What to Play (And Not to Play) in January

For the video game industry, the holiday season is a lot like New Year’s Eve. There is much hype, planning and anticipation, leading to a short period of self-indulgence and questionable behavior (like staying up until sunrise and then skipping work to keep playing). Of course, with the new year comes a hangover, and a month of gaming that’s historically known for being unremarkable.

But, if you’re looking to brave the winter storm and get something new from GameStop, here’s a guide for what to get and what to avoid:

Play: Skate 2 (PS3, Xbox 360, January 21)

While skateboarding is rarely easy the first time around, most games make the sport seem more natural than breathing. The Skate series changed things up with a control scheme that used both thumbsticks for movement — one to steer, execute a variety of tricks. The result is a game that feels more like the real thing than any of Tony Hawk’s virtual exploits. The sequel should be even better.

Don’t Play: Hotel For Dogs (PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, January 6)

They say a film is guaranteed to stink when critics aren’t allowed to see it before release. Similar logic applies to video games, and with no previews, reviews or general news on Hotel For Dogs with less than a week before it reaches stores, we’re forecasting this one as a cheap movie cash-in.

Play: Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop (Wii, January 20)

This Wii port of the now-classic Xbox 360 title puts you in a zombie-infested mall for 72 in-game hours, with only the stores’ merchandise to defend yourself. Weapons range from dishware to garden hoes to jerry-rigged explosives. The Wii can’t process as many zombies at once as the original game, but the visceral thrill of wielding the Wii Remote should make up for that.

Don’t Play: Neighborhood Games (Wii, January 5)

The Wii’s popularity, particularly with the casual audience, has opened the door for unprecedented quantities of shovelware. This one’s company line has all the clues: Comparisons to Wii Sports, a partial list of minigames, and the constant but empty promise of entertainment. “No need to worry about the rain ending your fun!” it says, probably because this game will end it first.

Play: Retro Game Challenge (DS, January 6)

Initially, I considered putting this in the “Don’t Play” category, but after reading a bit more, this one actually sounds interesting. What seemed like a lame series of old game clones is actually a fun send-up, broken into short, ADD-friendly chunks. All of this is tied together by the plot, which says you must compete in these challenges in order to escape the clutches of an evil boss. Plus, it’s got that Japanese import aesthetic to it.

Don’t Play: Deal or No Deal (Wii, January 13)

We’re all agreed that the fun of Deal or No Deal, the game show, is in watching people get greedy and squandering money that they earned by sheer luck, right? So what’s the fun of throwing away your own fake money in a completely safe, virtual environment? No amount of sheen on the head of Howie Mandel’s digital likeness can save this one.

Play: The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (PC, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, January 13)

While my nerd cred is forever damaged by the fact I don’t really care for Lord of the Rings, this title seems to be gaining some buzz in the new year. Modeled largely after the strategy game Star Wars: Battlefront, Conquest puts you in control of large-scale Middle Earth battles. A demo is available for download now for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, if you can’t wait until January 13 for your precious.

Don’t Play: M&M’s Adventure (PS2, January 5)

We thought advergames — or at least the ones you have to pay for — went out with Cool Spot in the early 90s. Technically, this game was released for the Wii in late December, but none of the major gaming sites noticed, so I’m still entitled to make fun of it before the Playstation 2 release this month. Broken English in the press release, a decidedly late Christmas Eve plot setting and the sloppy label of “classic 3D action adventure platform game” suggests that your money is better spent on the candy itself.

Semiconductor Sales Decline Slightly in 2008

The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group comprised of computer, device, and chip makers, is reporting that chip sales dipped to $20.8 billion in 2008 from $23.1 billion in 2007, New York Times is reporting. It’s yet another sign of the U.S. economy’s fragile condition. But the “glass is half full” part of my brain can’t ignore the fact that sales are still brisk.

We already knew, of course, that businesses and consumers are spending less on IT. It makes perfect sense that non essential capital expenditures would lower: you can’t eat silicon. Innovations in technology can give businesses an edge, but when it comes time to tighten the belt, it is better to delay buying new workstations or BlackBerries for interns than it is to cut advertising or hand out pink slips. Consumers can afford to wait another year for the latest and greatest gadget.

There could be other contributing factors. Aside from the economy, the industry is on the downward edge of a sawtooth. I’m not going to buy a new computer today unless I have to, because OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 aren’t out yet. Many consumers are informed enough to know that they may want to hold off purchases for those releases.

While it is widely accepted that 2009 will be a difficult year economically, that does not mean that every sector of the economy will be affected equally. The IT industry is not the automobile industry–let’s not panic because one report tells us what we already anticipated.

