3D, former natal and move

The current fad with 3D seems ongoing. I showed my old dinosaurs and speed cd-roms to a friend. They showed stereoscopic 3D on the PC. Both are from around 1996. I'm utterly amazed how many people are buying into this. This tech will not impress me until I have my very own holodeck.(That's probably a viacom trademark there.)

Seriously though: How often would you care enough to put on those glasses? For a really good movie that implements it well, sure. For normal TV shows? not likely. For the news? probably not.

The how is also very important. There are still movies, and many more games that do not have well worked out surround sound. So in how many cases will 3D visuals become either niche or done half arsed?

The move, natal/kinect and Wii all do their best to get you more actively involved with your games. I can see real benefits for parties, or to make certain work outs more entertaining.(Working out is good for you, but it can get ever so boring doing the same thing over and over without distraction.)
More than one birthday party has included Mario kart, just dance, or sports resort.

Now as fun as that can be there is also a drawback. After a long day at work sitting down to watch a movie or play a game sounds far more appealing. When being sick I like to play a game once in a while from my bed.

That's not counting the large number of problems relating to disabled gamers.
You can do a lot with custom gear, but if your body is the limiting factor in a direct sense that could ruin it for some.

The new Zelda is a good case in point: Based on the demonstration it might be very hard to play for me. I need to sit close to the screen. Now most Wii games that rely on wiimote use small gestures or pointing. I resolve this by putting the sensor bar somewhere else and pointing in that direction. However depending on how big the movements need to be in this game I could run into a space problem. After all, sitting next to the screen and doing swordplay is asking for a broken TV.

The 3DS is.. hm, not sure. With one eye the 3D part is out. The better hardware is nice. why there is no XL version at launch is something I would love to know.

In the end it will depend on the games as always, but also if they rely on/force the 3d gimmick too much. If there is one gripe i have with the Wii, it's lacking classic controller support.(New Super Mario bros wii leaps to mind.)

Thoughts on DRM

Lately I've started to notice a certain trend with my PC games: Either I end up going for the (used) console version, or I remove the activation/wait for it to be removed by the devs before buying.

Bioshock/Spore had horrid drm with activation limits that caused uproar. Mass effect was slightly better, but not great.

These last 2 or so years things have gotten worse: Ubisoft has it's hated always online scheme, and EA loves their EA account/code link combined with disk checks. Preorder bonuses that unlock main game elements, or are limited to certain regions/stores are another annoyance.

Borderlands really frustrated me for having Securerom in the DLC on steam.
Not in the least because I had to go into each DLC's sub folder to activate them on their own. Trying to go into a DLC location from within borderlands without doing this, would either completely hang the system, or after a very long load pop the activation prompt that blocked task switching.
Now since in steam the keys are found on the client's overlay, I could not access them. (I could have written them down on paper, but you'd have to know before hand.)



This is a generally bad trend in my opinion: Steam has had several games with external drm. (A somewhat obscure thing to do since purchases are linked to your account, and steam itself is a drm system.)
I've never bought games on demand from windows live marketplace, but something tells me it's the same there.

In an ideal world you could revoke these activations by removing the game. This does assume the uninstaller also revokes. (Not always the case) It also assumes you aren't forced to reinstall because of some hardware/software failure that prevented you from getting back into windows.

Now with some luck contacting support can fix this. That poses another question: What happens when I want to replay these games in 10 years? I still play old games from the 90's and sometimes even a earlier. The closest I've ever come to being stopped by copy protection was a misplaced manual. What happens with these systems when the companies are gone, or bought up? Or when they take the activation servers offline without notice/due to the company going bust etc?

Having a paranoid thought it occurs that this would push more PC gamers to consoles. Where both control, and profit margins are greater. On the other hand, these systems are alos popping up there. And in some ways those are even more dependant on their networks for things like patches and dlc. At least on PC we can usually make local backups.

How much worse can it get before people refuse to put up with it? If you look at the ACTA and copyright reform debates one could say quite a bit worse. The apple thing doesn't make me optimistic either. It's ironic: Microsoft was "evil" for their activation/license schemes. Now those are mild compared to what game devs put on their stuff. (So far windows does not stop working whenever an Internet connection has hickups.)

Since I just said something reasonable about MS I need to lie down for a while. ;-)