The trouble with dual platform gaming: You get used to one or the other. Back when I wrote PlayStation 2 for Dummies, the Dual Shock controller felt completely natural. Over time — and especially after serving as the 360 editor at GamesRadar and features editor at OXM – the 360 control became “normal” to my hands. Now I feel a little cramped on a PS3 pad, and my thumbs bump into each other when I use the Dual Shock’s analog sticks. Of course, other people have the opposite problem, where the 360 controller feels alien and they want something that feels like the PS3 pad. I’ve wondered if there was an answer to this problem — and I found it at PAX Prime this year.

Mad Catz showed a prototype of a Major League Gaming Pro Circuit controller for both PS3 and 360, which promised unheard of customization through removable parts. Like the 360 layout but prefer convex thumbsticks like the PS3? Change them with a simple twist-and-click move. Removable weights let you change the heft of the controller. Prefer matte black instead of a gloss finish? The faceplate panels are magnetic; just pull them off to swap them out. All this with a removable braided cable and a carrying case too. It was a neat demo, but the controller was inside a display case, so I wondered if it would fulfill on its promise.

I finally got one this week, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Change the sticks, the d-pad, the weight, the faceplate...it takes seconds to customize.

Once I got it out of the smexxxy presentation packaging, I found that the rubberized non-slip surface didn’t feel irritating or tacky; it was just comfortable. I regularly fiddle with the weights in my PC gaming mice, so I liked having two 35-gram weights here. I found not using any weights felt about the same as a PS3 Dual Shock, and one was right for a wireless 360 feel. Actually, both weights together felt quite comfortable to me. The nubs on the concave analog sticks were very pronounced and I had no problem with traction.

Reverse Trigger activated

The PS3 controller offers one crucial additional feature that the 360 version does not: Reverse Trigger mode lets you swap the L1/L2 and R1/R2 trigger assignments on the controller itself. Just hold down Start and Select for five seconds and the controller lights will swap positions — that is, if your controller is player 1, after this trick, the lights for 2, 3, and 4 will all light up. Now, in MW3, the R2 curved trigger fires your weapon (as it does on 360) instead of the smaller R1 bumper button (the PS3 default). If you are used to the 360 layout and you don’t take advantage of this feature, you will die a quick and horrible death.

There are a very few compromises. It’s not wireless (but the 3-meter braided USB cable is removable for storage and transport) and it doesn’t feature analog L1 and R1 triggers, so it might not be the best controller for all your games. But these are sacrifices I am very comfortable making in exchange for the performance and comfort.

No more broken controllers from wrapping the cable around the body. A threaded connector makes removal easy but attachment secure.

Last night, after trying the default PS3 config on MW3 Drop Zone, I swapped in the concave thumbsticks in a 360 config and used the PS3-style d-pad. I normally scrape by with a KDR of 0.55; my average after the first three games with the MLG Pro Circuit was 1.11. Dumb luck, lousy opponents, or the greatest controller ever? It’s all subjective; I simply felt more confident and comfortable than I normally do when playing MW3 on PS3. There’s a lot to be said for ergonomics and personal preference.

I ultimately went with 360 layout and sticks but a PS3 d-pad.

The MLG Pro Circuit controllers are $99.99 a pop (£109.99 in the UK). Significant investment, certainly — but this is exactly what I was looking for and then some. Hell, I want one for 360 now, and I’m already crazy happy with the MW3 360 controller I’m currently using. I do know this much: I’m not playing MW3 on PS3 any more without this, and I’m even more excited for Twisted Metal now.

I don’t have a rating system, but this gets eleventy-hundred icons of whatever. In my opinion, the MLG Pro Circuit is a shining (or matte finish) example of what customizable controllers can and should be.

Every day, millions of gamers play online RPGs. And every day, their rich fantasy lives are shattered by an all-too-common problem: Dumb names.

Hi, Lunaea. Thanks for the effort.

You’ve seen it in your MMO of choice, I’m sure: The guy at the auction house named Spydormann. The female mage named Magicwitch. A dude LFG named WellHung. A hired killer named HiredKiller. These people have made the commitment to immerse themselves in a world crammed with fantastic detail, and they complain loudly when its virtual reality does not live up to their standards. Why, then, do they intentionally ruin it for everyone around them with a stupid moniker that breaks that suspension of disbelief they just paid to support?

I’m hoping it’s just a case of people not knowing how to make an interesting name that matches their virtual realm. If that’s the case, I have some suggestions that will work for both medieval fantasy and science fiction games, online or off:

Change a letter. Start with your middle name, then swap a vowel or three. A double-swap on David yields Divad. Amanda, replace all the A’s and you’re Emendi. Still not hitting? Pick any letter in your name, look at your keyboard, and move one key to the left or right. Terry becomes Terru; Sarah is Satah.

Drop a letter. Daniel becomes Danil. Steve is now Stee. Taylor, meet Talor. Not enough? Use the above, then drop the last letter.

Anagram it. Rearrange the letters in “Dan Amrich” and you get…um, “rancid ham.” But you also get Archimand, which is my go-to name for any wizard I create. Try shuffling all the letters in your full name; if it’s not quite right, change or drop a letter as above.

Abbreviate it. Just as Jennifer Lopez is J-Lo, you can use the same first-letter-first-syllable trick, or the first two syllables. Dan Amrich becomes Danam; Robert Kotick becomes Arkot. Don’t like how your name works out? Try a teacher or a friend’s name instead, or swap in your mom’s maiden name for your last name.

Go international. Scandanavian and Gaelic names often put vowels and consonants where American gamers don’t expect to find them. As a result they can sound exotic if not downright alien. Not unusual enough? See the above steps.

Use a name generator. Available in sci-fi and fantasy flavors. Weapon of last resort, but better than HiredKiller, Spydormann, and WellHung.

Do your part. If you want to live in a fantasy world, at least show that world some respect. Because the rest of us are tired of seeing Laserguy and Hárrýpöttèr wherever we go.

UPDATE: Thanks to @AngeloAlcid for this Penny Arcade comic that totally validates my entire outlook!

I am honored to be a guest on G4′s Feedback this week, which is available as an audio podcast as well as the video below. We talk about game journalism, the end of GamePro’s run, “critic” vs. “journalist,” and where the comma goes, among various topics.

I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve gotten to meet Garnett Lee!

It started a few years ago. My wife Kat and I were home for the end of the year break, enjoying our time off, when we found ourselves playing games like Borderlands and Left 4 Dead 2 — games that, to be honest, didn’t have a lot of holiday spirit. Kat solved that by creating a new holiday: Headshotmas!

Headshotmas is the time when gamers finally get the time to play the games they have been looking forward to all year long, whether they got new titles as a recent gift or they’ve been staring at the box on their gaming shelf for the last four months thinking “When am I going to have time to play the rest of that game?” Headshotmas is a time to say not only “I love you” but also “I need to raise my KDR at your expense.” Headshotmas is the time to connect with long-lost friends and shoot them in the virtual eye.

In that spirit, Kat has created three Headshotmas holiday cards for you to send to your family and friends. To let them know that you are not just thinking of them this joyous season — you’re coming for them.

Click each image for a higher-resolution version:

This holiday, I've got you in my sights!

Friendly has Huggernaut.

This holiday, focus on the things that splatter.

You mean that guy?

I’ve been playing a lot of MW3 online lately, and in the spirit of Sesame Street, I’ve identified ten personality types of the people in my neighborhood — the people that I meet each day. You have probably met them too, and not just in Call of Duty games. Tell me if any of these sound familiar:

The Whiner
“Aw, why does the predator always hit me?” “What a loser, using [overpowered gun of the moment].” “I hate this map/mode/lobby.” If there is a reason for failing, the Whiner knows it – and it’s never his own lack of skill, bad aim, poor judgment, or lack of situational awareness. It’s the game’s fault. Or maybe yours. Why can’t you just let him win?