Digital Music Continues to Take Off

One has to wonder if RIAA’s decision to stop suing file sharers may have anything to do with the fact that digital music is quickly becoming the format of choice among consumers. A survey released by Nielsen indicates that digital music continues to become a larger portion of the overall music pie.

A record number of both digital albums and tracks were sold during 2008, sporting increases of 32 and 27 percent respectively. 1.07 billion digital tracks were purchased, while 65.8 million albums were downloaded.

Overall, albums seem to be falling out of favor, with a 8.5 percent decrease in sales to 535.4 million units. Interesting factoid? Vinyl is back in style apparently: 1.8 milion LPs were sold during the year, nearly double that from last year.

In the digital realm, Leona Lews “Bleeding Love” took top honors in the singles category, followed by Flo Rida’s “Low” and Rhianna’s “Disturbia.” In albums, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was the best selling album, followed by Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through The Static and the soundtrack to the 2007 film Juno.

Universal Music Group continues to be the largest purveyor of digital albums and tracks, garnering market shares of 27.8 and 31.8 percent respectively.

The Newsstand That Spawned Microsoft is Set to Close

Out of Town News, the iconic newsstand smack in the middle of Cambridge, Mass.’s Harvard Square, is within a month of shutting down after 54 years in business. It’s one of the most famous meeting points in the Boston area, since it’s so impossible to miss. But as the Boston Globe reports today, it also played a supporting role in one of the most famous moments in computer history.

It was at Out of Town that a young computer nerd named Paul Allen bought the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics–the one with a cover story on a built-it-yourself personal computer called the Altair 8800. Allen got really, really excited–and showed the issue to his buddy, Harvard student Bill Gates. Gates got equally excited. The two decided to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair–and that programming language was the first product of the company called, originally, Micro-Soft.

Allen and Gates were deeply into computers, and had already formed one software company together, Traf-O-Data. You gotta assume they would have heard about the Altair one way or another, and it’s therefore silly to posit that if Allen hadn’t stopped to to browse at Out of Town, there would have been no Microsoft, no DOS, no Windows, no Microsoft Mouse, no Microsoft Office, no Microsoft Bob, no MSN, no Clippy, no MSNBC, no Xbox, no Zune, no Gates Foundation, and not a single Blue Screen of Death. But it is Twilight Zone-ish fun to toy with that notion.

Within about five years of Allen’s purchase, incidentally, Out of Town played a major role in my own obsession with PCs–for many years, it had the best selection of computer magazines in the Boston area, and I bought countless copies of magazines such as Creative Computing, BYTE, and Popular Computing there. Given its proximity to Harvard, MIT, and other universities, Over the years, I’m sure many thousands of other people who were fixated on computers got most of their information on the subject from Out of Town. It may be a quaint relic of the pre-Web age, but the memories will live forever.

Cambridge city officials are trying to find another company to operate a newsstand in Out of Town’s hut-like building. (Which, incidentally, isn’t the one that Allen bought his magazine at–the newsstand moved a few yards into a new structure years later when the Harvard Square subway stop received a major makeover.) I wish them luck–for one thing, it’s going to be a tad disorienting if I ever visit a Harvard Square without Out of Town.

If it does close, I hope that Cambridge erects some sort of plaque in its honor, and that that plaque mentions Paul Allen’s purchase…

(Photo by Flickr user afagen)

JPG Magazine Goes Bye-Bye

JPG Magazine, the publication consisting entirely of photos submitted by its readers, is folding. The closure includes the print publication, its PDF version, and the Web site, and comes at a time when just about everybody involved in the creation of advertising-supported media properties is having a tough time of it. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, JPG’s founders were forced out in 2007, and the publication lost much of its energy thereafter.

At the peak of its buzz, JPG was sometimes held up as evidence that a magazine could get by without needless luxuries like paid contributors. I don’t think its death proves that the idea of user-generated publications is a crummy one, any more than the current trials and tribulations of media companies prove that the time of professional journalists is over. If JPG had a problem, it may have been that it was ultimately kind of redundant–thanks to Flickr, Facebook, and a zillion other places where you can share photos, the whole darn Web feels a little like an online magazine of user-created imagery.

Rest in peace, JPG–you were an interesting idea, and like many interesting ideas that die, your influence will likely be felt in more successful enterprises to come.

How Microsoft’s Clippy Got That Way

Think that Microsoft Office’s Clippy was a joke? Microsoft didn’t–Google Patents holds proof of the serious effort that the company poured into ever-unpopular animated “helpers” like Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and the Search Assistant. The whole idea remains baffling, but the drawings that Microsoft filed are weirdly fascinating. I’ve assembled a gallery of highlights.

