Presenting the first image
of Philips’ prototype 13-inch
high-contrast television. We’re
assuming that’s the Discovery
Channel onscreen.
Quick Start
AUGUST 2004 MAXIMUMPC
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.PCs and Consoles:
Unlikely
Bedfellows?
+GAME THEORY BY^ THOMAS L. McDONALD
We See Dead ProductsThese three technologies seem destined for not-so-greatness
We sympathize with industrial designers. After all, our own attempts to build
a combination cellphone/taser resulted in an unfortunate and quite painful
testing mishap, proving that even the best ideas are sometimes unworkable.
But occasionally, companies quixotically refuse to cancel products despite
every conceivable warning sign. Maximum PC rubbernecks three concepts cur-
rently charging toward the edge of extinction.The iVue
Biometric security company VeriTouch got together with Swedish design firm
Thinking Materials to create the iVue, a “handheld audio/video player capable
of biometrically encrypting and decrypting digital
media content.” Yes, that’s right—an MP3 player
that requires your fingerprint to use. The compa-
ny claims the fingerprint sensor will be used to
“unlock and play back files in real time” and
will include technology to prevent the extrac-
tion of files from the internal hard drive.
How and why these features would be
of any interest to consumers is anybody’s
guess. But we hear the RIAA is interested.
That’s reason enough right there to steer
clear of this concept.DVD-D
Sensing consumer frustration with having
to return DVDs on time or pay late fees, FlexPlay came up with an ingenious
solution with its EZ-D discs. You buy the discs at the rental store, and open
them whenever you want. Once opened, exposure to air causes the
discs to slowly disintegrate, giving you about 48 hours of
viewing time, after which you toss them into the trash.
Unfortunately, Disney set a doomed-to-fail price of $
per disc during the company’s trial run with the new
format. Sales were disappointing, to say the least, and
you’d think that would be the end of it. But nooo ....
FDD Technologies apparently came to a different
conclusion about what caused the launch to fail—
the discs simply didn’t disintegrate fast enough! Enter DVD-
D, the disc that becomes useless in just eight hours.
FDD is currently looking for marketing partners.
“Hello...? Anybody...?”Polaroid Image
Polaroid, the company behind what was once the Coolest Thing in the
World, is introducing the Image1200, the instant camera with an LCD view-
finder. Now, instead of buying a digital camera and uploading images to your
PC and then e-mailing them to your friends, you can: Buy the Polaroid
Image1200 for $170, buy a 10-pack of film for $14.95, take the picture (hop-
ing to get it right in one shot), wait for the image to appear, scan the image,
and resize it for e-mail. And
what’s the LCD viewfinder
all about?
The best argument
Polaroid could muster in
favor of its old-skool format
is that its cameras are “stan-
dard equipment for many
law enforcement officers.”The iVue prototype drawing.
Don’t let strangers get their
hands on your Avril Lavigne
playlist!Want to get burned
by your DVD?Green tea: Good for you,
good for your hard drive.Is Polaroid going to trot
out James Garner for this?When I first began covering games back around 1989,
there was this strange and immature antipathy between
computer gamers and video gamers. A generation
wet-nursed on the first video games left their consoles
behind for computers. Throughout the 1990s, computer
and video game design took very different paths, only
to converge again at the turn of the millennium with the
dawn of Xbox and PS2.
A good example of this cross-pollination can be
found in Thief: Deadly Shadows (which is on shelves
now) and Splinter Cell 3 (due this fall). Some would
argue that the stealth-action genre was born in 1998
with Metal Gear Solid or Tenchu , both PSX titles. They,
of course, would be wrong. 1998 was the same year
Looking Glass finally published its monumental, long-
awaited epic Thief: The Dark Project , the first “first-
person sneaker.” From the ground up, it was designed
to challenge players to use their wits, stick to the
shadows, and avoid conflict in order to achieve a goal.
PC gamers were still getting use to this radically
new game style when they were blindsided by another
1998 title: the original Rainbow Six , pater familias of
the entire tactical shooter genre. Rainbow Six begat
Raven Shield , and Raven Shield begat Ghost Recon , and
Thief and Ghost Recon laid together and begat Splinter
Cell , which proved that the Xbox could indeed have a
life beyond Halo. And Splinter Cell was ported to PC,
and PC gamers saw that console-style third-person
stealth-action was good and they could now forget all
about the club-footed Metal Gear Solid PC port.
Now we come full circle. Despite having Splinter
Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and various Splinter Cell ports
on its plate for the past year, Ubisoft shocked everyone
at E3 by showing a fairly advanced build of Splinter
Cell 3. The game looked truly gorgeous, with the kind
of detail that stealth games demand. In fact, it looked
better than any Xbox game to date, and there was a
good reason: It’s being developed for PC. The power
of the new generation of graphics cards was simply
too tempting for the developers, who needed the hard
horsepower of the PC to create the most detailed
Splinter Cell game to date.
Meanwhile, Thief: Deadly Shadows has ambled on
over to Xbox, giving console gamers their first taste of
this landmark series. Splinter Cell 3 will eventually,
maybe next year or so, find its way to console systems,
with the PC graphics duly downconverted, of course.
But since we are all one big happy electronic gaming
family now, sharing game design styles and techniques,
PC gamers wouldn’t even dream of gloating.