Gareth Jones

On March 25th, 2011 Nintendo officially launched the 3DS in Europe at a price point of £229. It was launched at midnight and after spending the run-up thinking I’d buy one within the first couple of weeks, at around 11.30pm the night before I decided to drive down to ASDA in St. Helens to pick one up at launch.

I got there at 11.55pm and was the only person there waiting to buy one. Odd, I thought, but nevertheless great news as a) I wouldn’t have to wait for long and b) I’d be guaranteed to get one. I picked up the graphite version with 6 games – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, PES 2011, Super Monkey Ball 3D, Super Street Fighter IV, Ridge Racer 3D and Rayman 3D. Only Street Fighter stood out as a must-have game with the others all being a bit average, but with nothing else available for the console beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Around midnight just as I was paying for my items another guy turned up to buy one, followed by a couple of teenagers who also picked up a unit. It was hardly the rush that the gaming press had been predicting.

Six months on and the games haven’t really picked up. Apart from Zelda and maybe Resident Evil there hasn’t really been anything worth buying, which is crazy considering this is the follow-up to the DS – the most successful console in recent history.

The woeful supply of games and the steep price point of the console were obviously having an impact on sales because on July 28th Nintendo announced a global price drop of around 30%. Acknowledging the console’s performance as a relative failure (though it has still sold a significant number in its own right), Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and other senior management also handed themselves significant pay cuts – an example that we can only wish many a banker would follow.

Such a drop in price so soon after launch is unprecedented and was a sign that Nintendo officially recognised that things were not going according to plan. In an attempt to make up for the ~£100 extra that early adopters had paid for the console Nintendo came up with the Ambassador Programme which entitled users to 20 free game downloads on the Virtual Console. Although better than nothing, many 3DS early adopters – myself included – would have preferred a refund in all honesty.

As if the 3DS’ first six months on the market haven’t been disastrous enough, Nintendo has today announced a new peripheral that adds a second analogue stick to the console. It requires its own AAA battery and will be released on the 10th of December in Japan for around £12.

Home consoles have made use of dual analogue sticks for some years now. The idea first appeared on the N64 in 1996 but was refined to the more familiar design that we have today with the original PlayStation’s Dual-Shock controllers in 1997. Since then pretty much every home console has had them – even the Wii on its classic controllers.

In 2004 Sony released the original PlayStation Portable (PSP), and since then every time rumours have circulated of a redesign or a revamp the gaming community has pretty much begged for a second analogue stick as it makes FPS games in particular a lot easier to play. Sony resisted such calls throughout the lifetime of the PSP but has thankfully implemented the feature in their follow-up, the PlayStation Vita.

So, since the games industry has been asking Sony for dual analogue sticks on its PSP for seven years, one would have thought that any competing company who had a hand-held console in development would have made sure to include such a feature on their new hardware. A company that has led an industry worth billions both with its home console and hand-held would surely have its finger on the pulse and any widely-requested feature like this was bound to make it into the new hardware.

In a move that was either stupidly incompetent or cleverly deliberate, Nintendo chose to ignore seven years of such requests and include just one analogue stick on its 3DS. Spectators were forced to conclude that Nintendo’s intention all along was to use the bottom, touch-sensitive screen as a second analogue as some games had done on the original DS. However, the launch of this new peripheral demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the lack of a second analogue stick on the 3DS was in fact an act of stupid incompetence after all, because Nintendo has now decided that a second physical stick is so important that it justifies an add-on that not only has no elegant way of communicating with the console (there are no expansion ports on the 3DS so it will probably use the infra red port which would also explain why it needs its own battery), but when held symmetrically will shift the screen over to the left of the user’s field of view.

Shifting the console over to the left like this could be a problem because the 3D effect on the 3DS only works in a very narrow viewing angle and games that require motion controls can already push the user outside of it with enthusiastic use. By shifting the screen over by an inch or so the angle will be even tighter on one side.

The botched, home-made look of the console with the expansion attached is a far cry from the simple elegance of the DS Lite (though the original DS of course was no looker) and would suggest that a 3DS redesign is on its way; one that includes the second analogue stick in a more elegant fashion as should have been the case the first time round. This will probably be announced just after Christmas after Nintendo has cleared as much original 3DS stock as possible beforehand.

With that in mind it seems even more foolish for Nintendo to reveal the expansion now as it can only serve to dampen the sales figures that the console is getting since the price drop. It would have made much more sense to keep it under wraps until after Christmas when the redesign is unveiled, maximising sales of the current design for the holiday and providing Nintendo with an elegant new design to market while offering early adopters a way to play the games that will obviously take full advantage of the second stick. As it is, Nintendo is left with an ugly contraption to promote as its primary offering for three months to an audience that would surely rather wait for the inevitable redesign – while Sony will no doubt start marketing its drop-dead gorgeous PS Vita to stick the boot in.

