Harmonix, Activision brawl over Guitar Hero PS3 controllers

Guitar Hero III box

In what is a most amusing series of events, Harmonix and Activision are fighting like kindergarten kids over who’s responsible for not releasing a patch for Rock Band.

Harmonix, with some help from MTV, thought that releasing a patch for Rock Band, which would allow Guitar Hero III controller compatibility is a good idea. The idea did, after all, come after thunderous public request. However, it didn’t go down as well as they had expected. Harmonix’s patch was approved by Sony, but not by Activision, who supposedly objected to the patch.

This makes Harmonix and MTV heroes who want a free and liberal gaming area and where everything is good and compatible. Activision is suddenly a dark, evil EA-esque villain who wants the depraved gamers to buy Rock Band controllers. And because we need a fine background for a fight, we have Sony and their PlayStation 3.

Sony promptly replied that this is a matter out of their hands, and one that should be “amicably resolved” by Harmonix, MTV and Activision. Well, at least Sony has nothing to do with the whole fiasco. Then again, it’s the ill-fated, all-cursed PlayStation 3 that serves as a setting for this tale.

Activision struck back yesterday by saying that MTV/Viacom is unwilling to participate in a healthy tussle discussion about the issue. According to their press release, Activision were the good guys all along and Harmonix/MTV have been the ones who were not talking with Activision about their technology.

This fight is almost like the Silicon Knights/Epic brawl, except there’s no legal matters here and the subject is ridiculous. What’s bad is that the gamers are suffering in the long run. They are the ones who haven’t gotten the patch yet, while the big corporations talk about how they love gaming and want gaming to be accessible.

How will Harmonix/MTV respond? Is the PS3 really cursed? Isn’t watching this silly fight fun? Comment and conquer!

Google to launch knowledge-sharing service, “Knol”

Google Knol

Google, the internet giant that was originally a humble, but powerful search engine has now manifested into one of the most important corporations into the world. In its goal of encouraging spread of knowledge, Google now has an e-mail service, an online office suite, a social networking site, two of the world’s largest video sharing sites, the largest blog hosting site, and so on.

Now Google is turning to the knowledge-sharing section of Web 2.0 with its under-development service titled “Knol” (supposedly a “unit of knowledge”). This appears to be a weird cross of Facebook, Wikipedia and Instructables, and I can already foresee it going big.

Unlike Wikipedia, though – Knol will emphasize on authors, as opposed to topics. Everyone will have a cute profile, and will be rated by the community depending on how good their articles are. The goal of the project is, as you might have guessed, to encourage people to open up about a topic they know a lot about. While good in theory, this may not exactly be the best thing out there.

YouTube sounds good in theory – a video sharing site. Browse through now and you’ll see some of the worst and most banal videos the internet has ever known. Since Google has stated that they will in no way directly serve as moderator or editor to Knol, there’s perfect chance that Knol will be ruined by the millions of teenagers who think they know a lot about something.

The site will host anything from outlines of a topic to in-depth articles to how-tos and just about anything that educates the reader. Google also hints that authors will also be able to use Google AdSense to generate money from sharing knowledge. This reminds me that Knol may just end up to be a pseudo-blog site with people posting on how to manage girlfriends, instead of a long, emo poem on how their girlfriend dumped them. Best community website ever? I don’t think so.

Then again, since there is so much of an emphasis on authors, there’s perfect chance that a lot of real talent can be highlighted here. If you ignore the unwashed masses, you might just find a few geniuses worth listening to (try YouTube as a comparison).

What do you think of all this? Is Google really doing good with this, or are they just money-hungry executives masquerading as internet geeks, monolopolizing the Internet? Love Google’s idea? Think it should be different? Post it all into the comments!

Best of 2007 – February

Continuing with our Best of 2007 series, we take a look back at February. This month was the official start of the blog so from here on out we’ll have some fairly long lists of our top posts.

Best of 2007:
January – February – March – April – May

February

The Divine PR Exposition
The Divine is a PC game that a group of friends and I were working on. At 1am we launched a PR campaign with tons of screenshots, a trailer, wallpapers and random other stuff. That was an exciting and fun day. All day long we rushed to complete everything as the countdown clock ran on the website. To bad we missed our own deadline by an hour.

The Divine

 

StuffWeLike.com Video Cast #10
This makes it onto the list because this video cast episode was the last time Spencer Beebe was a host. We’ll miss you Spencer!

Welcome to 7.0
StuffWeLike officially launches version 7.0 of the website. This version includes the blog, although back then it looked totally different!

Fantastic Four 2 – Better than the FF1?
At the time it seemed as if Fantastic Four 2 could really kick ass compared to the first one. With the death defying Silver Surfer the movie looked solid. To bad trailers lie.

The Pipeline Has Bad Music
When we first started The Pipeline we had it automatically load and blast some music. Apparently people don’t like coming onto a website where music automatically begins to play. Who da figure?

News in The Pipeline
The Pipeline was the reason why I jumped on and changed the focus on StuffWeLike in 3 days. It was a very drastic move, but I just feel in love with the capabilities of the player. One of the first things that I tried was posting text press releases in the player itself rather than the blog. I thought it was cool, but later I found out that no one cared. Yay for me.

Video Game Music Channel created
Still experimenting with the boundaries of The Pipeline, I created one of my favorite shows on it the Video Game Music Channel. Ever since I started StuffWeLike, I’ve always wanted to do a internet radio show. While I did have a brief experience in that realm with version 2 of the website, this was the first time that I had full control over every aspect. Thankfully no lawyers have come knocking at my door yet!

Add The Pipeline – Video Games to your page

StuffWeLike Conquers Digg, Digg Kicks StuffWeLike in the Crotch

StuffWeLike.com VS Digg.com

If you’ve been trying to access StuffWeLike.com for the past several hours, the site has been offline. Yesterday I submitted Ted Stokes’ interview with Valve’s Marketing Director Doug Lambardi to the popular Digg.com website. Seeing that the article was getting a few diggs in a couple of hours, I was content and went to bed.When I woke up the next morning around 9am Garbled Zombie and I were talking about how the post reached around 38 diggs, the highest digg count for any of our previously submitted articles. Out of no where the article reached 50 diggs and within minutes hit 100!

We were both ecstatic, but then StuffWeLike shut down. Yes we hit our CPU Quota. The traffic didn’t stop pouring in. I frantically decided to upgrade our servers. A little over 7 hours and almost 2000 diggs later the website came back online.

Yes, StuffWeLike got the crap kicked out of it also known as the ‘Digg Effect’, but we’re back with a vengeance!

Now that you know the story, also know that we’re trying our best to stay online and will continue to update the blog.

Thanks for your patience.

Journey music ROCKS

Add The Pipeline – Music to your page

There’s something about Journey that captures my ears and makes me rock all over my room. We whole heartedly welcome this fantastic band to The Pipeline.Don’t Stop Believin’ is probably one of my favorite songs of all time. The build up and then the rush is one of the best in any songs out there!