So maybe you’ve seen this Nielsen report on video game usage in the States. Of course, as with most things related to console gaming, the first thing everyone’s latched onto is the never-ending console fanboy war: did your console of choice win the day, or did the foul and evil other-guy’s-console beat your one-true-console in what must’ve been some devious statistical foul-up?

Well, first, the chart is wrong, as the Joystiq post indicates. The Xbox 360 leads in all categories for total console minutes, the Wii comes in second in all categories, and the PS3 comes in last. The original chart showed the PS3 dominating in the over-27 category; this turned out to be, yes, a statistical foul-up. But there’s a second issue that’s more subtle but potentially more interesting.

There are four columns in the chart: one for % of total console minutes, and ones measuring average number of sessions, length of sessions, and number of days per month the console is in use. Strangely, the average number of sessions, session length and days in use figures seem very similar across consoles—the 360 gets used about a week more often than the PS3 in the under-27 group and Wii sessions tend to be shorter, but otherwise the numbers don’t seem to work out. The most glaring example is the over-27 category, where the 360 and PS3 have very similar figures in all three columns, but then show a 30% gap in total console minutes. What gives?

Without seeing the raw numbers or an explanation of what exactly each column means, it’s hard to say, but I think the % of total console minutes represents a percentage out of the total amount of minutes spent playing on any console in the country. If the number of sessions, time per session, and days per month figures were exactly the same for all consoles, the % of total console minutes figure would correspond exactly to… the percentage of people owning that particular console compared to total console ownership. In other words, each console’s market share is built into that percentage of total console minutes figure.

What that means is the percentage of total console minutes is less an indicator of overall satisfaction or use of each console, and more a reflection of how well each one has done in the marketplace. The average sessions figures better reflect usage patterns: young 360 gamers are the most hardcore, while old Wii gamers are the least so. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be news to anyone.

The past couple of months have been a bit strange for me and my usually peachy relationship with music. I don’t know why 2008’s been so troublesome, but never have I felt so old and just plain out-of-it as I have this year. I always expected that as I grew older, I’d eventually stop listening to new music and become one of Those People—you know, the ones convinced all the interesting music was made years ago, coincidentally around the time they were in high school or college—but never did I imagine the decline would be so steep or sudden.

It’s in that limbo that I went to Lee’s Palace on Thursday night to catch the Long Blondes, a band whose show last year made me beg for their return. “Couples,” however, is not the immediately satisfying listen that Someone to Drive You Home was, and evidence suggests a lot of people feel the same way I do. So I carried three levels of uncertainty into that concert. Would the new material sound better live? Was my infatuation with the Long Blondes necessarily a short-lived affair? And did any or all of this have anything to do with the fact that me and music appeared to be breaking up with one another?

(more…)

Muxtape is neat!

Sins of a Solar Empire contradicts a lot of conventional wisdom. It’s a game for the PC, which obviously no one uses for games any more except World of Warcraft. It’s a real-time strategy game that mixes in a lot of elements of 4X games like Civilization and is fairly complex as a result, which goes against the trend of such games simplifying their gameplay to appeal to wider audiences (hello, SimCity Societies and Civilization Revolution). Like all Stardock games, it has absolutely no copy protection, which means no one will buy it because it’s so easy to steal.

All of the above means sales should be dismal. No one plays complicated games on a PC that they can swipe without even using a crack. And yet Sins of a Solar Empire beat Call of Duty 4 to take top spot on the PC sales charts last week. The game has sold over 100,000 copies in 23 days, a not-insignificant sum for an indie publisher like Stardock and an indie developer like the Vancouver-based Ironclad. In addition to besting Call of Duty 4 last week, Sins has outperformed highly anticipated PC games like Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3.

I bought a copy for myself based solely on a Joystiq preview a couple of days before release, and it’s the best impulse game purchase I’ve made in a very long time. I just didn’t realize so many people agreed with me.

