Entries from February 2008 ↓

Half of the reason I wanted an Xbox 360 was because it plays back video from a networked PC, which is awesome. Only a few complaints about the Xbox 360’s media playing capabilities: I feel like it probably could, if it wanted to, play video off of any Windows / Samba share. It doesn’t. It requires Windows Media Player 11, which I have a feeling it requires because WMP11 requires authentic XP. I don’t think it’s doing anything too complicated (no transcoding), but if you let anyone come to that party, people will be streaming video from Macs, and we couldn’t have that. (It could also be that WMP 11 is the first to really work with the video capabilities of the Zune, and before that they didn’t really care about video portability, so there were technical problems holding it up.)

It is far more fussy than my old DVD player in the user-interface department. There is a configuration option for “Configure a Windows Media Center Something”, but your XP machine with WMP11 is not a Windows Media Center. There is another option for “connect to a PC”, but I couldn’t get that to work. No, I had to go to “Video”, then change my “video source” to the XP machine I’d installed WMP11 on. I’d also dragged a few things into the “library” so they’d be available, and… they weren’t.

I had two options: Desktop or Shared Videos. It took me six days to figure out that dragging files to WMP didn’t add things to the library - you have to add folders to the library, and the files in those folders will show up on your Xbox.

But enough about library confusion. It will play H.264 in AVI containers. My old DVD player would not. It won’t play MPG files, for some reason. I think my old DVD player does this - I’m not positive.

Big win for the Xbox - it plays all kinds of locked down WMVs, since it asks the PC for the keys. You don’t have to do anything to “authorize” that playback device.

If you’ve burned multiple files to a disc or have a collection of shorter videos you want to watch, the 360 is not a great choice. Videos don’t queue up or play in order (you have to individually select them), and they can’t be added to playlists. So that’s two annoyances: no playlists and no MPGs.

But even for my enthusiam for iTunes, the 360 does a very nice job of grabbing music off the network and playing it. The interface is better than it has to be, and some game developers have even thought to check if the 360 is playing music, refraining from playing the game’s soundtrack if there’s something else on. Sweet!

I can’t connect my iPod touch to the 360, though the shuffle works fine. (It doesn’t do much more than read the files’ metadata, and iPhones/touches have their file systems extra-locked down.) You can rip CDs to the 360, I think, but there’s not really enough disk space on the default 360 to seriously think about that.

Anyway, I’m totally stoked about being able to watch video on my TV without burning / copying / etc. It’s mostly great.

Christie has the total kindergarten wrap-up.

The headlines: the school attached to Christie’s church has pulled into the lead, and we’re going to attempt to wrap up a real summary of how much private Catholic school is going to actually cost.

The details: there is public school, and there is private school. I imagine a lot of you are thinking “huh, free vs. a couple hundred bucks a week… doesn’t sound too hard”, and, for a lot of parents, that’s a fine way to look at it. After all, free isn’t free: you’ve paid for public education since your made your first $5.25 at Dairy Queen. Might as well get what you’ve been paying for.

But the public school where we live has five kindergarten classes. That seems like a lot to me. It has a surprisingly high percentage of non-English speakers, and my kids read. It’s not particularly close: the bus ride might be 10-12 minutes, by our calculations. And it would only be their school for three years - we’d have to reshuffle our routines in 2011 and make a whole new decision about “where are we going to 3rd grade?”

And the relationship with the local public school hasn’t been particularly warm. I trust my wife’s instinct on things like this - while we’re both the agents for our kids, it’s an uphill battle if you haven’t impressed her.

But there are more than enough reasons to do what we’re doing: as fledgling Catholics, they’re going to either be in a Catholic school or have a standing appointment every Wednesday night to get what they’re missing out on. If they can get that out of the way during the day, then we’re all set. Private school is going to offer them better access to technology, better access to music programming, more one-on-one attention, and easier access to pre- and post-school activities.

They have little groups of kids from all age ranges - K-8 - and that’s your buddy group. In my school experience, I never talked with people a grade above or below me. (And the kids that were two grades behind me are a special kind of awful.) But at private school, they’ll have the cross-grade groups that team up and go places together. And the kids, then, get to know everyone in the whole school.

