Posts Tagged ‘games’
Netflix, Stop Floundering Around and Making Things More Complicated
Netflix just divided in half: "Netflix" is now streaming only, while the DVD-by-mail service is now an entirely separate service called Qwikster
This is dumb.
The price hike Netflix underwent back in July aroused a sort of media-centric kerfuffle, despite the fact that the tech media, of all people, were surely aware that the ludicrously low prices Netflix was charging could not possibly stay so low if Netflix was to expand. (The same problem applies to music services like .) Aside from the day long eye-rolling about a raise in price, I doubted at the time that there would be any significant problem for Netflix down the road. Their service, especially compared to, say, cable TV, is insanely cheap, and I assumed people would grumble and then get used to it.
Apparently not, because this morning, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, sent out an email to subscribers notifying them of a pretty significant change: Netflix will entirely separate the streaming and the DVD-by-mail services. And not like they were before: the DVD-by-mail service is getting a new name, a new site, and will show up on your monthly statement as a separate bill.
This move doesn't solve anything, doesn't alleviate the woes of any of the crazies who cancelled their subscription to Netflix (which, might we say again, is amazing, and an amazing deal) over a four-dollar price hike. It simply makes it more difficult to have both a streaming and DVD service--and as many of the content providers (TV conglomerates like Viacom, movie studios) are being very obstinate about licensing content for streaming, a lot of movies and TV are still only available on discs, so it's not crazy to want both services.
Why does Netflix want to separate its streaming from its DVD service so completely? It's not for the customer. The DVD-by-mail service is dying slowly, and Netflix has made a whole mess of changes, some obvious and some not, to encourage people to think "streaming," and not "red envelopes," when they think "Netflix." And that's fine, but this separate services thing seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth just for some clear-cut severance.
Before the change, if you wanted to play, say, The West Wing, which you probably do because it's amazing, you'd go to Netflix, search for "the west wing," and find that, oh no, it's not available for streaming, but you can rent it on DVD. Easy! Now, if you did the same thing, Netflix would tell you "this title is not available." Then you can go over to Qwikster and search, if you remember that you pay for two separate services. Oh, also, ratings and reviews (which are pretty important, especially for Netflix's recommendation algorithms) will also be entirely separate, even when the exact same title is available both for streaming and on disc.
This isn't the end of the world, and I don't want to make it a bigger deal than it is. But here's why this is annoying: it is totally unnecessary. Aside from some psychological benefit of separating the DVD and streaming services in the customer's mind more thoroughly, there is no benefit to doing this, and it definitely makes using these services in tandem less convenient. Hastings did toss in a legitimately nice upgrade: Qwikster will also rent video games for Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. That is great! Very exciting! But there's no reason that couldn't have been integrated with the streaming service as well.
Is this a reason to abandon Netflix? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous, I don't know why you'd even ask that rhetorical question that you didn't even really ask. But come on, Netflix. Focus on getting more content and stop worrying so much about what the tech press (yeah, I know) writes. The one big benefit I see from this is that it'll be easier, in the future, to ignore what's going on with the DVD service as fewer and fewer people care about it--though I do wonder why this move is coming after the price hike and not before, and why it seems so oddly haphazard (Netflix didn't even bother to secure the @Qwikster Twitter handle, which is by a stoner with lousy grammar). Let's just hope this is the last shake-up, and we can all go back to streaming episodes of Roseanne instead of venturing outdoors.
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Why Baccarat, the Game of Princes and Spies, Has Become a Target for High-Tech Cheaters
Inside the world of high-stakes sneakery
See our gallery of cheating techniques
A favorite pastime of James Bond, baccarat attracts high-rollers willing to make large bets – and it's easy to play. In the most common variant of "punto banco" baccarat, the game requires a gambler to make just one decision: whether to bet that the value of a "player" or "banker" hand of 2 or 3 cards will end up totalling closest to 9, with face cards counting as zero and aces as 1. Game outcomes are fixed by the cards dealt, and players make no decisions after the initial bet. There's no skill to it at all…unless a person cheats.
The "Cutters" syndicate preys on a tank-sized hole in the security protocols that most casinos apply to baccarat. As part of the tradition that has built up around the game, high-end players expect to participate in flamboyant, superstitious rituals. Gamblers may handle, fold, or blow on the cards. Many baccarat tables allow players to use a single card to cut the deck. The Cutters cheat by exploiting that ceremonial cut, surreptitiously riffling the deck with a finger and recording a section of the card order with a hidden camera.
"It's stupid that this is allowed to happen," says a Las Vegas game security consultant, who asked not to be named out of concern for angering casino managers. "The lunatics run the asylum."
But when a "lunatic" at the baccarat table will wager a million dollars over a long afternoon, recession-weary casino managers starved for high-end action will indulge superstitious antics – even if it drives the surveillance guys nuts.
Fooling those eyes in the booth was the key strategy in both the Macau auto-shuffling scheme and the card-switching gambit in Connecticut.
"These are con men," says John Connolly, a casino security expert based in Central Europe. "They practice the art of distraction."
