I just got to play in a really-real nationwide game show and blew it within - literally - the first few seconds of my appearance. Details here.

Despite my best all-smiles efforts I can't help but feel upset about this, being driven from "heh I'm doing good at this tonight" to "HOLY SHIT I'M PLAYING FOR REALS" to complete choking flameout defeat, within the span of a minute. I hear the ghost of the laughter of every 7th-grade gym-class tormenter ringing in my ears.

This will be erased by the time I wake up next, so hooray for it being so close to bedtime now. But: ugh.

More hooray to derspatchel for also getting called up to the stage and making a much more impressive show of it!

Update: Fuck you, "contrarycoho". Now is so not the time.

Update:

I'm going to be online for some Xbox Live shenanigans at 9PM eastern tonight. TF2 and Castle Crashers are likely to be played, and maybe some Carcassonne. Feel free to join me! Note that I'm going to concentrate on how player-herding menu options work at least as much as on actually playing any games... this is a research trip!

Add Carney Vale to the list of "totally worth five bucks" Xbox 360 games. This is a Community Games title developed by the Gambit game lab, whose Kendall Square offices I've had the pleasure to visit by way of the various local events they host. It's a fine morsel, gleamingly polished, where you use minimal controls and simple 2D physics to fling an acrobat around a circus, collecting goodies and avoiding baddies. Try the demo and see if it hooks you.

It was interesting to see Obama inauguration-themed coverage, decor, and vaguely related downloadable-content ads (including one for the film "All the President's Men") all over the 360's desktop yesterday. Three years ago this concept wouldn't have made sense to me for multiple reasons.

Microsoft's having a sale on these two downloadable games for Xbox 360. Assault Heroes, a top-down shoot-em-up with Robotron-style controls, is ~$3.13 (i.e. 250 Microsoft Points); and Catan, a very nice port of Settlers, is $6.25. I already own the latter, and just picked up the former, because hey.

Both support network play, so If any of y'all would like to Xbox Live either game up with me, give a shout.

Gee if only there were some web-based service I could use to announce that I own and enjoy a certain game, and wish to play it online with others. I know, right?

(Yeah, I should make a Gameshelf post about this. I should made a GS post about a lot of things. Doo dee doo.)

Also on sale for $6.25 is Boogie Bunnies, which is Snood except cuter and stupider. I wasn't blown away by its demo, but if you want to play a, er, Snoodlike on your high-def TV and you have 500 Microsoft Points burning a hole in your Microsoft Points Containment Unit, go for it.

The launch of the "New Xbox Experience" last week still feels a little bizarre, in how it took a service that I had already subscribed to for a while and made it measurably better, in several ways, with no increase in price, loss of other features, or need to do anything on my part. This is so the opposite of the way things usually go, right? classicaljunkie and I quickly started to capitalize on the new Netflix-on-tap feature - to the point where we downgraded our Netflix account to one-disc-at-a-time, since we don't expect to use those things much any more, not when we can just whistle up movies in zero flat. I expect to be watching a lot more movies now. This is a good thing.

I just watched Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train". What an odd movie. Has so many beautiful bits, enough so that I was willing to overlook fundamental character stupidity. But the ending is spoiled by being so weird to the point of being flat-out stupid. The setup for the endboss fight depends on the police gunning down a completely random civilian by accident... and then completely ignoring that they did so (as do dozens of witnesses, apparently). How can you not watch that happen and not feel completely distracted for the rest of the scene? Was the time-budget so tight they they couldn't insert in a scene of the guy getting helped back up and muttering about his heart condition, and how loud noises make him faint, or something? Oh well.

Still a movie worth seeing sometime, if you haven't.

I am looking to build a contact-list of folks who may be interested in being the first betatesters for a major new Volity Games project.

It is not a game, or a thing for game programmers; it is an entirely new service that our company will run, separate and different from anything it's done previously. It does carry Volity Nature, though, in that it's all about improving the landscape of online, multiplayer games, and helping like-minded game-players find one another.

Specifically, we are looking for current users of the Xbox Live online system. For the most part, this means people who play games on a Xbox 360 console. We're especially interested in folks who have a "gold" XBL membership, permitting them to play multiplayer online games via the Xbox. If you happen to use Xbox Live with an original Xbox console, we'd also be interested in hearing from you.

The first wave of testers should be willing to not just use our service, but to also find ways to break it, and write up critiques about how it could work better. If you think you may be interested, please write me at jmac@jmac.org, or comment on this post. Feel free to share this request with people who you think would be good, smart testers. People who are on my XBL friends list will be getting an email about this from me sometime in the future, regardless of how they respond to this post (but feel free to comment anyway).

We haven't announced the project yet, or released a date when we'll begin testing, but it's near enough to now that it's time to start gauging the size of our initial tester pool. After the first testers have been crawling around a while and we've banged out the biggest lumps in the system, we'll start being less coy about it and commence letting more people on board. Watch this space.

