Archive for June, 2008

If you graced us with your presence over the last few days you might have stumbled across our last post – Ten Reasons to Skip Tivo’s Aussie launch. In the interest of fairness, and with less than a day until all is revealed, The Incomplete Gamer brings you Ten Reasons to forget everything we told you before. Some might call that fickle. We like to think of it as balanced coverage.

1. It just works. While we praise and recommend Tivo with an almost missionary zeal, all the while basking in the warmth of its technological wizardry; our two Series 1 Tivo units quietly go about their business recording our favourite shows and listing them for our viewing pleasure on the ‘Now Showing’ screen. Tivo is our best friend, no doubt about it, but it’s the end result – the recordings – that capture our hearts and minds. Like a kettle that boils water or a toaster that toasts, Tivo is a product that does what it was engineered to do but, in the case of Tivo, in an intuitive, reliable and intelligent fashion that very few products, past or present, have managed.

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It’s coming. Seven promised Australia that Tivo would launch ahead of the Beijing Olympics and that’s precisely the plan according to recent reports, although at this rate it looks like Tivo might be taking up it’s position on the starting blocks Harvey Norman shelves, not much before the Opening Ceremony commences. The Gadget Guy reports that online sales will commence on July 15, followed by in-store sales commencing July 28. We’ll know more come the official launch this Tuesday according to the good folks at Hydrapinion.

The big question of course, is not so much when it will launch, but rather should you join the ranks of the early adopters and take up your place in the front the Tivo lovers queue at your local HN Superstore? Today, The Incomplete Gamer gives you ‘Ten Reasons to Skip Next Months Tivo Launch in Australia’. Tune in Monday and we’ll argue the affirmative with ‘Ten Reasons to be First in Line’.

‘Ten Reasons to Skip Next Months Tivo Launch in Australia’

1: Sticker Shock.

Forget 1 Reason. Try 700. With a rumoured RRP of $700, at first glance the Australian HD Tivo is not quite the bargain its US cousin is. Stateside, the HD Tivo is currently selling on Amazon for only US$229.97. However Tivo comes to Australia with no ongoing subscription fees. Tivo offers the same deal in the US in the guise of ‘Product Lifetime Service‘ which will currently set you back a further US$399. Total damage for the US version converted into Aussie dollars – A$656.26. The good news then is that for once we’re not a victim of price gouging. The bad news…we’re still facing a steep admission price. While charging on-going subscription fees would have been a hard sell in the Australian market for a Tivo boasting only free-to-air content recording capabilities, the up-side of such a pricing model would have meant a lower priced HD Tivo.

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From Columbus Ohio comes news that video games can save your life. True! An online report from NBC 4, reported that “children playing video games escaped gunfire”. The implication being that the act of playing video games somehow saved their lives. No they weren’t taking refuge behind the Xbox 360 power brick.

The report goes on to say that two men were struck by gunfire and taken to hospital, and the police reported that “things could have been worse as there were children at home playing PlayStation”. Possibly – and this is just conjecture on my part – what saved the kids was the fact that they were inside the house, and not out on the porch and in the direct line of fire. If we want to hand out praise, there were probably a dozen kids in the street who were also ’saved’. Johnny, forced inside to the toilet by his weak bladder, the big-boned kid from across the road who’d ducked inside for another chocolate dairy snack…you get the idea.

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Another study, this time out of Wheeling, West Virginia in the USA. Students at Wheeling Jesuit University completed a study into the analgesic properties of video games. The study results indicate that playing sports or fighting video games produces a dramatic level of pain distraction. Now I can see why this study might have been embraced by at least some of the students at WJU.

“OK, we’re going to get half of the class over there playing some excellent sports and fighting video games, then the rest of us are going to attach electrodes to your nipples, dial up the current and then ask whether it hurts.” Sure it sounds like a typical drunken night of video gaming that got a bit out of hand, but by all accounts this was an honest to goodness genuine academic study, complete with a Professor with an amusing name. Director of Undergraduate Research, Associate Professor of Psychology, Dr Bryan Raudenbush, says the study results suggest that video games could help distract patients from painful injections or dental work.

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If there’s one thing we’re lacking at the Incomplete Gamer, it’s time. Time to read, time to play, time to consume…and perhaps most importantly, time to complete ‘Incomplete Gamer’ reviews.

Of course, time’s the one thing we can’t find on Ebay, although a quick Ebay search does  turn up a BACK TO THE FUTURE Flux Capacitor Official Prop Replica for only $350.  Had you been quicker off the mark you could have hit up US seller studbold1969 who was selling a ‘how to build a flux capacitor’ guide for the bargain price of $US20 (parts not included). The item description read ‘serious buyers only’ which you’d think would rule out the vast majority of interested bidders!.

While we’ve passed up on the weird science for now, The Incomplete Gamer did stumble across an equally tempting buy on Ebay the other day and in the interests of serving our readers, and, in the interest of hopefully saving some of that all important ‘time’, we successfully bid for the said item.

The Neuros MPEG4 Video Recorder 2 won’t transport you back in time, but it does promise to save you time and into the bargain, produce a pretty decent encoding of Back to the Future for you to enjoy on your PSP, Video Ipod, Handheld or Mobile Phone.

