When my first set of DDR pads got destroyed after nine months of abuse at the feet of college kids, I can't say I was terribly surprised - but it made me sad.

When I got Rock Band, and stories of flaky hardware were abound, I wasn't terribly surprised that the strum bar on my guitar got a little flaky. Not bad enough to send in, but causing the occasional miss.

I've had to retire two DSes (busted speakers and buttons, then a non-functioning touchscreen), a Mac Cube (optical drive motor), two Sidekicks (trackball both times), a lampshade iMac (optical drive malfunction), a G5 iMac (power supply), and there was that whole 360 thing.

Things break, I know.

Never did I think I'd be such a hardcore SingStar player that I'd break the blue microphone, but here we are. Color me surprised just this once.

View the full set: NYC LGBT Pride Day March 2008

Our poor cat has been through a lot in the last 48 hours.

Like all of these sorts of stories go, it was supposed to be a regular vet checkup. But after bringing him into the Astoria Veterinary Group, it appeared that his teeth and gums - something that had been pointed out as a potential problem in the past - were in bad shape. They recommended a "deep gum cleaning". Katie had to leave him behind at the vet, turning a day that was to be spent relaxing with the cat into a day of worry.

The call came around 2:30: he was fine, but the "deep gum cleaning" had turned into a "double tooth extraction". His trademark fang had apparently been loose and very exposed, as had the tooth directly below it. Both were removed, turning his usual expression - a little bit of exposed fang - into a lip curled sneer that would make Elvis proud.

Buttons returned home at 7PM last night, still drugged out of his skull from the procedure. This manifested itself in odd ways, particularly in his communication skills. Normally, he gets attention with a loud, cute "WOW!" - he doesn't meow. Last night it was more of a "Wowwwwwweeeerrrrrrooooooooooooowweee." He also walked around the apartment at least eight times as though he had no idea where he was - although he was very sure he still wanted to go under the kitchen sink.

We've had the catsujin for just over five years now (he's five and a half); this is the first time he's undergone a procedure of any sort. Being as attached as we are, Katie and I have both acknowledged an inability to deal with the idea of something happening to our cat. Taken as a test of how we would handle a small-scale event, it is easily argued both Katie and I failed brilliantly. We followed him around trying to cheer him up, lamenting to each other that we'd hope he'd be okay and back to his normal self soon.

To what may not be a surprise, he was back to normal not long after midnight, when he nuzzled up to Katie and watched an episode of Buffy on her computer. (They frequently share late-night TV watching. Apparently I'm not invited.) The morning brought the usual pillow-stealing, food-demanding, and lounging on the carpet that we've grown accustomed to with him. He greeted us home from work with proper-sounding "WOW!"s, and as I type he's nomnomnoming away at a catnip plush duck.

Thanks to everyone who sent well-wishes over Twitter and concerned IMs; we do tend to joke that he has a fan club but it's nice to realize it's not such a joke after all.

June has been a horrible month for movies. The month kicked off with the late May release of Sex And The City. My birthday was marred by the release of Kung Fu Panda and Zohan. The Love Guru and Get Smart came out this week.

But there's one name in Hollywood that overshadows Mike Myers. One that defeats Sarah Jessica Parker. One that even beats down Adam Sandler. His name is M. Night Shyamalan.

After landing upon Christopher Orr's amazing review/takedown of The Happening, I found myself reading excerpts to Katie over the phone during lunch.

"You know we now have to go see this," she said.

Last night, faced with nothing else in the theatre on the positive side of the equation, I gathered my spite and bought two tickets to what could very well have been the worst major motion picture in the last five years.

As the company credits began - not the actual movie credits, but the production company credits - the laughter began.

It went downhill from there.

I'm not writing this post just to tell you that the movie is bad. I instead aspire to fill in some of the gaps in the Orr's aforementioned "review". The movie is not as bad as he makes it out to be; it is far, far worse.

To begin: the concept is that an odorless, colorless airborne neurotoxin is being released by plants, trees, and other various greens. But without wind, said neurotoxin would go straight up. Yes, the wind is the device through which M. Night indicates RUN RUN RUN, but like all good serial killers, it has to be slower than the fleeing cast. Quandary: how do you make the wind fast enough to be scary, but not fast enough to catch someone? M. Night's answer: blow the wind perpendicular to the direction they're running, and have it creep slowly in the proper direction. Naturally, this looks ridiculous: the wind is advancing towards them at less than 5 MPH, never mind the neurotoxin being scattered the wrong direction.

