Major Nelson interview

There has been a lot of negative press about video games, and frankly, irresponsible, unfounded claims made about video games and children in the media.  More than ever before, unsecured loans we need a balanced perspective about gaming from one of the industry experts.  I approached Larry Hryb, aka

Photo: Microsoft

(Major Nelson) from Xbox Live on the tails of ECCC and the eve of PAX East.  He was gracious to take the time from his busy schedule and speak with me on the phone.  I asked him what his thoughts were on video games, education, his job and his favorite games, of course.

GD:     Do you see any link between video games and education?

LH:      Education as a platform is very important to me.  Education is something that people need in gaming.  And, different games can provide all levels of education.  When I was a kid, I had computer games that were teaching me arithmetic, teaching me to do equations, as you’re trying to puzzle out what the answer is.

GD:     Can video games benefit children then, by teaching them lessons?

LH:      Decoding a game is a part of the education process.  I have a younger sister who is a librarian on the East Coast.  She works in the high school environment and brings up the value of solving puzzles in video games.

GD:     What game are you most excited to launch in 2011 and why?

LH:      What our Xbox development partners are launching for Kinect—I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but an announcement was just made here at Microsoft that 1 million Kinects have been sold so far!  Now, Gears of War III and Homefront are coming out soon and I’m very excited to check them out.

GD:     What is your favorite gaming convention to attend?  What do you have the most fun doing?

LH:      PAX Prime (in Seattle) and PAX East.  I’m leaving tomorrow for PAX East.  I just love the Penny Arcade conventions, because they connect me to the gaming community and let me be involved with the people who do the gaming, who really enjoy games.

GD:     What do you do on an average day at work?

LH:      A lot of people see the public side of what I do on Xbox Live, but that’s only a small part of my work.  I work with product teams and what they do in understanding bad credit loans product features of games, making sure that all the many features in the games work properly.  A large part of this process is incorporating the feedback on features that don’t work and getting the fixes for the games in place.

GD:     How did you get the name Major Nelson?

LH:      I’ve been at Microsoft for ten years.  I came home from work one day, and my Tivo had recommended “Major Nelson.”  It comes from a TV show called “I Dream of Jeannie”, it’s a campy show from the sixties about a woman genie and an astronaut called “Major Nelson”.  Major Nelson became my gamertag—now, who doesn’t want to be an astronaut?

GD:     What would you say in response to recent comments in the press about video games causing problems in kids?

LH:      I look at video games as another form of entertainment.  There is not one thing that you can point to as the source of problems in children.  You have to look at the gaming issue holistically.  I have a sister who has young daughters and I urged her to delay getting the Xbox.  Not all of Xbox the games are appropriate for younger kids.  Now that we have Kinect, we have the platform for games that are great for young children.  Gaming should not be used a babysitter, but something families should use together to have fun.

GD:     What message do you have for kids who play video games?

LH:      Make sure that your games are used in moderation.  Always treat the person on Xbox Live as your next door neighbor.  Treat them with respect, as they would want to be treated.  Stay in school!  If you want to work in the gaming industry—study what does into making a game—whether it’s the art, writing the code or whatever you’re interested in.  Don’t stay at home all day playing video games.  You need to stay in school kids!

Sims 3 - Ambrosia Guide

Ingredients

• Life Fruit
• Death Fish

Ambrosia is a vegetarian dish that you can cook in The Sims 3 once you have reached level 10 of the cooking skill, purchase and read the recipe book, and acquired the proper ingredients, both of which cannot be bought. Ambrosia can be cooked at any time of day but is NOT a group meal so it can only be chosen from the Have (Meal)... menu instead of Serve (Meal)... You can make ambrosia as many times as you want, as long as you have the ingredients.

If a Sim eats Ambrosia, the Sim will be returned to the beginning of his or her current life stage (so if a Sim is an Adult and has 3 days until aging up, the Sim will have 26 days until aging up after eating Ambrosia).

The Sim will still age after eating Ambrosia, so you will need to have the Sim eat Ambrosia every once in a while if you want to make sure that the Sim never ages up again. Also, if today is the day when the Sim will age up, have him or her eat a Life Fruit in addition to the Ambrosia, because otherwise, the Sim will still age up later that day even though the days until aging up was reset.

Ambrosia does not protect a Sim from death by non-age-related causes like drowning, starving, electrocution, and so on. To protect your Sim from those sorts of deaths, have the Sim carry a Death Flower in his or her inventory at all times. The Sim will give the flower to the Grim Reaper if he or she dies, and the Grim Reaper will allow the Sim to go on living. The Grim Reaper can't eat ambrosia.

The ingredients required are Life Fruit and Deathfish. Below are instructions on how to get those are below.

Life Fruit

You can acquire Life Fruit if you're in the Science Career and reach level 7 of the career, but a slightly easier way is to reach level 7 of the Gardening Skill, then go to the Graveyard and look for seeds north and south of the fenced-in graveyard area. Some of these seeds are Unknown Special Seeds, which might grow into Life Plants.

