Gaikai. This …

 

Gaikai. This could just be revolutionary.

1. “Wow this new game is out, latest graphics engine, I wonder what the minimum specs are to run it? I hope I can play it, my machine is a bit old, let’s see, minimum specs – a web browser. I can manage that!”

2. Do I ever need a games console again?
Pay for expensive hardware that goes out of date within 5 years or so?  Why not just get a small, cheap box with a few minimum specs that’s always up to date?

3. Reduce platform development costs
As a developer, I have to get my game working on 2, 3 or more formats. I’m not always optimizing when I do that, and it makes the process more expensive.  What if there was no PS3, PC, 360 and Wii to develop for and I could just make one version, as polished as I can make it?

4. Avoid limiting your market
Sure a developer wants to make the best game they can, using all the technology has to offer – but doing that means you have to be anxious about limiting your market. Check Valve’s survey to see just how few have state of the art, and how many are on 4 year old tech. Can you really afford to leave potential customers behind? No longer an issue.

5. Easy demos
I’d love to try out a game, but downloading and installing a demo is a pain to find I don’t like it anyway. Fire up the demo and be playing within 5 minutes? Sure, why not! 

6. One step back from the pirates
The software is never downloaded, so can’t be copied. A little more security for the game.

7.  Play anywhere
I no longer need “own” the game on just one machine, I can call it up on any machine, regardless of its specs.

8. Pay as you go
There could be a subscription based approach. The more I play a game, the more of my money it gets. Maybe I have a flat rate fee,that gets shared out to the games I play. I can afford to try and play games I would never have bought outright (yet I won’t need to pirate them to do so.) Perhaps I can “pay by the hour” and if I don’t play a game a lot, I still have access to it for less than the outright purchase price. If I play a game at its expected average (and this would depend on how big the game is), I would pay around the same as full price.

Lots of different possible rental / subscription type models could benefit both developers and players.

 

 

 

Amplitube Review

Before you download Amplitube from IK Multimedia, take a second to adjust your mindset. Usually with guitar gear software, you’ll pay a couple of hundred dollars and up to get hundreds of stomp boxes, amps, cabs, mics and racks. The demo is like being a kid with free reign in a candy store and you’ll run gleefully around snatching up handfuls of tempting treats while giggling insanely. This sugar rush can easily make you think this is awesome, but in truth for every yummy-candy-amazing-sound, there are 20 that are just “meh” or downright awful that you’ll never eat, I mean, use.

Visit IK Multimedia

Now we’re getting to the Amplitube mindset. The download gets you the core software, not a demo, and from that base you can try out and buy individual pieces of gear. Much more cost effective, but also a better approach; less IS more, it makes it easier to get the best out of what you have, saves time flicking between 1000 different options and keeps you focused on getting down to playing.

The downside is that most of the sample sounds tell you “You don’t have such-and-such installed” which can seem a bit frustrating at first. You don’t get that initial heady rush, and that’s why I said change your mindset before downloading and trying.

 

In the end what you get is an awesome set of sounds. I’ve tried hundreds of pieces of gear since the free download, most of which did not thrill me so I’m glad I didn’t have to buy it. Instead, in two shopping trips, I have the gear that gives me the kinds of sounds I like – that other gear is great, I’m sure, it’s just not for me.

I still have infinite sonic variety from just that subset of gear, and over time I will get to know it better and better and get more and more out of it. Perfect!

Does it sound real?

I am not the guy to ask, sorry. I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there with $4k to spare to know just how a Soldano SLO100 really sounds, but I’m not one of them. I’m also a tone philistine – I was DI’ing a Zoom half-rack digital FX box straight into the mixing desk 15 years ago, and the only remotely decent amp I owned was a Fender Princeton Chorus. I have no idea if it sounds or feels like the real thing.

What I do know is that it sounds great. It is not thin, fizzy, noisy, or any of the other drawbacks you can get with effects that exist purely in the digital domain. It’s warm, rich and responsive, it changes if I play quietly or loudly, it does what I’d expect it to you in general if it was a physical piece of equipment, and I end up with sounds I can control, work with, and like. What more can you ask?

So What Did I Buy?

