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PSP screen protectors

I generally think screen protectors are a great idea. i'm glad that nokia provides one on all their high end phones, and i never take them off.

but man, that PSP screen is just ripe for scratchin'. i remember when i got my first Sega GameGear years ago (which the PSP is remarkably similar in form factor to) and somehow scratched the screen on my first day of ownership pulling it in and out of the zippered case - and i didn't want a repeat with the PSP.

enter Pelican Screen Guard. these things are great, easy to apply, and you can 't even really tell they are there once you put them on. each pack comes with a bonus cleaning cloth and a cardboard applicator for putting your protection on.

if you own a PSP, you shouldn't go unprotected.

plenty of PSPs at Target

i walked into Target this morning in Elgin, IL to buy something else, and saw that they had about 50 PSPs sitting there. No lines, no hype, no nothing. The hired a security guard to fend off the crowds. They hadn't sold one yet.

The guy working the electonics department walked up to me and said "you want one of these? I came in early for this. No one knows we have them, I guess."

Funny

PSP day tomorrow

I got lucky and got in on a PSP deal - and it looks like it just shipped FedEx overnight. I couldn't resist.

i'll post my thoughts tomorrow assuming i have time to even open the box!

SSX for N-Gage

Gamespot has posted some screenshots for "SSX Out of Bounds", one of my favorite PS2 titles which is basically just a great snowboarding game. The screenshots and movie make SSX on the N-Gage look "just okay".

I still like the concept of the N-Gage, but to be honest I haven't been spending much time on it lately, and think the multiplayer scale of the Nintendo DS will just blow this N-Gage implementation away enough to have a separate platform device for gaming...for now.

Nintendo DS sales to top 1 Mil before year's end

One of the spotlight gifts for my son (yes, really for my son) this year will be a Nintendo DS - and I've just saw that Nintendo sold 500K in the first week and hopes to sell a million before the end of the year. And that's how many will have been sold to end users, not the number in the channel. That's impressive, and I'll mention that's probably a stretch to how many N-Gages have been sold by Nokia in the last year.

Supposedly the wireless discovery on the units works really well - but it takes a volume like this for that to work. It's not out of the realm of possibility that sitting in an airport terminal, your kid could easily find other opponents to play network games against on the local network, not to mention the wi-fi network (in the future). I just don't see that happening with an N-Gage because you'd never find that level of saturation.

And here's the kicker...not all people in the area have to have a copy of the game. The slaves can download and play the game in multiplayer mode from the master. In a copy-protected crazy, world, that's forward thinking by Nintendo.

Age of Empires for the Pocket PC

wow i just tried out the pocket pc version of Age Of Empires and it's quite amazing what they can do on this platform. I'm a huge fan of AOE on the Mac, so i was definitely pleased to find this.

falling off the wagon with fifa

anyone who did business with us during the spyonit/724 years knows our office had some serious playstation EA Sports FIFA addictions. a day didn't go by when a meeting got delayed because someone was playing fifa in the conference room, and well, if any of my comrades say that fifa didn't affect their work, they are lying sons of bitches. i take full credit for being the pusher, having introduced fifa '97 for the PC to to this crowd and the epidemic spread from there. there were some good side affects, such as a bunch of americans being able to name entire rosters of the entire Serie A and La Liga Primera, and intelligently discuss why zidane could control the midfield like no other...such a shame he's french. In addition, an "all the ps2 you can handle" policy believe it or not, is a pretty good way to motivate a development team to "get shit done" and work late hours etc.

in the later years, i guess fifa lost it's effectiveness, heavy tolerances were developed, and the group started moving to the new street drug of choice, konami's winnng eleven (called International Superstar Soccer in Europe). i never took to winning eleven, mostly because they didn't have real teams represented, and it just wasn't as much fun pitting "Ronaldi" and "Figa" against "Savola" on "Team Catalonia" - and thus i went cold turkey, my addiction was broken. (back in the real world, i did finagle a ticket to a camp nou match last spring to see barça play, which was amazing, here it is, as seen from a nokia 3650).

