The Business of Play

First, note that even RIM is reluctant to frame the device as a direct iPad competitor. The press release for the PlayBook emphasizes its business appeal, citing “advanced security features, out-of-the-box enterprise support” and a brand new development platform aimed at IT departments. BlackBerry knows where its real strength lies, and it seems to know to avoid Apple’s, too.

RIM didn’t create the PlayBook to storm the consumer market. It did it because it had to, or face losing enterprise customers to iOS. Since a tablet is definitely useful in a business setting, people are already buying iPads for enterprise purposes, basically because they don’t have a choice. It’s probably true that most would prefer a BlackBerry option, so that’s what RIM’s providing. That also accounts for the timing of the announcement. RIM showed its hand early, but it’ll stop some businesses from making an IT buying decision until it can bring a device to market.

Early to Rise, Early to Bed

RIM may be retaining some customers on the enterprise side by announcing early, but it definitely isn’t doing itself any favors in the consumer market. First, Apple and other competitors know exactly what’s coming in six or so months, making it very easy to plan product updates that surpass the PlayBook’s hardware specs. Second, savvy consumers can tell that the PlayBook’s specs are on par with the iPad now, and perhaps beat it in some areas, but they also know Apple updates its devices at least yearly.

That means consumers are expecting an iPad with Retina Display and probably at least a front-facing camera with FaceTime at around the time the PlayBook arrives. The iPad revision’s upgrades will probably make the BlackBerry look decidedly last-gen.

The App Lead

Even if the BlackBerry PlayBook launches with a terrific development framework, and App World gets a significant update that makes it much more appealing to users, Apple’s lead in the app game is basically insurmountable at this point. That’s bad news for RIM’s hopes in both the consumer and the enterprise arena.

Forced to Follow

So is the PlayBook revolutionary? No, it’s a bitter pill RIM CEO Lazardis and Co. were forced to swallow, and it’s being rushed to market to defend a market segment that’s traditionally belonged to the BlackBerry maker. But RIM will continue to succeed in business, for the same reasons that it always has.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
• Why RIM’s Future (Unfortunately) Hinges on BlackBerry OS 6
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2

For 90 percent of my daily toil, OS X is the best platform for me. I use it during my day job, freelance writing, school, graphic design, and the usual goofing off everyone does. However, there is one glaring desire missing: I play Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs), and the Mac-native offerings are slim. I’ve had to result to running games in emulators, virtual disks, and Boot Camp partitions, and after running some numbers I thought I’d share my findings with you.

The Games

I play the following MMOs: World of Warcraft, EverQuest 1 and 2, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. Of these, only WoW and Warhammer have native clients. Which means I’m forced to use some sort of emulation to play them. A commenter  on Liam’s Windows 7 piece said, “You bought an Apple computer so use the Apple software. If you want it so bad go buy a PC.” For me, Apple and OS X are fantastic for my productivity needs, but when it comes to gaming, sadly, it’s still a Windows world.

The Emulators

Fortunately, all is not lost. Once Apple went to Intel chips, running Windows in some sort of emulation became possible. For a gamer like myself, it became a saving grace that let me enjoy OS X for my daily usage, but lets me have my games and play them, too. For the purposes of testing, I played games in the following programs:

• CrossOver Games 8.1.3. CrossOver is a Wine-based emulator, so you’re not actually running any Windows code; it’s all handled via the app.
• Parallels Desktop 4 version 4.0.3848 with a Windows 7 virtual,
• Windows 7 running in Boot Camp on OS 10.6.2. Unfortunately, Parallels can only access a Boot Camp partition officially supported by Apple, so I was unable to test Parallels directly accessing Boot Camp.

These were all tested on a 2.26 GHz 13″ MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and at native 1280×800 resolution.

The Results

Costs
For Boot Camp, Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99. CrossOver Games is $39.99.  Parallels is easily the most expensive. Windows 7 Home Professional is $199.99 and Parallels is $79.99.

Setting Things Up

Boot Camp: This is the easy one. Since Boot Coomp runs Windows natively, installing all the games tested was very easy — albeit time consuming since they each had to be downloaded off the net.

Parallels: Again, very straight forward. The process takes a little longer since it’s running in a virtual environment, and Parallels needs to install the Parallels Tools after the setup. I had no issues installing the games. Really, for all intents and purposes Parallels is just like running Windows.

