Keynote: Steve Jobs Announces iPad Newton

Steve Jobs Debuts iPad Newton at Keynote

STEVE JOBS KEYNOTE, SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 2010 –

World, meet the new iPad Newton. As suspected at Patently Apple, which noted in March that Apple renewed their Newton trademark, Steve Jobs announced at a conference keynote that Apple has transformed the past into the future by introducing the iPad Newton.

The iPad Newton improves on a number of issues that are well-known to iPad 1 owners. The WiFi antenna has been relocated for stronger reception, and the screen sensitivity has improved for typing purposes. Jobs also pointed out the product’s “downwardly compatible” mode which converts the iPad Newton to a black-and-white PDA with a maximum resolution of 336 x 240 pixels and the inability to differentiate between letterforms. Although included mostly for nostalgia purposes, the black-and-white mode also enables the iPad Newton to run off four fully-charged AAA batteries – for up to 7 minutes, according the presentation notes at the keynote.

Steve Jobs described the iPad Newton as the “realization of the original Newton’s promise to bring awkwardly-sized personal computing to satchels and man-purses around the world.” Jobs continued his keynote by listing the six women’s purses that are large enough to accommodate an iPad Newton or original iPad without a tailor’s or leatherworker’s expertise.

“We sold the Newton, warts and all, for $1000 in 1993,” Jobs said. “We’re asking $600 for this sucker now. Who says our products are marked up beyond reason?”

Steve Jobs Keynotes Dissected

Okay, we admit that Steve Jobs hasn’t leaked any such thing. In a long summer we have to amuse ourselves with something, like an imaginary keynote.

Steve Jobs’ keynote technique is something of legend, actually. Known as a Stevenote, a Jobs keynote is greeted with sometimes slavish anticipation and can herald the advent of industry-changing technologies. The Steve Jobs keynote even has its own wikipedia page. Persuasive and commanding, Jobs often opens with sales figures and performs a mock close as the anticipation grows for the expected announcement. Then he’ll turn around and return to the mike with the phrase, “There is just one more thing…” which usually elicits raucous cheers.

It’s corporate theatre – people cheering for a product announcement they could probably recite with 99% accuracy – but it’s certainly more entertaining that most keynotes, and the audience is in on the joke.

Austin LAN Party Discounts

If you’re looking to get your game on with dozens of other Austin PC gamers this summer, you’re in luck. Mayhem Team, a very inclusive group of gamers operating under the admirable slogan “Character Above Skill,” is setting up a massive Austin LAN party at the Omni Hotel at Southpark, a good south-central location. The event, called “Operation Lone Star: 2010,” is July 9-11 and runs all weekend (Fri 12p-2a, Sat 8a-2a, Sun 8a-2p). It’s a bring-your-own-PC event with Battlefield Bad Company 2, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, and other Battlefield games all on the likely docket. Prizes will be raffled off.

Shawn, aka “Rip187,” has contacted us with a set of special offers for Austin gamers:

  • $20 for Daily Gamer admission (single day, access to Sapphire level prizes)
  • $75 for Friends of Mayhem (swag bag, $89/night group hotel rate, shuttle ride to the airport, commemorative shirt, entry into all vendor drawings, keepsake ID tag)
  • $150 for “Full Boat Experience” (all of the above plus dinner on Friday and Saturday).
  • $25 extra for DG or FoM will get you entry in all the special raffles.

If you like the experience of playing videogames in the company of others, a LAN party like this is worth checking out. The Omni is at 4140 Governor’s Row, 448-2222. The event is sponsored by a huge list of recognizable names, including Thermaltake, Discount Electronics, Alienware, Intel, Enermax, Crucial, and CoolerMaster. I’m sure some of their products will show up in the raffle. If you’re interested, check out their site or fill out the contact form here and we’ll forward the info on to Shawn.

Rapidfire Review: Fret Nice

Game Write-ups on Ritalin

Hello, game writer central denizens. We’re rolling out a quickie review tonight of the PS3 demo Fret Nice. For the time-constrained gamer, game demos are an ideal way of assessing the longevity of a videogame before the actual purchase. Game demos aren’t always a perfect reflection of the final product, but they’ll always capture the core gameplay, art style, and feel.

Wanna find out what a game writer and game designer thinks of a demo? You’re in the right place.

Fret Nice is a charming sidescroller with some unique art direction. The hook? It’s music-themed and you use a guitar controller to move your character through the level. Playing the right riffs zaps monsters and tilting the guitar triggers leaps.

