Of CES 2012 and missed expectations
by Cyril Kowaliski — 10:10 AM on January 20, 2012

Ah, Las Vegas. I had hoped never to return. Yet there I was last week, in the ticket line at the Vancouver airport, cursing myself for making it in time and bringing my luggage and passport.

"Maui or Phoenix!" an attendant began to shout, pacing back and forth between the ticket counters. "Anyone going to Maui or Phoenix needs to step to the front of the line!"

We made eye contact. For one brief second, I thought she was beckoning me to a less wretched destination. "I... I'm going to Las Vegas," I said with my hand half-raised.

She stared at me blankly. "Maui or Phoenix! Anyone going to Maui or Phoenix, step forward now!"

A man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts waddled past me. I looked at him with a loathing, jealous look. His flight would be long, but he would soon be sipping margaritas and sunbathing. I would be nursing my chapped lips and trying not to step on blisters during long marches between casino hotels. I would be hurrying along sidewalks just narrow enough to dispense deep lungfuls of car exhaust. I would be getting friction burn from the strap on my new messenger bag.

My mood bottomed out three hours later, when I emerged from the walkway into the McCarran International Airport. I encountered the slot machines that would haunt my waking hours for the next week. Oh, please, not again.

Then, somehow, it wasn't as bad as I thought.

I'm not saying Vegas is any less awful of a city than when I went there last year. I'm not saying it's any less grotesque or absurd. My friends tell me they know people who work there, and they tell me those people are happy. They say you can make a good living there, with good restaurants, endless entertainment, and a reasonable cost of living. What's not to like? I don't think I'll ever see Vegas that way. Maybe this city just attracts a certain kind of people—people happy to go there on vacation, to settle there, to raise a family there. Maybe, when the rest of us get dragged there despite ourselves, we can't help but hate it.

And maybe, after a while, we start to tune out the bad parts.

Last week, the garish lobby of the Venetian felt like a fact of life, not a cause to stop, mouth agape, wondering why anyone would build such a thing. The people at the slot machines looked like regular people just going about their regular days, not wretched souls unknowingly paying for the hotel's marble columns and impossibly kitsch indoor canals. The overpowering fragrances at the Trump Hotel and the Wynn didn't make me want to choke on my own vomit. All I did was chuckle to myself. "Hah. It still smells like vanilla in here."

Somehow, it all seemed normal. Normal like a crazy homeless man you see on the street every day on your way to work. Normal like an old lady wearing big sunglasses and a fur coat and too much perfume, trying to accessorize away the years that stole her beauty. Normal like little Jimmy getting sent home from school because he smashed a slug with a rock and poked at its guts with a stick.

This year, Vegas just seemed like a quirky backdrop to CES, not an attraction in and of itself. That was lucky—because while I tolerated Vegas better, the show seemed a lot worse to me.

"Hello there, how are you? Come right in. Here's our new product. It looks like the product we released last year, but don't be fooled, because it's slightly different. Have you seen our new tablet? It runs Android and has a black bezel and tapered edges. Have you seen our ultrabook? It's thin and light and cheaper than the MacBook Air. Yes, it is going to be obsolete in three-and-a-half months when Ivy Bridge comes out. So, how's the show been for you guys so far?"

Meeting after meeting, hotel suite after hotel suite, that's what the friendly PR reps we all know by name told us. We smiled, we nodded, we asked questions. We took pictures and wrote it all up in the hotel room at the end of the day, our feet throbbing and our eyelids drooping from the exhaustion. We posted it all on TR because that's what we do, and new products are new products. There were even a few small veins of glittering excitement in the dull, grey bedrock—the high-DPI Transformer Prime, the 7-series mobos.

But the veins were too few and the rock too hard and thick.

I remember Computex 2007. It was my first trade show, my first trip to Taiwan, and my first time being in Asia. Asus announced the very first netbook there, the original Eee PC. Intel demoed the first Atom-based handhelds. Via showed me the first x86 motherboard the size of a business card. OCZ let me try its first brain-wave-powered game controller. I got first-hand word—anonymously, of course—about upcoming processors and graphics cards. I drank my first glass of snake blood in an outing with other press guys, and for the first time in my life, I flew home with the fulfillment of having covered an exciting trade show.

Were there any firsts at this year's CES? None come to mind. CES 2012 was a show of second tries and third wheels, like the $529 Tegra 2 tablet from Toshiba and the convertible ultrabook from Lenovo that folds flat with the keyboard exposed below. It was a CES of me-toos and maybes, where prototypes of dubious value intermingled with MacBook and iPad lookalikes. There was no big, earth-shattering story this year; nothing like the birth of the netbook at Computex '07 or the unveiling of Nvidia's Project Denver at CES '11.

