f13.net

I imagine this will be a lot of Xbox One news, but since we got a new gen coming may as well cut down on the "lol, xbone" threads that will pop up off and on since the laugh factory seems to keep on rolling.

Microsoft has spent $100 Million Earth Dollars on designing the XBox One controller.


(http://i.imgur.com/lsc4mdS.jpg)

Seems like a pretty good investment IMO.

Kinect doesn't need to be plugged in for the console to work anymore! (http://kotaku.com/xbox-one-wont-actually-need-kinect-plugged-in-microso-1113142909?)

Trigger Warning: Kotaku

I'm kind of wondering if they needed to cut any functionality for this since they were pretty fucking insistent about the Kinect being necessary.

Oh right, I mentioned Nintendo:

Iwata: Price isn't the reason the WiiU is selling like shit! (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/126733-Satoru-Iwata-Hardware-Price-Is-Not-Wii-Us-Problem)

Well, maybe you shouldn't have designed a previous gen quality console as a next-gen console and focused on another controller gimmick so ports are annoying to make for it.

All my years of exposure to designers have convinced me is there's a lot of naive people willing to pay way more money than they should for far too little result.  Designers are the flim-flam experts of the professional world, IMO.

Made worse when they only have to do "design development" and a guy who gets paid 1/6 of their bill (at best) has to figure out how to actually make the shit work.

A lot of WiiU games get knocked for not using the pad enough. I wonder if every XB1 game is going to get knocked for not using Kinect? From what I can tell other than Kinect shovelware games like Kinect Sports / Adventures only 1 or 2 games in the launch window use it to any real degree. (Ryse and Fantasia)

(http://i.imgur.com/PoFIOeZ.png)




 :facepalm:

Of course they won't, even though that's the biggest flaw in the "must have Kinect!" plan.

It'll be the exact same scenario as the Wii waggle.  Maybe some token use from ports and only the owned devs and exclusives making any real use of it.

If there is an updated version of the Your Shape fitness program, then it makes the updated Kinect worth it for me. If not, then I may have to look at the PS4 a bit more. Sony lost me last gen due to price point. The previous gen, I had both systems, but no kid.

Our 360 is our media box these days. We stream TV and movies, play games, and we would listen to music more often if the windows media center extender wasn't total shit. Maybe I am their target market. My gaming is split 50-50 with PC and console. I could get a Roku or whatever, but I have found a third party software solution that runs on my PC and streams to the 360.

Most of the Kinect games are shit. Your Shape works well, but it does suck at tracking sometimes, particularly when doing yoga and slower movements. It is not a game though. Our main use of the Kinect beyond fitness is voice command.

Its like every now and then Microsoft likes to remind us how much money they have to throw around.

They also spent $1,000,000,000 to buy Skype despite having working VOIP and video tech of their own they built to compete with Skype.

Well, if you're going to preserve something from the old controller, why not go for the worst thing possible?

Eh, Google ended up buying youtube despite coming out with google video first.  Sometimes its just worth it to buy a name (and the customers that come with it), even if you have similar tech already.

Not that I know if the Skype deal has made them any money.  All I know is that everybody on the planet still continues to use Skype for any sort of internet call/video, and the term to 'Skype' somebody has become as big a part of popular language as 'googling' something.  So it can't have been that bad of an investment.

Yeah, It's easier to buy a market and brand than build one.  Probably cheaper, too, since you have to learn all the lessons they did and chip-away at marketshare while doing so.

Absolutely. Look at the Fedex/Kinkos buyout.

Holy shit, it took them $100 million but they finally figured out that making an 8-directional pad be circular makes not a lick of sense.

IIRC Nintendo had a patent on the plus-style digital pad that ran out recently, which is why both MS and Sony have had terrible d-pads. I'm not sure exactly what the patent covers, so incompetence may be a factor as well.

360 controllers have terrible build quality. In game development you put a lot of wear and tear on controllers. I think about 80% of 360 controllers I used in development broke in some way - the analog stick suffered from permanent drift, a button got stuck down, etc. This is also why 360 games have huge dead zones on the sticks and very little actual analog throw. About a third of the theoretical range is unusable on a stick with decent wear and tear.

Is it safe to assume that there is no compatibility between the old controllers and the bone?

And what about PS3 controllers on the PS4? 

I am really, really getting fucking tired dropping a small fortune on controllers and I can't think of one good reason that they shouldn't be compatible...

