One of the new technologies I was looking forward to experience in person at GamesCom was stereoscopic 3D for gaming. Just like Move and Kinect it is an experience that can’t be conveyed by any kind of established means of mass communication. The device I was looking forward to most was the Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunatly, Nintendo didn’t exhibit it at the show floor. Apparently there were demonstrations behind closed doors but I didn’t manage to get in. So I was left with what Sony prepared this year.

Off the bat, 3D wasn’t really very prominent. I saw a total of 3 (!!!) 3D-enabled demo stations. They say that this was because Playstation Move was Sony’s focus this year. It left a bitter aftertaste of Sony not being really confident with that technology. And if this is true, I can tell why.

Speechless on how bad this is…

The first 3D station was the remake of Sly Cooper. I put on the 3D glasses, looked at the screen and wondered why the image was gone. It took me a few seconds to realize that the image was still there but incredibly dim. Apparently, the shutter glasses reduce the luminosity of the screen by half. What looked like a decently lit TV screen before became a large equivalent of a 1st gen GameBoy Advance screen. You know, the one without back-light. But hey, at least it’s 3D right? Well, kind of. Sure, there were scenes were the 3D effect really worked. In one sequence you had to crawl though a ventilation shaft. That looked fine. In the normal 3rd person view, the 3D effect was barely noticeable. You got used to it very quickly anyway and forgot all about it.

I thought maybe the screen was mis-configured. I wasn’t looking forward to Sly Cooper anyway. Next up, I tried GT5 which is a game I am REALLY looking forward to. The station was a cool racing seat with a steering wheel and the screen installed really close. I thought that would blow me away. It didn’t. Again, the screen got a lot dimmer with the glasses on. Even that close to the screen, the 3D effect was barely noticeable and didn’t affect gameplay in any way. The feeling of speed wasn’t more intense as I have hoped. I wasn’t able to grasp the track geometry any better than in 2D. The most disappointing thing was that the cars didn’t even look very plastic. They seemed almost like flat billboards. I have no idea if this is a limitation of the 3D technology or an artifact of some weird trick they are pulling off to get the 3D effect working. And as with every stereoscopic 3D I’ve seen so far, parts that move quickly tend to flicker a lot. Not the best technology for a racing game. The top it off, the head tracking we have been promised didn’t work either. Thank you, but no thank you.

There was a Killzone 3 station as well but it wasn’t working on that day and I haven’t bothered to check up on it later on. Killzone gives me narcoleptic attacks anyway.

All in all, this was a quite sobering experience. At this point, 3D TVs are WORSE than 2D. Having a bright, vivid 2D image is way more impressive and immersive than a dim, low-contrast, flickering sorta-3D. Again, I have no idea if the TVs were badly configured. But if this was indicative of how stereoscopic 3D is supposed to work, 3D technology is something I’ll gladly skip.

Having some experience with GamesCom I did the smart thing and checked out most of the stuff I wanted to see at the business day already. Here are some first impressions one of the most important topics this year: Kinect

Kinect – Weird cylindric Aquarium cell sold separately.

I tried out Dance Central. We were standing in line and there were several booths with different games. Weird enough, nobody wanted to see Dance Central. I think it’s because of the fact that other visitors would be able to watch you make a fool of yourself. I heard that it was good so I skipped the line and went right in with a buddy. We were introduced to the game by a very nice lady from Harmonix. I loved it. Kinect is amazingly flawless at recognizing people and gestures. There was small preview in the upper right corner of the screen. It did a great job at recognizing our silhouettes and keeping us apart. Believe me, we were testing the limits. Menu navigation works also surprisingly well. In Microsoft demos I often saw that to confirm an item, you would need hold the cursor in place for a couple of seconds. That didn’t look right for me. In Dance Central, you confirm by swiping you arm sideways. It’s intuitive and quite satisfying.

The game is exactly what you probably already saw. But having the full-body experience is exhilarating. It feels very good to perform a certain move in rhythm to the music and having the game recognize it and award you for that. The dance routines are simple yet stylish. The song selection is broad and ought to have a good song for pretty much everybody.

I had only one problem. You see a character on the screen performing the moves so you know what to do. This character is turned towards you. He is performing the moves as if the screen was a mirror. If he raises his right hand, you are supposed to raise your left hand. At some point in my life, I made a habit of NOT seeing people I stand in front of as mirror images. I tend to to the appropriate transformation in my head. So when I tell you you have a drop of jelly on your cheek and touch my left cheek, I mean your left cheek and not your right cheek. This habit made a problem for me in Dance Central. I was doing the moves in the opposite direction. It was hard for me to get into the rhythm when I lost it. But I’m sure this is something I will get into at some point. Maybe there is even a setting.

Generally, the game differs from other music games a little bit as it is not really possible to just jump in and wing it. You need to learn the moves before you perform. Otherwise you will embarrass yourself a little bit. The game even has a training mode to do so. On the other hand, there is cool music playing and in a party of friends with alcohol involved it might turn out not being that big of a deal after all.

