NetFlix on the Wii. $9 a month. Great, just what the doctor ordered. Except that, like the PS3, you have to put a CD in the Wii’s drive in order to actually watch the movies you rent. A MacMini or AppleTV doesn’t suffer that characteristic. Usability, guys. Same thing goes for you Amazon–if you’re going to compete with the ecosystem king, you better do it by beating them at the thing consumers care about most. Usability.
I finally got around to keying in the beta test activation code for Home, Sony’s new virtual world system for the Playstation 3. The initial download was around 80 GB, and Home requires an additional 3 GB allocation on the PS3′s hard disk.
Right off the bat, the similarities in mechanics to Second Life are greater than the differences. Of course, Sony’s graphics are superior, with the virtual world having less jaggies and pixelation than Second Life. As far as I can tell, you can’t create or craft virtual items in Home the way you can in Second Life, but that could change as this is merely a beta. Item creation inevitably leads to virtual perversion, so time will tell. Remember that Second Life “rape” case?
My girlfriend hooked up a USB keyboard, which worked as expected. The chat interface, without a keyboard, is the same on-screen keyboard seen in many PS3 titles, and is too frustrating to bother with. If chat is your thing, a USB keyboard (we borrowed one from our iMac) is a must.
We created two characters to try out. One that looks like me-skinny, pale and white–and one that looks like her–skinny, pale, white, and cute. It is remarkably easier to get your avatar to look more like your real-life self that it is with, say, a Mii on Nintendo’s Mii Channel. Of course, Miis are supposed to be caricatures, and I don’t suspect Nintendo has a Wii social network up their sleeves.
Walking into Home’s first main area, a town square, the female avatar was immediately inundated with chat requests and “really close” dancing by the other (male) beta testers. There were hundreds of male avatars running around, but I only counted three females including my girlfriend. So, not exactly chick-friendly. I’m guessing that the PS3 and XBox have far fewer female users than the Wii, since the dominant offerings for the Sony and Microsoft systems are shooters, Madden, and racing games.
There are some neat things in Home, despite its freshman appearance. Though the stores in Home’s virtual shopping mall were “unavailable”, there was a giant-screen in the town square running a game trailer for Far Cry 2–a shooter, imagine that. Also, there is a rather cool bowling alley where you can play arcade games that look like old-school standup machines. Pool tables (like the one shown at right) and bowling lanes provide real value-add gaming experiences, so that’s cool. A poker room would be even cooler, but Sony apparently hasn’t licensed a fast-enough hand evaluator to get poker running in the beta.
Some of the participants were chatting about a version of Home for the PSP, but it boggles the mind. Why anybody would walk around a virtual world on a 3-inch screen when they can just walk around the real world is beyond me. In a way, the same argument exists for the full-on PS3 version of Home. I guess it’s the same issue I’ve had with all these virtual world chat / emote / fantasy environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Perhaps that’s why Google canned their virtual world project. Somebody at Google must’ve had the bright idea — hey, what’s so bad about wandering around the REAL world, anyway?
It seems that there are a lot of unfinished ideas in Home: entrypoints into other games, participant contests, and so on. The things that do work (which surprised me) are buddy call (where you can call buddies from your list like a telephone), open-area voice chat, and the virtual games. Everything else more or less reminds be of stuff we’ve already seen a thousand times, whether it be Sims Online or the Mii Channel. Here’s hoping Sony can crack this nut. They’ve made it useable. Now it’s time to make it USEFUL.
With Bioware recently stating they’re looking into iPhone development, EA all but confirming so, and a former EA designer big-wig leaving to start an iPhone game startup, one has to wonder: is the iPhone going to accomplish what the PSP, DS, and their predecessors have thusfar failed to accomplish?
That is, to put handheld entertainment in the pockets of adults, not just kids and guys who still live with mom at age 35.
I’d say it’s a reasonable bet, especially if Apple can find a way out of that creepy deal it has with AT&T. This deal is stifling to the consumer at large, keeping the iPhone out of many needful hands (including my own, and I’m an AT&T customer–contract-free and loving life, baby).
With the PSP having shipped close to 28 million units, it has a big head start on the iPhone, which will only ship 10 million by the end of the year, according to estimates. The DS, meanwhile, has shipped somewhere around 31 million units, easily three times Apple’s take.
Nevertheless, the iPhone has a larger screen and more storage than either device, meaning it’s better for movie-watching, and the Internet surfing experience on the iPhone is priceless. If you’ve ever used the YouTube app on the iPhone, you know what I’m talking about.
Let’s talk games, though. Early attempts at iPhone games were online, web-based tripe. DHTML stuff. Not that compelling. But more recently, Pangea was able to port some of their flagship 3D game products over to the iPhone–products like Cro-Mag rally, a caveman racing game (think Flintstones meets Mario Kart). Apparently the conversion was done in “a matter of hours” with a “decent framerate”.
So there’s 3D API on the iPhone, the development environment, Xcode, is Cocoa-based, the operating system is OS X, and the availability of cross-platform game frameworks for OS X is excellent. The drawback, if you consider it one, is that the iPhone doesn’t (and can’t) have a true gamepad-type control system, since it’s a 100% touch-screen device.
But with Apple’s influence and a steadily decreasing price point, the iPhone has a change to be the next big game platform, minus the AT&T stick-to-head contract, of course.