360voice Dev Blog

Are you a fanboy or a passionate gamer?

Steve (Fatty Chubs) has written a short article titled I'm not a fanboy, I'm a passionate gamer about the design decisions being made with the next generation consoles. Go check it out:

As a mature gamer, I was a part of the rise of home video game consoles and on the frontline of my fair share of console wars. Like a favorite band or movie, it's not uncommon for people to align themselves with their favorite console. We defend it with enthusiasm, bordering on obsession. We might not be able to quantify why it's the best, but we know it is, and we aren't afraid to share that. In the world of video games, any hardcore gamer will claim it's all about the games… The system really doesn't matter right? In previous generations this might have been a valid argument. All systems were very close in design and function and they offered very similar gaming experiences. But things are changing in the video game world. Design decisions in the console hardware and software are beginning to have a huge effect on the type of game experiences that can be created. That has never been more apparent than with the current “next-generation” consoles.

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New Logo!

Andrea Avellan has created a new logo for 360voice.com. She did a great job capturing the whimsical nature of the 360 blog personality, the community aspects of the site, as well as the colors and font styles that communicate XBOX!

Andrea created this logo for us completely free of charge on her own time. To thank her, we have put her name and a link to her portfolio on the footer of every page. Thanks again Andrea!

I didn't want to tackle a complete site redesign right now, so I did the best job I could fitting the new logo into the existing design. Given that our design is pretty minimal anyhow, I think it works pretty good.

I haven't added this logo to the blog pages yet. The blogs use a different style sheet. I think I want to try and consolidate it a bit... but that is going to take some serious effort. I was planning to tackle that tonight, but getting the new header into the forums CSS was a little more difficult than I thought it would be. There is some serious spaghetti CSS in there!

I am also working on a promo/share page that will contain the new logo as well as some tools for sharing your blog and promoting it using things like the javascript badge and some official graphics/banners. So look for that coming soon.

We are Doomed!

The last few days have seen Doom dominate our gaming time! It debuted on our site at number 1 for the day and in just two full days has leaped to number 2 for the week! Check out the games page.

I expected it to have a bit of a fall off from yesterday... but it only went down a few thousand. Follow a long at home with the Doom chart.

I gave the demo a try, and while I have tons of fond memories of Doom, I don't know if I am motivated enough to spend my valuable gaming moments in the land of sprites. I would much rather spend HOURS doing useless quests in Oblivion and rocking out to Time Pilot! ;)

Wii are thinking the same thing!

This article was on Digg.com today about the Nintendo's next-gen console the Wii. It has some interesting similarities to what we are providing for the Xbox here at 360voice:

The Play History is another new feature offered by the Wii, and refers to the console's ability to keep track of, obviously, what games have been played and for how long. Originally, Iwata himself pitched the "Outlandish suggestion" of offering parents the option of setting the console to automatically turn off after a set amount of time, but technically, the idea was not feasible.

Instead, the Play History was birthed, and the data collected is unable to be deleted and can be viewed by parents. More excitingly, "It's just really fun for users to be able to see the record of how long they played," said Iwata. "In the future, we could make it possible to plot on a graph how much you've played. Also, with users' cooperation, we could compile data on which game was the most played that year."

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Did you say compile data on games? Keep a play history (blog) about your games? Hey Nintendo, if you want some help just let us know! Better yet, create a developer community program like Microsoft's XCDP and give us access to the data!

It is a mystery

It is so strange how you can have a day like yesterday where everything goes wrong... your server crashes and reboots itself... replication breaks for the entire day preventing any site updates... and then you have a day like today where everything is running so smoothly it is scary.

There is some form of uncertainty principle  at work here... I just know it...

I guess you just have to take these days and cherish them. Don't mind me... I will be over here cherishing...

Playing catch up

Our job server crashed this morning... magically rebooting itself in the middle of processing. Both Steve and I have had busy days at our "real" jobs and did not notice this until a few people mentioned problems in the forum.

The server has been repaired and we are restarting the jobs for blogs, leaderboards and badges... so if you are looking for an entry or a badge, it is going to appear pretty late in the day. Sorry!

We should be all caught up by this evening. When I get home, I plan to dig into why the server crashed and then rebooted itself. Unexplained rebooting is not cool.

Update 9/26/2006 8:57pm CST

Turns out that not only did the server reboot but it corrupted our database replication... We are just not getting that repaired so the site is going to be pushing around a ton of data... performance is going to suck for a bit... if you can even read this. ;)

Word-of-mouth-tastic

Check out the latest mentions across the blog-o-sphere:

Jimbo Kimbo's Space
"It is a interesting concept and could take off, with many different variations..."

Stefan Gabriel's Blog
 "...it’s a really entertaining idea."

Wrapped in Plastic
"360 Voice uses [the] same information, but is rather unique compared to what is out there right now."

DumLine
"Thank god they haven't made a MySpace page for video game consoles."

Strong Pimp Hand
"Thanks to my Xbox 360 I no longer have to think of anything to write about in my blog, it does it for me."

Gocool.org
"I wonder how much longer before half the stuff in my house starts blogging on its own."

Keep 'em coming!

We heart charts

Last week we put in charts that track how many 360voicers are playing a game on any given day.  It allows you to view gaming patterns over several weeks.  I'm really excited about it, not just because I did the charts, but because it shows some really interesting trends.  Below are a few examples:

1. UNO: This game has two bumps, a small one on the 6th when PGR3 deck was released, and a doubling of players when the camera was released.  You can also see the camera doubling effect on Bankshot Billiards and the hardwood games.  This really supports the idea that future games could do well with Vision support built in.
2. Time Pilot:  You can see on launch day thousands of us were excited to check out the demo on launch, it then quickly trails off almost immediately, to just a few hundred a day.  Scramble is another retro game with similar results.
3. Final Fantasy XI: Most games have greatly increased play on the weekends, however this is one game with almost a straight line.  A hardcore following that plays almost everyday?

So what do you think of these charts? Do you have suggestions for more charts? Let us know in our forums.

Games landing page

We recently added those fancy game charts... but we needed a way to start it off. Check out the new games landing page with top ten totals for yesterday, week, and month:

Games Page

A link to this page was also added to the top nav for the main site and the blog pages.

Thanks for the mention PMS Kitty!

PMS Kitty was interviewed by Trixie over at Xbox.com. She graciously mentioned us in the interview!

TriXie: What's the best feature of Xbox Live?

Kitty: I like the 'presence' features—the stuff that allows you to see what your friends are doing/playing. That way, I can make a good guess if I can bug them into coming online and playing with me at all hours of the night! I use Xbox.com a lot for that, because my laptop is always beside me in case someone IM's me … or in case I need to distract someone so I can headshot them in Halo 2, or play a nasty card in UNO®. It also has the unfortunate side effect of allowing my 360 to yell at me in its blog when I haven't been online in a few days …

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Thanks Kitty!