Rhapsody is a dinosaur.  The recently emancipated (disenfranchised?) and price-cut child of Real Networks, Rhapsody has been around for a long time.  Since they’ve started, dedicated Mp3 players have rapidly become less important, as smartphones – all-in-one convergence devices – have found their way into more hands.  The mobile revolution has also brought stiff competition in the music subscription space.  From bargain basement offerings like grooveshark with it’s $3.00 a month subscription, to upstarts like Rdio and Mog.  Let’s not forget about Spotify, the once and future king of subscription services that is almost/any day now/never coming to the U.S.   At the other end of the spectrum are the custom radio sites like Slacker and Pandora.  Finally, let’s not forget that Rhapsody is also competing with Zune on both the subscription and store sides, and Amazon and iTunes.

But this article is about why Rhapsody still beats them all.  So let’s get to it.

First, let me qualify something.  I have tried, and subscribed to all of these services.  I have owned/still own a Zune and an ipod touch, tested the beta of Rdio, signed up for a month of Mog, used grooveshark extensively on the Palm Pre and evo, and even figured out a way to play with Spotify in the U.S. (thank you proxy servers).  So, lest anyone think I’m just a rabid Rhapsody fanboy…  I’ve tried really hard to replace Rhapsody, because what it gets wrong, it gets so mind-shatteringly wrong that my choice has frequently come down to “run away” or cry in the corner.  The failings are for another post though.  I’m going to talk about what Rhapsody does right.

One word – convergence.  Rhapsody takes the best features of all of the streaming services and bakes it together in a delicious treat.  Start with an all-you-can eat subscription service at $9.99 a month (or a “family plan” letting you hook up 3 mobile devices for 14.99).  Add to that the ability to not only stream those songs, but also to download them for offline listening (currently available on the ipod touch/iphone, coming soon for Android, and available for any number of dedicated mp3 players).  The ability to download trumps some of the services right there, but not all.  In addition, Rhapsody stores your library in the cloud, so if you’re home at a pc, browse on the website – find albums you like – add them to your library, then on your mobile it will be there ready for you to play.  The library is intuitive and persistent throughout.  You can also make your playlists online or on your pc and they’ll also be available on your device.  In addition to your playlists, you can load up playlists designed by editors, artists sharing their “celebrity picks,” dynamic playlists based on your criteria, or based on your listening activity, or user playlists.  It’s pretty deep, and more than enough options to discover new music.  If the playlist browsing isn’t enough, Rhapsody also has a sophisticated “Radio” system, similar to Slacker.  The edited channels cover all of the major genres you’d expect, and you can listen to channels based on any available artist as well.  You can also create custom channels based on any number of artists (but it looks like this needs to be done from the desktop, to be used on desktop and mobile).

Each of Rhapsody’s major competitors brings something to the table, but only Rhapsody offers the entire feature set, with the flexibility to download your tracks and listen on your choice of device, whether it is the iphone, an Android device, or some cheap Sanza player that you found at Wal-Mart.  Now they just need to get offline listening finished on Android, make the desktop player less buggy, and improve the streaming sound quality on mobile.

I thought I was done with the whole mess, I read about the Movie for the final book (Breaking Dawn) will be made into two movies. I really thought this could use a bit of a cliff note because the final of the 4 books has the most OMGWTFBBQJEFFGOLDBLUM moments out of all of them..

I found an article online about why Breaking Dawn needs to be made into a movie. I am pretty sure in order to keep this movie from being rated R these moments will be taken out of the movies:

The Human Girl (Bella) finally Coaxes The vampire (Edward) to take her virginity. This is after chapters of begging and pleading in the last book. He said he will only if they get married. I guess neither of them want her ending up like Jessica from True Blood.  So they get married and on their Honeymoon they consumate.. so much so he breaks some of her bones and knocks her unconscious. That apparently doesn’t stop them, and she gets pregnant (who would have possibly thought that someone who is undead can biologically reproduce).

