro Center had a deal for a Q8200 processor for $100, I was intrigued. It’s not “officially” supported, but the specs match up to the ones that are supported, except for a slightly smaller L2 cache. I gave in, went and got it, and gave it a shot.

The installation as pretty easy, far easier than the last time I tried processor upgrading or modding (this was back in the Pentium 2 days). I ended up needing to use the old stock fan though, the Intel fan’s plastic snaps didn’t work well in the small form factor. But, considering this chip’s reputation for running cool (it’s very overclockable, but I didn’t want that), this didn’t worry me. Sure enough, it was instantly detected by the BIOS (I had v5.22). Just to be safe, I bumped up the BIOS version to v5.35, and it detected great, didn’t even require a re-activation.

How much of a jump is it? The average PassMark benchmark is 3,161. That’s a 2.87x performance boost, and it instantly took my Vista processor ranking from 5.1 (respectable) to 5.9, likely well off the chart. It also took my memory from 5.4 to 5.9 due to it not being a bottleneck. My system is now clocking in at 5.4, only because of the graphics card, and it’s still pretty darn good!

If you are toting around a system with a E2200 processor, I can’t recommend this enough if your motherboard supports it. The ability to improve your PC by multiples for a low price is hard to ignore, and it’s even pretty good at NewEgg’s current price ($165).

This is a private gripe, but one I feel like I need to get out there. Maybe once you read it, it’ll make sense to you as well.

The iPhone App Store has become a breeding ground for some wonderful games, and both big and small companies are realizing that a way they can get people to buy their game is through offering  a demo version, or as it’s always referred to in the App Store world, a lite version. This is fine to do. In fact, I enjoy that they do.

The problem arises from how the rankings system works. Because these are free downloads, they get dumped in with all of the other free downloads, and thus are viewed as strictly free, they take up almost all of the spots for the free downloads! Demo and lite versions really are different than truly free!

So, in the next iteration of the stop especially with the 3.0 OS, I would love to see a differentiation somewhere. Ideally, I would love a demo section, but would settle for breaking out “free apps” and “free games” as two separate entities. I think it would allow people who are genuinely making a free app, or a gateway to their web service (like Evernote) more recognized, as they should be, compared to the demo of the game they want you to pay for.

I recently came across a couple of excellent deals, one through Woot, and one through Amazon. The first was a GE cordless phone with a 7″ picture frame for $40. It was an awesome price and finally a point where I was willing to get into the whole digital picture frame market, and it had a nice quality cordless phone to go with it.

There’s just one problem with this setup: I don’t own a landline! So, I needed to find a way to make this work with some sort of service. Seeing as I didn’t really feel like buying something new like Magicjack when I already own a perfectly good Skype account with cheap outgoing calls ($3/month), I went on the hunt for a phone adapter. I found the D-Link DPH-50U USB telephone adapter.

After ordering from Amazon for the excellent price of $19.99, I discovered a sad reality: it’s not designed to work with anything 64-bit. But, there’s not much out there like it at that price point, so it’s worth it to try and hack something together to make it work.

The logic behind how to do it was solid. The implementation, sadly, not as smooth.

The idea was simple. Use Virtualbox to make a 32-bit VM, install XP and Skype, use the USB support to wrap the device into the VM, and then use it like normal through the VM. The XP install was smooth, and with a little bit of elbow grease, Virtualbos was able to wrap up the “unknown device” tbat x64 could do nothing with and bring it into a 32-bit VM. I sense this will be more and more useful in the future, the ability to do this really is pretty nifty.

The problem? Skype crashed every time I tried to load it up. There is a nice forum thread on it HERE. The two possible answers suggested were to downgrade Skype to 3.5 or enable hardware virtualization. Sadly, my cheapie E2200 CPU does not support that, so the downgrade was the option that I had to go with. Unfortuntely, Skype ate up a ton of CPU, did not run smoothly and thus did not work as expected. I successfully made it work in principle and the beginnings of it in practice, but my home PC limited my options.

So, what did I do? Found an old x86 laptop, plugged it in, and it worked great. Fell back to physical compatibility, not just virtual compatibility. Still, it’s good to learn how Virtualbox’s USB support works and that it’s able to grab and passthru any “unknown device” that is only x86 compatible. In a bind, that could prove quite helpful.

Feel free and command if you’ve tried this device out in x64, and if you had similar luck in your attempts to hack it together.

Thanks to a couple of comments (who knows where they found the article, maybe the wonders of Twitter, where I can be followed?), I was reminded of the article I posted back in October noting that Nintendo had maybe backed right into the best storage medium for their Wii system, the SD card slot, and if they made it SDHC compatible, it could truly be something that would supplant the need for a dedicated hard drive, without adding bulk.

So, imagine my interest in reading on CrunchGear that Nintendo may be working on a USB Hard Drive. There would be only one way I would like this idea over SDHC (we’ll get to that in a minute), but really, as a first reaction, why not just enhance the functionaly of the SD slot?

The one commenter on the CrunchGear post may have hit the reason for that. Nintendo may not want it to be an open format that can be competitive, they’d rather make their own thing that they could charge far more for in 32GB and 64GB portions. I sincerely hope they don’t plan to do it with the pictured flash drive in the CG post! Couple of reasons for that:

• Unless it’s a super small form factor, it would add a lot of bulk to the back of the case. Not that Nintendo cares, but there’s no good reason to ruin good cases and system setups by changing the form factor of the system, even a little bit.
• A USB drive isn’t going to offer any serious performance enhancements over a SDHC card, random writes will still be painfully slow in either case.
• If it’s a USB drive, expecting it to somehow stay “proprietary” isn’t realistic. Give hackers three days with that thing, and you’ll be able to roll with your own USB drive in a Wii, that’s a promise.

SDHC cards are up to 32GB, they’re  not horribly expensive (under $100, and even around $40 for a 16GB one), and with the way the Wii has built up to this point, it’s hard to imagine, even in a world of streaming and video downloads, that a Wii would need more than 16 gigs on board.

So what would the exception to this be? A true solid state hard drive. Even a basic core model of these drives would offer extremely fast read and write times, and as long as they avoid the JMicron chipset that has befallen some of the cheaper models (or pair them like the OCZ Apex does to offset the stutter problem), they could put a device together which would blow away even the DVD drive in access speeds, and provide one great experience and relief to load times.

I would also offer the argument that if Nintendo wants to secure these drives and prevent piracy through some method, such as hardware or software based encryption, the solid state would be the way to go, such operations would incude too many random writes and performance would suffer on flash media of lesser quality. Nintendo would be heroic if they offered this strictly as a software encryption method, and left the hardware side open for people to tweak with, but I think that is going to be asking a bit much.

We’ll see in a few months what they come up with. If it’s a full fledged SSD that doesn’t break the bank, I’ll line up to get one. If it’s just a glorified SanDisk flash drive, then I’ll just yawn and move on with my life and go back to enjoying the Homebrew Channel some more.