You can guess where this is going

Knights of Columbus, this is going to be difficult.

I am currently a beta tester for an upcoming, big-deal product that will be launching later this year.  I'm not entirely sure how I was able to secure that gig, but I'm not complaining; it's as close as I will most likely ever get to being in the videogame industry, and so I'm taking it pretty seriously.

Now, you can imagine that something this big-deal would come with a strict NDA, and you'd be right.  That hasn't stopped other people from uploading YouTube videos, of course, but - as I said earlier - I'm taking this pretty seriously, and so I've been biting my tongue.

Even so, there's only so much of this silence that I can take. 

Can you bear with me?  Can you muster enough patience to get through this with me?

Then know this:  it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty neat. 

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I've listened to a bunch of gaming podcasts regarding ________, and read any number of "hands-on" previews, and they all generally say the same thing:  ________ is not for the hard-core.  These previewers make no bones about their negative bias going in, and nothing they see convinces them otherwise.  (It's perhaps a little unfortunate that the enthusiast press is so clearly lacking in objectivity, but it's not like this is the first time that this kind of thing has happened.)  The larger issue, though, is that they all seem to miss the point:  ________ is not a product that was ever intended for the hard-core.  ________ is meant to get the non-gamer involved.

Of course, the problem is convincing a non-gamer to buy this thing in the first place.  I would imagine that a lot of ________'s sales are going to be from people like me - we'll buy it so that our wives and children and other non-gaming friends will get involved and enjoy it.  And so I recognize the angle that the press is taking here - is there enough value in ________ to justify a purchase in the first place?  Will there be any residual enjoyment after the non-gamer in the household is finished?   Can it ever appeal to the hard-core crowd?   

Lest we get sidetracked here into an unnecessary discussion of what exactly constitutes "hard-core", let me answer the more relevant questions:  Yes, it works (although it's not yet perfect), and yes, it's fun (but mostly when the game itself is fun, too).  And yes, the non-gamers who have come over to the apartment have been gob-smacked, which is probably the reaction that the makers of ________ were hoping for.

The most recent update to the ________ software includes one of the titles that got my wife's immediate attention when we watched some of this year's E3 coverage, and that's the one that we ended up showing off to our guests this weekend.  And they loved it.  They even loved just messing around with it, in between actual games - they loved seeing a 1-to-1 reaction between themselves and their avatars.  They loved seeing how, when my wife and I moved back into the playing area, ________ recognized us and changed our on-screen appearances accordingly.  It's the best thing to use ________ by a long shot, and it's the one that really shows off ________'s potential, even if it's ultimately just a really good-looking proof-of-concept showpiece.  The biggest downside to the ________ software so far is the tendency towards laggy sensitivity, but this specific game seems to have conquered that problem.  It's breathtaking.

And there's more to ________ than the software.  I'm not really at liberty to explain just what kind of testing I did yesterday, but there were hints that the ________ interface will work with various components and applications on the master machine, which would be pretty neat.  (It's more than a little ironic, actually - part of the appeal of ________ is its whole "get off the couch" nature, and yet some of the non-gaming functionality actually ends up meaning that you can stay on the couch, and not even have to press any buttons.)

Hmm.  I'm sure that I've said a lot more than I'm allowed to say, so I'll stop, even though there's a lot more that I want to talk about.  The short version, though, is that it's got some serious potential, and I'm very curious to see what happens next.

Home

If this Gamepolitics article is to be believed, Sony is officially releasing Home tomorrow. Sony previously had been rolling it out in larger and larger numbers, similar to what Microsoft did with the NXE; I somehow got into the beta a few weeks ago.

I've maybe checked it out once or twice since I initially installed it, and the experience hasn't gotten better. It's still unclear to me what exactly the experience is supposed to be. When I see Sony's press releases, describing it as...

...a ground-breaking 3D social gaming community available on PS3 that allows users to interact, communicate and share gaming experiences...

...well, I guess that sounds interesting in theory, but in actual practice it's useless. It's certainly useless without a headset; the canned responses are not particularly robust, and that assumes that you're interested in participating in a chat room with a bunch of teenagers. Maybe it's better with the chatpad thing that's coming out soon, but that's not even the point. There's no real need for a 3D social gaming community; it serves no practical purpose. The gaming community is a robust and diverse many-sided thing but the side that most people end up witnessing, whether in forums or in multiplayer matches, thrives on anonymity and calling each other assholes. You can't get into virtual fistfights in Home, and you certainly can't pwn someone in Home because there's nothing to play other than a few crappy minigames that start to get boring about 20 seconds in.

