4/17 TheAppleBlog

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. TheAppleBlog Time Warner: No Metered Broadband For Now, But We'll Be Back April 16, 2009 at 7:40 pm The good news is that Time Warner has “backed away from its controversial efforts to price broadband based on consumption” in the cities where the trials were implemented. The bad news is that it’s clearly not an admission of failure on their part. In their confirmation they stated this (emphasis mine): It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. Ah yes, it’s just a “misunderstanding”. We’re doing the right thing, you just don’t get it. This isn’t the end of it, they’re simply regrouping. The translation is simple: Our PR group screwed up and wasn’t able to successfully fool enough people into believing the other guy will pay big bucks, not you. Sometimes don’t you just wanna take a ball bat to the heads of companies like this? There’s a wave of technologies converging for which broadband will come out of the “luxury” category and move more to the forefront. VOIP, video streaming, etc. Wouldn’t any far-seeing (dare I say it, “visionary”?) company say to themselves, “Wow. All these technologies are going to have lots of new people interested in our bandwidth. We better fatten the pipe and get ready for the onslaught of new customers”? And not just streaming, more and more file downloads are requiring a larger pipe. In Apple’s case, they recently opened the gates for HD movie sales to Mac users (i.e., HD is not just for Apple TV owners), and could be a large beneficiary of more users having broadband in their homes. Sadly, TW instead said, “Wow. Here’s the perfect chance for us to grab more money from our base. Why bother with improvements to add more customers when it’s easier just to milk the ones we have”? This is why people hate the cable companies (and, yes, the phone carriers as well). Media Files unknown-96.jpg&r=G App Review: Hysteria Project — iPhone Owner Stalked By Maniac April 16, 2009 at 5:00 pm App Quick Stats Hysteria Project $1.99 iTunes Link Chased through a trap-laden forest by an axe-wielding murderer, Hysteria Project is a step in a much darker direction for the iPhone. Reviewing Asteroids-esque shooter The Void last week, I mentioned that some iPhone games are ditching the cute and getting darker. With their first release, the BulkyPix team have taken the anti-cute movement further: chopping up any semblance of cuteness with a rusty axe, putting the bits in to garbage bags and burying the bags in a creepy forest. Hysteria project is a choose-your-own-adventure for the iPhone. Blending atmospheric film sequences with quick-fire decision-making to create an intense horror experience. A Beautiful Place Out In the Country The game opens with you waking, bleary-eyed, in what seems to be deserted cabin. Viewed from a first-person perspective, your eyes still adjusting themselves to the dingy gloom. After discovering your hands and feet are bound with tape — trademark crazy serial killer move — the first decision is to how you’ll go about freeing yourself. After freeing yourself of the killer’s makeshift bindings, bursting out of the cabin, you’re on foot, limping through a foggy forest. Occasional flashbacks and visions, like twisted treats, fill in the back story. A hooded axe-man took you here and is now on the hunt as you make a desperate bid to flee the forest. With the action kicking in immediately — a constant blurred chase-scene, stalked by a madman — the game’s unrelenting pace holds up throughout. From the hand-held first-person camera, the blurry shadow monster and the creepy killer, it’s clear that the creators have cherry-picked from a selection of horror classics. As such, the game has a distinctly Blair-Witch-meets-Texas-Chainsaw vibe (with a sprinkling of Lost for good measure). Getting Ahead The gameplay itself takes its cue from choose-your-own-adventure books, updating the old-school concept with a modern(ish) twist using live action sequences. The game ends up playing out a little like the old FMV games like Sega’s Night Trap and Cinematronics classic Dragons Lair. Every minute or so you’re given a choice, such as freeing your legs or finding a sharp implement to help you. Most of the time however, these are not branching choices — one of the options will result in the game advancing while the other will lead to death at the hands of the axe man. There are also infrequent touch-screen interactions, such as tapping different highlighted areas to push branches away as you search for a hiding place in the forest. It’s fun at first, but feels incomplete — there’s a sense of disconnect between the action and the interaction during these quick-draw sequences. Sticking the Knife In This sense of disconnect from the world of Hysteria Project doesn’t end there, however. The low-level of actual interactivity is due largely to the constraining nature of video. Although there’s a poor illusion of choice, you’re pretty much on a one-track path to the end of the game. Furthermore, because most choices end in death or success, the game ends up playing out like a freaky trial-and-error process; replaying chases and choice sequences as all the intensity drains out of them. When a choice does arise, the game drops out of the first-person video view to provide a video-game style description scene. Paired with the waiting