Oh, hey. Is this thing on?

So if you’re into this whole video gaming thing you’ve probably heard about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 not having dedicated servers on the PC. The basic concept behind dedicated servers is that unlike most console games, where one of the players hosts a network game and everyone else connects to that one player, a dedicated server acts as the host of a game and all the players connect to that server. Why would you want this?

Back in the late 90s, when broadband internet was still an emerging trend and nowhere near the relative norm it is today, PC games allowed you to play both peer-to-peer and on dedicated servers. Anyone who’s ever actually played a peer-to-peer game in those bad old days remembers why it’s a horrible idea: because the player who is the host has zero ping. That means everything the host player sees—where other players are and where they’re shooting—is exactly where everything is supposed to be, while for everyone else, there’s a certain amount of lag. The host player can aim right at a running person and hit them easily; other players in the game will shoot at where they think the player is, but will hit nothing.

Of course, it’s not the late 90s anymore; connections have improved, and so has the state of client prediction. But the same basic principles apply. Now add to that some of the other reasons why dedicated servers are so beloved—they often sit on fat network pipes, as opposed to the crappy cable modem or DSL pipe most individuals have; they can have custom maps, mods and rulesets; they serve as community focus points where everyone knows your name—and you might start to see why everyone is in an uproar over the sudden removal of dedicated servers.

Personally, I don’t have any major interest in custom mods or maps, and I’ve never played on a server so much that I got to know the regulars that frequented them. I don’t have any inherent issues with matchmaking. But the lag issue, ingrained in me after years of playing multiplayer games on a 56k modem, is still a big deal for me—especially when you consider that PC games tend to allow more players in a match than consoles do. Moreover, the way Infinity Ward has treated the issue has been nothing short of abysmal. They’ve mostly failed to address directly the various concerns the PC community have brought up, instead parroting the same flimsy reassurances over and over: we’re doing this to simplify the process, you won’t see any performance decrease, and you’ll have just as much control as you used to when you had dedicated servers.

Myself, I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Infinity Ward has shown that they’re not really interested in PC gaming anymore; despite claiming that they’ve invested a ton of time into the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, the fact remains that they almost slipped a major change past the PC community and have since remained unrepentant even as people cancel their pre-orders and explain in many different ways why this is a Bad Idea. So I’ve cancelled my pre-order of the PC version. But I’ve also taken the step of doing exactly what I suspect Infinity Ward and Activision would want me to do: I pre-ordered the 360 version instead, even though it cost $5 more than my PC pre-order.

Why on earth would I do this? Because I’m reasonably sure that Modern Warfare 2 will be worth the money, and if they’re so interested in pissing off PC gamers and pampering their console brethren, I may as well join the pack. After all, I have two consoles and a hefty PC for a reason—so I wouldn’t have to sit things out whenever a game came out for the console I didn’t own. If Modern Warfare 3 or whatever doesn’t come out on PC, that’s not a problem for me. And for PC gamers who don’t have that option, I feel as though there are still plenty of options for the PC shooter fan—between old chestnuts like the well-supported Team Fortress 2 and newer entries like Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2, it certainly doesn’t seem like PC gaming is in its death throes. And with Battlefield developer DICE taking every opportunity to implictly and explicitly slamming Infinity Ward for their decision, I doubt the dedicated server will be disappearing from the PC landscape anytime soon, even if Activision and Infinity Ward wish it would.

Sins of a Solar Empire contradicts a lot of conventional wisdom. It’s a game for the PC, which obviously no one uses for games any more except World of Warcraft. It’s a real-time strategy game that mixes in a lot of elements of 4X games like Civilization and is fairly complex as a result, which goes against the trend of such games simplifying their gameplay to appeal to wider audiences (hello, SimCity Societies and Civilization Revolution). Like all Stardock games, it has absolutely no copy protection, which means no one will buy it because it’s so easy to steal.

All of the above means sales should be dismal. No one plays complicated games on a PC that they can swipe without even using a crack. And yet Sins of a Solar Empire beat Call of Duty 4 to take top spot on the PC sales charts last week. The game has sold over 100,000 copies in 23 days, a not-insignificant sum for an indie publisher like Stardock and an indie developer like the Vancouver-based Ironclad. In addition to besting Call of Duty 4 last week, Sins has outperformed highly anticipated PC games like Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3.