You can look at advertising, though. And what the press release doesn't tell you is that Home is slathered in advertising. There are game posters and game trailers all over the place, and I'm sure that non-game-specific branding will soon follow, if it's not already there. Maybe you can buy a Mountain Dew T-shirt for your virtual dude and then meet up with your similarly-attired "friends" by the bowling alley and watch a trailer for SOCOM. Boy, that sounds like a great time. Meanwhile, I'll be getting on with the rest of my life.

Quick Shots

1. In seemingly direct opposition to The Thing I Cannot Talk About, the New Xbox Experience knows exactly what it is and offers some exciting features that I have already been able to take full advantage of.

2. One of those features is the ability to play games off of the HDD. I spent a considerable amount of time earlier this afternoon installing the games in my current rotation, and all of them loaded faster and even seemed to play a little smoother. Fable 2 benefited incredibly well from preloading; menus were readily accessible and the sluggishness that I'd mentioned before was pretty much completely gone. The initial load-up for GTA4 is noticably shorter. It's been noted elsewhere and I must agree: everything on The Orange Box loads very, very quickly. Saints Row 2 feels a lot smoother (and the 360 itself is much, much quieter). And Fallout 3 is quick and responsive and rock solid.

3. Fallout 3 deserves its own section. I hadn't gotten very far - maybe 1-2 hours out of the Vault, maybe level 4 - and I realized that the character I'd created was totally out of balance with the way I'd decided I wanted to play, and I wasn't having any fun; it didn't help that Gears and Fable and other titles then appeared and so it was easy for me to put it on the shelf and forget about it. I think what happened was that I took the "Oblivion with guns" comparison literally, and maxed all my stats in strength and melee, which is absolutely useless in Fallout.

Having finished Gears last night, though, I decided to re-roll, concentrating on weapons, stealth, medicine and hacking - either I or the game conveniently put a save point right before I left the Vault, which allowed me to change everything - and now I'm having a ball. Stealing items lowers my Karma score, which is fine since I've already decided to blow up Megaton. It's still hard for me to be a real asshole in conversations - mostly because I don't want to lose any potential side quests in doing so - but at the very least it's nice to steal items with impunity.

4. Back to the NXE. I don't really care about Avatars, at least not in their current form; there's nothing to do with them. I do care about the Netflix thing, though, and I was able to sync up my account with absolutely no hassle. The problem, though, is that the number of streamable movies on Netflix is pretty low, and the selection is pretty weak; if I have 200 movie title in my queue, only 20 of them are streamable, and I can't say I'm terribly excited to watch any of those 20. BUT. The option is there, and hopefully Netflix will get its act together and get more movies available online.

5. Oh, and as for Gears... it seems odd that I should be writing so little about such a big title. It is what it is, basically; it's Gears of War 1, but better. The story is still ridiculous but it doesn't really matter, because the gameplay is so astoundingly solid. It looks great, it feels great, the campaign is well paced and presents a nice challenge. It probably won't be in my top 3 candidates for Game of the Year, but there's not a lot to complain about.

Can't Talk About It

Heard on Major Nelson's podcast a couple weeks ago that Microsoft would be pre-releasing the New Xbox Experience to a small percentage of the respondents of a specific survey. For some reason, I was utterly convinced that I would be one of those lucky people, and was actually a bit crushed when I wasn't. A week or so later, they gave out even more pre-release NXEs, and I again missed the cut. The NXE officially launches in 7 days, though, so I guess I can wait another week. I'm not sure why I was getting so bent out of shape over it, though.

On the other hand, I got an e-mail from __________ last night, telling me that because I'd downloaded the free __________ PS3 dashboard theme about 3 or 4 months ago, I was now eligible to participate in that beta program.

Maybe my luck was starting to turn around, after all. Maybe I'd finally be able to talk about something substantive and new here instead of just listing all the games I play.

Except, according to the beta EULA, I'm not sure if I can talk about it... here.

1. As a condition of your participation in the Trials, you must:

a. keep the contents of the Trials, including any information, software and service in connection with ___________, confidential as between you and us and not discuss any portion of the Trials with anyone beyond your close friends and family and other Trialists. You shall not discuss or disclose any portion of the Trials with any third party who is a competitor of ___________ or is linked to any news, press or information service (whether on television or radio, in newspaper or magazines or via the Internet or any other online medium) without the express, prior, written consent of ___________.

See, the phrase "anyone beyond your close friends and family" is what's tricky, here, because I'm not sure anybody reads this blog besides people who actually know who I am. But the internet is the internet, and I'm pretty sure this blog is Google-able, and I don't feel like getting sued.

Understand, it's not even like I have that much to say about it. The truth is, there's really not very much to talk about.

Consider me even more skeptical than I already was.

Keeping my fingers crossed, though.

So there.