Slashdot Mirror

theodp writes "A vexing glitch in Madden NFL 2005 has players complaining in online forums and even demanding a recall. Because repeated offensive shifts exhaust the defense before the ball is snapped, EA's forced online players to turn off the fatigue setting, which disables the exploit, but spoils the realism of the game. At least you've got an excuse for that first-round Madden Challenge loss."

chas7926 writes "OSNews.com is running an article that claims that the open source development model is not a very effective way to develop high quality games. Even the exceptions are not much of a threat to major label products. Does open source development only make sense for products like web servers and operating systems?"

Thanks to GameInformer for its story discussing EA Sports' announcement of a new Premium Pass service for Madden NFL 2005 players. Although it's explained that "This package of paid subscription-level features will be available [on the PS2 and Xbox Live] at no cost to Madden NFL 2005 owners, as long as the user enters their credit card number, by way of sponsorship by Dodge", there's some speculation that subsequent Madden seasons will include a higher-tier, optional fee, especially as "If you do not have a credit card, you can still sign up for the EA Sports Premium Pass with a PayPal account, or Telecheck for $19.95." In the meantime, this extra service means: "Players who sign up for the EA Sports Premium Pass receive a boost to their online Reputation Rating, which is a publicly visible indicator that rewards and penalizes players for following EA Sports Fair Play rules", as well as receiving: "Name in lights... personalized career pages... members only medals [and forthcoming] Web leagues [and] enhanced Web tournaments." Update: 08/06 17:47 GMT by S : Game Informer now has an interview with EA's Chip Lange which helps clarify the subscription-related shenanigans.

WebGangsta writes "Electronic Arts has proclaimed August 10th to be National Madden Vacation Day. Why? That's the day that MADDEN 2005 is being released, and they want everyone to stay home from work to play football all day. They've even gone so far as to publish fake jury duty summons and sick notes for you to give to your boss." I'd think the giant Madden logo on each form would be a dead giveaway, but they're still fun to print out and adorn your workspace with.

WebGangsta writes "Electronic Arts has proclaimed August 10th to be National Madden Vacation Day. Why? That's the day that MADDEN 2005 is being released, and they want everyone to stay home from work to play football all day. They've even gone so far as to publish fake jury duty summons and sick notes for you to give to your boss." I'd think the giant Madden logo on each form would be a dead giveaway, but they're still fun to print out and adorn your workspace with.

loid_void writes "Reuters reports that EA Sports, best known for its market-leading sports video games, 'said on Wednesday it would offer paid online fantasy football for the upcoming football season. Players will be able to join a 'public league' set up by EA Sports and sports information provider STATS Inc., or use EA's online system to track their own league of up to 32 'team owners' starting July 21, a company spokeswoman said. The EA Sports Fantasy Football site sets up personalized home pages for each league to monitor real-time scores and statistics, the company said. The cost to play will be $9.99 for the public league and $99.99 for private leagues, the company said.'" Seems like the service will be similar to the well-known Yahoo! Fantasy Football website, sponsored by EA last year.

loid_void writes "Reuters reports that EA Sports, best known for its market-leading sports video games, 'said on Wednesday it would offer paid online fantasy football for the upcoming football season. Players will be able to join a 'public league' set up by EA Sports and sports information provider STATS Inc., or use EA's online system to track their own league of up to 32 'team owners' starting July 21, a company spokeswoman said. The EA Sports Fantasy Football site sets up personalized home pages for each league to monitor real-time scores and statistics, the company said. The cost to play will be $9.99 for the public league and $99.99 for private leagues, the company said.'" Seems like the service will be similar to the well-known Yahoo! Fantasy Football website, sponsored by EA last year.

Thanks to GameSpot for their 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the correct blend of licensed music for videogame soundtracks. The writer argues that "there isn't anything inherently bad" in using licensed music, but suggests: "Whether you produce your own music or use existing music for your soundtrack, thematic consistency is of the utmost importance." He then picks Wipeout XL ("[changed] how people perceived music in video games") and the more recent True Crime ("a well-made licensed soundtrack") as good examples of this, before singling out the EA Sports Trax program, as used in Madden 2004 and others, as "destined to fail - 'cus you can't make a good soundtrack out of singles." Do you have a favorite licensed soundtrack, or is the whole concept a concern to you?