Last Friday, I packed my bags and grabbed a cab back to the McCarran International Airport. I smiled and nodded at the TSA officer who grunted a sarcastic "bonjour" after seeing my French passport. I ate an unfulfilling lunch at the Chili's near security. I figured out why my iPhone could get onto the airport Wi-Fi and my laptop couldn't. I spoofed my laptop's MAC address, got online, and hammered out our last bit of CES coverage for the week. I closed my laptop and stood in line at the gate. I realized how crowded the plane would be and made a last-minute run for the washroom before boarding.

I got into my seat and waited for the plane to take off. And then, for the first time in my life, I flew home from a trade show feeling nothing but disappointment.

What's next for PC gaming?
by Cyril Kowaliski — 2:12 PM on December 30, 2011

If you're reading this, you're probably a PC gamer. You've probably invested a decent amount of money in a fast graphics card, a decent-sized monitor, and more cheap RAM than you probably needed. I'm willing to bet you've also played some of the latest shooters on that gaming rig of yours.

If my description fits you, then you must have realized that your PC can carry much bigger loads than the lightweight Modern Warfare engine and its ilk. The sad truth is that today's games are developed with six-year-old consoles in mind, and they look the part, too. High-end gaming PCs are roughly an order of magnitude more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Playing Modern Warfare 3 on the PC is a bit like taking a Ferrari to go grocery shopping; as flashy as it might look, the resources at hand are being woefully underused.

None of that should be news to you. The question is, what happens next?

Epic Games Technical Director Tim Sweeney said in September that Unreal Engine 4 won't be ready 'til "probably around 2014." Speaking to Develop the following month, Epic President Mike Capps noted, "I want Unreal Engine 4 to be ready far earlier than UE3 was; not a year after the consoles are released. I think a year from a console’s launch is perfectly fine for releasing a game, but not for releasing new tech. We need to be there day one or very early."

Unless there's some miscommunication inside Epic, those two statements tell us the successors to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 won't be out until late 2013 or early 2014. That's a long time to wait with PCs getting more powerful and game developers still forced to target the same old platforms. However, I don't think that means we have to suffer continuing stagnation in PC graphics for the next two years. There's plenty that can be done to improve visual fidelity without tessellating everything and soaking images in photorealistic shader effects.

Mainly, I'm talking about four little visual eccentricities we've been living with for far too long—eccentricities that fast PC hardware could eradicate while we wait for the next generation of games.

• Jaggies. That's a big one, and some games have already made good progress toward eliminating jagged edges, but we ain't there yet. Ideally, multisampling and post-process techniques like FXAA need to be combined to offer accurately smoothed polygon edges and to eliminate jaggies inside and around transparent textures. Some games already do that, but it needs to become the norm rather than the exception.
• Shimmering. That one is trickier but just as bothersome. In all too many titles, distant textures shimmer as you move around the game world. Sometimes, it's because of inadequate antialiasing. Sometimes, even cranking antialiasing and anisotropic all the way up doesn't help. It needs to be fixed. Can you imagine watching a Pixar movie where some parts of the scene shimmer as the camera pans around? Unthinkable.
• Vsync. Unfortunately, vsync is the red-headed stepchild of the PC gaming world. Hardcore gamers leave it off, because it can induce low frame rates and input lag, and us reviewers and benchmarks keep it disabled in our tests, because if we didn't, we'd be obscuring the differences between different graphics solutions. I'm not saying those aren't good reasons to leave vsync off, but the fact remains: screen tearing is an ugly thing that needs to go away. Again, imagine a Pixar movie; now think how it would look with screen tearing in action scenes.
• Frame rates below a constant 60 Hz. Playing id Software's Rage earlier this year was something of a revelation. Here was a game that prioritized fluidity of motion above all else, adjusting graphical detail dynamically in order to offer consistent smoothness. And it was good. There's nothing more frustrating than walking into a wide outdoor scene and having your frame rate plummet all of a sudden. I saw that all too much in Skyrim, which was buttery smooth almost everywhere and frustratingly choppy when I was trying to take in the view from a mountaintop. That's no good. Movies don't have smooth parts and stuttery parts. Neither does real life, and neither should video games. Some of you might interject that 30 Hz is a good enough target, since that's the norm for TV, but I disagree. If you're playing a fast-paced action game, you want quick-twitch responsiveness in the blink of an eye, or quicker.
• Microstuttering. This kinda ties into the 60 Hz thing, but it's an entirely different problem. Even if a game does manage to pull off a 60 FPS average frame rate, that's no guarantee the illusion of motion will be preserved. Multi-GPU solutions especially have problems with microstuttering, but single-GPU solutions aren't immune, either. You'll want to peruse Scott's Inside the second article for all the specifics and watch the video here to see the real-world implications. In a nutshell, microstuttering is difficult to detect but easy to see; it damages the illusion of motion by having objects skip across the screen instead of gliding smoothly. It needs to go disappear one way or another. I hate to bring up the Pixar movie analogy again, but I don't recall any skipping or jittering in The Incredibles.

