Section: Gaming News, Features, Lists

Haven’t caught all of the Gamertell news this week?  Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!

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Image by define23 via Flickr

Technology Review: The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle.
This is an interesting concept.  Instead of making imitation insects for recon, they will modify the real thing.

Section: Reviews, Originals, Features, Gift Guide, Opinions, Consoles, Wii, Gear, Accessories, Controllers

Product: dreamGear’s Wii Dual Glow Sabers (aka Dual Glow Lightsabers for Wii)
Price: $34.99
Rating: One thumb sideways, one thumb down; 67/100; D+; * 1/2 out of five.
Pros: You get two in one package. Light construction does not interfere with motion. Hilt is very shiny.
Cons: Does not make any of the great Star Wars lightsaber noises. Uneven illumination. A bit chintzy.
Overall: Like most lightsaber toys, a bit of a letdown since it does not make any sounds of its own. My almost-two-year-old loves to swing one around (sans WiiMote, of course). Only get this if its deeply discounted.

.Intended to be used with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (and suggested to go with No More Heroes and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess) for Wii, dreamGear’s Dual Glow Sabers are WiiMote holsters that are intended to provide the illusion of wielding a lightsaber while gaming

Unfortunately, the idealized wonder of an actual Lightsaber meant this accessory had too much working against it before it was even made.

The Power of Plastic

The set contains two sabers, one that glows red and the other that glows blue.

The Glow Sabers are all plastic and ship in two pieces each: the shiny hilt (aka cradle) where you insert your WiiMote and the saber. The hilt is 7 3/8 in. tall and slightly larger in all dimensions than the WiiMote. The saber that has 4 1/2 in. of silver and the rest,  12 3/8 in., is opaque plastic. To power the light in the Saber, 2 AAA batteries go into a battery slot in the silver section of the saber (and is covered by a standard snap-on cover).

Each fully-constructed Saber with 2 AAA batteries, sans WiiMote, weighs only 4.4 oz (125 g). A WiiMote is inserted into the hilt of the Saber which also has an open area for your WiiMote’s strap and another for the controller’s trigger button. There is a small button on the silver section of the saber to turn the light on and off so it does not drain the WiiMote’s battery and can be illuminated whether or not the WiiMote is inserted in the cradle.

To see the Sabers in action, check out this YouTube video from dreamGear:

The Dark Side

Lightsabers are long, metallic, brightly glowing marvels that makes dern cool noises. In order to accomplish all of that, dreamGear would have had to have made a larger, more expensive device that would have required more batteries which, in turn would have made it pretty much unwieldy for a video game accessory.

In order to keep the accessory super light so you aren’t weighed down by it and the WiiMote together, the plastic has to be super light which, in turn, gives each Saber a cheap, chintzy toy feeling. The slight rattling the battery cover makes while you shake and the uneven glow in the saber portion also don’t help maintain the illusion.

In the more positive side,  the Sabers are not especially heavy so they don’t impede game play or cause much more exhaustion than playing with only a WiiMote. Also, due to the Sabers’ relatively short length (which also does not help with the illusion), they should not cause too much damage when swinging them around your family room. (Remember kids, keep those WiiMote straps tight. Just not too tight.)

Play or Play Not?

dreamGear certainly did not have an easy task in creating a Lightsaber cradle. I give the company credit for creating a cradle that is light enough to not hinder gameplay while maintaining some of the look of a lightsaber.

There are a few “ifs” that will determine whether or not you should buy this: If the gamer primarily playing with this is younger than 10, if you are getting or already own Star Wars: Unleashed for Wii (and your 10-year-old likes it), if you have zero breakables or valuables in your gaming room and if you can find this at least half the retail price (which may already be possible), then go ahead and stuff this in your kid’s stocking. Otherwise, this will likely collect dust in your bin of cooler-in-the-store-than-in-actuality game accessories.

Product Page [Wii Dual Glow Sabers]

Full Story » | Written by PJ Hruschak for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch posted “The New York Times Clutters Up Its Homepage With Links From Elsewhere (In Beta)” today – makes a good point.

The concept here is that if readers can find the best news and opinion from around the Web right from the homepage, they will keep coming back to it as a starting point, just like they do with Digg or Techmeme. Where this breaks down is that the reason I still have the New York Times as my homepage is that I want to see at a glance what is going on in the world…I don’t need three more headlines on the same story. That clutters the page, and leaves less room for other headlines. I want that page to maximize the number of different stories I can explore about different subjects, not different points of view on the same subject.

I think Erick is giving the NYT an “A” for effort – but NYT is failing to see the point.  The links others is great – but we don’t need another Google News – we have a Google News.

When I first read this article I thought he was critizing – but after further review, Erick is right on!

