Technology
Dialogue in games: won’t somebody think of the parents?
When you’re a parent, you don’t get a lot of time to play games. More often than not, your gaming time is the odd late-night session when everyone else is in bed - and because everyone’s in bed, you can’t stick headphones on because you won’t be able to hear the baby monitor.
That’s not a problem if you’re playing arcade games or dumb shooters, but it’s a pain in the neck with more immersive things. You need to hear the dialogue because if you don’t, you haven’t a clue what’s going on. However, you can’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear the dialogue because if you do, there’s bound to be a HUGE BLOODY NOISE that wakes the baby, brings your gaming session to an abrupt halt and ends up with you sleeping in the shed.
Last night, I attempted to play Alone In The Dark. It certainly looks good, but I gave up after about 20 minutes. There’s loads of speech in it (in the first 20 minutes, anyway), but because the speech is interspersed with HUGE BLOODY NOISES I couldn’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear it.
GTA IV has loads of speech and lots of HUGE BLOODY NOISE in it too, but it has - yes! - subtitles. It spoils the immersion a little bit - some of the dialogue is even more clunky/cliched/annoying when it’s on the screen rather than in your ears - but at least you can work out what’s happening without ending up in the shed.
I know subtitles aren’t a big priority for game developers, but given that the average gamer is in their thirties there’s a good chance that a lot of game buyers are in the same quiet boat as me - and of course, people with hearing difficulties play games too.
Make Amazon like a real bookshop
This is great: an interface for Amazon that attempts to recreate the bookshop browsing experience.
[Via MetaFilter]
Spam tries new ways to get your attention
Two message subjects this morning:
Britney found hanged in locker room
Obama withdraws from elections
A legendary video game… for all the wrong reasons
God, I really want to know the real story behind this one: new PC game Limbo of the Lost, which has been a bazillion years in development, is uncannily similar to pretty much every game ever made. And by similar I don’t mean “yeah yeah, this is just like Doom”. I mean “OMG that’s all been nicked!”
The ever-reliable Rock Paper Shotgun has a good overview and the gorgeous, pouting Richard Cobbett has an in-depth review.
Firefox 3 due later today
Is this the future of magazine publishing? Probably not, but it’s still interesting
The Magazineer has put up an interesting post about MagCloud, a print-on-demand service designed specifically for magazines. The content available so far isn’t particularly inspiring, but the idea itself is quite interesting.
But there’s still something about paper. It’s not just because screens suck to read on (they do, but that hasn’t kept us from doing it all day). There is an intimacy about a good book, a pleasure to the glossy pages of magazines, and, ironically, a permanence to paper. (How many times has a website you really loved simply disappeared?)
So what if we could combine the best parts of the web (no waste, personalized content, open to all) with the best parts of print (sexy print quality, permanence, no batteries required)?
For the last year, I’ve been working on a project with HP Labs called MagCloud. The idea is simple, really. MagCloud enables anyone to start a magazine - real, live printed magazine - with no giant pile.
Great technology needn’t be expensive
I’ve got one of these, and it’s brilliant: a bit of plastic that holds your mobile phone when it’s charging.
Yours for five Euros. Buy two!
Almost everybody pirates music. Most of them would pay for it
Interesting numbers from a British Music Rights-funded study of 14-to-24-year-olds’ music consumption:
A full 95% said they’d copied music in some way or another at one time or another.
And 80% would pay for a legal subscription-based music service that would allow them to discover, swap and recommend music.
BMR’s Feargal Sharkey - yep, him from The Undertones - states the obvious.
First and foremost, it is quite clear that this young and tech-savvy demographic is as crazy about and engaged with music as any previous generation. Contrary to popular belief, they are also prepared to pay for it too. But only if offered the services they want. That message comes through loud and clear.
But the BPI’s rather weird response to a piece by BBC journalist Bill Thompson suggests that the message isn’t being heard by the record companies. No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun does a typically excellent fisking of their press release, which [IMO] is a rather nasty attack by the BPI that, by design or by accident, misses the point of the original piece (which XRRF links to as well).
[BPI: Music companies are radically re-inventing their business models in response to changes in how music fans want to access music online.] Music companies have been forced to reinvent their business models faced with a changed world - but not in a way they can take any pride in, as they did everything to avoid getting to that point. And they’re still not trying to respond to how fans want to access music - unlimited, everywhere, for a fair price - as they’re still hobbling files, striking exclusive deals, locking formats, trying to find ways to gouge customers. Has any fan ever said “hey, you know what I really want? A music collection that I have to pay for every month or it’ll just disappear?” I suspect not.
What we have here is a situation where copyright owners simply aren’t meeting consumer demand, because they’re stuck in the mindset of what works for them, not the consumers. The internet gives the consumers the power, and the challenge for the music business is to find a way to make money from giving people what they want.
The best example of old-style music business attitudes I can think of is U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who pronounced Radiohead’s In Rainbows a failure because it was being pirated. Never mind that it generated a storm of publicity or that the album reached number one in the album charts; the fact that the free download ended up on torrents did Radiohead a favour. Delivering huge numbers of direct downloads isn’t cheap, and everybody who torrented In Rainbows saved Radiohead a few pennies on their server bills. So by torrenting the album, the pirates saved Radiohead money. Bloody pirates!
Hurry up and make this happen
Firms are still faffing about the Universal Power Adapter:
In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured last year, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don’t need a new one with every new phone.
Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industry doesn’t get its act together then the federal government may start to intervene in some way
A tale of two ISPs
Last weekend, my ISP - Bulldog - wrote me a letter. Good news, they said. Now we’re owned by Pipex, we’re migrating all our services to Pipex ones. You’ll be getting 8MB broadband. Hurrah!
Hurrah? Arse, more like. I’m currently on a 20MB service, not an 8MB one. I tried calling, but tech support and customer service were closed. So I emailed Bulldog customer service asking why they were downgrading me and what I needed to do to continue with a 20MB service. To date, they haven’t replied.
So I’ve switched ISP to, of all people, O2.
The connection isn’t perfect - O2 appears to have the worst DNS servers in the world, but you can fix that by using OpenDNS instead; for no good reason my authenticated SMTP server was blocked, so I had to change a port number - but these are minor issues. My router’s reporting an 18MB connection and Speedtest.net tells me 14MB, which is pretty much what I was getting with Bulldog - but O2 is half the price of Bulldog.
Because I’m already an O2 customer, the 20MB service is £15 per month with free 24-hour customer service. And so far, the customer service has been brilliant. Text message to confirm that the service is being set up. Text message to tell me the activation date. Text message to tell me when my free router (which I didn’t want, but they send it anyway) was going to be delivered. Text message to tell me when activation was complete. Text message to confirm that they’ve tested the service and I should be getting what I’m paying for.
Of course, it may all go completely tits-up now I’m a customer, but I’m really quite impressed by O2 so far - they’ve done an excellent job of making me feel that they give a toss, whereas Bulldog has done the opposite.