I feel it’s my geek given duty to make a post about this presentation. I was lucky to finally have the time to watch their hour long presentation and Q&A session at the Game Developer Conference 2009 (which ends a couple of days from today). They could have not picked a better place to finally demo their technology.

In short, they’ve introduced a huge new concept to the video game industry, I’d call it “Cloud Gaming” to not only host the games, but also host the processing juice. You won’t need a console anymore, they keep the hardware to execute and stream the game to your screen. They support TV (with a miniconsole), PC and Mac.

So bear with me, they say they have solved the issue that you’re thinking about now, Lag. The people behind this worked on apple to create Quicktime, and they identified differences between what it takes to compress linear (regular) video, vs Interactive Video. They say their compression algorithm doesn’t take seconds of lag (like when you stream over a webcam), but miliseconds. They have custom chips to process the graphics, and I bet they might even built their own network protocol right on top of IP.

So what are some of the implications of this:

• We’ll all be able to finally play Crysis and even more demanding games on low end PCs
• No more buying more hardware, no more upgrading your PC to be able to run games, no more buying consoles
• All your games live on the platform, so you can play from any computer, and you’ll keep the state of your game until the last time you hit the Pause button
• Your friends can see you play, live. I bet we’ll be able to see live tournaments, we’ll start seeing a new breed of famous people get more attention, the Elite gamers. Imagine seeing the best Call of Duty player in the world playing live
• New Genres of video games will emerge on this platform, maybe even new genres of entertainment, think new Live Broadcast shows where participants use an avatar to either act or compete (game show)
• Game Developers not need to think of the rendering limitations that they might have nowadays, and will be able to design games that could only be imagined in the past. Render quality only thought for movies will now exist for video games, think of virtual reality now
• There’s about 100 million PCs/Macs/Laptops out there that are not ready today to play high end games, now they’ll have the possibility of playing virtually any game by installing a 1Mb plugin from OnLive.com
• Takes Piracy out of the Business Equation
• A bigger gaming audience makes an even better case for companies placing advertisement in video games, maybe there will be a lot more high end free games with bigger audiences, think the next Grand Theft Auto coming out for free with superb real life like graphics rendering, all ad sponsored and free to the consumer. The amount of people that you could have playing a great game for free would make other developers think twice about charging for their games and having their virtual worlds ad sponsored.
• No more installs
• Now multiplayer will have almost no latency since all players live inside their datacenter, you only get the latency of your ISP if there’s any
• Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft must be shitting their pants
• Services that sell used games are going to be selling vintage and their business will be reduced

However I think there will always be room for the old consoles. This is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, we have grown up with consoles for almost 30 years and there’s a lot of changes to push into people’s minds:

• How do you convince me, that finally made up my mind after years and dropped $500 on a PS3 to play with my friends in latin america online to switch to this, if my friends will probably have no way to even have access to the system in years to come?
• How do you convince PC gamers that rather pay for the hardware and pirate the games? (There’s plenty of those, probably the majority of the PC gaming population outside the US never plays for a PC game, and doesn’t get into consoles because they pirate the games) into renting or buying games on the cloud?
• How do you convince all the people that they should switch when their gaming experience depends entirely on being connected to the internet. So If the ISP is having issues I can’t play? isn’t my console awesome?

It seems that many of these complains are similar to all the complains brought upon business models that didn’t exist online and that are now thriving. This presentation left me with my mouth wide open, and I highly recommend you watch it. You’ll be blown away by the power of the UI, and how as you Browse for games, you can even see how other people are playing live, it’s like streaming video is nothing for OnLive. Really sick technology.

In the case that they succeed, I just can’t wait for them to have competition by the existing big brands, it’s going to get so interesting once cloud gaming becomes the defacto platform, maybe we as consumers will end up playing games for free, all sponsored with in game ads.

Just by listening to the guy if you’re a techie, your mind will start to fly to barely start to imagine the awesomeness of the technology that should be behind this. I can imagine anything from custom virtualization technology, to custom GPUs, custom network cards, custom network protocols on top of IP, deals with major internet backbone networks, ISPs, deals with game publishers, sick level API development, incomprehensible comprehension technology for my retard brain… when I see shit like this, I always think… how the hell is there people that still believe in god? Mankind is the closest thing there is to something like that! I’m thankful for people in this world that can think so big.

