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Recently, I had a chance to play with an OLPC, the new “One Laptop Per Child” laptop and I was
thoroughly impressed with the hardware. Along with the Asus Eee PC, the Intel Classmate PC, and
rumors of a Acer product along these lines, the market of low cost linux-based laptops is really heating up.
Will this be the catalyst to make Linux a viable platform for gaming?

Linux has always been a solid platform for emulators, but not so hot for original games. With cheap, durable
laptops in the hands of many younger gamers, it seems like a good market for games. While the OLPC is targeted
in developing nations, some of them will end up in the hands of kids with deep pockets, and the Eee PC seem like
the perfect product for K-12 and college age students with it’s portability.

The downside for me as a parent is that there isn’t any educational titles available, so while I’m in the market for a durable laptop for my two younger kids, it’s hard to consider the current generation of linux laptops. My kids love to play games like Dora The Explorer on our current old laptop, so it’s a hard sell to get them to make the switch until publishers take notice and start releasing Linux titles.

A big question for publishers is piracy; can you create a Linux title that people will pay for as opposed to torrent? I personally think so, but I think it’s a challenge that many publishers won’t pursue.

Tags: Business by wagnoid
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The first game I purchased for my Xbox 360 was Call of Duty 2, and since then I’ve been in love with the franchise.  Infinity Ward knows first person shooters and they are master craftsmen of the genre.  Call of Duty 4 has been no exception, and I tore through the single player campaign as quickly as I could. Usually I end it right there, but having heard about the unique leveling system of multiplayer, talking to friends who were engrossed in the COD4 multiplayer game, and having still an unquenched thirst for more Call of Duty goodness, I decided to give multiplayer a try.I have no false expectations on my skills at first person shooters.  I don’t have the twitch and dexterity to be really good at them, nor do I have the time to practice to push my own skills higher.  Still, I’ve really enjoyed a good multiplayer coop from time to time, so the idea of playing with other people sounded reasonable, so I took the plunge. I’d heard it before on podcasts and forums, but the Xbox Live experience is just plain broken for multiplayer gaming.   I’d assumed there would be trashtalking online, but I wasn’t prepared for the racist slurs and complete idiocy of a select few players in each match.  I thought I might run into it once or twice, but it’s pretty pervasive to the point that I clearly needed to quit or change something because it just wasn’t fun for me to here someone’s drunken diatribe online.   Having 2 kids still too young for real gaming, there is no way I’d let them play online. The one saving grace for me was a little known setting in xbox live to turn off voice communications for everyone but friends (To access it: go to your gamertag, edit gamer profile, privacy settings, voice and text) which silences everyone but your friends.  Now I’m in blissful ignorance, enjoying the game albeit I wonder how much more fun it would be if there were friendly people there working together as a team to play the game as the developers intended. Microsoft really needs to revamp the system to make it a better community if they hope to grow their userbase for this kind of gameplay.  There are ways to report people who are obnoxious but it takes too long to do, and isn’t very effective.  A better system would be something akin to linkedin.com where you can let friends of friends in your voice chat or even friends of friends of friends to at least comb out the bad apples as a first pass and then ban the rest manually.  

Tags: Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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Here’s my own predictions for 2008 in gaming:

• PS3 will finally get some traction this year after a good spring and summer. There are number of good titles that slipped into Spring and if all goes well for Sony, they’ll have more buzz in their favor over Microsoft in the console wars.
• Wii might overtake Microsoft and Sony in console sales (if they haven’t already), but they’ll lose the war big time on software sales especially for third party games. I think many Wii owners will be happy making it a Wii Sports player, and many more will simply have Nintendo player.
• By next winter we’ll here about a Wii HD in the works which will be backward compatible with the Wii but be a bit more powerful to support HDTVs.
• Grand Theft Auto 4 sales will be below predictions.
• A new PSP will be announced (but not released) that will support PS2 titles via download and have two analog sticks.

This is all complete speculation on my part and very likely dead wrong. It’s fun to speculate though!

Tags: Business by wagnoid
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