The Psychic Commander
He knows exactly what to do, where to go, and how to complete the mission. He just won’t share his strategy out loud. He expects you to know already, or to read his mind to find out. And when you don’t, he explodes in a rage about your incompetence. He’s the guy who screams about nobody covering him when he never asked for cover.

The Commentator
This guy’s here to give you instant updates on what is happening on his screen in real-time. “Wow, I just got shot in the head!” “Oh, I just got a double kill with a grenade!” “Damn, someone just blew up a car in front of me!” Sadly, the Commentator never realizes that people are watching their own screens, where they are the center of their own attention.

The Passive Broadcaster
Coming to you live, it’s whatever conversation, television program, radio station, or hyperactive children may be in the room. Broadcasters are unaware because they have learned to filter it out when they’re playing…but they’re also unaware that everybody else in the lobby has to hear whatever’s going on in the background, from Oprah’s latest guest to stories of what that rude woman said at work that day.

The Conversationalist
Never mind the game we’re playing – let’s talk about every other game, news event, sports score, movie review, gamer habit, or other completely unrelated topic. The Conversationalist only wants to have a big live chat room, and he will talk over your frantic attempts to share useful info with your teammates to be heard. And if you do engage, chances are good that he doesn’t really want to hear your opinion so much as create a context to express his own.

The Moderator
You and your friends might want to have a chat during gameplay – maybe even share some tactical info – but nobody is allowed to talk except The Moderator and the people on his friends list. The Moderator is in charge of any conversation, and if you speak without permission, you will be told to shut up.

The Operator
The Operator works the phones…even though nobody wants to hear the call. “Hey, what’s up? Oh, nothing…playing games online. Yeah.  Yeah. No, I didn’t. Well, I was going to ask you about that because Friday I thought we were going out.” Pause the game? Let it go to voice mail? No, and no. The Operator is too important for that.

The Fighter
He won. Ergo, you suck. Every victory ends with an arrogant tirade about how bad you are and how good he is. The whole lobby is invited to log off, change games, or apply suction to a part of The Fighter’s anatomy. As a hilarious, paradoxical bonus, The Fighter will sometimes call you a loser for wasting your life playing games.

The Stone
Nothing. The mic is on; you can see the icon in the lobby. He could say anything he wanted. He doesn’t want to. You ask him a direct question. He ignores you, or he has muted you. To play games with a microphone attached but no desire to use that microphone is confusing to you and me, but it makes perfect sense to The Stone.

The Homophobe/The Racist/The Homophobic Racist
You know what this guy says; I don’t need to repeat it. But he makes you miss The Stone.

Of course, there is a way to handle the people in your online gaming neighborhood: you have to talk with them. I firmly believe that the gaming community is only as good as you make it. A lot of people immediately mute anybody that annoys them, but that doesn’t solve the problem; that ignores it. If you let these people know — politely — that what they’re doing is annoying, maybe they’ll say “Oh, sorry,” and turn down that TV or think twice next time the phone rings. Seriously, this happens. If they come back at you with hate, well, mute away; you don’t have to take their abuse. But if you speak up first, you might be surprised to find they’re receptive to feedback — or that you have allies in the room who feel the same way you do.

It’s worth a try. They can only shoot you with virtual bullets anyway.

It doesn’t matter whether you play on console, computer, handheld, or smartphone – the holidays are a time for asking for stuff. You ask for stuff, stuff is asked of you, and regardless of which way the stuff-asking flows, you need to come up with answers. In that spirit, I have assembled a mix of blatant plugs and left-field ideas that may actually help. And everything is different from last year, I swear.

Anything with an Modern Warfare 3 logo on it (Price varies)
There’s official MW3 gear from Turtle Beach, Microsoft, Munitio, and Gunnar. But you know that already, and having the guy who works at Activision tell you they’re great gift ideas is hardly surprising — or even useful. Instead of filling the article with those obvious items, I’ll just fill this paragraph.

Ready Player One ($12)
This is not just the best book I’ve read this year — it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Being unrepentantly geeky and oozing 80s nostalgia helps its case significantly, but even if you don’t get every last reference, Ernest Cline’s fantasy of a near-future where society is essentially replaced by a giant MMO — which itself turns into a life-or-death treasure hunt — cleverly and respectfully plays with everything gamers know and hold dear, quite literally from Adventure to Zork. I was genuinely spooked by this book because I felt it was talking directly to me. Who the hell else really would have appreciated that one-two combination Tron/Sneakers reference on page 326?!

Skylanders Tower Case ($40)
OK, so the only “problem” I’ve had with Skylanders is how to keep my figures organized, and also portable because sometimes I play at work. This carrying case holds 8 figures (which, if you choose one from each element, is all you need to see all the optional side quests in the game) and is shaped like a tower, so it becomes a decoration in a kid’s room. Looks like you might be able to fit the Portal of Power in at the bottom, too.

Astro Gaming Audio Systems ($200-$250)
I’m often asked for my opinion on gaming headsets, and I’m a picky bastard about them for a few reasons. One, I have a degree in audio (fun fact: I did not actually set out to do this for a living). Two, I reviewed plenty of them during my time in the press and I’ve seen the good and the bad. Three, I can buy any headset I damn well want now that I’m Mr. Fancy Pants, and the headsets I use every day are Astro Gaming A30s an A40s. That is, I have a set of A40s at the office and A30s at home, and I always use them with the MixAmp. The Astro system works with Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Mac…hell, I used my A30s as an iPhone headset on a conference call this weekend.

The A40s are bigger and the over-the-ear design is great for sound isolation (you can even put foam inserts in the sides to block out even more of the outside world). The A30s are slimmer with an on-the-ear designs that make them a great choice for use with your iPod or PSP when you’re out and about. I regularly wear both pairs for hours with no fatigue and excellent clarity. An investment? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely. I love my Astros.

Nuketown Mannequin shirt ($20)
I bought one of these shirts at Call of Duty XP 2011 because Nuketown is my favorite Black Ops map, and I thought the show would be the only place I’d be able to find them. Surprise — Jinx has the same shirt; all it’s missing is the XP 2011 logo on the back. What’s more, it’s $10 less than I paid at the event. I’ll be damned. Jinx has more Black Ops gear too, if you’d like to show your allegiance to the Cold War missions that never officially existed.

2D glasses ($9)
You know what sucks about 3D movies? The 3D thing. In my case, I have trouble seeing them because of my legendarily lazy eye (get motivated already, dammit!), but I’ve also heard from several other people that it’s just freakin’ annoying and they would rather pay attention to old-fashioned stuff like story and acting when they go to the movies. These glasses have two lenses featuring the same filter — they turn any modern 3D movie into a two-dimensional affair. Now you can see the plot holes much more clearly!

Call of Duty Elite premium membership ($50)
A premium membership gives you additional benefits beyond the usual free stuff. Primarily, premium members will get all the DLC for MW3, for 360 or PS3, as soon as it’s available and before it’s available to non-Elite users. It’s one of those “gifts that keeps on giving” that you hear about. There are other benefits too, such as more video storage space, longer video clips, the ability to win real-world prizes in competitions, and all that stuff you’ve probably heard me talk about before. But consider this: If you give it to a friend, you can make them thank you every time each of those 20 pieces of MW3 DLC arrives. Ho-ho-hold it over their head all year long!

