UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

There’s some buzz going around concerning Apple’s new iPad commercial and its similarity to one Apple produced for the Newton two decades ago. Though I’m not the first to comment on this, I have a few thoughts of my own, so here goes…

First, let’s watch both commercials. I did not remember this (apparently) “classic” (in John Gruber’s words) ad for the Newton:

Now, watch Apple’s new iPad ad:

Wow. Homage indeed. I doubt very many people remember the Newton commercial, but the iPad commercial is stunningly similar. This had to be deliberate, but I’m wondering what exactly that deliberateness is supposed to mean.

Well, I’ll tell you this: watching the two ads back-to-back, I’m left feeling that a) the Newton really was way ahead of its time, and b) the Newton ad seems like one of those futuristic concept videos Apple (among other computer makers) seemed to love producing in the 1980s.

Newton was a vision of the future. iPad is the reality. That Newton actually became a shipping product says a lot about Apple’s ability to realize its vision (compared to the long line of never-to-be-made concepts that have come from Microsoft over the years, most recently… well… this). But the Newton was too far ahead of its time. Then again, it ushered in the PDA era, which ushered in the “smartphone” era, which led to the iPhone and now the iPad. So maybe Apple was really seeding (if you’ll pardon the pun) its own future with the Newton.

There are two key lines that for me define the difference between the two ads:

“Newton can receive a page and sends faxes and, soon, electronic mail.”

“(iPad is) 200,000 apps and counting. All the world’s websites in your hands.”

Granted, paging and faxing were still relevant technologies when the Newton was released, but they were already doomed, and the best Apple could say was that “soon” Newton could handle “electronic mail” (even then, using a soon-to-be-antiquated term). In contrast, the iPad hits the ground running, leveraging the existing success of the iPhone, and with forward momentum for future technologies. Newton was about what could be, but iPad is.

My CMS, cms34, uses a few third-party tools for certain complex features. One of the most useful is TinyMCE, a JavaScript/DOM-based drop-in WYSIWYG text editor. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, you probably want to stop here, but in case you’re a glutton for punishment, it is, in short, a way to produce HTML-formatted text with a word processor-like interface. Think Microsoft Word in a web browser, with the results being formatted for display on a web page. Slick.

Anyway, there’s been one nagging problem: When users paste in URLs for links, TinyMCE converts any on-site links into “relative URLs” — it strips out the domain name. This is not necessarily bad; in fact, for the most part I would want it to do that. But for some reason the nature of my CakePHP-based CMS seems to confound TinyMCE’s ability to properly determine the relative URL. And what’s worse, the CMS includes an enewsletter editor which has to have absolute URLs, but TinyMCE was converting them to relative URLs even if the user pasted in an absolute URL.

A little research led me to a handy explanation in the TinyMCE Wiki. Basically, if you want your URLs to always be absolute, make sure your TinyMCE configuration includes the following:

relative_urls : false,
remove_script_host : false,
document_base_url : “http://www.site.com/path1/”

Of course, you’ll want to change the value of document_base_url to be the actual base URL of your website. As it happens, my CMS has a global JavaScript file that creates a variable called baseUrl that I can use anywhere in JavaScript to substitute for the full base URL of the website. So, in my case, I set the value for document_base_url equal to baseUrl.

And, voilà, it seems to work!

I apologize in advance if my argument here is less cogent than it could be: I’m under extreme time constraints to crank out this post. That said, this is something I just can’t leave alone.

“The album is dead!” people seem to be lamenting. What people? Well, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica for one, and he comes bearing graphs.

But how useful are these graphs? Not very. As one (or more, actually) of the comments on the article notes, comparing singles to albums (to streams, even!) in terms of units is useless, since an album is typically made up of approximately 10 tracks. Meaning, buying a single vs. buying an album is not the equivalent of buying a Mac instead of a PC, or buying an apple instead of an orange. It’s buying one song instead of buying ten songs. But you’re still buying songs.

So… the chart showing 1,138 million singles, vs. a paltry 76 million albums, sold in 2009 — a harrowing comparison — would more accurately be represented as 1,138 million songs purchased as singles, vs. (approximately) 760 million songs purchased as albums, in 2009. Singles are still more popular than albums are, but the number of songs acquired as singles vs. as parts of albums is less than double.

