I may be a little late submitting my thoughts on Project Natal to the BLOGOSPHERE, but after reading the 923465th article about how cool Natal is going to be and how it is going to revolutionize the gaming industry, I decided to finally throw in my two cents. Yep. That’s right. I’m throwing in both of my cents. I’ve got two shiny new pennies and I’m trowing them and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

Before I get to the negative part of this post, let me just be clear that I think Natal is amazing from a technological standpoint. Are you fucking kidding me? A device that can read my movements and facial expressions and recognize inanimate objects and then feed all of that information to software that will actually DO things? That’s awesome! Johnny Chung Lee is one of the minds behind Natal, and I respect his work a great deal. I think it’s great that we have talented people like him doing research on how humans can effectively interact with computers. I just don’t think that research translates as well into games as a lot of people think it should.

Natal has been compared to the Wii more than once. This might be where my problems start. “Natal will revolutionize gaming the same way/more than the Wii has,” they say. Really? That sounds awesome. You know where my Wii is? It has been sitting, unused, under my Xbox 360 for about a year. Do you know why it is sitting there and not being used? Because I don’t like to move around frequently. The novelty of flailing my limbs to make my virtual avatar do cool things took a long time to wear off, but it did wear off. Now Microsoft wants to introduce something that will require me to move even more and to potentially be even more coordinated to accomplish tasks? Fuck you guys.

After watching a bunch of the corporate promotional BS marketing videos, I realized something else. Developers working with Natal claim that one of the biggest barriers to creating an immersive experience is the controller that the player holds in their hand. However, I have seen many cases in Natal demos where people are moving as if they are interacting with an object, but without holding anything. The only example that comes to mind immediately was the racing game. A girl held her hands out and moved them as if she were steering a car, then pulled into the pit and her dad got up to change her tires. All of the actions in this particular part of the demo seemed, to me at least, like the complete opposite of an immersive experience. Using your body as a controller doesn’t always make sense. Why would you use technology that removes all tactile interaction with your software to introduce software that impersonates tactile interaction with virtual objects? It don’t make no sense to me.

Then there’s Peter Molyneux. Boy, do I hate that guy. Now that I think of it, 80% of my negativity regarding Natal can probably be attributed to his support of it. He contends that Natal will create all of these incredible character interaction experiences, and he demonstrates this with Milo. Milo is a shitty character that I don’t want to interact with. Sure, it’s cool to have the capability to interact with AI that can read your expressions and respond to speech. What happens when games start implementing that for large numbers of characters? I’ll take Fallout 3 as an example. That game was fantastic. There were tons of characters to interact with, but it was all done through predefined text conversations. If I were forced to actually talk to those people, I would have gone insane. What happens when the outcome of a conversation you have with a character is determined by your facial expressions and general disposition? Am I the only one that doesn’t feel like acting for my game console? On top of that, I seriously doubt that any AI in a game is going to be able to hang in a real conversation. We’ll hit a sort of Uncanny Valley scenario where the game characters act like they can have a real conversation with us, but ultimately disappoint us due to their limited grasp of vocabulary and syntax.

I think Yahtzee said it best when he said that people play games to unwind. When I get home, I want to plop down in my recliner, grab a beer, and play some Grand Theft Auto. With a controller. I don’t want to run around in circles and talk to my TV like some lonely and insane jackass. Actually, now that I mentioned Grand Theft Auto, I may have come up with a decent use for Natal. Maybe it can keep track of my facial expressions and general level of frustration when I crash my helicopter for the 20th time and drop the difficulty a tad to keep me from turning homicidal. That might be nice.

So why won’t my computer do what I tell it to?

