Is there food?

I’ve just configured the following Out Of Office AutoReply-thing in Outlook…

I am out of the office on Friday the 2nd of December. It’s Xbox 360 launch day, you see, and I’m taking the day off to play with it.

I’m very excited.

I’ll be back in the office on Monday the 5th of December, assuming I can tear myself away from my new toy.

If you have any really urgent issues whilst I’m away, please contact Steve Local (or my line manager).

Cheers.

Dan (via Dan’s Handy Out Of Office Auto Reply AgentBotThing)

I am now the proud owner of an Xbox 360.

After spotting the queue of 14 people camping overnight in Asda on my way home (the first of which arrived at midnight the night before) I thought things might be a little busy this morning. When I arrived at Game at 7:25, 5 minutes before opening, there was already a queue of 30 - 40 people.

90 minutes later I had a large, bulging sack (containing console and games) and was merrily making my way home.

First impressions are very, very good. The machine itself is brilliantly made, the interface is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a console, the wireless pads and voice communication are a generation ahead of anything that existed previously. Maybe people aren’t convinced about the next-gen status of most of the launch titles, but you can’t dispute the capability and design of the console itself.

There’s something a little sick about playing an accurate port of Gauntlet over Xbox Live, with full voice chat, on the most powerful console on the planet, but that’s the first thing I did :) Geometry Wars is one of the most addictive and curiously beautiful games I played in a long time (possibly ever). Hexic is a very accomplished, pretty puzzler. Need For Speed: Most Wanted looks like it could be good fun, and Project Gotham Racing 3 is the best looking racer I’ve ever seen. It’s a bitch to drive, mind you, but I’ll get the hang of it.

I’ve still got Condemned, Tiger Woods, and Perfect Dark in my bag, and I’m just about to try the VGA cable to see how much difference it makes. I’m blown away by the quality of the output even using a standard, crappy composite cable, so I’m expecting big things of the VGA output.

More later - it’s been hard enough breaking off long enough to write this. I think I have this niggling urge to eat something too, but I’ll try to repress it…

So I’ve now owned my 360 for over 48 hours - I thought I should post an update.

On the whole, things are going very well. The console itself, along with the new dashboard and interface, continue to amaze me. For example, I’ve just connected up my iPod, downloaded the aac update from Marketplace, and can now listen to anything on my iPod whilst playing a game. I’ve also tried hooking up my card reader, and doing a slideshow of all my digital camera photos - there’s a very nice panning effect used during the slideshow. If I install Media Connect on my PC, I’ll be able to stream images from my PC, which is also a nice touch.

As for the games, I’m more impressed with some, and less impressed with others. PGR3 is utterly amazing. On the right track, with the right cars, it’s just about the best racer I’ve ever played. It’s certainly the best looking. NFS:MW is good fun, and looks very nice, but I’ve not had anything like the races I’ve had on Gotham. Both have been assured a place in my collection though. Sadly, the same can’t be said for Tiger Woods. It is, quite frankly, a steaming pile of dung. Online play is erratic with connections dropped, a terrible framerate, and dreadful interface. Furthermore, it doesn’t support the VGA cable properly, so every resolution other than 640x480 is stretched to the wrong aspect ratio. Take my word for it, 640x480 on a TFT screen is fugly. So, bye bye Tiger Woods, hello Madden. I’ve not tried it yet, but will post an update later.

Condemned is the scariest thing I’ve ever played - even with the lights on. It’s visceral, spooky, and utterly compelling. Kameo looks fantastic, but I’ve not spent enough time with it to comment properly yet. Which brings me to Perfect Dark 0, which is in some ways a letdown, and in others better than I expected. The single player is fairly average; the first couple of levels are so cliched and unoriginal that it’s almost enough to make you stop playing. Co-op doesn’t make a lot of sense, as the other player is cast as characters that (in terms of the narrative) can’t possibly be in the level. Multiplayer, however, is great. The lack of jumping makes a lot of difference. Players instead have to roll around to avoid being shot, resulting in desperate rolls into cover to avoid being sniped by other players. Coupled with the dual wielding (which requires each trigger to be used to shoot), and it feels more like a John Woo style action movie than any other FPS I’ve played. I can see me spending quite a lot of time online with PD0.