I wanted to like this quirky game. Sadly, Fret Nice didn’t really impress me beyond the initial visuals. Here are the drawbacks:

  • I couldn’t figure out the correspondence between monster types and the riffs I was supposed to play. I sense there’s a cool gameplay mechanic here, but I couldn’t see it visually. As you start to play, a dialog bubble appears above your guitar-toting avatar, which looks a lot like the bulbous baddies. Notes look like eyes; if you play a lot of notes, your dialog bubble looks like a multi-eyed monstrosity… match the eyes and you zap the beast. This is a sly concept, but in practice I couldn’t get it to correspond. For a simple DLC game like this, it’s got to be obvious.
  • You can only play riffs when airborne. This is annoying and unintuitive. Save that for advanced levels, not for your game demo.
  • Your riffs sound horrible, like plunking on a toy keyboard. C’mon, guys. You’ve got all the power of this console, which is pumping out a plucky soundtrack, and you can’t synch that to something that sounds halfway cool? Gameplay fail. In a game visually and physically centered around music, playing riffs should be utterly gratifying, mirroring and amping up the audio already accompanying the game. It should rock! You should want to play riffs even when baddies aren’t on screen.
  • The controls suck. Tilting the guitar to jump is a funny idea at first, and it gets old after about the fifth jump. You can play the game with a regular controller, and you can probably reassign the jump function to a guitar button, but the mercury switch should not be the default.

Fret Nice is a Tecmo game for Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.

The Janus Fund Fee Game

janus fund feeThe Janus Performance Fee Proposal

The Janus fund fee (“performance fee”) recently pitched by Janus Funds is a good example of gamesmanship for higher stakes than seen in your typical RPG or RTS. We don’t usually talk about financial matters here at Game Writer Central, but I believe that it’s important to recognize game elements in all environments, especially when those elements are subtle and insidious.

Just like the manufactured financial instruments that were a large part of our recent economic meltdown, mutual fund fees are arbitrary structures that exist only on paper. Like the rules of a board game, mutual fund fee rules don’t come from any governing body — they’re agreed-upon between the shareholders and the fund management, and they can be changed by a simple vote. Like the Janus fund fee that’s being proposed for their Janus Forty, Janus Fund, Janus Global Opportunities, Janus Overseas, and Janus Twenty Funds.

Janus Funds wants to change the usual percentage management fund fee to a base fee plus or minus a performance-based amount. If they beat their benchmark index (an unmanaged group of similar investments), they get more money; if they don’t they get less.

The Janus Fee: Fair or Fail?

This sounds great until you realize that Janus is never going to pitch something that’s not in their best interests. A little investigation on the Janus fund fee proposal reveals it isn’t really in the shareholder’s best interests:

  • A simple Google search yielded this article from Smart Money that cites a NYU/Fordham study showing that performance-based fund fees actually caused fund managers to take abnormal risks. Unsurprisingly, when given short-term goals, people often sacrifice what’s best for all to grasp at the dangling carrot. If you ask me, this kind of thinking infects Wall Street in general: CEOs sacrifice the company’s well-being for quarterly earnings, because the CEO plans to cash out ASAP and ride his golden parachute away from the smoking ruins.
  • Benchmark indexes are by nature mixed bags. They’re representative of a certain slice of the market, and they contain dogs as well as stars. Although it’s true that many managed funds struggle to beat the S&P 500 on an year-over-year basis, sector indexes are often much more motley. Here’s an example: Janus Overseas Fund is benchmarked to an index that it consistently beats. Of the eight sample periods shown on Janus Funds’ own website, the Janus Overseas Fund beats the index six of eight times, including the entire past decade.

So… this is some interesting game design. If you’re an investor, do you want to change the game rules so that the game scalps up to 15% more off your hard-earned winnings with that kind of frequency? Or do you vote to keep the rules the same?

Of course, if fund management takes abnormal risks and performs badly, the fund could perform worse than its historical tracking and be penalized by the Janus performance fee. But if the Janus fund fee is ticked down, so are your earnings. That’s a lose-lose game, with you holding the bigger share of the risk.

Don’t Play Hooky On Fund Fee Proxies: Your Power Is Your Own

It’s my opinion that we Americans as a nation often fail to look out for our own best interests because it often requires a bit of painful research and thought. Whether it’s investigating the track record of a politician or taking the time to vote on school board elections, we don’t like doing our homework. And as a result, we get “gamed” by the entities we’re supposedly overseeing.

Keep this in mind the next time you get a boring fund fee proxy statement in the mail. If they’re asking for your signature, you have power. Signing blindly isn’t as dramatic as kneeling in fealty to a demonic end-game boss, but the consequences can be more dramatic for you and your family.

Blu-Ray Sale and Game Blowout at Hollywood Video

blu-ray-saleBlowout Blu-Ray and Game Sale as Hollywood Craters

Blu-rays, DVDs and videogames are bearing closeout sale tags at Hollywood Video as the crumbling of the movie rental business continues. We stumbled on this recently when rolling into an Austin-area Game Crazy, Hollywood’s game subsidiary, for the usual dose of videogame overexposure, and instead got a cold shot of business reality. The shelves were bare at Game Crazy, and next door at the Hollywood, all the games, Blu-rays, and DVDs were wearing eye-catching red sale tags.