I watched the return episodes of some of the late night talk shows—Letterman with writers, Conan, Leno, Stewart and Colbert without—and I’ve got questions. Leno, of course, has been excoriated for saying he wrote his opening monologue, which explains why the show seemed to display about the same level of suckitude as it usually does with writers. Conan, on the other hand, seems to be flying mostly without a net, and the Stewart/Colbert duo are obviously making some things up as they go along. Even so, all three shows are clearly benefiting from prep work, which raises the question of where the WGA and the talk shows decide to draw the line. When is a show improvised and when is it “written”?

I’m not alone in asking the question; shortly after the first Stewart and Colbert episodes on Monday, TVSquad wondered about the same thing. Who does the graphics? Who ties jokes to those graphics? Who picks out clips and decides they should be the target of ridicule? And in the case of all the talk shows returning without writers, not just Stewart and Colbert, who does the research and plans the questions for the guests? Some of these tasks seem distinctly writer-ish.

Some more insights into TheA Daily Show during the writers’ strike comes from an audience member who saw the taping of Monday’s episode. On the one hand, the description of how the first segment played out originally makes it clear Stewart’s ad-libbing. But then there was the question from the audience of how the show came together, and Stewart’s statement that “thoughts didn’t go through the fingertips”—in other words, an outline of the show but no script. Does writing cease to be writing if you make it sufficiently vague or don’t actually put it down on paper? When you’re not coming up with specific jokes, but you are sketching out topics to cover, is that planning or writing?

One thing’s for sure—by the time the writers’ strike is over, the average television viewer will probably have a much better idea of just what a writer does on a talk show, if only because these sorts of questions are going to keep coming up.

Boxing Day is here again, but lately it seems like the Christmas after Christmas hasn’t been quite as exciting for the shopaholic as in the past:

According to a Visa Canada survey, more than five million Canadians planned to hit the shops on Boxing Day. After electronics, the most sought after item was clothing.

(…)

However, the Visa survey also found the number of Canadians planning to make purchase on Wednesday was 17 per cent less than in 2006, and the lowest number since 2002. Those who do decide to hit the stores are expected to spend less too.

Prowling the RedFlagDeals forums this year reveals much the same story—disappointment at lacklustre sale prices, unstable online shopping experiences, and a growing distaste for huge lines and mob rule at store opening in order to claim hot items available in extremely limited quantities. When 500 people line up outside a store hoping for a crack at 20 HD DVD players, a lot of people are bound to go home disappointed. With the diehard bargain hunters realizing that many of the Boxing Day deals aren’t much better than sale prices from the rest of the year, it looks like for the person in the know there’s really not too much point to braving the crowds and the traffic.

That said, I did pounce on one Boxing Day deal, though it’s actually been available for a couple of days now and involved no lineups, limited quantities or even leaving the house. And assuming I never need to contact Dell’s horrific warranty service for repair, I imagine it really will feel like Christmas when I get my shiny new PS3 in the mail. RedFlagDeals strikes again!

This and this are my two favourite things for today. Seriously, her heart is bursting with cute animated robot empathy. BURSTING.

The Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board has commissioned a set of ads about accidents in the workplace. And by all accounts they are fucking horrifying:

One TV spot features an exploding gas canister that blows a construction worker off the side of a building. Another shows a young chef slipping on grease and dumping a vat of boiling water on herself, leaving her writhing on the kitchen floor while her skin peels off in bloody ribbons. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says they toned down the actress’s screams in editing because they worried they were too upsetting.

Metafilter has a thread on the subject, and I can’t even bring myself to read the whole thing, let alone actually watch the YouTube videos. Thanks, Ontario government, for giving me ample reason to avoid Canadian television altogether for about four months!

So the new Zunes are out, and as competitors to the iPod lineup they look quite good. The in-player interface, often cited as a huge selling point for iPods, seems to work well on the Zune, and looks gosh darned pretty to boot. The price points are exactly the same, taking away the hard drive iPod’s price advantage over older DAPs like the Creative Zen Vision M (speaking of which, Creative, the Vision M is ancient—can we please, for the love of all that is holy, get a replacement already?). And the Zune doesn’t lock you into an iTunes ecosystem, the major reason why I will no longer consider buying an iPod.