I'll just drop this  :facepalm: here as a general reply to most all of Microsoft's XBone shenanigans.

Yes, Nintendo had a patent and it ran out. That played a big part of it.

While I like the 360 controllers, the damn analog sticks are built like ass. That rubbery shit they put on it wears off WAY too quickly then it becomes a thumbfucking machine of torture.

Looks like the yield problem rumors were true: the Xbone is delayed in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland. They're trying to put it out at some point in 2014.

It's not like I wanted to buy the console anyway, but it's nice to know MS got my back.

There is some talk that they may have needed some time to localize some of the changes they've made to the console as well.

I still don't like it: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85916/nope.png)

I happen to like/don't know what's wrong with the PS3 d-pad.  Seems pretty similar to the NES one on the surface.  I didn't see any PS4 controller pictures that didn't come from Destructoid or Polygon so I'll let that lie for now.

There's nothing wrong with the Playstation dpad. No fucking games use it except for ones you should be using a joystick with anyway.

The 360 dpad however, is literally hitler.

I like the PlayStation D-pad but I'd like it more if it were less mushy and more clicky. NDS D-pad is best D-pad imo.

Nothing is clicky anymore.  We are all old.

There are some JP games that use the d-pad to do things like move around menus while the stick is reserved for moving your avatar.  Sometimes this is for no good reason, since the effect is that they simply prevent you from using the stick to navigate menus.

I really enjoy the title of this thread because my dad DID actually work for Nintendo. Back in like 1988. :|

An Irishman's take on the console war:

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/the-point/?event=why-the-xbox-is-losing-20130814&tag=Topslot;Slot3

I enjoy this thread title because of the word "horseshit".

Tildas get me hot and bothered.

That seems like a good analysis. Though I'd be happy to see some hardcore bleed onto the PC (even as a companion device) and Microsoft is also motivated by the strategic goal of becoming the front end to TV. They could potentially capture the softcore gamers and subscription income that way without really caring what the hardcore do.

I did like the comment that casual and soft gamers get put off by the catalogue of violence heavy titles on the consoles. I think that's probably true but easily missed.

What game is this? :
(http://i.imgur.com/R3uhgwJ.png)

Looks kind of like Geralt (white pony tail, 2 swords) in the saddle there.  So, Witcher 3?

Ah yes you're right. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_127455723&feature=iv&src_vid=c0i88t0Kacs&v=TZ_G6XiHoUA)

Maybe I'll have to go back and play Witcher 2 even though I didn't much care for it.  I really liked the first one.

(http://i.imgur.com/i7shJaI.jpg)

Buy the Xbox One folks, it has literally everything you hate about gaming!!

Also Games for Windows Live is being shuttered, which apparently will render some games that use it unable to save progress or buy content now.

Underscoring my deep hatred for these DRM schemes.

Are you sure? The GFW Marketplace  is being shuttered, along with similar Xbox stuff, but I haven't heard of GFWL, the authentication service, being closed.

I'm pretty sure it's breaking the GFWL stuff period. Age of Empires online for example is gutted by it; you won't even be able to save your game anymore unless they fix it.

(http://i.imgur.com/xCVlXx5.png)

Seems like the whole thing to me.

"1/3 of titles announced are brand new franchises"

So much wrong in one statement. So much.

Agreed.

Death of GFWL means I might buy dark souls... and I think there were one or two other titles with the same infection I wanted.

Didn't Fallout 3 require GFWL as well? I think that's the game that made me install it.

Fuck GFWL . I hope it never makes a return. EVER.

One year from now? Aww nuts, I was hoping they'd shut it down right now.

I'm less hyped for the XBone than I was for the Wii.

Edit: Also, GFWL. Surely the shit-addled spark that ignited the idea of Origin. Burn it all down. All of it.

There was a video of the "Fighter Within" Kinect XB1 game from Gamescom that was up for about 10 minutes and is now made private. It's exactly what you'd expect from a Kinect fighting game - a completely unresponsive laggy mess.

What is it with these new 'interactive' gameplay bullshit that most companies don't realize will not sell at all?
How much money do they have to waste before they realized they can't turn a turd into gold.