It is an accelerated pregnancy filled with rib breaking, spines being snapped in half leaving Bella paralyzed (the baby is quite a kicker). Bella while still  human craves human blood and that is the only thing she can consume while pregnant. The baby is apparently not human, which freaks the Edward out which not only leads him to try to convince her to get an abortion, but he also tried to convince the Werewolf (Jacob) who is in love with her as well to knock her up instead. Obviously this doesn’t happen and why would it? There are still chapters and chapters left to go! Not to mention the baby is telepathic and convincing everyone to fall in love with her.

So the baby is ready to come out, and well it won’t without killing her (because apparently sparkly vampire skin is also super strong, and was developed inside the womb. so the only way for her to be born is (ready for this???) Edward gives Bella a C-Section.. with his teeth. I don’t get the logic behind that either.. then again it is just Stephanie Meyers world, and we just live in this shit.

So the baby is born, given one of the stupidest names since Pilot Inspektor.. Renesmee. Like this kid isn’t going to be picked on enough. She has a sparkly emo twink of a father and an idiot Mother. And while everyone is cooing over mutant baby Bella is dying. So Edward who is concerned about causing her any pain, puts her into a coma and makes her a vampire.. Problem is she is aware of everything going while she is under.

So Letsee.. Bone breaking knock out first time sex? Check. Spine Severing paralyzing cannibalistic pregnancy? Check.  Going through the vampire change while unable to move and function but is fully aware and can’t tell anyone? Check. What else could be missing??

Oh yeah.. The Werewolf, who has spent the last 2 and a half books brooding and looking to be alone upon seeing the baby falls in love with her. Not in the happy parental way.. fucking falls in love with her, and winds up imprinting (the werewolf love spell apparently) on her. Granted she apparently ages at an accelerated rate and he doesn’t age now.. but still. This makes Roman Pollansky look moral.

For a book geared towards teenagers this is all pretty fucked up, and yet they (as well as their Twilight Cradle robbing obsessed mothers) are eating it up. So really the first 3 books were leading to all of this..Yes parents, you are letting your kids read this junk.

And with that, I need to bleach my eyeballs now.

One of my favorite games of LAST generation has unequivocally got to be God of War 2.  I have not owned a single Sony console in my life, but I did borrow a PS2 from The DLB and worked my way through the entire game, a full two years after the launch of the Xbox 360.  While the God of War series isn’t really a poster child for subtlety and restraint, the execution of the action, the breathtaking boss battles, and the ever-changing-but-always-well-delivered set pieces made me feel like we had actually moved the ball forward to the endzone known as True Cinematic Gaming™.

You can imagine, then, that I had (perhaps unreasonably) high hopes for Dante’s Inferno.  A combination of God of War-style gameplay and a studio that created one of this generation’s coolest games?  Instant win, yes?I regret to inform you that this isn’t the perfect game.  I also regret to inform you that it’s not even close to that.  A few of the high points first:

- If you’ve played God of War, you’ll be very at home here.  The combat system, the power-up system, even how you acquire health, experience and mana, are painfully and shamelessly ripped from Kratos’ world.  God of War IS genius, though, so if you’re going to copy something, make it the best.  (I am reminded of Uncharted’s “homage” to the Gears of War-style stop and pop style of gameplay, a system that they recognized as genius for the type of game they were creating and ran with it to wonderful effect).

- The presentation elements surrounding the game are pretty wonderful.  The cutscenes are a mix of pre-rendered CG movies and in-game interchanges, but they take advantage of the extra fidelity during the CG portions by blending high-quality renderings and a disturbingly effective hand-drawn animation style (this is sold to you through the era-appropriate tapestry artwork that starts moving from time-to-time).  None of it ever felt forced, and it was usually quite chilling, which a game of this subject matter should achieve.