with the advent of playstation online, however, and fifa 2004 supporting online play, i had to give this enhanced version another try. I've been slowly building up my chops again, getting ready for the online arena, and took the plunge last week into the online arena.

the major point here, is that online gaming has come a LONG way from the days of LAN quake, constantly wanting to be the LPB with your "shotgun" enabled double 28.8 modem (and anyone remember Quake Haiku?) - to everyone having high speed DSL and cable modems. last night, after a bout of insomnia, i decided to try a game at 3 am (and with kids, that's pretty much the only time i could play anyway) - as there was nobody in north america up, i had to play against some folks in the "N. Europe" room and the experience was pretty surprising. no lag, no coughs, no hiccups. playing FIFA "across the pond" was pretty much like playing on a LAN. the europeans have better online EA Sports names to - instead of "go b01l3rz" i was playing against the likes of "Rcarlos21" and "batigol".

with strides like this in online gaming, and wireless speeds getting faster, we're pretty close to having some good mobile gaming experiences on mobile devices - it should be cool. N-gage arena is a good first step. let's see where it goes from here.

in the meantime, anyone up for a game of FIFA?

"Really must get sleep
Definitely the last round
OK just one more"
  - Salt

still lovin' the n-gage

a while ago, i published a seemingly dissenting review in that i liked the nokia n-gage. i still think it's a great gaming platform, and also great for things like entertaining your kids when waiting at the doctor's office. mosty i think it's misunderstood. it's not a phone. it's a wireless data device for mobile gaming that has huge potential and will be copied by sony and nintendo in the future. nokia needs to market it differently for sure, but that will come with rev 2.

anyway, if you read some reviews on how it sucked, the reviewer probably tried it once and put it down. perhaps it's a bit of an acquired taste.

as further proof, russell beattie, who i believe first hated it, now covers some of the alternate ways to game with the n-gage and shows there's more there than meets the eye.

q&a with john romero from forum nokia

this q&a with john romero [pdf], one of the founders of id software, famous for creating doom, quake, etc., talks about developing for the n-gage, comments on BREW vs j2me, and brings forth some insights on mobile gaming in general.

his secret weapon: "Years of experience and a small, hard-core development team".

downloadable n-gage games

first, lemme say that i think the n-gage is getting a bad rap. most of the people picking on it out there haven't even tried it. if they've tried it, they tried it once and put it down. Noah Shachtman in the Chicago Tribune compared the n-gage to the apple newton, but there's a big difference here: apple at the time they released the newton had no clear strategy and was taking the shotgun approach the market - with focus a 3rd or 4th generation newton could have blown away the palm before it ever got started. nokia is in a different postion. they are the worldwide leader in phone sales in fierce competition with sony-ericsson, and the n-gage is just the first iteration of of a new category of device that will find a market. they can afford to send out some test flares (note intentional avoidance of overused term "trial balloon") to figure out what sticks and what doesn't, learning and innovating in the process.

announcements like this as well as EA Sports developing for the n-gage make me excited for a new category of mobile game that's better than most of the mediocre games operators are offering today.

prediction 1: many reviewers that panned the n-gage will be eating their words in 18 months

prediction 2: the sony playstation portable (PSP) becomes the sony ericsson PSP before it is released

no, n-gage games don't work in a nokia 3650

just a short headline in case anyone was curious. the n-gage looks a lot like a repackaged nokia 3650, but no you can't play the n-gage cartridge games in the 3650. i didn't think this would work, but was still hopeful this was undocumented and i'd get a pleasant surprise. i tried it today, and i got a symbian "kernel-exec failed" message on startup. kudos to the 3650 for recovering gracefully after the "ok" and going about it's business. maybe a flash upgrade or loading a software module could make this work in the future.

also, SD memory cards do not fit in the n-gage, only MMC. guess that limits you to 128 MB in one expansion card.

full review of the n-gage coming soon. in short, despite some well published shortcomings, i like it!