I was amused to find that 50 percent of all the people I have played with in Xbox Live have awarded me an "Avoid" flag, meaning that they've asked Live's matchmaker to make it less likely to encounter me in the future. I assume that they are all past teammates from my TF2 sessions, which I played without a headset on - thus ignoring anything that they had to say to me - and invariably appeared at the bottom of every end-game scoreboard. Heh heh.

As one who has designed a system like this in the past, I found it interesting that the Avoid flag comes in two flavors, established by answering a three-part quiz as you assign the flag to a player. If you give it to them because they're too good, or too crappy, or just plain clueless about the game (which is a separate answer from 'too crappy'), then the matcher will take it into account from then on, but the target player isn't otherwise affected. If, on the other hand, you Avoid them because they're a disruptive player in some way - a jerk, a quitter, a spoilsport or just irritating - then you will also negatively affect their public reputation. Furthermore, that player will be informed of their perceived transgression. (In my case, it was none of these, so people just thought I sucked / was clueless. Which I can't disagree with, I suppose.)

There seems to be a mistake here, in that the system assumes that game skills are communative. IOW, if I consistently crush you at chess (yes, there's a chess game somewhere in Live Arcade), I don't think either of us would assume that I'd therefore wipe the floor with you at Halo 3 as well. But the system seems to treat it as just so. Now, I may be assuming too much here; the system knows what game the two of you played together last, so perhaps it affects only its weighting regarding that one game. But if it does, it doesn't say so.

I know about the different types of Avoid-flag because I played a rollicking game of Aegis Wing on Live the other day, whose sole downer was a little boy who got a bit hyper as the four of us approached the last level, and started chattering non-stop, eventually breaking into a sort of sing-song screeching. (He stopped when the game's host threatened to kick him off.) After the game, when I saw that there was an Avoid-reason category labeled "Inappropriate use of voice, such as shouting, singing or inane chatter", I laughed.

The opposite of Avoid is Prefer, and there's no refinement for that; if you Prefer a player, the matchmaker will try to pair you up with them more often, and their public rep improves.

Yeah, so I dropped a sawbuck to change my Xbox gamertag (username) away from my real name. (If I understand correctly, current Xbox-friends needn't adjust anything to compensate.) While the tag now points at my domain name, it adds just enough abstraction-distance to make me comfortable while staying within a global namespace I don't feel silly or false in using.

After buying "gold" Xbox Live memberships for myself and classicaljunkie, I quickly concluded that having my full legal name being my handle wasn't at all like using a full name in an internet forum. Basically, when I would sit down to play Uno with XxHiReDhItMaNxX, WLD BLDOG 1980 and BLOODYSTOOL69 - or whomever - I would essentially be inviting them all to address me by my real name (out loud, via their headset mics) while their pulsatingly macho American handles kept me from doing the same. This made me feel more than a little creeped out, and reminded me of nothing so much as the time I lost my official plain-red Cohasset Youth Basketball League T-shirt, back when my parents had signed me up for basketball, and so I played a game wearing a red T-shirt my mom found that had my name on it, making me the only kid on my team wearing his name. This would be the last game of basketball I would ever play, my friends.

How do you find other players for games that aren't the top five FPSs? I don't know! I'm asking!

It seems that for any game other than Halo / Gears / TF2 / wev, the only way to get a decent XBox Live game going is to contact remote friends offline and set up a game. The Quick Match button is almost always futile, and plenty of games that seem like they'd be plenty of fun online and aren't even two months old (yes, I'm thinking of Schizoid) seem to have approximately zero joinable custom matches going on, at any given time.

This is rather crying out for a user-made scheduling system, and you'd think that it would exist already, but I'll be damned if I can find one.

Oh boy! Rivet works much better in the new apartment, since now my sessile Mac is hooked directly to the router via Ethernet (thanks to dictator555's wire-running machinations, from back when she lived here). It didn't work at all when I was trying to play movies more than a few megs in size over my old 802.11b connection.

But now I can torrent down entire TV series upstairs, and then immediately play them on the downstairs TV via the XBox, without having to move or change anything. I just tested it on an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I grabbed some months ago, but haven't watched because it was too much of a pain. No longer!

Also can access my whole music collection from the TV. Yeah, totally gonna buy this.

Utterly mad Tempest-style game from industry pioneer Jeff Minter.

On the one hand, the game is bursting with infectious joy, and it's hard not to get wrapped up in it.

On the other, a game should never cause an experienced game-player to say "Uh, why did I just die?" out loud. Repeatedly.

On the left rear hoof, it's five bloody dollars, and it's made me laugh, and I will have to show it to friends who will also laugh, so there that is.

Ten bucks spent between two utterly ridiculous new video games in one weekend is enough for now.

The new Penny Arcade XBox game takes its gameplay cues from Final Fantasy, and is $20 despite being the first chapter of a downloadable episodic series. I find both of these facts surprising; I guess I was expecting something more like the Sam & Max games. Well, good for them that they're trying something new (sort of), but that's a double sawbuck I'm not spending.