I bought a copy for myself based solely on a Joystiq preview a couple of days before release, and it’s the best impulse game purchase I’ve made in a very long time. I just didn’t realize so many people agreed with me.

So the new Zunes are out, and as competitors to the iPod lineup they look quite good. The in-player interface, often cited as a huge selling point for iPods, seems to work well on the Zune, and looks gosh darned pretty to boot. The price points are exactly the same, taking away the hard drive iPod’s price advantage over older DAPs like the Creative Zen Vision M (speaking of which, Creative, the Vision M is ancient—can we please, for the love of all that is holy, get a replacement already?). And the Zune doesn’t lock you into an iTunes ecosystem, the major reason why I will no longer consider buying an iPod.

Unfortunately, the Zune doesn’t lock you into iTunes because it locks you into a Zune ecosystem instead: the new Zune desktop software, which you must use in order to sync all your music with your Zune. Worse, the third-party software situation is even worse than the already abysmal iPod situation, in that there is none. It’s Zune software or nothing.

This might’ve been okay if the Zune software was powerful and flexible enough to basically allow you to do whatever you liked with your music, the way you could if you could just dump music files on your Zune via the filesystem. Unfortunately, it appears the Zune software is even more crippled than iTunes. This, along with Microsoft’s continuing hatred of any country that isn’t the United States (any attempt to even purchase a Zune via the new Zune Originals site, for example, is met with a lovely ACCESS DENIED message in Canada—I guess Microsoft really doesn’t want Canadian money), means the Zune 80 is off my list of MP3 players to purchase as well.

Which leaves exactly ZERO MP3 players I’d be willing to buy. There has been a shocking lack of development in the hard drive MP3 player world; it’s as if every company has suddenly decided there’s no market for people who want to carry around their entire music collection—or at least a significant subset thereof—in their pockets any more. The only companies that even offer 80/160GB variants are Apple, Microsoft, and Archos, and the Archos 605 Wifi is out because its touchscreen interface fails an extremely basic test: how do I play all my songs in Shuffle Mode? I couldn’t figure this out after ten minutes of poking around in the music interface. No. No. No.

Just as bad is the general tendency to lock people into software ecosystems that don’t meet people’s needs. The Zune software issue isn’t great, but it’s a hundred times worse because without substantial third-party or open source efforts to make software that can crack the Zune’s lockout, the Zune software is the only game in town. In other words, the deficiencies of the desktop software effectively become the deficiencies of the device itself. iTunes is more functional, but because of the nanny state it practically imposes on your music library, it’s equally untenable. And with Apple’s recent move to include a device hash specifically designed to lock the iPod to iTunes, third-party software suffered a setback. Though OSS projects like gtkpod cracked the new hash in a matter of days, the symbolic gesture isn’t lost on them. The makers of Amarok, another Linux iPod manager, basically said the only way to keep your device free of lockouts is to stop buying iPods.

I can see why you’d want to include your own software with your music player. From a new user standpoint it makes perfect sense; why tell people to move all their files using Explorer when having an all-in-one solution makes it easier for the novice to get started on moving music to their shiny new toy? What I don’t understand is why the major DAP manufacturers then take the extra step of locking out other software, so that the novice-user solution becomes the only solution. I’m not afraid of modifying my own ID3 tags; indeed, I prefer to do it that way so I don’t have to screw around with my computer’s music library just so all my singles are marked properly on my MP3 player as having no album. I’m not afraid of moving files by myself via Explorer. And even if you aren’t like me and you are afraid of doing all that on your lonesome, it’s not hard to look at software like Amarok and Sharepod and wonder if third-party developers can’t come up with solutions more palatable than iTunes of the Zune software.

To make an analogy to the web, it’d be as though Bill Gates or Steve Jobs said, “we’ve included this great web browser for you in Windows/OS X, and you cannot use any others.” Legions of Firefox users would then be stuck with Safari—or even worse, Internet Explorer 6. I rather like Firefox, thanks. I’d like to be able to manage my music the way I like as well, and the first company that makes an 80GB player that lets me do so will get my hard-earned money.