So, all good so far. Sadly, it’s not all good. I don’t seem to be able to download anything from Marketplace (other than teeny weeny files) and neither do a lot of people online. I’m not sure yet whether it’s my ISP, but I’ve tried swapping my router, bridge, cables, hub, etc. I’ve even tried using someone else’s Live account, and that didn’t work either. The only thing I can’t change is my ISP (or can I?). The VGA cable isn’t quite as crispy as I’d hoped either. It looks nice, yes, but not as nice as I expected. Maybe my TFT is crap, but I find that hard to believe, given that I’ve always been impressed with the way PC games look.

So, mostly very impressed, with a couple of let-downs. Given how high my expectations were, and that the hype surrounding the machine was so enormous, I don’t think that’s too bad :)

I have been intending to post an iPod update for the last couple of weeks, but never got around to it. The other day, I had an email from a guy at the Boston Globe asking me what I thought of the new device, and what I used it for. So, in a two birds vs one stone style, here’s my iPod update.

Scott from the Globe asked me the following questions:

• Why’d you buy the video iPod?
• What are you watching on it? Mostly new content bought from iTunes, or stuff you had before?
• Do you think the iPod Video will have as much impact on the world of TV/movies as it did on music?
• What do you think about watching full-length movies on your iPod? How much would you pay?

All interesting questions. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I bought the video iPod (or iPod With Video, as Apple would have you call it) because an opportunity presented itself; I could sell my existing fourth generation, black and white iPod and upgrade to the shiny new iPod With Video for very little money. I wanted the extra space, and I wanted the nicer, colour screen, so it made a lot of sense. Would I have bought one if I couldn’t sell my existing player? Probably not. Would I have bought one if I didn’t have an existing player? Yes, absolutely.

I can’t honestly say I’m exploiting its video capabilities to the fullest; I converted a couple of DVDs from my collection to try it out, and have copied a couple of television episodes across, but I’ve not actually bought anything from the iTunes store. DVDs don’t work terribly well as they’re mostly presented in a widescreen ratio, which the iPod doesn’t handle - you either get a letterboxed display (which reduces the visible screen size) or you have to crop the edges of the picture - neither of which is ideal. The battery life doesn’t really support the watching of full length movies either - approximately three hours if you watch a film without jumping backwards and forwards (seeking through to different scenes is a great way to eat your battery very quickly). In fairness to Apple, they aren’t selling the iPod for movie use, but rather television and music videos. The few television episodes I’ve copied over, and the few music videos work very nicely, and I can honestly see me using the device to watch a few episodes of something on my next trip abroad.

Do I think this iPod will have the same effect on video as it did on music? No, not yet, for a few reasons:

1) Storage space: Video = large file sizes, music = small file sizes. Unless codecs become massively more efficient (which I can’t really envisage) or huge disk drives become far more affordable (which is only a matter of time, judging from the past 4-5 years) it’s not going to be realistic to store the same amount of video as music.

2) Reuse: I have a reasonably large list of favourite albums that I listen to regularly. I also have some more obscure albums that I’ll listen to every now and then, or new albums that I try out and won’t go back to if I don’t like them. With movies, typically you’ll watch it once and forget about it for a while, perhaps you’ll revisit it after a few months or maybe years. For television, you’ll almost certainly only watch it once and then await next weeks episode. As a result, it’s unlikely that many people are going to want devote large amounts of drive space to films.

3) Availability: I’m a “computer geek” (so I’m told) so acquiring and using the software necessary to convert a DVD from my collection into a format that’s usable by my iPod is trivial. For the mass market (and the iPod is truly a mass market device these days) this is harder to do. Simple software to enable the conversion is commercially available but most people don’t have the time or inclination to do it (you’re looking at a matter of hours to convert your DVD to your iPod, rather than the few minutes it takes to convert a CD). Apple have made some video content available on the iTunes Music Store, and from what I’ve heard this has been popular in the US. Typically, Apple is offering music videos or television shows which offer a smaller file size and a reduction in quality (required to keep file sizes small) is more forgivable. I don’t see Apple offering an feature length content on iTunes until the next generation of iPod. Incidentally, in Europe Apple’s content is far less compelling (no Lost, no Desperate Housewives etc), and as a result I’m not likely to buy anything from iTunes.