There are dancing games out there already. They pale in comparison to Dance Central. We played the Michael Jackson experience shortly afterwards. It’s a Wii game pretty much like Just Dance. Compared to Dance Central it felt like a very bad joke.

Let me be clear on this: this IS the Guitar Hero of dancing games. I remember paying roughly the same for the original Guitar Hero as Kinect is supposed to cost so there we go!

So what if you aren’t really sure if you want a dancing game? Is Kinect something for the hardcore crowd? I have no clue. Microsoft hasn’t shown anything hardcore yet. For me, Dance Central works so great that it justifies to get the new system. But I can totally see that some people may not be interested. The solution for them is simple: don’t buy it! Wait out until they bring out a game that suits you. It might turn out to be a one-hit-wonder after all. It’s a very cool technology. Dance Central is a very cool system seller. But if that doesn’t sound interesting to you already, don’t feel obliged to go for it.

I’m quite interested where Microsoft is going with this one. It seems like they delivered the technology they promised. Color me impressed.

Regardless whether you think achievements are harmful or not, there is a lot one can learn from how the user interface for achievements was solved in StarCraft II. For example, there is one little bit of UI was quite surprising to me and shows quite well how much polish was invested in the game.

Clicking on the small [+] reveals more detailed information.

If you click on the little + button on an achievement you can see review your progress. This is already a nice touch but I’ve seen that being done before. The surprising bit is that the way the progress is tracked is DIFFERENTLY depending on what kind of achievements it is. So for example, if the goal is to kill a certain amount of enemy units, you get a progress bar. However, when the goal is to complete all missions, you get a to-do list where completed missions are checked-off. This way you can tell which missions are still missing.

Now I know what they have spent 12 years on.

I touched upon a similar thing in my Massive Interface Fail trilogy and the more recent Collectibles Review of Red Faction. Games have the tendency to re-use UI elements even for tasks where those elements aren’t the best choice. The reason is probably because it’s easier – especially since UI is so tedious to code. Also, it will never crop up as a bug or criticism in a review so there is no reason to do more than just the bare minimum. So players are served sub-par interfaces on a regular basis. At this point, having a developer like Blizzard putting just a tiny bit of effort into those parts of the interface is mind-blowingly refreshing. I think critics and players should start demanding and rewarding quality UI in games. I gave up on mature topics or innovative gameplay in the AAA industry. But can we at least have high standards in UI craftsmanship?

There is an even better example for outstanding interface design in StarCraft II but I think I will leave that to game design review. It got awfully quiet over there recently.

But on the other hand, even Blizzard makes mistakes. Apparently, the achievement system is a little buggy at this point. Many players complain about various achievements not tracking the progress correctly. For example, one achievement tracks just the number of single-player missions you have completed on hard difficulty. Another achievements unlocks when you completed ALL the missions of hard difficulty. If that redundancy wasn’t weird enough, the two achievements don’t actually match up in my game. The second achievement tracks the missions correctly but the first one seems to be oblivious to some of my progress. Because the first achievement uses a progress bar instead of a check list, I can’t tell which missions weren’t registered by the game. By experimenting a bit I figured out that the first achievement only updates when you play a mission you haven’t played before. It seems like a problem that occurred due to some significant changes in the game’s structure. It created that odd redundancy and apparently some asymmetry in how different achievements track progress.

So it’s hit and miss at the moment. I would say it’s more hit than miss. After all, as they say: bugs can be fixed, bad design is forever.

I spend most of my day at my computer. I don’t have an hi-fi system in my living room. I consume all audio content via headphones. So naturally, I’m dependent on good headphones. After some experiments I found pair of Sennheiser headphones I really like. They are not earplugs but real headphones with some surprisingly descent noise isolation. Best of all, they are very compact too. They can be folded Transformers-style into a small plastic case and I can take them everywhere I go. They are premium headphones while still being portable.

PX200 – sorta awesome… as long as they work.

Unfortunately, they have a serious flaw. The audio connector on them causes some annoying problems. I admit it may have to do with the way I use them. I bought the same ones for my girlfriend and they work fine for her. But I had 3 pairs of those and each of the succumbed to a failure of the connector of some sorts. Usually they would develop a nasty loose contact and one of the channels wold work only intermittently.

Now granted, Sennheiser has some very good service. I sent in my first pair long after the initial warranty was over and they just sent me a new pair. That one lasted for around 3 years until it also started having problems. At this point the material also was rubbing off so I got me a third, brand new pair. It had a different connector so I had my hopes up. Unfortunately, that one also sorta broke just recently but in a different way. The cable slid out for a few millimeters out of the connector casing, exposing the wires. They would sometimes cross over and disturb the signal.