Not that I recall, but Warhammer 40k does.  I think Bioshock did as well which was what got me to pull the trigger, but this list isn't clear on which required it and which just had features.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_titles

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-nintendo-pricecut-idUSBRE97R0U920130828

$50 Price cut for the WiiU, and a new weirdass version of the 3DS literally called the 2DS. It's the 3DS with the 3d portion stripped out. Fucking lol

It's not just a 3DS with no 3D -- it's flat like a tablet, not a clam shell.

Hmm.  Whatever.

This is probably a good thread to complain about MS converting my Family Pack to individual Gold accounts.  There are quite a few Q and A pairs in the FAQ, but like most FAQs it should be called "Frequently Answered Questions" because I'm left to assume that I'll now be paying for three separate Gold accounts instead of the somewhat-cheaper Family Pack.  Or will I just cancel one or two?  I suppose it depends on if the canceled account can play local co-op or not.

I don't understand...they're designing a DS handheld for pre-7 year old that can play all of the games, if not a majority of them designed for, the 7+ year old crowd.  This just seems silly.

Side note: Wind Waker HD's getting a week head-start for digital download sales  :awesome_for_real:

Some people don't like 3D or don't want to pay a lot for a handheld.

That sounds like something up my alley, but I still want the clamshell design to protect the screens.  Why can't they just rip the 3D out of the 3DS chassis and sell that instead?

I thought the same thing but quickly decided that it is cheaper to manufacture without the hinges.

One review implied that it was using a single LCD panel with the bezel maintaining the classic 2-display look.  A single panel design probably is simpler in quantity (minimizes control logic, power supply, flex or wire harness, etc) and would, of course, make a hinge unworkable. 

[/quote]

It's as if they're taking ideas directly from gamefaqs forums at this point.

My favorite thing about the WiiU Price Drop is that Iwata insisted like...a week ago that the price was not the issue. Welp!

He did make a compelling argument.

Fallout 3 is in the 2008 section. 10 down

I think that when the library of games is as restricted as it is, then price is an issue automatically.  I read something yesterday about the Madden 25 anniversary edition, and there was a throwaway comment about how they didn't bother to create a version for Nintendo this time around.  When the ultimate example of copy/paste shovelware can't be arsed to make a version for your console, you are in deep shit.  I was kind of aghast.  What it boils down to, then, is that if the console in question only has a limited number of 1st party games that are worth a damn, then it costs me more as a gamer.  The more games you get to experience on the console, the more value you get from that console.

I am thinking about getting a Wii U; for the Wind Waker remake, for whatever new Zelda game is coming next year, for Mario Kart.  I suspect that there will be far too many 3rd party titles that I will want that will NOT be coming out on Wii U (the Madden example is not one of them) and I will end up buying one of the other next gen consoles as well.  That makes the Wii U really fucking expensive.  Price is a huge issue.

I don't recall having to have a GFWA account when I played and a quick search seems to indicate it was a later edition to the game and that it can also be disabled.  In 40k it can't be.

I think it was disabled in the Steam version due to the crashes it caused.

I bought the physical box CE for Fallout 3 at launch and had to use GFWL.

I remember using it.  And I have it on Steam.  But that could have been purchased later (for pennies). :|  Not that I'm ever going to play Fallout 3 again, anyhow.  I liked it, but if I'm going to replay a recent Fallout, it's going to be New Vegas.   In fact, I just might once my new PC is assembled.  All of this talk is making me want to play.

XBONE dropping Nov 22 (US) and PS4 dropping Nov 15 (US).

If anyone cares.

Has anyone quipped "a week late and a hundred dollars short yet"?  Phew.

There was one of those news articles today where the press basically just quotes a company's press release, it was about how Microsoft had "sold out" of preorder machines.  Can I assume this has more to do with their manufacturing troubles limiting the supply than a huge number of actual preorders?

The important question is, will my weeaboo games be on the PS4?

The Xbox One also I guess got a slight clockspeed boost from 1.6ghz to 1.75.

Nice but a lot of the "inside rumor" stuff suggested Microsoft was having heat issues with the One so who knows?

Anyone who buys an XBox on release day deserves what they get.

Yea, but probably not for a year or two in the US.

People seem to be shitting themselves over Titanfall, I think it is going to sell fine.

That's going to be on PC too.

Duebro shooter with mechs. Color me thoroughly uninterested, though I'm sure it'll sell a squajillion copies and further ruin video games.

(http://i.imgur.com/Btrgo50.jpg)

We need a symbol for us facist PC users to get behind.