As for the other shoe:

- It’s wonderful that the game is running at 60fps at all times (especially during the more stunning moments such as the church falling apart around you), but I can’t help feeling like we could’ve used just a bit more in the lighting/texture work/animation department and trade that in for something closer to 30fps. (while inconclusive, DigitalFoundry is banking on God of War 3 being 720p/30fps, and everything we’ve seen so far is nothing short of stunning in comparison to Dante’s Inferno).  There are definitely “seams” in the presentation that feel a bit like a step backward in terms of the generational leap we’ve been experiencing in game engines over the past few years.  Levels feel very “geometric”, animations of enemies are synchronized like a robotic dance squad, and the lack of some now fairly common special effects (depth of field in particular comes to mind), all scream last-gen.  There are some AMAZING moments of high-quality texture work, though: the fire effect used for your “you can’t move forward until you beat up these guys” wall, the lightning storm outside the church, and a few other moments of note all pop off the screen.

- The voice acting is a little bit on the suspect side.  For such a narrative-heavy game, I really do wish they landed this part.

- Shock value is great, but sometimes the showing of breasts without any real meaningful context feels more juvenile then perhaps originally intended (of course, it’s looking like we won’t be stopping at naked boobs…).  The violence portion of the game isn’t really a huge deal for me in a game where you FIGHT through hell, but the nudity just didn’t come off as serving any purpose outside of getting people to talk about the game.  Congratulations guys, you win.

If the demo is the sole basis one should use in considering this game, I currently am going to classify it as a rental.  As is typical for most demos, there is a sizzle reel of upcoming moments in the full game (which I had already seen once before), and after playing through the demo and peeling back the mask of the quick cuts and explosive musical score, I found myself a little less excited for Dante’s trip through Hell.

What did you think?

So, not really for the kiddies…keep THAT in mind when you think about downloading/playing it.

There is a basic tutorial mode in the beginning that demonstrates what a badass bitch you are in the game.  After that, they dump you into the most intensely confusing and difficult 3 minutes of gameplay you’ll ever play.  I played it twice and nearly turned the demo off because I was SURE this was not a game for me.

It is totally worth it to play through, though.  The game then pulls that, “Well wasn’t that trippy?!  Now let’s start back at the beginning of our story” sort of bit (albeit with a different narrative trick), and then the actual demo starts.  The demo material that follows is MUCH easier on you, and actually lets you figure out how to apply those tricks from the tutorial in the beginning.  Without spoiling the moments, I actually didn’t want the demo to end, and considering how I almost deleted it from the first “mission”, that’s a pretty amazing feat.

The game is exceptionally weird, with the full Japanese womanizing erotica and absolutely strange mashups of different genre pieces (angels, fairies, and torture devices?  Ooooo…K?), but it was dealt with so confidently (especially when you are introduced to new enemies…weird but clever “journal entries” are presented referencing them) that somehow it all “works”, at least as well as this sort of quirky Japanese actioner can work.

The graphics are pretty nice, ranging from “meh” to “wow, that is actually an enormous hair monster eating a mini-boss”.  Nothing that is advancing the state of the art, but very confidently delivered and it runs smooth as butter even when craziness is at its peak.

It’s definitely something that sticks with you, and not necessarily in a bad way.  In a sea of gaming experiences, that’s saying something.

Can’t a guy just get to bed at a decent hour?  After a somewhat ho-hum episode of FlashForward last night, I stopped my Windows Media Center Extender DVR session on my Xbox 360 and booted back to the dashboard, ready to do a quick check for new content before SleepyTime.  Alas, I was kicked from Xbox Live and prompted for an update!  Almost 2 hours later, here’s what I stumbled across.