Section: Reviews, Exclusives, Originals, Consoles, Wii, Game-Companies, Developers, Publishers, Genres, 3D, Casual, Sim

Title: Animal Crossing: City Folk
Price: $49.99, $69.99 with WiiSpeak
System(s): Wii
Release Date: November 16, 2008
Publisher (Developer): Nintendo (Nintendo)
ESRB Rating: “Everyone” for Comic Mischief
Pros: Works with the Nintendo WiFi Connection for visitors, like Wild World, has a city area you can visit to have easy access to items and people, large town environment to explore, you can update your town with bridges and a fountain, there are special Pro outfit designs and player houses aren’t clustered together. There are also some new furniture items, new holidays, new clothing and new NPCs.
Cons: Town visitors don’t come as often, there’s only the Wii remote/nunchuk control scheme, houses can only expand to three rooms and Gracie Grace stock only changes every season.
Overall Score: One thumb up, one sideways; 88/100; B+; ***1/2 out of 5

There are two kinds of people who are going to be buying Animal Crossing: City Folk. The first are the ones who love casual or simulation games, but have never owned an Animal Crossing title before. The second are adamant Animal Crossing fans who own every entry in the series, and are eager to build up a whole new town and life on their Wii.

These two groups of people will love City Folk, and will likely spend hours developing their perfect town. Players who don’t fit into either of these two groups will likely criticize City Folk for its minor improvements and adjustments. It is a delightful entry in the series though, and should provide hours of entertainment if you’re willing to invest the necessary time and effort into it.

Moving to a new town to start a new life

Animal Crossing: City Folk starts out in the same way as all previous Animal Crossings. You decide to move to a new town and live on your own. You talk to Rover the cat to determine your appearance. When you get to town, you find a house, but discover you’ll be an indentured servant to Tom Nook until you can finally pay off the mortgages. Of course, once you get your house to an acceptable size for you, you can always decide to quit paying, and just focus on relaxing.

If you choose to import your DS character (like I did), you still have to go through all the opening chores and servitude. However your character’s appearance is already set and you have a copy of your Wild World item catalogue with you so you can instantly start working on room themes.

Pleasantly familiar, with a few new touches

If you’ve played Animal Crossing before, any version, you know what you’re getting into with Animal Crossing: City Folk. It has most of the characters, the Nintendo WiFi Connection compatibility, scrolling environment, coconuts, hairstyle options and neighbor socialization options from Animal Crossing: Wild World. It also has the special events, separate houses with three levels and big screen presentation of the original Animal Crossing.

What’s new is mainly the city area, a place where you can get emotions anytime, get free souveniers from Phineas if he’s there, stop by Redd’s back alley shop, check out Gracie’s elite Gracie Grace store, change shoe styles at Kicks’, get a fortune read at Katrina’s, bid or sell at Gyroid Lloid’s auction house, get a hairdo or Mii mask at the Shampoodle or check in with Lyle at the Happy Room Academy office. You can also create and store designs and Pro designs at Able Sisters now, get silver tools or donate to improve your town with an extra bridge and fountain. Also, you can’t forget the Wiispeak compatibility – you can actually talk to people over WiFi.

I’d have to say that my favorite part of City Folk is the ability to create Pro designs in the Able Sister’s tailor shop. When you pay 350 to create a Pro design, you get to customize the front, back and both sleeves of a shirt. Since my town has a Final Fantasy theme, I’ve already created Yuna (FFX), Terra (FFVI), Yuffie (FFVII) and Rinoa (FFVIII) outfits. If you liked only focusing on a single canvas, you still can – for free. You can open your design window and make a single square design, that can be used for the same purposes as a Pro design. That’s how I made my ShinRa logo, after all.

If I could change one thing about City Folk, it would be the control scheme. The nunchuk is perfect to navigate the town, but the wii remote feels awkward as a main control. It is fine as a supplement – for selling, changing equipment, designing, managing pocket space, but otherwise very inaccurate and cumbersome. I’m also disappointed to see Nintendo didn’t offer GameCube controller support – it probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to factor in, and it would have made the game more comfortable for some players.

Something to be said for the Same Ol’ Same Ol’

Yes, Animal Crossing: City Folk is basically a glorified version of Animal Crossing: Wild World, with a dash of original Animal Crossing elements and a few new mechanics thrown in. But, that isn’t such a bad thing. Fans of the series will be pleased with the way Nintendo has handled the game, and that’s what matters. I know I’m having fun rebuilding my town, even though I’d already done it twice before in Animal Crossing and Animal Crossing: Wild World.

Site [Animal Crossing: City Folk]

Full Story » | Written by Jenni Lada for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

Section: Features, Lists, Handhelds, iPhone & iPod Touch, Updates, Apple App Store

It’s our second edition of the App Store gaming update! This week wasn’t as bad to put together as last week’s, though the insane amounts of turkey didn’t help things.

