Well, I’m not going to play it for days at a time (like DTD), but entertaining for awhile. Definitely a clever idea.

Magic Eye Tetris

::Kiskis::

If you’re looking for a way to waste away hours with colleagues, look no farther than Games By Email. WWII is basically an Axis & Allies clone – fantastic way to spend a full morning strategizing about how to take down Russia.

::Kiskis::

I’ll be up in Seattle starting tomorrow attending the Microsoft Gamefest. Microsoft is rumored to be revealing some elements of their upcoming Panorama service – described as Live for Windows, in some form or other. I definitely believe they’ll be showing off something. We’ll see how much of that Live functionality they’ll be bringing anytime soon. What’s especially interesting to me is the pricing question. Are PC gamers ready to put up some money for access to a gaming environment like Live?

Live on the Xbox is a fabulous experience – seamless, simple, and (relatively) secure. I have far more fun playing on Live than any other multiplayer system, with the exclusion of our office LAN (can’t beat smacktalk down the hall to the boss). The ability to more accurately rank players, and then place them against players of similar skill with immediate voice communication and easy friendship making is really a powerful combination.

I’m actually of the mind that a big chunk of the PC gaming community will be willing to pay for that experience, once the early adopters get in and start spreading the word. Will they be willing to pay $5 a month? Maybe, maybe not. It’s a deal on Xbox, but with services like PlayLinc coming down the line to provide free servers (in exchange for watching 30 second spots each time you launch) on the PC, and so many existing services for staying in touch with friends, downloading content, etc…it’s a much tougher sell. But throw in the matchmaking and ranking, global leaderboards, and some other gaming-specific services (voicemail? email? web services designed as well as Xbox Live, but implemented on any platform?) and it starts to look a lot more interesting.

Of course, they’ll probably have a free membership level which gives you access to at least some of the community for free. Friends list, text & voice communication, access to Arcade downloads, etc – almost a certainty. So those somewhat diminish the value of any pay service. But access to the leaderboards and playing against friends on a 360 from the PC, including matching against people of my skill level, high speed servers, in-game access to a whole slew of services…I’d probably be putting in my credit card.

Anyway – if you’re going to be up in Seattle as well, drop me a line.

::Kiskis::

This is the first year that MTV has added game music to the Video Music Awards (VMAs). As part of that, they’ve asked us and Gametrailers, our fellow MTV gaming site, to hold a vote in our respective communities. The results of that voting will help determine which of the finalists will eventually with the VMA. The vote runs until August 28th, and you’ll be able to see the final winners on MTV’s Overdrive on August 31st. (You can access Overdrive through MTV.com, under “Games”.)

There’s been some posts in the forum asking how the finalists were chosen, or why so-and-so’s favorite game wasn’t chosen, or that this or that game’s music is crap, etc etc. The short answer is – those are the finalists. You may not agree with why some game was left out, but those are the ones that the MTV gaming folks decided on. So maybe your favorite’s not there, but get out there and vote anyway! Here’s why.

The long answer is that this is the first time MTV has done this. So it’s entirely uncharted territory. So if they run this vote and we get 50 votes for the winner, chances are that next year they won’t be bothering to do the vote at all. On the other hand, if we rally together, get your friends to swing by and vote, and get up to tens of thousands of votes – then suddenly this community is a pretty serious force to be reckoned with. So that when MTV is looking for gaming advice in the future, they’ll know where to come – right to the source of the world gaming community, you all.

So get going, and let your voice be heard

::Kiskis::

Been awhile since I posted, but it’s been quite busy here at Xfire. A couple things of note over the past 2 weeks:

• New Xfire release is out. One cool feature is the new LAN Server Browser.  Our friends over at 20ID were recently in town (winning the CAL championship, by the way – congrats!) and pointed out that Xfire could be very useful at these tournaments and LAN events by simply detecting what servers were available on a local network, rather than only looking at Xfire’s master server list. Now, when you hit your local LAN center, check if they have Xfire installed (most do). You can hit the Servers tab and see what servers people around you are on. Easier than ever.
• We also just launched our new Xfire Store. We’ve had tons of requests for Xfire shirts, hats, whatever – some way to show off the love of Xfire. Well, over the past few weeks we’ve been building up a cool new store with Func Industries. Right now we’ve only got a few products – couple t-shirts, a hat, and mousepads – but you can use Func’s nifty flash tool to completely customize your mousepad. They’ll print it out on their industrial printing machines and send it to you within a few weeks. These aren’t the crappy foam mousepads that you can print photos on at Walgreens – these are professional, high quality mousepads that the pro gamers are using to win. So go customize one! We’ll be adding more new shirts, sweatshirts, and cool stuff over time. Got a suggestion for a cool product or design? Contact me.

There’s a bunch of other new stuff, including new games, in this release, which you can find out about in the release notes. Enjoy!

::Kiskis::

I’ve been reading The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi. Actually, I pretty much demolished it on a weekend trip up to Seattle. As the marketing material describes, Dean gets a really remarkable level of access to the Xbox team, and is able to put together the pieces in any area where he didn’t do a direct interview.

One quote by Robbie Bach (now the President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division, then Chief Xbox Officer) really struck me: “You discover that 90 percent of the decisions you make aren’t right or wrong. The most important thing is to make them. On about 10 percent of the decisions, those matter a lot and affect the outcome. The important principle was to get the decisions made.”

I think that’s so true. It’s been hammered home time and again how important it is to make decisions. I’ve seen countless frameworks for analyzing decisions, each of varying usefulness. It’s been about doing the most complete, thorough analysis in order to come to the right decision. Yet if 90% of those branches are going to (essentially) join back up again in the future – why bother? Take a peek down each pathway, lean on your experience and feeling, and then move. If you find that right was actually better than left – make a decision to move in that direction instead.

Of course, Bach seems to dodges the another important question – how do you know which decisions are important? How do you make sure that you get that 10% the appropriate level of thought? (and, hopefully, get them right!) The answer I think he’s hinting at is that there’s no way to tell – you can only discover that through hindsight. The key skill here is just an ability to make a decision.

Organizations and individuals become bogged down, or worse, completely paralyzed, because they believe that the decisions they’re making are all critical. If 90% won’t matter in the long run, you hope that you get enough of the 10% right to not completely screw yourself up. You also hope that the time you save by making the 90% of decisions in an efficient manner will give you time to fix any of the 10% you get wrong

::Kiskis::