What I really want is Sam & Max on my XBox. There are plenty of Googlable articles hinting at the advent of this very thing, and they're all over a year old. No idea if this means that good things are in store soon, or if it's a dead issue.

Oh but apparently there's a Wii version coming out. Cool.

Picked up one of these dongles at Best Buy yesterday. Less than half the price of a new controller, and it lets me use any wireless 360 controller (of which I own two) with Limburger. This should make debugging much faster. Thank you for the pointer, lediva!

(LImburger is the name of the stank Windows XP side of my creamy white MacBook, which is otherwise named Brie. Yes, there must always be at least some vestigial amount of Mac Pride goin' on.)

Extra props to VMWare: This was the first time I tried installing new driver-dependent hardware onto XP through a VM, and it didn't even blink. That's very nice.

Extra props to Best Buy: I initially located a blister pack containing the adapter and a new controller together, so I picked it up and walked to the first blueshirt I found, asking if they sold this without the controller. She didn't know but proceeded to escort me from one of her cowrokers to the next, all of whom doubted that they had any but suggested the next person to ask. We eventually came to a fellow who said "What, this?" and handed the right thing to me. "You have succeeded where all others have failed," I told him.

After a week of consultation and thought, I've decided to pursue "Project X" at full tilt. This involves me creating a prototype game for the XBox 360 and then pitching it at Microsoft, as a candidate for their "XBox Live Arcade" service of smaller, downloadable games. Things have aligned in such a way that not doing this right now would seem very foolish. Over the last few weeks, and much faster than I anticipated, I got Microsoft's ear, and I earned the support of the rights-holders of the game I wish to adapt. I have the skills, and the time to do it. OK: let's do this, then.

Success, which looks not impossible, spells a significant amount of prestige and passive income. Yes this turf looks a bit familiar. Already the project is reminding me of writing the books, except that I'll actually enjoy the work, and the checks will be bigger. Much bigger, if everything falls out the way I hope, and I have good reason to believe that it really can. I mean, actual market research, with hard numbers. Good stuff.

I shall continue to avoid describing the particular game in public blogging, at least until the project pitch has been delivered, and its fate decided. At that point, on success, there would be great joy, a press release or two, and then six months of deep magicking. On failure, there would be surprise and disappointment, and perhaps a time of deep magicking anyway with an eye to float the title in the upcoming XNA Community Games thing. But the first route would be quite preferable, since it would include a great deal of support from Microsoft.

This project will happen under the Appleseed aegis. (I'm ramping up a DBA to use specifically for game publishing.) I'll look for ways to involve Volity, but Volity is not a deal-maker-or-breaker. No matter what happens, though, there's plenty of opportunity for positive blowback in Volity's direction.

I just got a sweet deal on DDR Universe for XBox 360, snagging it for only $10. But after much googlin, I conclude that there's no hope of getting my awesome old PS2 pads to work on the 360. Boo.

The deee-luxe pads cost me $200 five years ago. I don't want to buy new ones. This is poopy.

(Yes, the 360 has USB ports, and I have PS2 → USB adapters. This does not appear to matter. The 360's sense of controllers is so proprietary that there's apparently no easy way to get it to recognize first-gen XBox controllers!)

I have been playing too much Half Life 2, during this, the first week (of two) I've set aside for the greater glory of Volity. Before putting it away one last time, I made sure to unlock the 5-point XBox achievement you get for killing a headcrab by throwing a toilet at it.

The story and structure reminds me a lot of Marathon. This is not a bad thing. I'm unsatisfied with the characterization of the protagonist, though. Judging from NPC reactions he's a brilliant and creative scientist, but from PC actions he's a silent, staring robot who is only able to follow orders and kill things: a standard-issue FPS dude. This same setup played into the plot of Marathon in a clever way, but here they just pretend it ain't so, nearly to the point of self-parody.

I was amused to find the turrets from Portal as enemies, and then meta-amused that I thought of them as such, since this game is two years older. (And the turrets are, sadly, far less polite.)

Other than last night's yuckiness I've been really enjoying my XBox. It's everything I hoped it'd be, from both fun-having and game-wonking perspectives. I have added my (cough) GamerCard to the jmac.org games page, and here it is again:





Yeah, "zendonut" was taken. I came up with that username when I was 28 (for my first AIM account) and while I still use it where I can, it may be the last silly internutty handle I'm capable of creating. I have so far run into nobody else using anything resembling their full legal name as their XBox handle, which makes me feel unique, and old, but not in a bad way.

Are XBox Live's "gamer zones" actually used when matching up players for games? I just witnessed a Carcassonne match between a local-to-me player in the "Recreation" (happy fun whee) zone versus one in the "Underground" (lol fag pwned) one. I found it surprising, and deeply unpleasant. ("Surprising" in the principle-of-least sense.)

When I was presented with the list of zones while setting up my account, I thought: that's a rather nice idea. I'd be quite disappointed if the XBL world pays it no mind, though.