time as the choice (or video) loads, this text-based screen feels completely at odds with the intensity and immediacy of the video sequences. Summing Up Based on the story-arc in Hysteria Project, I’m under the impression that this is the first episode in a series. And perhaps it’s best to look at Hysteria Project as more like an interactive TV series than a straight-up survival horror game. There’s not enough interaction to really classify this as a proper game, furthermore, there’s not enough real choice either. It’s more an intense, shocking, and exciting interactive experience than a playable adventure. While Hysteria Project isn’t as groundbreaking or genre-defying as its creators would have us believe, it’s certainly an accomplishment to have realized such a twisted vision. Fans of horror movies and players should check out Hysteria Project, though it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a unique iPhone experience. Media Files unknown-96.jpg&r=G iPhone Wrestling Smackdown: WWE vs. TNA April 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm Finally, the Rock has come back to video games, and for the first time ever, on the iPhone. Well, he did for a little while, anyway. WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania was released on March 24 and being an avid wrestling fan, I immediately bought a copy. Meanwhile, on the March 30, TNA Wrestling was released, bringing the wrestling promotion wars to the iPhone and taking me to potential heaven. So here I am, ready to pit the two games against each other in a wrestling showdown of epic proportions, one not seen since the glorious WWF vs. WCW days of the late 90s. WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania The battle was on, however as soon as it had begun, WWE pulled Legends Of Wrestlemania from the App Store due to an insane number of bugs how unplayable the game was. Trying to make a traditional, real-time 3D wrestling game on a small touch-screen device is a big challenge. The gesture-based system they went with had potential to be slightly playable, however for this to work it required instant recognition of the gesture you’ve made. Unfortunately, Legends of Wrestlemania didn’t do this. It would ignore some gestures, or recognize them two seconds after you’ve made them. This made the game play incredibly frustrating and more trouble than it was worth. On top of this, the game was riddled with bugs, as gloriously highlighted in the screenshot below. Yes, Jimmy Snuka is standing on the second invisible set of turnbuckles that are above the normal turnbuckles. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh on this game since, in all fairness, they have pulled the game and presumably are working hard to address these issues. However I think it’s important to stress that even without the horrible bugs and gesture playability issues, the game is still incredibly bland. Here’s a screenshot comparing The Rock with Andre The Giant: Not only do they look nothing like the people they’re meant to portray, they have identical stature and build. If the game play was solid, this would be OK, but for such a shallow game, you’d expect the ‘look’ of it to be right. Additionally, while you can play with different game rules, they do little to change the game play (Hell and Cell is identical to falls count anywhere, with just a cage drawn around the ring, no way to interact with it). The ’story’ mode just moves you through various matches with very little story. You start off as the WWE Champion and have to defend it leading up to and including Wrestlemania. You don’t interact with other players in anyway apart from the matches. To top it off, Hulk Hogan is nowhere to be found. How can a game about legends of Wrestlemania not let you play as the Hulkster? Even if they fixed the bugs and made the gesture control system responsive, this is a poor design for a wrestling game and feels like it was thrown together just so they can say there’s an iPhone version. TNA Wrestling With an old-school video game feel, TNA Wrestling is the breath of fresh air for modern wrestling games. The developers apparently recognized the difficulties they faced implementing a wrestling game on the iPhone and decided to throw out the modern rule book by shunning both 3D graphics and real-time game play. TNA looks and feels like a game from the early-to-mid 90s and focuses on game play and story over flashy gimmicks. This is a turn-based game, in which you perform basic moves like kicks, punches, lock ups and Irish whips one at a time and can perform a big move by hitting the basic ones in the right combination. The combo moves available to you can be viewed in the bottom area and you can scroll with a finger gesture left or right to see what moves you need to hit for the combo. There are also a limited number of reversals, counters and avoid moves that can be used strategically during the opponent’s turns. This forces you to pick the right time to use them to minimize the damage taken and turn the tide of the match. It’s not all about strategy, however, as once you hit a combo move or a reversal you have to perform a series of guided real-time gestures correctly to successfully hit the move. These gestures are not in any way hard to hit, but you have a very limited time to mimic all the gestures and often in haste you can miss one, throwing a big spanner