I got Guitar Hero 3 last week for the Wii, marking the first game I’ve bought for the poor white box since Trauma Center, which has mostly laid unlamented and unplayed on my coffee table ever since the incredibly impossible early level. You know the one. The one with the stuff. I didn’t even get to GUILTs or nothing.

Anyways, it turns out that because I got the Wii version, and because people have long ago figured out how to connect the Wiimote to a Bluetooth-equipped PC, it means I can connect my Wii guitar to my computer and play Frets on Fire. The day after the game came out, someone had already put together a GlovePIE script for the guitar. This is great except Frets on Fire comes with just three songs. But I didn’t hook up my guitar just to play songs on my computer. Oh no. I hooked up my guitar so I could make songs on my computer. Fake songs. Or rather, fake frets to real songs that I didn’t originally write.

Basically I have become a pretend Harmonix/Neversoft song developer for the weekend. And it’s strange the things you learn about music when you have to line up brightly coloured dots to the beat that correspond to buttons people are supposed to press in order to pretend they’re playing guitar. Perhaps the most frustrating thing, one that’s given me a new fondness for metronomes, is that some bands can’t seem to keep a steady beat. Be Your Own Pet is an awesome band, but holy crap does the bpm change with practically every measure of “Ouch!”

Why does this matter? Because generally games like Frets on Fire and Guitar Hero tend to assume that time signatures and tempos don’t change very much, if at all, during a song. It’s a very digital way of looking at things—everything in regular intervals, no divergence—but it doesn’t exactly reflect reality very well, especially with the smaller bands whose songs I most desperately want to play. So, if you’re an indie band who wants desperately to have a song featured in the next Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, here’s a tip: buy a metronome and use it.

The president of Enterbrain, publisher of weekly gaming magazine Famitsu, claims 67% of Wii owners aren’t even using it anymore. But wait, what about all those stories about how the Wii will beat out the other consoles this holiday season? Or the continuing issues Nintendo has with production (which aren’t actually production-related but instead due to the “unprecedented popularity” of the console)?

Well, I know two things. One: the people I know who’ve bought a Wii, including myself, don’t play it anymore. My friend, who has far more Wii games than I do, even had his unplugged and lying on his kitchen counter for months because he was too lazy to plug it back in. Mine would go completely unused if not for my brother, who’s stocked up on such groundbreaking games as Carnival Games, NBA 2008 and Pacman. He still puts in a fair amount of time on Wii Sports. Too bad he’s not the one who bought the damned thing.

Two: the completely unscientific Joystiq poll suggests we’re not alone. About 55% (or 4,000 voters) also claimed they hadn’t turned on their Wii in a while, with a further 17% going the usual “haha Wii iz 4 luzerz” route. Did we all make a colossal mistake in buying a Wii, then? Well, let’s put it this way: I’m seriously considering waiting until I pick up a real console, like a PS3 or a 360, before I go ahead and buy Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. And between Bioshock, Dwarf Fortress, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, I haven’t even had a reason to look at consoles at all for the past couple of months. I heart my computer.

And my Weighted Companion Cube.

Apple has taken measures against third-party iPod apps by encrypting the database file so that it’s locked to one particular iPod and prevents unauthorized modifications to the file. Result: any software that was able to upload music to previous iPod generations will no longer be able to do so with the current generation, at least until someone reverse-engineers the SHA1 hash creation process.

I have a fourth-generation iPod that’s served me quite well over the past two and a half years, but this is the final straw. When I replace the iPod I own (and that day may come soon, as I can no longer upload music via Firewire), it will not be with another iPod.

In certain corners of the geek world, people buy products not necessarily because of what they can do out of the box, but because of what they could potentially do down the road. And no, I’m not talking about the Playstation 3. (zing) Firmware hackers, kernel developers, reverse-engineerers and general-purpose tinkerers alike have all broken into (or just plain broken) tons of your favourite portable electronic devices in an attempt to make them do things their manufacturers never imagined or intended. From routers that run Linux-based firmware to iPods that play Doom, people have always gotten a perverse pleasure out of making devices dance to a new tune.

