A friend sent along a link to Indexed, a site that does mini-charts and venn diagrams on 3x5 cards daily. Some of you in the industry will likely get a chuckle out of the particular one they chose to send along to me – I know I did!

And for the record, one of my favorite venn diagrams continues to be Chris Kohler’s PS3 model chart. I just wish he’d update it sometime!

There’s an interesting post over on Gamesutra (with thanks to Evil Avatar for highlighting it) which reports some of Neilsen’s findings around video game platform usage last year.

Nielsen's data, which actually covers the period from January through October, found that PS2 users accounted for 31.7 percent of the total time played from all nationwide gamers. The Xbox 360 was the year's second-most popular console, with 17.2 percent of the time, followed by Wii at 13.4 percent.

Interestingly, Nielsen says that the first-gen Xbox currently sees more usage than the PlayStation 3, with 9.7 percent versus 7.3 percent, respectively. The GameCube still made the surveyors' list with 4.6 percent of total time, and an "Other" category accounts for the remaining 16.2 percent.

It’s pretty fascinating to see the long shadow the huge PS2 install base continues to cast. Also interesting is the fact that the Wii is used significantly less often than the Xbox 360, in spite of having a larger install base. That said, what I’d really like to see is a legitimate comparison of time spent online on the different consoles. While the report shows World of Warcraft continuing to dominate the PC online space, it really doesn’t give a sense of activity in the console online space. And as traditional PC stronghold titles continue to shift over to the console (yes, including MMOs), understanding this usage across platforms is going to continue to grow in importance.

This is the end of the useful post – everything following is a test. If it were not a test, you might find it interesting and useful. However, this is only a test.

Below is a completely gratuitous World of Warcraft logo intended to allow me to test out image imbedding. ;)

And next up is an embedded map of the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. Go Live Writer!

And today’s final test: an embedded YouTube video showing Portland drivers in the snow. Watch at least the first SUV – and be sure to have sound. The crunches make the video!

Yes, it's a new year, and I'm pleased to report that thanks to the help of Kevin from Telligent, we've finally gotten the blog updated to a new platform. I'll be tweaking it a little over the coming weeks, but in theory spam comments should be much, much reduced. I'm also feeling pretty reinvigorated after having basically taken a month off for the holidays (thanks to Microsoft's use it or lose it policy), and should be writing more often. Let me me know what you think of the new look and features... and here's wishing you all a fantastic New Year!

Fable 2:

A wonderful fantasy world to lose yourself in for hours on end. If you liked the original Fable, you'll love the sequel. Visually the game is stunning, and I found myself really enjoying doing sidequests off of the critical path much more than I normally do. The simplified combat works just fine - though I found that an initial Raise Undead blast (to summon shock troops to distract enemies) followed up by a powered-up Inferno could kill almost anything. My only real disappointment was the ending... it was fine, but that's about it. Felt significantly weaker than the rest of the game preceeding, but that said, certainly wasn't "bad" per-se. Did make me think over my final decisions... but I wish the impact upon the world was a bit more earthshaking. Final tip: start buying real estate early on and renting it out. You'll soon build up a siginificant ongoing revenue stream (even when the game is off!) that helps a lot down the road.

Fallout 3:

Have just started, so will keep this short. Never played Fallout 3, but played Oblivion a great deal. The overly-large, rambling world that I faulted in Oblivion has been tightened up... the world feels much more dense and real. Visually stunning... really captures what a post-holocaust world could look like, and I often myself just staring at the sun rising above the ruins. (Of course, I'm easily distracted by shiny objects, too... so take it for what it's worth.) Biggest complaint so far is character animation, especially in the third-person view... just doesn't look right, especially when compared to titles like Gears of War 2. Stick to the first-person view IMO.

 

With thanks to BoingBoing, wanted to share a stabilized version of the infamous Bigfoot film.

Although I'd love to believe these sorts of creatures exist, I'm afraid this one looks far too much like a guy in a monkey suit for me to buy in. Ah well... there's always Nessie!