Here’s one of my favorite set-ups right now, for a crunch type sound (this picture has been composited out of the various components and screens):

For my initial purchase, I went with the Soldano SLO100 for clean and crunch sounds, a Vox AC-30 cab (didn’t really like the sounds I got from the amps, to my surprise), a Fender ’65 Twin Reverb (closest thing I could find to the Princeton Chorus), a digital reverb rack, and the Mudhoney stomp pedal for the range of sounds from warm and crunchy to over-the-top distorted. A second trip to the store, thanks to a Fender sale, saw me pick up a Fender Pitch Shift, Fender Tape Echo (wonderfully traditional!), the ’64 Vibroverb Custom amp (I love Texas blues sounds), and a multi-tap delay stomp with a couple of mics just for the sake of it.

I now find I have a range of great clean, crunch and distorted sounds, with enough psychedelia from the extras to let me make some crazy sounds that I’ll use just once in a blue moon. I still find the presets to be of little use, as I’m always missing one piece of gear or other – it would be nice would be if it offered to download in demo mode all the items you don’t have for a preset which would make it easier to explore some good sounds and find the gear you need to make them.

Meantime, I’m just making my own preset library of the sounds I like, so I’m doing fine.

Economies Of Scale

Total cost for the gear I purchased when I add both shopping trips together, around $90 or so. Now, you can see that purchasing the full-meal-deal is good value for money, if you have all that money to spend in one go in the first place. Have to admit that from my tests and trials, I now have all my “must have” gear for my set up, so I’m pleased not to have to spend the extra to get stuff I didn’t really want anyway.

And if I do ever change my mind and want to expand? I can do so at any time I choose, or I can wait for the sales and specials to snap up a bargain.

Verdict

Exactly what I was looking for in terms of functionality, budget, and precision tailoring to my personal preferences. Awesome.

Visit IK Multimedia to try and buy Amplitube for yourself.

 

Not the belle of the ball

Went and purchased an Acer netbook, far from the belle of the ball these days compared to the glamorous tablets but much more suited to my needs, which are mostly to do with typing only, and when on my lunch break at work with no access to my main desktop.

My Acer, already covered in fingerprints. It has a hard life!

Kind of ageing tech, but I need a keyboard and want to pay the lowest price I can find, so it fitted the bill. Great for novel-writing and more! I will enable the wireless hotspot too for my Droid 3 so that I can get the netbook online even when not sat in a free wi-fi environment. At least I can turn that on and off at will.

While that is the main aim of the feeble little thing (I say that comparing it to my desktop, or much more expensive tablets). I will see if it can also act as a simple practice recorder for guitar sessions at lunch too!

 

Personal Assistant

The concept of the PA in the real world is a simple one – someone who knows you, knows your routine. It’s actually the knowing you that is the important part, knowing how you work, what you like, what order you like to do things in.

One of the key things is that you might give some instruction on those things to your PA,  but a key element is that they should be able to learn about you by themselves, spot preferences you might not even know you had or that never crossed your mind to express.

I am still amazed computers, and in particular mobile devices, are not up to speed on this yet. I still have to go into a preferences setting and explicitly tell my device or my software what I want it to do.

It sees EVERYTHING I do, so it has all the information it needs to spot my habits and adjust itself accordingly. Yet for all the new computing power we have, computers are still as dumb as ever when it comes to adapting themselves automatically to the needs of their users.

It’s about time that changed!

 

1984

So George Orwell was right, we all have our privacy invaded and our thoughts inspected – what he didn’t foresee is that big brother would be the giants of ad, search and marketing rather than the Government, and that we would be the ones voluntarily giving up our privacy in exchange for a few apps and a bit of convenience.

 

Demon’s Souls – been interested in this for a while so picked it up over the festive season for myself, and rather good it is too. I particularly like the unusual take on multiplayer, where you see ghosts of what the other players are up to, can leave and read messages from other players, and can see bloodstains where other players have died in their own universe (bloodstains which let you replay the death, giving you some vague warning as to what hazards might lie ahead). I haven’t yet tasted the other aspects of multiplayer, which is having a player hunt you as a black phantom in your world, or teaming up with others to defeat bosses and hard areas (again as spectral kind of ghosts).

The story is rather intriguing too, as are the settings. The difficulty level is very high indeed, and death is commonplace – but the twist on that makes it not so frustrating, as you keep all equipment and level advancements and just lose your current crop of souls. Souls being currency, that can be a bad thing, but you can always fight your way back through the level and touch your own bloodstain (ooer missus) to get those souls back. Oh and being dead puts you in soul form, with less health that your physical self. You spend most of the game in soul form (well I do anyway, maybe there are some non-sucky type people who spend most of their time in corporeal form, who knows).