Or another way to look at it, if you don’t like thinking about songs, is dollars. Most popular singles are selling on iTunes these days for $1.29, vs. $9.99 for albums. So you’re looking at $1,468 million in single sales, vs. $759 million in album sales. Again, about twice as many dollars spent on singles as opposed to albums. Maybe not good news for albums (I don’t know; it would be helpful to see what the trends in singles-vs.-albums sales have been over time), but certainly not the catastrophic disaster the Ars charts suggest.

One aspect of the story that is perhaps worth evaluating is how much of the concept of the album as an art form is being lost here. But again, honestly, the 3-hit-singles-and-7-tracks-of-crap model for pop albums has been around since (based on anecdotal evidence from my mom) at least the 1960s. That doesn’t mean all music follows that model, though, and it doesn’t mean that the fans of longer-form compositions or concept albums aren’t still buying albums.

Apparently this brilliant mock trailer for the “happy version” of The Shining has been on YouTube for 3 years, but I just discovered it in a post on Brand New, cited as an effective metaphor for the horrible decision of the merged United and Continental airlines to simply merge their logos as well.

Anyway… wow. This trailer really messed with my brain. Watch:

The most disturbing part for me was that for most of it, I believed it was a real trailer. I was too young when The Shining came out to be able to remember the marketing campaign for it, but I’ve seen enough late-’70s and early-’80s movie trailers as bonus features on DVDs to recognize the dippy narration as de rigeur for the era.

It wasn’t until I heard a brief snippet of my favorite piano motif from the soundtrack of The Shawshank Redemption that I realized it was fake… and then moments later, when “Solsbury Hill” (a song that at least existed when the movie was made) came in, the conceit went over the top — funny, but obvious.

Regardless, this is a brilliant piece of work. In addition to being hilarious, it shows how you can twist an assortment of brief clips from a movie to tell just about any story you want. (It also helps explain why trailers can be effective in selling tickets for a crap movie… which The Shining, of course, is not.)

The coup de grâce is the way the voiceover says “Shining” at the end.

I’m not a super hardcore gamer. I don’t spend any time in MMORPGs, I’m not on any XBOX Live leaderboards, and I’m able to balance my interest in playing video games with other things like work and family. (When something’s gotta give, that something is, invariably and rightly, playing video games.)

And yet, I guess I’m a pretty serious gamer. I’ve been into video games since I first got an Atari 2600 in 1982. I’ve been collecting both vintage and modern games since I had a resurgence of interest in 2002, and I now count among the game systems I own: Panasonic Tournament 2000 (a mid-’70s Pong-style console), Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Intellivision, NES, GameCube, XBOX, Wii, XBOX 360, Sega Game Gear, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. And all told, across those systems I own a total of around 500 games. And, oh yeah, there’s the iPhone. But… is the iPhone a game system or not?

I’ve explored this issue before, and come to the conclusion that not only is it a game system, but it’s arguably superior to the Nintendo DS, at least in two key ways: 1) its technical capabilities, and 2) its portability. To paraphrase Chase Jarvis, the best game system is the one you have with you.

The iPhone’s technical capabilities far outshine those of the Nintendo DS (the main strength the DS has working in its favor is its physical controls), and it also has the big advantage of the fact that I’m far more likely to have it with me at any given time than my DS, even considering how much more often I carried the DS with me before I had an iPhone.

Since I got the iPhone, I’ve spent far more time playing games on the iPhone than on all other systems put together. And yet I’ve mostly played casual games like solitaire, Scrabble, or, when I’m feeling particularly… erm… risky, Strategery. But the deeper, more engaging adventure style games I really like, especially games like the ones in Nintendo’s Metroid and Zelda franchises, or Konami’s recent Metroid-esque entries in the Castlevania series, just aren’t there.

Why not?

It’s pretty clear that we’ll never see a Metroid or Zelda game on the iPhone. Frankly I’m a bit surprised Konami hasn’t released a Castlevania game for the iPhone yet — they’ve made a few other iPhone games — although one may be in development and I just don’t know about it.

For the most part the iPhone seems to have become a magnet for casual games. It’s easy to understand why, to some extent. The iPhone is owned by a lot of “non-gamers” and casual games are most appealing to them. I think the iPhone as a gaming platform shares a lot of its audience with the Wii. But the Wii does have Metroid and Zelda and other “hardcore” titles.

