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  • NFB Starts Streaming their Catalog for Free
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Over the weekend I burned through Timothy Carter’s Epoch. It was provided free of charge and sent through Minibook Expo, an awesome site where you can get books for free so long as you let the publisher know what you thought about the book(s) in question.

Here’s publisher Flux’s summary…

In his fourteen years, Vincent Drear has been sure of a few of things. First, the world is going to end. And until it does, he has two jobs: saving souls and protesting movies about boy wizards. But Vincent wonders if there’s more to life than this. His suspicions are confirmed when he finds an elf at his school science fair. Vincent’s excitement fades, though, as the elf informs him that his family’s religion is right about one thing: the end of the world is coming-in forty-eight hours! Vincent can’t save the world. His only hope is to get his family off Earth before demons wipe out everything, paving the way for a new epoch.

Did I like it? Hit the jump and find out.

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I accepted an offer for a position at The CBC on Thursday, August 21st, so starting September 8th I’ll be working there as an Associate Producer of online content. The opportunities that present themselves just by virtue of being in the building are incredible, and I feel fortunate for having been given the chance to show what I can do within and for the company. It’s a big step up for me from working as a Webcast/Multimedia Producer for CNW, where I’ve been working for just over 3 years after having moved to Toronto from Montreal.

When I arrived I was working at The Disney Store at the Eaton Center, so this CBC gig really does make me feel like I made the right decision in forcing my wife to come to Toronto with me. Sure, I had to sedate her with some barbiturates and tie her her hands behind her back to make sure she made the trip to the big smoke with me, but with this new job I think I can finally untie her and let her see some sunlight without worrying that she’ll flag down a cop car.

Thanks to Guin for the big ups- they certainly didn’t hurt my chances!

I’ve been all pissy and complainy lately, so I figured I should post something less, err, pissy and complainy. There’s lots of other great relics from your childhood over at the NFB’s Beta Video serving site!

Hard copies mailed to Mr. Alex Rigopulos and Mr. Eran Egozy
Hard copies CC: Mr. Mike Dornbrook (Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President, Harmonix), Mr. Greg LoPiccolo (Vice President of Product Development, Harmonix), John Riccitiello (Chief Executive Officer, EA)
Email only CC: Floyd Watkins (PR Operations Coordinator, EA)

I bought a Playstation 3 in March of 2008 for (at the time) the sole reason of playing Rock Band. Dollar for dollar it was the best option at the time. I brought the game home, unpacked it, and my wife and I jammed until the following morning. The game excels in every aspect and after spending more than $750 just to play it, we concluded it was worth every penny.

As soon as they were available I purchased a second official guitar controller for the game. We were finally able to have 4-person jams and get full band unison bonuses during the songs. It was awesome, even though the guitar was DOA (stuck yellow fret button) and had to be replaced. Your replacement process was first rate, though.

Aside from the guitar, I’ve also pumped a sizeable amount of coinage into the Rock Band store. We currently have over a gigabyte of paid-for downloaded music content and do not regret a single music pack or song purchase, though, you really should choose NIN songs that don’t end up being boring to play (”Burn”, who would’ve thought?!) or don’t have enough guitar to sync up with requiring you to play a piano on the guitar controller for 2 minutes (”The Collector). STILL, , it’s awesome, and we consistently buy new content almost every week. The fact that all our content will be compatible with Rock Band 2 (day 1 purchase, by the way) is great and very pro-consumer.

I recently encountered an issue, though, that is surprisingly anti-consumer. My PS3’s blu-ray drive died yesterday. As such it will need to be sent in for repairs and in all likelihood I will be sent a different PS3 refurb unit. I do not mind having to redownload all my track packs (I understand the nature of the DRM and don’t begrudge it) but what I do mind is that my Rock Band save game file is the only save game file on my PS3 that I cannot back up. This means that all of my bands’ progress, our customized characters, the money we’ve accumulated, the stars we’ve received, etc, will be lost.

I can understand the fear that people will pass their saved games around the net, allowing people to access tracks that had yet to be unlocked and all that jazz, but such a practice and conscious implementation does not take into account the very real possibility of system repairs. Really, since the PS1 days, systems have progressively become more unreliable with each generation. It’s no joke that a sizable number of the PS2s in people’s homes are replacements for the first year’s worth of shipped systems that ended up having dead disc lasers, and I remember having to flip a PS1 upside down and on a 40 degree angle to get it to play games after awhile. The fact that my PS3 died after 5 months is not surprising, particularly considering the failure rates of its direct competitor.

Yes, my wife and I will start the game over and re-unlock everything as we enjoy having people over to play the 4-man game which would be pretty lame if we only had access to a few songs. I will not be buying the next Guitar Hero game, not only because Rock Band is already wicked awesome but also because of the amount of money I’ve put into the game. Point being, you have not lost a customer, but you have made one quite upset nonetheless. I hope you “unlock” the save game file in Rock Band 2 for the PS3 as I’m relatively certain my PS3 will die again in the future, and having to go through it all a second time will be far too much to ask of a legitimate and loyal consumer.

Sincerely,

Ryan Couldrey

[signed]

I was given a Zune as part of a Microsoft campaign. Companies do it all the time- get the product into people’s hands, and if it’s good they’ll let other people know. My Zune arrived 5 days ago and I sang it’s praises for the first 4 days.

Today I give if a mark of FAIL. The “why” is after the fold.

