quick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
10 MAXIMUMPC OCTOBER 2007
The Wassup (is it a blind bunny,
or an egg with ears and legs?) is
supposed to dance, spin, and fl ash
its LEDs to the tune of your iPod’s
music playing on its scratchy-
sounding monophonic speaker.
But the only thing it did for us was
spasm its way to the edge of our
desk and fall off.
$25, http://www.b2stuf.comMiJam Wassup
Id Software’s John Carmack gave Ageia
some physics action—namely, turbu-
lence—when he told Bootdaily.com
that he is “...not a believer in dedicated
PPUs.” It looks as though Valve isn’t pre-
pared to join the PhysX faithful, either.
“Physics routines such as those in
Half-Life 2 were achieved in 2004 on
millions of non-PPU-enabled PCs,”
said Valve’s director of marketing, Doug
Lombardi. “Multicore CPUs open the door
for advanced AI, advanced physics, and
more. It’s going to require something truly
wicked and only possible on a PPU to
move customers and developers.”
Ageia’s arguments for PhysX dovetail
nicely with Lombardi’s latter comment. As
Ageia’s VP of marketing, Michael Steel,
argues, physics acceleration requires
“...hardware that is massively multicore;
high amounts of fl oating-point throughput;
highly independent processing to handle
the irregular nature of physics, which GPUsdon’t have; and high amounts of memory
bandwidth, which CPUs don’t have.”
In the end, however, it may be the
installed base that matters. As Lombardi
puts it, “There’s a bigger question mark with
respect to adoption rate, and that has a
real-world impact on how many games will
support these PPUs. We all hate cliché’s,
but it’s the chicken-or-the-egg problem.”
For more details see Michael Brown’s blog
at http://tinyurl.com/ysrw.Valve Drops the Other Shoe on PhysX
N
intendo is justifiably cocky about the
cross-market success of the Wii, but does
this mean anything for gamers as a whole
and PC gamers in particular? Is Nintendo’s claim
of driving a 69 percent growth in the gaming
industry for real or mere bluster?
There is absolutely no question that the Wii
has an appeal that crosses generations, markets,
and demographics. Yet the games with the most
newb appeal are not what we’d call “gamer
games” but rather simple pick-up-and-play titles
like Wii Sports. Predicting some kind of ripple
effect that will wash across the entire industry
assumes that a) the Wii is more than a mere fad
and b) its unique control and design elements
will have an effect on other platforms.
We can dispense with the control element
quickly, as far as the PC goes. Wii-style motion
control is a nonstarter for the PC as long as
it remains deskbound. Plenty of space and a
very large screen are required for a Wii-mote
to work, and until people get more comfortable
running their PCs through their TVs, this just
isn’t going to happen.
Game design is more intriguing, since a
strong element of the “Wii effect” is the device’s
ability to bridge the divide between hardcore
and casual gamers. We can see a glimmer of
this design potential on the Xbox 360, where the
games Catan and Carcassonne (both from veter-
an PC developers) are near-perfect embodiments
of the netherworld between casual and serious
gamers. Both are deep and reminiscent of PC
games but instantly accessible to nongamers.
In the end, it’s not how the Wii will affect
design on the PC, but what the Wii will do to
the gaming market. Nintendo claims it’s bring-
ing millions of freshly minted newbs into the
gaming fold (true) and that it can then challenge
them with increasingly more complex, yet still
accessible, designs (debatable). Essentially, the
company claims to be building a new generation
of hardcore gamers with the Wii as the “gate-
way drug” to bigger and better things, and all
gamemakers will benefit. The success of this Wii
effect is impossible to predict right now, but the
vision is certainly appealing, and the technology
is clearly in place to make it happen.Google, Verizon Take Sides in Wireless Auction
A chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum is opening up, and everyone wants a piece
The Wii
Effect
GAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDThomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years.
He is editor-at-large of Games Magazine.In January 2008 a 60MHz band within the 700MHz range—currently reserved for
analog television signals—will be auctioned off by the FCC to the highest bidder.
Consumer advocates are calling for an open-access policy, noting that the availability
of this spectrum has the potential to allow nationwide wireless broadband access. It’s
a stance supported by at least one of the fi ve FCC commissioners, as well as Google,
which has pledged to bid at least $4.6 billion if the FCC commits to keeping the spec-
trum impartial to specifi c software and devices. Verizon, on the other hand, is opposed
to such “regulation,” preferring, naturally, that the market sort things out. AT&T sup-
ports keeping 22MHz of the spectrum open to all, but, of course, has its own ideas
about what to do with the rest.&DIS