Unfortunately, the Zune doesn’t lock you into iTunes because it locks you into a Zune ecosystem instead: the new Zune desktop software, which you must use in order to sync all your music with your Zune. Worse, the third-party software situation is even worse than the already abysmal iPod situation, in that there is none. It’s Zune software or nothing.

This might’ve been okay if the Zune software was powerful and flexible enough to basically allow you to do whatever you liked with your music, the way you could if you could just dump music files on your Zune via the filesystem. Unfortunately, it appears the Zune software is even more crippled than iTunes. This, along with Microsoft’s continuing hatred of any country that isn’t the United States (any attempt to even purchase a Zune via the new Zune Originals site, for example, is met with a lovely ACCESS DENIED message in Canada—I guess Microsoft really doesn’t want Canadian money), means the Zune 80 is off my list of MP3 players to purchase as well.

Which leaves exactly ZERO MP3 players I’d be willing to buy. There has been a shocking lack of development in the hard drive MP3 player world; it’s as if every company has suddenly decided there’s no market for people who want to carry around their entire music collection—or at least a significant subset thereof—in their pockets any more. The only companies that even offer 80/160GB variants are Apple, Microsoft, and Archos, and the Archos 605 Wifi is out because its touchscreen interface fails an extremely basic test: how do I play all my songs in Shuffle Mode? I couldn’t figure this out after ten minutes of poking around in the music interface. No. No. No.

Just as bad is the general tendency to lock people into software ecosystems that don’t meet people’s needs. The Zune software issue isn’t great, but it’s a hundred times worse because without substantial third-party or open source efforts to make software that can crack the Zune’s lockout, the Zune software is the only game in town. In other words, the deficiencies of the desktop software effectively become the deficiencies of the device itself. iTunes is more functional, but because of the nanny state it practically imposes on your music library, it’s equally untenable. And with Apple’s recent move to include a device hash specifically designed to lock the iPod to iTunes, third-party software suffered a setback. Though OSS projects like gtkpod cracked the new hash in a matter of days, the symbolic gesture isn’t lost on them. The makers of Amarok, another Linux iPod manager, basically said the only way to keep your device free of lockouts is to stop buying iPods.

I can see why you’d want to include your own software with your music player. From a new user standpoint it makes perfect sense; why tell people to move all their files using Explorer when having an all-in-one solution makes it easier for the novice to get started on moving music to their shiny new toy? What I don’t understand is why the major DAP manufacturers then take the extra step of locking out other software, so that the novice-user solution becomes the only solution. I’m not afraid of modifying my own ID3 tags; indeed, I prefer to do it that way so I don’t have to screw around with my computer’s music library just so all my singles are marked properly on my MP3 player as having no album. I’m not afraid of moving files by myself via Explorer. And even if you aren’t like me and you are afraid of doing all that on your lonesome, it’s not hard to look at software like Amarok and Sharepod and wonder if third-party developers can’t come up with solutions more palatable than iTunes of the Zune software.

To make an analogy to the web, it’d be as though Bill Gates or Steve Jobs said, “we’ve included this great web browser for you in Windows/OS X, and you cannot use any others.” Legions of Firefox users would then be stuck with Safari—or even worse, Internet Explorer 6. I rather like Firefox, thanks. I’d like to be able to manage my music the way I like as well, and the first company that makes an 80GB player that lets me do so will get my hard-earned money.

AVS Forum is a very popular site devoted to all things related to home theatre. You can research HDTV panels, look up TV tuner cards that pick up QAM, and stare in awe at pages upon pages of people detailing their lavish home theatre setups. It’s both a wealth of information and a home for home theatre aficionados and obsessives.

About the obsessives part: AVS Forum has shut down one of its subforums until further notice. It turns out the HD DVD and Blu-Ray forums were seeing more than their fair share of fanboyism run rampant:

We have seen members attacking other members not only in debate, which is the right way, but with physical threats that have involved police and possible legal action.

Threats of physical violence, all because some people don’t like your choice of HD format. I eagerly await the Apple-Microsoft wars of 2016.