My Take Radio

The suc­cess of the Microsoft Kinect and the Sony Move rests squarely on soft­ware. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about which one is bet­ter based on hard­ware specs but it is all going to come down to soft­ware. The best exam­ple of this is Gui­tar Hero (or Rock Band). I know Rich touched on this in his last show but I wanted to break it down a bit more.

With Gui­tar Hero, the pub­lic had to buy addi­tional hard­ware to play var­i­ous ver­sions of the game. The game itself was very well done, addic­tive and became a huge hit. Peo­ple were will­ing to pay for the addi­tional hard­ware because the game was so great, and they enjoyed the nov­elty of using phys­i­cal instru­ments as the game controller.

When you boil it all down, the Kinect and Move are exactly the same as Gui­tar Hero, but with­out the allur­ing tie in of the music game. Right now peo­ple are say­ing the Kinect is rev­o­lu­tion­ary and the Move is the Wii on steroids but if nei­ther has the soft­ware to cap­ti­vate gamers in the same way as Gui­tar Hero did, or the Wii, then both will only gar­ner mar­ginal success.

Which device will get the killer title first? What do you think?

The used video game mar­ket is on the verge of becom­ing down­right crazy! This 2 bil­lion dol­lar a year busi­ness (which is dom­i­nated by Game Stop and eBay) has Ama­zon and Best Buy foam­ing at the mouth to grab a piece of the action. More com­pe­ti­tion between retail­ers breeds bet­ter deals for con­sumers. You’re prob­a­bly think­ing, “Hey, that sounds good for gamers,” and you’d be right in a way. Depends on if you are a buyer or a seller. I’ll get more into depth on this sub­ject in a minute, but before I do, I have to throw in the recent news that the game man­u­fac­tur­ers such as EA want to get into the used game mar­ket as well. They’re say­ing, “We spend count­less hours and mil­lions of dol­lars build­ing these games and every­one else is prof­it­ing from sell­ing these used games but us!” They are cor­rect in stat­ing that they are being cut out, but should they be in the pic­ture at all?
The answer is: they will be if they want to, and they want to. The only ques­tion is if they will actu­ally do it in an obvi­ous fash­ion, by adding a form of DRM where the sec­ond owner would have to put in a code in order to take advan­tage of the full func­tion­al­ity of the used game, or try to off­set their “losses” by lim­it­ing what goes into the game when sold new and cre­at­ing more down­load­able con­tent which they will charge you for (See COD and their Map Packs). Either way, the con­sumer would be pay­ing. The num­ber that has been thrown around is $15.

(con­tinue reading…)

Some­one ported the iPhone ver­sion of the SuperNES emu­la­tor for the iPad. Check it out!

Check out the arti­cle at Giz­modo

Video Credit: Giz­modo

The title of the post is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing. It should be iPad + Net­flix Stream­ing = Poten­tially Awe­some. The movie com­pa­nies have imposed such crazy restric­tions on stream­ing to pro­tect their DVD cash cow that all of the movies you want at the touch of a but­ton just won’t be there. So the big news (unless this is an April Fool’s joke) is that Net­flix is going to offer a stream­ing ser­vice for the iPad. There really couldn’t be a more per­fect match. Watch­ing movies and TV shows on an iPhone is fine for short peri­ods of time, but watch­ing them on the larger and higher res­o­lu­tion screen is going to be a much more enjoy­able experience.

The big ques­tion: Is Net­flix the app that will get you to buy an iPad?

One per­son who isn’t jump­ing on that band­wagon though is Michael Bay. Dead­line Hol­ly­wood says Bay remains skep­ti­cal of the tech­nol­ogy, specif­i­cally the ‘up con­ver­sion’ process used to trans­form 2D films into 3D (ala “Alice in Won­der­land,” “Clash of the Titans”).

“I shoot com­pli­cated stuff, I put real ele­ments into action scenes and hon­estly, I am not sold right now on the con­ver­sion process… Right now, it looks like fake 3D, with lay­ers that are very appar­ent… Peo­ple can say what­ever they want about my movies, but they are tech­ni­cally pre­cise, and if this isn’t going to be excel­lent, I don’t want to do it and it is my choice” says Bay.

Credit goes to DarkHorizons.com
Bay did appar­ently do some early tests on the via­bil­ity of shoot­ing “Trans­form­ers 3″ with 3D cam­eras but found them “too heavy and cum­ber­some” for the way he shoots.

Nin­tendo has jumped on the 3D band­wagon with a hand­held? What?

Chris Evans has been cast as Cap­tain Amer­ica. I thought it would go to Chan­ning Tatum. What do you think of the casting?

Grow­ing up I watched a lot of wrestling. Over the past ten years or so I’d drift in and out of it, watch­ing for sev­eral weeks in a row and then not, mostly because the prod­uct was not con­sis­tent. Clearly, dif­fer­ent peo­ple watch wrestling for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Some watch for a cer­tain wrestler, oth­ers love the amaz­ing high-risk moves, and peo­ple like me enjoy a good story mixed with good performances.

(con­tinue reading…)