Free Candy For Everyone

Read about this a few days ago at PVRBlog but just haven’t had a chance to post about it. Basically, this forum post has news that there’s a new TiVo coming out - well 2 of them, one is 80 hours and one is 180. It’s not a TiVo Series 3. It is not HD.

I’m not sure what the strategy is here, exactly. They’ve introduced a new pricing model where you don’t actually pay for the box anymore, they just spread that cost out over the per-month fee. (So you’re still actually buying it, you just don’t have that upfront cost) Maybe this is just a move to keep their existing boxes viable since the Series 3s will probably cost major money. So if you are curious about TiVo but have a box from you cable company (like I do) that’s dual tuner (like mine) and can record 2 shows at once, you probably wouldn’t want to buy a current Series 2 at all. But still. I’m not quite sure on this whole thing.

I have no intention of getting one of these. I already have 3 PVRs. A Series 1 TiVo, a Series 2 TiVo and my Motorola dual-tuner HD cable box. I’m waiting on Series 3 for sure.

People keep telling me TiVo is dead/dying. I don’t want it to be true. But I can see how it would be really hard to get a non-tech savvy person to buy a TiVo today when they can just get something from their cable company to do it. Dunno, dunno.

I’m still playing catchup with my notes from GDC. I’m sure there’s already news all over the internet about Will Wright’s talk, but I wanted to at least give my impression. I’ve seen Will talk several times before, and it’s always great. He has the wonderful frenetic energy to him. He doesn’t care about convention, he talks so fast it’s hard to keep up, and he somehow imbues everything he does with an aura of genius. Or something like that.

He didn’t show Spore at all during his talk, but it was a lot about Spore, or the process of getting to the idea of Spore. He talked a bit about the Sims Online and how it wasn’t the same experience that people loved from the Sims. In the Sims, you can control time. Not online. There was no custom content online. And there was no cheating online. He said about 60% of Sims players use cheats. Wow, that’s a lot. So the Sims Online wasn’t really the same experience as the Sims, and it was also monstrously huge to architect. Very big team. He likened the Sims Online to this giant machine called the Bagger 288. Here’s a picture.. Then he compared Spore to a Ferrari. In size as well as maneuverability. Read up on the Bagger 288. It’s really kind of funny. Especially since when he started talking about it we had no idea why he was bringing it up. There was just this slide with a picture of this giant machine. It was awesome.

One other thing that stands out from his talk was him discussing the movie 2001. He said how at the time it came out, no one commented on the AI Hal being able to talk and plot and everything. They all walked out being surprised that it could beat a human at chess. His point had something to do with people being bad at understanding the real challenges in a problem. It was interesting, regardless.

He was talking about how risky Spore was going to be. It has tech, design, production, marketing and political risks. Well, he said he took care of the political issues by talking to the EA brass who all play World of Warcraft. He told them, “It’s going to be like World of Warcraft except it starts in a tidepool.” I liked that.

Joystiq had some images of the first few slides of his talk. And someone out there must have more info if you want a detailed transcription. But that’s my high level take. It was great. I always come away from his talks with a sense that games aren’t the same for him as they are for me. He sees the whole world in a different way. He manages to make connections between such disparate elements that seem to me to be completely unrelated. That’s pretty darn powerful.

I got in a bit of time on WoW patch 1.10 yesterday. Like a lot of others out there, I still haven’t seen any weather! I was playing on the test servers for many hours, never saw weather. Yesterday I was on for a couple hours, no weather. How infrequent is it?!? I could see it being a bit annoying if it happens all the time. But it’d be cool if we had some better feedback about where the weather is, if we want to check it out.