To be fair, the types of adventure and action RPG games I enjoy on other systems do exist on the iPhone, but in my experience so far… well… they all kinda suck. I’ve been lured in many times by the promise of “Zelda-like gameplay” and impressive-looking graphics, but although I’ve found a few to be of passable quality, almost all of them are so buggy, or so riddled with grammatical or spelling errors, or just so ill-conceived and sloppily-executed, that I play them once and then delete them off my iPhone, consoling myself in the fact that I only wasted $3 instead of $30 (the going price on new Nintendo DS titles).

As for the big question — why this particular genre of games has never delivered a satisfying experience on the iPhone, that’s the big mystery. There are plenty of casual games on the iPhone that demonstrate a tremendous amount of polish and great execution: apart from the aforementioned Strategery, there’s quite possibly the best casual game ever — Plants vs. Zombies, and of course an assortment of popular card, board and word games.

Up to now, the best 3D adventure game for the iPhone was the Halo-meets-Metroid-Prime clone N.O.V.A. It’s pretty good, but there’s still something I just can’t pinpoint about it that just makes it seem a little rough and just not totally engaging. Still, it’s been the most promising game I’ve seen yet for the platform. Until…

And now, on to the review…

Chaos Rings is a new Japanese-style RPG from Square Enix, developed specifically for the iPhone. It’s not the first Square Enix game for the iPhone — a few of the early Final Fantasy games have been ported, for instance — but it’s their first full-blown, brand new all-out effort on the platform.

It’s the most expensive game I’ve ever bought for the iPhone. But at $12.99, it’s still less than half the price of a standard new Nintendo DS game. (Most Square Enix games for the DS retail for $39.99.) But there’s a reason for the extra price: the depth, quality and polish is unmatched by anything I’ve yet seen for the iPhone.

The game looks fantastic: the art is highly detailed and is consistent with the established and popular Square Enix style, and it’s technically impressive — the iPhone’s 3D graphics capabilities are stunning. The musical score and sound effects are great, too. Gameplay-wise, Chaos Rings is a traditional 3D RPG dungeon crawl: you explore a diverse variety of worlds, battling monsters with both attacks and magic, and there are also a number of puzzle rooms. The puzzle rooms feel a bit tacked on, although they’re a fun diversion from the level grinding characteristic of the game style.

Something that cannot be underestimated in terms of what makes the gameplay in Chaos Rings engaging in a way that so many other, otherwise good iPhone games (Hero of Sparta and Dungeon Hunter come to mind) lack is the control mechanism. It’s become standard practice for iPhone games that require “traditional” movement schemes to employ a “virtual” (on-screen) direction pad and buttons. Typically, mimicking the controls on traditional handhelds, the D-pad is placed in the lower left corner of the screen, and the buttons in the lower right. The big problem with this approach is that you don’t want to have to look at where you’re placing your fingers: when the D-pad and buttons are physical objects, there’s a tactile experience. You don’t have to look, because you can feel that your thumbs are in the right place. Not so with virtual controls on a glass screen.

But somewhere along the way — N.O.V.A. is the first game I encountered with it — an important advance was made: the D-pad only appears when you touch your finger to the screen, and it appears wherever you touch. So you no longer have to worry about putting your thumb in the right place — just put it down, and it’s always centered on the D-pad. Likewise, there may be “buttons” on screen, but usually just one, and a tap anywhere counts as a button press. This change makes a huge difference in playability and delivering a satisfying experience. As I said, N.O.V.A. uses this kind of control scheme, but that game had other problems that have kept me from really getting into it. But Chaos Rings offers a near-perfect execution of this evolved virtual control scheme, and it may be the single most important factor in my enjoyment of the game.

Chaos Rings is not a masterpiece — it’s not the kind of seamless, immersive world I loved so much in Metroid Prime (my favorite video game of all time), but it’s so far beyond every other iPhone game I’ve seen, in every imaginable way, that it seems to be an introduction to a new era in iPhone gaming… real iPhone gaming. It’s the first adventure/RPG game I’ve seen on the iPhone that I genuinely can’t put down. I’m sure there will be better iPhone games in the future — especially as the platform evolves with the iPad — but I truly believe this game will stand as a milestone in that evolution.