Features
Mobile Entertainment
All
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
By Edison Carter
First
printed in its modern form in a 1659 book of proverbs and later
made famous by Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, the
words loop through my head as I stare at an empty page on my PowerBook's
widescreen. After eleven days of work away from my wife and daughter
and with little in the way of relaxation to break the monotony,
I can seriously relate to this old aphorism. Call me Jack. Then
the UPS guy shows up with a new robot dog from Sony and I'm smiling
for the first time today. Things are looking up! Computers can
simulate anything, from the trajectory of a subatomic particle
to a detailed model of our expanding universe. Somewhere in between
these extremes, we use them to represent paper documents, sounds,
and images both moving and still. We use them to design mighty
buildings, to tweak our genetic code, to cure disease, and to
selectively target people halfway around the world when we feel
threatened. The economies of the planet run from them. We make
a living and we make a killing, right from these glowing screens.
Fine. Great. Terrific. Now can we have some fun? What is still
quaintly called the videogame industry is big business ÷ bigger
by far than the mighty movie biz. Game consoles are everywhere,
while major new titles are eagerly anticipated for years and released
with Hollywood-style hoopla. PC users worldwide while away untold
billions of hours playing Solitaire. You'd be hard pressed to
buy a mobile phone these days that doesn't have a game or two
in ROM. Meanwhile, movies, music, books, and all other media are
going digital. By the end of this decade, the transition to all-digital-all-the-time
media creation and delivery will be complete. Today, millions
of us select, purchase, and enjoy our music digitally on iPods
and other devices. Early adopters are carting around entire two-hour
movies on their Pocket PCs and Palms. Dedicated media playback
devices are shaping up to be the Next Big Thing in mobile technology.
This
ain't no GameBoy
2004 is rapidly becoming the year in which mobile game devices
go beyond our kids' GameBoys and shoot upmarket into the lucrative
middle-age crowd, where cost is not as important as status and
style. The first company to break in to this segment is Tapwave,
whose Palm-powered Zodiac I and II appeal as much to graying executive
types as they do to the traditionally younger gaming crowd. Sony
just released photos and specs of next year's PlayStation Portable,
or PSP. Not surprisingly, it looks a heck of a lot like the pioneering
Zodiac. Suddenly, a rash of handheld game consoles have appeared
from the usual suspects (Nintendo) and some unlikely ones (Nokia).
In 2005, they'll all battle it out to the death, scrambling for
hot titles and paying obscene ad rates for thirty seconds of the
Super Bowl. Barring some fatal design blunder, Sony will dominate
the space with the PSP, but since little is known about the operating
system it is too soon to say if it will double as a PDA. More
likely, it will be billed not as a game device but as a media
player that gives good game. Sony would rather sell you one of
their excellent mobile phones for talk and personal information
management, so those of us who prefer to carry a single device
for everything may want to stick with our communicators and smartphones
for entertainment. Today, game titles are available in droves
for every handheld platform: Palm OS, Pocket PC, Symbian communicators,
Smartphones, Java phones, and even RIM Blackberrys. If you want
to play on your ãworkä device, chances are you'll find what you
want without much trouble.
The
Machineries of Joy
What constitutes an entertainment experience for one person often
looks more like a lot of hard work to another. In my case, for
example, all electronic games except for racing or flying simulators
just stress me out more than I was before, so I'm just not interested
in spending any time or money on them. My wife, on the other hand,
adores puzzles and card games and could not be less interested
in vehicle simulators. Needless to say, we never game together.
(Good thing we have similar taste in movies!) Games
involve movement, so the bigger and faster your device's display,
the more involved you'll feel as you play. The Zodiac's 480 x
320-pixel backlit transflective TFT is not only bright indoors
and out, but it is driven by a custom ATI Imageon graphics controller
that blows the doors off the native graphics engines in other
Palms, Pocket PCs, and other traditional PDAs. Combined with games
written or ported specifically for the Zodiac's capabilities,
you have some serious action on your hands. That's great for action
game devotees today, but Tapwave can't afford to rest on its laurels
for long. Aside from the ominous looming shadow cast from Sony's
Tokyo headquarters, the Zodiac could rapidly be eclipsed by the
next generation of Pocket PCs, some of which will have 600MHz
microprocessors and tweaked high-performance graphics engines.