Anyway, nice to see some twists and turns on the usual gameplay structures, and I hope we see more games that are similarly inventive, particularly in the bringing players together options. This “kind of but not really” multiplayer makes the world more unique and constantly changing, but without the stress and fret of having to play alongside others.

Nice one!

 

Experiment IV

Just an experimental blog posting – I have a client who wants to know more about using video on WordPress, so checking out the various ways that might be achieved, starting with embedding a YouTube video on here.

And presto. I hope.

 

Transitions

At last, Knights of the Old Republic was made available for download.

It’s strange really how “unrevolutionary” downloading is. My thinking was that this would happen – freed from the expense of creating physical versions of something, the creative world would explode with options available to the reader / listener / viewer / player. In the past, if someone came up with something quirky, something niche – well, it was a risk, wasn’t it, to turn that into a book / film / LP errr I mean CD / game?

What if I made 100,000 copies, and only 1,000 sell! Think of all the lost money. Think of all the pollution in the deserts as we bury the unsold product. Wasteful. And that sort of potential disaster discourages risk, better to play it safe, with a sequel, with whatever is the current big thing, and tough luck to anyone who wanted something a bit different, that didn’t have a huge guaranteed market.

But with digital, you have nothing to lose. Release an album, and you don’t have to worry about pressing x number of copies and thinking a bunch of them might not sell. Same with any media. Better yet, with existing media that was hard to find, just re-release it! Old stuff that never was particularly popular or big profit, just put that out on digital, and every sale is cash in hand, no risk, no fear of loss.

Yet this has not happened. I log on to music sites, and I get lots of great music it is true, but since I love the weird, obscure and off-beat, there is a whole slew of music I hoped to get access to that simply is not there. Once again, just like “the bad old days,” it is the safely popular that is well-represented.

Which is very disappointing, if you ask me. Same with new acts of course – this age should allow anyone and anything to try out whatever art form, in whatever style, that they choose, and still offer themselves (and any promoting / sponsoring party, person or company) a chance to make a bit of moolah. Everyone wins!

But it really isn’t happening, at least not yet.

I see where the Google book scanning idea comes from. I am against it (mostly as I don’t think such power should be granted to one corporation / company), but I can see the idea, the appeal. If I want a book that I simply can’t find in print, one that is old, was unpopular, that is discontinued – well, couldn’t the digital realm be my salvation? I’m not saying I want it for free, either, I just want a means to legally and legitimately access such things.

And this takes me back to Knights of the Old Republic. It was about 3 or 4 months ago that I had a hankering to be a lightsabre wielding Jedi (or possibly Sith, depending on how nasty or nice I was in-game!), and I figured the perfect source for that would be the classic RPG, widely hailed as a masterpiece. But could I find KOTOR for sale anywhere? No!

Crazy. I figured such a popular and classic game would be available from its parent company, via download now that it wasn’t worth making CDs or DVDs of it any more. They get cash from something they have “laying around” and I get to fulfill my lightsabre wielding desires. Perfect. But it was not to be, even for such a huge hit, the digital option was just not available.

I could have probably found it on a Torrent someplace, some cracked or hacked copy, but having been a programmer, and being in the business of creating content that people could easily borrow without me getting due recognition and / or payment, I am very opposed to such behavior – after all, I want to see a brave new world of creativity where anything can be made available to anyone, so that fashion, popularity, etc are no longer in control of what people can get. If they like it, they can get it, whether 10 million others like it, or just 10.

I am glad that KOTOR has finally appeared on Steam (hurrah Valve and their ever-growing catalog of games old and new that they are making available and accessible).

I am sad the music and film industry is having a hard time adapting. I am sad that there is still a lot of music I have to go and order on CD from Amazon, often at an overly high price, when it could be made available for download – obscure and unpopular? All the MORE reason it should be on download!

I hope the potential here is one day fully realised, and that the catalog of human creativity both old and new is available, where anyone can create and distribute and profit from their art (whatever it may be), is made available to all, without it being in charge of any single company or organisation that could turn it from a fair profit for all to unfair profiteering that would return limitations onto art and creativity once more, as bad or worse than restrictions of fashion and risk used to impose.

Tom Grimes
http://www.tmgcgart.com/