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Let’s say you’re a company that makes video games – sports games in particular – and you generate a nice recurring stream of revenue by putting out new versions of your sports games every year to coincide with the new seasons of each sport. But let’s also say that some of your customers don’t buy the newest versions because they’ve discovered almost endless replayability of the older versions thanks to online multiplayer features. What a pickle!
Although EA would probably never say that cutting the online features of older games is a move to get people to buy the newer versions, that might be what’s on some people’s minds. So it’s with a heavy heart that I relay to you the February 2nd, 2010 kill date for the following games’ online services:
UEFA Champions League 07 PC and x360 Facebreaker x360 and PS3 Fantasy Football 09 x360 and PS3 FIFA 07 PSP, PS2, PC Fight Night Round 3 PS2 Madden 08 Wii Madden 08 PC Madden 09 Xbox1 Madden 09 Wii and PSP March Madness 07 x360 NBA 07 PSP, x360 NBA 08 PS2, PSP, Wii NBA 09 Wii – Europe only NBA Street (2007) PS3 and x360 NCAA Football 08 PS2 NCAA Football 09 PS2 NASCAR 08 PS2 NASCAR 09 PS2 NASCAR 09 PS3 and x360 – Europe Only NFL Tour PS3 and x360 NHL 07 PSP and x360 NHL 08 PC Tiger Woods 07 PC Madden 09 x360 and PS3 Madden 07 Xbox 360
Yes, indeed, there are some old-ish games in there. But Madden 09? There are probably a fair amount of people still playing that game online who aren’t going to be too happy next month.
The Media Democracy Survey tries to ascertain America’s entertainment habits. It comes out every year, and this year’s edition just went live. As you might image, the terrible economy played a major role in the way Americans went about their business this past year. In fact, it turns out that Americans now watch (well, watched in the past year) an average of 18 hours of TV per week, which is up from 16 hours from last year. And this is TV on TV, not Hulu or anything like that.
Let that sink in: 18 hours per week spent sitting on a couch, watching TV. That works out to a little more than 2.5 hours of TV per day if you want to average it out like that, which might not make too much sense. How many Americans will sit there all day on Sunday to watch the NFL? (I tend to watch at least one soccer game per week, typically the FC Barcelona one when it airs. So there’s two hours right there.)
The story, though, is that Americans, strapped for cash, have returned to almighty TV to entertain themselves. It’s cheap and it gets the job done. So that’s not hard to understand.
The survey did touch on new forms of entertainment, including online entertainment consumption. Only 10 percent of Americans watch TV online (Hulu, downloads, etc.), but more and more people are buying video games, which is where I spend most of my entertainment hours. (New Dungeon Finder~!) And it’s people between the ages of 27-43 who are the fastest growing segment of gamers. That’s good news for Hollywood, provided it figures of digital distribution sometime before the year 3000: these people have money and they’re not teenagers who will download a movie just for the hell of it. Hmm, people with money, willing to spend it… why try to reach them? Madness!
So yeah, that’s about it. People were broke this year, so TV to the rescue. Not online TV, not fancy set-top box TV, but plain ol’ TV.
The Japanese madness for all things USB continues. Today I can give you an Alien figure that you can connect to your computer’s USB port. It then sticks out its nasty tongue at random times, backlit by a spooky red LED. Apart from that, the thing isn’t good for much else.
Live streaming video on the iPhone and iPod touch is neither "madness" nor the exclusive domain of the heavy hitters anymore. Livestream on Thursday unveiled its...
Mamiya announced two new DSLR cameras today, the DM22 and DM28. Pushing the megapixel wall again, DM22 is 22 megapixel, and the DM28 is, you guessed it, a 28 megapixel. Both cameras use the stock Mamiya lenses so if you are already a Mamiya shooter, you’re set.
Don’t expect to get this level of megapixel madness for cheap. The DM22 has an estimated street price of $9995, and the DM28 will sell for $14,990. This is one of those cases where it’s the only camera for the job, and you need one, no other camera will do.