I think those are the big ones. Rage already got us part of the way there with a hard 60 Hz target and beautifully effective vsync. Now, other games need to follow suit and iron out the other kinks mentioned above. I certainly hope AMD and Nvidia will push developers in that direction, too. After all, extra graphics horsepower can be put to good use making games look smoother, cleaner, and more seamless—graphics horsepower that would otherwise go unused... or, more crucially, un-purchased. Yes, I know about PhysX, stereoscopic 3D, and PC-only DirectX 11 eye candy, but the GPUs that come out next year and the year after that will no doubt have the brawn to handle those things with cycles to spare.

Of course, if my wishes are fulfilled, then we'll be in an interesting position when the next-gen consoles do come out. If Epic's Samaritan demo is any indication, future titles will take another step toward photorealism. I expect hardware requirements will suddenly spike up, but does that mean we'll be forced to trade silky smooth, shimmer-free graphics just for a taste of all the eye candy future games can throw at us? I certainly hope not. I hope next-gen titles will manage to offer smooth, distraction-free imagery with an added dose of realism. Otherwise, what would be the point? Photorealism with screen tearing, shimmering textures, and microstuttering wouldn't be photorealism at all.

Where's my 21st-century television?
by Cyril Kowaliski — 10:10 AM on December 9, 2011

Gabe Newell said something that caught my eye the other day. As part of a broader interview with The Cambridge Student, Newell shared some powerful words of wisdom on the topic of piracy and copy protection:

In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.

Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

If you're a media industry executive who campaigns to paint pirates as amoral thieves who must be drawn and quartered, those words probably feel like a slap in the face. If you're an average, Internet-savvy adult, they probably ring truer than anything anyone's ever said about piracy—if only because of their eloquence.

I know Newell's right because I can relate. Many years ago, I was just another kid who downloaded MP3s and games off KaZaA and BitTorrent. I would make a point to purchase physical copies of the content I liked, but I would usually leave the jewel cases and boxes unopened. Retail purchases were a show of support for the content creators, not a means of obtaining their work.

Today, I buy almost all of my music on iTunes and almost all of my games on Steam. The exceptions are indie songs distributed through the artists' websites and games inexplicably walled off from the world's most popular PC game distribution service (*coughBattlefield3cough*). I use iTunes and Steam because, as Newell says, they provide a better service than the pirates do. I can get any content I want instantly, I know the quality is up to snuff, there are no viruses or cracks to worry about, and I get to support the content creators without letting shrink-wrapped jewel cases pile up in my apartment.

Valve can claim credit for making online game distribution appealing, and Apple undoubtedly deserves props for doing the same with music. Before iTunes came along, record labels were cluelessly trying to make up for declining CD sales with awkward, unappealing, and restrictive services. Apple didn't invent the concept of digital music distribution, but in true Apple tradition, it was the first to do it right. The move away from digitally locked songs and the introduction of iCloud have only made iTunes more appealing as the years have gone by.

Thanks to Apple and Valve, we're in a good place with music and PC games. Unfortunately, watching one's weekly slate of TV shows is still, inexplicably and frustratingly, a royal pain in the ass.

Yes, you can spend a hundred dollars every month on a carefully customized cable TV service, and then spend valuable time configuring your DVR to record the shows you want to watch. You can pay $1.99 per episode on iTunes, ensuring that you never give obscure shows a chance and that you curb your consumption of nightly programs like The Daily Show. You can use Hulu and watch recent episodes for free, with commercial breaks, the day after they air (provided you live in the United States). You can even scour the websites of different cable networks in the hope that they, too, let you stream recent shows for free.

Or... you can hop on your favorite BiTorrent tracker and download high-definition, commercial-free rips of any TV show on the planet at most an hour after it airs.

Many of the legit offerings are doing things almost right, but the pirates still provide a better service, hands down. It's not even funny. We all know what the problem is and what needs to be done, so why haven't the big networks gotten the message yet?

Here's what I want: a single service like Hulu Plus or Netflix that regroups shows from all major channels (including Comedy Central and HBO), lets me watch all past seasons of shows, and offers new episodes immediately after they finish airing. I want this service to be available in Canada as well as the United States. I want to pay a flat subscription fee, and I'm prepared to live with brief commercial breaks on top of that. I want to be able to cancel my cable TV subscription, because I never watch live TV anyway, and to use my PC or on my girlfriend's Xbox to watch shows. I will pay good money for this service ($50 or more a month doesn't sound unreasonable), and I will use it every day.

Why is nobody willing to take my money and provide this service in exchange? My demands aren't outlandish. All I'm asking for, really, is an on-demand alternative to live TV that doesn't suck. Save for sports, news, and American Idol, I think we can all agree that live television is a relic of the last century. It's high time to give 21st-century television a 21st-century platform on which to flourish, but I fear that won't happen until a dashing, Steve Jobs-esque executive once again strong-arms content providers into doing what's best for their customers. I hope someone rises to the challenge, because every day, entirely too many good TV shows are pirated by people simply following the path of least resistance. And that's just sad.