However, there are several possible plants that an Unknown Special Seed can grow into, so to make sure that you get a Life Plant before it's too late, be sure to collect and plant Unknown Special Seeds daily. Use the best fertilizer you can get to reduce the amount of time that it takes these unknown plants to reach maturity.

Once you do get some Life Fruit, it's a good idea to plant at least one of the fruits to grow more Life Fruit. You can eat them occasionally to give yourself more time to gather the required things for Ambrosia.

Deathfish

The Deathfish can be caught at any skill level, provided that you are using Angelfish as bait. The Deathfish only appears in the pond in the Graveyard, and only between the hours of midnight and 5AM (in other words, it disappears from the pond when the clock reaches 5AM, so you can't catch it while the clock says 5AM).

To get an Angelfish, you need an Alley Catfish (which can be purchased at the grocery store) as bait. Angelfish appear in the pond with the waterfall, among unsecured loans other places. In that particular pond, the fish are jumping, which makes it take less time to catch an Angelfish.

Make the ingredients easier to get

If you want to be able to make Ambrosia at any time, grow Life Fruit on your lot, and also make a pond on your lot. You can stock your pond with a particular type of fish if you catch ten of that type and then choose Stock after clicking your pond. This will permanently give your pond an unlimited supply of that fish type, even if it's a type of fish that only is found in the sea.

So, stock your pond with Alley Catfish, Angelfish, and Deathfish to have a limitless and easily accessible supply of those fish right next to your house.

It will also help if you grow Cheese Plants on your lot (which you can do after completing a gardening opportunity), because Cheese is the bait for Alley Catfish.

If you have those things on your lot, you can make Ambrosia pretty much whenever you want.

Getting the recipe

Getting the recipe is pretty straightforward. You will need §12,000, though, which can take time to save up. Just live frugally, and sell some of your unneeded possessions if you must (this lowers your bills, too). You can only read the recipe book if your Cooking skill is at level 10. To quickly raise your level of Cooking, be sure to cook plenty of meals, because when you finish cooking a meal, it increases your skill by a large amount. Also, if you can afford it, get the type of oven that says that it makes your Sim learn more quickly.

Ambrosia is Vegetarian

In spite of the fact that Ambrosia includes fish in the recipe, a bad credit loans  Vegetarian Sim will cook it and not get nausea from eating it (a Vegetarian Sim of mine has made and eaten lots of Ambrosia). I guess we can assume that creating Ambrosia turns the constituent ingredients into something else entirely.

Resurrecting Ghost Sims with Ambrosia

If you put a plate of Ambrosia near a ghost Sim that you don't control, the ghost might pick it up and eat it, becoming resurrected. This is easier to do for ghosts who died of starvation, because they have a tendency to eat random food. Other ghosts are not as interested in food, so they might drift past a plate of it if you put it near them. It seems like ghosts might join a Sim that is eating a meal, so if you take multiple plates of food to the graveyard, you might be able to entice a ghost Sim to join you. Also, you should try introducing yourself to the ghost.

I have resurrected a ghost Sim a couple of times. The first was Joel Astroman, who died of starvation, and upon being revived, he walked away from the graveyard, got into a car, and drove to an empty lot. My Sim unfortunately went to sleep right about then, which kicked in the ultra speed mode, so I don't know where Joel went after that. I haven't figured out if he is gone from that game or is still there for my Sim to randomly find.

The second ghost Sim that I resurrected was Jasper Remington, who was an electrocuted ghost Sim who haunted the Jones lot in Riverview. I had spent quite a while on the Jones family, building up Aiden's gardening and fishing while building up Hannah's cooking skill. (I forgot that Aiden is a  natural cook.  D'oh.) I also gave Aiden the Bookshop Bargainer and Haggler lifetime rewards to bring the cost of the Ambrosia recipe down to 7,680. Finally Hannah read the recipe, and when Jasper Remington's ghost appeared one night, I woke Hannah up to make a plate of it. She was startled while cooking, because of seeing Jasper, so I had her make a friendly introduction before finishing the Ambrosia.

She had been about to eat it, but I cancelled that. Then, other hungry members of the Jones family kept trying to eat it (they had two teenage sons and a young adult son at this point), but I cancelled that, too, and had the family get a bunch of quick meals from the refrigerator so that they would stop trying to eat the Ambrosia. Once they had all settled down in the kitchen to eat, Jasper went over to the Ambrosia to join the family in their meal. He ate it while socializing with the family, and when he got up, he glowed and came back to life. He had a hairstyle featuring sideburns, and was wearing some sort of blue sweater or jacket. Before I had a chance to talk to him, he left. I didn't follow him to see where he went. When he was gone, so was his urn that had been next to the TV where, presumably, he had been electrocuted. 

