“The one area in which the success of Halo 1 was totally surprising to us, and completely changed how we thought about Halo 2, was LAN parties,” says Butcher. “We never really thought that people would do a lot of playing Xbox multiplayer on LAN, even though people in our office played it all the time… Well, it only worked five weeks before we shipped the game, but in those five weeks we played a lot of Halo multiplayer!”

“We had a lab full of Xboxes on a LAN, so we played 16-player CTF every single afternoon,” Griesemer remembers. “It was fun, so this was what we designed for – but when we shipped, the vast majority of our fans never got to experience that. They were playing four-player split-screen on the smallest maps. There was a total disconnect.”

“We looked at the small set of fans who were able to do this,” continues Butcher, “and just how much they were enjoying themselves, and asked ourselves if we could bring that to everybody. That would be something really special, really unique.”

The Xbox was the first console I actually bought. Sure, I had owned a Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo and a myriad of other consoles as well, but this was the first I actually funded with my own, hard-earned money. There was something about that small detail of ownership at the time that made my gaming experience much different.

In my last years of elementary school, everyone had an Xbox. Looking back, I must have lived in a small, quirky part of town where Playstation hadn’t taken hold. But as a result, that was all we played. It was Xbox at my house, Xbox at a friend’s house. It was only natural we discovered that little Ethernet port sitting inconspicuously on the back of the console.

Owning my Xbox meant that I could take it wherever I wanted. So when I went to a friend’s house, it came with me. I learned how to turn a vanilla Ethernet cable into a crossover cable at the age of 12. We’d hook our consoles together, somehow drag a giant CRT into the basement, and play. That situation that Griesemer talks about? That was us. Playing 8, 12 or even 16 player Halo was the only way I played that game, for the longest time.

To this day, I’m still convinced that mutliplayer in Combat Evolved is the best of the Halo series. I’ll try, now and then, to get my current friends to play. But it’s really not the same. Combat Evolved was a game built for LAN, built for us dozen teenagers huddled in a basement. Perhaps its just nostalgia for a decade past, but I haven’t had a gaming experience like that since.

The above quote is from a Eurogamer article “Better Than Halo: The Making of Halo 2″

Over Skype one evening, Hector Martin tells a story of the Playstation 2.

A group of hackers discovered a serious exploit that allowed unofficial — or, homebrew — software, to be run on the console. Unlike previous hacks, a memory unit and some software trickery was all that was required to make it happen. It wasn’t long before the pirates could do the same as well.

Sony, of course, was not amused. Due to the system’s design, the problem remained for months, unresolved until a new hardware revision could be pushed out the door.

But that was then.

Read the rest of this entry »

NVIDIA had their CES keynote earlier today. Fitting in with this year’s theme, it had both 3D and a tablet to satisfy the masses. But what today’s keynote lacked was Fermi, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Fermi is NVIDIA’s next generation of desktop and notebook GPUs, which the company hopes will finally give them a leg up on the competition. If you’ve been hiding in a cave, you may not know that ATI has been wiping the floor clean with NVIDIA’s abysmal GPUs for the past year, and it hasn’t been pretty. Compounded by delays, and supposed production difficulties, NVIDIA’s current journey has not been an easy one. Fermi is supposed to change all that.

The problem is, nobody knows how. Today’s keynote was dominated by Tegra 2, the company’s next generation mobile and portable graphics chipset, in addition to a curious partnership with vehicle manufacturers. The GF100 – the first Fermi card announced – was given but a brief mention towards the end of the show, much to the dismay of gamers and hardware enthusiasts. NVIDIA said the card would be shown on the show floor, but information has been scarce thus far. However, one CES attendee overhear the following:

“Performance numbers are hard to come by on the GeForce GF100, but we overheard someone saying that it is around 36% faster than ATI’s Radeon HD 5870. When asked to confirm the number, NVIDIA could not comment. We also heard a rumored launch date of March 2nd, 2010 from various people at the show, so it looks like the graphics card is close to coming out.”

Of course, with none of this yet to be confirmed by NVIDIA, and no benchmarks to show for it, this can only be taken with a grain of salt. NVIDIA’s lack of comment is concerning, especially with ATI so far ahead. However, like others, the graphics giant may simply be waiting for GDC in March to drop the full Fermi experience – logical, considering the rumoured launch date is that same month. While it may be hard to say for sure, the fact remains clear that NVIDIA needs to do something, and do it fast.

I bought myself a fancy Playstation Triple just before Christmas, and I couldn’t be happier. It means I’m part of this so-called next-generation of gaming, despite being nearly three years into the system’s life cycle. More importantly, it means I can stop looking at the floor when telling people I own a Wii. Bliss.

Now, Sony is a company known for being rather…proprietary. Examples include ATRAC, UMD, and everyone’s favourite, the MemoryStick. These were all technologies that, for the most part, didn’t do so well with the North American crowd. They were restrictive, tough to reverse engineer, and near useless outside of Sony’s product ecosystem.

With the Playstation 3, as far as I can tell, there’s none of that. Blu-ray notwithstanding, I can charge the controllers via USB, play certain games with a keyboard and mouse, and even use my wired Logitech USB headset in online games. There’s no proprietary cables, and no restrictive first-party accessories. If this is the future, I like it.

I’m writing an article that involves piracy right now. And boy, do gaming companies not like piracy.

After all, games are the magic dust that powers this billion dollar gaming machine; it’s not that hardware that makes money, but the software and accesories. So naturally, it’s in the best interests of developers to protect that investment. Which brings me back to my original point…

Gaming companies do not like piracy. And by extension, they sure as hell don’t like talking about it either.

Things get fuzzy when you try to account for homebrew development. For the uninitiated, it’s generally the sort of console development that relies on hacks and exploits to get unsigned or third-party code on to a console. Most gaming companies are wary to issue any sort of official stance on this activity — welcoming homebrew is out of the question, and condemning it is an unspoken rule of the industry. The reasoning behind this is that most companies seem to equate homebrew with piracy. And if you haven’t gotten it already, the gaming industry certainly isn’t a fan of those who pirate their magic smoke.

The gaming industry’s attitude toward piracy ultimately puts those who attempt to hack and exploit and reverse engineer a console or portable in an awkward situation. Exploits aren’t always intended to encourage piracy or the illegal copying of games, but they can certainly be used to do so. In some cases, like the custom firmware for the PSP, it’s hard not to inadvertently support piracy when the mechanism for loading custom software happens to be the same mechanism for loading illegal games.

To be clear, I’m not looking for some grand sanction on homebrew activities. The point of all this is, it seems like it’s become increasingly hard for companies to take the idea of homebrew seriously when it is so deeply entangled with pirate culture. People are doing some amazing things with consoles — XBMC for the original Xbox — comes to mind; and yet, I get the impression some companies can’t be bothered to separate the pirates from the programmers.