View Secret Origins of Clippy slideshow

The Secret Origins of Clippy: Microsoft’s Bizarre Animated Character Patents

Of all the peculiar ideas that Microsoft has pursued over its almost 34 years in business, I can’t think of many that are more inexplicable than its long-standing interest in using animated characters to provide help to users of its software products–an aberration best known in the form of Clippy, the “Office Assistant” paperclip who was introduced in Office 97 and only departed the scene completely when the company released Office 2008 for the Mac a year ago. It’s hard to take Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP’s Search Assistant doggie seriously. But a dozen years’ worth of patents relating to the basic idea shows that Microsoft takes it very seriously indeed–and I’m convinced that someone, somewhere within the company is still working away at it. Herewith, some images from those patents (click on the filing dates to see the filings in their entirety at Google Patents).

Technologizer’s Top Ten Stories of December

Last month was a wonderful one for Technologizer from a traffic standpoint–we had more big hits than in any month to date. But in case you missed any (or all!) of ‘em, here are the top ten, in order of total page views to date:

1. Apple Patentmania: 31 Years of Big Ideas: I discovered that you could use Google Patents to look up old Apple patents, and found the drawings they contained fascinating. I thought other folks might, too. They did!

2. Patentmania: The Golden Age of Electronic Games: I couldn’t stop digging up old patent drawings, so I collected ones for Simon, the Atari 2600, Vectrex, and other old games into a gallery.

3. iFrauds: The Fakest iPhones Ever: I went to a lousy liquidation sale and wanted to kick myself until I saw that it was rife with weird imitation iPods.

4. The 13 Greatest Error Messages of All Time: A story from back in September that seems to be the closest thing Technologizer has to a timeless classic so far.

5. State of the Browser Betas: A Technologizer Cheat Sheet: A quick rundown on what’s up with the next versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.

6. Is Swoopo Nothing More Than a Well-Designed Gimmick?: Ed Oswald’s musings on an oddball auction site turned out to instigate an ongoing discussion that just keeps going and going.

7. The T-Grid: BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone 3gG: A quick spec comparison between two leading touch-screen phones.

8. The 13 Other Greatest Error Message of All Time: A sequel to top story #4, based on nominations from folks who read the first article.

9. The Best of Frenemies: A look at tech players who can’t live with or without each other.

10. Windows 7 First Impressions: Hey, This Looks Pretty Good!: My take on the first prerelease version of Windows 7 to escape from Redmond.

Next Week: Two Big Keynotes, Twice the Live Coverage

As usual, this year will kick off with two of the biggest tech shows of the year, Macworld Expo and CES, scheduled so tightly that they overlap. But for the first time, Macworld Expo’s keynoter will be Apple marketing head Phil Schiller and CES’s will be Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. If nothing else, it marks a major changing of the respective guards (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, respectively). And I’ll be at both speeches, covering them in real time. Save yourself all that running around between San Francisco and Vegas and join me–whatever the news is, I’ll let you know just as soon as I did.

Pages for the two live events are now live–and if you click on one (or both) of the promos below, you can even sign up to be reminded by e-mail before they start.

Hey, It’s 2009!

(It’s kind of obvious I’m obsessed with patent drawings, huh?)

Best wishes for 2009 from Technologizer–thanks for being part of our community. Hope you have a great year in all respects–both technology-related or otherwise.

Happy New Year Microsofties, Here’s Your Pink Slip?

Happy New Year Technologizer readers. Of course we have to start 2009 off right with some fresh layoff rumors from the world of tech, and this time it’s coming from Redmond.

Yes, Microsoft. The one who likes to point out it never lays people off (well at least officially). It’s no small pruning either: anywhere from 10 to 17 percent of the company’s workforce will be let go–or so the scuttlebutt says.

Pink slips are set to be handed out January 15 if you believe what’s being written, which would put it a week before the company announces its quarterly earnings.

The company is declining to comment on the reports, calling them “rumors and speculation.” Nobody seems to have any way to confirm it either, so I guess we’ll have to wait for folks to begin walking out of their offices with cardboard boxes in tow. If they indeed do.

We’ll probably find out sooner than that, however, as Microsoft is mandated by securities law to inform stockholders of actions that may affect its stock price within 24 hours.

Blogger Mini-Microsoft seems to think that layoffs may not be in the cards, however at the same time he seemed to suggest that the pullbacks might come in another way, such as reorganizations, phasing out of projects, and the like.

I guess we’ll see what happens, no?