Mad Catz MLG Pro Circuit Controller ($100)
While the FightStick TE is still my weapon of choice for UMvC3 (and SSFIVAE on Steam, for that matter), the new MLG controllers gave me new gear lust when I saw them at PAX. The d-pads and analog sticks are swappable — so, say, if you’re a PS3 player and the 360 controller layout feels weird to your thumbs, move the analog sticks so they feel right to you. Don’t like the texture of the thumbsticks themselves? You can get different ones. Want the controller a little lighter, or heaver? Adjust the removable weights until it’s just right, Goldilocks. Prefer a matte look to a glossy one? Swap faceplates. Throw in a removable braided cable and a hard case and you something I’ve honestly never seen anybody attempt to bring to market. Right now the 360 version is available for preorder at Amazon, and the PS3 is coming soon. But the gamer on your list will probably accept a photo and an IOU if it’s not ready in time.

Starfire LS-24 Light Sword ($130)
Admit it, you big geek — you would love to hang a real sword on the wall or over your fireplace. This is the one I actually own, making it the official sword of OneOfSwords. It’s designed for stage combat, so it can handle some action (um, don’t sharpen it, dummy), but I’ve used it as a damn-that’s-cool accessory for ren faires and costumes for years. Oil or WD-40 and a scabbard will keep the blade rust-free; just keep an eye and some steel wool on the hilt from time to time, too.

A donation to the Call of Duty Endowment (Price varies)
It is the season of giving, and perhaps you have a person on your gift list who really doesn’t need anything physical this year — maybe the knowledge that you made a donation to a worthy cause in their name is what would really make them happy. Heaven knows it would make the veterans that benefit from the Call of Duty Endowment happy, as they return to civilian life and get the jobs they deserve. It’s as simple as PayPal.

Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they’re happy, for yourself and others.

Tell me, honestly — do you know what all those things in your PC game’s graphics menu actually mean, let alone what they do? I don’t, and I finally found someone who can answer: Darren “Gizmo” Gladstone, ex-game journo and currently the blogger-in-chief at HP’s TheNextBench.com, is here to educate me (and maybe you) on what those esoteric technical terms really mean and how they affect the PC games I play. Beyond that, Kat, Hugh and I tackle the new Transformers game announcement, thorns & roses, Skylanders’ free demo this weekend, Ewok movies, limes, how much a big gaming URL costs (if you hire a lawyer), the second round of Activision’s Independent Game Competition, sugar water, Episode III continuity issues, and Hugh’s…well, let’s not call it a fetish, lest we paint him as some sort of weirdo. (This episode is brought to you by RoboChangers: Not Quite What They Seem!)

Get the podcast on iTunes
Get the podcast on Zune Marketplace
Get the podcast on your own with RSS Feedburner
Or use the links below to listen in the browser or download direct.

More info after the jump…

Special Guest: Darren “Gizmo” Gladstone, Blogger-in-Chief at HP’s TheNextBench.com

Co-host: Hugh Sterbakov, screenwriter, comic creator, and Emmy-nominated writer/toy wrangler for Robot Chicken
Co-host: Katrin Auch, graphic designer, bassist, photographer, light gun enthusiast, videographer, worgen mage, and inventor of Headshotmas

Soundtrack: Yameen - available on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and all online music stores

Relevant show links:

• Gizmo’s advice on Diablo III PC prep, graphic limitations, upgrade tips, and a helpful tweak guide
• Transformers: Fall of Cybertron will be in Game Informer
• Skylanders demo this weekend at your local Toys R Us
• Skylanders.com itself (and how it came to be)
• Activision Independent Games Competition, round 2
• The Damsels of Dorkington and “I Kissed A Nerd”
• Jonathan Coulton’s Artifical Heart
• Hugh’s sister Jill’s running blog
• Kat and Hugh on Twitter
• Enter your own question for Stick It To The Dan (or Hugh Don’t Know Jack)

For some people, Activision means Call of Duty, or Tony Hawk, or MechWarrior. For me, Activision means Pitfall!, Laser Blast, and Keystone Kapers – the Atari 2600 games from the early 80s. I always romanticized what visiting Activision would be like as a kid, and now that I work here…well, it’s been my goal to bring some of that romance back, at least to my office.

A few years ago, I picked up an Atari 2600 Jr. (the redesign from 1985 with the awesome ad) and attempted to modify it so it would run easily on modern televisions. That did not go so well (I can’t solder to save my life) so my friend and musical cohort Jude Kelley finished the project for me.

I had the games, but the system came with a Pro-Line joystick

The result: An Atari 2600 that outputs via S-video, composite video, and stereo sound.

Stereo sound and composite video via jacks that Jude added

Remove RF jack, replace it with S-Video -- Jude makes it look easy

I will keep this in my office from now on. I am now looking to fill the holes in my Activision 2600 cartridge collection; except for a few I’ve picked up at yard sales, those games in the photo are the same ones I’ve had since I was a kid. I have the Pro-Line Joystick (CX24) but also a standard Atari joystick (CX40) so whenever someone wants to come by and play Stampede or Starmaster as the founding fathers intended, they can.

UPDATE: Jude sent me a photo of the project when it was in progress. Crazy!

Oh, is that all?

Also, I have tracked down a few of the titles I was missing — Boxing, River Raid, Chopper Command, Kaboom, and a handful of titles from Imagic (which Activision owns — they bought them out after the big crash). I even tracked down Absolute Entertainment’s Skate Boardin’, programmed by David Crane. Absolute was founded by ex-Activision programmers. It’s in an Activision cartridge shell with the logo blocked out.

This could be you

Just heard about a cool promotion for folks who preorder Prototype 2 at GameStop: Since ponying up the bucks this early shows real dedication, developer Radical Entertainment might reward you by putting you in the game itself. Winners will fly to Vancouver to meet the team, be digitized, and then when the game ships in April, you can change from Sgt. James Heller into yourself. I’m jealous.

Follow these links for details on how to enter if you are in the US or Canada.

The gang over at OXM asked me to write a guest column on, of all things, game manuals. I guess I have a rep for having opinions on just about everything. Naturally, I found a way to work classic arcade games into the discussion. The resulting article has just been posted online if you’d like to see it.

I have a PlayStation 3. I play games on it, I watch movies on it…you know, it only does everything.™ But there’s one thing that I use my PS3 for more than anything else, and I’d like to encourage other people to join in. It’s charitable, easy, and even a little competitive.

For several years now I’ve been donating my computer’s spare processing power to the Folding@Home project at Stanford. The goal is to use the untapped power of the world’s idle computers to research how proteins assemble themselves (or how proteins “fold”) and, through that, cure diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, and cancer. All you have to do is set up the software on your computer, which then downloads “work units” and kicks in whenever you’re not terribly busy. The system assigns you points for your work; I’ve been running clients on my home and work machines for years, so while working with the Maximum PC folding team, I’ve processed over 17,000 work units and earned 5.8 million points. Now I’ve started my own Folding@Home team in an attempt to spread the word and get more people involved.

What a protein looks like on your PlayStation 3

The PlayStation 3 features a built-in Folding@Home client as part of Life With PlayStation; all you have to do is put in your name and team number. Many geek groups already have teams, so pick any organization you like, or join the OneOfSwords team I’ve set up, team 205163, or leave it blank — even uncredited, your work will still go toward a greater good. All you really have to do is leave your PS3 on when you’re not playing, if you’re comfortable with that. (I leave my PS3 Slim running 24/7; I’ve had no problems for the last year or so.) Full setup details are here but you can probably figure it out on your own from within Life With PlayStation. You can track the team leaderboard here and see how we’re doing against other teams here.

So when you’re not working on a new level of Prestige in Call of Duty, consider doing something even more prestigious in the meantime. If you want to spread the word, the URL for this page is http://bit.ly/1osfolding. Thanks.

I’ll be in Santa Clara, California this weekend for the annual California Extreme arcade show. It’s being held at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, a whopping 10 minutes from the San Jose airport. It’s two days of several hundred arcade games and pinball machines, all set to free play.