Thanks to GameSpot for their 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the correct blend of licensed music for videogame soundtracks. The writer argues that "there isn't anything inherently bad" in using licensed music, but suggests: "Whether you produce your own music or use existing music for your soundtrack, thematic consistency is of the utmost importance." He then picks Wipeout XL ("[changed] how people perceived music in video games") and the more recent True Crime ("a well-made licensed soundtrack") as good examples of this, before singling out the EA Sports Trax program, as used in Madden 2004 and others, as "destined to fail - 'cus you can't make a good soundtrack out of singles." Do you have a favorite licensed soundtrack, or is the whole concept a concern to you?

Thanks to 1UP for its feature charting the history of SNK's cult King Of Fighters series. The piece starts: "From 1994 until now and counting, SNK's King of Fighters... has almost as consistent a track record as EA's Madden football, and Madden didn't have to survive the protracted buyout and collapse of its owners." The yearly versions of these Neo Geo-originated 2D fighters are then analyzed, from KOF '94 ("Two dozen characters in a fighting game doesn't sound like much nowadays, but it was a hell of a cast in 1994") through the controversial KOF '99 ("a pretty daring move on SNK's part, delivering a complete overhaul of the series' tested gameplay"), to the present day, where a separate article delivers new details on the forthcoming KOF '03, revealing new rosters and "a tag battle system" for this latest arcade-bound iteration.

Thanks to the St.Petersburg Times for their article discussing how NASCAR videogames are giving the real-life drivers tips on a newly redesigned course. According to the piece, which discusses the "$10 million... redesign of Homestead-Miami Speedway", the drivers are checking out EA Sports' new NASCAR title for tips on the as yet undriven new layout: "'The boys playing the video game said Homestead's going to be real fast,' said Busch Series driver Scott Riggs in September... 'With that new banking in there, they could be pushing 180 (mph) in the straightaway'." The coursebuilders at the International Speedway Corporation also got their first look at racing conditions from the game, according to an EA spokesman: "The first time we went down and showed the game to the ISC people they were jumping around the office... [the redesign] was going to add roughly 30 mph to the top speed and shave five seconds off a lap."

Thanks to Reuters for their story revealing Sega's profits jumped 485 percent for the first half of the fiscal year, to 5.93 billion yen ($54.53 million), largely due "to strong sales of its [Japanese] arcade game machines such as [popular crane game] 'UFO Catcher 7' and [intriguing arcade-based CCG] 'The Key of Avalon'." Elsewhere, Sega's consumer division "...posted an operating loss of 1.8 billion yen, but it was less than it expected because of solid sales of its soccer simulation and car racing games." However, the company "...trimmed its projection of key U.S. sports games to 1.73 million from 2.6 million units", still dogged by Electronic Arts' domination of the genre, as the president said: "We need to carefully plan how to compete with EA in terms of marketing, but we believe our games can win more market share because of their high quality."

Thanks to Reuters for their report that last month's video game sales rose 4 percent from August 2002, due in significant part to EA's Madden NFL 2004, which "...sold 1.45 million units on the PS2 and 310,000 units on the Xbox in the month, generating sales of more than $86 million. Sales of Madden for GameCube were negligible." There were new figures on hardware sales, too, as "PS2 sold 291,000 units in August to bring its installed base in the United States to 18.8 million, while... Xbox sold 144,000 units to rise to 5.8 million and... GameCube sold 100,000 units to 4.5 million." Analysts suggested that PS2 sales "continue to lag behind expectations" (1 million short of the 9.5 million hoped), and predicted that Nintendo will "...introduce their own bundle or price cut by the end of September" (scanned early-October print ads for a major US retailer have the GameCube at $99.)