Nintendo again only has itself to blame for the market so confidently predicting a redesign. For years they have capitalised on selling multiple revisions of their previous hand-helds as a means of generating new money for old rope. The DS gave way to the DS Lite which gave way to the DSi which shared the market with the DSi XL. Each version has also shipped in numerous colours and special editions, and even before the DS we had exactly the same scenario with the Game Boy. But never before has a redesign come so quickly after the original machine’s launch.

With such a long list of mistakes and poor decisions relating to the 3DS coupled with the poor response to the Wii’s follow-up the Wii-U, it seems that Nintendo has been riding high on a wave of success for the last five years through happy accidents and good fortune rather than any kind of deliberate strategy. I just don’t see how one company could have got things so right with one console and so wrong with another if the decisions behind them both were all deliberate calculations and part of the same overall vision. Rather than outwitting their competitors with genius decisions it seems Nintendo simply stumbled upon an open goal by accident and happily took advantage of it. With that once-open goal now packed full of other players and Nintendo left relying on outplaying the rest of the field for victory, it seems they’re not quite the gaming gurus they’ve made themselves out to be.

So, where does this leave the current 3DS? With several companies delaying software releases due to the poor console sales which are themselves a result of a lack of quality games (and its previous high price point), the console now faces an up-hill struggle to secure critical mass in the run-up to Christmas. It’s unlikely that the 3DS could completely fail with the vast reserves of cash that Nintendo has amassed over the last 5 years, but I’d say it’s highly unlikely to replicate the success of its predecessor because as lucky as Nintendo seems to have been over the last 5 years – and in light of their recent form it does appear that luck factored significantly in their success – everyone’s luck runs out eventually.

Today marks two weeks since Learnalot‘s launch and during that time almost 40 UK schools have signed up for trials. While 40 schools only represents a fraction of the total number of schools in the country, it is already interesting to read the wide range of feedback that we’re getting from teachers who are using our software.

Most of the feedback we’re receiving is incredibly positive. The quality of the software, the range of scenarios, the graphics, the sound, the supporting documents – everything is going down well. There is a discrepancy in one area of feedback however, and that is the difficulty of the questions.

While most schools seem to feel that we’ve pitched the questions at just the right level, some have asked us to make the resources harder and one has even asked us to make it possible to disable the hints function and force the students to work it all out for themselves without any help whatsoever. Brutal!

On the other hand, we’ve also received feedback that the questions in what is actually our easiest resource – Britain’s Got Power – are too difficult and that their students are struggling with it.

While I have no intention of naming individual schools, teachers or students, the pattern in the feedback is certainly worth discussing and exploring in more detail so that we can better understand exactly why this discrepancy exists and whether there is anything that we, as an educational software provider, should do about it.

Although the data and questions within the activities are randomised, they’re always within sensible parameters and as such the range of difficulty for each student can, I think, be considered negligible and therefore be rounded up to a constant. So if the difficulty of the software is a constant, why are we being asked by some teachers to make the software easier and to make it harder by others?

There could be a variance in the abilities of students, of course. While some students excel in maths, others excel in other areas and can find maths problematic. But such variance would be extraordinary on a school level and is much more likely to exist on an individual level with every school in the land being home to students on either end of the spectrum.

Could it be student age – and by loose extension, ability and/or experience? Taking extreme cases, one school that thinks we have it just right has students a full year younger than another school that thinks we need to make the resources easier, and although this is an extreme in one direction, there are no extremes in the opposite direction as would be expected so we can probably discount student age as a plausible factor as well.

What about student sex? Whilst the school that most strongly believes that our resources are too difficult is a girls’ school, other girls’ schools have not said anything at all about the resources being too difficult. Similarly, the schools who want us to make the resources more difficult are made up of both boys and girls in fairly equal measure, and still more schools that are made up of mostly boys have said that they feel the difficulty is spot-on as it is.

Just to remove all doubt that student sex is not a factor, in a recent study published in Science, Professor Janet Hyde used data from around 7 million US children in 10 US states from grade 2 through to grade 11 and showed that the difference in performance between the two sexes was negligible and that while boys were marginally ahead in some states, girls were marginally ahead in others.

Our own results, though obviously from a much smaller pool, would seem to corroborate this finding as several of the top spots on our leaderboards are occupied by girls. The gender ratio of the schools must therefore be irrelevant when trying to work out the reason for the discrepancy in requests to alter the difficulty.

So again, why are some schools asking us to make the resources easier while others are asking us to make them harder if we can assume that each school on average has students of approximately equal ability?

From what I’ve seen so far, the answer is the teachers themselves.

