It’s Diablo 2, except prettier and more interactive. I like it. I don’t really expect to play it much, because I’m too busy with Star Wars: The Old Republic. But if you liked Diablo 2, it’s worth a look.

Diablo 3 Beta

No, my air conditioning is fine, I just picked up a Microsoft Kinect, their new motion control device for the Xbox 360.

The first thing I did after I set it up was play the TRON: Legacy trailer…with my voice.

“Xbox…Play Trailer!”

BAM! High-def Tron goodness.

That was a “future soon” moment for me. I hate voice control. I don’t really like babbling commands at my phone. I can’t imagine dictating something I’m writing.  I make great use of Dial-A-Human. Yet, talking to the entertainment center in my living room felt very natural. After a week or so of playing with the Kinect voice control, I’m wishing it could do more things, especially since using your arms and hands to control the menus with gestures is still a bit fidgety.

Rumor has it Microsoft wants to bring this kind of gesture and voice control to computers. I’m hopeful about this because I hate touch screens. After five minutes of fiddling with my phone at lunch, my screen is as smudged as a Macy’s window during the holidays. Pizza grease and touch controls just don’t work well together. Kinect makes me want to wave my device in the air, like a Harry Potter wand, to control it. “Wingardium dial-my-mom-um!”)

Games is where Kinect really shines. Kinect Adventures, the game that comes with it, easily equals the fun of Wii Sports. You jump around, wave your arms, have fun, and get winded and yes, extremely sweaty. The fact that Kinect Adventures takes pictures of you being a silly ass that you can then post to the Internet is a bonus.

The virtual puppet rewards are really fun, too.

Since my wife uses the Wii to work out, I also picked up Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. Being able to follow along with a workout without having to hold a WiiMote, nunchuck, and some crazy fitness rubber band is a big bonus. Kinect gives you the ability to actually work out while holding weights.

It comes with an excellent  variety of workouts and some fun fitness games, though their confusing menu system makes it a bit difficult to find different things. While I like working out with it, I’m finding it’s kicking my butt and I can’t really create the custom wimp-ass workout I want to. How about I tell you how many lunges I want to do, Fitness Evolved?

Definitely some nice innovation here from the Microsoft folks. Looking forward to checking out some of the other games, as well as seeing what other neat hacks people come up with for the device.

Edit: Updating the embedded video to a link to the video, since I can’t seem to figure out how to make their player not autoplay, and I hate videos that start playing as soon as you enter a site.

http://swtor.com/media/trailers/deceived-cinematic-trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of4u5PMsD0Q&eurl=http://www.roosterteeth.com/archive/&feature=player_embedded

Jeff Green on why he says he sucks at gaming.

Grim Fandango Cover

Just the simple number of wacky adjectives you can apply to Tim or the things he worked on are examples of his genius. Give it a look. If you haven’t played his games, you’re missing something!

For those who don’t know, two-factor authentication means you have to provide two items to prove who you are to, for instance, the Internet site you are trying to log in to. In the case of an authenticator like this one, you provide both your password, chosen by you, and the random code provided by the authenticator, to log in. Since each code generated by the authenticator is unique each time it it used, someone who wanted to sneak into your account would have to actually have the authenticator in their possession AND know your password.

Authenticators like this are a really good idea, when used properly by the companies that implement them. I hope to see a lot more banks and credit card companies offering this kind of authentication in the future.

I know people who have had their accounts hacked, so I think getting one of these is really a great idea.

Bejeweled in WoW. Well, looks like flight time no longer means I can hit the restroom. I’m going to need a bucket….

Sometime during my history of gaming, games got more complicated. Games routinely shipped with these giant manuals. To play some flight simulators, you had to read books that were a million times thicker than the ones real pilots read. There was a kind of joy to that for me — not only had I just gotten a new game, I cracked open the box and drank in the fresh scent of a brand new book. Here was my reading material for the next week. Just like the paper and pencil version of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, if you played an RPG you had to read through the book to figure out what spells you wanted to memorize. Ah, good times!
Sometime after that, big changes happened in the gaming industry. Gone were the giant manuals. Here to stay was the philosophy that gamers could learn to play a game much more effectively and fun-ly by playing through a tutorial in the game. Can’t argue. Gives me more time for novels and I can jump right into a game without having to fall asleep at night for a week reading the manual.

I’m still annoyed by one thing, which is that most RPGs (like World of Warcraft, f’rinstance) teach you the basics of how to play, but don’t really ever document their full rule-set anywhere. WoW has a web site with the rules on them, but it doesn’t really cover all the details of how the game works. For that kind of Player’s Handbook information, you either need to buy the strategy guide (which is outdated in a month) or go to a site like WoWWiki, where the community has detailed all that information. All hail the community.

How does the community get the information? They play the game. Over and over and over, and run spreadsheets to figure out what, exactly is going on in the world. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the scientific method. (I know, you had to think back to before Bush…) Proving once again that video games make people smart, as it says in this Wired article.

So, I used to think it sucked that game developers kind of hid the way the world worked from players. Now I realize, they were just trying to teach us something. For us slow learners, strategy guides are the textbooks and Cliff notes. There are even various services for learning video games, tutors, if you will.

Bless the community. I barely have time to figure out how to play the game, but now, I can fall asleep at my laptop while soaking up the knowledge gained from their hours of experience.

Hey, WoW players are hot, if I do say so myself

This ones for all my single friends who play World of Warcraft. Discovered the other day that there is a dating site for World of Warcraft players — datecraft.com. I know, I know. You’re picturing pasty white goth chicks who have known more twinkies than other human beings. But, at least with the cursory look I gave it, the chicks on the site seemed fairly hot.

If you ask me, WoW girlz appear to be the sexiest gamers I have seen. Of course, I didn’t grow up with ready access to the Internet, so I have no clue about just how true the pictures on Internet dating sites might be. I had to meet people in person. Oy!

And hey, I mean, at least you might find someone to play the game with…