Thanks to Smartmoney.com for their report into GameStop's second-quarter financial results, which revealed "a 31% surge in videogame software sales", although a drop from last year's hardware-discounted highs, and "better-than-expected performance in stores." According to the report, "...the company said videogame-software sales were 'very strong' for the quarter, with leading titles such as 'Enter The Matrix' from Atari Inc., 'NBA Street: Volume 2' and 'NCAA Football 2004' from Electronic Arts Inc. and 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic' from LucasArts." Most interestingly, GameStop indicated they're expecting "...further hardware price reductions 'or similar promotional activities' during the third quarter", a move that may include the rumored $99 GameCube price drop which IGN Cube are confidently predicting for the end of September.

Thanks to Slate for their article discussing the Madden football game series' enormous popularity. The article suggests: "To a new generation of football players, landing on the cover of the latest version of the game is a career-defining experience, the way an enormous shoe contract, or the Wheaties box, or the cover of Sports Illustrated once determined which sports stars had hit the big time." It also points out that "In the last two years, only the Grand Theft Auto games sold more copies than Madden", and Wired News are also running a story on the Madden franchise, which debuts its 2004 version this week, and was recently voted into the Pro Football Hall Of Fame.

Thanks to IGN PS2 for posting their hands-on impressions of EA's newly unveiled NFL Street. This more 'street' alternative to EA's own Madden series, modeled on other EA BIG titles such as the NBA Street series, is described as "..seven-on-seven street ball showcasing the showoff skills and showboat style of the NFL elite. No helmets, no pads, but all the attitude you'd expect from the game's greats like Ray Lewis, Terrell Owens, Michael Vick, and Marshall Faulk." Could this title join Madden in outselling Sega Sports' football titles, despite Sega's attempts to catch up?

mojotooth writes "According to an article on The Register (via Gamesindustry.biz), German courts have handed down a ruling that the EA Sports game FIFA World Cup 2002 cannot be sold in Germany, because it features the name and likeness of Bundesleague goalkeeper Oliver Kahn without his express permission. The court has not yet handed down damages. This could be troubling to the sports gaming industry - we might be forced back into the dark ages of sports gaming, where team names and jersey numbers could be used, but not the names or likenesses of the players."

With TiVo's release of the much anticipated Home Media Option (anticipated by me, anyway), I renewed my quest to find a way to integrate my computer's media files with my TV. TiVo's solution is not an option for me, because I don't have a Series2, and even if I did, the TiVo solution doesn't work with DirecTV units (for now, anyway). So I looked into something I saw a few months ago on ThinkGeek: QCast Tuner for PlayStation 2. QCast Tuner is software that plays audio, video, and image files from your computer to your network adapter-equipped PS2. There are two pieces to the software, the PS2 DVD and the computer software (on a separate CD), for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. I used the Mac OS X version, of course. There's a configuration utility to set up what you will share, and to what users/IP addresses. Then a separate program launches the server, which serves up the files and playlists. It's all written in Java, which means the UI stinks, but it seems to work well.

It can handle many media formats; to me, the most important are MPEG-1, MP3, and JPEG. But it also handles DivX, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, Ogg Vorbis, and PNG, and can be updated to handle other formats. But it doesn't handle the majority of my movie file archive, which are QuickTime, and that's a shame. And if you try to open a file it can't read (I changed some .mov files to .mpg, as it filters by name), it seems to hang.

I got the PS2 Network Adapter installed first, popped it onto the back of the machine, and ran the setup disk to configure it. Then I played a game of Madden 2003 online. I scored a touchdown on a tight end slant on the first play, then got one more play at the end of the half (a 30-yard reception to Troy Brown), and then didn't take another snap. Stupid 1-minute quarters. I lost 14-7.

Then I remembered I had this QCast Tuner thing, and I installed it on my PowerBook G3/500, where I keep my images, my MP3s, and my EyeTV recordings. It didn't take much to set it up, same as with the initial setup: I manually entered my IP address, router address, etc. and the IP address of the PowerBook G3. The software on the PowerBook updated and configured the PS2 software, and restarted it, and I was ready to go.