into your strategy game. These gesture tasks add a great real-time feel to the game play while still being playable — it’s just great fun. In a similar way, making a pinfall (or conversely, escaping from a pinfall) requires you to push the button at the right time to hit the target with a moving bar, with the size of the target dependent on the current health level of you and your opponent. With single, tag team, gauntlet, iron man, 2 out of 3, lumberjack and handicap matches available, the core wrestling game play in TNA Wrestling is just awesome fun. Which brings me to the story mode. Unlike the story mode of Legends of Wrestlemania, in TNA Wrestling you start as a nobody trying to make his name in the independent wrestling scene. You finally get noticed and signed to TNA Wrestling, where you work your way up from the bottom. Half of the time spent in story mode is in choose-your-own-adventure style conversations. What answers you choose change the story path at every step of the way — this gives great re-playability to see what would happen if you choose a different path. Just as important however, the choices you make give you heel or face points, which impact if the audience like you or not and what moves become available to you as you level your character up. The story lines in this game are all classic wrestling story lines, with wrestlers turning against you, love angles and more. Its all hilariously written and is an absolute pleasure to see unfold. This is the best story mode of any wrestling game I’ve played. There are some negatives, of course. The animation is a little choppy, the music is annoying (but can be turned off), and here, too, the bodies of all the wrestlers are the same size and stature. These don’t matter so much, however, as the immersion from the story lines work so well you don’t mind. Your winner, and New iPhone Wrestling Champion is… Since TNA Wrestling is the last man standing in the App Store, it wins by disqualification of WWE Legends of Wrestlemania. However I think that its important to reiterate that even if they fixed the major bugs, Legends of Wrestlemania just does the minimum necessary to be called a wrestling game. The graphics are poor, the story mode is incredibly weak, and the game play design is broken. TNA Wrestling, on the other hand, is absolutely entertaining in its story delivery, provides an innovative turn by turn wrestling game play, while sporting old-school graphics that work well with the game. TNA Wrestling is without a doubt the iPhone Wrestling Champion, and could even become my favorite wrestling game of all time. Media Files unknown-96.jpg&r=G IDC Numbers: Apple's Doing Just Fine, Thank You April 16, 2009 at 1:00 pm Here’s a piece on IDC’s PC Tracker numbers for the first quarter of the year. They’re quite revealing when you look at them soberly. The first thing you have to do, as I’ve argued before, is pull Apple out of the “PC” mix, so Apple (Mac) can be compared against all the others (PC). Comparing Apple’s figures to an overall figure that includes Apple’s totals makes no sense. In the U.S., we can pull Apple’s figures from the PC total and come up with 13,835 for 1Q ‘09, and 14,297 for 1Q ‘08, for PCs. Some quick math shows that to be an overall Y/Y drop of 3.23 percent. Apple’s figures, as the number 4 vendor, show a drop of 1.22 percent. Right off the bat you can see PC sales dropped 2 percent more than Macs. It would be hard (impossible, really), based on these numbers, to say that Apple was doing anything but better than the PC industry. And the real story goes even deeper than that. Consider this: Lots of noise is made over HP’s and Acer’s gains, but clearly these have come at the expense of Dell and “Others.” You can’t change the fact that overall the PC industry is down over three points. Millions and millions of netbooks have been sold, without which the PC figure would be worse. Why does this matter? Ultimately unit sales mean nothing, what matters is profits, and netbooks are even more razor-thin than cheap laptops. Speaking of cheap laptops, those are practically being given away. The deals at HP and others are so “good” right now that there’s even less money in it for the vendor. Apple, meanwhile, dropped by a much smaller amount than the PC industry. A good portion of the quarter Apple didn’t even have their latest models available, being launched in March. Apple did not have to rely on a “netbook” to drive its sales; profit margins are still good. Apple also did not have to rely on giveaways or free upgrades. I realize the above figures are U.S.-only, but it’s where IDC has provided detailed Apple figures. Besides, it’s silly to think that globally this overall trend for Apple will be different. Especially since — as PC supporters frequently point out — Apple is a smaller player on the global front. And, no, I’m not saying a year-over-year drop is a good thing. Of course it isn’t. I’m saying it’s all relative, and one must consider the conditions under which the drop occurred. The bottom line is this: For all the ranting and raving by analysts about lowering prices in this economy, which PC vendors have done, Apple has continued to produce quality Macs at good profit margins and still dropped less than the PC industry. Media Files unknown-96.jpg&r=G   This email was sent to arildinho13@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.