The ScooterBlog

A friendly reminder to everyone having issues connecting to anything XBox Live related (especailly EA servers, which are more sensitive to NAT settings) … make sure that if your 360 reports your NAT settings as “Moderate” or “Strict”, forward these ports to your XBox 360:

• Port 88 (UDP)
• Port 3074 (TCP / UDP)

I’ll help anyone out on my Friends list who is having issues, especially since I’m about to get the camera and want to do video chats.

Many of you have likely read the article on Gran Turismo HD supposedly being very focused on microtransactions (I’ve begun a disussion on the Game Junkie forums about it too), so much so that the game could potentially cost hundreds of dollars in microtransactions.

While I’m sure there are hardcore Gran Turismo fans who would easily pay twice, three times the price of the game at launch (even at $60), this seems like it’s taking the general idea, and expounding on it to the point of absolute lunacy. I’m not a MMORPG player myself, but that said, it doesn’t seem like any game should ever cost hundreds of dollars to play, once you have already forked down hundreds of dollars for the system.

[It's worth noting that two years of World Of Warcraft would cost $350 ... plus the $50 an early adopter paid to buy the game, and that's $400, so this could well just be a console user's point of view]

Anyways, my idea to help curb the costs but allow Sony to still get its fair amount of microtransaction coin? Some type of play-to-pay system. There’s a couple of ways to do this.

• Offer free points towards cars and tracks through the amount of time that you play the game … for every hour that you play, you get so many points. It surely doesn’t have to be much, a hardcore GT player will put in a lot of hours no matter what, so a new car for every 3 hours of play, while it seems like chump change, would mean your dedicated players get something every so often for their efforts, and would still leave incentive for players to put some initial investment down for some extras.(I’m sure clever hackers will point out that just sitting on a track and letting the car sit there could cheat this … so basic prerequisites would have to be to only allow a maximum amount of time per race of credit to gain, and to only allow time to count for in-race actions. If Sony is smart enough to devise all these ways to take your money, I’m sure they are smart enough to devise a rewards system that doesn’t allow for the “leave system on” cheating)

• Of course, promotions. I’m a little surprised Microsoft hasn’t caught on to this one more. As in, you buy something from a store, you get some points to use. McDonald’s or Burger King would be all over this
• Points for performance. Like the above options, there’s 100 different ways to accomplish this, but somehow offer points based on performance in online tournaments, or sanctioned events through the game itself. I would sense the “sanctioned” part is important, because as I have seen in the XBox 360 Texas Hold ‘Em game, it’s easy to build credit when everyone’s in on the take (free competitive tournaments where everyone goes “all in”), but if the scope is large enough, this ability is more limited.

By no means do any of these methods need to give back a lot of money in point credit. But if you knew that you had the option of either playing the heck out of the game to earn items, or to just buy the ones you wanted, basically to bring the model back in a next-gen way to the more traditional approach we’re more used to, could you see it where everyone would win?

So Demolition Man was filmed in, when, 1993? So for it to be able to say anything about the future must prove one of three things. That they were incredibly lucky, that director Marco Brambilla obviously must know time travel, or some strange combination thereof. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger is the president … not far off, he’s the governor. BUT, when they go into the list of subject in the Cryogen prison, the first name that pops up is Scott Peterson … for those who don’t follow the news, he is currently a high-profile murder convict for killing his wife and unborn baby about a year and a half ago.

Kinda spooky, don’t ya think?

Mr. Jeanneret, I’m coming for your high scores!!!

(Of course, considering his mad skills, who knows if I’ll get there!)

Both of us are participating in a contest on Short Attention Gamer, a site that many of us guys from Game Junkie have come to love. They’re doing a XBox Live Arcade contest, and the main prizes are XBox Live Vision cameras! As of the last check, Pat’s winning in 4 of the 6 games, and the other two are ones that I don’t think he much cares about (like Street Fighter 2).

My personal goal is simple … catch him in a couple of the games. He’s got a huge lead in Texas Hold ‘Em, but I don’t think that is something that I couldn’t overcome with a lot of strong single player games. I also think I can catch him in Frogger. I better, I did once play Frogger for goodness’ sake!

We’ll see how it goes. I’m afraid to look at the scoreboard shortly, but I will come back!!!

Cliche topic for today, but still so very important. Where were you five years ago? Especially at the moment I write this (8:35 AM, about when things began to move).

Me? I was sitting at my desk working for my dad in Kentucky, when I got a call from the Louisville branch of the company (there was a merger in place at the time), telling us that aplane had hit the World Trade Center. Back then, the office there didn’t have peristent Internet, and didn’t even have a TV with anything better then rabbit ears, so we were connected, but just barely. We turned on the TV (Walton, Kentucky is out in the boonies BTW) and took breaks often to watch the coverage as every terrifying moment unfolded, realizing just how spooky it was at lunch time to know that not a single plane was in the air. Walton was in the path of the airport, about 15 miles south, so you always saw about 3-4 planes in the sky.

Everyone out there worked the entire day, but I’d be lying if I said that any of us really got a whole lot done, our minds were in a thousand other places, and then driving home quick and watching the coverage for the rest of the evening on my TV. It was one of the very few nights where I can ever remember going to bed scared, because while you were pretty sure apocalypse wasn’t going to happen that night, there were so many unknowns that no one really knew what was going to happen next (as it turned out, nothing, but no one knew).

I have not had the time to really sit down and watch too much of the documentary stuff that has come out in the wake of this fifth anniversary, but just what I have heard about it all is amazing, to think that so many people did what they did so selflessly is an astounding thing … one that most are afraid may happen again, but hope never will.