As a sidenote, I have NOT tested the Facebook app, Halo Waypoint, or the MSNBC.com news feed.  (In short, I am not a Facebook member, and the other two options are not available as of yet).  Moving on…

Last.FM: For those of you not familiar with the service, Last.FM is a music discovery service in the vein of Pandora and Slacker.  It allows you to create customized streaming “radio stations” based on artist or keyword (if such a keyword has already been populated on the service, of course).  Last.FM also offers a service called “scrobbling”, which is essentially Last.FM’s term for “listen to what you like and sculpt your listening habits”.  The implementation for the Xbox 360 delivers these features quite effectively.  When I added my Last.FM login info, it had my custom radio stations and preferences downloaded in under 60 seconds.  Choosing one of those stations almost instantly begins to stream that station, complete with photos of the artist playing.  A tap of the “X” button fades the radio station bar into the background, allowing you to navigate through the various options, create new stations, etc.  It is surprisingly fast and smooth.  The major gripe against this feature is that you are stuck in the Last.FM app for your listening experience.  As incredible as the in-app experience is implemented, you don’t get to go cruising about the dashboard, in games, or really anywhere outside of the app and its nifty artist slideshow.  As disappointing as this is, it also relegates this to a far different purpose from  replacing in-game music streaming from your personal music collections.  I can actually see this being a great option for gatherings or really any occasion where you might want to jam out to some tunes while NOT sitting at the 360.  It doesn’t really soothe the wounds inflicted by not having ubiquitous Last.FM support, but more is still more, and I’ll take it over not having any streaming radio.

Twitter: Not too much to say here.  I posted two tweets from my Xbox 360, and it works just how you might think it would.  The inability to surf to links or see pictures makes the experience pretty limited, but what is here is nice.  I sincerely hope they at least add the ability to see Twicpics, otherwise I can’t imagine being here very often (as it is I open/update twitter about once every 2 months anymore).

Zune Video: From a technological perspective, this is probably the most exciting of the updates.  This update to the Video Marketplace (launched three years ago this Thanksgiving) allows all video content to be streamed rather than downloaded.  The streaming is also adaptive, meaning that your video stream (if you meet the minimum bandwidth requirements, of course) will start at a lower video quality and ramp up.  I tested the trailer for Caprica, and I had been ramped up from a rough, low-res Youtube-esque quality up to what was called (via a small prompt in the top righthand corner of the info pane) 1080p HD, all within about 28 seconds.  Not bad considering most feature length content has title cards during this period anyway.  The quality was quite good when we achieved 1080p, so I have high hopes that this technology will quickly be adopted by those deterred by the need to download releases before now.  (I was one of those people, in fact; as much as I prefer digital media to physical, I could not recommend the Video Marketplace before now, since it defeated the one major advantage that streaming video could always claim: instant grat).  Keep an eye on this one, folks; I think this is going to be bigger than most folks are giving it credit for.

I’ll try to put out updated impressions of the remaining features as I’m able to test them.  Overall, great stuff coming this November!

It’s that time again!  What’s “New” with the Xbox Experience!

I just got into the preview program last night, and I think “modest update” would be the correct term for this most recent dashboard update.  Here is a quick breakdown of the features I’ve stumbled across so far (this list isn’t exhaustive, but these are most of the major points):

The Good:

• Netflix update.  Although there is supposedly some updates to how Silverlight is integrated into the Xbox OS, this is still technically a standalone update from the dashboard (you are prompted separately to update the Netflix app).  Anyhow, once it is updated, you are treated to a much more usable and integrated Netflix experience.  For example, you are now able to browse 100 titles in each major genre you frequent (for me, they are Sci-Fi, Comedy, Indie Horror, and Action Adventure…I feel you judging me right now…); I’m assuming these get rotated out on a periodic basis.  You can either play these immediately or add them to your instant queue (a nice touch).  With the above mentioned tech improvements brought about by updated Silverlight implementation, there is now dynamic video streaming quality for playback of Netflix movies.  Also, there are now a few very small but welcome pieces of info attached to the movies in your queue, such as whether the title is in high-definition or not, and when the movie will expire from the Netflix Instant Watch catalog.  All in all, this makes the Netflix Instant Watch function a much more inviting portion of the dashboard.
• User ratings!  You can now rate content on the Marketplace (welcome to the turn of the century, Microsoft…)  There are now “top-rated” sorting options in each area of the Marketplace, so you can see which Halo people like best.    The implementation is pretty great overall, with a quick pop-up that allows you to give 1-through-5 stars.
• In-game achievement browser.  This one is just flat-out brilliant.  When the NXE launched last fall, they added a nice sub-screen in the dashboard for your profile that allows you to see the titles you have played and the achievements you’ve earned.  When browsing the achievements here, you can simply navigate between the items to see what the requirements are without having to go into each achievement to find that requirement (contrast this to the in-game Xbox Guide, where you DO have to enter each achievement to see the requirement).  In short, they’ve brought the much-improved achievement browser to the Xbox Guide.  Once you use it, you’ll be upset it didn’t happen sooner.
• Sorting for your Xbox Guide friends list: by activity, Gamertag, or online status.  I’ll take it.
• Party improvements.  Adding someone to your party is pretty quick now with one-button invites, and even accidental disconnects from your party will now be handled by the service, connecting you right back up to the folks you were hanging out with inside cyberspace (we already had this “reconnectivity” for Xbox Live updates, but now even wonky internet connections and locked-up consoles can’t keep you and your friends apart).
• An “eject disc” button (“X”) when you are selecting the disc in the tray!  (It’s the little things, people).

The Meh:

• For the Netflix update: The other major piece of the update is the party watch feature.  You can demo this without anyone by suggesting a movie and starting it; as other sites have covered, this is a MST3K-style movie den where you can “emote” about the movie experience.  I don’t really mind this feature, and it’s actually a bit mind-bending that it syncs viewing with up to 7 other folks in a virtual living room of sorts, but my major problem with it is that there isn’t one button press that will switch to full-screen (currently you need to choose the “Display” option that typically cycles through aspect ratios?)
• For the user ratings: The two things that stood out as a natural evolution to the experience would be a better visual cue that you’ve already rated something (currently the stars “cycle” between the current group rating and your rating, but you have to wait for that cycle to get to your rating; perhaps have your rating show first?), and the ability to rate the items in your dashboard achievement list.  This second one makes the most sense, since this is verifiable proof that you’ve actually played the game you’re rating (at this point, anyone can rate anything, regardless of whether or not they’ve played or even seen the title).
• Avatar Marketplace.  w00t, I guess.  I do like the ability to earn “awards” for my avatar in addition to achievements, but Microsoft will probably never get me to buy virtual clothes or props for my virtual self, as generous as they’ve been with the free clothing options for the past several months.  It’s well-implemented and easy-to-use, for what it’s worth.
• Xbox Live Gold Member badge.  How many years were you paying for this?  Oh, that many.  Cool.
• Xbox Live Indie Games update mechanism.  First of all, a revision to this was sorely needed; I purchased Weapon of Choice awhile back (EXCELLENT little Indie Game, btw), and when updating the title the first time, I was awkwardly dumped to a screen to re-download the full version of the game.  Only after launching the game did I see that the version number (which not all games sport on the home screen) was incremented.  I assumed when I had read they revamped this process that it’d be just like the update process for regular Xbox titles (By the way, why are we still getting kicked off of Xbox Live for these updates?).  That’s…not the case.  Instead, the splash disclaimer screen for the Indie Games informs you an update is available for your title.  THEN you are awkwardly dumped to the screen that has you re-download the full version of the game.  It is then added to your active download queue, but doesn’t begin to download.  When you choose continue, you receive another prompt to inform you that you are getting sent back to the dashboard.  So, instead of migrating to the much more streamlined title update procedure, we got more steps.  Oh well, better luck next time.  At least I know what the hell is going on now.
• There is a Tips/Tricks/Help section near the end of your My Xbox channel now.  This isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s basically just a collection of links to other parts of the NXE.  Not really quite as exciting as I had thought it might be.

The Not-As-Good:

• The NXE now lags and gets choppy with no rhyme or reason as to why.  Fix it.  Now.

