I know, I know, I’m behind the times… this was announced on Monday, and picked up all over the place including Edge. I just wanted to commemorate the moment as I’m particularly proud of the LIVE subscriber numbers. For context, I joined Microsoft six years ago to help convince the industry that a subscription-based online service was a good idea. We promised that we would deliver a world-class service that “just worked”, and would build a huge worldwide gaming community that would benefit gamers, game developers, and publishers. Not many people remember now, but there was a ton of skepticism from all over. Some thought people wouldn’t be willing to pay for a quality service, and others didn’t think gamers would want to extend their game experiences with DLC. I think it’s fair to say those arguments are finally dead and gone.

What I’m most excited about is the future. Over the holiday we had 1.5M users on LIVE concurrently. Think about that for a moment… Xbox LIVE is the world’s largest TV-connected social network. And I think the next five years are going to be just as exciting as the last as game developers, publishers, and users all start leveraging the social connectivity of that network. It’s going to be a fun ride!

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.