But the holy grail has always been that neat little hack (or collection of hacks) that suddenly unlocks a wealth of functionality previously tucked away in the depths of a high-powered processor punching well above its weight. It’s the digital equivalent of flipping a switch to turn your Toyota Corolla into a Lexus sports sedan. Such hacks are possible because oftentimes electronics manufacturers find it cheaper to produce one microprocessor for a host of different devices (at different price points) rather than developing a new processor for each device separately. To continue the car analogy, it’s like using the same engine for the $10,000 subcompact and the $80,000 luxo-sedan, and then artificially limiting the engines going into the $10,000 cars so they only produce a quarter of the horsepower. Remove the artificial limiter, and suddenly you’ve got a 400hp subcompact car.

So you can imagine the excitement certain amateur photographers must be feeling about this custom firmware for DIGIC II-based Canon cameras. Among other things, it theoretically turns any DIGIC II camera into one that can produce RAW files—even the relatively cheap Powershot A630. There’s also a histogram and zebra display, which are probably more useful on a day-to-day basis than RAW (which may or may not be a bit slow to write on consumer-level cameras). Theoretically a wide range of cameras support the hack, but at present only a subset of A-series cameras and the S2/S3 have firmwares you can dump on an SD card and go. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if greater publicity of the custom firmware brought new firmware files for Powershot SD cameras as well.

New iPods just got dropped on your collective asses today. Screw the commentary, let’s whip out the giant nerd chart! (It’s so giant that I tweaked the design of the entire site just to fit it in, suckas!)

This table was sort of generated on the fly; I don’t have any vast respositories of MP3 player knowledge or anything. So if there are any errors or things I’ve left out (specs or players) let me know in the comments.

Ever wonder why the end credits in a movie always seem to scroll at the same rate as it does in other movies? No? Well, here’s the answer anyways. Beware: if the terms PAL, NTSC and scanlines mean nothing to you, here be dragons. Found via an AskMetafilter question that provides some interesting reading material for those of us not blessed with a working understanding of video resolutions and interlacing.

(The title of this post is apparently taken from the end credits of the UK short film Blowout, though obviously it applies to a great many other films.)

Update: Consensus is still forming, but a lot of people are now dismissing the initial rootkit diagnosis. It now appears to just be a particularly onerous copy-protection scheme, which is kind of what we’ve come to expect from Sony and SecuROM these days. The protection-stripping patch promised by Levine and company can’t come soon enough.

Having just finished playing Bioshock the first time through and loving it to bits, I’m now tempted to uninstall the whole game and shelve it for a couple of months. Why? Because the SecuROM copy protection Bioshock uses exhibits rootkit-like behavior. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the same sort of thing we saw about two years ago, when Sony and Universal were caught red-handed trying to put rootkits onto their music CD releases.

There’s still a question of whether SecuROM puts a rootkit on your system. At the very least, it exhibits some odd behavior, like protesting when you run Process Explorer—a powerful utility that, oh, by the way, was created by Sysinternals, now owned by Microsoft. In other words, you can’t run Bioshock and a legitimate Microsoft utility at the same time. And of course there’s the general copy-protection issue, namely that copy protection hurts legitimate consumers more than it hurts people who steal the game. In this case, it’s the problem of only ever being able to install the game twice. 2K Games says you should be able to install/uninstall as many times as you like, but if you should ever forget to uninstall twice, no more Bioshock for you. (2K recently said they would up the activation limit, which helps but does not eliminate the issue.)

To be honest, my Steam install of Bioshock was relatively trouble-free, at least once I got past the 400MB zero-day download and the intermittent failures of the activation servers. But now 2K Games may have accomplished what thousands of virus writers, malware spammers and worms have failed to do: infiltrate my computer with malware. Even if SecuROM turns out not to be a rootkit, there’s still the general problem of copy protection DRM becoming more aggressive with every passing year—as well as the incentive to steal a game instead of buying it.

Do I feel like a sucker for buying Bioshock? Not yet. It was a great game and the developer team have a lot to be proud of. But I don’t want to have to come back in two weeks and say I was wrong to support such a good game because the publisher went and fucked it all up with rootkits.