I think those are the highlights.  Anything else cool/terrible you’ve found in your travels?

Things I like/love:

Email, Calendar, and Messaging – These all just work the way you’d expect them to.  On the messaging front, the built in IM client only does Gtalk and AIM, which is nice, but I would very much like to get my live ID in there as well.   Email is a joy to use.  The fonts Palm chose and the interface is just spectacular.  For Gmail, all of my sub-folders are there which really helps with mobile organization.  Deleting messages is just a swipe to the right to slide them off the screen into that big junk-mail box in the sky. 

The Calendar syncs with ALL of my Google calendars, and lets me view that information however I want (all, none, one or two, etc…)

The Messaging is quick, integrates with universal search on the device, and provides a single interface for SMS and chat, with your SMS messages threaded just like IMs.  

The fact that all of this is seamless, and I got all of this set up just by putting my Google info in once (for the email) just goes to show how much thought went into their planning this device as a pipeline into your online identity.

WebOS is beautiful.  It’s not immediately intuitive, but Palm decided to choose a few simple metaphors that ultimately pay off in usability at the expense of immediate approachability/familiarity.  Here’s a few examples:
The Pre has the gesture area, which someone coming from any other phone may not immediately realize.  It’s incredibly useful, but you have to 1) know it’s there, and 2) know what the gestures do.  When you first boot up the phone, Palm has a little welcome video and brief tutorial to teach you the back gesture.  The feedback is very nice as there are two soft leds on either side of the single button to let you know if it realized you swiped back or forward. 

If you want to close an app, you need to "minimize it" to it’s card by either pressing the single button (which will always do the zoom out), or swipe up on the gesture area quickly to minimize the app.  Once you’re in your card view, you just flick the app up to toss it away.  The functionality is really nice in that you can quickly switch between open applications (much faster than I ever could on windows mobile, although SPB Mobile Shell 3′s task manager helped with that a little bit) or close out of an application you don’t want anymore.  The functionality and the metaphor works beautifully, but if you didn’t know that that’s how it’s done, I could see a new user getting a little nervous that there’s no "X" on the app.
Another really useful motion that I didn’t know about until another Pre user showed me, is that you can access your quick launch (4 programs and your launcher key)  by slowly dragging up from the gesture area.  You can call this up even if you’re in a program.  In practice, I’m not sure if this is really necessary since flicking up quickly or pressing the single button will minimize your app, and show you your quick launch anyway, but in practice, it’s one less button press to get where you want to go. 

Moving icons around, or adding them to your dock is a simple affair, just click and hold to while you’re in the launcher menu to drag one of the four icons off your quick launcher to free up a spot, and then do the same to drag a new application down.  It works, and once you know how it works, it works effortlessly, but I wouldn’t have understood intuitively that I had to get rid of one of the icons before I could add a new one, instead, I probably would’ve just assumed that those icons are not for me to change. 

One other thing that I didn’t find right away that should’ve been touted loudly, is that you can save any webpage as an "app" so you get a little icon, and a quick launch right from the applications menu.  Very nice for example to get greader access, or any other site you visit regularly.

Overall though, the interface, the card system for applications (new applications get their own card, and applications can generate new cards for specific tasks, so for e.g. you’re in your email, and you go to start a new email – the compose screen gets it’s own card, so you can flick back and forth, or do other things while you’re composing, look at other emails, etc…) works really, really well.

Things I don’t like:

There is no way to save things like pictures or media files (podcasts, etc…) from the browser.  This is my biggest WTF yet.  I mean, seriously, how dumb is that.  I have a beautiful phone with a full web browsing experience that is fast and ridiculously beefy at rendering pages, and I also have a device with a great media player and beautiful home screen that I’d like to add wallpaper to.  So why the hell can’t I download a podcast or save a picture to my collection, or for that matter simply set a photo as my wallpaper.  Really really silly omission.  Dear Palm, please fix this.  Soon.

