HHG: World Series 2009

Quickly now, because I seem to be on a losing streak of late.

Head: Yankees

Heart: Yankees

Gut: Phillies

Here's why. The Yankees had the best record in baseball, higher ranked players in batting and pitching, and had the best home record in baseball. Also the Yankees look very fit to make their new stadium an impenetrable fortress of doom. Wouldn't it be something, in their first year there, they would take the gold immediately?

And everybody has completely forgotten about A-Rod coming clean about his steroid use at the start of the season. Let alone that he used to suck in the playoffs, and now he doesn't. How quickly people turn.

I'm not sure any team can repeat in pro sports these days. The Patriots are the last team to do it I think. The Red Wings failed last year. The Celtics didn't make it at all last year. So I don't really see it happening to the Phillies this year either. It's just that Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jim Rollins and Cliff Lee scare me. If the Phillies steal one of the first two games in New York, they should take it home all the way. Otherwise the home advantage of the Yankees will be too great.

Rest will probably not be an issue. It's gonna snow, rain, hailstorm and everything, so CC and Cliff will each be pitching at least thrice this series.

A new retail market for computer games

The time of selling PC games in retail stores has come. It's already like this in the States, where only console video games are sold over the counter. Japan is following quite rapidly, although PC games have never been as popular there as over here. Our market will soon follow, being replaced by the more sensible online retail option. That to me seems fine, apart from a couple of caveats.

• consumers are expected to still pay full price (45+ euros) for new computer games. That's a ridiculously high amount of money, considering that the market and the client end-user agreement has changed. Computer games nowadays need to be activated by the publisher (cf. Spore, Mass Effect, every Steam game), which means someone else outside of myself gets to decide if I can play this game today, tomorrow, next year, ten years from now. I used to pay good money ten years ago for a game disc I own, and can still install today. If I can't hold on to this self-control over when I play a game, I expect to be compensated. If a publisher decides to keep prices as they are, while taking away liberties I used to have, I cease to buy their product.
• same goes for expiring products, limited downloads and other similar avenues. This essentially means I'm renting, and I shouldn't be expecting to pay full price for that either.
• the online offering used to be truly global. No matter where you are in the world, you can buy a title, as long as you are willing to pay for shipping. Now the Steams of this world are only offering particular content to particular regions, while barring it from others. If the reason for this makes sense, I'm fine with that. I don't need to see any right-wing stuff in the latest releases. If it's just to make a buck, or to prevent losing a buck, then no. Let me decide if content is worth buying.
• finally, unless offline retail actually has something to add to the content of any form of entertainment, then there's no reason for online product to be more expensive. Retail channels can help out a product by having location, distribution, marketing and so on and so forth. But it's ludicrous to force online retailers to simply carry higher prices, just to protect the offline channel. That's market pollution.

At some point in the next four years PC games will only be sold online. Soon after, the eighth generation of video game consoles (Sony PS4, Xbox III) will lose their disc-based content as well. At least, as long as they make prices more reasonable. 80 euros for Uncharted 2 Special Edition is too much. For that amount of money, I expect to get an escort service, a bottle of champagne, and a limousine.

(So indeed, PSP Go is a bit too early for the party. As Scott Adams said sometime ago, "success is mostly timing, which is mostly luck".)

Some Typical Business Measures

• Reducing complex principles to three meaningless bulletpoints
• DATIC: Dropping acronyms to increase credibility
• Shrinking the box to think outside it

(Whoever came up with this, is freakin' brilliant... and cynical)

Why I See Things Differently

I'm sure I'm late to the party, but here's a study that explains why I see things differently.

Pay attention to section 1.5 for some tests.

What makes an on-line game successful

Developers take note: Successful online gaming means that you have to adhere to the following rules:

• make your connectivity code flawless. It already takes a long time to find a game you can play online. When you finally find one, you don't want it bogged down by buggy, laggy, shitty code. I hated Little Big Planet's online features because the connection time was soooo looong. It almost looked (and in fact it was) as if the PS froze. And even when it did come on, the connection nearly always failed, so I ended up playing on my own anyway. In other words, if my first online game isn't running well within the first five minutes, I quit and never come back.
• don't endlessly look for players. Give me feedback as quickly as possible what you found. Keep looking in the background, but at least give me the opportunity to do something else, like skip back a few screens, or customize my player or something. SFIV is very quick in looking for players, which is great, and also gives me feedback very quickly. I don't mind if it doesn't find me a game to play. Again LBP did it wrong. When it is looking for players, the game is basically off-limits. You can't cancel, and you have to wait for a frickin' timeout.

I think the Uncharted 2 multiplayer option is great. You're into the game quickly, it gives you constant feedback, connectivity has never frozen on me, or broke down, and I have the option of cancelling if I find I have other things to do. And the game is pretty funny to boot. (That, or one of the players was really discussing his hemorrhoid medicine with his pharmacist while he was playing.)

When A Bank Dies, Who Thinks About The Children?

The crash of the DSB Bank makes painfully clear how easy it is to bring down an institution. It's a crisis in pocket-sized form. Just tell everyone at the bank that their money isn't safe/profitable/is getting stolen, and if more than a critical mass of people believe you, the bank is a goner.

I think at some point some economics undergraduate will make a thesis on calculating the critical percentage of bank capital for it to survive. It probably already exists, but will have to be updated with this new business case. Seriously. It only took one news article and a television interview to bring the house down.

Strangely enough the imminent foreclosure of the bank first brought attention to the athletes (ice skaters and soccer players) who were sponsored by the bank. Like they were hurt most.

The athletes were given more attention than the 2000 people who are about to lose their jobs.

Hell. The bank owner's dog got more attention than the bank employees.

Running out of colours

It seems every major illness has its own colour now. We've got red for AIDS, we've got yellow for cancer, we've got pink for breast cancer (actually those coloured ribbons already seem to have divvied up the spectrum).

And you can't just pick up new colours either, because green is for the environment (or maybe blue is the new green, I'm not fully up-to-date).

And then you've got all kinds of black label, white editions, gold and platinum... at some point all the major colours are going to be taken. (Actually they already are.) What if you have a worthwhile cause to promote, but no major colour to promote it with?

You end up taking some weird shade like Periwinkle.

Fail.

8 Observations From Japan

• The Japanese know how to cook. They know their food, and they know how to do it well. Their cuisine is one of the best in the world, they've got more Michelin stars than the French for crissakes. But why do they persist in making all these weird Kitkat (and here) and Pepsi Cola flavours?
• Everyone (under thirty) has either a Nintendo DS, a Sony PSP or a mobile phone in their hands at all times. They don't talk much.
• Every single baseball player on the home team has a song. If you're in the away section, every player from the away team has a song (the same song). If the home team sings, the away team is quiet, and vice versa.
• The politeness that the Japanese exhibit is hurting my neck (...from all the bowing).
• Japanese guys are shy. They tend to hide themselves in make-believe computer games, or in their work. No wonder Tokyo seems to have a serious women surplus. No wonder also that the Japanese population is declining.
• Pertaining to the previous point, quite a few women do know how to dress to impress. Yet the men don't notice (or can't show it). So now the women turn to cosplay, and dress up as maids or playboy bunnies or lolly popsicles.
• You'd think that after so much time with tourists and such, Tokyo might actually employ some competent English-Japanese translators for their signs. Currently these are way to funny (In restaurant: "Don't Pl(r)ay on the floor"; on escalator: "Don't hang baggage or children over the escalator.").
• J-Pop and Japanese party music is really too funny. It's also very child-like, but then again, the alternative is that we have to listen to Dutch folk music again.