Microsoft has learned a thing or two from its burgeoning Xbox
franchise and they will build a load of game-enhancing tricks
into the next rev of Windows Mobile. According to the director
of Microsoft's mobile division, they are incorporating a Direct
X-derived technology called Direct 3D Mobile (D3DM) in order to
allow easy control of the graphics coprocessing engines from nVidia,
ATI, and Intel that are beginning to show up in handhelds. And
in this corner, we have PalmSource, whose next major version of
Palm OS is slated to contain a 2D/3D API standard called OpenGL
ES. Devices with smaller screens, such as smartphones, can offer
fairly immersive gameplay for younger, sharper eyes ÷ particularly
for two-dimensional scrolling game designs, abstract geometric
puzzle games, and word-based titles. It goes to show that a great
game experience comes not solely from convincing graphics but
from the illusion of interaction and responsiveness the game designer
codes into it. The mind is extremely good at filling in the spaces
between the pixels when the gameplay feels immersive. A beautifully
rendered game environment means little if the logic of play is
unconvincing. The classic, best-selling Myst would have been just
a bunch of pretty CGI fantasy scenes without a compelling underlying
story carrying the player through this stunningly intricate alternate
universe.
Medium:
a means of effecting or conveying something
When we talk about media on computers, we are usually referring
to audible and/or pictorial entertainment content that has been
digitized. This boils down to self-contained musical performances
such as songs and symphonies, spoken word such as audiobooks and
lectures, short movies such as music videos and art films, TV
show-length recordings, and two-hour movie titles. These are invariably
represented as discrete files on our machines that may be copied
and moved about more or less at will, depending on whether or
not digital rights management (DRM) code has been embedded into
them and/or your device's media player software. Streaming media
is a subcategory that cannot be contained on the display device
and requires a constant connection to the media source to play.
Sever the connection to the media server and the playback stops
as soon as you local cache is drained ÷ usually within seconds.
Both discrete media and the streaming variety place heavy demands
on your handheld's horsepower. Moving thirty, 320 x 480
images per second while playing a stereo soundtrack in perfect
sync is hard work even for some desktop machines. To expect a
three year-old PDA to do it is simply asking too much. If you
dream of carrying your own personal theatre in your jeans pocket,
prepare to spend US$400 and up on a new PDA, plus several hundred
more on a few high-speed, high-capacity memory cards. While there
are some websites that can stream short movies to your handheld,
such as WindowsMedia.com, AtomShockwave. com, and PalmPixels.com,
most users will opt for desktop-based visual media converter/rippers
such as the popular Kinoma Producer 2 for Palm-powered devices
(www.kinoma.com), DVD To Pocket PC (www.makayama.com), or Moviemaker
for Sony Ericsson P800/P900 communicators (www.makayama.com).
Still images present far less of a resource drain on modern handhelds
than movies, though the wimpy, lo-bit color screens of two three
years back look pretty pale in comparison to today's ultra-bright
transflective TFTs. Many devices these days include rudimentary
photo viewers in ROM or on disk, but if you're into carrying a
lot of images and want them to look their best, you'll need a
dedicated application like SplashPhoto (www.splashsoftware.com).
Using a trim desktop component, SplashPhoto intelligently optimizes
the high-res photos stored on your desktop while converting them
into your choice of a native handheld format, such as Palm .pdb,
or in the common JPEG format. SplashPhoto is available for Palm
OS, Windows Mobile Smartphone Pocket PC, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile
Smartphone, and Nokia Series 60 smartphones. Speaking of still
images, many people (including me) find customizing the background
images on their computers to be a form of entertainment, though
admittedly a low-impact one compared to first-person shooters
and football simulations. I've searched the net for interesting
images for all my machines and recently stumbled upon Ryan Bliss'
DigitalBlasphemy.com, a site packed with images of stunning quality,
all created using 3D software. His themes range from firing neurons
to wolves and dolphins to imaginary planetscapes. Ryan just recently
began offering variations of his high-resolution personal computer
desktops for Pocket PC, a number of which are available for free
download. People who like to change their outlook often will only
be satisfied by subscribing and paying this talented artist the
$12-$25 membership fee. Great stuff.