At unnamed casinos in Macau, a gang of seven people repeatedly slipped doctored auto-shufflers onto the table while surveillance eyes were diverted elsewhere, until they were caught in March. At Foxwoods, the female accomplice Wookyung Kim would nuzzle close to her male partner Young Su Gy and otherwise block the view of casino personnel as he made switching cards look like he was idly shuffling his hand.
And the mathematics of baccarat make a scam in progress difficult to spot. “The use of statistics for live gaming is limited in what it can prove or disprove,” high-end casino security contractor Bill Zender concludes, in a 2009 analysis of baccarat. The game has a small but significant house advantage, over time transferring just over $1 from player to casino for every $100 wagered. But Zender’s analysis shows that results may fluctuate wildly in either direction until the sample size goes above 10,000 hands. A high-roller who wins $250,000 by playing 1,000 hands over a holiday weekend is well within the normal range of probability for a non-cheating player.
With a speedy pace of about 60 hands per hour, a compromised game can cause six-figure losses in a matter of minutes. After multiple huge baccarat wins by the same player, a surveillance guy can't know from the laws of probability if he's just temporarily unlucky – or been taken by a con.
How L.A. Noire Rebuilt 1940s Los Angeles Using Vintage Extreme Aerial Photography
L.A. Noire's carefully reconstructed world owes a huge debt to Robert Spence, who photographed Los Angeles while leaning out of a biplane with a 46-pound camera in the 1920s
Since 1997, when players first sped stolen police cars through the bird’s eye canyons of Liberty City in the original Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games has constructed bigger, better, and more detailed virtual worlds than any other gaming house. These worlds--from the dusky horizons of Red Dead Redemption to the cocaine-dusted nightclubs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City--have always owed as great a debt to the popular imagination as they have to historical research. They are uncannily skillful recreations of places we know from movies and magazines. They are hyperreal, rather than authentic.
But building a faithful version of 1940s Los Angeles for their newest, L.A. Noire (out today), required more than a mastery of popular culture and a healthy knowledge of . It required Robert Spence. A Los Angeles photographer, Spence was the subject of a recent profile in and was Rockstar's secret weapon in re-creating the city.
of Robert Spence's daredevil photos and the L.A. Noire screenshots they inspired.
Team Bondi, the Australian developer behind L.A. Noire, pored over Spence’s photographs in the UCLA Department of Geography, where they’ve been held since 1971. The pictures gave Team Bondi building locations and conditions, public transportation routes, traffic patterns; the real arterial structure of a city preserved mostly in film and literature. As a result, gamers will be immersed in the most accurate version of 1940s Los Angeles ever created.
"During the roaring twenties," writes Air and Space, "Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture." Spence in turn hired a pilot and an accompanying airplane to complete the task, leaning out from the cockpit with his 46-pound camera (makes you think better of the "bulky by 2011 standards" , eh?) and shooting at an angle rather than straight down, as most other aerial photography was done at the time.
That was a huge help to Team Bondi--Simon Wood, production designer for Team Bondi, calls the Spence collection a "magical find, as they're the equivalent of satellite photography" decades before satellite photography would become common. Spence's photos actually showed Los Angeles as it was to its residents. Says Wood, "They showed us the density of the traffic and the pedestrians, the trolley car routes; they showed us different mosaics and sidewalk patterns that we couldn't make out from the other street photo reference materials. They showed the different types of rooftops and tar roof styles and air conditioner units."
The booming decade also meant a boom in real estate, which meant construction. Everywhere. Team Bondi incorporated details from the construction, captured by Spence, into several missions in L.A. Noire--without Spence's photos, Team Bondi never would have understood the now-abandoned construction methods used at the time. They even reproduced in full the now-unrecognizable Pershing Square--Los Angelenos can't experience, as Wood says, the "curved footpaths, street lamps, the food stall and the fountain" that were integral to the park. But players of L.A. Noire can wander around in the park to their hearts' content.
The Spence Collection held some surprises for Team Bondi, as versed as they were becoming in 1940s Los Angeles. "The most striking thing," says Wood, "were the oil wells! There was one on almost every corner, it was crazy! Reading about the mini-wells/nodding donkeys [the above-ground part of ] is one thing, but actually seeing them in people’s backyards was incredible." These photographs gave the developers and artists a more personal look at what living in Los Angeles at that time was really like, especially as the Spence Collection spans several decades, capturing the evolution of the great sprawling city and its surrounding areas--the filming of Ben Hur, the construction of Dodger Stadium and Disneyland, and the organic evolution of Los Angeles's peculiar downtown-surrounded-by-independent-communities layout.
We've compiled , courtesy of UCLA. They capture a Los Angeles long gone, but one that gamers are now able to experience. There's even a black-and-white mode in the game, to really get that film noir feel--and get that much closer to these amazing source photographs.
Live Tweeting Now: Ken Jennings vs. Watson, the Jeopardy!-Playing Supercomputer
Remember ? We're currently at IBM's offices watching the world's best Jeopardy-bot take on Ken Jennings, the winningest human to play the game. right now for the live blow-by-blow, and stay tuned for a full report later today.