Intervention: Battlefield 3's single player campaign
by Cyril Kowaliski — 11:09 AM on November 4, 2011

Hi Battlefield 3. How're you doing? Please have a seat. We're here today because we care about you. We're your friends, your players; your fans, and your customers. With a heavy heart, we've—

...can you put down the gas duster can for a minute? Please, just listen, okay?

We've arranged this intervention because we want you to seek the help that you need. We want your children, and your children's children, not to end up in the bargain bin within weeks of release, their DVD jackets adorned with "50% OFF!" stickers. Most of us have enjoyed your multiplayer mode, and we think you've done a good job there. It's really just your single-player campaign we'd like to talk about.

Battlefield 3, your SP campaign has hurt me in the following ways.

I was hoping for a deeper, more meaningful, and more enjoyable experience than what I've gotten from the Call of Duty series lately. Your preview videos looked wonderfully tantalizing, and I figured that, after Modern Warfare 2 jumped the shark with that whole Red Dawn scenario, everyone else would get the message: over-the-top, on-rails shooters have been done to death, and it's time to move on. I know that game sold literally jillions of copies and allowed Activision to install gold toilets around its offices, but I didn't expect the Battlefield series to sell out in the same fashion.

Imagine my disappointment when I realized that, while you looked like the prettiest girl at the dance, your gameplay was essentially Modern Warfare 2 on steroids—or canned air. From the outset, you coaxed me along set paths filled with dreary cut scenes, endlessly respawning enemies, and unforgiving quick-time events (you know, those things where the game randomly gives you half a second to click a mouse button... or else).

All attempts at initiative or creative thinking were mercilessly quashed. I had to progress at exactly the pace you determined. Any slower, and infinite spawns of enemies would pin me down; any faster, and quelling those infinite spawns would cost my character his life. Sometimes, even when progressing at the designated pace and crouching behind the designated cover, I would be gunned down by an unseen enemy, a hail of bullets turning my vision into a blurry, splotchy mess that extinguished any hope of a timely counterattack. Time and time again, I would progress through your levels by trial and error, obediently awaiting the next instruction. "Run over there," you'd say. "Pick up that machine gun!" "You have three picoseconds to hit E so that your character doesn't die!" More times than I can count, I had to move out of the way so my team could follow its scripted path to the next objective. I wasn't leading or following; I was trying to stay out of their path and not get myself killed.

Battlefield 3, I know that being a real-world soldier is largely about following orders, sticking with your team, and trying really hard not to get shot. But I don't want to be a real-world soldier. That's why I'm sitting here at my computer and not thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, cold and tired, mourning lost friends and hoping my squad doesn't run into an IED. I don't have the guts for any of that. I just want to play video games and pretend I can take on a whole platoon of bad guys all on my own.

The fact of the matter is, people play video games to get a sense of achievement. It feels great to complete an objective against all odds, using your wits and skill to outmatch the enemy. That's why open-world games are so much fun. They create the illusion that you're left to your own devices, making it all the more satisfying when you clear a dungeon or advance the storyline. Trial and error still comes into play, but succeeding after repeated failures is all the more enjoyable, because you had an active part in the decision-making process.

What you've done, Battlefield 3, is rob me of that enjoyment. At no point in the campaign did I feel like I, the player, had any part in what was happening. How could I? The scripting system so transparently pushed me from point to point, barking orders at me and punishing me with instantaneous death whenever I failed to respond in time. My problem-solving skills were left untapped. Instead of determining the best tactic for a firefight or coming up with the best way to infiltrate a building, I simply tried to make sense of the game's instructions. Whenever I died, I questioned not my strategy, but whether I had interpreted those instructions correctly.

Playing your single-player campaign, Battlefield 3, felt like watching a very expensive action movie where the main character kept forgetting his lines, walking off-shot, or misinterpreting the script. The director kept yelling "cut," and I was forced to sit through each ruined take. Somehow, I felt guilty about those takes getting ruined. Also, the movie cost $60, and I needed a pretty fast graphics card to watch it.

Scripting shooters to that extreme extent is just a recipe for disaster. At one point near the end of the game, I walked into a mansion and the game took the reins. I watched as my character walked into a Russian special forces guy, who started a long expositional monologue. I took my hands off the keyboard and mouse to pay closer attention. Eventually, another character entered the scene and asked the Russian guy to put his hands up. The Russian guy turned to my character and said, "You don't shoot him, millions will die." I waited for the cut scene to continue, but my character suddenly and inexplicably died. After starting over, I realized that I was supposed to take control and shoot the other character right there and then. I had to click the left mouse button at just the right time within a one- or two-second window. Any other course of action was punished by instant death—and being forced to re-watch the whole cut scene. Unlike previous quick-time events in the game, this one provided no on-screen instructions, either.

