This story starts, for me anyways, at WWDC. The theming for Moscone West was bursting, flying app store icons. Up on the second floor, the windows showed icons captioned with the name of an app, where it was created, and some fanciful stats (“Marriages saved: 700″, “Bullets fired: 2,000,000″, that kind of thing). One that caught my eye was this somewhat “Western manga-style” icon:
That’s Flo, the lead character of Diner Dash, the first and most popular of PlayFirst’s casual games (more on the series from Wikipedia). The game is based in time-management: you get more points by chaining your actions (seating customers, taking orders, delivering meals) in groups, so you try to juggle impatient customers, buffering them up for a few seconds so you can get them all in the same mode (ordering, eating, paying), and thereby build up a combo.
Since the original dates back to 2004, I ended up buying one of its more modern sequels, Wedding Dash, and have been playing the heck out of it. Between self-employment and high-maintenance kids, I don’t have time for long PS2 sessions (Final Fantasy got me in the mindset of setting aside at least an hour whenever I turn on the PS2, something I can never do), but knocking off a Dash level in five minutes is a nice break.
One thing that struck me about the game is the simple story that unfolds between levels, as lead character Quinn starts planning weddings for friends and slowly turns it into a career, and a business that Quinn builds as you progress through the game. Flo cameos frequently to keep Quinn’s head in her business:
About the third time that Quinn described the work of the game as her “business”, it hit me that there is a none-too-subtle message to this game, about building a business as a virtuous pursuit. With rare exceptions (like Miyazaki’s least typical film, Kiki’s Delivery Service), you really don’t see that often in pop culture; companies are much more typically portrayed as insufferable sweatshops, or rapacious empires. And given the times, Flo and Quinn’s DIY messages really stand out as a breath of fresh air: here in handout-happy Michigan, it seems like a lot of people are sitting around waiting for their share of stimulus money (i.e., their grandkids’ future taxes), and as video games go, it’s a sharp contrast with the “build a criminal empire” ethos of the Grand Theft Auto series and its many, many knock offs.
Continuing that message, PlayFirst just announced a collection of women’s apparel that builds on the idea of Flo as a 512-pixel Dagny Taggart. The t-shirts offer slogans like:
- Roll up your sleeves. Dreams take work.
- Not another princess. I’m my own Fairy Godmother.
- Elbow grease is the new black.
From the PR:
The launch of Flo’s Closet is deliberate in its timing as it aims to inspire and encourage women to strive towards success in challenging times. A recent study* reiterates this potential showing that female business owners are surviving the downward trend better than other businesses and Flo’s in-game character notoriously rejected the corporate life and aggressively pursued a more meaningful venture as a successful restaurateur.
So, yay PlayFirst. The games are fun, and the message is something that all of us, women and men, need to hear more of. I’m now following PF on Twitter, and the PF jobs Twitter is a nice feature with a shockingly low number of followers (13?!)
The WWDC keynote announcement that iPhone OS 3.0 would be released in a little over a week caught us a bit by surprise: the next edition of our iPhone SDK Programming book was nearly ready to go, but we’d waited until WWDC to resolve some blockers. Now we had a week to get the new version ready for the public release of 3.0 and the end of the NDA for that version.
The biggest blocker for me had to do with the Bluetooth peer-to-peer features in the new Game Kit framework. The problem is with device support: first-gen iPod touches don’t have Bluetooth, and the first-gen iPhone (which I have) has an older Bluetooth chipset that Game Kit doesn’t support. So back in April, I bought a second-gen iPod touch, largely for writing this chapter.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the iPhone Simulator doesn’t support Game Kit’s Bluetooth networking, even on Macs with Bluetooth. So, to develop and test a P2P game, you need two recent iPhone OS devices.
I could have waited until Friday, when I’ll be buying an iPhone 3GS (which surely will have Game Kit-capable Bluetooth), but to get the chapter out for the new version of the book, I wrote blind code on Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent Thursday morning in the iPhone Lab with Apple’s test devices, and the Game Kit engineers handy to answer my questions.
After a couple hours, I had P2PTapWar running on the two devices. This is an asinine little game that lets two players find out who can tap their screen the fastest.