This is actually the second bankruptcy filing for the country’s second-largest video and game rental company. Hollywood’s vomited red over the last several years, with revenues plummeting 30% from 2008 to 2009. They’re closing all of their locations in Austin, and two-thirds of all their locations, down from a peak of 4,500 in 2005.

Meanwhile, the #1 movie and game rental company, Blockbuster, is also riding the downward spiral, closing 1000 stores.

The game writer guy snagged several used games at tasty prices, but the movie offerings were weak. However, they also handed out flyers about an online DVD and Blu-Ray sale. If you’re not near a Game Crazy, try the online sale, where you can get Blu-ray movies for about $7 each, with free shipping, if you do it right.

Getting the Best of the Blu-Ray/Game Sale

The Hollywood Video site is behaving a little funky right now. When I first created my account, it showed me three addresses of complete strangers and asked me to pick my address. A little disturbing. And it showed an amazing talent for forgetting the 25% discount code that I got at the store.

So here’s what to do: pick out your DVDs and Blu-rays, and use the promo code 25PV. Make sure the code discount is being applied at every stage, because it will try to forget, the sneaky devil. After you’ve finished the transaction, go back in and edit your account. Delete your address entry so no one else can accidentally stumble on your personal information, Google map your house, and send ninjas to purloin your hard-won Blu-ray movies. My picks: Hellboy 2, The Simpsons Movie, and the Swedish vampire rework called Let the Right One In, which was a big hit at the last Fantastic Fest.

Today’s Prose Poem

A Bit of Marketing Writing

Writing about a light is today’s little gem. I bring you a prose poem by the good, if perhaps inebriated, people behind “Safety Warning Flashing Lamp”:

Especially for the children,

blind men

old men

in the morning

or evening

and the cloudy

day

when the bright is

not enough,

to increase

more safety.

writing-lite

Austin Game Tester, Part II

New Game Tester Job

We’ve got an urgent call for game testers to work at Bioware, one of the best studios in Austin.

“We are looking for 20 Game testers for Bioware. We need to hire them by Friday. There are onsite interview on this Friday for this job in our office and start on Monday 04/19 of next week.

“We need resumes with good game testing experience on Online MMOs. I need your Word resume and the cover letter elaborating your experience in the Game Testing-Online MMO game testing, games you have tested, your QA experience/skills etc. I would be happy to schedule your interview.

“The rate is $10/hr on W2. The start date is 04/19. (Work location- Domain Mall- North East Austin)”

The interview is Friday 12pm-5pm at 12007, N Research Blvd, Suite 103, Austin, TX 78759 (the Volt offices). If you’re interested please contact Manisha, mlele AT volt.com – don’t email us! And don’t go to the interview sessions without contacting Manisha first.

BUT if you do land this tasty game tester job, please let us know! It sounds like a good opportunity for the right people.

Game Designers Actually Write?

game-designer-writerGame Writers Aren’t the Only Developers Who Need Writing Skills

“Game designer” is an oft-misunderstood label that, like all labels, sometimes fails completely in describing the variety and depth of tasks tackled by the many talented people who fall into this bucket. Many times game consumers and friends have told me they thought game designers were the people who put faces on avatars and choose the colors for game environments. (I believe the confusion stems from the word “designer,” which evokes “graphic designer” and all things visual.)

Perhaps it’s a related consequence that few non-developers understand how much writing figures into the workload of a good game designer. Randy Smith’s latest blog at the excellent British game publication Edge Online addresses this, and the oxymoronic way in which we are often forced clumsily to use words to describe the indescribable. It’s a little-known fact that game job postings for designers specifically ask for English degrees. A game designer must be an idea generator, but she must also be an idea communicator. If a game designer can’t draw a vivid picture of her concept with words and the occasional diagram*, she can’t expect her teammates to bring that vision to life using often-recalcitrant tools and code.

* And yes, a good game designer needs the ability to use art tools to communicate visually as well as verbally.

Game Design Tips from Jordan Mechner

Game design pointers don’t get any better than when they come from Jordan Mechner, the man who designed Prince of Persia, The Last Express, and one of the main reasons I became a game designer, the elegant and stylish Karateka.

Here’s his blog on story-based game design. Today I’m giving props to design tip #6: “The more the player feels that the events of the game are being caused by his own actions, the better — even when this is an illusion.”

And yes, the new Prince of Persia movie looks promising. They scored Jake Gyllenhaal, Alfred Molina, and Ben Kingsley on the cast. It’s helmed by Mike Newell, whose resume is a lot more balanced than, say, Michael Bay’s (Newell’s work includes Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Love in the Time of Cholera, and the indie darling Four Weddings and a Funeral).