That wasn't the only instance where I was forced to go through the motions and punished for not following the script—far from it—but it was definitely the most puzzling and frustrating.

Battlefield 3, I wouldn't have complained if you had supplemented your multiplayer mode with a cheesy in-engine action movie. I probably would have watched it. But you had to get all Call of Duty on me and awkwardly pad a cheesy in-engine action movie with heavily scripted gameplay portions that weren't any fun to play. I can tell it all took a lot of effort, and I feel so, so sorry that you persevered in that path without realizing the error of your ways.

I've booked you a ticket to rehab clinic in California, but I don't think you'll take it. However, perhaps your example can serve as a warning for future Battlefield titles. Perhaps your offspring will realize that not having a single-player campaign is okay, especially if it means more development resources allocated to multiplayer. They may even figure out that single-player campaigns can be enthralling without being scripted to the gills. Rage, Borderlands, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are great examples, and there are many others. More importantly, I hope they understand that, if a certain game franchise with an awful single-player mode sells zillions of copies, aping that franchise's worst traits isn't the way to make a good game...

...and making good games is still what it's all about, right? Right?

Four hours with the Battlefield 3 beta
by Cyril Kowaliski — 9:50 AM on September 30, 2011

I managed to sneak into the Battlefield 3 beta on Wednesday afternoon. Right off the bat, I wasn't impressed.

First, I had to download and install Origin—great, another piece of software to complicate things when I could be using Steam. Origin refused to sign me in, citing a server error. Getting in and downloading the beta took a few tries. Attempting to launch the beta, I ran into another unexpected snag. Turns out clicking "play" opens your browser window and loads up Battlefield 3's web interface... which requires a browser plug-in to launch the actual game. One more unnecessary installation later, I was finally able to click the big, orange "quick match" button and get to playing.

Well, almost. The game inexplicably started in a window. When I went into the options to switch it to full-screen mode, it crashed. I guess they don't call it a beta for nothing.

My frustration only increased when I, at long last, got into the game. Seconds after spawning in a neatly rendered city park, I was immediately gunned down by an unseen enemy. The same happened shortly after I respawned. Then again after that. I tried to duck and move out of the area, only to meet my demise once again. Things weren't off to a great start, and traumatic flashbacks of my unsuccessful attempts to enjoy Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer were flooding through my mind. Not again!

That was on Wednesday afternoon.

Yesterday evening, I had to summon all my strength to pry myself out of the game and start writing this blog post. As I write these very lines, I'm fighting the urge to declare writer's block and play another match to loosen the words out. The rattle of my newly unlocked M249 light machine gun is fresh in my ears.

So, what happened between then and now?

I guess you could call it a rapid case of habituation—climbing a relatively short and very gentle learning curve, if you will. Point is, Battlefield 3 grew on me fast. Yes, I got taken down at the beginning for spawning too close to the action, but I soon realized that the antidote was simply to spawn as part of a squad, stay under the line of fire, and choose the right weapon for the job. In the first part of Operation Métro, the beta's public multiplayer map, that weapon turned out to be the sniper rifle. (I didn't have the stomach nor the experience to go rushing to the front lines with an assault weapon; that came a few hours later.)

Soon, I was snaking my way within view of the action, lying prone close to cover as bullets whizzed and crackled above my head. With a little bit of care and patience, I would eventually find a nice spot in some bushes or behind some rocks. I'd get an enemy in my sights and pull the trigger. I'd watch him turn in my direction, sunlight reflected in his rifle's scope as he prepared to shoot back. I'd feel the adrenaline surge. I'd pull the trigger a second time, then a third, then a fourth. He'd fall down, and the game would proudly grant me a point bonus for a kill, laying down suppressing fire, and whatever else my victory accomplished.

Battlefield 3 is a team game at its core, and players are rewarded for helping the team. Killing an enemy will get you plenty of points, of course, but skirmishes lost to a more skilled adversary aren't always without value. You'll likely still get points for a kill assist, or even for spotting the enemy, which puts a red marker above his head so your teammates can track him down. That helps you climb up the scoreboard even if you're not channeling John Rambo and turning entire enemy squads into hamburger.

After your team takes out the first two objectives in Operation Métro's park area, you must proceed underground, into the subway tunnels. At that point, the game turns into an intense close-quarter slugfest—and if you're a member of the attacking team, it's time to switch weapons. My first runs through the tunnels were done with a shotgun, and I cracked a smile as I downed, with one shell each, members of the defending team trying to overrun our position. I was getting flashbacks again, but they were good ones—memories of victorious Counter-Strike: Source matches from long ago.

I eventually got sick of the shotgun, and that's where the icing on the delicious cake that is Battlefield 3 came in. As you accumulate points, the game rewards you with ribbons, promotions, and fresh items and weapons. The weapons can all be modified and augmented with different kinds of scopes, extended magazines, different ammo, etc. You can also unlock whole new weapons, like the M249 machine gun and Glock 17C handgun. Then there are specializations, which let you, say, carry more ammo, sprint faster, or withstand more damage from nearby explosions. I haven't ascended all the way up the rank ladder yet, but I know there are more goodies in store for me still. For example, some of my foes occasionally score easy kills by temporarily blinding me with a flashlight, and I don't have one of those yet.

