This podcast has a little storminess to it, as it was recorded during a thunderstorm. There’s also tons of interesting news.
This week’s items include:
Let us know what you think.
In a world driven by the Internet, global economics and the short attention spanned reader we’ve been bombarded with social networks and 140-character micro-blogging. We’re constantly finding ways to promote ourselves, promote our brands or tell people what we’re eating for dinner. Is this obsession with ourselves and our creativity bridging into video games?
It’s games 2.0 people!. A time when we’re inventing our own video game stages, characters and full blown casual games! Not only are people getting a chance to design their own games with Microsoft’s XNA, Adobe Flash or from small independent casual games, but we can design our own stages in games like LittleBigPlanet.
Microsoft wants to remind us that Boku is much like LittleBigPlanet in its user generated video game content. Seen in this video below:
It’s obvious their going down the same path as Sony has gone with creating your own stages with LittleBigPlanet and creating a new way of gaming: playing other people’s stuff. You can find some similarities with Guitar Hero: World Tour‘s ability to create your own songs and publish them for others to play.
Are we heading down a generation of games where some of the best stages are created by fellow dedicated gamers? Or, is this just a distraction and means for developers to have gamers invigorate and create more of a demand for the games they are making the money on?
(Thanks, Destructoid)
The deal has been done, you can now officially call the company Activision Blizzard. Sure, the name is sorta lame but it does cover the bases… they’re Activision and they’re Blizzard; surely neither company wanted to lose their lively hood and branding.
We’re now looking at a company that’s more powerful than Electronic Arts, surely this worries Electronic Arts a bit. However, consumers like ourselves should be cheering for more competition against the big EA, perhaps forcing them to innovate a bit more and keep competitive.
Many gamers and industry participants would love to see independent companies grab a bit of the market share and bring in new startup companies and spin-off studios. However, if there is going to be a merger at the top-tier it might as well be one that puts pressure on Electronic Arts.
“We have created the world leader in online and console games with this transaction, and the combined strengths of the two businesses offer immense growth potential,” gushed Vivendi SA CEO Jean-Bernard Levy. “I am also very confident that, with the new leadership team in place, the new entity is perfectly positioned to take advantage of these rapidly developing markets across the globe.” (gamespot)
Now, we’ll have to wait and see if the upper level management can get along in a fluid manner and keep all their projects on track. With great power comes great responsibility, they’ve got the power… are they going to be responsible with it?
This week’s podcast includes the following news items:
Let us know what you think.
I like using keyboards for racing games that have simplified acceleration, braking, reversing, and turning such as TrackMania (four keys for all), but fighters and etc. are difficult for me via keyboards.
Mice allow for more angular granularity than controllers because of the area of movement across the mousepad/surface when using an adequate sensitivity, and mice can be polled around 1KHz or more versus controllers being polled around 250Hz, as far as I know.
If mouse sensitivity is set too high above 800 CPI or so, noise becomes an issue (quantization occurs at too low of CPI), so I recommend mice equipped with the 3360/3366 sensor as the older mice with 30×30 or less pixel/photo-diode arrays might have more trouble with noise because correlation imaging sensors will always be imperfect.
Here’s a thread regarding mice with said sensors from a reputable forum:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1602282/lets-compile-all-3360-3366-and-their-release-dates-for-everyone/0_100
The reason of 800 CPI or so being the sweet spot for current mice is, each pixel on the tracking surface or “matrix” is approximately 30 microns in diameter because of the lens magnification and sensor height from the tracking surface, so 25.4mm to convert an inch / 0.030mm = roughly 846.666 of these pixels are able to fit in an inch on the tracking surface, and the aforementioned sensors should be the same.
Each pixel is divided to achieve a higher resolution, so noise becomes an inevitable issue making a larger photo-diode array more ideal.
http://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-mouse-myths-busted/#page-1