I'm pretty stoked about Titanfall.






...please don't break my arm.

Stoked to play it on PC...

What I don't get is just how Microsoft could manage to fuck this up at all.

All they'd basically had to do was to state that there will be a new XBox this year and Kinect will be included in the box and that it's on par with the PS4 performance-wise.

All they had to do at their event was to

- tell people there will be a new XBox
- tell people that Kinect is included
- tell people that Kinect is improved
- tell people that they can control their TV or cable box with the XBox
- keep your mouth shut about all of the DRM bullshit
- show the new call of duty

It baffles me. It baffles me that they allegedly didn't know that Sony was planning a PS4, when basically everyone else did and you can't keep such things secret for long. It baffles me that they included all of that unnecessary bullshit in their PR and presentation that confused people and diluted their message. It baffles me that they hadn't considered making things easier for Indie devs, when that shit is basically easily integrated and done with no fucking effort whatsoever. Just tell devs that they no longer need an actual publisher and reality check and adapt the fees and you're done. Everybody talks like helping indies was such a huge effort, no fucking way. All they need is a relatively cheap dev platform and access to the store without the need for publishers and without ridiculous transaction fees.
Why fuck with a winning formula? Why e.g. change the controller (except maybe the battery compartment) when it's already being heralded as the best there is?

I cannot wrap my head around that. It was basically a done deal. It required a real effort by a lot of people to fuck this up as badly as they did. If they hadn't done anything at all they'd have fared better than they did. Even if they had to scramble because Sony had caught them on the wrong foot, they could have easily launched six months or a year later than the PS4 and would have had a real chance to still come out ahead of the PS4

1. Announce the new XBox
2. Sell it
3. Profit!

As things are the last few months have shown that Microsoft basically has little clue about, well, everything.

They don't seem to know what their competition is up to, even when their projects are already rumored about in insider circles. (Also you can't really keep a project on the scale of a new console secret for too long. Sony had to talk to suppliers, developers and contractors long before the announcement was made or the rumors started)
They don't seem to know much about their own ecosystem or about what concerns their developers. The blanket dismissal of indie developers is proof positive that they don't.
They don't seem to know how their own customers use their console or they simply don't care
For a global brand and for a system that needs a global customer base and mindshare to succeed it's entirely to US centric

I know I repeat myself but how could this happen? And they still have no grasp on things it seems. We've had the E3 and the Gamescom was only last week, why announce the launch date one week after one of the major industry events of the year is over? If there is a valid reason for that why don't you use PAX to do it instead? (Same question goes to Nintendo for announcing the 2ds after the gamescom ended)

What were they waiting for? Tokyo game show? I heard a rumor that until it was clear that Sony made efforts to launch a PS4 nobody at Microsoft had even begun work an a next generation XBox. Why the hell not? I'd expect them to at least have plans for HW and/or SW in development somewhere even if they're not planning to release anything short term, like every other fucking company out there.

Announcing the release date for the Xbox One not at a show is probably one of the biggest non-story stories I've seen in a long while.

Microsoft is a giant, unwieldy company still bloated on old glories suckling at a dying teat and filled with old men. That's how it happens, Jeff.

I haven't had a sense of hunger, drive or desire from the company since '04 at least.  Just a plodding 'stay on this path. It's served us well' approach with tentative feelers in to other revenue streams that's going to kill them in the end.  Seems to be the story for a lot of tech companies after 20-30 years.  Looking at ways to monetize what you know well and is old hat vs. keeping up to date.

Yeah.
Funny picture time.

This thread's depressing.

(http://nbnl.globalwhelming.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/25.jpg)

Maybe. You're missing out on lots and lots of free PR and press coverage though.

For example: Sony announced the launch date on the first day of Gamescom which led to literally every news medium out there to cover it even if just in passing with a small news item. Every major newspaper over here mentioned it, even the 8 o'clock news on frigging public television (average viewer age 60) had a news item about it. Microsoft announced the launch date a week later and even a significant number of game related internet news sources haven't covered that yet. Case in point was the last giant bombcast. At one point the guys basically talk about the XBox launch with one guy asking if MS has yet announced a release date and when another tells him that they already did more than one of them basically says that they hadn't heard of that fact yet.

I'd fire the company that handles my PR at that point.