You might think the reward system makes the game unfair and frustrating, since more skilled and experienced players have more gadgets. But believe it or not, it seems to work the other way around. You see someone with a cool add-on, or you pick up a discarded gun you've never seen before, and you think, "Man, I want that in my loadout." In my experience, the reward system only makes Battlefield 3 more addictive.

And it's not the only thing. There's also something strangely gratifying about the way the game levels up your character. And the end of a match, all of the points you've accumulated fill up a progress bar on the screen, and a little distorted jingle plays every time you earn a new distinction or item. It's like playing a slot machine where you never lose, and you quickly start to crave the gratification of that progress bar and those jingles. That's on top of the gratification that comes from taking out a whole bunch of bad guys all by yourself, of course.

Battlefield 3 also saves web-based "battle reports" after each match... so if you did particularly well in a given game, you can save the page and use it to gloat. I'll freely admit to having flaunted a battle report on IRC just to show off my 17:3 kills-to-deaths ratio and "highest awarded" status, and I'm guessing plenty of other players are guilty of a similar crime.

In the end, the Battlefield 3 beta has proven be shockingly addictive and surprisingly well balanced. It's already eaten up four hours of my life, and it threatens to consume many more. I'm not sure how long this infatuation will last or whether the full game will prove as exhilarating after a few weeks or months. Still, this is the first time I've truly had fun playing a Battlefield game online, and that's saying a lot. From what I can tell, this title takes the best parts of the Battlefield series, Counter-Strike, and Modern Warfare, and it smushes 'em all together into one gorgeous-looking package with amazing sound effects and a neat web interface to tie it all together.

Windows 8 and the marginalization of geeks
by Cyril Kowaliski — 10:23 AM on September 16, 2011

On Tuesday, Microsoft made the Windows 8 Developer Preview available publicly without demanding so much as a Windows Live login name and password in return. I know, I was surprised too. After a bit of poking around, I managed to get the DP up and running in a trial installation of VMware Workstation 8.0, and I've spent a good few hours tinkering with it.

Now, I think we can safely assume that the full release of Windows 8 is still a year or so away. That means what we're looking at here is very much a work in progress, and criticizing Windows 8 for specific bugs or omissions based on this early build would be unwise. Nevertheless, we're beginning to get a clear sense of where Microsoft is heading with Windows 8, and I think some general observations (and predictions) are in order.

I believe consumers are going to love Windows 8. I don't mean just any consumers, mind you. I'm talking about the kind of people who use technology on a day-to-day basis but aren't intimately familiar with it. To those people, Windows and Mac OS X must seem like strange, Byzantine concoctions, with layers upon layers of unexplored settings and features. Today's tech-aware citizens may be comfortable enough to browse the web, send e-mail, exchange instant messages, and write reports here and there, but they lack the assurance to venture too far beyond that familiar realm. As a result, they might endure annoying pop-ups from an unregistered anti-virus program or leave all of their files scattered across the desktop, not imbued with sufficient confidence to explore the file system and harness the file-and-folder metaphor.

People with that level of technical expertise unarguably make up the majority, and I think their problem lies not with education, but with the excessive complexity of modern operating systems. With Windows 8's Metro interface, Microsoft is tackling that problem head-on. The goal seems to be to streamline the everyday PC experience as much as possible: present the user with a friendly start screen full of application tiles, an app store where he or she can fetch more software, and a solid web browser. Make everything modal, track down and viciously destroy any traces of user-interface clutter, and simplify access to advanced functionality.

Put yourself in the shoes of a non-expert user, for example, and imagine your computer is on the fritz. Things aren't working right, say, and software keeps crashing. What are you gonna do about it? You could open the Control Panel, click on System and Security, then look around the mess of items for the words "Backup and Restore," click on those, then click the unexplainably small link at the bottom that says, "Recover system settings or your computer." You might then end up with something like the screenshot below... and, in all likelihood, System Restore won't be of any great help.

But let's not kid ourselves; you're not actually going to do any of that. Instead, you're probably going to call your friend, coworker, nephew, or kid brother who's good with computers. Failing that, you're going to overpay someone underqualified and hope they manage to fix it without wiping all your family photos.

In Windows 8, your odds of resolving the situation by yourself are much better. Just open up the Control Panel, click "General" in the left pane (the description underneath helpfully includes the words "refresh your PC"), then scroll down the right pane. It's all right there, literally two clicks and one flick away: "Refresh your PC without affecting your files" and "Reset your PC and start over."