I am still cogitating carefully about all this, but that might just be me dealing with the reality of it. (It’s going entirely too fast, honestly, but if we go at my speed, we’ll start kindergarten when they’re 11.) I don’t want to have a prejudice against public schools where I live, but I know the schools struggle. I think it’s selfish on some level to pull bright and talented kids out of public schools and put them into private schools - it doesn’t make the problems the schools face any easier, but I want the best for my kids. On that note, I find it incredibly strange that we’re a family that will comfortably handle private school tuition - that’s not how I grew up at all. And I’m slightly uncomfortable about the idea that the education my children will receive is going to be framed by the ideas of Jesus and Christianity and Catholicism.

I know my kids. They will both do their best learning and growing in an environment where there are real expectations and a ton of help getting there. Private school may not be the easiest thing for them, but I think in the long-term, it’ll be the best thing.

So the 360 it was. I got Madden 08 and BioShock. Madden is generally state-of-the-art, although they’ve gotten a little shady since they’re the only NFL game in town. This year’s version says “new! franchise mode” - right. New in 1999. And then you couldn’t figure out how to cram it into Madden 06 on the 360, even though it was on other platforms, and then everyone took a nap on 07, and now it’s back in 08. The game itself is very, very good - fast, fun, with the right feel. The menus getting there are kind of frustrating. I couldn’t find a camera control (which is actually okay, I guess), and I didn’t know how to save my game the first time through. (Other consoles have an auto-save option - not so with Madden 08 360.) Turns out you click the left stick if you want to save quickly.

BioShock is supposed to be “impressive”. I told Cratchit that I don’t care if it’s fun or interesting - it just needs to justify the investment and represent the first-person shooter in the year 2008. Mostly, it delivers. It provided our first “oh, that’s the game, not the intro” moment. At the same time, it’s delivering a host of “I am better on the mouse than I am on the thumb-stick” moments, and I hope I get over that.

So everything else I’ve played, I’ve played on Xbox Live Arcade. I like it so far - I wondered for a while where you can search for people who might not be your friends yet, and it turns out you can do that online, but not on the box. Before I send a friend invite to “Cratchit”, I want to make sure that it’s really him.

The first game I played on the 360 was actually the Street Fighter II HF demo. It’s emulated from the 15-year-old arcade ROM (there’s a justification for technology!) but I don’t think I’ll be paying $10 to see the rest. I could be wrong. I paid $12.50 to buy 1000 points to spend 800 of them on Pac-Man CE. That game is pretty timeless and bringing back the original guy to help write a real sequel is a classy move. I also bought Puzzle Fighter, and then Cratchit gave me puzzle spankings over the internet.

Rez HD is amazing, and I’m not even playing it in HD. I’ve been wanting it since the PS2 days, through when it hit $80 on eBay. Lumines is another game I thought I’d never get a chance to play, but I’m enjoying the demo quite a bit. It’s probably the next game I’ll buy. My kids grow very quiet, with rapt attention, but that might not be the best measure of value.

My son really, really enjoys the Cars demo, and I haven’t even let him play it yet. He comes from a Pole Position background, and he likes Lightning McQueen more than just about anything else in this world. It’s not a great driving game, and Tractor Tipping with Mater is fun like folding socks is. Depending how low valuations drop on eBay, we might get Cars or the Mater-national sequel.

Their poker game is obnoxious. Boogie Bunnies isn’t trying very hard. Puzzle Quest was a lot of clicking “OK” and then, when it’s time to get down, it’s Bejeweled. (My friends have achievements for these games. Odd.) N+ didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t really read the help file. (When the guy kept falling to his death, making a squish sound, and body parts flew everywhere, my daughter told me “he lies down when he’s tired. And he’s really tired.”) Zuma is Zuma. Uno is Uno.

I played Geometry Wars once and that was okay. My wife died three times because she couldn’t figure out how to shoot - game developers, you have to think about moms!

Skate looks like fun, but I hope there’s a learning curve with the controls, and not just endless, hopeless sadness and frustration.

Basically, I bought the thing for the $10 games. I’m definitely getting my money’s worth there. The bigger titles - who knows? Maybe I’ll find time to rip through a $60 fully-featured adventure, but since I appear to be finding endless replay in things like Pac-Man and Puzzle Fighter, my disc library may not grow that much.

In terms of kid-safe programming that doesn’t drive me crazy, American Idol has been pretty good to us this year. I’m not sure if they’re following it exactly, but they have an idea about “you’re going to Hollywood”, and how that’s somewhere near where Lightning needs to go at the beginning of Cars, and also that it’s warm there.

But yesterday Adam wanted to tell me how Simon talks, and he did two bits in this hilarious English accent that were a pretty fair approximation. I want to say that Simon is his first exposure to any English accent, but we do watch a ton of Mary Poppins and there’s plenty of English characters in things like Lion King, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and probably a ton of other stuff I’m forgetting.

