Ghost Razor

The press release for the Dec. 4th Dashboard update has some cool stuff in it. Major Nelson has released a couple of new tidbits that we’re in the press release.

One of those two features fixes a major longtime problem with Xbox Live, although it’s not expressly stated in the release.

Previously, if you decided to move to another country (I hear people do that sometimes), you were screwed to the nines. The Live Passport framework locks in the country code when the account is created, and that country code cannot be changed. For things like webmail, it doesn’t really matter. The only result is that the advertising that you get is irrelevant to you in your new country.

But because an Xbox Live account is tied to a Live Passport, this has serious repercussions. Firstly, you need to pay for your account with a credit card who’s billing address is in the country your passport is linked to. What this means is that you would need to maintain an active billing address and credit card in your old country, just to be able to continue to pay for the service.

Secondly, you’re locked out of any content you might normally have access to in the new country (e.g. if you move from Canada to the USA, you would normally now have access to Xbox Live Marketplace TV and Movie content, something which is forbidden in the great white north).

The work around in the past has been “Start a new Xbox Live account”. Yeah. That means you lose all your achievements, your gamerscore, and any months of paid access you might have had left on the account. Additionally it means that you can no longer access any games you’ve purchased on XBLA from any machine, only the console you specifically downloaded them on in the first place. If that machine should happened to, oh, I don’t know, fail in some way, you’ve lost the title.

The potent point in my opinion is this. Starting today, you will be able to re-associate your Xbox Live account with a new passport account. The question is does Xbox Live retain a separate copy of the country code, or do they simply follow the pointer to the one used in the Passport account? If it’s the latter, all problems are solved tomorrow, and ye who change countries can rejoice in the streets.

On a related note: Canada (and some of Europe) is movie rentals on Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th! Yay for being slightly less of a second class citizen.

Tags: Platform by Morphix
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I’ve got to be in Sea-Tac Airport at 5 am tomorrow morning. I’m flying home to Toronto for American Thanksgiving, which is ironically not celebrated in Canada. As such, the likelihood that I put up any posts is remote. Perhaps I will, in a Tryptophan and Carbohydrate-induced stupor, wander onto the interwebs and gibber maniacally into the network before Monday, but I wouldn’t commit a lot of money to the concept.

Tags: Offtopic by Morphix
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Yeah, this is off topic, but I when I’m not doing the video game thing, I’m reading books.  I read a LOT of books.

And I would really, really like an e-paper based eBook reader.  So today Amazon launched their new eBook reader, the Kindle.  It’s ugly as fuck, but they have some sweet wireless setup going on.  Unlike basically every other reader out there, the Kindle has a free, EV-DO based wireless network that allows you to browse, buy, and download eBooks from Amazon’s ever increasing collection (they plan to eventually make every book they carry available).  You can also grab newspaper, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.

Great, sign me up.  Take my $400 dollars, I don’t care that your device is hideous, it looks marvelous.  Wait a second, as per usual, Canada gets the raw end of the stick.  Despite the fact that Sprint and Bell Mobility have agreements with each other, Amazon’s Whispernet does not work outside of the 50 US States.

Ever wonder why Canada is a haven for piracy?  Maybe it’s because companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Apple - the premiere offerers of digital content - don’t fucking offer their services in Canada.  Remember prohibition?  If there’s a demand for something, it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, people will obtain it.  And unlike prohibition, under which criminal organizations were still charging money for booze, digital content is free to steal.

I don’t know whether the issues are legal or economic, but once there’s a culture of theft that’s been established for a long time, it’s very difficult to legitimately offer content and expect the people you’ve been shirking in the past to expect to pay for your shit.

Tags: Delivery, Offtopic by Morphix
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Yeah, yeah, I’m aware this isn’t really news of note, but having newly discovered this font of hilarity, I thought I’d mention it.  Choice Yahtzee quote:  “I don’t really think that America is populated entirely by assholes and cowboys; I know that some Canadians live there too”.

Tags: Offtopic by Morphix
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Research study shows that Canada is awesome, and all game developers should move there immediately.  Full text is available here.

Tags: Developers by Morphix
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I should really be studying for the distributed computing final I have tomorrow morning, but hilarity wins out.

Citizen Game posts a (less than) amusing truth about living north of the 49th parallel: You get screwed in the exchange rate. Once upon a time, our shining little loonies and toonies were worth half a big green American bill. This is happily no longer the case.

Never the less it would seem that the US would like to pretend that it was the good ol’ days of the ninties and charge exchange rates to that tune. I’m not going to bother showing the analysis here, but the image below sums it up pretty well (you can go to Citizen Game for the full run-down).

I would mention however that exchange rates are not the only place where we get nailed (or even the worst). My biggest beef is in the lack of digital content that we get up here.

In the USA, there are lovely services such as TiVo, Amazon Unbox, iTunes Music Store, Zune Marketplace, Xbox Live Marketplace, and so on. These lovely services will allow you to pay them money - in real dollars - and in exchange they will give you media content (movies and TV shows in particular). In Canada I’ve heard it’s theoretically possible to buy a TiVo system, but there’s some magic you have to pull. Rogers will allow you to rent a PVR system from them at an approximately cost of $15,000 a month, with an initial start up fee of whatever you’ll get for putting a second mortgage on your house. iTMS sells music, but nothing else, and the Zune and Xbox Live Marketplaces just aren’t available here.

What is going on here people? You wonder why we download so much media off torrent sites up here? Maybe it’s because for some reason nobody wants to let me have the ability to give them money so that I can watch the Colbert Report whenever I like. My guess being that nobody seems to be able to secure licensing rights from the IP owners for distribution in the great white north. This does not make any sense to me whatsoever, but I would guess that the enemy of Mankind, Rogers Communications, has something to do with this as they are responsible for all problems in Canada.

I may have gone on a bit of a tangent here, but to return to the land of Videogames, Gametap has a restricted set of titles for Canada as well (and that I _Really_ don’t understand).

In conclusion, if you don’t allow someone to buy something, they will steal it from you and lobby their government to make it okay to do so.

Tags: Offtopic by Morphix
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