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The NFB has always held a strange place in my heart. On the one hand they provide the means for a lot of film makers to create and distribute their works. Without the NFB, many awesome little (and bigger) indie films wouldn’t see the light of day.

On the other hand they want $15 for a 10 minute VHS I wanted a few years ago. That right there meant I wasn’t going to see the film.

I can understand that people need to make some money, but I’m also glad that the NFB has realized that there are other ways to do so that don’t involve charging far too much money for an out dated technology. So it’s pretty damn awesome that they’ve started opening up their catalog for free, on the net, and totally embeddable to boot.

Less a hack and more of an exploit, this article details how to do it, but the quickest way to explain it is that anything that has the “Podcast” tag in the genre section of the ID3 tags will be free to share without any DRM. This will cause music to end up in the Podcast section of the player, but you can always change that tag after you have it on the player to something more suitable.

E3 has come and gone and I now know exactly why I will be dirt poor by the end of the year. The amount of software that I must have for the PS3 (and to a lesser degree my PC). With videos linked to the titles and in no Particular order…

- Fallout 3 - PS3 Blu-Ray: I never played the first 2 isometric games that came out oh so long ago but the moment someone offers me a post-apocalyptic action-rpg using the Oblivion engine you have my money. The time stop mechanic where you can select what bodypart you want to shoot your rocket launcher at is a stroke of brilliance.

- Mirror’s Edge - PS3 Blu-Ray: A first-person parkour (free running) game where gun play is kept to a minimum (and you unlock a trophy/achievement if you never fire a bullet during the game), this genre creating spectacle is a sight to behold. Unless you’re not the person playing it; a lot of people have said that while the game doesn’t sinspire nausea while playing it, they have felt motion sick when they weren’t playing it. I don’t like to share anyways.

- Dead Space - PS3 Blu-Ray: This and Mirror’s Edge are both EA published games, and the fact that I want not one but two games from the behemoth means that things have to be changing inside the company. This is an over-the-shoulder horror-action game where the developers have been saying that you have to dismember the creatures if you want them to stop attacking. Headshots are so 1998.

- LittleBigPlanet - PS3 Blu-Ray: This game is the game of 2008. You might not be too aware of it unless you’re a PS3 owner but rest assured, you will have no choice but to come over and play this game on my couch with me. No more words, but more and more and more video (last one is where they created the Sony Powerpoint in the game, which is way more entertaining than your standard bar graph). Watch them all, or I’ll sick a Killzone-esque Sackboy on ya!

- WipeoutHD - PS3 Downloadable: This game was playable at 1080p and 60 frames per second last year, but Sony let it slip that there’s a game-breaking technical problem with the game that they haven’t been able to solve. I owned the first game on my Saturn way back when so I’m praying that this download-only Playstation Network game arrives before the end of the year.

- Pixeljunk Eden - PS3 Downloadable: I’m not entirely sure what the game is about, but it seems the goal is to swing around with two other friends (on my couch, natch) polinating plants. It almost looks like it has a bit of a racing mechanic, as player swing around spiderman style trying to grab the pollination bits to make the flowers. Something about it has me hooked… it also has the ability to record video play of the game and upload it to Youtube, very cool.

- Fat Princess - PS3 Downloadable: Say what? The goal of the game is to capture the other team’s princess (or catch your own, I’m not sure) and bring her home. Thing is, the team in the castle holding the princess is consistently supposed to fdeed her pounds of food and cake to fatten her up, making it harder to carry her home. There are multiple classes of players, and it’s a 16 vs 16 online Playstation Network game, think Team Fortress 2 meets Castle Crashers meets Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

- Left 4 Dead - PC Steam: 4 player zombie killing co-op multiplayer from Valve and the people who programmed Counterstrike’s bots. The game has a heavy emphasis on actual co-operation as you do not want to be left alone for long. The zombie spawn points are procedurally generated so you’ll never get stuck in the same choke point twice, so each play through will require new tactics and on the fly decisions. I’ll be g etting this one on PC and will be playing with my fellow Ectomites.

- Rock Band 2 - PS3 Blu Ray: What, you need me to say more than just the name of the game? It will not only come with 84 master track recordings, and extra 20 free downloadable songs near the launch, and not only will it be compatible with all the songs I paid to download for the first game but for under $5 I’ll be able to put all but a couple of songs from the first game onto my hard drive so I can play them from within Rock Band 2. Fuck yeah.

Thanks to my double crossing friend I’ll be getting a Zune 8gb (no idea what colour) as part of a marketing program from a local company called Matchstick. The gist is that they give me a free Zune so long as I talk about it. Truth be told, I’m quite amped already. As a long-standing Zen 30gb user (in lovely green) I’ve never had much urge to swing over to the iPod side of the fence.

When it arrives it’ll already be a very feature rich player. The Zune 2 models (4gb/8gb/80gb) all share the exact same OS and screen resolution (320×240, though, the flash model screens are smaller, regardless of the matching resolution).

A couple of things were niggling at my shins, though.
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Yahoo just announced BOSS, short for Build your Own Search Service. I can’t say I saw this one coming, but then again it takes a lot for me to actually care about something that involves the acronym API.

The service allows those with the know-how to take the Yahoo search engine and customize it to the point where you can change the algorithms and alter the page ranks of sought after sites. Instead of having to use the jack of all trades Google, you could use the master-of-one [Insert-your-name-here]-Search engine. However, like open source software the only people who’ll be able to really mash this up and do some good with it will be those who already have the coding know-how. Still, a great idea to steal some shine from Google.

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