Sony
AIBO ERS-7
Third-generation robot
dog is smarter and more charming, but needy and way overpriced
When
I first reviewed the second-generation AIBO two years ago, I admit
that I was smitten with the little guy. But by the time I returned
the review unit to Sony, I realized I was ready to let it go and
didn't really miss having it around. Bottom line with that robot
was this: I already have two real dogs that need my attention,
as well as a young daughter and a wife. I didn't need another
demanding, high-maintenance robotic being constantly begging for
me to play with it. When the new AIBO ERS-7 model arrived, I was
hopeful that Sony had addressed all of the many shortcomings of
the previous iterations. Now, after ten days with the new AIBO,
I feel pretty much the same way I did about the last one at this
point. This is a terrific tech toy for adults, but most definitely
is not for children. My five year old was unable to correlate
the price and fragility of AIBO against that of her $30 furry
robo-cat that spastically moves its head and tail and meows every
now and then. At one point of frustration with AIBO, who had decided
to ignore her commands for awhile, she said, ãI like my kitty
better than AIBO!ä Like her, my expectations were high. We expected
something that would be at least as responsive as a real dog,
but what we got often acted more like a snooty old Siamese cat
than a obsequious young beagle. My editor compared it to a starfish,
slowly moving its arms around and completely oblivious to its
keepers. For $1600, the darn thing should at least come to me
when I call it. One huge improvement over previous AIBOs is the
ERS-7's ability to find its charge cradle when the battery runs
low, which it does every two hours or so. This
is fun to watch and contributes greatly to the illusion of autonomy
that Sony is striving so hard to achieve, and is quite remarkable
to witness. The new look is best described as futuristic anime
Snoopy, with a pearlescent white finish and lots of transparent
LED windows. It has a real mouth now, and ears that flap, and
a very expressive tail. From any angle, it is extremely cute ÷
a great piece of industrial design that appeals to everyone. Beyond
the cute doggie play aspects of AIBO, there is some actual utility.
AIBO has a built-in 802.11b WiFi card and a tiny web server. With
a bit of fiddling with settings on your Windows box, he can be
trained to check you email and let you know if you have new messages
waiting, but he cannot read them to you. He can also be remotely
activated and made to snap a picture (there's a VGA digicam in
his nose) and show it to you. He can even be turned into an extremely
expensive webcam, set to detect any movement and send you an image.
All good fun for the nerd set, but still peripheral to AIBO's
real mission: entertain humans who do not have true, warm-bodied,
breathing humans and canines in their home lives. ÷ David MacNeill
www.us.aibo.com
Choosing
your software
Once you've settled on your hardware, it's time to go shopping
for software titles. A great place to start is Handango. com's
Top 10 Best Selling Entertainment lists, which we've detailed
in a sidebar broken down by platform. Many titles are available
in demo form, so download anything that looks promising and have
a go. So don't be a dull boy. Close that boring spreadsheet and
let the games begin!
÷
Edison Carter
Top 10 Game & Entertainment Titles
[Source: Handango.com, Spring 2004]
|
Palm
OS
1.
Chess Tiger
2. AOL¨
3. Bejeweled
4. Aces Texas Hold'em
5. Solitaire Pack
6. SplashPhoto
7. Madness Tracker
8. Labyrinth
9. SilverScreen w/ Dynamicons
10. Puzzle Pack
|
Windows
Mobile Pocket PC
1.
DVD to Pocket PC
2. Chopper Alley Classic Collection
3. PDAmill - Snails
4. PDAmill - GameBox Classics
5. Dots
6. AOL¨
7. All-In Hold ÎEm
8. Anthelion: The Galactic Alliance
9. PocketMusic
10. Blackjack
|
Symbian
OS
1. GeniusCaddy
2. V-Rally
3. MGS Karting
4. Strategic Assault
5. MGS Cobra Attack
6. Sky Force
7. i730 StatusLight
8. SplashPhoto
9. 3GPP Philips Camcoder
10. Interstellar Flames
|
RIM
1. Casino Pack
2. Puzzle Pack
3. Baccarat Tournament
4. Tri Peaks Solitaire
5. Hangman Tournament
6. Merriam-Webster Crossword
7. Reef War
8. Pocket Quotes
9. Labyrinth
10. Concentration |
Windows
Mobile Smartphone
1. SoundZ Cool
2. Photo Contacts
3. Snake for Smartphone
4. Checkers for Smartphone
5. Interstellar Flames
6. PocketGrandmaster
7. Freecell for Smartphone
8. Pocket Mini Golf
9. Resco Mobile SmartPack
10. Links |
Java
1. Racing Fever 2
2. Aston Golf
3. Solitaire Classic
4. Backgammon
5. Casino Roulette
6. Wizard Pinball
7. Darts
8. Ace Trivia: Music, set 1
9. Merriam-Webster
10.
Bingo |
Home
