·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
• • • • •

Another new Grow for anyone interested.  It’s a pretty simple one.

So GDC is the big thing going on these days in Super Video Game World.  Lots of announcements to and fro.  The coolest one so far as I’m concerned is the new XNA interface for the 360.  Announcement here.  (But as always, ignore any “comments” because the a key sign of low intelligence is commenting on Kotaku/YouTube/etc.)  More detailed FAQ here.

Short story is: all that homebrew XNA development that has presumably going on is actually going to be visible at some point.  Right now, to play an XNA developed homebrew game (unless anything has changed since I last checked) on your 360 you had to pay to sign up to the “Creator’s Club”.  It seems in the future that only the creators themselves will be signing up for the club (presumably at the same or a similar modest fee) to put the game onto the box.  Then you can submit your game to an online “peer review” process.  Supposedly this process is merely looking to vet games for a) basic quality control, b) naughty content, and c) plagiarism.  If you get through this process, your game goes up for everyone to play.  Most surprisingly, this will apparently allow people to sell their games this way just like other XBLA games.

This will probably hinge a lot on how frequent people can finish games (if you could get at least 1 game a week to go up alongside XBLA it will be a more than vibrant system) and how good the peer review is.  Presumably they’ll take obvious steps of anonymising both ends of the process as best they can, and hopefully provide incentives to ensure fair and honest review somehow, but I think it won’t really be a problem either way until/unless the system is big and successful enough that it will be a pretty cool problem to have.

I’ve worked with XNA before and it really is pretty amazingly slick in many ways.  Very easy to use and get working.  The FAQ mentions that creators will retain the IP rights, but that could be read cynically as the game content rather than the actual source code and related data.  In any case, coding a game in XNA kind of pretty much locks you in to Windows and the 360 anyway so nobody would really be blindsided by more restrictive terms.  All in all, I think this is a pretty fantastic little bit of news.

Cognitive Daily is a pretty cool blog to subscribe to, just to get the occasional crazy unbelievable illusion every now and then.

Just to let anyone who cares know that I’ll be back in Fredericton for a few weeks, starting next week.

So one issue I’d been having with Wordpress is getting a proper RSS feed for all comments on the site. All of the answers I read online, given to other people with the same desire, were straightforward, almost condescending. And they didn’t work.

In the end, I had to change my permalink structure to the “numeric” setting, which magically made things work. (This must be the default or something?) In any case, the feed is here now, and I hacked in some links on the left to the feed for the main site in RSS or Atom, and the comments again.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes.

I never really took the time to write about Rock Band. I still don’t have it. Thanks to the generosity of Mike over Christmas, however, I got to play a ton of it for the couple of weeks I was back.

Secretly, in the back of my mind, I was prepared for disappointment. I was so very, very excited about the game. It’s the primary reason that I even have a 360 right now (especially ironic now that the game is finally out and I can’t really afford it, natch.) There was no way it was going to live up to my internal hype.

Holy crap, I cannot stress how much I enjoyed my time with that game. It surpassed my expectations. I want to do violent things to undeserving victims in order to get more time behind the drums or even with the guitar. Every week, they release even more awesome songs. Even if this game didn’t have the additional instruments, it would be the best pretend-guitar-game on strength of soundtrack alone.

The big question on everyone’s minds, however, is “when are those full albums coming?” Before the game was even released, they announced loud and clear that they were going to have Who’s Next available, as well as Nevermind and some other unspecified albums. None of these have materialized, despite an otherwise consistent 3 track per week record. Nobody seems to know quite exactly why, so, it’s time for unfounded speculation!

• They lied! Possibly the simplest explanation: they never actually got the rights secured on ink and paper, but maybe they were close and some wires got crossed somewhere and someone went and announced something a bit too soon, and everything has since fallen apart.
• Strategic reserve. Seeing as how the 3 tracks per week deal seems to be selling gangbusters, perhaps they’re just being jerks and holding onto the goodies for a more opportune time. Inject some excitement back in if the bottom falls out of the weeklies, take some wind out of Activision’s sails (sales!) on the release of GH4 or an expansion pack or just some big DLC release, or something like that.
• Gameplay logistics. The explanation given in interviews for the lack of an online-capable Band World Tour mode was that they just couldn’t figure out a graceful way to handle tracking progress or other issues along those lines. (I do not understand this, their already awkward local system that requires a constant “band leader” seems like it would do the trick, doesn’t it?) Maybe, rather than have the full albums be just a bunch of tracks to dump onto your list of songs like everything else has been, they want to do something special. (This kind of makes sense?) Like, a separate menu option or setlist to play the album “cover to cover.” This goes beyond the scope of a track download, however: you’d need to code up a patch for the game itself, which then introduces compatibility problems between people playing online, etc.
• XBL logistics. (Not familiar enough with the PSN to figure out how that relates to things.) One big glaring pit for someone to fall into as more and more songs get added to the roster is that on XBL, when songs are sold both individually and as a bundle, there’s no checks or warnings preventing you from buying the same track twice. This would be worse if they are going to release full albums that contain tracks that they’ve sold previously.
• Stupid memory. I thought I had another one but I’ve since forgotten it.

In any case, they seem to be doing just fine without the full album downloads.  So much so that I actually don’t even care if they ever come out any more.  Even if I had Rock Band I’d be hard pressed to afford more than what is already coming out.