There has been a lot of discussion this week on the future on Ritual and the Sin Episodes series after they were purchased by MumboJumbo recently. Aside from the announcement that Sin Episodes is on hold the most important fact gleaned is actual sales figures for the game,
The first episode did well, but not good enough to completely self-fund the second episode. It sold over 150,000 units, which is better than many shooters. It more than paid for itself, but not enough to entirely fund the next one.
If I am not mistaken these are the first numbers released for a Steam based game. It’s very important as Valve are keeping their cards close to their chest in regards to online sales and it makes you wonder how many copies Half-Life 2: Episode 1 shifted.
Ultimate Fight Night was fun on Thursday, shame about Herring but he really had nothing in terms of a takedown defence and with that fighting stance he was clearly focusing way too much on his injury. Finish was fun as Rashard Evans obliterated Shawn Salmon with a high kick that will be on many a highlight reel in the future.
So we have finally returned to MMA madness after a few weeks off post UFC 66, just look at the great schedule:
- UFC 67 - High kick, power bomb, muay tai, nuff said
- EliteXC - Shamrock vs Gracie, Gina Carano, CRAZY HORSE
- Pride 33 - Wanderlai Silva, Gomi vs Nick Diaz!
- UFC 68 - Please destroy Sylvia Randy, please!
FUN
Just finished my interview with Iain Mackenzie of Radio 1. Should air in some of the news segments tomorrow (Tuesday), it’s all about Vista - good and bad.
One of the things Microsoft’s ‘Games for Windows‘ initiative was supposed to address was the common controller problem on PC. The Xbox 360 controller is now the standard pad and must be supported by all games bearing the ‘Games for Windows’ logo to get certified. Which makes it strange to hear quotes from Peter Moore saying “January 30th 2007 will be the most significant day in gaming for the next several years” when it would appear the new OS he is hyping doesn’t know about the common controller.
This is a small complaint but the fact that a crappy third party PS2 pad (notice the centre dual analogues and tacky rubber grips) has been used as the basis of this icon rather than the 360 pad is another example of how new initatives are not filtering down to the rest of the company. Lazy.
The only way I have been able to get some usefulness out of my second gen iPod Nano in Vista was like this:
- Hook it up to a Windows XP PC with the latest iTunes.
- Restore the iPod to factory settings and do a clean format.
- Once complete don’t sync anything, just check the manually manage iPod box.
- Plug into Vista PC with clean iTunes installation.
- Try and sync podcasts. This works but attempting to do so with any music playlists doesn’t. You can however drag over the playlists you need manually.
This should tide us over till Apple release an update.
The footage of Heath Herring’s now famous pre match confrontation at 2005’s K-1 NYE show is now actually being used by the UFC to promote him! Being first ever site to post the video I do feel slightly responsible for ‘the kiss heard around the world’ :-).
[via UFC Junkie]
When Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed the iPhone was widescreen we all assumed he meant real widescreen aka 16:9 aka what you get on all TVs. Finally the ability to watch TV shows in their native aspect ratio without letter-boxing or cropping.
As it turns out after a little investigation over at Cnet’s Crave the iPhone actually has an aspect ratio of 1.5:1, putting it firmly in proprietary, non-standard family of screens. Why do we have to keep going through this? Its been hard enough controlling content and displays in the move to 16:9, so why can’t Apple who are overlords of all the content and all the displays on their platform get it right?
It really pisses me off when these manufacturers flaunt the standards and formats in place by just completely ignoring them and doing their own thing. When you say widescreen you better mean it instead of fobbing us off with this half arsed attempt, hell even Sony can do it. Do you really want to become more notorious than Sony for this sort of thing?
Until we get a proper, true, authentic widescreen iPod with decent battery life and a larger storage capacity this is a non starter. No sale Apple!
[via Engadget]
UPDATE (2007-05-15): I believe this issue is now resolved. Make sure you have the latest firmware for the Nano, the latest iTunes and the recent update put out by Microsoft.
One of the most frustrating problems I have had since moving to the final version of Windows Vista is getting my iPod Nano to sync up to iTunes. No matter how you configure it you can’t sync up. The only thing I have been able to do is allow iTunes to pick out music for me and sync that, but as soon as it completes you can’t change anything because the following error appears (not a Vista screen shot but the same error).
Apple don’t officially support iTunes under Vista yet but I know that people have had no problems syncing iPod Minis and regular iPods up to the new OS. This could be an issue that only effects second generation Nanos but I do not know for sure. Has anyone else had this problem or know of a work around?
Having obtained an OEM version of Vista a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and move my main computer over to Microsoft’s much hyped new OS. Choosing to install the 32 bit version over the 64 bit one seemed like a wise move even with my modern processor due to the driver issues usually involved with the latter. Sure enough, after a smooth installation process, which is vastly improved over XP, I didn’t need to install a single driver to have a usable system.
So far so good. Booting in for the first time was cool, I quite like the effects such as the blurred glass and the window transitions. It gives Windows a much slicker feel then before even if purely aesthetic and of no functional use. After a playing about with this for a while and tweaking the system a little it suddenly hit me, where are the new features? I can see a sidebar, nice, now I don’t need to install the Google one, I can see indexed search, nice, now I don’t need Google desktop and I can see Giant Windows Defender, uhoh, better install AVG.
Having the Ultimate edition does entitle me to a bit of Media Center action. It hooks up well to the 360 allowing me to access all my masses and masses of Media Center recordings and the many WMV files I have stored right in the living room. Yeh so that’s not much use with the current crop of codec support. I am a strong advocate of MPEG-4 (especially AVC aka x264) and when it won’t even allow native playback of Xvid files it’s not much use to me. The fact that all they need to do is switch on direct show codecs to get it to work added to the fact the the 360 can natively decode x264 in software (!) makes it a bit of a joke.
Games support in Vista is a bit hit and miss. I played through the latest Sam and Max episode without a hitch but when trying to install Jaws Unleashed (I kid you not) I didn’t have much luck. Supreme Commander is looking like the next big thing to hit the PC so I will be nailing that in the next few weeks for sure. The real seller on Vista for me is Live Anywhere which won’t hit till summer making it perfectly ok to hold off upgrading. Getting achievement points for PC games is definitely appealing to me.
Third party application support much like the games is a mixed bag and I will write a separate post on this entirely to see if I can drum up some help.
Overall I am impressed with the OS if a little let down by the number of new features available right now. It’s certainly not a revolution but it provides some much needed polish to an OS that has been on the shelves far too long without an update. Once the Ultimate Extras and Live Anywhere hit I am quite positive that Vista will start to come into its own.
Between heavy multiplayer sessions of Rainbow Six Vegas you can’t help but notice the sheer amount of noise produced by the Xbox 360. Which is why I am stunned that it has been proven to be the quietest when playing a disk based game out of all three ‘next gen’ (or is that current gen) systems. I was positive that Nintendo or Sony wouldn’t go any louder but it would seem I was wrong. Perhaps it has something to do with the slot loading and blu-ray drives they use.
It would seem in an effort to reduce load times all the modern consoles have been given the fastest drives possible with no consideration for the noise they produce. The best recommendation for 360, Wii and PS3 owners? Just play Lumies Live, Bomberman ‘93 and Gran Turismo HD - no disk thrashing involved!
[via Engadget]
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