You Could Do Me A Huge Favor…
These three lovely ladies will be performing at South By Southwest.
They are from Japan. I am currently in Japan. I planned to see them in Japan except they decided to take this month to make their US Debut in Austin, TX. I usually live in Austin. Do you see the irony in this?
Anyways. I won’t be able to go to their show in Austin so I am asking if anyone is going to South By Southwest? If you are, please maybe find their booth and maybe buy me a cool looking T-Shirt. I am an XL. Feel free to email me if you want to work out the details.
Also, if you wanted to check out a good Japanese Band, this would be your chance.
Chatmonchy
Friday March 19th – Japan Nite
Schedule says near Midnight
Thanks,
David
They are also playing: (as part of Japan Nite)
March 21 (sun) New York @ Bowery Ballroom
March 26 (Fri) SF @ The Independent
March 27 (Sat) LA @ Viper Room
Steam coming to MAC?
So news hit recently that valve is about ready to release Steam/Source, and something called Steam Play, to the MAC. The latter being a utility which allows the player to seemingly switch between MAC and PC versions of the game if you own both types of computers (Portal 2 will be the first game getting a simultaneous PC/MAC release).
Fancy stuff, for sure, but honestly I’m not entirely convinced that this is a viable use of resources. Especially since Valves development for the PS3 has been woefully ignored in comparison to other platforms.
Valve/PC development and the xbox 360 are, of course, a perfect fit…at least in terms of development for similar architectures. But is the Macintosh really such a viable gaming platform that it’s development precludes that of the PS3? Is the Macintosh install market for gaming really that huge? And considering the dire truth that PC gaming in general has been waining over the years I’m not so sure that gamers should take these current announcements with any type of real levity.
We cannot doubt that MAC usage has grown recently. Quanticast, a web analytics firm, as recently released numbers showing 10.9 percent of online users in North America signed on using MAC OS X ( a 30% increase over the past year). But I’m not completely convinced that the majority of these users are not signing on at a coffee shop to read the newest NPR news and are, instead, booting up World of Warcraft.
The only thing I can think of here is that Valve see’s the MAC as some possibly fertile land that can be tilled. They might have seen the World of Warcraft MAC users number and want a piece of that pie. Personally, I don’t see it happening. PC gaming is a slowly dying adventure and MAC gaming hardly ever existed in the first place. As consoles become more and more popular, and the PS3 install base grows thanks to the pre-holiday price cut, Valve is going to have to seriously look at giving more love to the console market.
Missions 1 Valve: Work with XBLA, and eventually PSN, to deliver to the console market the handiwork of the robust modding community that gave so much more life to your games in the first place.
-Joseph-
I Started This Game Again Today
I never finished Hotel Dusk 215. I deleted my save and started the game up again. It’s only right.
Thanks Brad for giving me the news.
David
GRIN+Cing
Rock Band Network Launched
The Rock Band Network is up on the Xbox 360 today and I’ve checked out what it has to offer. The interface is similar to the regular Rock Band store but with more sorting options. These options include sorting by artist, author (group who did the note tracking for the song), country of origin, decade, difficulty, genre, label, language and title. Along with those, there is a menu for a random song, “Harmonix Picks” and Top 10 lists of newest and highest rated songs. It is well organized for the most part but can sometimes be slow to respond, hanging up on some menu selections.
A major addition to the Network Store are the song demos. From my research, the demos are always the first minute of the song and cut off right at that minute, which can be a little jarring. At the end of playing that song there is an option to buy, replay or to exit out. Once purchased, there is an option rate quality of the note tracking at the end of the song. The authoring on the few I have played felt fine but the tuning on the levels of difficulty isn’t super consistent.
At launch, there are 105 songs with the majority of them being listed as having no label, a good sign, but there isn’t much representation from the larger indie labels like Sub Pop, who have promised support. Personally, there is a lack of the independent stuff I was looking forward to but two songs from The Shins and of Montreal isn’t too bad of a start. Hopefully, that will improve in the next few months. The songs are priced at 80 and 160 points, which is 1 and 2 dollars, respectively. Selected songs will come to other platforms at an unconfirmed later date.
Ben
Noby Noby Boy coming soon to the App Store
Who wouldn’t buy this when it has features for worldwide kindergartners, party people, planners, businessmen and music lovers!
Ben
