MotorStorm: Pacific Rift Review (Initial Impressions)

I have recently started playing MotorStorm: Pacific Rift and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite games. I am personally not generally interested in racing games unless they have one of two qualities. They either need to be cute with weapons ala Mario Kart or RC Racing (dream cast) or they need to have crazy tracks with jumps and obstacles and such. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift has the latter in droves.

The graphics are flat out everything you would expect from a PlayStation 3 game. The scenes are beautiful and lush with plants, rocks, water and other such objects. The one down side to the graphics and all they cram into a track, it can be difficult to near impossible to figure out what is a path and what is not the first time through. I find that I usually throw the first lap if not the first race on a track to figuring out how to get through it.

The game play is every bit as adrenaline pumping as the first MotorStorm if not more. If you play this game at night do not expect to get to sleep any time soon after playing. There are jumps galore and tight canions and caves to drive through. The addition of deep water and lava take the danger up a notch too.

There are a number of new features I have not not yet explored using. You can now use L1 and L2 to bump other drivers with any vehicle. You can also duck and bunny hop on bikes and ATVs.

There is also the adition of the monster truck to the game. I have not tried it yet as I am a rally car kinda guy but it looks impressive.

Overal I would have this game a full set of stars.

Sony media update

I can now download my Rockband songs on my new Plastation 3, but still am unable to access videos purchased in the past or present. I am also still unable to access my Singstar songs. Still no help from Sony. I was able to activate my new PS3 console for games but it still says "you have 1 consoles activated for video. You must deactivate that console before you can activate this console." So Sony is still trying to get me to repurchase a significant number of Sing Star songs and well as all of my videos.

Sony gives your media to thieves

That is right if your PlayStation 3 is stolen if you replace it you will not be able to download all of the things you paid for like your Rock Band Songs, Sing Star songs, Videos and Purchased games. This happened to me and when I replaced my PS3 I figured I would just be able to download all of my media again. That did not work, so I tried account management figuring all I needed to do was associate my new console with my account. Nope, since my old console is still associated with my account the new console cannot be. And here is the great part it tells you that you have to use the old console to deactivate the old console before you can activate the new on. Of course if you have replaced your stolen PS3 that is a reasonable expectation, NOT. But I still had faith, so I called Sony tech support figuring that all I need to do is tell them my stolen consoles serial number and my new ones serial number and all will be well with the world. Nope, they tell me that I need to write down a bunch of information and fax that with a copy of my receipt and then a week later it will be fixed.

Well I faxed in every thing they requested and wait a week and it still does not work. So I call them and they tell me that they did not receive the fax and that I needed to send it again. So I have my attorney send the fax the second time since he has the most reliable fax machine I know of. One week later still no access to my media, call again and wouldn't you know it they say "We don't know what happened to the fax we did not receive it."

So now I write this, to let other consumers know that Sony will happily give your paid for media to any thief that steals our PS3 and do their best to get you to pay for all of your downloads again. This is the one reason that I am seriously thinking about going back to XBox 360, apparently on a 360 you can manage your licenses from your account and never loose your media. I doubt that I will ever make another purchase from the PS store again and may very well be getting a 360 with my tax return.

Customer service is dieing

In the 80’s customer service hardly existed and when used was generally easy to get a hold of. In the 90’s customer service was every where but you got to wait hours on hold to receive useless responses from a customer service agent that could not do anything you needed. In the late 90s and early 2000’s customer service became accessible and useful, hold times were down to minutes if anything and the customer service agents could actually help. Now it seems that customer service is experiencing a sudden and unexpected death. Case in point, Vonage, whom I was and I stress the was looking into for VoIP phone service.

Their web site is well designed and provided easy access to all of the important information about their service. I found plans easily and was quickly able to narrow my choice down to two possible plans. I was able to find all equipment information I needed. So far so good, but I still had the lingering question of which of the two plans I needed to pick. Here is where things went down hill. I first clicked the contact link thinking that I would just email them, ask my question and get an answer from a person in a day or so. Once I get to the contact page I am presented with a set of drop down lists to select what my contact was about. So I select plans and then click go. To my surprise I am not presented with a web form but taken to the plans page. Frankly this was the moment that I decided that I would not do business with Vonage, if a communications company cannot properly define the term “contact” then I do not believe they are competent enough to provide the service I am looking for. Also this kind of run around assures me that if I ever have problems with their service it will be very difficult to get it resolved.

Out of morbid curiosity I decided to find out how difficult it might be to contact them through their site. So I go back to the contact page and choose the “Other” options from the presented drop down lists. Now that Has to bring me to a email form, right? Wrong. Instead of an email form I get a paragraph of text explaining that do to high volumes they cannot receive my email. What?!? Upon further reading they do tell me that there is an “"Ask Vonage" online interactive chat agent” in their help section. Oh online chat based customer service, I can handle that. So I go to the help section and click Ask Vonage, a chat window pops up and asks me what my question is. Cool, so I type in my questions and I get back:

“I'm sorry, it's hard for me to understand long questions like that. Please ask again using as few words as necessary. Also, it helps if you only type one question or topic at a time. “

Nice they have a bot servicing their chat based customer support. At that point I was done with them. I did not bother calling the provided 1-800 number, as they have already proven them selves in capable of modern communication, not what I am looking for in my VoIP service provider.