So I thought I try a different strategy and fix that damn connector. After all, the headphones are great, it’s just that stupid connector that is causing problems. I thought it was a good opportunity to get some soldering skills. I bought a soldering kit some time ago and didn’t even have the time to try it. So I got a bunch of replacement connectors sat down and… failed miserably.

The problem is that the headphones use a RALLY weird cable. I have never seen anything like this. Usually, you would have a two pieces of wire per channel, each one in some kind of insulator. When I cut open the cable in the headphones I found that each channel had two exposed wires with no visible insulator. Even better, within the wires I found strands of some sort of artificial fabric – probably nylon or something. So I started putting the wires on different part of the plugged-in connector to see which wire is which – it didn’t do anything. Very rarely I would get some static but never a clear signal. WTF?! Was this nylon some sort of super-new material transmitting the signal?

After at least two hours of experiments I finally got it. It turns out that each fiber of the wire is individually isolated with a super-thin layer of coat. I was able to remove some of that coating by scraping it off with the knife. But this causes some tremendous troubles. I had to crape that coat from each of the four wires individually. The procedure way very tricky. Scraping would often cut of individual fibers thinning the wire out until it was not much thicker than a hair. The nylon core also got in the way so I had to extract it and cut it off.

But then the soldering didn’t went well either. Normally you would heat the wire and simply put the solder on it. The hot wire would melt the solder and the liquid solder would spread itself on the wire. But that wasn’t really possible with such hair-thin wires. I had to heat the solder directly and let it drip onto the connector plates, which is always a mess. After a long fight I finally connected everything. I plugged it in and it simply didn’t work at all.

I got frustrated and wanted to see at least some kind of results. I took another cable with already a connector installed, I cut in in half, exposed the wires and soldered them onto the wires of the headphone. Again, that turned out to be also a pain in the ass because of the flimsy thin headphone wires but at least I got it to work.

Just like new!

The result is a mess. The soldering is horrible. Because of all the exposed wires it’s still got a loose contact. I even managed to melt the cable isolation with the soldering iron in some places. I can pretty much just throw away the whole thing. Good thing I started out with the old worn-out pair. I initially wanted to do the same procedure with the newer pair. I decided against it. Instead I put some epoxy on the exposed part of the new headphones and decided not to attempt any repairs on them ever again.

There is a lesson in there somewhere.

Steven Poole recently wrote a funny and short piece for the Edge magazine. It’s called Don’t Believe Everything You Read. He basically re-wrote some of the recent events in the gaming industry as if they happened in the book industry. Hilarity ensues.

Next door, rival Fourth Estate was pushing its own 3D display technology. “We think readers are bored with the same old flat words,” whispered its bug-eyed spokesman. “Lettering that is truly three-dimensional will empower a new level of immersion. Your favourite words – like, maybe, ‘plinth’ or ‘flange’ – will quite literally jump off the page.”

He touches on a couple of subjects seemingly quite alien to literature such as the power of publishers to own and control content, the constant attempts to merge games with other media or – as in the quote above – the blind belief for new technology to automatically provide better quality content. It’s a quite amusing thought experiment. Oh man, aren’t games just crazy? Heh, yeaaaah…

But wait! Looking closer, the comparison falls a bit flat. So for example, publishers have less control over the content of books today, but that wasn’t always the case. A hundred years or so, we had a very similar situation where authors had much less control over their work and publishers could make very specific demands, especially in the popular fiction genre. The respect towards the author as the driving force behind a work is something that emerged quite recently, after centuries of discourse.

Similarly, for a long time, books WERE actually considered as damaging for the youth. One prominent example is the book The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, released in 1774. The protagonist of that book commits tragic suicide due to unrequited love. Supposedly, some young readers were emotionally struck by the book and were driven into suicide out of sympathy for the protagonist. The book was banned in some places because of that. Many saw it as an example for the corrupting nature of literature. It was the Columbine Massacre of literature.

The part with 3D technology for books is amusing but the book industry actually moves towards technology-centric thinking right now. Just watch the iBooks presentation at the recent iPad keynote. We are sadly not that far away from this. With new technology come new problems. Comparing the breakdown of PSN to not being to able to read anything is a failed analogy, especially since we had a REAL similar incident already – the removal of 1984 from Kindle eBook readers by Amazon.

Finally Steven also commented on the tendency to merge games with other media, especially in order to establish their status of art. I must admit that this is probably the best part of the article. But even here we don’t need to go far to find analogies in other media. Movie adaptations of books are prominent examples of forms of entertainment being blended together. Early movies were often based on famous books or theater plays because movies were struggling with being recognized as art at that time.

So at close scrutiny, the games culture is actually not that different from other media. Of course, this doesn’t make things any less frustrating but there is a happy ending to be derived from Steven Poole’s article. If games aren’t that different they should sooner or later evolve into a much stable and more accepted status and we will look at these times and laugh about them in disbelief.