It also would have taken them no effort at all. A venue like gamescom would be head over heels to give MS a half hour or hour for the announcement, they wouldn't even need to have their own booth and basically every news outlet that covers the trade show would have put it next to the Sony announcement in their news coverage.

Our PR people would be over the moon if they had an opportunity to so easily reach a lot of people that you'd otherwise have to spent a significant marketing budget to get to.

You're right, I haven't seen anything about the XBox release date at all... wait, that's not true at all.

I understand your overall point, and don't disagree, but the extent with which you (and some others) seem to think that this is some big mistake seems a bit... much.

Big mistake it's not and if it were the only thing MS had done in recent months it probably would have mattered even less. As it stands a lot of companies think that in the age of the internet trade shows and industry events are no longer as important or relevant as they were a decade ago.

It's another supposed 'misstep' in a whole string of perceived ar actual mistakes both big and small though. It's the 'MS already did this and this and that and now even the announcement is odd and seems misplaced' kind of thing. They could use any positive buzz they can get and with the way they mad ethe announcement it is less likely to hit as many outlets as they would have hit when the yhad announced it at a big industry event.

The Connected Vision was supposed to be a selling point, not a non-starter. They were caught by surprise when consumers saw it as a huge negative. There's some serious kool-aid drinking going on in Redmond.

Well, I don't really see it as a misstep. They haven't lost any media coverage. I've seen it on the news and on the internet blogs/etc. I'm not sure why you would say they lost media coverage on this.

Xbox, get in the way of my football with useless features I can get anywhere else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmD0vPOd5Rk

Who the fuck puts their giant, expensive television on the goddamn open air roof?  :ye_gods:

Please, their servants are well trained.

We have an outdoor TV that's huge in Colorado, and it's good against rain, snow, and sub 20 temps.

While true, there's a large segment of market that only games on consoles, and it won't be on the PS4. I think it doesn't sell as well as Sony's this time around probably overall, but it isn't going to be a disaster, it will do fine.

I think if rumors of Microsoft's manufacturing issues are true, we can expect a good bit of hardware failure in the first gen - even though the hardware is almost identical to the PS4. And if that happens, my God, will I be laughing my ass off.

Better marketing from Sony.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWplhhktgqs

It's never really fair to show foreign commercials to other countries. Especially Japanese commercials. Even weird 4:32 long ones.

I thought the Greatness Awaits thing was pretty good.

Yeah, that was a pretty slick campaign.

Alright, there's my weeaboo.

If MS comes up with a way to cause a hamstring injury for Peterson, I'll consider buying one.  How's that for fantasy football? :oh_i_see:

They also announced a Vita TV which is a 100 USD streaming device that lets you stream PS4 games to a different TV I think.

You can also use it to play Vita games on a TV. There's a $150 bundle as well that comes with an 8g memory card and a dual shock 3 controller.

Did they hire some old Nintendo dude to come up with that shit?

I do enjoy my GameCube GameBoy Player, though.

Here's a toxic dose of "Games Journalism".

Trigger warnings: Kotaku, NeoGAF

Dev claims PS4 ~50% faster or thereabouts, Microsoft pushes back on NeoGAF. (http://kotaku.com/game-dev-claims-ps4-is-more-powerful-but-microsoft-pus-1284635124)

Not copying/pasting the whole thing but this article features the phrase:


~A frequent NeoGAF poster~

Speaking as Fabricated, a frequent F13.net board poster: NeoGAF is for fucking tossers and devs really, really, really shouldn't post there.

Not that I like to defend Kotaku, but it's clear you didn't read the whole article. From the third paragraph, emphasis mine:

I did. I was commenting on the frequent poster part.

As a frequent f13 poster, I don't give a shit which performs better. Neither is going to be "worth it" for at least a year and based on Microsoft's continued dick-tripping, the Bone will never be worth the money.

It's a timed exclusive - it will be on the ps4 at some point.

Look at the size of that power brick.
(http://i.imgur.com/ho5lBwS.jpg)

Oh no! They still cling to that inane power brick with the shitty noisy, annoying little fan? The power brick that has spawned a whole accessory sector selling you less shitty replacement power bricks where the fan inside doesn't sound like a chainsaw attached to a dentist's drill.

The 360 is a decent console at least in the second to last hardware revision which I own but that power brick is the thing that annoys me the most about the whole product. The power brick and that shittastic huge ass proprietary plug they use to connect it to the console. The power brick that fucks up your whole idea of hiding and managing your cables to not have your living room look like the bargain bin of a best buy with cables hanging everywhere and which is in most often louder than the rest of the console because of the tiny, tiny fan.