One school told me that although their students are now doing very well with the resources, this wasn’t always the case. At the beginning the students were struggling and thought the resources were too difficult, but she said this was because they were used to getting their answers on a plate. They weren’t used to having to think about the best way to solve a problem using first principles. They weren’t used to not being given the answers if they didn’t get the question right the first time round. She stayed the course however and since then the students have accepted that they need to do the work themselves, they have embraced the challenge and have excelled in every resource. Those students are now dominating several of the leaderboards and are eagerly awaiting the next resource so that they can continue to flex their mathematical muscles.

On the other side of the scale, another teacher whose students initially struggled with the resources said that they were using another service instead which provided simpler activities, and he reported some of the more difficult questions in our resources as “bugs” that needed fixing.

Intrigued by the difference in approach between these two teachers, I recalled back to when I was at school and what my teacher used to do with us in order to have something to compare against. Indeed, my teacher didn’t use any educational software at all because back then our school had only just migrated from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and marker pen. The “ICT room” consisted of around 5 computers and was only ever used by students on the “computing” course. In any case, a persistent theme of my maths lessons were that we were told what we had to learn and we practised it until we knew it. There was no such thing as choosing an alternative task that we were happier with because it was less challenging.

Looking again at the contrasting approaches on display here, after discounting every other variable it seems that the teachers themselves are the key factor in why we’re receiving such mixed feedback on the difficulty of the resources. Some teachers are pressing ahead and weaning their students off resources that almost complete themselves and are achieving incredible results in the process, whereas others are seemingly happy to let their students continue with a false sense of achievement with software that doesn’t offer any challenge at all.

While it’s clear that the teaching of maths in the UK is not consistent even from a sample as small as ours (it will be interesting to see what happens when we start looking at hundreds of schools), I think it’s clear which method leads to better performance in students.

So where does this leave Learnalot?

Well, we aren’t going to start developing software that almost completes itself because that’s a pointless exercise.

What we will do instead is continue to challenge and engage our learners and push them to the limits of their abilities because this is how students learn new skills and improve existing ones. We will broaden the range of difficulty exhibited in the resources ever so slightly to make them more inclusive to those who aren’t as strong in maths and more challenging to those who are gifted, and we will continue to do so with scenarios that students find interesting and engaging.

This, I think, is the way to bring out the best in young learners and by building a suite of resources that covers the entire syllabus in this way, I don’t see why we won’t have a significant effect on these learners’ maths skills.

Having completed Batman: Arkham Asylum around two weeks after I started playing it, I decided that the next game that I should play and complete was Activision’s Call of Duty 3. This game was developed by Treyarch back in 2006, and I’ve had it for ages but never really got round to playing it. I loved the 360 launch game Call of Duty 2 (developed by Infinity Ward, as was the original) so I was looking forward to finally continuing the series with 3 before moving onto Modern Warfare 1 and 2, World at War and then Black Ops.

I completed Call of Duty 2 back in 2005 sometime on Veteran difficulty. This is normally my difficulty of choice, as you don’t want the game to be over too quickly and you tend to unlock more achievements at that level than on Normal. So, at the beginning of Call of Duty 3′s single player campaign I selected Veteran and looked forward to another round of top-quality entertainment.

It’s a shame then that I wasn’t playing a different game. Call of Duty 3 is disappointing on almost every level. As anyone who has seen my games collection can tell you, I love FPS games and as such I’m willing to put up with the odd niggle here and there if the remainder of the experience is worth it, but unfortunately Call of Duty 3 is not – read on to find out why.

After a few hours of playing, it became painfully obvious that back in 2006 Treyarch’s idea of increasing the difficulty level was not in making the enemy AI more intelligent or brutal or giving you fewer squad-mates to help out. Instead, Treyarch increased the “difficulty” by giving every German soldier God-like aiming abilities, X-ray vision and a hate for you that is so strong that they are willing to shoot at you in unison as your squad-mates (who are often closer to them than you are) clumsily open fire on their position. With their X-ray vision and seemingly laser-guided bullets, the Germans can spot you from hundreds of feet away in thick foliage even if you’re crawling and tear you apart with pin-point accuracy before you’ve even spotted them. Treyarch’s detection routines obviously don’t get any more complex than “Is the player within a mile of the German? If so, open fire with 100% accuracy irrespective of whether or not you can actually see them”. This is neither realistic nor fun and it all makes for an incredibly frustrating experience as your countless, repeated deaths are caused not by any foolish decisions, delayed reactions or lack of experience – they’re caused simply by broken game mechanics. I got around a quarter of the way into the game before deciding to restart on Normal difficulty as the game had become too frustrating.