There's more where these came from

This is the 15th year of this gathering of pinball and coin-op conservationists. I look forward to it every year, even though I no longer live in the area. I would urge anybody with the means to get there, to get there. Why? Well, in case last year’s recap didn’t entice you, let me rattle off a half-dozen reasons…

1. This is history you can play.
The way other people get nostalgic about NES or Genesis (or, heaven help me, original PlayStation) games is how I get about arcade machines. This is really where gaming culture was born, where innovation was at its peak, when there were no rules — whatever the engineers and programmers of the late 70s and early 80s could come up with was fair game as long as it was fun. I like to think I know a great deal about old coin-ops, but every year I am introduced to some obscure game I’d never heard of, or learn something I’d never learn anywhere else. Last year I wound up playing an 8-person Atari driving game with one of the guys who built the thing; as we did laps, he told me stories of how it came to be. Somebody pinch me.

My friend Jude plays the only-one-in-the-world Nightmare prototype.

2. Rarities abound.
Atari’s coin-op headquarters was not far from San Jose, and many of the people who bring their games to CA Extreme are ex-employees. As a result, they have prototypes and oddballs that you simply will not find anywhere else. There was a sequel to Marble Madness that used a joystick. There was a military version of Battlezone called Bradley Trainer. There was a Beavis & Butthead arcade game that never came out. There was going to be sequel to Race Drivin’ called Air Drivin’, where your car turned into a plane. I have seen or played all these at CA Extreme.

That’s to say nothing for the low-production-run and just-plain-forgotten games that you’ll see and play. Varkon — a pinball machine in an arcade cabinet! There’s only 100 of those in existence, but one shows up most years. The Grid, Ed Boon’s never-ported-to-console deathmatch masterpiece that links six arcade cabinets together for total chaos? Always draws a crowd here. You can quite honestly see the entire evolution of pinball in one room.

3. It’s more than just games. 
The main attraction is the arcade, but there’s more, too. If you’re a competitive player, there are official tournaments with trophies and prizes. A few vendors appear each year with rarities for both coin-op and console collectors. This year, there will be a long list of game music and chiptune acts performing Saturday night into the wee hours. Every year there are speakers and panels, offering everything from wisdom on how to keep your own coin-ops running to silly stuff like trivia contests and game shows. I have come in second in the trivia contest four years running. This drives me nuts.

4. Some of the machines are for sale.
Every year, CA Extreme doubles as a giant swap meet. Any machines that are for sale include a sticker with the price and a cell phone number, so you can make deals. Prices are very reasonable; this community is not going to rip you off. And of course, you can try before you buy…!

5. I really do love this stuff. 
CA Extreme is put on by collectors who simply care about this stuff enough to truck all their games out of their homes and garages and basements to let everybody play with their favorite toys. It’s like Blizzcon for arcade nerds, or PAX with a specific arcade focus — a celebration of gaming love. Last year, Kat directed & shot the Arcade Gaming Shrine video at CA Extreme. It typified everything Jude and I were talking about in the song.

Like any gamer, I want to share what makes me really happy with other people. I basically grew up in arcades, so it’s a personal thrill when I see people come to CAX and discover what has always been important in my life. I love to share these experiences with other people.

6. I’ll be there.
Granted, this is not a huge draw, but I am going to be helping out a little more this year than in past years — I’m helping host a Panic Park tournament and I’ll be part of one of the panels. So if nothing else, come and play old games with me. You will likely see some writers and editors from local game websites and magazines there too.

California Extreme really is like nothing else I’ve seen or attended. If you can be there, be there. It’s totally worth it. I will be heading up on Friday, so there will be no Playing With Swords event this week. I’ll report back on what happens at California Extreme, but it’d be better if you can see it yourself.

Time for a retrotastic lesson in geek gaming, folks. Keen-eyed gamers who played Call of Duty: Black Ops may have also noticed that, buried within the secrets of the computer in the interrogation room, there was an old-school easter egg: a complete and playable version of the original Zork I — the granddaddy of interactive fiction, which Activision just happens to keep safe in its vast library of games. But wouldn’t you rather play Zork on your iPhone or iPad? You can. It’s easy. And I’m gonna show you how.

For this Fun Of Swords Rainy-Day Activity, you will need the following:

• A copy of The Zork Anthology from GOG.com for PC ($5.99)
• An iPhone, iPod Touch, or an iPad (pricey)
• A copy of Frotz for iOS devices (free)
• A computer with a web browser (ubiquitous)

1. Spend six bucks and get The Zork Anthology from the fine folks at GOG.com — the home of Good Old Games. That package includes Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and the not-Zork-but-absolutely-awesome sci-fi comedy Planetfall. Of those six games, only Zork Zero requires an actual PC to run; it was one of the few Infocom games that utilized a graphical interface. The other five are pure text adventures, and they will run natively in Frotz. Install this Anthology wherever you want it (the default is C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Zork Anthology) but remember where you put it — we’re going to go digging through its directory shortly.

This is what you want from GOG. Six games, six bucks. Cheap!

2. Download Frotz from the iTunes Store and install it to your iOS thing. It’s a universal app; I’m showing iPhone screens, but the iPad interface is the same, only bigger. Frotz is a free interactive fiction interpreter, and it comes with two dozen community-written games already. It also supports Dropbox, so you can store your save files to your Dropbox account and keep the same progress if you happen to have both an iPhone and an iPad, for instance. Anyway, tap the circle-i information icon at the top of the screen and you’ll bring up a settings menu. Select File Transfer.

3. Here’s the only tricky bit, really, and it’s not even all that terribly tricky. You need to load the game file from your PC into your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. Tap “Start File Transfer” at the bottom, and you’ll get an IP address, like 192.168.X.X, and a port number for either HTTP or FTP connections. Frotz suggests HTTP first, and so do I — type that IP address into your browser’s address line. It should bring up a simple and easy graphical menu, showing all the games currently installed on your iOS device.

Frotz comes with 24 games already, but we're adding more.

4. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and you’ll see a small interface for adding games. See where it says “Original Infocom files with extension .DAT are also supported”? That’s what matters for you. Click “Upload Story File” and navigate to the Zork’s DATA folder (default location is C:\Program Files\GOG.com\Zork Anthology\Zork\DATA). Select the file called ZORK1.DAT and type in the name “Zork I” in the box on the lower right. Then hit Submit.

Don't forget to type in the name of the game before submitting.

5. Faster than you can say “xyzzy,” you should see Zork I appear in your list of games. Repeat the process for the other four titles. When you’re done, you can close that browser window and check the list of games on your iOS device.

Frotz recognizes original Infocom files and automatically adds thumbnail art.

6. Tap “Zork I” in your list of games and you’ll get a screen that looks uncannily like this:

Frotz works in portrait or landscape and lets you do cool things like double-tap any word on to screen to repeat it in your next command — a handy shortcut. Play around with the settings in Frotz and you can change the colors, fonts, and assists like word completion. But there you have it — totally portable text adventures on your iDevice.

Neat, huh? Enjoy being eaten by a grue.

It’s always the first question at every show — sometimes asked in earnest, sometimes a desperate attempt at awkward small-talk. But it’s also understandable since E3 is such an enormous information overload. If a friend can bring up a game you should make time to see, you want to know before the event is over.

A lot of people on Twitter asked me the same question. I was in the Activision booth for a good chunk of the show (and this site contains all you need to know about those games — check my quick & dirty previews), so I really didn’t visit a ton of booths and I missed some big titles — Batman: Arkham City, Gears of War 3, and BioShock Infinite were “ones that got away” so I’m eagerly watching trailers and reading previews like everybody else. But I did get a chance to check out a few non-Activision things of particular personal interest:

Twisted Metal
I think what I associate most with the TM series is the car handling — there’s a sublime joy to powersliding with the e-brake while strafing an enemy with gunfire. I played a team competitive mode and was thrilled to find that the feel was exactly right — it looked great, offered a wide selection of cars, and totally made me happy to play again. While I’ve certainly enjoyed games like Uncharted, Flower, and Super Stardust HD, this is why I really wanted a PS3. It’s been a bit of a wait, but my hands-on time really gave me the jolt I was looking for.