This thing has been a shitty idea for the 360 and it will still be shitty for the Xbone.

It gets quiet when you wrap it in a towel.

Many things do.

Not cats.

Not at first anyway.

Video Games.
(http://i.imgur.com/MY3oceh.png)

Either way you go, PepsiCo wins.

THIS IS WHY WE VIDEO GAMING.

Obviously forty-year-olds with IBS don't play games.

IF I Buy DORITO I GET XBONE FOR FREE?  :why_so_serious:

PepsiCo doesn't own Taco Bell anymore. They spun that out awhile back, late 90s as I recall.

True, but as part of the spin-out, YUM! Brands owned chains only carry Pepsi products.  So they still win, heh.

I also thought their shares were still majority owned by Pepsico, but could be totally wrong.

Legally separate corps can have the same meat-based owners.

Wait.  If corporations are people, and people own corporations, isn't that a violation of the 13th amendment?

That must be why all Taco Bell sodas are utter, vile pisswater.

Ipsos and Reuters commission a poll (online, so take with a grain of salt even if it's from a proper polling firm) and the Xbone might be in a bit of trouble.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/09/survey-on-next-gen-console-purchases-may-spell-trouble-for-xbox-one/

To put that in perspective, 27% is over double Apple's global market share of the smartphone market (13% last I looked) and I don't think there's a lot of hand-wringing about Apple being doomed yet. I'm not sure the sky is exactly falling here, especially since the article also states there's 'strong' preorder interest.

But that's a different business model.  Apple makes a bunch of money on each phone it sells.  It marks that shit way the hell up for a hefty profit margin, and make a lot of money selling the phones.  Xbox machines themselves have had slim to no profit margins for the last two gens as I recall.  They make the money off of selling games and services.  Which requires you have a large user base to make money.

I still think the reports of the death of Xbox are highly exaggerated, but I don't think Apple is the best comparison.  However, unless they found a way to increase the profit margin of the systems themselves quite a bit, MS needs to have a significant user base to make money.

Can someone just attach a pair of analog sticks to a freaking Saturn controller, please?

Please?

Saturn is a failed console. Why would we ever copy things from it?!  :drill: :awesome_for_real:

The PS3 d-pad is certainly better than the 360 one but the directional buttons are too small (as is the whole controller actually). I used it recently for Rayman Origins and while it is rather precise it made my fingers hurt after only a short time of play because the pressure of your finger is applied to such a small area. I never owned a Saturn (or any Sega console) so for me the best d-pad will probably always be the one of the Super Nintendo controller.

My all time favorite controller would be one where you have the bumpers and triggers of the 360 Controller, the analog stick of the Nintendo 64 (which I remember being better even than the 360 one but that can just be nostalgia) and the d-pad and buttons from a Super Nintendo controller. As much as I like what Sony has achieved with the Playstation brand, I never liked the PS2/PS3 controller very much.

Oh yeah the current thing that gamers are arguing over is a NeoGAF topic where some "industry insiders" basically said that the Xbone version of the new Call of Duty runs at 720p while the PS4's version runs at 1080p. Scandal!

Well, to be fair it is fairly scandalous. Cod is not exactly a graphical powerhouse and you could buy an actual pc for the price of an xbone. I think the latest scuttlebutt is that their engine is unable to use the special RAM thingy on the xbone.

edit: actually the really sad part is that there are legions of supposed games journos who know all this stuff but are hamstrung by NDAs because they can't think of any other way to survive than being an extension of corporate marketing strategy. Caveat emptor as always.

edit2: on the bright side, I'm feeling really good about my decision to pass on both consoles for now. I have a backlog a mile long and if anything new and incredibly good comes out, it's guaranteed to be the best on PC.

Um, I'm not sure why you think this is silly. There is a solid point behind this.

COD is, after GTA, the biggest gaming release of the year. It's an absolutely massive, massive game that will drive sales.

For one of the supposed next gen consoles to be running in the same resolution as the last gen is significant. It shows something is fairly fucked up with the xbone development environment or the power of the console, but either way we shouldn't be seeing differences like this in multi-platform launch titles and it can very easily harm the xbones potential sales - it costs more and delivers less is hardly a winning campaign.

