I spent part of the evening chatting with a fellow classmate about tonight’s launch of Modern Warfare 2. His wife is the GM of a local GameStop, so he had his pulse on all things MW2. She’d arranged a pre-launch tournament complete with big screens and a local band in the parking lot. I’m getting too old to stay out all night waiting for a video game (much as I’d love to!) so I came home and hit up Google instead.

I came across an Ars article outlining a few… changes in the Modern Warfare universe, most of which don’t seem to be making the fan base very happy. The article specifically focuses on the PC version of MW2, but outlines a few doosies:

• Total number of players = 18 (weak sauce)
• No tweakability
• No booting the bad guys out of the room
• Game-selected hosting with a five second delay should the Chosen One drop out

I’m not sure what I think about this. Superficially it sounds like a lot of people griping for no good reason. The more I think about it though, the more I can relate. Even though I’ve been primarily a console player for the last decade, part of the appeal in PC gaming is the ability to do pretty much whatever the hell you want to with a game.

Ars pointed out that it’s only a matter of time before the hacker community comes up with some workarounds, but should they have to? I’m sure the game will be great but does the studio really need to take away features that their customers and fans want?

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Google: Wave, an early version of a collaboration and communication tool, was recently announced and released to developers. It consolidates email, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia, and document sharing, into one interactive application. By presenting Google: Wave to the community now, Google has committed the project to open-source development in hopes of inspiring IT professionals everywhere to find revolutionary new ways to apply their own applications to Wave, before the product’s launch later this year.

“We’re banking on Wave having a very large impact, but a lot of it depends on our ability to explain this to users. That’s part of the reason why we’re putting this out early to developers,” said Lars Rasmussen, Wave project co-founder. “Now is a good time for developers to start picking up the APIs, building cool applications and extensions, so when we do launch later this year our users and their users can enjoy all these things together.”

In their eighty minute presentation at Google’s annual I/O conference co-founders Lars and Jens Rasmussen, of Google: Maps acclaim, demonstrated a number of of already functional applications. This included multiple Wave Clients, Photo Sharing, multi-user live-interaction, contextual spell check, live language-translation, and API’s interacting with applications outside the demonstration hall.  With just minimal interaction, Wave easily co-opted its operation with data mining, Google: Maps, an unspecified blog client, and Twitter.

Wave is built on Google Web Toolkit using HTML 5, and is designed to let developers extend its functionality and integrate it with other Web services. By design, Wave lets people create a document using a client no more advanced than a Web-Browser, where multiple users can add and edit rich text, multimedia, gadget applications and feeds concurrently.

See for yourself at:

http://wave.google.com/