CrossOver: Well, the install is quick — you just install CrossOver like any OS X program. Getting the games to run…well, that’s a different story. While there’s a decent compatibility listing on Codeweaver’s site, since CrossOver is a Wine emulator results are very mixed. If an app has a Gold rating from Codeweaver, it’ll install and run well. Unfortunately, none of the games I tested received Gold ratings so installation was challenging. With DDO and Lord of the Rings, the actual installer won’t work; you’ll have to download the full client off a third-party site. After that, a program called Pylotro is required to launch the game — it’s a custom front end someone wrote to handle the launcher duties. There’s no guarantee an installed game will keep working, either; a previously working EQ2 broke in a patch of CrossOver.

Load Times

Frankly, the load times were the biggest source of agony during my tests. Not because of the load times, but because the results were hard to sort out because of a lot of variables. Every game is an online-based game, so, to get my character in the game I had to pass an authentication server, several load screens and a character select. Therefore, Internet latency and a whole host of issues come to play.

Here’s how I got the numbers. I loaded all the games and timed from when I started and stopped when I was able to control my character in-world. With Parallels and Boot Camp I also added the boot times of the required OS to the chart. I did this three times and averaged the results.

I did notice an odd thing in Parallels: if I rebooted my Mac, the load times for both the OS and the game were significantly longer. However, after further testing I noticed that if I loaded Parallels/Windows 7 and immediately launched a game, the load results were almost double the value above. If I let the OS “sit” for a few, the load times were normal. Rather than report those numbers, I’ll just say this: a watched OS never loads — go get your beverage and snacks while Parallels loads and by the time you’re done the game will load faster.

In-Game Performance

Boot Camp: Unsurprisingly, the performance here was the best. At high I was getting around 40 FPS, and the game just flew. No issues.

Parallels: I’m actually amazed gaming performance under Parallels was decent. With graphics settings on High (but shadows turned off) I was getting around 20 FPS average. Turning down options like view distances got the FPS closer to 30. I noticed no major issues outside of a slight stutter when loading a crowded area. Both windowed mode and full-screen worked fine. As an added bonus, you can set Parallels to share your OS X and Windows home directories, so any screenshots I took went right into my OS X Documents folder for easy viewing.

CrossOver: The performance was about half-way between Parallels and Boot Camp. I was getting just over 30 FPS in the games. There were, however, some significant trade-offs. Neither DDO or LotRO handle windowed mode well — once the window loses focus, you can’t click inside the window when you get back to it. Also, there’s a big issue with LotRO where the screen will go black forcing a reboot. I was able to get around both issues by forcing the virtual to run in a window. The game would think it’s full screen, but the OS treated it as a window. This way I could have access to Skype and if LotRO crashed it didn’t take the entire OS down with it. As I mentioned earlier, a previously working EverQuest 2 install broke with a recent patch release of CrossOver.

Conclusions

I used to be a huge fan of CrossOver due to its overall speed and low footprint. However, I’ve had enough and will be deleting the files. The final straw was EverQuest 2 breaking. While it’s cheap, getting a lot of games running is a gigantic hassle and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep working. As an aside, the community on the official forums is very helpful, and just about every issue someone’s had is at least addressed, even if there’s no solution.

For now, I’m running my games in Parallels. While the performance isn’t as great as in Boot Camp, the convenience of not needing to reboot is a big bonus for me. Often, I’ll game when taking a break from a project and I’d like to not have to reboot. As an added bonus, it’s very easy to resize the virtual disk in Parallels. It took less than 5 minutes to add another 32GB to the virtual disk (in Boot Camp, I’d have to repartition and reformat). I’m really surprised at how well these games ran in Parallels. Version 5 claims to add better support for Shader Model 3, so I’m planning on upgrading.

I’m not deleting the Boot Camp partition, though. Once Apple releases official support for Windows 7, I plan on re-paritioning it to a 100GB partition and have Parallels access that directly. That’ll cover me for the best of both worlds: for every day gaming, I can load Parallels, but if I need it, I can reboot and use the same install files in Boot Camp.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

App Quick Stats

With Watchmen arriving at movie houses around the globe, the iPhone game attempts to brings the grim world of the costumed hero to you.