We're still talking about the Windows 8 Developer Preview, so those options might change slightly or move to a different place by the time the operating system is finalized next year. Still, this is a fine example of what Windows 8 is all about: turning the PC into an appliance, something with a considerably softer learning curve than today's systems—something you'll need to waste far fewer Sunday afternoons to become familiar with.

There's a reason Metro looks so much like Windows Phone 7, by the way. I reckon it took smart phones to make everyone realize that PCs don't have to blind users with science so much. When was the last time someone called you for help installing an app or sending a text message on their iPhone?

But I digress.

I also think people with above-average technical expertise, especially enthusiasts, are going to loathe Windows 8. I think those people will cling to Windows 7 for their dear lives as long as humanly possible. The new Metro interface, you see, is a double-edged sword.

Think of it like Russian nesting dolls—or peeling an onion, a more appropriately unpleasant metaphor. Doing anything remotely complex in the Windows 8 Developer Preview involves a strange waltz between the classic desktop and Metro. All of the functionality power users need, like file management, advanced configuration options, and access to legacy applications, is constrained to the desktop. However, Metro takes over as the application launcher and treats the classic desktop just like another tile or app. That leaves you dancing between layers of very different and conflicting user-interface conventions all vying for attention: Metro, Aero, and all the Windows 95/98-style interface items Microsoft still hasn't cleaned up. Add an Office-style Ribbon to every Explorer window, and the picture is complete. You've got what might be the most confusing hodge-podge of UI conventions this side of the Milky Way.

Some of those inconsistencies will no doubt be smoothed over by the time Windows 8 is released. However, the underlying issue will remain: Metro is designed for simplicity, so complex options and tasks will need to be stashed away in the Desktop. Yet Windows 8 will put Metro front and center, so power users may not be able to shove it into a corner and forget about it. They may be forced to maneuver around its big, chunky, friendly UI whether they like it or not. The need to maintain backward compatibility, which Microsoft usually fulfills with religious fervor, may prolong this unhappy marriage until the desktop has faded into irrelevance—something that could take decades or possibly even never happen. Microsoft was never able to get rid of the command line, and the traditional desktop metaphor provides too many benefits to power users to be fully replaceable by something like Metro. Attempting to merge the two would make Metro more complex, which would defeat the point entirely.

Microsoft isn't the only one facing this problem. I already complained about the strange mix of UI conventions in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and Apple still hasn't given an indication of how it plans to deal with that. Will iOS and OS X merge into a single operating system, and if so, will that OS also turn classic and modal interfaces into unhappy roommates? Will Apple attempt to produce a hybrid of the two? Or will the two operating systems remain separate, borrowing from each other on occasion?

Such thorny questions are inevitable as the personal computer continues its transformation from a niche product once reserved for an educated elite into a commodity appliance operable by everyone. We now have computers in our offices, in our cars, on our couches, and in our pockets. We might not call them all computers, but we're fooling ourselves if we don't. Consequently, the target market for our most powerful personal computers is shifting from the elite to the common man, and user-interface designers are responding accordingly. That's great news for most folks, but I think it's eventually going to leave us geeks longing for the good old days—back when computers were designed by geeks for geeks.

That feeling of longing will be rendered all the more bitter by the fact that, as our computers become simpler and simpler to use, us geeks will lose two things we prize ever so dearly: control and routine. We're the smart ones—or so we tell ourselves. We're the ones who should be deciding how our computers are configured, how our data is backed up, and which applications should run in the background. Yet in a few years, we may find ourselves no longer needing to do any of those things... and with a lot of free time all of a sudden.

Perhaps I'll take up fishing. What about you?

Just one more mission: impressions of the new Deus Ex
by Cyril Kowaliski — 10:03 AM on August 26, 2011

It's now 9PM. My plan was to start writing this post three hours ago, but that didn't pan out. Instead of writing, I found myself running around in circa-2027 Hengsha Island, China, splitting up my time between sleuthing, sneaking, and breaking bones. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is just one of those games—the kind that has you persuading yourself to stop after just one more mission... before playing for another three hours and wondering where your evening went.

I was a big fan of the original Deus Ex. I remember playing it on my 1GHz Athlon hot rod 11 years ago and enjoying every moment. Oh, sure, the gameplay mechanics borrowed heavily from System Shock 2, but there was a whole other dimension to it. Character interactions, side quests, and the intricate storyline all made the game feel broad and dynamic, like you were a real actor unraveling a complex web of conspiracies. (The original release seemed to require some sort of supercomputer to run, though. I recall some pretty bad stuttering on my then-speedy machine.)

Ion Storm Austin managed to squeeze out a sequel in 2003 before getting shut down, but I never bothered with it. Reports of that title being dumbed down and scaled down for the Xbox offended my sensibilities as a proud, 18-year-old PC gamer, and I decided to occupy my time with other games. I slowly forgot about the Deus Ex series altogether—until, that is, news of Human Revolution started trickling out.