The service is supposed to launch next Winter 2009, but you can sign up to be a beta tester

                          

That’s me on Xbox live, my gamer tag is of course “GUBATRON”

Check out the Xbox Live Upgrade experience screenshot by screenshot.

What’s your avatar like?

                          

It’s official, I’m retarded compared to the guys that built this technology.

                          

My friend Daniel Chang was recording “incognito” with his macbook’s webcam when I popped the game for the first time.

                          

They call it the best game of the decade.

                          

The city map as expected resembles quite a lot the maps of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and New Jersey.

I found this on the Bronx like area of Liberty City, it’s some kind of Latin character called Manny Escuela, it seems they’re recording some kind of Reggaeton Music Video during the game:

So far I’ve seen videos of other ethnic mafias, such as Italian (Jersey-like side), Russian, Albanian, Jamaican and Irish.

The similarities between Liberty City and New York are amazing, this is a picture of the main character flying over the city and looking at what in real life is Queens and northern brooklyn (where I live)
See how they made a building resembling the Queens Citi tower.

The game is finally coming out at the end of this month, it looks light years ahead of anything else that’s come out for any console, can’t wait to be playing it with my friends (yes, its the first multiplayer-gta)

                          

Anyway, I’m just posting this as a reminder to myself for the future, hope it will serve some other people having he same problem:

1. Turn xbox + controllers on, with one of them linked to a single gold account
2.Main gears menu -> Versus -> Xbox Live Player Match
3 you will now notice, at the bottom of the screen “Y Guest Sign-in. Press Y on the 2nd controller, one not linked to xbox live
4. This will bring up a tab where you can select a sign in. Select “Guest”
5. Done, find or create your player match!

Now, does anyone know how to play Call of Duty 4, online, with split screen? I want to play with my friend at home, with other people on Xbox Live!

                          

Aqui puse un video para demostrar que en Xbox 360 uno se puede divertir muuuucho mas que con la consola de juguete llamada Nintendo Wii. Jeje. Esto es en realidad una respuesta en video a un hilo de conversacion muy largo que llevamos en la lista de correos de wedoit4you.com sobre si el Wii es la consola gay y si es divertida o no mas alla de unos 15 minutos de gameplay.

Aqui queda prueba de que puedes simular de forma bien divertida lo que se siente tocar una cancion de metallica en la bateria, y aprendes a mejorar tu ritmica mientras pierdes unas cuantas calorias.

                          

Download this video in full quality (MPEG-4 ~ 33.2MB)

So here’s my pro’s and cons of Rockband, and why I still enjoy Guitar Hero more.

PROS:

• The guitar is awesome, it doesn’t make as much noise as the regular Guitar controllers
• Good Multiplayer, a lot of fun in quickplay with all songs unlocked (UI a little confusing at first though)
• The Mic gameplay is amazing, exceeded my expectations (although I was scared for a while cause I plugged the mic and it said it wasn’t plugged, and it wasn’t until I read on the internet that I had to plug the gamepad as well…, the game should say… the mic is in but you need a gamepad dude!)
• More people get to play

CONS

• Songs available are not as cool as Guitar Hero, maybe cause they tried to balance the coolness between drums and guitar. The Guitar player will get bored if it’s experienced in guitar hero, most songs are just dumb chord strumming
• They promoted the game with Welcome To The Jungle and the song isn’t there, that was dissapointing after clearing all the songs
• When playing the Tour in multiplayer, it’s a pain in the ass to unlock more songs, and you’re forced to play the same songs over and over again, and you get bored and stick Guitar Hero III for another 2 hours
• 2 Friends from PlayMor.com reported on their podcast their Guitars Broke, I can’t say the same yet
• The noise of the drum’s is very annoying to even the drum player, no matter how loud you play the game you’ll still hear the TAC-TAC-TAC,
  then your neighbors will complain, and then you’ll have to play with headphones, which is the best solution so you don’t hear the damn plastic sound.

                          

The xbox 360 controller lacks the white and black buttons (this is explained everywhere), so on the cheat codes when they refer to the Black button, this means you gotta hit the Right Bumper (which is the button right above the Right Trigger).

Now, what they don’t tell you is, that when they say “Left” or “Right”, they mean “Left Trigger” and “Right Trigger”, sons of bitches.