So maybe he’s less interested in the English accent bit than he is in the character of Simon, which would be kind of interesting. Christie says “he has an ear…” but these are accents and impersonations - role playing and characters and personalities. He’s four - he can’t be smart enough to figure that out yet. I don’t know.

Since that was probably better experienced first-hand than related on a blog, I’ll list a few more things that Adam tells us.

• No, you’re in time out.
• No, you’re having a break from candy.
• No, you go sit on the stairs.
• You’re thrown out of this house.
• You’re thrown to the sky.

We had a DVD player we liked - one that played DivX / Xvid from a disc - and it died. The new version of the same player came with the ability to read USB drives, which is awesome, but it lacked S-video output. This, to me, is like when they pretended to cancel the Whopper. I just stared at the back of my new shiny box, expecting to find a little flap that revealed the S-video output. It did have component output (the red, green, and blue wires), but I had no component cable, much less a fancy high-def TV with color-coordinated inputs. So we downgraded to composite video, which is that yellow wire that beat the pants off RF switches, back when we had those, which was seriously 1988.

The Xbox 360, taken out of the box, also does not have S-video output, but I was prepared for this. I was not planning on doing this until I bought a fancy new TV, but then my wife was there and generally agreeable and I had $349 and I remember bits and pieces after that. But now I had two things that needed to use the yellow input in the back of the TV, so I tried to think about how to connect them both. When I went to the back of the TV, there were red, green, and blue inputs. Component input on my seven-year-old TV. I literally never knew that was there. I hooked that up - the picture is pretty sweet.

I bought an Xbox 360 this weekend. It kind of happened out of the blue, as these things go. At the same time, it was inevitable. (I jumped the gun a little bit on my plan to upgrade the TV before buying new components.) But I’d made up my mind about Wii vs. Xbox 360 vs. PS3, and I’m terrible at waiting once I’ve made up my mind. Adam and I went to go play video games at Target, and when I came back to the cart, my wife said “well, did you buy one or not?”

“I didn’t think I had permission, exactly.”

“Dan, once you’ve made up your mind about these things, they pretty much just happen. It’s your money.”

True, I’d made up my mind seven years earlier to buy a PS2 as soon as they were back in stores at retail prices. That time, though, I hadn’t really mentioned it to her beforehand, and for some reason I remember it being a day or two before her birthday, and… well, things didn’t go well.

But that means we’ve been on the same platform for 7 years.

So how had I made up my mind about the 360? Mostly, I think it’s exposure to the blog over at Penny Arcade. They are, every week, talking about a new demo or $10 downloadable game. (Pac-Man CE and Rez HD come to mind.) I buy maybe 3 games a year - but downloaded mini-games seemed like something more casual, something the kids or their mom might enjoy. And December 2007’s software update, which lets the Xbox 360 play DivX/Xvid really tipped the scales. (I burn a lot of CDs full of two episodes of this, or a video podcast of that - networking the solution is a much better plan.)

That’s not to say that the Wii or PS3 never entered my mind. The high-def DVD war ended last week, and the format backed by the PS3 won. The PS3 is, by many accounts, the best available Blu-ray player. (It is fairly cheap, anyway.) But it’s still very expensive, and I haven’t heard a ton about PS3 games that I absolutely have to play. That might change over the next year, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything there. The Wii is a different story - I think the Wii is video game history. It’s put a charming face on gaming, and welcomed thousands to a really unique experience. And it’s got as compelling an online-download store as Xbox has, so that’s a consideration. There are so many strikes against the Wii, though: first, it doesn’t do any kind of network media playback, and I’m a little concerned about the technology. The harshest thing you can say about the Wii is that it’s not a huge leap beyond the GameCube, and that’s basically correct. The big selling point is the full-motion-capturing controller setup, but in my experience with it, the pointing and the gyroscopes and the motion detection are all a little imprecise. If you’ve ever hurt your arm during a tennis match, while a more experienced opponent sat on the couch, wrist-flicking you into submission, you know what I’m talking about. And I hear a TON about Wii Sports and Wii Play, but almost nothing else about any of the other games available on that system. Certainly not third-party stuff. But the biggest obstacle for me is that I’ve still never seen one in a retail store. Some sites sell them, when they get them, in bundles, full of games I’d never otherwise consider purchasing. And not useful bundles with the extra controllers and accessories that normal people buy - they make you buy things like the Silver Surfer game.

So the 360 it was.