Of course, what good is a neurotoxin if it doesn't always work? In two scenes, the leads are caught in said wind, and nothing happens. Something resembling an explanation only follows one of these happenings.

Speaking of which: rather than appearing on camera in his usual movie-ruining cameo, M. Night's script calls for Mark Wahlberg to use a form of the word "happening" more times than I could count.

But to my surprise - what a twist! - an investigation into IMDB reveals that M. Night spoke a single word of dialog over the phone - "Hello?". This was enough to get him 12th billing in the credits, above most every other background actor. He is akin to the girl on the other end of the phone in rap songs, only he also wrote the song and directed the video.

I could spend an entire article on the emotionless void that is Mark Wahlberg's acting, but I'd prefer to boil it down to a single anecdote. While seeking refuge in a house, Wahlberg spies a plant in the corner. He begins to talk to it in a "I am trying to peacefully negotiate with a hostile life form" voice. He soon realizes the plant is plastic, yet continues talking to it - comedy! At no point does he realize he's being out-acted by the plant.

At the one point in the movie he shows emotion - a mild freakout, where he shouts "I need a second okay? Why can't anybody give me a goddamn second?!" - he instructs himself to "be scientific, douchebag". I am not joking.

This isn't to let the other lead actors off the hook. John Leguizamo substitutes wearing glasses for acting, but in his defense he doesn't have much to work with. Zooey Deschanel fares no better, repeatedly forgetting that they're being attacked by something in the air.

But the real joy to be had in the background actors, who are made to say some ridiculous shit. An army private, upon being told about some bodies on the road, actually says "Cheese and crackers". A thirteen year old shouts "OPEN THE DOOR, BITCH!". An old woman shouts "Why are you eyeing my lemon drink?" And a botanist gets to be the first character to lob a hypothesis about the plants when he says:

"We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rap. They got a cool shape. They got protein. You like hot dogs, right? By the way, I think I know what's causing this."

The advertising for the film played heavily upon the idea that this would be the first R-rated film to come from M. Night, but as one might expect, the violence is tame in light of contemporaries. Most deaths are either off screen, cut away from at the moment of impact, or shot at a very wide angle. Perhaps I'm an outlier - I did just see Dario Argento's Mother Of Tears - but more graphic violence can be seen regularly on network television. It doesn't help that a lot of the violence is unconvincing - tiny bullet holes, painted on blood.

Other bafflements abound:

• People who were traveling on a train in one scene jump in cars to flee a different scene not five minutes later.
• Six cars arrive at a four-way intersection on a dirt road almost simultaneously; the next scene, showing everyone standing around outside, has about forty actors in it.
• Not twenty seconds after showing that the weather in Philidelphia is 86°, a cop remarks that it is "kinda chilly today" to a cabbie.
• Sequentially, three people affected by the neurotoxin - remember, the second phase is disorientation - calmly walk over to a handgun, pick it up, and shoot themselves in the head.
• John Leguizamo joins a car of five heading east to Princeton, NJ (abandoning his daughter in the process) after spending an hour on a train heading west. The reason? To find his wife, who was "buying a dollhouse" for their daughter.
• The scene above, with the plastic tree, ends up with characters complaining that everything in the house is fake - the food, the computer, the glasses of wine, etc. Fleeing the house, a sign can be seen off to the side reading "Model Home". Obviously this sign was placed for if you were too dense to pick that up on your own. But then in what I can only call a directorial flare, M. Night chooses to zoom in on that very sign. What. A. Twist.

The Happening is not merely a bad film, it is a horrible film. It is so horrible, it passes the rich "cheesy bad" vein that can be tapped for so many of my favorite films (Death Race 2000, Showgirls, The Apple, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter) and ends up in some sort of unfathomably-bad quarantine.

The Happening redefines what it means for a movie to be bad.

"The best part of WWDC is the post game analysis. And booze." - Michael Lopp

(I'm breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

In the post keynote fracas, I was asked by multiple friends if I was upgrading. My answer shocked each and every one - a fairly blasé "no". One friend shouted over IM that I would soon cave. (I'm taking the reaction as a sad commentary on how I am perceived.)

This isn't to say the iPhone 3G isn't a good model; it corrects most of the gripes leveled at the original iPhone. Data speeds are faster, batteries last longer, and it has a true GPS module. The headphone jack is flush, eliminating a market of headphone extenders. The cost of the handset is far cheaper. Hell, it even comes in an additional color. Certainly, if you're in the market for an iPhone, it's a great model to start with - just not to upgrade to.

A $200 mobile upgrade is not the most expensive thing in the world - we are talking about a handset that started at $499 - but it's not a drop in the bucket. That $200 gets you a double data rate, but along with that you're stuck with an additional $10 a month on your bill. This adds up quickly over the life of your new two year contract extension. The true GPS is nice, but I've found the fake GPS to be working fairly well. The extended battery life is not a feature point I can wave away, but collectively, that's the end of the feature list. All the benefits of the 2.0 software - the app store, app installation, push email support - will be on the first generation handsets as well.

Is all of that worth $200? For once, I can't say yes. Never mind the newly discovered activation hassles. Never mind what will undoubtedly be new hurdles towards jailbreaking and unlocking (for those into those sorts of things).

The simple conclusion: if you don't have an iPhone, it's a fantastic phone to start with. It's going to be the perfect time to jump in. But if you do have an iPhone, you may want to ponder whether the total cost is worth the fairly small bullet list of features.

"Not wanting to sound like an asshole, Phil, but I use Gmail IMAP and when I read a message on my iPod, it's read on Gmail too." - Yanik Magnan

(I'm breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

Apple has been running .mac as a service since 2000 (when it was known as iTools), and for the first six years, the service was happily functional. But the service has languished over the past two years, with service outages and a lack of compelling reasons to chalk up the $100 a year.

MobileMe is the .mac mulligan. It's been revamped, with a focus now on pushing data to devices rather than enriching your digital life.

From my own experience, .mac became less valuable not because of the downtime but because of strong alternatives - largely from Google. Gmail trounced .mac mail. Google Calendar edged out iCal. Google Talk has grown more useful that .Mac's piggybacking on AIM. Flickr creamed the iPhoto integration. You get the picture - free and/or cheap services continued to pop up and outclass .mac on nearly every level.

MobileMe certainly appears to have a compelling interface, but the proof is in the service. Apple has to justify the expense of MobileMe over robust free products, and that's no small feat, even for Apple. And nothing I read about the demo made it sound $100-compelling.

Apple has already posted a few resources for curious .mac users:

• How to prepare for MobileMe
• What will happen to my email address?
• .Mac to MobileMe transition FAQ

The FAQ reveals the features that are getting cut: Web access to bookmarks (not the end of the world), iCards (one of the very original iTools features, which I strangely loved), .Mac slides (meh), and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync (which should've been dropped a year ago).

It also strikes me as terribly weird to announce this, a very consumer-oriented service, at the Developer's Conference. Perhaps there will be some sessions about hooking into it via an API - joy of joys. But there's a larger elephant in the room.

While I'm sure there's some consumers who have bought in that they absolutely must have push email so they can get funny forwards from Aunt Millie instantly, where an "Exchange for the rest of us" is really needed is in the (very unsexy) enterprise. Exchange is costly and cumbersome, and Microsoft is raking money in hand-over-fist in CAL fees.

Were Apple playing it smart, they'd be baking the same core technologies - push email, calendar, and address book - behind MobileMe into 10.6 Server. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely convinced Apple is playing it smart here.

For more, Merlin Mann (like clockwork) has some good thoughts on MobileMe.

Apple did, in their usual pretzel of logic way, address the big issue regarding application development: apps that need to function in the background.

In many ways, the proposal (a single connection to Apple's server handles push notification from servers) does have many benefits, and I can practically recite them off of Scott Forstall's slides. It will lead to better system performance, help save on battery life, and certainly streamline the networking.

But rewind back to the SDK announcement on March 6th. Remember this slide?

Not three months ago, Apple was touting how superior their Exchange support was to the Blackberry because you didn't have to go through a server owned by a vendor to gain functionality.

The other shoe certainly seems to have dropped here. Apple is offering to be the intermediary for every app that needs backgrounding, much like RIM is for everyone who wants Blackberry email. With the number of issues RIM has had with their service over the last year, Apple is going to be under high scrutiny if they have similar outages.

Don't get me wrong; this isn't nearly as crippling as RIM's reliance on their cloud servers. I'd rather lose my backgrounding for, say, an IM client than my email. But there are implications for developers, and I don't even want to think about what this means for enterprises writing apps. I can only hope Apple makes their retention policy very clear.

"Loopt is a location-based social network for douchebags who wear two ill-fitting polo shirts at the same time." - John Gruber

(I'm breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

More than any other segment of the keynote, the demonstrations of the applications excited me the most.

• Sega, Super Monkey Ball - One of the sources I was following during the event said the graphics were "as good as the DS". To me, it looks a lot better than many of the games on the DS. The price point is lower than most of the Super Monkey Ball games, but this one isn't really grabbing me, probably because I've played SMB so many times over the years. (Also: if you're giggling about the name, you probably still think "Wii" is hilarious.)
• eBay, Auctions - Auctions isn't much more than a native front end into eBay's API, but the experience is so well done, I can only hope that other companies can follow eBay's lead in developing
• Loopt - I fully expect there to be lots of location-aware social networks forming around the iPhone, but I expect Loopt to get a big boost for being featured in the keynote. Hey Dodgeball? You're on notice.
• Six Apart, Typepad - the TypePad client looks like a simple, clean blogging client. But I'm not a TypePad user; I use MovableType (and Tumblr). I asked Anil Dash if there was any reason the app won't work with their other products, and I was greeted with a no comment.
• Associated Press, Mobile News Network - it's truly a thing of beauty to watch the Associated Press innovate within the news space. The citizen journalism things are a thing of beauty. NowPublic? You're on notice.
• Pangea - I have no great love for Brian Greenstone, although I admire his tenacity for sticking in the Mac software industry for so long. Enigmo looks promising, but Cro-Mag Rally was generally regarded as a poor cart game when it was originally released. Still, to hear that porting apps from OS X was largely painless is good news.
• Cow Music, Band - very interesting music making app, and I look forward to seeing where the iPhone drives music creation tools.
• MLB.com, At Bat - I'm not much for baseball, but kudos to MLB for so quickly integrating nearly real-time video into their box scores. This is a killer app for many of the guys in my office.
• Modality - when Scott said the medical community has been flocking to the iPhone, they aren't kidding. Modality is not an obscure app - I've been told we use it in our curriculum at the medical college. The iPhone is going to be a great platform for building rich educational apps for all curriculums.
• MIMvista - again, seeing these apps make me smile because I know there's lots of latent interest in the medical community for clinical applications.
• Digital Legends Entertainment, Kroll - the animation style reminds me a bit of Dragon's Lair, although it looks to have slightly more gameplay. I guess we'll see how it ends up in September.

"Man, I should have kept my 'Mac OS X 10.6 ignored' square." - John Siracusa

(I'm breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

For the sake of not wanting to vomit every time I type it, I'm going to refer to Snow Leopard merely as "10.6".

A mere blip at the start of the Keynote (when Steve says "This morning I'm going to talk about the iPhone", he means it), OS X 10.6 would be talked about only at the OS X State Of The Union. To the chagrin of those who care less about the iPhone, the OSXSOTU is always the first session covered by the NDA that surrounds WWDC.

Luckily, some relief came in the form of a since-deleted press release from Apple. Also, in the time it's taken me to write this, the official Snow Leopard homepage appeared.

To dissect what we know:

• A technology code-named "Grand Central" will enable developers to more easily leverage multi-core processors. It's hard to consider this a bad thing, although I haven't seen a lot of multithreading issues in modern applications (from my very casual viewpoint).
• A technology called "Open Computing Language" (OpenCL) allows developers to tap into the GPU for general processing. It has been "proposed as an open standard", which is interesting as I can find no information to this effect (and OpenCL was a name formerly used by a Linux cryptography package).
• The theoretical limit on system RAM will be 16TB. So when those 2TB RAM chips come along, OS X will be so ready.
• Quicktime X will come bounding along, seemingly destroying hopes for Quicktime 8 or 9 in the meantime. Hopefully "support for modern audio and video formats" indicates that Apple will embrace some of codecs that have been killing Quicktime for what feels like ages.
• Safari will get the recently announced SquirrelFish - but it's not like you can't run that and get performance upgrades right this second.
• Exchange support will finally be rolled into Mail, Address Book, and iCal, which is great if you're in the sort of environment using Exchange. Everyone else may not care so much - but we'll come back to this.
• "Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos." Consider this confirmation that 10.6 will not run on PowerPC. Nothing else is likely to shed that much weight from the OS. I don't expect Rosetta to die any time soon, much like Classic (technically) will live until 2009.

Lastly, and most smugly satisfying for me, 10.6 is scheduled to ship "in about a year", which sounds remarkably closer to my August 2009 prediction than TUAW's "shipping by January 2009".

                       COMPARISON         FIREFOX 3.0RC2       WEBKIT r34367

** TOTAL **:           1.56x as fast      2597.0ms +/- 2.1%    1666.8ms +/- 0.3%

=============================================================================

  3d:                  1.44x as fast      327.4ms +/- 5.1%     227.2ms +/- 2.1%
    cube:              1.62x as fast      120.2ms +/- 1.1%     74.0ms +/- 2.9%
    morph:             1.43x as fast      106.2ms +/- 14.3%    74.2ms +/- 3.6%
    raytrace:          1.28x as fast      101.0ms +/- 2.8%     79.0ms +/- 0.0%

  access:              1.48x as fast      363.4ms +/- 2.0%     246.0ms +/- 0.9%
    binary-trees:      1.54x as fast       44.0ms +/- 2.0%     28.6ms +/- 2.4%
    fannkuch:          1.61x as fast      136.4ms +/- 1.4%     84.8ms +/- 2.2%
    nbody:             1.28x as fast      137.2ms +/- 6.1%     107.4ms +/- 0.6%
    nsieve:            1.82x as fast       45.8ms +/- 3.0%     25.2ms +/- 2.2%

  bitops:              1.53x as fast      245.0ms +/- 2.6%     159.8ms +/- 1.0%
    3bit-bits-in-byte: 1.62x as fast       39.2ms +/- 5.2%     24.2ms +/- 2.3%
    bits-in-byte:      2.07x as fast       62.2ms +/- 0.9%     30.0ms +/- 0.0%
    bitwise-and:       1.35x as fast       65.4ms +/- 1.7%     48.6ms +/- 3.9%
    nsieve-bits:       1.37x as fast       78.2ms +/- 4.8%     57.0ms +/- 0.0%

  controlflow:         1.75x as fast       30.8ms +/- 1.8%     17.6ms +/- 3.9%
    recursive:         1.75x as fast       30.8ms +/- 1.8%     17.6ms +/- 3.9%

  crypto:              1.41x as fast      155.8ms +/- 2.6%     110.8ms +/- 0.9%
    aes:               1.43x as fast       61.4ms +/- 3.9%     42.8ms +/- 1.3%
    md5:               1.40x as fast       46.8ms +/- 1.2%     33.4ms +/- 2.0%
    sha1:              1.38x as fast       47.6ms +/- 3.5%     34.6ms +/- 3.2%

  date:                2.15x as fast      321.6ms +/- 7.7%     149.6ms +/- 0.7%
    format-tofte:      2.16x as fast      195.0ms +/- 13.2%    90.2ms +/- 0.6%
    format-xparb:      2.13x as fast      126.6ms +/- 1.6%     59.4ms +/- 1.1%

  math:                1.60x as fast      277.4ms +/- 4.4%     173.0ms +/- 0.7%
    cordic:            1.81x as fast      104.8ms +/- 2.1%     57.8ms +/- 1.8%
    partial-sums:      1.48x as fast      124.0ms +/- 8.7%     83.6ms +/- 0.8%
    spectral-norm:     1.54x as fast       48.6ms +/- 1.4%     31.6ms +/- 2.2%

  regexp:              1.35x as fast      225.4ms +/- 0.5%     166.8ms +/- 0.3%
    dna:               1.35x as fast      225.4ms +/- 0.5%     166.8ms +/- 0.3%

  string:              1.56x as fast      650.2ms +/- 0.5%     416.0ms +/- 0.5%
    base64:            1.16x as fast       77.2ms +/- 1.8%     66.6ms +/- 1.0%
    fasta:             2.30x as fast      173.8ms +/- 0.9%     75.6ms +/- 0.9%
    tagcloud:          1.34x as fast      133.4ms +/- 0.5%     99.8ms +/- 1.0%
    unpack-code:       1.67x as fast      173.4ms +/- 0.6%     103.8ms +/- 1.0%
    validate-input:    1.32x as fast       92.4ms +/- 0.7%     70.2ms +/- 1.5%

But don't worry, Firefox! You may be 56% slower on overall Javascript performance, but you've been promised to be bug free!

TUAW wrote yesterday about "10.6" being unveiled at WWDC next week:

We have also learned that OS X 10.6 may go gold master by December 2008 in an effort to start shipping it in January '09 at Macworld Expo. Mac OS X 10.6 will be a milestone release for Apple, as it will leave the PowerPC behind: a fully 64-bit clean, Intel-only Mac OS X.

John Gruber weighed in this morning:

I still think it seems too soon by at least a year to drop PowerPC support -- especially for G5s, which are still extremely capable machines by today's standards -- but that's the word on the street.

Gruber's on the right track here, but not because the machines are still capable (which they are).

Consider two truths about Applecare:

• Applecare typically comes in two quantities: the free one-year that comes with each machine, and a three-year extended service warranty.
• Applecare provides support for all point revisions of the current operating system and the final point release of the previous operating system.

As far as I'm aware, Apple has never released an OS that cannot by installed on computers that fall within the three-year window provided by Applecare. Once a machine falls outside of that window, a machine is not guaranteed to run any new major OS revisions.

The PowerMac G5 was the final machine to be killed in the Intel transition - a slight irony given that the developer kits for the Intel transition were in PowerMac towers. The MacPro was introduced to market on August 7, 2006.

For these reasons, I would not expect Apple to kill off PowerPC support in their OS until after August 6th, 2009.

(An aside: that's also the day that Classic finally becomes unsupported, as there won't be any Applecare eligible machines that can still run Classic.)

Over the last seven years, no one company has contributed more to the sheer volume of gaming devices in my possession than Konami. These seven years have seen five dance mats, four beatmania IIDX controllers, one gigantic Pop'n Music controller, one headset, one plastic guitar, and one set of plastic drum pads. Few of these have survived the yearly purge sessions, but the point came across loud and clear: Konami is, in no uncertain terms, the king of the peripherals.

Or at least, they were. Konami hasn't introduced a new music game peripheral since 2005 with the US flop of beatmania. (Mysteriously, that peripheral - a redesign of the old IIDX controller - was a nearly flawless upgrade.) Three years later, Konami has threatened the world with another damn drum set, the sixth drum peripheral on the market and the third introduced by Konami.

But this post isn't about that monstrosity. It's about the Pop'n Be-Mouse, a strange (yet cute!) Japan-only device which combines the shape of a beetle, the functionality of a mouse, and the general purpose and style of a Pop'n Music controller. It's the newest addition to my gaming controller collection.

This isn't Konami's first foray into PC Bemani - of course, you'd be easy forgiven for forgetting that those previous tries were mostly typing tutors like beatmania Da! Da! Da!. To its credit, the Be-Mouse is true to the ideals of Pop'n Music, it's just...tinier.

Konami has crammed a nine-button Pop'n Controller into a 2.5" mouse. Each of the nine buttons is about a centimeter in diameter, making them just slightly smaller than my fingertip. The buttons are tucked away under two plastic wings that, when opened, make the thing look not unlike a beetle. The wings are fairly sturdy and don't give me fears of snapping them off.

Let's hold off on the gaming for a moment and talk about it purely as a mouse: surprisingly, it's not half bad. The mouse feels good in the hand, and the buttons function as one would expect. The scroll wheel has a more "clicky" feel than my Microsoft Intellimouse, which I actually enjoy. The mouse is plug-and-play under OS X, but not so under Windows XP, as you'll have to install the drivers before it does anything interesting. Of course, the Pop'n software does not work on OS X at all, so Mac users should stay away unless they've got Boot Camp or other Windows methods.

While the mouse does come with an adorably weird mouse pad - full of half-broken English like POP'N MUSIC MAKES YOU HAPPY, PRETTY, LOVELY! - I don't recommend using it. It is quite thin and light, making it easy to travel around your desk as you mouse. Worse, the texture it's made out of causes the mouse to float strangely while you try to use it for regular functions. I went back to my usual mousepad and haven't had any similar problems.

All things considered, the Be-Mouse is a competent laser mouse. But no one is going to buy this as merely a mouse - they're looking for some Pop'n insanity. Despite it's candy-colored exterior and endless supply of cartoon characters, Pop'n is notorious for being among the most difficult of music games.

After what should be a straightforward install, the Pop'n Be-Mouse software is accessible through the standard Windows methods, or by pressing the middle red button on the mouse's controller. The game launches almost instantly, and after a quick load, you are off to the Pop'n races.

The game ships with 10 songs, most of which will be familiar if you've played at least one Pop'n game before. If you're coming to Pop'n by way of another Bemani game such as DDR, you might recognize Daikenkai by Des-ROW. Additional songs are available via an in-game store that uses i-revo - but due to patch complications, I was unable to upgrade my install to the version necessary for store access.

Pop'n is a very visual game, so here's some camera-recorded video of what the experience is like, end-to-end:

Pop'n Music Be-Mouse Demonstration from Dan Dickinson on Vimeo.

While Pop'n Be-Mouse is fun for what it is - Pop'n Music Lite PC - it's important to note what it isn't.

If you're looking for extreme Hell course-style difficulty, you may wish to look elsewhere. The game features four difficulty modes; three of which are shared with the traditional Pop'n games (5-Line, 9-Line Normal, 9-Line Hyper). But 9-Line Ex, the peak difficulty level, has been dropped. Instead, users will find a 3-Line version, boiling a song down to a whopping three keys out of the nine available.

Likewise, Poppers familiar with some of the other modes that appear on the Pop'n games should prepare for the minimum possible in presentation. There's no training mode, no versus or courses, no character select, no unlocks, no COOLs or arcade stage scoring or ojamas. It's Bemani at the most basic form - pick a song, play, repeat. It will track your clears and best score on each difficulty level, but that's about it.

Finally, it could potentially be used for a controller for other applications - MAME32 saw it as joystick input - were the red center button not bound to launch the Pop'n app. I think this can be worked around by killing the application in the system tray, but I haven't verified this yet.

In short: it's a decent mouse with the neat feature to play a music game as well. Is it worth dropping $70 plus shipping on? Perhaps not, but in the wide array of merchandise that Konami has put out for Bemani players over the years, at least this one is functional and fun.

The Pop'n Music Be-Mouse can be imported through Play-Asia.

From last month's trip to SF.

Physical media has remained the primary distribution method for video games since the inception of home consoles. But with the current slew of platforms, digital distribution is finally not merely a possibility but a reality. The channels come in many forms: from the Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Store, to Nintendo's Virtual Console and recently launched WiiWare, to the hugely popular Steam platform run by Valve for Windows.

A lot of gamers still love having discs for a variety of reasons. But there's a growing movement of gamers and publishers pressing towards digital distribution. Gamers gain quicker access to games, less fiddling with discs, and the ability to reinstall their purchases at a later point. Publishers can create smaller, more innovative titles that wouldn't survive at retail, keep a smaller budget, and not worry about fighting for shelf space in a brick-and-mortar store.

Or so we all thought.

Hippie Priest Bum-Out

Today, in an interview with Next Generation, Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten let loose that this no longer holds true for Xbox 360 owners: Microsoft intends on delisting games that "underperform".

In addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games.

What defines an "underperforming" game?

"The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service. This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both. We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title."

The method may be sound, but the reasoning is not. But before the logical attack - statistics!

Power In Numbers

I've spent a few hours parsing the Metacritic data in Excel to the best of my ability. It is the only one of the three metrics through which the public can determine which titles are possible underperformers. Sales data (particularly the conversion rate) is not released by Microsoft. And while a number of 2008 games are not yet six months old, time is marching on and all games will inevitably be six months old at some point.

55 XBLA titles are rated at a Metacritic score below 65, so were they all not hitting the needed conversion rate, the number of XBLA titles would drop from 128 to 73, a 43% reduction in titles.

Aren't they all poorly done remakes of classic titles, though? As it turns out, no. The XBLA catalog features 55 remakes, about 43% of the XBLA offerings. 30 of them fall on the list of titles in danger of being delisted, meaning it's nearly an even split of original titles to remakes. Should all these titles be delisted, the number of remakes on XBLA would drop to 25 out of 73 titles, reducing the percentage to 34%. I would consider this a small adjustment, but not a significant one.

The other interesting metric is to examine what categories and genres the games are broken into.

The current XBLA breakdown heavily favors action and puzzle games, which collectively make up 57% of the titles.

If we take a look at possible delisting by genre:

There is certainly some variance, as some genres are being hit hard (Racing is 100% at risk, while shmups face a 70% reduction) while others are fairly safe (Adventure/RPG games, as well as Party games, only face losing one of their own.)

But what's truly interesting is that after we shake out the delisting, the genre distribution would look like this:

Notice anything odd? It looks almost exactly the same as the market before. The changes are subtle - no individual genre gained or lost more than 4% of the total share. The most significant change is that racing would be eradicated completely from XBLA were this to happen. (I'm sure Yaris fans will be crying themselves to sleep.)

Lessons learned? The proposed delisting of titles will not radically affect the distribution of games across genres. Nor will it drastically reduce the ratio of remakes to original titles.

(For those who like random abuses of Excel, my spreadsheet is available.)

Logical Dash

This policy has potential to harm both consumers and producers, if it hasn't already.

Consumers can no longer be guaranteed their purchases on XBLA will be available for download should they suffer a hardware failure or have to remove the title due to disk limitations. With no ability to resell XBLA titles, and no ability to make backups, it now is quite possible that users will begin getting screwed out of accessing their purchases.

Developers who were sold on a platform have had the carpet pulled out from under them. (Perhaps in more ways than one, as one developer I talked to today only heard about this announcement after I told them.) Because XBLA titles have had the advantage of an availability period that far exceeds that of retail, an employee from Sidhe estimated that this could cost small studios roughly $127,000 in revenue.

Let's not ignore the effect that announcing this policy publicly will induce, either. Savvy gamers will be less willing to take a chance on games that fall under the 65% line on Metacritic. This will drive conversion rates lower, making it harder for companies with titles in the middle range of reviews on the virtual shelves. The cycle will feed itself.

I will be the first to admit that based on some of the titles on XBLA, the primary intentions behind this policy - quality over quantity - make sense. But in what I can only think of as typical Microsoft fashion, this is the exact wrong way of doing it. Quality control comes before games launch, not after.

Perhaps the most absurd thing of all is that Microsoft chose the line to be 65%, which Metacritic defines as:

Barbarians At The Gate

Xbox Live is under assult on all sides from strong competition. PSN, while lacking in quantity, is providing scores of quality with titles like Warhawk, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, and echochrome. WiiWare has significant buzz with titles like My Life As A King and Lost Winds. Steam is adding community features putting it on par with Xbox Live, only without a $50 a year fee.

Finding themselves under siege, backed into a corner and being outmaneuvered, Marc Whitten and his team have done what Microsoft seems to do best: stabbed their service in the foot.

Three hours later...

I think I'm happy again. In some ways, this was a very silly rebuild - I've basically redone the same look and feel with a different base stylesheet. But the syntax has been cleaned up considerably, and while I'm sure I've missed some styles, the site is more functional than it's been in years.

I also nuked over 300 entries from my archives, which turns out to be about 20% of the total number in the system. This seems wrong for a site that's acting as an embodiment of myself, but all the posts that were nuked were from the del.icio.us nightly posting script. After some reflection, I regretted having them in the system, as they mostly just take up space on the archives page and provide minimal value. So out they go. (These links are now autoposting to my Tumblr blog.)

Anyhow, there's more playing to be done, but for the time being, I'm satisfied. If only I had the motivation to write something substantive. (In the mean time, have you been to The Power Is On lately?)