I’m glad we got this chapter into the book, the latest beta of which is available today. It went well enough, in fact, that a section of the Game Kit chapter is one of the new free excerpts available on the book’s page.
Now to finish up our remaining issues with this book and get it to the printer.
So, to explain this morning’s angry tweet.
My ASD 6-year-old son has a few obsessions, one of which is the Dance Dance Revolution series of video games. In the car, the DDR soundtracks are pretty much the only thing he wants to listen to, and he’s reasonably competent at the Beginner and even Basic skill levels when he wants to clear them (he’ll sometimes fail songs on purpose too, which is really not a lot of fun for me when he’s at the arcade and spending real money).
Last month, he was trying to play Dance Dance Revolution Extreme and I could hear him screaming. I went to the PS2 and saw he was getting the message “System Data is corrupt”. In other words, the settings and progress on the memory card couldn’t be read, and all our unlocks had been lost. It took a long time to talk him off the ledge and get him to switch to another game. Over the course of the next two weeks, I played Extreme every morning and many nights to earn back all the unlocks… all the more annoying because the US version of Extreme is easily the worst of the series: terrible UI, terrible music, and a useless workout mode (strangely, the Japanese version, which we have and could play on our old “fat” PS2, was one of the best, meant as a possible “last hurrah” for the series).
I bought a second memory card and copied over the data from all our essential games to it, including all the other DDRs we own, which is every DDR released for PS2.
So wouldn’t you know it, this morning he goes to play Dance Dance Revolution Supernova and gets the “System data corrupted” message again. OK, calm down, I say… I’ll just copy over the data from the backup card. Except that doesn’t work. So I move the backup card over to slot 1… and that doesn’t work.
OK, WTF? Since the timestamp on the file is from three weeks ago, I’m looking at two unlikely scenarios: either I managed to back up the file right after it became corrupted (not knowing it was corrupted, since we would have found out before then) and he hasn’t played it since then, or the hardware is failing to read from and/or write to the memory cards consistently.
What can I do? I pick option #2 and buy a new PS2 this morning. Thank goodness they’ve dropped to $100.
Except this doesn’t work either, so I’ve bought a PS2 I don’t need. Guess the old one goes up to my parents’ place at Torch Lake.
The lucky thing is that by digging through memory cards, I found a DDR Supernova save from two years ago that seems to have most of our unlocks, so I copied that over to our main memory card and it works. So at least I’ve defused Keagan for now.
But seriously, what the hell? Two file corruptions in a month? From the same series of games?
So here’s something to chew on. I searched ddrfreak.com for “corruption” and found lots of threads with other users complaining about data corruption. Many of the others on the boards lectured the posters about the usual thing: don’t turn off your power or remove a card when saving… the kind of patronizing BS you’d expect from tech support.
But it doesn’t wash for me. I’ve owned PlayStations since 1997 and I’ve never had data loss except for these two games. And here’s something else. I searched the forums of two Final Fantasy sites (Eyes on FF and Final Fantasy Forums), to look for threads about data corruption. After all, if the rates of hardware failure or user incompetence is consistent, then we should see many more complaints on the FF boards, as that series is far more popular than DDR. And yet, there seem to be no complaints of lost memory card data on those boards.
So maybe it’s time to stop assuming that the corruption in this case is media failure. What if the problem is that DDR gets into a state in which it writes data that it can’t read? What if it corrupts its own data? As far as I can tell, this hypothesis is most consistent with the evidence.
And, as you might expect, it pisses me off. It might sound like a reckless boast for a developer to make, but I think that software should never lose user data. In 2009, with automated backups, redundancy, and simple common sense, there’s just no damn excuse for it. Software that’s known to inadvertently destroy user data should be pulled from the market, rated F by reviewers, and deleted en masse from hard drives and download servers until such a time as the people behind it can get their act together.
It’s quietly acknowledged among developers that software engineering does not aspire to the level of dependability and quality of other engineering disciplines. We think it’s too hard. This despite the fact that we galavant in a fantasy world of total unreality, while other engineers have to deal with real physics, real chemistry, real biology. Our standards, practiced in other fields, would be unconscionably negligent, if not criminal.
And yet, somehow we get a pass.