4) Hardware limitations: As I’ve mentioned above, the battery life doesn’t really support a great deal of viewing time on the iPod, and the screen isn’t the correct ratio for displaying widescreen content.

Would I watch full length movies on my iPod? No, almost certainly not - at least on this device. In the future (possibly the next generation, possibly the one after that) I can see Apple putting together a far more convincing device for video content. I suspect that the current iPod with Video is simply a little market research tool (the hardware was already more than capable, it just needed a few screen size tweaks) and that the real Video iPod (ViPod?) will be released in the future sporting a true widescreen display, better battery consumption, and surrounded by a suitable amount of portable video fanfare from Apple. Considering the rumours around Apple’s Media Centre-esque FrontRow application, the two would work quite nicely together.

I’m very pleased with my new iPod though - I think the sound quality is better than my last, the battery life is better, it has a larger capacity, a far superior screen, and has less “niggles” than my fourth generation device. I’m also quite pleased that I can play video on it if I have a desire to, but for me (and I would imagine for the vast majority of users) the video functionality is an very pleasant extra, not a must-have.

A few of us went to see Doom the other night. In tribute to the films most entertaining sequence (a three minute first person sequence which plays like a cinematic ghost train) I’m going to post my impressions of it in a suitably gimmicky fashion:

Doom. Scientists. Carmack. Running. Monsters. Blood. Credits. Rock. Moody. Holiday. Cancelled. Guns. Troubled. Stargate. Vomit. Ear. Aliens. Corridors. Doom. Yawn. Yawn. Zombie. Yawn. Mutilation. Death. Resurrection. Pointless. Shooting. Zombies. Wounded. Death. Superhuman. FPS. Yay. Tedious. Wire-foo. Rock. Fight. Yawn. End.

I had hoped that Kong would live up to my expectations and take its place as my pick for the best film of 2005, but the film fails for more often than it succeeds, and I suspect it’s the viewer’s ability to overlook (or ignore) these failures that will determine whether they’ll enjoy Peter Jackson’s “epic” remake. It’s quite easy to name the two aspects of the production that work: Kong himself is a superbly designed and animated CGI creation, and Naomi Watts has such luminous charm that she steals the vast majority of the scenes she’s in. The first few quiet moments that Kong and Ann spend together are easily the best in the film and in theory the strength of both Kong and Watts’ performances should be all you need to “buy into” the film; the faults managed to alienate me to such an extent that by the time the action moved to New York, I wanted the film to be over. The faults are numerous and significant. Kong aside, a large chunk of the CGI (or rather the CGI/Live action composite) is very poor; the initial dinosaur stampede is some of the worst blue-screen I’ve seen in recent years, with no sense of interaction between the dinosaurs and the human actors that they’re supposedly nearly trampling. The Kong vs T-Rex (x3) fight is too long, and while the vine sequence is briefly entertaining, it’s an over-the-top CGI roller-coaster with no emotional impact what-so-ever. The fabled “spider cave” sequence feels out of place - it’s so dark and in your face that on reflection it only serves to slow down the action, and kill off another couple of characters. By the time we reach New York, so much bad CGI, dialogue, and acting has littered the screen that I was completely disengaged. And what of the other actors? Jack Black doesn’t cope very well with the duties he’s called upon to perform, and is seemingly incapable of delivering any of his lines with any sincerity (including the final line of the film). Adrien Brody (equipped with a face I could never tire of smacking) essentially sleepwalks his way through the film, perhaps aware that he is as pointless as the tacky CGI velociraptors. The numerous disposable crew members do no more than slow down the action, and whoever dreamt up Billy Elliot’s terrible Heart Of Darkness sub-plot should be shot - “It’s not an adventure story, is it?” “No Jimmy, it’s a tedious, overlong CGI indulgence”. Much has been said about the films “massive” three hour duration. I would argue that a great deal of the film’s content could and should have been left on the cutting room floor (or, more accurately, relegated to the back of a hard disk somewhere), and that I would have been far more involved as a result. Final thoughts? A massive let-down - perhaps I’ll come back to Kong on DVD and enjoy it significantly more than I did in the cinema, given that my expectations will be suitably lower. Perhaps, in the comfort of my own home, I’ll be drawn in a little more. As it stands right now, this is a long way away from being film of the year.