Shockingly for a game released over a decade later by another studio, Human Revolution has a lot in common with its granddaddy. Deus Ex wasn't afraid to slather elaborate RPG elements onto an FPS experience, and happily, neither is the new sequel. Both games also have the kind of elaborate storytelling that leaves you scratching your head at times. But for me, the most shocking part is that both games seem equally at home on the PC.

No, really. Human Revolution shows almost no signs of consolitis. Fonts and user-interface elements are appropriately sized for a high-resolution display, and the graphics fit within a 16:10 form factor without letterboxing. Players are asked to mouse around inventory, character configuration, and log screens, where they'll find themselves agonizing over how to spend upgrade points and, just like in the original, reshuffling inventory items to save space for new discoveries. To get a handle on the story, one is expected to read pages upon pages of intercepted e-mails, personal diaries, and e-book excerpts. Players can choose to master hacking, which involves figuring out the best path through a set of nodes and rapidly clicking your way through as a timer counts down, attempting to slow down a trace as you go along. Frankly, I can't imagine slogging through so much writing on a TV screen or having to use a controller to hack security consoles. Even dialogue requires careful reading if you plan to use your "social enhancer" augmentation to get things your way.

You'll find no trace of forgiving, console-friendly shooter gameplay, either. A few shots from even a weak future rent-a-cop will kill you dead, so you'll need to be careful about whom to engage and when. Luckily, Human Revolution offers elaborate sneaking mechanics reminiscent of the Splinter Cell series. There's a decent cover system, plus augmentations that let you peer through walls and tell you where enemies last saw you, so you can better flank them. The game gives you an XP bonus for sneaking through areas silently, stunning or tranquilizing enemies before they have a chance to alert their pals. Players with a more gung-ho attitude can load up on guns, grenades, and other deadly equipment if they so choose. One can even reprogram enemy turrets and robots to turn against their own team. There's something strangely cathartic about flipping a turret's allegiance switch from a remote security station, then hearing the faint sound of gunfire and seeing XP bonuses for downed enemies rapidly accumulate on the screen.

Somehow, Eidos Montreal has managed to retain much of the complexity of the first game, creating a true thinking man's shooter-RPG hybrid. In today's world of overly dumbed-down, cinematic RPG-lites and shooters on rails, that's refreshing, to say the least.

And how could I forget the game's open-world component? This is no Oblivion or Fallout 3, but the missions are spread out across large city hubs rife with explorable nooks and crannies, characters eager to dish out side quests, shops, and disaffected bums. The game starts out in Detroit and soon takes you to a massive, two-story Chinese city (you'll see what I mean). I haven't had time to play more, but I hear there will be further traveling.

Even within individual missions, the game usually gives you multiple routes to each objective. It's up to you to determine which path will work best for your chosen play style. Folks big on stealth will want to scout rooftops and air vents, which can sometimes provide shortcuts straight through heavily guarded areas. Those shortcuts aren't always easy to find, though. Rambo types can punch through walls and pelt bad guys with explosives, while more middle-of-the-road players may find themselves stalking guards on their patrols and knocking them out when they venture out on their own. Of course, you're free to adjust your play style if you get bored—there's nothing wrong with a little shooting spree after a few stealth missions.

I'm also quite impressed with the game's visuals, but not for the usual reasons. Eidos Montreal has come up with a very unique graphical style, outfitting cyberpunk characters with neo-renaissance garb and letting them loose in decors that mix ultra-modern architecture and late-19th-century decor. An orange hue permeates most locales, and true to Deus Ex tradition, all of your missions take place at night. Blade Runner fans will be overjoyed. Again, it's nice to see a game doing something different once in a while. I love titles like the Mass Effect series, but squeaky-clean futuristic environments and skin-tight combat suits are getting a little played out. Why can't the future have weird, retro fashion and lots of orange lights everywhere? In Human Revolution, it does.

I'll withhold my final verdict until I've completed the game. In essence, though, it seems Human Revolution beautifully captures the gameplay sophistication and atmosphere of the original game while making everything bigger, bolder, and more visually striking. Off the top of my head, I can only muster two complaints at this sequel. First, level load times are inconvenient at best and frustrating at worst—I'm talking a good 20-30 seconds per load on average, even after the latest patch. It doesn't help that load screens appear every time you enter a new district, walk into a large building, or have to load a saved game because you got caught sneaking around. Also, while the voice acting works well (in spite of the main character's overly gravely voice), wooden facial animations make the game's many dialogue scenes a little dull to watch. All too often, you're forced to stare at character models on the wrong side of the uncanny valley as their lips almost, but not quite, keep up with the recorded lines. If this took more after L.A. Noire, I'd be happier... but I suppose one game can't do everything.

After sinking a good 10 hours or so into Human Revolution, though, I think I can tentatively say that this is one of 2011's best PC games. I'd even be tempted to rank it up there with Portal 2. Few titles are that engrossing, and even fewer make the PC gamer crowd feel like first-class citizens.