The usb cover.  I’m used to devices that let their jacks hang out in the open.  Minor gripe, but considering the battery life is not what it was on the treo pro, I do have to plug it in from time to time, so this could be easier. 

Lack of apps.  Speaks for itself.  Will be fixed.
Ultimately, it’s by far the best phone I’ve ever had bar none.

Any other Pre users out there? What do you think so far.

Here are my impressions for the Big Three:

Nintendo: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.  I was absolutely taken aback by the fact that they completely didn’t show up.  Nothing was revolutionary or interesting; the games were a rehash of older titles, and their nods to the “core gamer” were three titles they had already announced and a new Metroid game.  Oh, and there is the Wii Vitality Sensor: a finger clip that senses your pulse in conjunction with hold your waggle remote in one hand, having a nunchuck in the other, and standing on your Wii Fit board.  No new features for the console at all (no firmware updates).  I’m sure none of it matters and they will continue to sell, but easily the worst press briefing.

Sony: Very well-constructed press conference.  They bookended the presentation with Uncharted 2 at the beginning and God of War 3 at the end (clearly the most impressive games for the PS3).  The structure was great in hindsight, but it didn’t serve the “middle” very well.  Tony and I disagree about MAG (their 256-player online game), but seeing the terrible graphics of MAG after seeing the insane physics and animation of Uncharted 2 (MAG was shown right after Uncharted 2) didn’t work very well as a strategy.  Modnation Racer looks really fun, a Mario-Kart style game with the Far Cry 2 level editor baked in; I didn’t realize this until yesterday, but the Play-Create-Share brand started with LittleBigPlanet and it is their “community” brand for games that will have community features like level/content creation and distribution.  Cool idea to have those in a specific bucket.

Sony’s motion controller did not impress me for a few reasons:  First off, it is a Wii-killer, but only that (no real innovation, just doing it better).  You’ll need to have both the camera and the wands to make it work, which will add to the total price.  And on top of those things, there just wasn’t anything outside of some engineering demos, so who knows how well it will work in games.  This last part isn’t a knock against the product, just the demo of it.  It really just showed the fact that both Microsoft and Sony’s shareholders told them to either make a motion controller or we’ll find someone who will.  Microsoft obviously was told much earlier since their motion camera was much more a part of their presentation (and much further along come demo-time), and Sony probably stuffed that in at the last minute so as not to be the last kids to the motion controller party.

TOO MUCH PSP STUFF!  I know they are really trying to love and pimp the PSP, but they spent way too much time on this.  Way too many game/feature announcements for it, as well as the PSP Go! launch.  More than anything, this part just wasn’t my bag, baby.  One interesting point, ALL UMD titles going forward will be launched on the Playstation Network.  I’m sure Gamestop loves that.

The continual “it’s not just only on Playstation, it’s only possible on Playstation” was getting a little old (Microsoft had a different super-corny bullshit marketing line), especially since they said it 30,000 times during the 90 minute conference, and because they kept saying the exact same line last year in the E3 2008 press conference.  It felt rehashed and embarrassing; the stellar games speak for themselves (although they don’t really say “that” to a gamer that plays more than one console), it just reeks of “trying too hard”.

Microsoft: Definitely had the most “even burn” of the three conferences, although the they had some real duds, the worst of which was the Tony Hawk presentation (I can’t imagine caring less about that game).  Thankfully that and the total throwaway announcement about the Beatles Rock Band games were at the top of the presentation.

Microsoft’s uber-corny catch phrase was “showing, not telling”, and it also got very irritating; what else would you do with the three ultra-huge LCD screens behind you?  Also, I now know where my $50 a year for Xbox Live goes to: Sir Paul McCarty, Ringo Starr, and Steven Spielberg all showed up to tell us how awesome these announcements were.  ‘Cuz, you know…I really trust those three when it comes to my gaming purchases.