I hope this is an isolated case but I am afraid that it is not. It seems that human customer service is near dead and until A.I. can learn to stop repeating the obvious, our lives will be just a little bit more difficult due to technology.

Opera 9.0 to support the Opacity tag!!

I recently received an email from Olafur Arnason, in response to my inquiry to Opera about support for the Opacity CSS 3 Property in Opera 9, with a relevant link to his blog. From his blog "On the core side we have fixed many crashes and we have also added support for opacity.", finally the Opacity CSS 3 Property will be supported in Opera. This is great news as this is one of my favorite CSS 3 Properties. With this all browsers that I care about support opacity in one way or another. I cannot wait until opera 9 comes out. Now if we could just get the guys over at MS to stop dragging their feet on IE7!

You can see Olafur's full blog post here

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Video Download services reviewed

I am finally please to see the dearth of online video services popping up this year. That being said we do not yet have a perfect service, but we are getting close. The main players in this market are iTunes, Starz, and Google.

There are Six main areas I judge a video service by and they are:

1. Video quality. I think Video quality is of utmost importance when I am paying for video content. Unfortunately many services think that since it is coming over the internet I am willing to pay for sub standard video quality, these providers need to re-evaluate this assumption.

2. Start Watching Now. When I decide I want to watch some content, I am usually ready to watch it at that point. Some of these services get that and others dont.

3. Interface. When it comes to video content not one of the major players have gotten the interface right yet. They just do not get that I want a really, stress the really, simple interface to my video and when I play it, I want the interface to go away until I am ready for it again. Further more none of the major players have provided a 10 foot interface yet.

4. Purchase vs. Pay per View. Most of the services seem to think that everyone wants to own everything they watch or conversely never want to own it. I don't know about you but there are many things that I watch that I do not care about owning and vice versa.

5. Pricing. Some of the pricing on these services are a little out of whack and some is fairly close. Most services are one size fits all pricing, which I don't get. Why would I pay 1.99 for a 45 minute show and 1.99 for a 3 minute music video or short movie? Oh, and why would I pay 4.99 to rent a new release on a download service when I can get the same video for 1.00 at a RedBox 2 blocks from my house?

6. Content. Many services think that you either want movies or television, but not all. Content is growing but you still cannot get just anything your heart desires right now. Though content is limited by what the studios and networks are willing to offer.

All that being said up front lets talk about some specific services. I will save the best for last so let's start with Google video.

Google Video: I must admit before I go too far that I have not actually purchased from Google Video yet. The front end is so bad I cannot bring my self to give them any money. I can say that their interface is terrible, and there is so little information that you cannot make a decision on whether to buy or not. The first question that comes to mind when you click on a video is, "is the purchased video quality going to be a terrible as the preview quality?", and there is no answer to that question on their site. Oh and full screen does not mean maximize the window. So aside from having an interface that not even a mother could love and video quality that makes over the air channels look down right good, Google Video does have some good points. You can start watching now, assuming the purchased videos work like the rest of videos on Google Video. They have both Purchase and Pay per View on many selections and they have variable pricing. Google Video is also the only one of the services mentioned here that offer both movies and television, though I doubt any one reading this will have much interest in the movies they are offering. Their Pricing model could pull them to the front of the line, if they improved their video quality.

iTunes: Apple is supplying a competent offering here though far from everything I would wish for in an online video service. Their content has the best offering for television, but no movies. The iTunes interface is not ideal for video, it has been retro fitted into an interface that was designed for music and is there for not the best for video. As far as using it as a 10 foot interface it will never make it. The video quality of iTunes videos leaves much to be desired, the compression is just too high, so it can be bother some with shows like Battlestar Galactica where there is a lot of black. They only offer shows for purchase and a one price fits all pricing model. They have the defacto market for downloading media but will likely lose the video market unless they improve their offering.

Stars/Vongo: This is by far the best service available, though still not perfect. The Vongo interface is nice and well suited to a video service, though everything is till too small and complex for use as a 10 foot interface. They are in bed with Microsoft so I would not be surprised if a plug-in for Media Center PC comes out soon, to fix the 10 foot interface issue. You can start watching the videos you select usually within 30 seconds of selecting the video. The video quality is the best of any service I have ever looked into. Vongo offers a subscription and Pay per View pricing model but no purchase option. Though they do not offer any television at this time their movie selection is very nice. The biggest flaw with the pricing is that they do not compete with Block Buster, let alone RedBox with their Pay per View pricing, though I think the subscription pricing is a good value.

Over all I think 2006 is shaping up to be a very good year for internet video and I think the future is bright.

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NBC President says 'many more NBC TV shows' coming 2 iTunes in couple weeks

"Over the next couple of weeks, in fact, we will have many more announcements about many more shows there. We see it as a brand-new business, and it will be run like any television network, with new material refreshed and replenished all the time. I don't think there's a limit as to how many shows we can have available."