In this edition of the update we added two new sections entitled: “What’s Free” and “Games you might like.“ I won’t bother explaining to you the complex definitions of these sections, as I’m sure you folks can figure them out. Since we are still in beta, we can tinker around with the list week to week to find just the right format for you guys. As always, feedback is appreciated so feel free to let us know how much you love the list or heaven forbid, hate it!

We also hope to provide reviews for these games at some point so look out for those as well! Now, on to the list: Read More

Image by klessblog via Flickr

I’ve been having some hallway discussions with our CEO Chuck Peters (or as I affectionalty refer to him as “Chucky P”).  I think it started after I was talking too much about how cheap I thought I could rebuild a TV station.  I was tossing around a number which was close to 10% of the cost the consultants were estimating.

So this morning, Chucky P called me to the table about the conversation.  He’s asys – OK, mr. 90% reduction in cost…HOW?  It was a much nicer was that he asked – but seriously, he said – “tell me more – how would you do it?”

The Methodology
You first have to agree – it’s not going to be the “TV Station” it is today.  It’s a digital distribution station, a DDS.  This DDS will do many of the things a traditional station does, but it must look and adopt some of the best practices of the web.

It will be hard – and I know I don’t understand some of the TV concepts and I can hear the old school media guys saying – this is all good, but what about…   the point is to try and think about what TV will be in 3,4 and 7 years.  I’m not sure TV as we know it will exist in 7 years, so why rebuild it now to currect specs.

Slashdot ran a post Oct 05, 2006 called “Could I Run a TV Station on Linux?”

• I’m working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they’re using tape and I’ve been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won’t sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. Tom’s Comment:  Wow does this sound familiar – this is exactly what I hear from my co-works at the tv station still today…but the interesting part is the other comments, I found some interesting one – but I’m sure I missed a couple of gems.
• Actually, you can address a lot of those types of problems (like playlist management, etc.) with one of the many mplayer frontends on their related projects page [mplayerhq.hu]. All you need to do is choose whichever one you prefer and mplayer is your best friend for video playback.

• The things you need are a scheduler (to determine which commercials air when), a program format spec file (to tell where in a program file the actual video begins and ends so you don’t end up unnecessarily airing several seconds of black as you might if you just paused the playback of a TV show), and a mechanism for crossfading the audio between spots to handle the case where people run it right up to the wire. You need a switcher for the video—the ability to quickly change from one foreground full-screen video window to another without any glitching. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Finally, you need a player that can start pretty much instantaneously and without glitch in the middle of a program. I haven’t found that to be true of VLC at all in my experience, but maybe it has improved a lot in the last few months….

• For a possible controller UI, you might check out SongCue on SourceForge. I designed it for radio automation, but combine that UI with a preview pane above each controller and show a still frame from 5 seconds into a segment, and you have a UI that would work pretty well for what you’re doing, too. Maybe even show live video in the preview panes during playback. (I wouldn’t recommend the code from SongCue, though, as it’s pretty much raw Xlib, not for the faint of heart.)

• If I were writing such a thing, I’d start with a Mac OS X (10.4 Server) box. Xsan provides a supported mechanism for handling your storage needs. QTKit can do your playback, and Quartz Composer should make switching the foreground full screen movie pretty easy. The only potential snag I can think of would be that if you aren’t careful, you could mouse over onto the live output signal, but all things considered, it’s probably the easiest way to build an app that does what you want, IMHO.

You see – this is a two year old post with ideas we have not seen people look at or try.  This is all good stuff.  I have not even begun to speak about user content – there are two projects like this going on – one for sure is based on Drupal…an open source contnet management system.  Don’t even get me started on my favorite CMS Wordpress – I’m SURE it could do it with one processor tied behind it’s back.

Here is also a pre-bult server from NetTVWorld (posted from CNet) which is calling it self a TV Station in a box and also – clains the idea of a reporter taking it with them to a story and broadcasting from there.  See link in comments to here.

Conclusion

So I’m not saying I can do it – but I think if you get a TV outsider who gets the web (someone like me) and a few TV people who really have a mindset to change the scene – it could be done…for 10% ok 20% of what they think!

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Section: Gaming News, Features, Rumors

Oh Edios, will you guys ever learn? A majority of gamers still remember the mess that was dubbed “Gerstmanngate” after former executive editor, Jeff Gerstmann, was allegedly fired over his negative review of Eidos’ Kane & Lynch game. Opinions were all over the map about the incident and it looks as though debaters will have another incident with the premise that Eidos – or at least Eidos’ PR company – is trying to get reviewers to hold negative reviews of Tomb Raider Underworld until this upcoming Monday (November 24, 2008), days after the game launch (November 21, 2008). Read More