Remember when everything had a capacitive touchscreen, and we decided we really hated those and we wanted resistive ones that required styluses? Me neither. That’s why I’m a little puzzled as to why the Eee Keyboard, which had a perfectly workable capacitive touchscreen when I gave it its first hands-on in January, has been changed to have a resistive screen and integrated stylus. It’s like they produced a concept car, and then when they put it into production, they gave it wooden wheels.
Watch the full video demo above, and see the madness that is the new design decision. Controlling a cursor on screen by using a stylus on a differently-shaped touchscreen… seems a bit of a terrible idea to me.
This here is a photo frame that contains a proximity sensor. When you walk past the frame, it’ll activate a flurry of swirling snowflakes. So whichever 4×6 photo is housed inside the frame will take on the appearance of a wintery wonderland. All for just $25.
For best results, you’ll want to use a winter-time photo. That’s because if you had a photo of yourself at the beach and the fake snow started swirling around, your house guests would be like, “This is madness! Snow at the beach?! I have to get out of here before [INSERT HOME OWNER'S FIRST NAME HERE] locks me inside this house or apartment for all eternity!”
If you had a photo of yourself building a snowman, however, your house guests would be like, “Oh, that’s nice. How clever. Also, I feel safe in this house or apartment.”
iSync 3.1.0, to be shipped with Snow Leopard, has struck another blow against Palm. What is it this time? They’ve removed Palm HotSync support, relegating thousands of Centro, Treo, Zire, Tungsten, and Palm Pilot users to the darkest corners of Obsoletia. When will this arms race end?
It does not appear that the discontinuation of legacy Palm OS support in iSync is at all related to efforts by Palm to trick iTunes into syncing data with the new Palm Pre as if it were an iPod. While Apple doesn’t provide a public syncing system for using iTunes, it does provide public APIs for any developer to hook into Mac OS X’s Sync Services.
No, it does not appear this way because Palm is busy trying to forget it’s decade of madness and missteps and couldn’t care less for you and your Life Drive.
I know I waxed friendly on Gates yesterday, but this latest plan seems a little mad-scientist to me. Of course, he didn’t concoct it personally and it’s only possible to use it for good, but the sheer scale of the thing just screams “Dr. Evil.” The idea is that by changing the ocean’s temperature by a few degrees in the area where a hurricane is about to hit, they can slow or weaken a hurricane before it makes landfall. Of course, changing the temperature of the ocean is about is large-scale an operation as is possible on this planet.
Fortunately, they only need to change its temperature in a certain area, and only by a few degrees. This would create enough atmospheric something-or-other to affect the storm. A whole bunch of “sail-maneuvered barges” (why sails?) with pumps and 500-foot tubes would pump up cold water from the depths and push warmwater down. Of course, it’s going to be hard to staff a hundred ships that will be going straight into the path or eye of the hurricane. Not exactly the safest place to be, but on the plus side it’d make a great movie.
If you were to say to me “that’s madness,” I wouldn’t think less of you for it. But it seems that hurricanes apparently cost the US $10bn annually and Katrina cost us $81bn. A fraction of that would pay for this entire fleet.
My problem is this: the ocean is a very well-tuned ecosystem, and a temperature change of a few degrees might be negligible to us, but for microfauna or algae it may be fatal. Mess with the planet’s homeostasis at your own risk, my friends.
No day is complete without a silly video that’s only tangentially related to CG’s modus operandi. Thus, presenting this: a video that shows a man controlling a really big grapple with a Wii controller.
Fifteen tons, to be exact. All controlled by your standard issue Wii controller. Madness? Hardly; reality!
Mamiya announced two new DSLR cameras today, the DM22 and DM28. Pushing the megapixel wall again, DM22 is 22 megapixel, and the DM28 is, you guessed it, a 28 megapixel. Both cameras use the stock Mamiya lenses so if you are already a Mamiya shooter, you’re set.
My problem is this: the ocean is a very well-tuned ecosystem, and a temperature change of a few degrees might be negligible to us, but for