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The assumption that people will be watching the shows on smaller screens, is not very valid. Considering that a video ipod and play on a TV, all LCD televisions can have a computer hook directly up to them as if they are a monitor, and almost all computers today come with hook ups for TV, I think you might be surprised about how many downloads are actually played on the living room television.

Giving Thanks Online

Being Thanks Giving morning I would like to take a moment to give thanks online to some of the online services I could not live with out.

#3 MySpace.com, this is a site I love and I hate. I love keeping all of my friends together in one place, finding news friends, networking and everything else I can do there. I hate “An unexpected error has occurred” and it happens a little too often for me to over look it.

#2 Digg.com, I have never felt more connected to what is going on in the world as I do since I found digg.com. Every day I can see what the online community finds the most important news of the day.

#1 Google.com, I am sorry but I have to call google.com my number one online site. I would be lost with out it, and would never have found all of the sites I frequent had it not been for their search engine.

So, what in the online world are you thankful for?

No, I am not in favor of piracy

I feel like I should take a moment to clarify my position on piracy of movies and intellectual property rights. I do not condone the theft of intellectual property through piracy. My criticism of the entertainment industry and recently of the MPAA stems not from their desire to protect the property of their members. My criticism is of their approach. Instead of being solutions driven they are using the business equivalent of violence, by attacking individuals who have downloaded movies.

I truly believe that the majority of people downloading illegal copies of movies are not doing it because they do not want to pay or that they want to steal. I think that they want something that is not available to them through any legitimate means. I believe that the majority of people downloading movies just want to be able to download newly released, movies on demand and would be more than happy to have an Itunes or Rhapsody model to do it. If such a system was available only those with a desire to steal the movies would be downloading illegally.

Movie Link: I just want to be clear incase any MPAA people actually read this and say to them selves, “We did that it is called Movie Link.”. Movie Link is not the above mentioned solution. Movie Link costs more that the video store and only has old movies, so to say it plainly Movie Link is too expensive and out of date to be a viable solution.

Ok, I am done talking about the MPAA, I am going to go digg something else to talk about.

MPAA coming for you....

I really wonder how much one of these law suits costs. If they were to take the money form one of these and invest it in a good online, distrobution system, how much money woudl they save in law suits?

There will always be piracy and companies that produce intellectual property should take measures to protect their intellectual property. That being said I don’t think that the MPAA has taken a moment to wonder why so many people are downloading, movies produced by the studios they represent. Most people in the world do not want to work to get their movies, nor do they want to wait for them or get random quality from what they do get. But when people do not have the option of fast, high quality, easy to access license managed solutions they turn to what is available, in this case pirated movies.

Hey MPAA, give users access to new releases, for $1.00 per 24 hour viewing period, that download fast enough to start watching the movie instantly and you will more than recapture what you are loosing to movie piracy.

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Hollywood, BitTorrent Reach Agreement. (MPAA could you define agreement for me?)

So yesterday morning I read about an announcement that would be coming later in the day in a press release about an agreement between Bram Cohen ( of BitTorrent) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association). I was immediately filled with the hope, (I can never hold my optimism back), that the movie industry was finally realizing what the music industry had figured out over a year ago. That being that people want to be able to on demand access, download and watch/listen to all media for a reasonable price. I was looking forward to a statement such as “Bram will remove links to pirated movies from the BitTorrent search engine and in return the MPAA has selected Bram to lead the development of licensed distribution of movies over the internet”. I was practically giddy.

Then came the announcement. Which was only half what I hoped for and really the half I really did not care about. The announcement was (translated through my bull shit filter, to get the truth) “We have made Bram remove links to pirated movies on his search engine and in return we are going to dangle this carrot in front of him until he figures out he will never get it.”

Of course my optimism cannot really be held out of this conversion. I do think that it is possible for the industry to do right by us. The MPAA as an organization that represents many other organizations may actually just need time to approve plans with all of its member studios. It may actually be that in the near future we will be learning about the new plans to improve movie link with BitTorrent technology

Movie Link will not become useful in any way just by adding BitTorrent. The hope, or at least my hope, is that it will decrease their costs to a point that they can provide a service with value. Just looking at the front page of movie link I can see that I can rent “Rock School” for $4.99, that’s not cheaper than Block Buster, and it is not even a new release. Then we look at RedBox, I can drive 3 blocks to the nearest Mc Donald’s and rent “War of the Worlds” for $1.00. So for about the same investment in time I can have a new release for $1.00. And finally I would like to mention Stars Online from Real Media. Here I pay a low monthly fee, get a better selection of movies that Movie Link and I can play them immediately, the releases are not quite as fresh as RedBox but far fresher than Movie Link.

Ultimately the Movie industry and the MPAA seem to be looking into how the online world affects their business but, I don’t believe that any one in the industry realizes how far behind they are. I hope what ever the industry is offering Bram that he will be able to lead them to an offering that we as consumers actually want.