A Look at the New Xbox 360 Dashboard Update

We've come a long way since the “blades.” Where once the 360's interface was merely for purchasing content or checking out your friends lists, it now has to juggle more balls than Sasha Grey on a casting couch. With games, movies, music, avatars and social networking apps, Xbox Live's overflowing content list demands a robust and sophisticated operating system.

So while the original blades OS was fine for its time, and its replacement, NXE, has done a good job in recent years, tomorrow sees a major step forward in the 360's evolution unsecured loans. An entirely new operating system is coming, bringing an influx of new services, apps and content with it. We've had a preview of what Microsoft are calling 'Project Williamsburg' and here's what we made of it.

As those that have been part of the limited preview program will know, the most striking aspect of the update is the operating system's new look and feel. Built to reflect both Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, as well as the upcoming Windows 8 for PC, it's a clean and simple interface composed of large, bold, easy to navigate tiles.

This simplicity of design allows the OS to adapt equally well to a range of inputs. You can now navigate the menus with ease either via Kinect motion controls, a plain old controller, or most impressively, Kinect voice commands. Taking into account the tech's foibles – you have to speak quite slowly and deliberately – it's hard not to see this as a little glimpse of the future.

This is due in part to Bing integration. Every single piece of content available across Xbox Live is indexed and searchable. So all you have to do is say “Bing: Call of Duty,”  bad credit loans and all of the games and content relating to the franchise will pop up on screen, ready for selection. It's a process that works across music, television and movie content too. It's fantastic, but has one notable shortcoming.

The problem is with the way Bing finds content. Bark Christian Bale at your Kinect and it will dutifully find every film that Christian Bale has starred in, and offer a variety of ways to watch that content, be it via LoveFilm, Sky, or whatever. Impressive, right? Say Cliff Bleszinski or Peter Molyneux, however, and the only content it will return is interviews with the developers on say, Inside Xbox. None of the developer’s work will appear.

The same goes for development houses too, as well as publishers. It's a terrible shame, as implementing such a feature could both educate consumers and lead them to similar content. Like the Halo games? Then why not search for Bungie and check out their early work in Marathon: Durandal? It's just not possible. But you can access all the Jennifer Aniston films available on XBL in a flash.

Now, of course, this is indicative of a larger issue with games and a general ambivalence to the people that make them. But Microsoft are in a privileged position to help bring about change.  During our presentation numerous references were made to the “curation” of the content on XBL - about how Microsoft make sure everything hits their very high standards. If this is true, then they should slap a few extra tags on the game content and let us search via the talent involved. It would make a world of difference.

Broadly speaking, however, this update isn't about games. It's about turning the Xbox 360 into an entertainment hub for your living room, about delivering one piece of tech that can provide everything you need. One box to rule them all, you could say. With Williamsburg, Microsoft come mighty close to achieving just that.

Tomorrow sees an explosion of XBL apps from third-parties, across live and on-demand TV, music and movies as well as internet services and social media, all available via an Apps Marketplace. UK will be able to access iPlayer, 4OD, Demand 5, LOVEFiLM, YouTube and more. Even established XBL services have been upgraded, with the likes of Facebook getting a makeover to bring them into line with the style of Williamsburg. Consistency of experience looks to have been a key goal. 

There's some decent bonuses on offer too. LOVEFiLM for example is rolling out a free 30-day trial for all Xbox Live Gold Users, meaning that you can try out the service for a month, without obligation. It's a nice touch. More apps and features are going to roll out over the coming months and years. The value of the service is soaring.

Meanwhile, gamers haven't been completely forgotten. Cloud saving is a highlight. Now, when prompted to save your data you'll find an extra option titled merely "cloud." There's just over half a GB's worth of space in there, accessible from any XBL-connected 360 in the world, at any time. Your Gamertag just got a whole lot more portable.

Beacons also stand out. These allow you to communicate to your friends exactly what it is you would like to play. You just pop in, pick a game from your library, and then click on it to communicate your desire. You can even set a beacon to post to Facebook too, for you friends that are not currently on Live.

It's hardly a revolutionary addition, but it is indicative of Microsoft's desire to provide a compelling social experience for its users. From the very beginning, Microsoft has pushed to connect as many Xboxes as possible. It shows. Socially, Xbox Live remains far in advance of its nearest competitors.

Ultimately, despite the fact that Williamsburg brings scant new features that directly relate to games, this is a profound improvement of the service. Microsoft are keen to say that they are effectively providing a brand new console, delivered for free, six years into the platform's lifespan.

That's clearly overstating the case, but the truth is that the new dashboard represents an entirely new way to interact with your Xbox. It's a system that looks, feels and most importantly works incredibly well, with a ridiculous amount of content delivered in a uniform, coherent manner. Attractive and easy to use, very little about Williamsburg disappoints. We've come a long way since blades.

Microsoft’s new Xbox dashboard will be available to download by all users tomorrow.