David Fries' WebLog

Moving to Japan

2005-11-21T11:57:00Z

So, it's been a long time since I've blogged, and I figured it's time for an update.

First of all, I no longer work on the CLR team. It was a great year and a half, but an opportunity came up that I just couldn't resist. I have transitioned to the Windows TV team (part of Media Center). Once again I find myself in a position where I have a lot to learn, but I think when I'm learning is when I'm happiest, so no complaints here.

This particular position is in Japan, and I'll be moving to Tokyo in a couple of months. Working in Japan has been something I've wanted to do for a while, and I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully my Japanese will be good enough for the work environment.

I'll probably add a new RSS category for TV to reflect this change. You might see some more activity on the Japan feed as well, but that may be more appropriate on a personal blog.

Anyway, wish me luck!

XBox 360 Japan Plan

2005-06-02T11:18:00Z

Here's an interview with Yoshihiro Maruyama and Mike Fischer, some of the big wigs for the XBox in Japan, about what efforts they are doing to make the XBox 360 more competetive in Japan. Having been in many a game store in Japan, and seeing the lack of shelf space devoted to XBox games, I'm hoping they can turn things around in the next generation. I believe their ideas are sound, but only time will tell.

Oh, and here's proof that Japanese XBox fans do exist.

Microsoft signs 3 Japanese developers for XBox 2 exclusive content

2005-03-03T05:23:00Z

This is probably the most exciting bit of news I've heard about XBox 2 yet. While I love Halo as much as the next guy, I sometimes prefer to play a nice epic RPG like Final Fantasy. In fact, the sole reason that I own a PS2 is because of Final Fantasy. Well, it looks like the man behind the Final Fantasy series himself, Mr. Hironobu Sakaguchi is going to be making not one, but two RPG's for the next generation XBox.

As if that weren't enough to make you start drooling, Microsoft announced today that 2 more Japanese industry giants, Yoshiki Okamoto and Tetsuya Mizuguchi, are also signed up to develop exclusive content for the next XBox. Okamoto is responsible for the Street Fighter and Resident Evil series, as well as a slew of other Capcom titles, and Mizuguchi has developed such games as Sega Rally Championship, Rez and Space Channel 5.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a turnaround in the Japanese market for the XBox platform. At the very least, they've made this gamer a happy one.

Sources: Gamasutra, XBox.com

NGEN in Whidbey - Overview

2005-02-25T23:48:00Z

Here's Reid Wilkes' post about his article in MSDN magazine on NGEN in Whidbey:

http://blogs.msdn.com/reidlw/archive/2005/02/19/376800.aspx

...and here's the article itself:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/04/NGen/default.aspx

This is an EXCELLENT overview of what is new in NGEN in Whidbey.

Now that the cat's out of the bag, you can expect some more ngen related content from me in the near future. (In between bouts of Halo 2, I find time to do a bit of testing of NGEN)

XBox Live: 1.4 million strong

2005-01-21T08:00:00Z

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jan05/01-20XboxLive04BenchmarkPR.asp

Some other interesting stats from the press release:

There are now more than 200 Xbox Live -enabled titles, making it the richest library of online console games available today
Halo 2 has sold more than 6.4 million copies worldwide.
The Xbox Live community has logged a record-breaking 91 million hours playing "Halo 2" since the title's launch.
There have been close to 61 million logged sessions for Halo 2, with an average session lasting nearly 92 minutes.

More stats (not from the article)

XBox Live Subscribers were broke 1 million on July 15th. That means that there has been over 400,000 new subscribers in 6 months.
Doing a little arithmetic, we can see that 6.4 million copies of Halo 2 minus 1.4 million XBox subscribers means that there are 5 million people out there who own Halo 2, but aren't playing it on Live. C'mon folks, what are you waiting for?!

XBox Live: On the Road

2005-01-03T23:30:00Z

Over the holidays, I went back home to visit my family. My little sister has an XBox, Halo 2, and DSL, as well as a free trial to XBox Live that came with Halo 2. However, the XBox is located in a part of the house that doesn't have any phone jacks nearby, so she'd never taken the time to hook it up to XBox Live. I decided to rectify this situation by bringing the wireless bridge I use at home (Linksys WET11) with me when I visited.

We got the security settings changed on the WET11, signed up for our free trial of XBox Live, and were soon happily online taking on the world. So far, so good.

However, after a while, my sister went off to do something else, and I decided I wanted to try to add my Gamertag to her XBox to see if anyone on my friends list was online. I exited to the dashboard to try to add my gamertag, but unfortunately, it kept asking me to create a new account, and didn't seem to give me the option of registering an existing one. I ended up turning off the XBox and spending time with my family. I know, what a totally lame way to spend the holidays. *grin*

This post was originally going to be a feature request for roaming profiles for XBox Live. However, I did some research, and it turns out that you can already do this, by saving your XBox Live account to a memory unit.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/live/acc-memory.htm

I really wished I would have known this before I left for vaction. It would be nice if you could download an existing profile to an XBox via the XBox Live service, without having to mess with memory units.

Actually, there is. I did some more research and found this page:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/live/acc-recovery.htm

Apparently, you can use the account recovery feature of XBox Live to move accounts between XBoxes. Sure, you invalidate your account on your original XBox when you do this, but you can just run the account recovery tool again when you get back home to restore the account.

Anyway, this caused me some grief, so I figured I'd post this in the hopes that it helps someone else.

EDIT: Wow, someone on the XBox team must read this blog. 1 day after my post, I see this up on the XBox site:

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/live/about/features-roaming.htm

XBox Live traffic quintuples after Halo 2 launch

2004-12-20T22:59:00Z

Here's an graphical look at XBox Live traffic after Halo 2 launched.

Source: http://www.sandvine.co.uk/solutions/pdfs/Gaming_trend_analysis_haloII_traffic.pdf

Not like this is something we didn't know was going to happen, but interesting nonetheless...

Halo 2 stats in Excel

2004-12-07T16:15:00Z

I just saw this in the Seattle PI today.

"Microsoft Notebook: Tool connects 'Halo 2' with ... Excel?"

Using the RSS feed that http://www.bungie.net provides, Microsoft Excel Program Manager Sam Radakovitz was able to create a better way to check out your Halo 2 stats. (Well, the Game Viewer is pretty darn cool as well).

Per game, you see displayed in Pie Graph form how much you contributed to your team in Score, Kills, and my best category, Deaths.

You can also check out Kills per Map, Kills per Game Type, etc.

Try it yourself!

Jason Zander and the CLR Tour on Channel 9

2004-11-23T22:18:00Z

My favorite quote:

"Your testers must be amazing developers."

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=30187

Halo 2 Sales in Japan

2004-11-19T03:22:00Z

For the week of 11/8 - 11/14, Master Chief worked his way into 37,507 Japanese homes, placing Halo 2 in 3rd place on the all console charts. Not bad, considering that the XBox console market share is....shall we say, a bit small.

English: http://www.m-create.com/eng/e_ranking.html

Japanese, complete with sales figures: http://www.m-create.com/jpn/s_ranking.html

Just be thankful you didn't have to pay $95 for your copy of Halo 2.