The fact all journalists seem to be gagged from talking about this, or even reviewing the Xbone version of games does seem to be quite ridiculous.

For hardcore gamers it's an issue; particularly if you play competitively (okay yeah stop laughing I think it's funny to play console FPS titles "competitively" too) since FPS/resolution actually have a pretty distinct effect on how well you can play.

I just wonder if the general gaming public would even notice. I'd notice for sure, and I think THE big ticket/marquee title of the new generation basically running like shit on the Xbone pretty clearly underlines what I've said about the hardware differences mattering...

...but will most people even give a shit?

also what the fuck is this about

(http://i.imgur.com/R4zUykK.png)

I guess this is some dude from Polygon and I guess the issue is supposedly that publishers are flying reviewers in to review their games now instead of mailing out review copies?

Sessler used to be on the G4 video game review shows. Not sure what the fuck he is on about, but I don't really give two shits about his opinion anyway.

The masses did buy 1080p TVs to replace their perfectly good 720p ones. It's pretty tragic if they don't even know why they got 'em.

I'm willing to bet that in a blind test 90% of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 720p and 1080p unless there was some weird anti aliasing that only occured due to up/down scaling.

It's almost as bad as this utter bullshit 240 hertz nonsense.

(http://i.imgur.com/I6HBr5Q.jpg)

I don't think these two examples are really comparable.

Whether they can tell the difference doesn't really matter. The message going out is that the PS4 is better and cheaper. Exactly what that means matters less than the fact you pay less, get more and get all that PS4 exclusive content which seems to be being advertised absolutely non-stop in the UK.

Simple message that Microsoft seem to be struggling to counter.

Destroying competitors who have better and cheaper products is one of Microsoft's specialties so while I think the PS4 will win this generation you can never count Microsoft out.

EVERYONE WHO CARES ABOUT THIS IS A BAD PERSON

For someone that basically ranted all day that 'something really really apocalyptic for games journalism happend but I won't/can't tell you' he has made quite a fuss over the interwebs. Gamer nerds all over the internet are hacking away at their keyboards starting a million threads about what this guy could possibly mean. Current pet theory is that Sony somehow shuts down game journalism with the release of the PS4.

I on the other hand had to actually google this guy because I had never heard his name before. Why is it always guys from third rate internet 'game sites' no one has ever heard of that have their psychotic breaks all over twitter and reddit?

The "industry insiders" at NeoGAF are hilarious.

I mean, let's take someone like myself. I currently have a development kit for a certain system sitting right next to me. I have all the relevant documentation for the system, including a bunch of super sekret infoz about it. If I wanted info on the other consoles I could just become a developer for them and get it, or ask somebody I know.

I know of a lot of secret stuff - game projects that were cancelled, game projects that have yet to be announced. Everybody who works in the game industry has a lot of secret info, about their own employer and other employers as well. You interview a guy and he tells you about a project that isn't going to be announced for another year. An old co-worker of yours gets a new job and tells you about what he's working on. So these "industry insiders" with essentially zero actual information must be like friends of friends of friends of a guy who works in the mail room. That's the level of information they possess - lower than that of anyone who works in the industry.
---

Now as far as 1080 vs 720 - higher resolution is higher and that's strictly better. People used to say that the human eye couldn't distinguish between 30 and 60 FPS, that they eye couldn't distinguish between 24-bit color and 32, or that you couldn't tell the difference between AV and S-VHS cables on an SNES. Now they say that at X distance on Y-sized screen you can't tell the difference between 720 and 1080 - bullshit. These claims are always bullshit.

The human eye and brain are pretty fucking good at seeing stuff.


If you sat someone down to examine the two and asked which was 720 and which was 1080 many would fail, but if you let them play both for a while and the asked which looked better I suspect most people would guess the 1080 one.

The 240hz thing is funny. People used to seriously say that you couldn't tell the difference between 30 and 60 hz - even though that is easily proven false. Not only is that false but you can definitely tell the difference between 60 and 120 as well. Can a person tell the difference between 120 and 240? I've never tried myself but I wouldn't be surprised. (Note: not talking about 120/240 auto motion smoothing crap, which is a different beast from just higher refresh rates)

Are you trying to tell us that this gen will be even more terrible than we think?  :why_so_serious:

I thought you couldn't even use the 120/240hz mode for games due to input lag?

