Here’s another video of “quantum levitation”:

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Biggest Disappointment of the Year and Generation: Sony pushes C#/Mono for hobbyist development. As a programmer, this is heartbreaking. With such a vibrant landscape of new languages and runtimes, why would Sony, arguably the biggest competitor to Microsoft, mandate the ultimate in conformist Microsoft only tools on the development community? How about tools like Fantom, Scala (for type theory purists), Google Go (a cleaned up version of C++ for high performance applications), LLVM (adopted by Apple), OpenGL/OpenCL, or the upcoming Kotlin (from JetBrains who create the world’s best IDEs)? The following is a must-watch video regarding Java and .NET:

Most Overlooked: Motorstorm Apocalypse. The action racing in this game is the best, the tracks are brilliantly creative and packed with fun art and content, yet most people didn’t even realize that this title existed.

Worst Products: Sony’s smartphones and tablets. The Android space is exploding with amazing products. The bar for quality is just so high when you see budget entries like the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet and super Tablet products like the Transformer Prime (wow!!!), or premium superphones from HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Then, Sony and Dell, seem to be making the worst Android products on the market that are both overpriced and using old hardware and software. I can’t imagine why anyone would buy them or what Sony and Dell are thinking. I was chatting with some Dell employees and they definitely didn’t “get it”. They were telling me about Android products have such a low ROI (return on investment), but they really just didn’t fully understand how far behind the competition their Android products really were and how significant that is if you want to have a hot product.

Biggest Trend: Rise of the smartphones and tablets. I’m surprised to hear so many predictions for the end of dedicated handheld gaming devices as I see the home-console market at more of a risk.

Personal Favorite Game: LittleBigPlanet 2. The provided levels are the most fun I’ve had all year, they are extremely co-op friendly, and perfect for playing with kids. The level editing tools are a joy to tool around with, and the Move pack is the most fun I’ve had with the Move controller.

I can summarize my rebuttal to that in three words: The Strange Loop. This is one of the best, if not the best, programming conferences that covers the most cutting edge programming concepts, applied technology, and paradigms. There are lots of programmer conferences and meetups, but this is the main event. This really gives you a feel for what the brightest programmers of today are really passionate about. (by the way, this is a yearly event, going on right now, and my current manager, and several coworkers, flew to St. Louis on their own dime because it is that good).

Skim through their session list. You can see lots of excitement and use of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), which you will notice almost no one is using for the Java language but the newer, more elegant languages such as Scala, Clojure, and Groovy. There’s also lots of excitement about Git, monads, cloud computing, iPhone/Android, HTML5, etc. The number of sessions that are interested in Microsoft developer tools are very few. Absolutely zero mention C# or Visual Studio. There’s one speaker from Microsoft (speaking on category theory and monads) and another session about F# (which is Microsoft’s more elegant, cutting edge language), but that’s it.

Secondly, most of the recent success stories in software don’t use Microsoft development tools. The developers at Twitter are fanatical about Scala. The Facebook developers write lots of PHP, but their core fancy massively parallel database (Cassandra, which they open sourced) is completely written in Java. Mint and Pandora were created on Java/JVM development stacks. Amazon has a heavy investment in Java and a few other non-Microsoft infrastructure pieces (going by their job postings and past Amazon developer speakers).

Most people think Netflix is all Microsoft tech, because they have an exclusivity deal with Microsoft on the web client to only use Silverlight, and that’s the piece that people see, but internally, Netflix predominantly uses Java and some C. Talk to most of the programmers working with university academics in the natural science, and Python is prevalent (see the SciPy conference). Even look at Microsoft’s Bing: you think it’s built in C# or .NET or Visual Studio? Nope, it’s all Java and Hadoop on the server-side (well they basically acquired it from Yahoo).