Here are all the Cheat Codes, you can enter them during regular Game Play, meaning, when your Sim is walking around.

When you enter a Cheat Code correctly you will hear the voice of a woman Yawning, if you enter the same cheat code again, you will hear a “Uh-Uh” voice with a negative sound to it.

Once a first code is entered, you’ll see a small white pole in the front of your property, this is called the “Cheat Gnome“.

So remember:

Left -> Left Trigger
Right -> Right Trigger
White -> Left Bumper
Black -> Right Bumper

When they say D-Pad, they mean the Directional pad on the center of your Xbox 360, the one that looks like the good old directional pad of the old NES.

                          

Acaba de salir el trailer de GTA IV, este episodio puede mostrar la emocion de estos geeks que esperaron con ansias la salida del trailer y hasta tomamos fotos esta semana de la publicidad en Canal St. en New York.

Estaremos esperando al 16 de Octubre para comprarlo para PC o XBOX 360 y ver lo que unos 150 desarrolladores pueden hacer.

Algunas fotos del trailer (haz click para ver los detalles analizados)

Entre otras cosas mencionadas hoy:

Agreganos a tu twitter, y todos tus updates apareceran en wedoit4you.com

Realtime Death Toll Counter

Yahoo Mail sin Limitaciones de espacio

Robot de Michael Jackson en las Vegas

Kwikie Marts and 7-Elevens

                          

These are the pictures of a building size banner that has the letters “IV”. To someone that’s not in the scene of Grand Theft Auto, this is absolutely irrelevant, it might bring some curious people, but for those of us that know about it, we’re like, damn, Rockstar’s marketers are starting to play with my head, they want my $50.

The Teaser has a countdown for the Trailer of the game, I repeat FOR THE TRAILER, not even the launch date…

Talk about creating Hype.

By the end of the marketing campaign for this game, I bet some people are gonna be sleeping by the video game shops the night before it’s released.

                          

Recomiendo que sigan los enlaces, especialmente el de Asassin’s Creed y vean los videos para que vean de que trata el juego, cuyos escenarios fueron reproducidos en gran detalle basados en la tierra santa y con la ayuda de historiadores (Ver los videos en la seccion de diarios de los desarrolladores para mayor informacion)

                          

Jugar y hablar en “Venezolano” siempre sera lo maximo, mentar madre, humillar en grupo al otro equipo… no tiene precio.

Unete a nuestra comunidad de Xbox Panas

http://gamesource.groups.yahoo.com/group/xboxpanas/files/

Agrega tu gamer tag a las listas de los juegos que ya estan, si hay un juego que tienes y no esta en esa lista de gamertags, simplemente dale a “Create Text File”

                          

See the entire flickr set here

I got Gears of War and Need for Speed = Carbon.

My Xbox live gamer tag is GUBATRON.

Cheers to the people of Planeta Ligero podcast, I sure gave them a lot of shit for talking and defending this product, I must say I consider them being right about it after trying it.

                          

Sin costos escondidos, Nintendo va a dar palo en Noviembre. Anunciaron finalmente el precio oficial de la consola, $250, y dijeron que la consola tendra acceso gratuito a un servicio de juegos en Linea. La consola sera inalambrica ademas, asi que si tienes WiFi en tu casa (con conexion a internet por supuesto), estas hecho.

Enchufa tu nintendo WII (de solo $250), y juega en linea.

X-box live, corre o te encaramas.
Sony, baja los precios si no quieres fracasar.

                          

In this podcast I play some of the songs of my favorite NES games, the fun of it is that you have to guess the game of the song before it finishes.

The last song in the podcast I will let you answer on the comments of this podcast.

Hope you can take this podcast on the way to work, you’ll be giggling in the subway.

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons License, so feel free to air it wherever you want, as long as you don’t monetize from it and you say where you got it from.

                          

This time it won't be as easy as the first, but I bet you played this konami game a lot.

As a note I want to tell you that I'm preparing a podcast with several NES soundtracks and screenshots, it will be edited as a trivia podcast so that you can make your guesses.

 As I listen to all this NES music, I realize those developers really like classic rock and heavy metal, just pay attention, all this music could be played by rock bands (Like The Advantage)

                          

Leave a comment with your best guess.

This is an easy one.

BATMAN!