David Fries' WebLog : Misc

Microsoft signs 3 Japanese developers for XBox 2 exclusive content

davfries — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 05:23:00 GMT

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

XBox Live: 1.4 million strong

davfries — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 08:00:00 GMT

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

davfries — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 23:30:00 GMT

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

davfries — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:59:00 GMT

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

davfries — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 16:15:00 GMT

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!

Halo 2 Sales in Japan

davfries — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 03:22:00 GMT

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.

Lazy Mail

davfries — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 03:19:00 GMT

Have you ever sent out an email saying:
"Hey, check out the new Britney Spears video <hypothetical link/>! It's HOT HOT HOT!"

Only instead of sending the mail to your buddy Alan, you sent it to the "All Employees" alias?

Then you frantically send out a "Recall" mail, which simply attracts more attention to your original blunder than you would have gotten had you simply done nothing.

My solution (since I'm always sending out Britney Spears videos) is to use an (apparently) little know feature of Outlook.

In Outlook: Tools->Options->Mail Setup Tab
Uncheck the "Send immediately when connected" checkbox.
Click the "Send/Receive" button
Check the checkbox for "Schedule an automatic send/receive every [5] minutes"

Now I have up to 5 minutes to open my outbox and save my career. Sure, I'm not always the first person to chime in on the latest email thread, but 5 minutes won't make that much of a difference.

Besides, if you really need to respond ASAP, you can always click on the Send/Receive button on the Outlook toolbar to send immediately.

Other benefits:

Emails come in only once every 5 minutes, so distractions are not constant.
While waiting for your answer to a thread to send, someone else might have responded with the same answers. You can delete my thread and save everyone time.

Now if I could only figure out how to get Outlook to fetch my morning toast for me...

Bungie.net website revamped for Halo 2

davfries — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:51:00 GMT

With all the excitement surrounding Halo 2's release, it seems that the new features added to Bungie.net's website have been overlooked. A co-worker told me about it, and I am now in awe.

Once you finish a game over XBox live, all your stats are uploaded to the servers. Sure, you get all the standard stuff like number of kills, deaths, etc, but there is much, much more to be explored here.

Halo 2 introduces an experience system so that you get to play against players of a similar skill level. You can view your current experience level in each of the different game types on the Bungie website, as well as your ranking compared to your friends.

There are also "medals" which are awarded for doing specific actions in the game, like carrying a flag, planting a bomb, killing the flag carrier, etc. It's nice finally getting credit for something other than kills!

In addition, you really should check out the new "Game Viewer". The Game Viewer shows you graphically who you killed, from where, to where, and vice versa. If you can't figure out where you keep getting sniped from, this is the tool to expose the assasin.

Here's an article that has screenshots, or you could just go ahead and create an account on the site to experience it for yourself!

Super Tuesday

davfries — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:02:00 GMT

Sure, electing the leader of the free world may seem important, but I think this is the day that the "Youth Vote" has been waiting for. (Good idea having the election BEFORE Halo 2's launch date, rather than ON launch day!)

Yes, my friends, it's time for representatives from the Red and Blue states to come together and let off some of that steam. It's easy! Just choose your team color based on your political leanings and start slinging the mud (among other projectiles). Hey, it's a lot easier to plasma grenade your rivals than actually engage in honest debate with them.

Luckily, in Halo 2, everyone can agree on one thing: the Death Penalty.

I'll see you guys on Live.

Gamertag: Chinpokomon

Security Report on Vulnerability Scanners

davfries — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:43:00 GMT

Hey, my buddy Joe wrote Security Innovations' Security Report this month. It has all sorts of information about vulnerability scanners, how hackers use them, and how you can help keep your network secured.

Could be useful for those of you with a home wireless network!

Vacation, all I ever wanted...

davfries — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 04:23:00 GMT

I'm off to Japan next monday for 4 weeks, so I most likely won't be blogging much, if at all. I'm sorry to both of my readers for the inconvenience. :)

Back in my day...

davfries — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 01:00:00 GMT

... we didn't get iPods just for being freshman. We were happy with our shaving kits, Pert Plus, and chewing gum.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5469970/

Halo 2 and XBox Live

davfries — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:11:00 GMT

With the release of Halo 2 on Nov. 9th, I'm looking forward to breaking out my XBox Live Communicator once again, and joining the ranks of the online warriors. (Actually, my dog chewed up my Communicator, so I've got this cell phone adapter headset that doesn't quite work right...)

I was one of the early adopters of XBox Live. Unreal Tournament was a blast. I loved sitting there in my living room, with my XBox wirelessly hooked up (thanks to a Linksys WET-11). Of course, my wife was always looking at me like I was crazy as I verbally laid the smackdown on my foes.

I recently haven't played XBox Live that much. I think there are a few factors contributing to this:

Time: Definitely the #1 limiting resource.
Single Player Games: I still enjoy playing single player games like Knights of the Old Republic. I've been playing single player video games for most of my life, and that's going to be a tough habit to break
Don't Take Candy from Strangers: I'm ok with playing with people that I don't know, but in that situation, I'd prefer to be in the “Every man for himself“ type of game. Teaming up with strangers....somewhat frightens me. Maybe I'll get over that in time. Along the same lines, most of my friends aren't online, so most of the time I'm forced to play with strangers..
I suck at video games: Not really, but when I play online, I certainly feel that way. Everyone is so good online that I don't even stand a chance.

Why I think Halo 2 is going to change the XBox Live experience:

People will make the time for Halo 2. I still occasionally go to LAN parties to play Halo, more than 2 years after its release. Halo 2 is going to make finding a pickup game much more convenient than lugging that 2 ton piece of hardware to your friend's house.

Let's face it. Everyone is going to have Halo 2. No longer will XBox Live be limited to the L33t. You will have ordinary players (like myself), who can join the fun and know that no matter what, there will always be someone worse (unlike today, when I am always the worst player). Also, more of my friends will be online, which means I'm more likely to be online as well. Which means I can actually play some of the team games with people I know, instead of that guy who keeps breathing heavily into the microphone. :)

Nov. 9th, 2004. I'll see you online! Go easy on my, alright?