Pure Digital Thought

While poking around on a few blogs discussing E3 and news from Nintendo and the Wii, someone posted about Le Stick (scroll about 7 controllers down that list). I never knew the Atari 2600 had a motion sensing joystick. This was all the way back in the 80’s. Let’s see… that makes Le Stick, Nintendo PowerGlove, and the Logitech & Microsoft controllers. Are there any more dead failures from our motion sensing past?

Will the Wiimote or the PS3 motion sensing features really get used other than as a novelty for E3? In all honesty, when I play games, I’m usually lounging on the couch. The last thing I’m doing is jumping around and swinging my arms. When I’m up at 2:30 on a Saturday night, I’m half-asleep playing Oblivion. Swinging the Wiimote to hit something would just be a hell of a lot of effort at that time in the morning.

I picked up my GamePro magazine and I saw a feature (also available on the website) about the “20 Games that Changed the World“. So I flip through and I think it’s a pretty good collection of games with good reasons, some more than others, on why that game changed the world. The usual suspects were all there: Sim City, Doom, Street Fighter II, Tetris, Pac-Man, GTA III, etc. Each of those games really were unique and had something new that no one else had. They set a bar to which future games would be measured and some broke ground for completely new genres. Read the rest of this post »

This month’s Carnival of Gamers is going on at ButtonMashing.  There is lots of discussion on the Wii, MMOs, politics, etc.  Stop on by and take a look.

Okay, I’m really liking the XBox360.  XBox360.com has a press release on the content they will have available during E3 for the XBox Live users.  Major Nelson has specifics on what’s going to be released.  But I’ve done a copy/paste of the coolest below.

Playable game demos and/or trailers from highly anticipated titles like:

• Crackdown (Microsoft Game Studios)
• Dead or Alive® : Xtreme 2 (Tecmo)
• The Lord of the Rings ™, The Battle for Middle Earth™ II (EA Los Angeles)
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Capcom)
• Moto GP™ ’06 (THQ)
• Sonic the Hedgehog™ (Sega)
• Splinter Cell Double Agent ™ (Ubisoft)
• Test Drive Unlimited (Atari)
• Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios)
• Plus a flood of HD trailers from games that have yet to be announced

Now that’s what I call awesome.  They’ll be more content but the best thing I think is that you’ll be able to play the stuff that people are playing at E3.  I hope this sets up a standard for Sony and Nintendo to do the same with their consoles.

The Beta Patch for The Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion has just been released. It looks like many of the fixes are related to the exploits for unlimited gold and such. Really, I don’t see why they wasted time on something like that. It’s a single player RPG. If someone wants to cheat and get infinite gold, they can go right ahead. It only ruins the game for themselves and affects no one else in no way whatsoever. I think they could have left those alone and spent more time fixing quests and making performance improvements. I think there are more quests that need fixing besides the ones listed. There is one quest currently sitting in my list that I cannot complete because apparently I must have done something that caused the NPC I need to kill to not appear. So, it sits in my quest queue uncompleted. The PC folks seem to have many more performance issues than those playing on the XBox360 although I’ve come across a few things on the XBox360 version that could be improved. Ah well, here’s hoping that the final patch has a few more things in it or that they will be coming out with another soon.

Here’s a fun but useless (to most everyone but a few) Java fact.  I found this while digging through some config files when I was setting up this new server.  I don’t remember which one it was.  But here it is.

The magic number for a Java .class file is CAFE.  A magic number is the first two bytes in a binary executable file which are used to tell what type of file it is since the file extension is something that can change.  Most often, the two byte magic number is written in hexadecimal.  For Java, that happens to be 0xCA and 0xFE.  Coffee, Cafe.  A little joke that the developers of the Java Language Specification must have enjoyed.  I looked at a couple of class files with a hex editor, XVI, and sure enought it’s true.

Everyone’s talking about the Nintendo Wii. If anything, Nintendo sure has generated a lot of discussion about it’s upcoming console name be it bad or good discussion. With so much buzz I figured I’d like to drop my two cents into the mix.

Personally, I think the name, Wii, is a horrible name for a console. Sure, Nintendo has explained that you can pronounce it as “we” which gives a sense of community and togetherness Nintendo wants to bring to the console with it’s online component. However, seeing that Microsoft has already used this idea by naming its console the XBox 360 it just makes Nintendo look like it’s trying to ride the 360’s wave of success. Read the rest of this post »