Dance Central 2
To me, DC was the definitive Kinect experience at launch — and my choreographer/dancer wife agrees. Not only does the choreography look more interesting this time around, but two people can dance side by side, and at different skill levels. Plus, Kasson Crooker confirmed that all existing DLC will work with the sequel, so that’s awesome. I think this will be similar to the jump from GH to GHII — fun the first time around, but way more fun with some refinement and a two-player simultaneous mode. You might find some blackmail video of me dancing to Bananarama’s “Venus” if you look, but I hope not.

Rocksmith
I’ve been playing guitar since the days when people wore spandex out in public, and while I stay active as a guitarist, I have plateaued. It’s hard to find ways to push yourself; you get comfortable and stagnate. Many fellow guitarists in line for the Rocksmith demo expressed that same problem, and were hoping the game might give us the creative kick in the ass we needed. Rocksmith uses any electric guitar — plug it in via a special USB cable, and your console hears everything you play (I suspect there’s a small pre-amp in the cable, but I don’t know for sure). As you play along with the on-screen cues, the game ramps up the difficulty based on your skill. I went from single notes on Nirvana’s “In Bloom” up through chords on my first play-through — but had I had the time to play it again, I’d pick up on chords again. I liked what it offered, but found the interface a little tricky; since they need to show the entire fretboard on the screen at once, the forced perspective/isometric view makes it hard to determine which note is coming on which fret. Maybe they’ll be able to tweak that before release this fall, but I’m stoked to try it more either way.

Need for Speed: The Run
I have always liked the idea of the Cannonball Run, the illegal cross-country race which inspired some goofy movies in the 80s. The next installment of the NFS franchise seems to take its inspiration from the same events, but views it through a darker lens: you play as Jack, a marked man who participates in an illicit race from SF to NY to save his own life. I played the Chicago level that was available in the EA booth and it was fairly harrowing — dodging a spotlight from an armed helicopter overhead was not easy in the somewhat sluggish police cruiser, but the tension was undeniable. I like racing games with plots, so I’m keeping an eye on this one.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition
One of the best technical fighters ever made is coming to XBLA and PSN? My TE FightStick is prepared.

There was plenty more to see, and I think I would have liked a lot of it. I just didn’t get to this year. But I do know what I’m going to preorder…

Follow all the OneOfSwords E3 coverage by clicking below:

If you’re just joining us, I do a weekly podcast with two friends, one of whom is a writer for Robot Chicken and the other of whom is married to me. And on that podcast I give away prizes to people who can answer a weekly trivia question.

We’re changing the way the trivia works — instead of me asking you something that you can just look up on Google, you have to come up with one and try to stump me, and I have to answer it on the spot. We call it Stick It To The Dan. (Hugh calls it Hugh Don’t Know Jack, but he is delusional.) Here’s how it works:

Come up with a good trivia question — preferably about videogames or something that I might have a chance in hell of knowing. Include the right answer and three wrong answers. Kat will screen them and I will never see your email, but she’s also in charge of picking ones she thinks will be worthy challenges. She’ll read it on the air; Hugh and I will both attempt to answer, based on our vast gaming knowledge and advanced age. Whether we get it right or wrong, you have already won — if Kat picks your question, you will get an Activision Mystery Prize Pack.

So, come up with a good geeky gaming trivia question and put it below, then tune into the podcast and see if your question made the cut. If it did, you win!

Once upon a time, my podcast co-host Katrin Auch and I worked on staff together at GamePro magazine. This was in the era when all the staff editors and artists had cartoony pseudonyms. It became a point of criticism — some people suggested that the editors were hiding being a fake name, but when the one levying that self-righteous critique is posting under the name Goku1985, well, that kind of loses its sting. Besides, we didn’t take it seriously; it was just fun to have your own cartoon character. And when they made those cartoon characters into action figures…well, that was geek immortality.

GamePro partnered with Joyride Studios (a division of Ertl) to make a line of action figures based on a wide variety of game characters — Sonic the Hedgehog, SSX, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter, stuff like that. (They also helped broker the Halo and Nintendo lines, but Nintendo said the latter had to have Nintendo Power’s name on it instead of GamePro’s.)  The catch was that Joyride had to make a limited number of figures based on the GamePro editorial characters, and we let the readers decide who got made. Kat’s character, Miss Spell — the witch who put the sex in dyslexia — was one that made the cut.

Now, let it be clear that nobody really expected the GamePro figures to be big sellers. They only made 2500 of each one — individually numbered on each figure, no less — relegating it to “chase”status by design. We were never intending to compete with Samus and Super Monkey Ball; it was really just a feather in our cap.

Then it became a box in our garage. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a huge honor, but how many tiny plastic reminders of the past does one person need? Kat and I have been hoarding a few cases of Miss Spell figures for years, and I figured it’s time to make good on my podcast promise to give some away. So in honor of Kat’s birthday this weekend, I’ve got 10 to hand out.

To enter…well, start by listening to the podcast this week. I teased this many months ago on the show and, since Kat participates every week on the podcast, the prizes should go to podcast listeners. And since they’re her figures, she has designed a competition for giving them away. She explains it all on podcast 067, so download it and find out what you need to do to enter. You have until the end of Sunday May 15th; starting Monday the 16th, she’s going to pick winners.

So have fun with that, and good luck. Oh, and happy birthday, Kat.

UPDATE 5/16: In case you never went back to listen to the show, Kat challenged the listeners to come up with a LOLcat based on a) photos she’d taken of her own cats (Sadie’s the gray one, and Devon’s the white one) and b) the podcast/OneOfSwords in general. She looked at the 30+ entries multiple times before she could make up her mind, and it was tough picking the winners. But these were the ones that made her smile the widest and laugh the loudest. The entries proved two things conclusively: One, we have a lot of international listeners with a good sense of humor — we got lots of entries from Canada, England, Scotland, and New Zealand, as well as the US of A. Two, everybody around the globe likes making fun of Hugh. We wonder if that might the common thread that will one day create world peace.

Here are the 10 winners, in no particular order:

Mark Litzinger -- Kent, Ohio, USA

Kevin Selinger -- Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Salvador M. -- California, USA

Matthew Booth -- El Segundo, California, USA

Mick Smart -- location TBD

Patrick Gadrow -- East Aurora, New York, USA

Robin Scott -- Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK

Bane Williams & his girlfriend -- location TBD

James King -- UK

Craig Galbraith -- Guelph, Ontario, Canada

It should be noted that Kat saw the last one early on and said “It’s a classic. I have to respect that.”

It’s a busy week behind the scenes, so please be patient on prize fulfillment — I’ll get them shipped out ASAP. If you entered and didn’t win, Kat thanks everybody for the creative effort and the virtual birthday wishes — she had a lot of fun seeing what people came up with and appreciated the kind words, too.

And if you didn’t get any of these jokes…you should listen to the podcast more often. Because now it’s a matter of world peace.

If you are a fan of Call of the Dead, you’ve probably downloaded the poster image to your desktop by now. There are paper verisons of that poster (some of which the Activision Customer Support team is giving away), and by and large it’s the same image, albeit with a metallic finish and a shiny spot varnish. But I haved learned that that there is actually a hidden layer to the poster for Call of the Dead…I’m just having trouble photographing it.

Turns out there is yet another layer of ink, and special sections of the artwork glow in the dark. First, all the zombies’ eyes glow. Second, the phrase at the top of the poster glows, but it replaces “killer” with an ellipsis, so it reads “There is a zombie…in all of us.” And finally, the credits across the bottom of the poster disappear and are replaced by the word “BRAAAAIINS” in capital letters!