I will say this. In the English speaking video gaming blogosphere, particularly among the non-programmers or very light programmers, Microsoft’s developer brands have by far the most brand awareness influence. This is for a few reasons:

• The big video game competitors, Nintendo and Sony, don’t have a stake in software development tools and brands. They don’t have their own IDEs, languages, and VMs, and don’t have interest in that field either.
• The other big players in development tools don’t have such a large consumer presence as Microsoft. There are tons of smaller companies pushing game development kits for hobbyists. Adobe Flash has probably been the most successful at making game developer tools that are successfully used by hobbyist and entry level developers. But Microsoft is really the only company with both a large consumer presence and a large investment in developer tool brands that is heavily advocating to the hobbyist game developers.

  This may change in the near future with Google, who is under strong lawsuit pressure to move away from Java, which has serious interest in video games on the web and on Android, and has two large programming language projects (Dart and Spot) rumored to be near unveiling.

• The Microsoft fan culture, among adult managers, is generally all Microsoft all the time. Even if 99% of people think that the Microsoft web browser is ridiculously inferior compared to the competition, Microsoft fan mangers enforce it’s adoption rigorously, just because it’s Microsoft. Somehow, they mentally equate using Microsoft software with maturity, and anyone who prefers another product for any reason is being childish, silly, and just being a hater.

  Go to a SharePoint Saturday conference: you will see seemingly normal looking adults who obsess about pushing obscure bits of Microsoft tech on others for no apparent reason. Contrast that with the Java/JVM community or the Python community. The Python community has a heart of its own and isn’t centrally driven at all, which you can tell by the general refusal to adopt Python 3.x. Most of the people who are writing amazing software in Java, actually hate Oracle, and have zero loyalty to Java as a language or the corporate backers. I’m talking about the guys who wrote Scala or Clojure or Fantom or Hadoop or Cassandra or Lucene or all of the other big success software projects that use Java internally.

  The great part about this, is that technologies and paradigms generally don’t gain traction because the corporate backer says so and spent a bunch of money on developer advocacy and expensive media circus keynote speeches, but, instead, because the stuff is actually good. The downside is that you don’t have a strong central voice to do the consumer style advocacy that are needed to win over the more consumer driven minds of the video gaming crowd.

• Development IDE:Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Development OS:Microsoft Windows.
• Programming Language:Microsoft C#.

There are better programming languages: Scala would be my pick, but I’d also prefer Java (unfortunately, this isn’t legally viable due to lawsuit happy Oracle), and to a lesser extent Python, C++, Go, or Clojure. There are also better IDEs: IntelliJ is much better than Visual Studio, and yes, I’ve used both extensively.

I’m not opposed to giving developers a choice of using Microsoft exclusive products. Most Amazon and Google developer inititiaves provide Microsoft options in addition to other, more innovation friendly alternatives. What I really, really despise is the innovation destroying Microsoft-only, fire every employee and kill every project that hasn’t fully adopted the Microsoft mindset. Every programming concept has to come from a Microsoft PR agent, every programming tool has to be a Microsoft blessed plugin in Microsoft Visual Studio on Microsoft Windows.

As a long time PlayStation fan, this is heartbreaking, but ultimately, I’m more interested in innovation, including developer innovation, than supporting the PlayStation Suite and it’s Microsoft technology agenda.

Microsoft basically has gutted Nokia and Yahoo and taken them over from the inside. At some level, I’m disappointed to see signs of this with Sony.

On the bright side: rumors have leaked that Google is privately working on new programming languages and ecosystems, supposedly called Dart and Spot. I’m expecting a browser-centric JavaScript replacement and a more rich client and server focused Java replacement tool set. Also, despite Oracle’s lawsuit centric nature, software development innovation continues within the JVM ecosystem.

• Twin 720p OLED displays. Supposedly this provides higher image quality than traditional LCD displays.
• Optical lenses give the viewer a widescreen 45-degree horizontal viewing angle. The lenses simulate a 750-inch virtual screen with a virtual viewing distance of approximately 20m (quoted from Sony PR, yes they are mixing metric/English units).
• Stereoscopic 3D support that works at full brightness that is 100% crosstalk free.
• HDMI in and HDMI passthrough
• Requires wired connection to separate processing box.
• Integrated Virtual Surround Sound Audio.