In typical opportunist fashion, people are crafting the new enchanting bags and selling them for huge prices. So I jumped on the train, of course! At tailoring 225 you can make a 16-slot enchant bag (that holds enchanting supplies only). At the same level, we’re only making 12-slot normal bags. So I made a few, shipped one off to Shaleyla, my enchanting character, and dumped one on the auction house for a high price (well, it seemed high to me, about 6 gold). We’ll see how long they sell at that level before things stabilize. The next sized bag up that I saw was a 20 slot enchanting bag. Those were selling for 30, yes 30, gold. I didn’t try to buy one of those. Gotta level up my tailoring so I can make them!

I hit level 49 with my main, Shaleyla, yesterday. I’ve been failing behind my Crazy Cattle guild mates. Our highest level member hit 53 this week, so I need to try to catch up, or I won’t be much help on our instance runs. Next up for Shaleyla is a run to Uldaman to level up my enchanting. Why would anyone wanna hang out inside a dungeon? I certainly wouldn’t. But that’s where the Master Enchanting trainer lives. Weirdo.

I haven’t played my priest yet. I’m not sure how to spec her, with the talent changes and all. She’s at level 29, and I really just do PvP with her, running WSG. I don’t intend to level her up at all because she’s on a PvP server and I’m sick of getting ganked (people especially seem to love ganking priests. grr). So I need to chose my talent points with PvP in mind. I’m still thinking about it.

I do enjoy playing a priest. One of these days I’ll roll a priest on a non-PvP server. But for now, I still have 2 whole classes I haven’t tried at all - Warrior and Rogue. Those are the only ones left.

I must be snoozing on the job. Or maybe just working too hard. I totally missed this announcement that more Guitar Hero games are in the works. It was sort of obvious, given how successful the game has been. But it’s good to get confirmation. Apparently there are two “song pack” type versions in the works, a Guitar Hero Country and Guitar Hero Metal (those are my names, not theirs), as well as a full-fledged sequel with 40 more tunes. I’m psyched. Now I just need to get me another controller so I can rock out with friends instead of only solo.

Been playing my Xbox 360 a bit. So far I’ve tried a bunch of downloads for free on the Xbox Arcade. It’s really easy to use. It’s probably all too easy to spend money too, since they know my credit card number. I fear that all you need to do is click to buy something. That’s not good. But I haven’t tried yet, fortunately.

I put about an hour or so into Oblivion - haven’t played anymore since that first session. We have a bunch of 360 titles floating around at work, so I took a stack of them home and I’ve been playing Kameo:Elements of Power, which is surprisingly good. It was a launch title that was originally going to be an original Xbox title, so I didn’t expect it too look all that great. It looks awesome. The graphics are good, and it looks really good on my big screen HDTV. It’s a platformer-type game, and I tend to be bad at those. It usually takes me a while to figure out what they want me to do in a puzzle situation (Prince of Persia was particularly irritating for me in that way), and then a bit longer to execute it. Don’t know why, but I’m just not good at these things. Despite that, I was able to appreciate it. It’s really sharp, the gameplay is interesting and unique - you are a cute little flying elf girl, but you can transform into a bunch of really different beasties, including a giant rock slug thing, a yeti-type-thing, and a walking-Audrey II. I’ll keep playing a bit I think.

Another thing to note is how crazily effective the Achievements system is. Basically, the Xbox platform has this built in achievements system. Any game has a set number of points (it seems to be 1000 for most titles, and 200 for arcade titles). These are doled out however the game designers wish through accomplishing tasks in the game. These points add up to your gamer score, which you can see above displayed on my gamer card. I want to play games that will give me points so I can see them catalogued (because I’m like that, ya see, loving the tallying and organizational type stuff). I kept playing Kameo past the point I might have stopped because I wanted to get at least one achievement. And I probably will go back to try to get more. Good system design there.

I have a few other titles to try, but right now I’m pretty happy with my 360. It’s kind of funny, since just before GDC I posted about how I wasn’t excited about the 360 at all, and couldn’t wait for the PS3, and yeah yeah, whatever MS. And hear I am, spouting MS rhetoric left and right. I guess that full day tutorial on Microsoft technology I attended at GDC must have sunk in a bit too deep!