There’s a whole heap of Marvel in my comic collection but, I’m afraid, not so much DC. I preferred my heroes to have hyphens and make cheap puns. Plus, Batman just ain’t a superhero, however you cut it: real heroes have powers.

Shielded from the darkness of the DC-universe, I never read Watchmen. Never got to bask in New York’s crime-ridden ’80′s underbelly. Failed to experience a mankind-enveloping conspiracy unfolding, page after page, the distinction between hero and villain smudged like a fresh inkblot test.

And so, in preparation for the iPhone game — a massively multiplayer online adventure — I purchased the Watchmen graphic novel. Now, having read this classic book, I’m ready to shine my healing torch of justice into an ocean of violence and crime, representing all that is good and just. I am The Ambassador.

New Frontiers

The idea behind Watchmen: Justice is Coming seems to be to take the MMO experience — think World of Warcraft, Age of Conan etc. — and transport it to the iPhone. It’s a seriously compelling prospect: forming your own crime-fighting syndicate and entering a dark, bustling fictional New York, teeming with hidden evils.

Having just read the graphic novel, everything seems almost real to me — the source material is so rich, setting the stage for a vast online adventure. Therefore, there’s much at risk and much that could be wrong; like more paranoid members of the Watchmen contingent, I got the feeling that there would be something awful waiting for me.

Before donning costume and taking up residence in the rotten core of The Big Apple, as The Ambassador, the first thing I had to do was set up an account. It’s fairly standard character-generation stuff, choosing skin color and a name, but there’s a clever twist thrown in with the Rorschach inkblot test — determining your hero’s personality type.

Vigilante Stuff

However, there’s no palpable impact as a result of the setup process. The Ambassador popped up on a New York sidewalk, wearing civilian clothes, nothing particular heroic about him and the result of the Rorschach test seemingly rendered irrelevant.

Moving around the streets is easy enough — pressing and holding your finger on an area of the screen starts your character walking in that direction. Unfortunately, you’re just another guy, wandering the streets, getting your drab city clothes soaked through in the everlasting rain, rifling through dumpsters in search of new clothes.

Indeed, aside from fighting, that’s how you up your XP and acquire new costume pieces: dumpster diving. Before you’re even ready to start fighting, it seems your first mission is to saunter around the curiously deserted back-alleys and street-corners in search of garbage.

Maybe it’s a tip of the hood to Rorschach’s trashy drop-off point in the graphic novel (a can rather than a dumpster), but it just doesn’t seem appropriate. We’re heroes — we get our hands dirty handling criminal scum, not digging through garbage for cast-off costumes.

Sham Crusade

The Watchmen graphic novel didn’t seem to be about fighting, or violence, or good vs. evil per se; the story seemed to be something a step ahead of traditional comic book fare. It’s a shame therefore that the MMO eschews all of this and seems to boil down to fighting.

The city streets seem to be empty much of the time. Maybe it’s because it’s early days for this MMO, occasionally though you’ll pass by another player and they’ll pick a fight with you. If you agree to fight, you’re thrown into a mini-game — an odd little affair which involves tapping a couple of buttons, no skill is apparently needed.

Another option for those of a violent disposition is to go hunting for Knot-Tops and other criminal rogues. These fights with computer-controlled characters can be accessed by locating floating red exclamation marks on the streets — something else which just doesn’t sit right, detracting from the atmosphere of the Watchmen universe.

A Perfect Grid

Despite the fact that the game plays out on an isometric grid — harking back to the old days of adventure games, an impractical viewing angle that I’ve never appreciated — the atmosphere is something which it almost gets right.

The New York of the graphic novel is grim, falling to pieces under the weight of fear, criminality and hysteria. The New York of the iPhone game — while devoid of the hustle and bustle — is a forlorn, broken location. It’s totally appropriate and feels just right. Or just wrong, as the case may be.

Walking the streets, I wandered past the Gunga Diner and kissing silhouettes nearby. I stood next to the Newspaper stand so often visited by the reader in the graphic novel. There was even a visit to the cemetery, where I paid my respects to The Comedian. It’s all, quite pleasingly, present and correct.