I did photographic experiments all day and could not get a shot of the glowing elements, but while I was charging the poster in the sunlight, I was able to get the reflections right to show the first part of the word “BRAAAAIINS”:

Normally it's invisible, but you can see it from a well-lit angle

I don’t know if anybody who won these posters in my last giveaway has spotted this yet, but I tried to give them a hint in the congratulations note I included in the tube — I said things like “at night this will reveal its secrets” but I didn’t want to go full spoiler. Well, now they know! And now that you know, I figure you may want to increase your efforts to win one of these posters in the CS team’s giveaway.

The Call of the Dead posters I gave away last week were extra popular as soon as people realized they were gone — a lot of people have asked if I have any more to give away. I do not, but the Activision customer support team does — and they have come up with a fun way to give them out.

Basically, the CS team wants you to turn them into zombies. The Twitter profile pictures of ATVI_Randolph, ATVI_Bernard, ATVI_Mikey, ATVI_Dov, and ATVI_Flav are all fair game — follow them on Twitter, then zombify any one or all of them with your leet Photoshop skills. You can also use the images from the recent Community Playdate if you like them better. (If you don’t have Photoshop, you can do fairly powerful image editing at photoshop.com for free — just sign up for an account.) Then @reply on Twitter to one of the aforementioned CS folks with your entry — upload it as a Twitpic/Plixi/yfrog/whatever image service you like and include the hashtag #zombifysupport in your message so they can keep track of all the entries. You have until Monday, May 16 to get your entries in, and you can submit multiple entries to increase your chances (but you can only win one poster).

The team will then post their favorite photos to the photo gallery at facebook.com/ActivisionAssist and you will be able to vote on them. The three images with the most Likes on them take home posters, and the single image with the most amount of Likes also gets an Escalation map pack code for 360 or PS3 (your choice). Due to shipping costs (as well as the region lock on the DLC codes), this one’s North America only.

So…start thinking. Check out the images on those Twitter accounts, let the creative juices start seeping out like so much zombie effluvia, and get your entries in before this time next week. May the best zeds win!

UPDATE 5/17: Wow, check out the Facebook photo gallery!

Not just trippy and awesome -- officially culturally important!

Back in February, gamers were asked to vote on the most visually important and influential games in history to be counted in a Smithsonian art exhibition celebrating gaming visuals. The official description:

The Art of Video Games exhibition will explore the 40‐year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus onstriking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers. A website offered participants a chance to vote for 80 games from a pool of 240 proposed choices in various categories, divided by era, game type and platform.

I’m happy to say that three Activision games made the cut — the original Pitfall! helping represent Atari 2600, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns on ColecoVision, and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 as a key title for the Xbox 360.  The complete list of winners is here.

State of the art in 1982. Now, legitimately art!

Since we’re talking about it, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the original Pitfall! is still available as part of Game Room on the 360, and that its origin story — which in turn gives fantastic insight into how Atari 2600 games were made — is recounted in Racing the Beam, a book I wholeheartedly suggest you buy.

The Art of Video Games exhibition will be on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from March 16, 2012 through September 30, 2012. Yes, that’s a year away — so plan your vacation accordingly!

So we’re at the one-week mark for the PlayStation Network outage. No system is ever perfect — Xbox Live had some growing pains, and of course PC game servers have spent their share of time offline — but this is the first outage of this magnitude I can remember since the dawn of the connected console era. It’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed and fixed definitively, which takes time, and I would rather have a secure system than a quick fix, so I’ll wait patiently. Seriously — this is a problem that will get solved, and while it’s a major drag, it is an inconvenience to a luxury activity that should be kept in perspective.

I was going to write about things you can do while you wait, but many of them are pretty obvious. Watch Blu-ray movies? You probably figured that out without my help. Play single-player games or couch multiplayer games? Again, duh. That said, if you have not finished the original Prototype, which has no multiplayer component anyway, now’s a good opportunity — there’s a sequel coming next year.

No online? No problem!

But there’s one thing that I use my PS3 for more than anything, and it’s not tied to the PlayStation Network — but it is online. For several years now I’ve been donating my computer’s spare processing power to the Folding@Home project at Stanford. The goal is to use the untapped power of the world’s idle computers to research how proteins assemble themselves (or how proteins “fold”) and, through that, cure diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, and cancer. All you have to do is set up the software on your computer, which then downloads “work units” and kicks in whenever you’re not terribly busy. The system assigns you points for your work; I’ve been running clients on my home and work machines for years (as part of the Maximum PC team that was set up when I was at Future US), so I’ve processed over 17,000 work units and earned 5.8 million points. It’s like Trophies, only this time, they really might mean something beyond personal digital glory.

What a protein looks like on your PS3

The PlayStation 3 features a built-in Folding@Home client as part of Life With PlayStation; all you have to do is put in your name and team number. Many geek groups already have teams, so pick any organization you like, or join the OneOfSwords team I’ve just set up, team 205163, or leave it blank — even uncredited, your work will still go toward a greater good. All you really have to do is leave your PS3 on when you’re not playing, if you’re comfortable with that. Full setup details are here but you can probably figure it out on your own from within Life With PlayStation. The PSN outage does not affect the F@H client; the only thing you can’t do is see leaderboard data through the PS3, but the work units are still going through just fine.

So you can’t Prestige in Black Ops online right now…but you can do something even more prestigious in the meantime.

I flew in to Boston a day early to make a pilgrimage to Funspot, the largest arcade in the world. This is the document of that pilgrimage, and it has pretty much nothing to do with Activision. Special thanks to Jamie Jamitkowski and Jude Kelley, not to mention Katrin Auch. Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I was talking with cartoonist extraordinaire Charlie Gavin (he of the superhero comic Silver Age) the other day. We’ve been trying to find a project to work on together for a while now. He’s heard me rant about a few game-culture things, and suggested those rants take comic form. Well, one problem — I don’t really want to be a ranter. If they happen, they happen, but I don’t really want to formalize myself as the “you kids, get off my lawn” type.

So Charlie came up with a way around it — “you talk, I’ll interepret.” I threw out a few concepts, Charlie ran with them — wrote the script, drew the comics, made it all happen. I just sort of said “You know what bugs me? You know what I wish more people were aware of?” and he literally did the rest. And I love where he went with it.

Enjoy some exclusive Monday funnies. And thank Charlie for the healing power of sarcasm.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops team gave me some codes for the First Strike DLC to give away…and I gave them away today. If you didn’t see it, you might not have been following my Twitter account. I sent out a URL to a video chat room with no warning or explanation, and proceeded to post handwritten codes on my cubicle wall in real time. Well, handwritten codes with a twist.

These are all claimed -- don't bother to enter them in

As you can see, some of the codes were just normal characters on a page, while others I wrote out of order, rotated, backwards (never tried that before…turned out to be tricky to write) — I even gave some away by creating HTML pages that held further clues. I was doing this all on the fly while people came into the chat room, so I missed most of the actual discussion. I saw some haters, I banned a few disruptors, but overall, it worked pretty well.

I did it this way because…it simply struck me as fun. If you have followed me for any length of time, you know I like puzzles — I create them from time to time and maintain an outdated website on one that was a strong influence. Also, I’m not convinced the “RT this to win” Twitter contests do much good for anybody. I tried it for a while; in addition to being called a spammer, what I found was people would follow me, wait for the contest to end, then bail. Now, I’d rather simply reward the people who do follow me on a regular basis with random surprises and scratch my sadistic puzzle itch at the same time. And even if you don’t win, hopefully you’re having fun cracking the clues.

I don’t have any more First Strike codes to give away at the moment. If you like winning free stuff, I give things away on my podcast every week and I also have a Freebies category here on the site. Those are generally much easier.