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Video gaming has attracted some favourable press over the past couple of years. It seems this often maligned and misunderstood social pastime may have some redeeming qualities after all. And we’re not just talking about games to make you smarter. How about improving your vision, providing relief from pain and even saving your life?

We’ve all heard about the popularity of Nintendo’s brain training games, if not experienced them firsthand. Basically, these games help improve your mental agility, firstly testing you to see how smart you are, and then continually testing you with sets of exercises to monitor you for signs of improvement. I’m not sure how I feel about these types of games. At least when playing a more traditional video game you can blame failure on a bad control system, or an unforgiving AI. Flunk these and you’re basically a dummy.

So how about claims of video games that can improve impaired vision? The boffins from the Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VRART) at the University of Nottingham, England, have come up with a video game that cures ‘Lazy Eye’.

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Talk of in-game advertising is enough to get gamers frothing at the mouth. No one wants ads popping up unannounced and unwelcome when they’re in the midd…Frothing at the Mouth. You need Aunty-Biotics new Froth-Be-Gone Oral Sand Paste. Where was I? In-game advertising. It’s enough to get gamers manning the barricades with all the fervour of the Friends of the ABC’ protesting budget cuts to their beloved public broadca…Tonight on The Bill, DC Nadir expresses doubts about whether this weeks storyline is original. Acting Superintendent Amanda Prosser assures him it’s just a bad case of déjà vu. Sorry, I keep losing my train of thought. A report just out by the folks at PricewaterhouseCoopers, puts a billion dollar price tag on the in-game advertising sector couple and projects strong growth in the coming years.

According to the ‘Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2008-2012‘ by 2012 the sector will be valued at $2.3 billion. This is good news for video game publishers, ever anxious to find new revenue streams, the advertising execs anxious to flog more ads, and the confused CEO’s still wondering what happened to all the people who used to watch advertising the old fashioned way; you remember, between breaks in the free-to-air TV shows.

So the bean counters are excited and the gamers are a little agitated. Frankly I don’t see what all the fuss is about. If one of the goals of video game design is a quest for greater realism, then the inclusion of real world advertising surely only adds to the immersion.

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There are a lot of good reasons to be revisiting Capcom’s Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max, the Street Fighter port released for the PSP back in 2006. Capcom celebrated its 25th birthday just a couple of weeks ago on June 11th. In May this year Capcom announced what we’ all suspected. Street Fighter 4; already heading to the arcades later this year, would also be making its way to PS3, Xbox360 and PC as well. Then there’s Kristin Kreuk. She’s still the best reason to watch Smallville, and currently she’s filming the latest Street Fighter movie – Street Fighter – the Legend of Chun Li, in Bangkok. Lastly, Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max was the first game ever reviewed by The Incomplete Gamer, albeit for another gaming website. As our first piece of review code, the UMD takes pride of place in the TIG lab.

But a word of warning. while the following review holds a special place in our heart, there’s nothing new here that we haven’t all seen before. If Street Fighter was a singer and not a game franchise it would have retired to Vegas a long time ago, where it could perform the same routine seven nights a week to its loyal fans.

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This month, Capcom’s Blog ran a Street Fighter promotion; the prize up for grabs, the dubious opportunity to get your pixilated mug shot transposed onto the body of a bystander in the up-coming Street Fighter IV video game. Lame. Where’s the glamour, the excitement, the money. Capcom made ¥74.542 billion in 2006. Surely there’s enough small change under the couch cushions to spring for a more exciting prize. Make me a fully animated fighter who talks like me. Fly me to the game launch in Tokyo. Don’t make me a inanimate background character that I’ll never notice ’cause I’m too busy mashing buttons. To be fair, Capcom is not the first video gaming giant with a stingy or unimaginative promotions department.

A while back, the Stars and Stripes (a daily newspaper published for the US military and their families) reported details of Sony’s promotion of the then new turn-based combat, PSP game, Field Commander. Sony ran a competition with copies of Field Commander on offer. If you think coming up with twenty five words or less why you love product X is a bitch, try this contest on for size. Just to be in the running to win a copy of Field Commander you needed to be serving overseas in the US military. And if the chances of being stuck in a war zone, or at best, a very unfriendly neighbourhood weren’t bad enough, instead of twenty five words, Sony wants an essay of up to five hundred words. I don’t mean to be unkind but if you could churn out a decent prize-winning five hundred word essay, you would probably not have enlisted in the first place and opted instead for a safe desk job back home in the States!

Frankly I think it would be a lot less trouble just to rent the sucker. I didn’t think anyone would actually be bothered going to the trouble of entering the competition, but a former colleague of mine, First Corporal Hector de la Garza, a US Marine currently serving in Iraq, sent me a copy of his entry, which I’ve printed below.

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You’ve got to figure that, two years on, poor old Steve Allcock, who was sacked by a Lancashire Bus company for playing his PSP while driving the bus, has been punished enough. But you’d be wrong.

Problem is, we badly wanted an excuse to revisit a post that first appeared in March 2006 over at PALGN. Blame it on our love of Lego, and puerile toilet humour if you must, but we like to think of this post as a public service. In order to prevent any further embarrassment to Steve and anyone else out there who’s a little confused about what society expects of them, we’d like to remind you of scenarios and environments were you should avoid playing the PSP or your handheld of choice.

You might think of it as reheated left-overs, environmentally correct recycling, or a slow news day. Here in the TIG lab, We call it Classic Incomplete Gamer.

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