Ex-Voodoo PC chief Rahul Sood joins Microsoft to design cool stuff
Rahul Sood, a product wunderkind at , left his job last month and has reappeared as the general manager of “system experience” within the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. He announced the new gig on his today.
His hire is sure to set off speculation. Is he working on a new game console to replace the five-year-old Xbox 360? Will he replace product design wizard J Allard, who left Microsoft this year? It’s a reminder to me that, for all the vast number of employees at big tech companies, one or two key people can make all the difference in the world.
One thing is for sure. Microsoft wouldn’t hire a guy like Sood and put him on something unimportant, like making sure a fan fits inside a game box. Whenever Sood showed a new HP product to me, he held the thing like it was his own baby.
Sood has had a storied career as a computer designer. At a time when everyone was designing beige box PCs, he started Voodoo PC in Calgary, Canada, in 1991. Joined much later by his brother Ravi, the Sood business created screaming-fast computers for gamers with liquid cooling, the fastest graphics cards, and custom paint jobs. Voodoo PC made a hundred or so a month and sold them for $5,000 to $10,000 each.
The company caught the eye of Mark Hurd, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, who wanted to bring in the right people to revamp HP’s product design and create magical technology experiences that rivaled Apple’s. For a time, it worked. HP designed the Blackbird gaming PC and created the Envy laptop, which was HP’s answer to the MacBook Air.
But somehow, HP didn’t seem to make the best use of Voodoo’s crew. It pretty much dropped out of the gaming PC business and focused on trying to make its mainstream products sexy and edgy. Designing good products may come easy for Steve Jobs at Apple. But doing that at HP can’t be easy. As former CEO Carly Fiorina once said, if HP marketed sushi, it would call it “cold dead fish.”
Sood left not long after Hurd went out the door this fall. At Microsoft, Sood said, “I’ll be working on some really… really … really cool stuff come January 2011. If you need to get in touch with me feel free to find me on Facebook or Twitter. I may or may not attend CES, but if you have something really cool to show let me know soon!”
It’s exciting to see that Sood has gone to Microsoft. He may very well be working as a janitor, for all I know. But I get the feeling that Microsoft is working on something important.
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Sony Ericsson’s PlayStation Phone expected to debut in April (report)
The rumored Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone powered by Android could hit stores as early as April, according to the news site .
Pictures and videos about the upcoming game-focused phone have been appearing for a few months, suggesting that something is happening. The phone would likely be Sony’s response to the competitive threat from Apple’s iPhone, which has become a major gaming device with tens of thousands of game apps. And since it’s running Android, it will give that platform some much-needed gaming cred as well.
Sony Ericsson also has to worry about the threat from Windows Phone 7 phones, which feature integration with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service.
Pocket-lint said that the phone would like be announced at the Mobile World Congress in February, not at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, as some had hoped.
, the phone will come with a slide-out keypad that features game-like controls in the familiar PlayStation pattern of a square, x, triangle, and circle buttons. The device reportedly has a 1 gigahertz Qualcomm MSM8655, 512 megabytes of random access memory, a gigabyte of read-only memory, and the screen is 3.7 to 4.1 inches.
Sony Ericsson hasn’t commented. But the company’s chief executive, Bert Nordberg, said in November, “There’s a lot of smoke, and I tell you there must be a fire somewhere”, when asked about the PlayStation phone’s existence.
“Sony has an extremely strong offering in the gaming market, and that’s very interesting”, Nordberg said before adding: “gaming, including content, is a very interesting proposition”.
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Week in review: The top 10 video games of the year
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— Game publishers aren’t thrilled that video game sales are down 5 percent year to date. But for gamers, it’s been an awesome year because 2010 saw the debut of some of the best games ever made.
— The Android Market on Google’s Android operating system has been broken for some time. This week, Google said it will fix some of the longstanding problems with an update.
— Just when you thought you’ve seen everything mobile apps have to offer, along comes an entry like Word Lens that makes you feel like you’re in the future. The app instantly translates Spanish into English (and vice versa) whenever you point your iPhone’s camera on text.
— Former WikiLeaks members say they plan to start rival Openleaks as part of an effort to compete for official leaks with WikiLeaks.
— World of Warcraft Cataclysm broke all PC game records, selling more than 3.3 million copies on its first day of sales on Dec. 7.
And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:
— The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act suggests that electric cars and hybrids might be a little too quiet.
— It seems Google is willing to wait a little longer to fulfill CEO Eric Schmidt’s dream of cars that drive themselves.
— I’ve seen a ton of TV check-in apps in the last few months, so I asked founder and chief executive Alex Iskold how GetGlue will stand out.
— Google is taking a cue from desktop speech recognition software, like the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking program, by bringing personalized voice profiles to Android’s mobile Voice Search app.
— Zynga’s CityVille has become the fastest-growing game in history. And based on an interview with a key Zynga executive, that isn’t an accident.
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