Graphically, the game is undeniably impressive, certainly drawing comparison to early PlayStation titles, even reminding me of the original Metal Gear Solid at one point. Although there don’t seem to be any sound effects, the soundtrack swoops and moans, dripping with melodrama and intrigue.

Under the Hood

Unfortunately, all the melodrama generated by the dark soundtrack and the aptly depressing scene-setting achieved by the graphics doesn’t help the game’s cause. In actual fact, this grim atmosphere feeds in to the frustration felt because of the game’s many bugs and flaws.

Other players seem to always want to pick a fight. This is a world of heroes and, although it’s mentioned in the graphic novel that heroes frequently end up in combat the first time they meet, it just doesn’t sit right. Why should all the heroes be fighting each other? There’s no scene-setting, no grand over-arching plot. (There is a plot, but it hardly seems to explain why there’s a proliferation of violent heroes on the streets.)

Plus, I’ve frequently been thrown in to a fight that I wanted to walk away from: the yes/no option is broken, it doesn’t work and it’s so frustrating. Once a fight starts loading, you’re taken off the streets, in to fight mode. This mode frequently doesn’t load, there are usually connection issues, and the game either locks up, disconnects, or takes around five minutes to reconnect you to the street server.

The game falls asleep too. So while you’re waiting to be reconnected to the streets, if your iPhone goes to sleep, it may not actually connect when it finally does wake up. It just feels unpolished, rushed and, frankly, rude on the part of the game developers.

The interface is clunky, it’s frequently unclear just what is a clickable object or button and what isn’t. Plus, there’s no visual or audible feedback from pressing buttons or interacting with objects. It’s disconcerting that from source material teeming with so much vitality and expression, can come such a lifeless and, at times, dull game.

Summing Up

I enjoyed the graphic novel so much, plus I’ve been waiting for an iPhone MMO, something with a compelling narrative and real mass appeal. Unfortunately, this isn’t a worthy companion to the graphic novel and certainly not the iPhone MMO I’ve been waiting for.

The game feels rushed and, as is a trend with games based on movies, is most probably a hastily created cash-in. It seems to have very little relation to the universe it’s based upon; instead it’s probably best described as a lazy, bug-ridden chat-room with pretty graphics.

With more players and less bugs, this could really be something special. For now though, The Ambassador is packing up his costume and retiring. Perhaps he’ll return when the world is ready for heroes like him.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories
• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices

Given my affinity for the original, you’ll understand how excited I was as I downloaded Aurora Feint II: The Arena last Friday. The sequel to the popular puzzle RPG promised asynchronous online multiplayer play, and enhancements to the existing character and leveling system. How could you go wrong by bringing more awesome to an already awesome game? The answer: you can’t.

There are so many additions its hard to know where to start. Let’s start with basic game play. Even in the Mine, arguably the central component of the Aurora Feint world, there are noticeable improvements. The core play that makes the game so addictive is still there, but now animations are smoother, and you receive better, more visually pleasing tutorial tips throughout. Colors are brighter, and special combo animations are completely revamped. At any time during the game, you can press the arrow at the top of the screen to review your progress, go to the main menu, and return to the world map.

On the map, we find out that the area we could see in the original Aurora Feint, which is still included, is only The Town. The World is an entirely different parent map, featuring three locations: The Arena, The Town, and the Tavern. In The Arena, you can take advantage of the all new multiplayer aspects of the game. To do so, you first have to summon a Ghost, which is essentially a copy of your character that other players can do battle with. Summoning a Ghost is itself a mini-game, in which you try to maximize your stats so that your multiplayer substitute will be able to compete successfully.

Once you’ve summoned a ghost, you can do battle with other players. You’re not playing them live, but through an asynchronous battle system that pits you against their own ghost. Playing against another player’s ghost is essentially a race to burn as many resources as possible, filling up a meter faster than your opponent. I felt a real sense of urgency playing it, so even though you’re not actually playing live, it still feels sort of like you are. The always-on chat displayed at the bottom of the screen adds to the MMO feel.

There are other new features to explore, like the Academy, where you can review the game mechanics, features, and how to play. The Tower, the Smith, and the Store have also been tweaked. All the additions and refinements, and the already great Aurora Feint gameplay add up to make this feel as polished as any major developer release. Get it now in the App Store for $7.99, before it goes up to $9.99 after the holidays.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview