In the inaugural episode of the Fruitygamer Podcast, Warren and Todd discuss new games on the iPad and iPhone, Spore, Hayao Miyazaki’s rather blasphemous views regarding the Jesus Pad, and the latent homophobia in Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony. All this and more in the very first episode of the Fruitygamer Podcast!
I’ve been working through various ways to create compelling internet content, and I’ve explored various options including scripted material and making elements for FInal Cut Pro so I can film, drag and drop. All off this comes from the idea of minimizing the inputs while maximizing outputs…but it would still involve a lot of work. Putting together the two Fruitygamer pilot episodes required about half a day of work for each segment, in addition to being down at E3 in the first place and filming the interviews.
That’s all well and good, and there’s no reason I can’t use that same methodology for special episodes. But if I want to create a lot of content quickly the way to do it is live and streamed. So I looked at BoinxTV as a viable option. I got Boinx when I bought one of the MacHeist offers for $40 a while back, and as the program is normally $299 I got a pretty decent bargain. But since I had no use for it at the time, Boinx sat on my computer unused, until now.
When I started Freyburg Media, I wanted to create videos for clients that brought TV-level quality to web video. I’ve been lucky enough to accomplish that with a couple of different projects including working with The South Granville Business Improvement Association on a number of videos. But while I love doing work for clients, I like creating original programming even more, and I think that’s where the future of online media is headed.
To that end, I spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure out how to create niche websites targeting things I’m interested in and could blog about regularly. But what I found is that while I’m perfectly comfortable zipping around FInal Cut and creating a video, all the attendant Wordpress setup, ad network crafting and other bits and pieces of “making money from a website” drives me mental. It also occurred to me that while many people can and have created websites in order to bring in income, significantly less do so with video and audio (Leo Laporte and a few others spring to mind) because of the much higher barrier to entry.
Fruitygamer is my first effort to create a niche program for an online audience. Mac gaming is finally coming into its own, and the iPhone and iPad are becoming portable gaming platforms rivalling Nintendo’s dominant handhelds. It makes sense to target that audience, I think.
In the next few weeks and months I’ll be rolling out more programming, but for now enjoy the two episodes of Fruitygamer from E3. I’m looking forward to putting out more content soon.
Fruitygamer at E3 2010 with an interview with Joe Bentley of Onlive about their streaming video game service. Onlive brings many premium titles to the Mac that have up until now been out of reach for Mac gamers.?
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TechCrunch is a great resource for tech rumours and breaking news on startups and new tech trends. It’s also a continual soap opera run by Michael Arrington, a mercurial provocateur with an eye for scoops and a skill for controversy.
Now Techcrunch has joined TWIT TV, This Week In and others and is moving to live streaming shows over the net with Techcrunch TV. If you have the resources to create professional looking programs from a studio, livestreaming is a great alternative to post-produced programs, because you can archive shows as you go and quickly build a huge library of content. Of course that sort of approach demands a big crew, multiple hosts and a large wallet to pay the bandwidth bills…none of which is accessible to small producers such as myself.
But in a larger sense it’s a very interesting shift towards niche audiences and away from mainstream, lowest common denominator fare. Tech Crunch is aimed at a very specific and very influential audience, and their move towards what amounts to a cable TV station is indicative of how far the medium has come in not only changing the way people watch video to stay informed, but how easy it is to create what amounts to a television station. The barriers to entry keep falling, and what requires a small business (after all Tech Crunch isn’t NBC) today will be doable on your phone tomorrow.
Here’s a sample of TechCrunch TV for your perusal:
Fruitygamer hits the show floor at E3 to interview Mike Larson of Capcom Mobile about Street Fighter IV and other games on the iPhone.
I originally wrote this article about the new Doctor Who video game for Eurogamer, but then E3 happened and by the time the annual gaming conference was finished the game had already been out for a while. So as a result, Eurogamer nicely said I could publish the article anywhere I like.
I’m lucky enough to know Phil Ford, the writer of the game and of various Doctor Who episodes (along with being the head writer of the Sarah Jane Adventures) and he was cool with being interviewed for the article, presented in full below. And if you’re arriving from Radio Free Skaro…hello! Thanks for listening ot the podcast and I hope you enjoy my site.
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One of the UK’s oldest heroes is entering a whole new world.
Doctor Who returned to the small screen in 2005, hypnotizing a whole new generation of viewers with the adventures of the Doctor and his companions as he once again hurtled through space and time vanquishing his enemies with only a keen wit and his trusty sonic screwdriver.
Though the new show soon spread to other media such as novels, toys and comics, video games were unexplored territory until the BBC announced earlier this year that they would release four “adventure games” featuring Matt Smith, the newest incarnation of the Doctor, and Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond, his new companion.
It was only a matter of time before iPhone 4 filmmakers began posting well-crafted vignettes like this little gem below. While watching it I was thinking that it could have more easily been done in Final Cut Pro or any number of other editing programs….but the fact of the matter is that a phone, something everyone carries in their pocket, pulled off an amazing little short that previously would have taken weeks, required a crew and wrought grief from the filmmakers. This little number was made in less than 48 hours with an everyday device. I like the future.
iPhone 4 hasn’t even arrived in Canada yet, but for some reason (likely because the OS isn’t all that country-specific) Apple is allowing Canadians to download iBooks, the Apple branded e-reader currently found on the iPad and on U.S. iPhones.
And as of right now, it’s a complete disaster.
At first iBooks couldn’t even reach the iBookstore. Starting the app resulted in futile warnings, but searching revealed you could find public domain works from Project Gutenberg for download. All well and good, because who DOESN’T want to read Wuthering Heights on their phone….except that your iBookshelf iEats all your iBooks. Keep downloading them, and they’ll simply disappear. SOme people have had luck syncing their books through iTunes, but I haven’t.
More to the point, I’m chompng at the bit to actually BUY some books, but Apple won’t let me. I suspect whenever the phone is introduced in Canada (presumably at the end of July) the store will be populated with bestsellers and other goodies, and it may not even be Apple’s fault. Canadian publishers, like most of the old print guard, aren’t exactly know for forward thinking and bold new strategies.
In other news, getting rid of custom wallpapers dramatically speeds up the performance of my jailbroken iPhone 3G. Weirdly, having a nice bit of background on my home screen seems much more challenging than multitasking several programs at once. Who’da thunk it?
iOS4 hit the iTunes Store this week, and with it came several updates designed to enhance the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad gaming experience. Here’s a list of the new and improved features that will affect your gaming:
Gamecenter: Companies like ngMoco and others have up until now created adhoc social networks to connect up players for games as diverse as We Rule and Words with Friends. Apple has in one fell swoop replaced their patchwork efforts with Gamecenter, a social networking hub for iGamers to connect, compare scores and compete.
Unfortunately, Gameceenter isn’t out yet, with only vague promises of “this summer” to tide us over. Until then you’ll have to use Feint or one of the other competing services, or actually (ugh) talk to your friends and set something up.
The other big addition for gamers is the gyroscope, though unfortunately it’s restricted solely to iPhone 4 owners. Like the compass and the accelerometer, the gyroscope will literally bring a new dimension into gameplay. Steve Jobs impromptu display of his Jenga skills at the WWDC keynote notwithstanding, it’ll be very exciting to see what amazing gameplay iPhone developers come up with to take advantage of the gyro.
Not quite related to gaming, but thrilling to the anal-retentive amongst us is Folders, which lets you organize up to twelve apps in a folder that opens up when you tap it. I’m sure all of us have tons of games scattered far and wide across many pages of our iPhones, and the folder app lets you gather all of them up onto one page, and even sub categorize them into different genres.
Last but not least is the Retina Display. With a 960 by 640 display, the new iPhone screen has eye-popping clarity. While many are touting the screen’s suitability for surfing the web or reading e-books (all of which are valid points), think back to the leaps in gameplay that occurred int he glory days of the Graphics Card Wars. Entirely new game genres like first person shooters and RTSes became possible on the PC, and now that same revolution will happen on the iPhone. FPS still presents a challenge due to the iPhone’s touch screen controls, but RTSes and other tactical games could get a real boost from the increased screen real estate and sharpness. And dare we dream of World of Warcraft on the iPhone? Yes we dare indeed.