On Normal things are only slightly better. The Germans no longer possess their God-like aiming abilities or X-ray vision (although stealth play is still impossible in this game because they still seem to have eyes in the back of their heads apart from one scripted scene where you’re tasked with sneaking up to a German who is answering the call of nature), but plenty of other bugs, glitches and other issues exist to ensure that the game remains a challenge albeit for all the wrong reasons:

• Countless invisible walls prevent you from performing any flanking manoeuvres and funnel you down a single narrow path into the line of fire. And I don’t just mean short walls or fences that are strategically placed to block your path (although there are plenty of these as well), but literally invisible walls. The walls that aren’t invisible are so short that even an old woman should be able to jump over them, but you can’t despite being a young, fit and healthy soldier.
• Enemy AI is happy to break cover and run around like a headless chicken before being put out of its misery by a well-aimed bullet. This actually happens in Veteran as well.
• Your squad AI is happy to stand by and watch as fellow squad-mates are shot and killed mere feet away. Your squad-mates will also do their best at every possible opportunity to get in your way, either blocking your line of fire or preventing you from entering/leaving an area. A rifle butt to the face convinces them to get out of your way most of the time, but not always.
• From a distance, enemy turrets seem to be unmanned as they rain down bullets on you and your men. This makes them impossible to take out until you get close enough for an operator to spawn, who you can then kill in order to disable the turret.
• You can walk into a room inside a building and initially find it empty, only for a German to spawn before your very eyes as if by magic. If the German spawns as you’re leaving the cleared room and shoots you in the back, well that’s just your problem. The best thing to do is wait in each empty room for a second or two just to make sure everything that is going to spawn has done so before you turn your back.
• I had to restart one of the early chapters from a checkpoint because although I’d taken out everyone in the house, my squad-mates were stood in the cellar and were unwilling/unable to leave in order for the story to progress. After running around the entire house no less than four times looking for some kind of trigger, I gave up and restarted. My squad-mates then remembered what they were supposed to do and gave me orders to progress to the next area.
• Similarly, you’ll frequently be left waiting for the game to catch up with your progress as you patiently wait to be allowed to do the next thing in any given area. Only when the game finally catches up and decides to let you proceed will you be able to interact with whatever it was that you were trying to interact with earlier. The worst example of this was when I rescued a squaddie from a cellar. There were four of us in the cellar and after waiting at least 10 seconds to be told to proceed I tried to open the door but it was locked. I then walked to the rescued squaddie and smacked him with the butt of my rifle a few times before the game told me to exit the cellar by opening the door which had magically unlocked itself.
• There have been several instances of soldiers running on the spot as they try (and fail) to run through scenery/walls.
• On two occasions I’ve fired at least 20 rounds into a German through a window from outside, and despite seeing the resulting blood clouds as the bullets hit (and presumably pass through) him, the German has refused to die. Do the same from inside the room however (but employ the same angle of attack and from the same distance) and he will die as normal.
• A German that I killed as he stood on top of a moving half-track stayed exactly where he was when the half-track drove away, suspended horizontally in mid-air around 6 feet above the ground. Here’s a photo.
• In one chapter I had to capture a factory and then defend it from a counter-attack. At one point two of my squad-mates were stood outside of a building aiming their guns at the wall without firing, while a German who was inside the building was glitching half-way through the wall and shooting at them from inside. Clearly he was far enough through the wall to be able to see my squaddies, but not quite far enough through it for them to decide to shoot back. I fired some shots at the wall/glitch and he died, and then my two squaddies proceeded to their destination.
• Sometimes when you perform a head-shot, the victim flies up about 15 feet into the air as though you’ve just delivered the mother of all upper-cuts.
• With the rifles and the MP40, you can shoot a German from a few feet away only for him to get back up and continue running after a brief pause. I realise some guns lose their effectiveness at range, but surely the victim would at the very least be injured? And surely a soldier wouldn’t instantly die if you shot him in the foot at close range? This is more of a game design issue than a glitch though, and as the game is 4 years old perhaps it’s an unfair complaint to make, since most other games (but not all) from the same period handled injury/death the same way.

Even with all of the above issues, the game is too easy on Normal difficulty and you’ll rarely die if you’ve got any FPS experience under your belt. Because of the huge number of issues though, the game is more of a challenge than it otherwise would be (or that it should be) on this setting. If you decide to increase the challenge and select Veteran then the cheap way in which Treyarch increases the difficulty saps any fun out of the game by making the enemy totally unrealistic.

I’m still going to complete the game though now that I’ve started – if not for my personal satisfaction then for the achievements points – but unlike the first Call of Duty or its sequel Call of Duty 2, I don’t think I’ll be replaying this one out of sheer enjoyment of the game. I will keep it though rather than sell it because it does have a good split-screen local multiplayer, which of course is unaffected and unhindered by poor AI.

Treyarch has historically played second fiddle to Infinity Ward, but with the original Medal of Honour and Call of Duty released at the beginning of the decade surely even a B-Team could develop a good FPS in 2006? In Call of Duty 3, Treyarch emphatically answered that question with a big, fat “NO!”. Since Treyarch are also the team behind World at War and Black Ops (which broke sales records around the world on the back of Infinity Ward’s earlier work on Modern Warfare 1 and 2), I’m no longer sure if these are games that I should be looking forward to or dreading.

3/10
(7/10 for multiplayer)

With the excitement building as we head towards Learnalot’s launch in January, we’ve decided to give one lucky school a full year’s subscription for free.

To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is explain in 50 words why your school deserves a free subscription and send it to competition@learnalot.com before January 1st 2011. More details are on the email flyer that was sent out last night.

Good luck!

After getting the kicking of a lifetime over their controversial plan to force gamers to use their real names when posting on its official forums, Blizzard vice president and executive managing director for international operations Michael Ryder told Eurogamer before StarCraft II’s midnight launch in London that the “process” had “worked”.

So, it turns out that getting their arse kicked by the community for coming up with such a stupid idea was all part of the plan.

To celebrate this revelation, I have prepared a couple of images that show other people’s plans coming together.

I was asked a few days ago by a father of two if it was worth buying the PSPgo. He already had a PSP 3000 which his eldest had commandeered and wanted another so that his youngest could play as well.

The PSPgo was released in Europe and the US on October 1st, 2009 as an alternative – not a replacement – to the recently released 3000. At launch the unit price was £250 – around £100 more than the 3000 – though due to the substantial resulting backlash many retailers were discounting the machine to around £225 from day one.

The Go has exactly the same hardware specifications as the 3000 except that it can’t play traditional UMD games as it lacks a UMD drive and it has a smaller screen due to the console itself being half an inch smaller and 43% lighter than the 3000. Depending on who you ask, the smaller size is sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative – yes it’s easier to fit into your pocket but yes a larger screen is always better than a smaller one.

Sony’s decision to launch the original PSP back in 2005 with a UMD drive was quite controversial. Back in 2005, solid state memory was pretty expensive and the UMD allowed a cheap method of providing up to 1.8GB of storage space for its games which would have cost almost as much as the console itself in solid state. However, the drive was slow, it drained the battery and as soon as your games collection surpassed the grand total of 1 you had to find another pocket for your (cumbersome and delicate) UMDs. Some cases allowed up to 3 UMDs to be carried with the console but quickly got bulky – anything more than 3 and you were looking at a bag.

The UMD format shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone though as Sony’s history with bespoke formats is long and colourful. Among the success stories are the CD, the Memory Stick and Blu-ray, but on the flip side are BetaMax, DAT tapes and Mini Disk. Cynics were adding the UMD to the latter list as early as 2006.

At the beginning Sony seemed to have high hopes for the UMD format. As well as providing the medium for the PSP’s games, the UMD was also used for PSP versions of the latest blockbuster movies (the original PSP came with Spiderman 2) though this aspect was actually poorly thought out.

Firstly, a UMD movie could only be watched on the PSP – a rumoured UMD set-top box that would allow UMDs to be watched on your living room TV never materialised. Secondly, this PSP-only version of the movie often cost considerably more than a DVD copy that you could watch on anything. It was even possible to rip DVD movies to memory card and watch them on the PSP at no extra cost, though Sony artificially crippled the resolution of movies played back this way to 320×240 as a way of forcing people to watch their movies on UMD – which could use the system’s 480×272 screen to its full potential. With custom firmware removing this limitation however and UMD movie sales slumping, Sony eventually removed the limitation from their own firmware in revision 3.30 as part of a larger drive to try to stem the flow of custom firmware installations.

So, the UMD failed as a movie format and here in 2010 you can get memory cards of a higher capacity for next to nothing, so surely the PSPgo is a no-brainer and everyone should upgrade from their PSP3000, right? Sadly not, and the reasons are all down to yet more stupidity on Sony’s part.

First there’s the console’s price. Even today it has an RRP of £225 while you can pick up the PSP 3000 for just £130. In May Sony CFO Bill Glaser called the Go’s sales “a little bit of a disappointment”, so recently it has gone through a relaunch to an indifferent public and now includes 10 “free” games, though again all is not as it seems. The first and most obvious issue is that you’re paying for these “free” games in the inflated price of the system so they’re not free at all. The second issue is that while 6 of the games are either critically or commercially acclaimed, four of them are not and so are unlikely to be on your wanted list, and lastly, although Sony claims that there’s £200 of games being given out for free here, you could actually get all 10 for closer to £70 on UMD if you were to shop around. Still, if this offer is enough to tempt you, be warned that Sony fully intends to make back any money that it’s losing with this promotion as soon as you start buying more games.

Assuming you swallow the £70 higher price tag of the Go, you’ll then be wanting to buy some more games for the machine. The only place to buy games for the Go is on Sony’s online PlayStation Network (PSN), and for some reason nearly a year after the console’s launch there are still a LOT of great games that aren’t available on the service simply because they were released before Sony started selling games online.

When you do find a game that you want to buy on the service, be prepared to pay a premium. Despite having zero distribution costs, everything from brand new releases to bargain-bin golden oldies costs significantly more on PSN than on UMD. I’ve heard clowns make excuses for this, claiming that it costs publishers more to sell on PSN than it does to sell in shops and therefore the games simply have to cost more. Whether this is the case or not I don’t know, but I don’t think the average customer cares about the politics behind it all and I think they just want fair prices. Besides, I’m not sure how any of this is supposed to excuse Sony’s own games which also cost more on PSN than they do on UMD – are we to believe that Sony’s gaming division is charging itself extortionate rates to sell on its own platform? That seems to be quite a stretch for the imagination – even for a Sony fanboy.

Lastly, if you’re one of those people who sells their games once they’re completed or no longer played (personally I keep all of mine, unless the game is just total garbage) then you’re out of luck on the PSPgo. Games are digitally signed at the point of download to only work on your PSP, so you’re stuck with the game whether you like it or not. You can’t sell it to anyone and can’t send it back for a refund – this really is a one-way trip here. Of course, with a UMD copy (which cost you less in the first place remember), you can either sell it on eBay or part-exchange it for another game in your local games shop.

I said earlier I’d come back to why the PSPgo has so far sold so poorly that Sony felt it needed a relaunch. Unfortunately for Sony, it appears that the gaming public isn’t quite as stupid or gullible as Sony likes to believe.

When the PSPgo was first announced and the lack of a UMD drive was confirmed, thousands of PSP owners who initially wanted to upgrade asked the question, “How do I get all of my [UMD] games onto it?“. Sony promised a solution, though wouldn’t give any clues as to what the solution was until shortly before the release of the console. Speculation was rife, including – though not limited to – the idea that Sony would install booths into games shops all around the country that would turn UMD games into digital copies.

It turned out however that the “solution” was this: for people who had an existing UMD games collection, Sony was willing to give them an incredible 3 games for free with their PSPgo. That included those who only had 3 UMD games as well as those who had 100+. Also, the selection of games to choose from was very limited. Unsurprisingly, few took up their “trade-in” offer and most stuck to their older PSPs instead.

Those who were new to the world of PSP weren’t stupid either – why would they pay extra for a system that also forced them to pay extra for a smaller selection of games? And then prevent them from selling those games when they were done with them?

The result was, quite naturally, poor sales of the PSPgo which lead Sony to conclude that the gaming public “was not yet ready for digital distribution”. I’d say that on the contrary, digital distribution is doing just fine when done properly and that in fact what people aren’t ready for is to be ripped off three times over with a single console. Had the pricing of the console reflected the lower manufacturing cost and the pricing of the games reflected the zero distribution costs, then I think the PSPgo could have been a contender – even with the smaller games selection. As it is, to answer the question at the beginning of this article – is is worth buying a Sony PSPgo? No it isn’t – get the PSP 3000 instead.

Update: As of 21st of April, 2011 – just 18 months after launch – the PSPgo has been discontinued due to its failure to have any impact on the market. The full story is here.

After my launch Xbox 360 died on me the night before last, I ordered a new Xbox 360 S. It arrived a couple of hours ago (though sadly the data transfer cable was sent separately and won’t be here until tomorrow – thanks, Amazon!), so I quickly opened the box and took out all of the essentials.

First off, the console is gorgeous. It’s noticeably smaller than the original and very shiny. The power and drive tray buttons are both touch-sensitive so you only need to tap them for them to work and there are 5 USB ports instead of the old one’s 3 – which means my USB hub is now unemployed.

Somewhat annoyingly, the connection to the power brick has also been changed so I had to go behind the TV and untangle a load of wires to get the old brick out so that I could put the new one in.

Anyway, once all that was done I looked again at the console. The hump that housed the HDD on the old model has disappeared and in its place is a little slot with a little cover clipped on it. I took this cover off and found a little HDD case about a half inch tall and about 3-4 inches wide. I pulled out the HDD to take a look at it and saw a couple of standard Serial-ATA connectors on the other side. Was Microsoft finally letting people upgrade their machines with unofficial drives that were bigger and cheaper than the official offerings?

A discussion with @XboxSupport on Twitter revealed that no, this is not the case. Somewhat annoyed by this since my PS3 is happily running a 7,200RPM 500GB drive since I got it, I asked why. The ensuing conversation (after the jump) has been edited to make it more readable but the content is untouched.

g4r37h: Hey guys. I got my 360 Slim today. The HDD has standard serial ATA ports on it – does that mean I can install a bigger drive?

XboxSupport: It is not possible for a larger hard drive to be installed into the console. ^RH

g4r37h: Hmm, so what would happen if I connected a 500gb laptop drive? It would physically fit, right? But the software would block it?

XboxSupport: The drive would not be properly formatted to work with the 360. ^RH

g4r37h: So the answer is yes you block it through software. I guess that’s so that you can charge twice as much for an official drive?

XboxSupport: The official drives have been formatted to work with the 360 software to ensure security of the files and system. ^RH

g4r37h: Come on guys, I know formatting is nothing more than the file system which is controlled by software. You could make unofficial drives work quite easily. In fact, you’ve clearly gone out of your way to stop them working if an unofficial drive won’t work. I think it’s down to being able to charge crazy money for official HDDs. Tell me I’m wrong.

XboxSupport: If you’d like to use an external USB drive you can for storage from 1-16GB. ^RH

g4r37h: I don’t want 16GB USB storage. I want a 1TB drive in there. There’s no hardware reason why I can’t – the connections match. So can you confirm that a 1TB drive wouldn’t work because your software would block it? I have a 500gb drive in my PS3 and have done since launch. Why can’t I do the same with my 360?

g4r37h: OK I’ll be honest – I know it’s so that you can charge crazy money for official drives. I just wanted to hear you say it :P

XboxSupport: It is not a feature supported by the 360. We do not have specifics on why that decision was made. ^RH

g4r37h: Of course you do – check out my previous post!

XboxSupport: We do not have specifics on those decisions that were made. ^RH

g4r37h: OK let’s make a deal. We’ll agree that it’s so that you can charge double for official drives until you give me an alternative.

XboxSupport: We don’t have details on that decision but it is not for that reason. ^RH

g4r37h: Oh come on. If you don’t know what the reason is, how do you know what it isn’t? It’s not hardware – the hardware is the same. It’s not software – because you control that. The only other variable is price. Why let people buy 500GB if you can charge them the same amount for 120GB! It’s a great business plan.

XboxSupport: The official hard drives are there to be trusted sources and help keep the platform secure. ^RH

g4r37h: Trusted sources? So a brand new drive with twice the capacity and half the cost wouldn’t be secure? Can you explain why? Because as far as I know you could still format the drive, encrypt the content etc just the same.

g4r37h: I was happy to let this go with a gentleman’s agreement but since you’re trying to tell me it’s something else now I’m curious!

XboxSupport: We don’t have details on that process, sorry. ^RH

g4r37h: Sony’s PS3 is a lot more secure than the 360 and yet they allow unofficial HDDs. I’d say secure sources isn’t a factor.

g4r37h: Hmm ok then. Is that your final word on the matter? Because all of this is going into my blog as we speak. :)

XboxSupport: It is a decision that was made by Microsoft when developing the console. Sorry, we don’t have any details outside of that. ^RH

g4r37h: Yes I know when the decision was made and who made it. The question was why. I’m saying it’s all down to pricing.

XboxSupport: We do not have full details on why the decision was made. ^RH

g4r37h: Yeah I got that the first time! Then I said it was so you could charge double for official HDDs and then you failed to retort.

g4r37h: Never mind. I think everyone else knows the reason even if you’re not allowed to confirm it. Thanks for the chat!

XboxSupport: Have a good day. ^RH

So, there we have it. When I put it to Microsoft that there was no plausible reason for blocking unofficial HDDs other than the fact that they want to be able to over-charge for official drives, they had no reply. I know we all knew that anyway, but it was still somewhat disappointing that Microsoft couldn’t just admit something that is painfully obvious and instead tried to fob me off with some rubbish about security and reliability – security on a console that is a lot less secure than its main competitor (which freely allows unofficial HDDs) and reliability on a console that is plagued by RRODs – none of which are related to the HDD.

Microsoft, if you’re going to lie about the reason you don’t allow official hard drives, at least come up with a half decent excuse!

Tonight we’ve unveiled the Learnalot portal and opened the discussion forum for registrations.

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

It’s here at last -  Mercury 1.0 launched today!

For more information either check out the launch post at Quak Multimedia or check the Mercury website directly, where there is even a demo of the software showcasing some of its capabilities.

Mercury is viewed as a live product that will evolve and adapt over time with the needs of our clients, so this won’t be the last time I mention Mercury on this blog I’m afraid!

As well as the software itself, we’ll also be offering a development service where we will either help clients develop their eLearning or develop it all ourselves for an extremely competitive rate.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.

I’ve just managed to get myself banned from the MDM forums for stating that their Zinc V3 software is a load of rubbish. Released about two years ago, the software currently has a whopping 70 open bugs – many of which date back to the beginning of 2008!

I first started using Zinc around 6 years ago, back when it was called Flash Studio Pro (1.9.x). The software was pretty flaky but was good enough for the small projects that I was working on at the time. Soon after though, support for the software vanished as MDM released a new product called Zinc V2 which provided a new GUI and a load of new commands. I upgraded like most of MDM’s users, only to find that Zinc V2 had just as many bugs as FSP and that MDM was just as slow to fix them.

Some time later, support for V2 again dropped off the face of the earth as the company excitedly announced the release of Zinc V3 – a cross-platform application that was built from the ground up, no less. MDM made lots of noise about it being the most stable version of the software yet, thoroughly tested and that it would only be released when it was absolutely bomb-proof thanks to an extensive beta phase. Another thing that I remember from this time was disgruntled customers who had just bought Zinc V2 being told that their product was no longer supported and that if they wanted to move to V3, they’d have to pay an upgrade charge. The V2 forums were also locked, making it difficult for people who didn’t want to “upgrade” to V3 discuss and resolve issues collaboratively. So much for looking after your customers.

Anyway, fast forward two years and here we are. The bugs that are to be fixed in the next version (the 17th for those keeping count) include fixes for such basic functionality as being able to export JPEGs, read and write to the Windows registry, resetting event handlers, broken AS3 support, broken MAC mask support and a load of other things that should have been resolved before launch let alone before the software’s 2nd birthday. There are even bugs on there that were once fixed but have since been re-introduced in later “updates” thanks to the poor level of testing they do over there. A full list of the open bugs is helpfully available on their website here.

I never upgraded to V3 myself. Having seen first-hand how painful it was to come up with workarounds to V2′s bugs after jumping from V1, I decided to sit out the next ride and wait for the inevitable bugs and other issues to be resolved before taking the plunge – yep, despite MDM’s bullish claims of QA this time around. I also didn’t see any major benefits in V3 seeing as I hardly ever need to develop for Macs or Linux-based PCs (just as well as the support for these two OSs is patchy and inconsistent), so I was in fact more than happy to watch from the side-lines until the dust settled. The problem was that the dust never did settle and two years on V3 users are still having to put up with an insane bug count. V2 was bad sometimes, but nowhere near as bad as V3.

Despite not having taken the plunge for V3 myself, I would still visit the forums occasionally, sometimes helping out a newbie or two with some Flash/Zinc related questions and sometimes just watching in amazement as the bug reports continued to come in thick and fast – bug reports for standard functions that showed quite clearly that were was next to no testing going on at MDM between releases. As the bug count continued to rise and MDM continued to clumsily release hit-and-miss updates, I thanked my lucky stars for not having given them any more of my hard-earned cash.

Finally it was the 2nd of December 2009 and I took another look at the forums – hoping that by some miracle V3 was in a usable state by now. What I found in Gambini’s post (that they were “aiming” to fix some of the bugs but couldn’t make any guarantees) just floored me and so I started asking awkward questions and suggested that perhaps a 2-year-old application that had over 70 known bugs is actually a load of rubbish and that hey really needed to sort themselves out. Other users agreed but stopped short of venting their own frustrations as openly as I – surprising really since they had paid good money for V3 while I had not. MDM responded by offering some pretty lame excuses (we’re a small team, there’s lots to do, we’ve had lots of things go wrong this year, blah blah) and totally failed to explain why 2-year-old software that they charge good money for should still be on the shelves with over 70 known bugs.

Rather than admit Zinc’s problems, Gambini (or Jaspal Sohal to give his real name) tried all kinds of tactics to divert attention from the software by – among other things – accusing me of not caring about MDM and being there only to start arguments. While I don’t really care for MDM either way (why would I? And why is that even relevant?), I do care about having access to good software and I do dislike it when honest, hard-working people are ripped off when buying faulty goods.

Anyway, for making my thoughts known, I was banned. I haven’t logged back in to see what they did with my posts, but I was there long enough to see that they deleted some other posts that didn’t reflect too kindly on themselves or their products.

In short, anyone who owns Zinc V3 and is unimpressed with its bugs should be prepared to be banned from the forums if they dare raise their concerns with the administrators. Anyone who is looking to buy some decent (i.e. working) software on the other hand would be wise to seek out some alternatives! The one that I’ve recently started using again is Northcode’s SWF Studio. I had used SWF Studio in the past but was never 100% happy with the script language, but having been forced to search for an alternative to Zinc due to V3′s ridiculous bug count, I found that the latest version of the software (SWF Studio 3) has a brand new scripting language that is much more intuitive – but most importantly it actually works!