Otherwise…stay sharp and follow me on Twitter. You never know when I’m gonna do something weird, and that’s exactly the way I like it.

The coolest thing you will see — or maybe have seen, the net moves pretty fast — this month is Fire Hero, which is kind of what it sounds like: Guitar Hero plus FIRE!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fire Hero is the brainchild of Chris Marion, who took the project from dream to reality in a week. As he describes it: “Simply interface a Guitar Hero controller to a microcontroller that would power some relays which would in turn fire off solenoid valves on five individual fire poofers!” Easy!

Naturally, this is not something you should do at home, but damn, it’s awesome to watch. And he’s talking about improvements for Fire Hero 2.0, including color flames and…Star Power!

There are more videos, photos, and a complete story of how Fire Hero came to be over at Chris’s site. Go, but keep a safe distance. (Thanks to @Toymasheensh and @GuitarHero for the tip.)

I have been getting that question more frequently recently — which I take as a compliment. I’m hoping people ask because they like what they hear and might be trying to build their own podcast rig. The gear and methods I use to record the show are not something I consider a secret; I’m happy to share what I know. However, it’s also a huge question, and I put a lot of thought and research into my choices, so this is going to be a lengthy and detailed post. You’re warned!

My college degree is in audio production, but the year after I walked away in my cap and gown, the industry went digital. Everything I’d learned about sound theory and microphones and stuff was still valid — but if you need a guy to cut 1/4″ reel-to-reel tape armed only with a grease pencil and a razor blade, I am absolutely your man. With digital recording, I’ve had to fill in the gaps myself. But let my mistakes be your benefits.

When I came to Activision, I had a decent budget to get the gear I’d need, so I went with a MacBook Pro and, knowing I’d be doing both audio and video production, a copy of the Final Cut Studio suite. I use its audio editor component, Soundtrack Pro, to record and edit the podcast. In the words of Ferris Bueller, it is so choice — if you have the means, I highly recommend it. However, most people won’t have access to that, so Audacity is my backup. It’s multiplatform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), it makes waveform editing easy, and best of all, it’s free/donateware.

I knew I would need to record in several different situations — Skype interviews, phone interviews, live-in-person interviews, stick-a-recorder-in-someone’s-face-at-an-event interviews — so I planned ahead for all eventualities, plus I had some of my own audio gear I knew I could press into service. So for each situation, here’s what I do:

Recording Skype
When Hugh and I record the show, it’s via Skype. I use one of three USB condenser mics — the Blue Snowball, the M-Audio Producer USB, or my favorite, the Blue Yeti — and Hugh is using a Logitech ClearChat Comfort headset. Before that, he was using a Rock Band/Guitar Hero microphone — they certainly get the job done.

To record everything on one machine, I route the audio output (via System Preferences -> Sound) through a free Mac system extension called Soundflower. Then in Soundtrack Pro, I record Hugh on one track (with Soundflower selected as the input) and my audio on another (with my USB mic selected as the track input). Soundtrack Pro is very accomodating in that it lets you put different mics on different tracks simultaneously — not all audio apps do that. There are other ways to record Skype calls — Pamela for Skype, or routing the Skype computer’s audio output to another computer or recorder — but this was the best Mac solution I found for my setup, and I have used it since the beginning with no issues.

Recording phone calls
The easiest thing for me to do is the Skype method above and just use Skype’s phone functionality. For international calls, I bought some Skype credits (I called Poland on one of the earliest shows). On other occasions, I really need to be on a physical phone — like when I spoke to the guys from Bungie during their “audio press tour” and they called me. For those opportunities, I have a Radio Shack patch cable that plugs into my phone’s handset and basically taps the line. I run the audio out to a Tascam DR-07, which records to SD card — and the Mac has an SD reader built in. The audio usually needs heavy tweaking to get the levels up to something I could use on the podcast, so I still prefer to use Skype, but it at least lets me get the interview, whether I choose to broadcast it or not.

On-the-spot interviews
When I ambush people at industry events or on the floor of E3, I use the Tascam DR-07 again. I often use an external condenser mic — an older Sony ECM S907 (which has its own interesting footnote in my personal gaming history…another time!) which is powered by a single AA — but it’s personal preference and not really necessary. The built-in stereo mics do a fine job.

In-person interviews & roundtables
This is where I realized it was going to get tricky — sometimes I will have the chance to talk to an entire development team at once and I might need to travel to get that interview. That means I need a lot of mics and I need to be able to move them all at once…and I had to be able to bring all the gear myself. Behold:

Be prepared

That’s four MXL 770 condensers (on tiny little collapsible mic stands) running into a Mackie ProFX8 USB mixer. I also have four sets of headphones and a headphone distribution amp so all four people can hear themselves and have an individual volume control. If I have four guests (as with the DJ Hero team’s love advice show), I can add a fifth USB mic for myself as host. (The other stuff you see are a bunch of XLR/power cables and an external Mac hard drive — the laptop itself stays with me when I travel.) Kat helped me cut the foam out of the Pelican case, which thankfully has wheels, so I can check it as luggage if I need to get on a plane and do a roundtable interview with members of a studio in their natural environment. It takes about 15 minutes to set up, which isn’t bad, considering.

When Kat and I record the podcast, we’re usually at home in the same room, so I use a combination of the USB condenser mics listed above (one mic per track) or I route two MXL 990 condensers through a Line 6 TonePort UX2, which is just the gear I have at home for recording music stuff in my free time. But two USB mics has proven to be even less hassle — the only problem is isolation, because I am often very loud and wind up bleeding into her mic when we record.

So, with that in mind, here’s my three best bits of advice if you are making your own podcast:

Quality microphones make quality podcasts.
Take care of your mics, and they will take care of you. It’s worth investing in a good USB condenser mic. (I used the term throughout this article, but condenser mics are powered and therefore more sensitive, more delicate, and warmer in tone compared to dynamic mics, like the handheld microphones you see singers use on stage.) I really recommend the amazingly well designed, feature-laden, and just plain sexy Blue Yeti if you can spend $100 and the Blue Snowball if your budget is closer to $70.

Get a pop filter.
If you instantly want to make your podcast sound more professional, use a pop filter. It’s nothing more than some nylon fabric stretched around a frame, but speaking through a pop filter reduces the plosives — the big puffs of air that come out of your mouth when you say the letter P and B and things like that. They record as a “pop” in the mic because of the gust of air, but the little nylon mesh dissipates that air before it reaches the micrphone. You can make a pop filter yourself from some pantyhose and an embroidery hoop or coat hanger, but there are lots of pre-fab options starting at around $15 or $20. If you plan to podcast regularly with a non-headset microphone, it’s absolutely worth the effort or expense.

Every extra piece of equipment is one more thing that can go wrong.
I have a LOT of equipment at my disposal — I blame my degree for giving me gear lust. But in podcasting, less is more. Every new component is a component that will, one day, fail on you. Pop filters are worth their mild hassle, but plugging in an external mic to a DR-07 is probably not, even though I do it. Every time I use it, I have to check the AA inside; what if the mic gets switched on in transit and drains the battery before my interview? I would unknowingly record silence and not get the interview after all. So there’s a risk, and I don’t recommend taking those risks unless you really believe the end result is significantly worth that risk. Don’t build a needlessly complex system — only use as much gear as you absolutely need to achieve quality results.

Sorry you asked, huh? Hit me with questions below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

A few months ago, Activision pledged its support for President Obama’s Change the Equation initiative, which aims to raise the bar for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in America. This is something that I was very happy to hear about — I think educational charities don’t get nearly enough attention, so to see Activision Blizzard up there pledging support alongside other big companies like Google, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Epic Games (crossing my fingers for Gears of Math!) made me quite proud.

