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.
Apparently Konami just realized Harmonix, MTV Networks and Viacom have made some game called Rock Band and want to take legal action. Konami has created some Japanese games involving karaoke called Karaoke Revolution. Why take legal action now?
Probably because Konami is working towards Rock Revolution, a title which puts together drums, vocals and guitar. How odd, don’t we have a game called Rock Band which has done that for awhile now? It’s much easier to be competitive in the market if you can squeeze your opponent out of the market by telling them you hold a patent on the entire concept…which you let slide for a year.
It seems a bit convenient to force a lawsuit, now, after Rock Band is proven successful and before you launch your own “clone.”
Its suit claims that Rock Band violates a series of US Patents registered in 2002 and 2003 relating to “simulated musical instruments” and “musical rhythm-matching game.” (gamespot)
Although the developers of Rock Band should have gone through some patents on the topic prior to make it (or maybe they did?), it seems a bit out of place to patent such a generic concept. As far as I know, Musical Chairs is also a musical rhythm-matching game but nobody put up any stink when Konami filed a patent for the same concept…
Electronic Arts is (was?) building a first-person-shooter based on the Command and Conquor series and was set to release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The original title was originally slated for 2008 and now has been pushed to EA’s fiscal year 2009 or 20010.
The game was not shown off at E3, which is a bit weird, but considering other titles that didn’t make an E3 announcement (halo) perhaps this isn’t too out of the usual. Perhaps the game design was harder to tackle than originally intended? The only thing we know is that it’s slipped a good deal of time from the original date.
The debate is still up on if we need yet another first-person-shooter title, even if it’s based on the C&C series. It seems they’re using a popular series to launch another FPS genre game, will it stand alone as an innovative title or simply be another FPS title skinned with C&C character models?
(Thanks, 1up)
This week, the gang follows up on Tim Sweeney from last week, and also discuss Dark Souls 2 modding, the “photorealistic” ant RTS Empire of the Ants, and Resident Evil 4 Remake crossing 7 million copies sold.
The news also includes:
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