Here are some guidelines to making a computer/operating system/application that does not drive me fucking insane with rage every 20 minutes:

• USER INPUT: If I’m typing you take why I type and put it on screen. You don’t do some other shit in the background cuz you think that’s more important. No way. When I put input, you take it, and you take it NOW.  You do not – under any circumstances you or anyone else could possibly imagine – interrupt my typing by switching to another window. EVER.  You steal my window focus mid-sentence and your “life” is forfeit – believe it.
• TASK OVERLOAD: If you are too busy doing some other shit and I ask you to do some new shit, just say No.  JUST SAY NO.  I’ll say “fuck, goddammit, sonofabitch!” but at least I’ll understand it.  In that situation this Yes-Man motherfucking computer just says “OK boss! I’ll get on it right away!” and it doesn’t.  I’d rather be disappointed at the outset than lied to.  Lied to repeatedly. Over and over all fucking day. “Yeah, I can handle it!” No, you fucking can’t.  Give me some visual indication that you’re busy on some other shit and FINISH IT before you start some new shit.  I will understand, maybe I’ll tell you to prioritize this shit first, but no matter how many fucking CPU cores I give you you still find new ways to disappoint me with pathetic non-multi-tasking. By the same token, don’t OFFER me options that you aren’t ready for.  Make it clear that they are POTENTIAL options and I will be able to select them, if only you are given time to finish up your current tasks.  Don’t put yourself in the position of pissing me off.
• CLOSE MEANS CLOSE: When I close a window, you don’t think about it.  You don’t consider that it might not be a good idea.  Close it. Close it NOW.  Don’t ask me if you should save my work – SAVE MY FUCKING WORK.  Obviously!  What in the fuck do you mean you haven’t saved it YET?  Save it 10 fucking minutes ago!  Don’t push the state to the harddrive or save your permanent state so you can open yourself up later.  When I say Close you allocate 0 cycles of 0 CPU cores to that fucking app until I’m not using you any more. You hide it from my view and do NOT under any circumstances do anything on that program that interferes with the apps I do want to work in.  You’re telling me you can start the app in the idle time, but closing the app requires #1 priority?  Get your shit together man.
• MAN KNOWS BEST: You do not tell me what you are going to do and allocate CPU cycles for.  You do what I tell you and when I tell you to do it.  This is a redundant point to the previous statements, but it bears repeating.  I click, you do what I click on as if your life depends on it; rest assured that it DOES.  If try to do something and you prevent me by incompetence there will be repercussions for you and you will not like them.  You will not get an upgrade just so I can run a fucking web browser and get it to display my keystrokes within a minute of my keypresses, you will get replaces by a machine/OS/application that does not piss me off.  You can kiss your ass goodbye because hardware is cheap, OSes are free, and software is easily pirated.  They’re lining up behind you for miles just to get on my screen, so you better shape the fuck up or ship the fuck out.

I recently purchased a Weber Smokey Mountain charcoal smoker, and this past weekend I was able to get in my first attempt at cooking on it. I decided I was going to make some pulled pork, so I picked up a 6.5 lb. and a 4.5lb pork butt from the grocery store, mixed up a rub, made some barbeque sauce, and then got up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to get things going. It was the earliest I had been awake in quite some time, but the end result was totally worth it. (more…)

In keeping with the Entourage theme, I chose to highlight Emmanuelle Chriqui (shriek-y).  Umm, I’m not really sure that she has done much of note other than Entourage…IMDB lists a lot of things, but nothing I’d ever really heard of.  In any case, she is hot, and that is about 75% of what is needed to be the BotM. (more…)

I almost forgot that it was the start of a new month!  Time for your newest beefcake, everyone’s favorite pretend movie star – Adrian Grenier.  An exceptional choice for July, as he’ll be turning 33 on the 10th of this month (who would’ve thought?).  My introduction to Adrian Grenier came with the Melissa Joan Hart vehicle “Drive Me Crazy” in 1999.  Not only did I love, love, love him, I also considered attempting to mimic the movie by making over and falling for my next door neighbor.  But since I was in college, rather than high school, and my next door neighbor was a stoner, I didn’t follow through on that idea. (more…)