Things picked up quite a bit, with excellent showings of the new Splinter Cell and Alan Wake (both incredibly beautiful games), and some breakneck announcements of Crackdown 2, Left for Dead 2, and Microsoft’s own Mario Kart clone, Joyride (which will be free and supported only by DLC purchases of tracks and cars beyond what it ships with).  Forza 3 was also shown, and looks friggin’ incredible, but I’ll never ever play it.

The “fall update” (I’m calling it that since every damned thing is apparently coming in the fall – come on, guys, Sony gave out the Uncharted 2 Multiplayer beta Tuesday night; where’s our love?) has a whole slew of things coming:

- the Video Marketplace will now be Zune Video, and we’re getting instant-streaming 1080p video with 5.1 surround sound (instead of waiting for an 8GB file to download).  It looks like it’ll function much like the Move Player on ABC.COM, where it instantly starts you out at a lower bit rate and ramps it up; there will be a little indicator at the bottom lefthand corner that shows what “level” you are streaming at (1,2,3,HD).  To get the HD level, you will need a minimum of 8Mbps on your download speeds.

- Free Twitter/Facebook integration with both the dashboard and in the development kits (meaning programmers can add a “Post My Stats On Facebook!” button to their games.  Mostly yawn, although I’m sure there are folks out there who will love this.

- Free Last.FM integration.  You’ll now be able to stream your custom Last.FM stations (and set up new ones!) to the dashboard.  No word on whether you’ll be able to do this in-game, but I’m doubtful since the bandwidth to play multiplayer games takes precedence over downloads from Marketplace.  Rich and I have lots of questions about whether or not you can have your music scrobbled (think Pandora so that your custom stations will be more personalized to the things you like) on the Xbox, so I’ll just reserve judgment on how nice this integration will be until we get some concrete details.  Not having Zune Pass integration sucks, though.

- Full Games On Demand.  Great addition; needs to be competitive pricing with retail of course, and newer titles not older.

The motion controller (Project Natal) was the coolest addition so far.  Not so much for the actual motion games, but for the incredible tech baked into it.  If you haven’t seen the videos, you must hit the web and check them out.  My favorite implementations so far are the facial recognition (you walk in front of your Xbox and it logs you in), the Minority Report surfing of the dashboard (we’re there folks), and the ability to have a multi-array microphone that A) uses voice recognition for quiz games on the couch and B) allows multiple people in the room to chat without having headsets and Xbox Live Gold accounts.  The demos they showed were very far along and amazing in their own rights.  The Peter Molyneaux (Fable creator) demo video was hysterical for it’s Molyneaux-ness and amazing for what he is suggesting is actually happening; must see.

Overall, tie between M$ and Sony, and Nintendo’s show was a complete bust.

Rich: It’s very slick, highly slick really, but the content is only kind of neat.   It does work just about seamlessly on the 360 and certainly gives us much more content for free, but arrested development is the only show up there.  Joost at least has all of cbs’s shows (ncis, csi, etc…)  Microsoft needs to quickly expand their umbrella and work out some content deals for it to be worthwhile.  but, it’s typical MS proof of concept beta stuff,  it works well, but there’s just not much to see.

Tim: I’m still a little confused on how the content works.  It’s actually all quite confusing to me if I turn myself into a normal “TV user”.  It’s broken up into several different slices, which I guess is OK, but I’d much prefer it to be managed a bit better.  I’d like to just see the 6-7 channels that they have, and maybe 3 or 4 “user-created channels” that builds content based on tags for us geeks out here.  Unfortunately, they’ve just pre-sliced those potentially user-created channels for you into main subheadings like “sports” and “entertainment” (kinda useless and a bit strange in the “TV” concept of execution), and then the main “channels” like National Geographic and A&E don’t work that way at all, since you can see a list of the programs, but once you click on it, it just branches off in a stony haze to whatever it thinks you should be watching.  The ad system works fairly decently (surprise, surprise they got THAT right), but the rest of it feels just a touch messier than I expected.  I guess we’ll see if they sharpen it over time.