IGN has an excellent hands on preview.

A few comments:

• This is a large advance over previous displays of this type.
• The obvious missing feature is head tracking. I assume the hold up is there are no game systems or other devices that currently use head tracking data.
• Ultimately, I’m hoping Sony creates a PlayStation platform dedicated to the VR input/output form factor.
• On PlayStation’s idea sharing site, where users can submit PlayStation wish list ideas and vote on them, I submitted this concept as an idea (with head tracking) several times in 2010. For some reason, the idea never made it through their audit process, never got published, and my support requests were ignored. Obviously, they were working on this exact idea as I was submitting it, so I wonder if they blocked it purposely.

Console gaming is the last non-portable holdout in the entire consumer electronics industry. Years ago, desktop computer users swore they would never trade in their desktops for laptops because they were so accustomed to laptops being so much worse than desktops. But as soon as laptops were good enough, desktop users did exactly that and made the switch.

In the past and the present, portable consoles have been dramatically worse for most types of games than home consoles. Most people view them as completely separate industries where people play completely different types of games. Today, home console gamers play tons of FPS/TPS type games, and while those games exist for portables, they are basically garbage that almost no one plays. The Vita seems like it will be the first device to really change this dynamic and you will actually be able to play the same types of games at nearly the same quality that you would play on a non-portable system.

A big trend is the rise of smartphone and tablet devices. While some gaming is definitely going in that direction, particularly games that work well with touchscreen/tilt controls and don’t need cutting edge technology, there is still a need for dedicated gaming hardware. Some games really benefit from gaming-centric controls (analog sticks, face and shoulder buttons, d-pad, motion wands, and soon VR type head tracking). Additionally, gaming centric hardware provides higher gaming optimized performance at mass market price points and has less fragmentation than the smartphone/tablet space does. But with the Vita, you have the benefits of a dedicated gaming platform, but also the portability that consumers want.

If Vita really does let you play the big console games of 2012 at roughly the same quality that you would experience on a home console, why wouldn’t consumers migrate towards the portable option?

RPGS

When I was a kid, I *loved* the classic stat-builder stat-battle single player RPG with a pulp fantasy or sci-fi back drop. Today, I feel that some RPGS cling too tightly to a dated view of what RPGs used to be. I’m more interested in games that deliver a fresher style of game play. Catherine is a prime example of this.

Story Quality

Catherine is one of those few games that has such a good story that it’s hard to put the controller down because you are so interested in what happens next. The central story arc involves some great romantic tension, and the side characters are tons of fun to explore. As great as the story is, I have two complaints.

The big complaint is the way the game portrays alcohol. The characters think they are cool and moody when they drink alcohol and think other people like hearing them talk with a cool swagger about their consumption of alcohol and neither are true. It comes off as an annoyingly forced posture and it doesn’t work. My second complaint is that the characters are written as early thirty somethings but they have a more adolescent maturity level.

But overall, the story is awesome.

Interactive Story Mechanics

On top of the gripping story, there is some really good interactive branching elements as well. Your choices influence many events of the story. It pulls you in to the world and makes you care about the choices your character makes.

Puzzle Mechanics

Most of the game is the 3D block moving, climbing puzzle game. What makes this puzzle game special is:

• It’s unique and makes you want to learn how to play.
• It doesn’t have lots of frustrating points where you lose play momentum (although I’ve only beat the first half or so of the game).
• It continues to be fun to play even after you’ve gained proficiency.
• The puzzle world of abstract blocks is surprisingly well tied to the the main story and characters.
• High end production, art, graphics, and presentation values.

Extras

There is a great mini-game, an awesome soundtrack, and an online group voting element. It’s definitely a packed and well rounded experience.

Summary

This is one of the best RPG-hybrid games and big budget puzzle games we’ve seen this decade.

This review is based on a retail copy of the PS3 version of Catherine provided by Atlus.