vindigo's new business model

while no one was looking, vindigo, inc, developer of vindigo 2.0, which imo is the best mobile city guide available, has started developing other productivity apps on the BREW platform under the name "vindigo studios". in the last few weeks, they have snuck a few other great productivity apps into verizon's "get it now" service, where subscribers can download BREW apps over the air, and have them automatically charged to their account, with no wallet to deal with, and no WAP browsing necessary to locate applications.

vindigo has released MapQuest mobile, an BREW based front end to MapQuest for directions and maps, and MovieGoer, which offers the same for finding theatres and movie times. I've tried both of these out on verizon's network and both work great.

and for the price, they had better! MapQuest Mobile is offered at $3.99/month or $2.49/day. that is, you can choose a monthly subscription and pay the monthly price, or buy a 1 day subscription that expires the next day. definitely pricey, but very useful - and your success rate will be much higher than if you had tried this on the WAP based versions of the same apps.

the way the revenue split works with BREW is you sell your app to an operator at a wholesale price, which the operator marks up. then the developer gets 80% of the wholesale price per unit sold, qualcomm gets 10% and the operator gets 10% - so it's very developer friendly, and suggests a strong postion for developers in the BREW vs J2ME argument. i've heard that vindigo was making 4 times the revenue on their BREW version of vindigo vs the J2ME version that runs on att wireless' mMode service, so it's no surprise to see them expanding their line with vindigo studios, as well as doing custom development for other operators.

nextel has a similar revenue split for their J2ME developers, so this model seems to be setting the market here in north america. we'll see if other operators that offer J2ME and mophun applications follow suit.

pet peeve #1: why do i have to know i'm playing a j2me game?

it bothered me with smalltalk. it bothers me with java swing apps. and now it bothers me with j2me apps, especially games. why can't j2me apps behave like any other native app on a mobile device?

i love java. not only is it a great platform for development that found a great middle ground between being object-oriented and low level enough to be useful for about anything, the delivery on the promise of being cross platform is worth the weight of a yellow Java and Corba book in gold...after all, i'm primarily an OS X user, but find myself using Linux and Solaris exclusively for server applications, and Windows to integrate with all those special apps that only run on Windows...but i'm beginning to wonder, is the portability at the expense of acting native? I expected such traits in early versions of Java, thinking it would improve as we moved up the version chain, and it has, but not to the level we all need. I'm okay on a desktop using an awkward start script to start a swing application, and can handle the widgets being a bit klunky.

But on a mobile device, especially ones with a phone, there are certain things i'm seeing across the board in native games that i am not seeing in j2me games and that has me worried. I'm not sure where to place the blame. Is it the j2me programmers being lazy? or is it the device manufacturers that have chosen to segregate the j2me apps from the native ones, and not give access to APIs that native apps have no trouble accessing?

I've been playing a lot of games on my mobile phones these days, and here's what i am noticing:

1) no j2me game saves it's state. on my sony-ericsson t610, when i'm playing a game of Java tetris and the phone rings, and i switch to the phone, my game is gone. when i go back, i have to start over. the mophun games automatically seem to save their state, so why can't ericsson's Java VM do this?

2) more use of native phone functions. many native games use the vibrating ring and other sound api's to make the games a lot more real. the biggie is using bluetooth for PAN (personal area networking) multiplayer games. this must be easier for native games, or is this the bite of the portability bug again?

3) memory leaks, memory leaks. i seem to experience my phones running out of memory and having to "reboot" them regulary after heavy j2me gameplay. hm.

4) general keypad awkwardness. simple things like not reconizing the joypad keypress as a selection.

5) slow performance. again, i'm not sure where to place the blame here, but my j2me games just seem to run slower than their native counterparts.

i really want j2me to succeed on the phone, and i think that it will. i think it already is. but i want to feel comfortable that i can write my app using j2me instead of the native platform, and my users will have the right experience. i'm not comfortable yet.

my final point in the rant...do we really need the extra java icons in the tray, or the java spashscreen before every app? again the user shouldn't have to know they are using a java app or playing a java game....well unless they knew they could port it right over to another phone and it would work seamlessly. but we'll leave that for another day.