It's an interesting question... and a challenge the industry faces as user-generated content becomes more prevalent. Most people can agree on certain areas of content being "offensive"; racial, sexist, or exploitative content comes to mind. But I just saw an interesting post on Crispygamer.com which states that a user-generated boxer resembling Adolph Hitler is "the most downloaded user created character for EA's boxing game FaceBreaker".

The writer goes on to ask some interesting questions:

“Is it because people want to beat the hell out of history’s most notorious demon, a man that epitomized evil and wiped out millions? Or could this seemingly harmless user created character be used as a way to promote antisemitism? Or perhaps we are reading way too much into all this?” 

 I certainly don't pretend to know. However, what did catch my eye is that a piece of content that I would have personally assumed could easily be defined as "offensive" by the community might actually not be so in this context. Maybe people really do want to vote their opinion of this historical character by using it within a game? Who knows? But it highlights that the next few years are going to be really interesting as games continue to evolve their support for UGC. I'm looking forward to seeing LittleBigPlanet's support in action - they've obviously thinking about this for a while.

Found a link in my mail to Edge Online's "Oh. My. God!!!" article where they go through 50 of their favorite moments in gaming. This is obviously a subjective exercise, but I really enjoyed the article as it reminded me of some of my favorite moments. Those include:

• Final Fantasy VII - Aeris
• Ico - The relationship with Yorda
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - Going "insane"
• Knights of the Old Republic - Darth Revan revealed
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - Meeting Farah again at the end of the game
• Dead Rising - The lawnmower
• Bioshock - "Would you kindly"
• Call of Duty 4 - Shock and Awe

Fair warning - the article has what some might consider minor spoilers if you've never played the respective games. It's a tricky line to follow - at some point a storyline becomes well enough known that there really shouldn't be any hesitation about talking about spoiler points... everyone who watched Titanic pretty much knew the boat sunk at the end, right? Still, I tweaked my favorites above to not be as specific as the article.

I wish they'd caught a few of the really old school moments from games like Zork or King's Quest. "Count Leaves" or "Plugh" or learning to spell "Rumpelstiltskin" leap to mind... ah well.

[Update - Nicholas Puleo, Editor-in-Chief of Evil Avatar and founder of Co-Optimus.com has kindly agreed to step in and join the panel. Thanks Nick!]

Just wanted to let you all know that Rob and I will be participating on a panel at PAX next weekend. The topic is whether Casual Game influences are "killing" Core Games, and we've been able to get some great panelists together for the event. They include Mark Deloura (who previously managed Sony's developer relations for Playstation and PSP), Jane Pinkard (of GameGirlAdvance fame), and of course everyone's favorite actor-geek Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley from ST:TNG and the guy who did the PAX keynote last year.) N'Gai Croal of Newsweek/Level Up fame was also planning to join us, but unfortunately can't make it due to a conflict.

The panel will occur on Saturday, August 30th from 6:00 to 7:00 PM in the Raven Theater.

Panel description:

Is Casual Killing Core Games?

Are you annoyed because casual gamers and casual gaming mechanics are killing your favorite games?  Are you too busy playing Puzzle Quest to care?  Do you think casual gaming is finally culling the herd of outdated gaming sacred cows?  Come and watch industry insiders, top press, and celebrities debate whether casual should be feared or embraced.

Moderator: Rob Gruhl, Senior Platform Strategist, Microsoft Game Platform Strategy Team

Panel Speakers:

• N’Gai Croal, Newsweek Technology Writer and Blogger of Level Up (sadly no!)
• Mark Deloura, CTO Greenleaf and ex Sony Devrel
• Jane Pinkard, GameGirlAdvance and Bizdev Foundation 9
• Wil Wheaton, Professional Geek, Actor, and Voice-over Artist… AKA the guy who did the keynote last year. ;)
• Andre Vrignaud, Senior Platform Strategist, Microsoft Game Platform Strategy Team

Should be a good time - hope to see any of you who might be at PAX!