From the main screen you can elect to view pictures, or play music and video. I tried music first, where I had shared my iTunes directory, which has one directory per artist (except for compilations, which are in a separate directory). I have 293 directories in this directory, and there is no good way to skip to the bottom of the list; you can go one screen at a time, but that takes a little while. So I picked Ben Folds to start out with.

The user interface, apart from not handling long lists well, has several usability problems. To go up a directory, you select the ".." directory, which is something that Unix geeks know, but most PS2 users would expect to use the triangle button or something.

You cannot play songs from these lists, either; you need to add them to the playlist, then hit L1 to switch to the playlist, and then play from there. To get the ID3 tags to show up, you have to hit L1 again, and select that option (along with the shuffle and repeat options). And if you leave the playing screens (which makes the music stop, so you can't manage playlists while playing music) and come back, those options get reset.

You cannot get the time remaining of a song, and the UI doesn't show the full track name -- or track number -- if it is too large for the available space (it has trouble even with track "1/10", though "1/9" fits). And you can't scan forward or backward in a song or movie (which is often the case with streaming software), you can only pause, play, stop, and skip to another file.

To make it easier to find what you want to play, you can make playlists. Select the files you want to play in the interface, and save the playlist, which is stored on the server. I didn't want to do this for all my MP3s, but I had an easier solution: I wrote a small Perl script to create symlinks to my MP3 artist directories in other directories beginning with the first letter of the artist; and I share that directory of directories of symlinks instead. So instead of going down a list of 390 artists to get to Wesley Willis, I just select W, and he's right there.

My problem with EyeTV was greater: as noted in my review of EyeTV, the filenames bear no resemblance to the contents of the files, unlike the MP3s. But the solution I wrote for EyeTV was easily modified to serve me here, too. The playlists are just text files with the path (relative to the share point) on one line, and just the filename on the next line.

I thought I could change the filename line to be any arbitrary text (like "McLaughlin Group 2003.04.11") and have one playlist for all my EyeTV recordings, but that didn't have any effect; the display still showed the filename. So instead, I created multiple playlists, one for each program. So the playlist "EyeTV: McLaughlin Group" has paths for each McLaughlin Group recording I've got saved. It would have been nice to have an EyeTV playlist directory, instead of naming the playlists "EyeTV: ", but I could find no way to make nested playlists. If a playlist is not in the root playlist directory, it is not recognized as a playlist.

I can now watch the shows I used to have to watch on the computer, on the TV. It makes me feel kinda dirty, like it should have been on the TV all along. Oh well. And any changes to my music and TV recordings are regularly updated, as the two programs run via cron every half hour (and I can even begin watching a program that is currently recording).

QCast is bitten by the iTunes ID3 comment bug whereby data is stored with a frame header of "COM ", which is illegal. So QCast doesn't recognize any of the ID3 tag at all. I can't blame QCast for Apple's bug, especially since it bit my code too; this was the final straw that made me convert all my tags to ID3v2.2.0 (only v2.3.0 and v2.4.0 are affected). Maybe the QCast people can fix that problem when they add QuickTime support (he says hopefully).

The final issue I have is how to integrate it into my TV "experience." I don't want to have to turn on the PS2 and wait for it to boot every time I want to listen to music, so do I leave it on whenever I am around? And my system isn't set up to easily switch between PS2 and TiVo and DVD; my switch box has no remote, but does switch to a device that is turned on, which is nice for DVDs, but useless for when you leave the PS2 on all the time. I could plug the PS2 into the spare inputs on the VCR (which is on a separate input to the amplifier, and has its own button on the remote control), but that is kinda sloppy. And do I buy an IR remote control for the PS2? Is there an IR remote that can turn the PS2 off and on? These are problems mostly inherent in the design of using PS2 for multimedia, and there's not a lot I can do except to try to figure out ways to do things that work for me.

Basically, QCast Tuner is a nice idea, and it works well despite its UI and design flaws (some of which can be fixed on subsequent updates, I imagine), if you can fit it into your setup (or change your setup to suit it). I'm still undecided on using it long-term, but I am going to keep trying it out for awhile and see how it goes.