Right now there’s a video competition going on, where all the supporting companies get to show how they support STEM — or in the case of Activision developer Vicarious Visions, how STEM supports them. VV used its experience developing Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock for the Wii to illustrate STEM’s importance to the kids who visited from a local school:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you liked that, give it a Like on Facebook and/or YouTube. That’s how the contest works — you vote!

I have made no secret of the fact that my brain is wired for words, and the reason my career is writing about videogames instead of making them is because I do not have the necessary math and science aptitude to do that — I’ve tried. I’m actually jealous of people who can blaze through math problems and visualize complex programming relationships in their heads. I’d hope that future generations of geeks like me will have what it takes to reach their game-creation goals, and it really does start with a better background in STEM.

UPDATE: Kotaku’s Owen Good did a nice piece on this, and interviewed VV’s Karthik Bala to boot.

Sorry, trying to work out why the podcast RSS feed has decided to become a full-site RSS feed. I noticed it after the WP 3.0.2 upgrade but I have not been able to determine the issue. If anybody is an ace at WordPress, PodPress, and RSS feeds, I’m all ears for your diagnostic tips — this is one of the parts of the site that I just barely got working when I started.

UPDATE: Thanks to PodcastHelper and NuckFuggets on Twitter, and I think PodPress was the culprit. I switched to PowerPress and we’ll see if there are any issues with this week’s show. Please let me know what you see and how things work for you, and I’ll attempt to fix it.

I had planned to do a big gift guide here on the site, but I suddenly found myself late to to the table — many sites have already done them, Black Friday has come and gone, and a lot of people have already given their friends and family their gift ideas anyway. Half the time, gift guides are filled with things you would never get anyway. “Check out this home theater setup — and a house to go with it! Awesome gift!” Yeah, if your dad’s last name is Warbucks.

The reality is that when you are desperate enough to turn to a site like mine for gift advice, you already have your dreams — what you need are solutions. You need last-minute, platform-agnostic stuff on the cheap — and something that isn’t just “hell, I’ll get them PS Store/Xbox Live/Wii Points.” Lucky for you, I am all about practical gifts. Don’t give me doodads that you spent too much on that I’ll never use — give me something I can appreciate on a daily basis.

And it’s in that spirit that I present the nothing-over-twenty-bucks One of Swords 2010 Gift Guide. Everything a gamer can use, from everything another gamer can afford. Mind you, if you expected my guide would be full of Black Ops controllers and t-shirts and stuff, go for it. Otherwise, let’s go with something a little less obvious…

A Guitar Strap That Isn’t A Piece Of Crap
I don’t care if you play Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Power Gig, even Rock Revolution — your plastic guitar controllers came with crappy 1″ nylon straps, which instantly get tangled and look like crap. What you want is a real guitar strap, 2″ wide, made of nylon or cotton. That’s easily under $5 in a  solid color, and you will pay only slightly more if you prefer cotton and still only $10 for leather — but you can hit $15 if you want patterns, designs, or attitude, like this or this or this or this or this. Bottom line: Friends don’t let friends suffer through lousy guitar straps, even when the rocking is pure plastic.

The Ultimate History of Video Games
Steven Kent’s aptly titled book traces the origins of gaming back to the very roots, documenting the Atari era, the NES 8-bit glory years, and the resulting 16-bit and 32-bit showdowns in exciting, highly readable detail. Kent did tons of excellent interviews, so along the way, you’re hearing straight from the people who lived gaming’s history, both the highs and the lows. This is the book I always wanted to write, but Steve beat me to it. Damn his talent!

USB Squid
Let’s say you want to play Guitar Hero with all four players as vocalists (yes, you can do that!) and you have four wired mics. Uh oh — Xbox 360 has three USB ports, PS3 has two. How do you get everybody singing? The USB Squid is one of the handiest USB hubs I’ve seen — four ports from one, perfect for snaking USB mics (or other wired controllers, if you want) around the living room. It’s $10 but if you need even more connections, try the USB Octopus, which offers 7 ports for $5 more.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Podcast co-host Hugh Sterbakov is reading this book now, and he recommends it — so do I, because I read it first! It’s no exaggeration to say that modern home gaming began with the success of the Atari 2600 — which, it turns out, was a beast to program and wound up doing a lot of stuff it was never designed to do. Racing the Beam is slightly technical but still very readable book that offers a close look at several of the games that helped define the system (yes, including Activision’s Pitfall!), using their creation to illustrate how the platform evolved over time. I found it absolutely riveting; every example is in context, and you really walk away with a great appreciation for what the programmers pulled off.

Bawls Guarana
Back in the day I didn’t just consume energy drinks on a regular basis — I reviewed them. And if I had to choose one energy drink to enjoy while gaming for the rest of my life, it would be Bawls Guarana. The caffeinated kick is not as sharp as some other drinks, so instead of causing you to spike and fall, Bawls keeps you consistently alert over long gaming sessions (and I’m speaking from experience). The original flavor is a light tropical/citrusy thing — just sweet enough — but I also like the cherry flavor, and the G33k B33r is one of the best root beers I’ve ever tasted — for real. A weird perk: the sugar-free variant contains more caffeine. You can get an eight pack of any flavor, in 10-ounce bottles or 16-ounce cans, for under $20 either online or in your local beverage store. And if you haven’t heard the slightly salacious Bawls Christmas song…you should.

Geeky Wrapping Paper
So now that you’ve found a groovy gift for your gamer friend, what do you wrap it in? Robots, zombies, binary code, internet memes, and snark, courtesy of ThinkGeek’s Geeky Wrapping Paper. Yes, one of them says “Have a Satisfactory Non-Denominational Capitalist Wintertime Gift-Giving Season.” I like the one that just repeats the phrase “Can Has” all over it. In any case, you get a few sheets for $6. Thank you, ThinkGeek — and thanks to Kat for spotting it in the first place.

If you want even more suggestions, check out this week’s podcast. And whatever holiday you celebrate, make it happy, for yourself and others.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of two of the earliest Activision 2600 games, Bridge and Skiing. Bridge, I admit, I never owned — to this day, I don’t know how to play it. But I think it speaks to the goals at the beginning of this industry: Bridge is a complex card game, only playable by four players, and those players have traditionally been adults. Knowing that, Larry Kaplan created a 2600 cart where the computer played all three of the other positions, so someone looking for a good game of Bridge would never have to wait. For all of gaming’s banishment to the kiddie ghetto, video games began as a leisure activity for adults, without any need to justify them as such. After all, the first Pong machine wasn’t installed in a bar for nothin’.

Just like the real thing

I was, however, old enough to play Bob Whitehead’s Skiing, having never skied before in my life. Its graphics look paltry now, but were nothing short of amazing in 1981 — a small skier diving down a mountain, dodging trees, hopping moguls, and tucking between slalom flags — it was as good as a sport had ever been represented on the Atari VCS. If you got a high enough score, you could send a photo of the screen in and Activision would send you a patch to acknowledge your accomplishment. So I did — I still have most of the patches I earned as a kid, and I keep them here on my desk at Activision. They were really important to me — the clear forerunner to Achievements and Trophies, no question.

Humble beginnings. Respect your elders!

Struggling to find the perfect geeky gift? Hope so, because Kat and I spend a fair amount of this show sharing our favorite ideas for holiday cheer. We’ve also got some Tron love, a definitive statement from Activision’s Eric Hirshberg, the Pixies, a reminder about MUA2 DLC, Thanksgiving memories, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the DJ Hero 2 team’s romantic expertise.

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Co-host: Katrin Auch, light gun enthusiast, graphic designer, bassist, photographer, table refinisher, media maven, frame painter, videographer, and inventor of Headshotmas

Soundtrack: Yameen – available on iTunes, Amazon MP3, and all online music stores

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