I don’t get it. And yet, I’ll probably buy the next DDR for Keagan when it comes out. Even though the series, and seemingly only this series, has proven its inability to take care of my data. And even though the manufacturer, Konami, can’t even get physical media together — a chunk broke off our Supernova 2 disc while putting it back in the case (center ring near ESRB rating logo):
…and even though we were in the 90-day warranty period, Konami refused to replace it. It’s pretty amazing to see a company with such contempt for customers (well, outside of the US airline industry, anyways) but there you have it.
Still pissed, but I think I’ve said enough about this.
I saw one of these Microsoft “PCs are cheaper” ads during the basketball game last night. It’s probably best of me to leave the advocacy to those who are good at it (e.g., Daring Fireball), but even setting aside tiresome evangelism, this campaign still seems like an odd duck:
- One of the classic rules of advertising is that #2 trashes #1, but never vice versa. Avis says “we try harder” to catch Hertz, but Hertz never even acknowledges Avis. As the market leader for decades, it doesn’t have to. So why does Microsoft, still enjoying at least a 10-to-1 advantage over Mac in market share, feel the need to take potshots?
- And did you notice the fallacy with that point? It’s that Microsoft isn’t even advertising its own product, which is the operating system. They’re forced into telling you how great PC hardware in general is, not why Windows is great. I suppose the Linux community could expect a free ride off this campaign, if it works, because it too benefits from a “buy a cheap PC” message.
- The big question is, how much does price and feature set matter? If it’s the only thing that matters, then the iPod never had a chance against the Zen Nomad.
- That said, there is a perception that Macs are more expensive, largely driven by the fact that Apple doesn’t even bother making zero-margin el cheapo computers. Saying that you’re “paying $500 for a logo” is rubbish, but I think some people will buy it.
- But is it really just about styling? The ads seem to make the point that Macs are “sexy” – are they admitting that most PCs are ugly? – but I don’t know how many Mac users really pay that much heed to appearance. If it’s just about the sexy, then why would people try so hard to get OS X running on admittedly ugly-ass PCs?
Finally, couldn’t Microsoft use this exact same line of reasoning in selling the XBox 360 against the PlayStation 3? The cheapest PS3 is double the price of the cheapest 360, yet Microsoft hesitates to do so, even though the 360 is something they actually make and sell (as opposed to PCs, which they do not).
Maybe the difference is that – for this console generation and in North America at least – they know they have Sony beat. But can’t we say the same for desktop operating systems? I mean come on, it’s still 10-to-1 right? Maybe, but there’s a sense that a lot of innovators have switched to Mac, as Fortune noted in a recent article about Boxee. If cool new stuff is all on the web, is multi-platform, or (heaven forbid) is Mac first, then Microsoft’s classic advantages are lost.
But if that’s the case, then unless “Lauren” from the ads is a developer – oops, wait, she’s an actress – then it’s hard to see how selling her a cheap-ass laptop does much for Microsoft.
I went ahead and upgraded Parallels, kind of in hopes that Maple Story would work without a) having to run in Boot Camp, or b) running without DirectX support (and therefore at a crawl), or c) having the Windows .exe terminate with a dialog accusing me of an “Illegal hacking attempt”.
The result: my character (“Quaoar”, near the center of the screen) seems to have picked up the texture from a “Wizet Wizard” label elsewhere on the screen:
Fail. Amusingly, turning off 3D acceleration now completely fails (instead of just making the game hopelessly slow), with Maple Story complaining of an unsupported graphics mode.
If Windows is only good for games, and this game still doesn’t work in Parallels… I don’t suspect I’ll be using Parallels that much after all.
Details from Gamasutra. With all the iconic design associated with the Beatles — the Yellow Submarine movie, the Sgt. Pepper concept, the B&W of “A Hard Day’s Night” or the Bond-spoof “Help!”– this could be as fascinating visually as much as anything else. Maybe “Rock Band” meets “Kingdom Hearts”, where the different Beatles eras and concepts serve as the various lands?
Since Harmonix is made up of musicians, it’s safe to assume it won’t suck like the Sgt. Pepper movie. Worst case, it’s Across the Universe, which sits unwatched in my DVR…
BTW, with rumor mongers saying for years that a deal for Beatles on iTunes was close, who would have thought that we’d see them in a game before being on iTunes or one of its rivals?