More GAF shit, only you don't have to read GAF to see it since he didn't get "mod approval"!

http://doddscientifics.com/2013/10/28/xbox-one-os-and-xbox-live-issues-bouncing-about-as-we-approach-launch/

Hey devs: This is why you should abandon NeoGAF and never post there. I'm not saying post here even; make your own private forum if you want to talk shop and motherfuck your bosses or the beancounters or something.

Well I don't know, the way the industry wants the consumer to buy everything sight unseen and often with outright misrepresentation of the product, is not making me sympathetic.

The 120/240 mode on a TV introduces lag and it works by interpolating frames, which gives things a video / soap opera look. It also gives some people headaches.

A tv that refreshes at 120 or 240 needs the underlying source to also refresh at that rate to be meaningful. No tv signal or game does that right now.

Do you mean "supposed legions" or "supposed games journos" ?

I'm likely to wait as well.  I don't know what's a new exclusive that I have to have, plus the backlog (I'm still playing PS2 games), and plus I think Gran Turismo 6 is PS3.  Also plus, I've only played one game on my WiiU and I sort of want to make use of it.

Just FYI on televisions: I've been playing Demon's Souls on a 120Hz television and I don't have any lag issues.  Of course, it's not a first-gen 120Hz television.  Also, everyone can easily tell the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz.

I mean people who are supposed to be games journalists (but act more like PR people). Was that bad English? Sometimes Finnish grammar worms its way into my English.

Perfectly fine English, which is vague enough to allow my word jokes.

And now IGN is on it  (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/28/call-of-duty-native-1080p-on-ps4-720p-on-xbox-one?zeta_id=16100434&utm_source=Targeted%20Blasts&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=COD+native+next+gen_21318_1174369_1174379&utm_content=16100434) :why_so_serious:

I'll always remember Sessler for saying how he didn't understand how TV ratings worked, and blaming his exit from G4 on stations being too focused on ratings and not how great the show was.

:oh_i_see:

Infinity Ward confirms: CoD Ghost is 720p on XBox one and 1080p on PS4.

(http://i.imgur.com/amvOFEQ.png)

I am greatly enjoying the drama.  :grin:

PS4 seems to have this incredibly weird feature where you can only listen to music through their subscription service. No MP3 support or anything. The more think about our entertainment overlords, the more evident it becomes that if they achieve a customer friendly experience, it's at worst by accident and at best by trial and error. Their own ideas are not suited for home use.

Sony works in silos and whoever is high up on the Movie / Songs totem pole has pulled rank on the PS4 silo. Or so I guess.

Do people commonly listen to music on their game consoles?

I know custom soundtracks and background music are a thing, but I don't know how many people do it.

Uh, it goes beyond music. There's no DLNA support, which means no streaming content from a PC to your PS4. Movies, whatever.

Supposedly one of the top PS division dudes from Japan answered people requesting DLNA support on twitter that they'll look into it and consider it. Who knows. I never used my PS3 like that but kind of a stupid thing to not have.

I've never done any of that either, but my PS3 and PC are hooked up to the same TV so it's not something I need. Regardless, removing features in a next gen system is a stupid move.

Which is obnoxious, but the PS3 was so particular about containers and codecs I gave up on trying to stream content to it, eventually just using a PC.  Having to transcode or re-container everything was just a mess.

Shortsighted nonetheless.  Sony's content arm has resulted in a lot of braindamage in their consumer electronics over the years.

I think these features are relevant to like 0.1% of people.

I don't understand why I'd stream media to a PS4. The PS4 isn't an output device, what does streaming a movie to the PS4 accomplish? To actually watch the movie you need a display, so why not stream directly to the display or just watch on your PC?

Watching on your PC isn't much of a family solution, and the reason you stream to the console is because the console and the PC are connected to your network while the TV generally isn't. Newer TVs have wireless and apps built in, so that's an option if you have one, but a lot of people do not.

Ideally I'd like less junk in the living room.  The PS3 does great with dvd, bluray, netflix, and amazon video -- but that doesn't cover *all* media I might want to watch on the TV.  My TV does have some internet/streaming crap, but it's all horrible clunky samsung junk that I want nothing to do with -- all I want the TV to do is reliably display video from the console or PC.

There's a video comparison (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XqWRACk2zY) between the graphics between PS4 and XO for Battlefield 4 if anyone wants to see for themselves.  Note that the ps4 is running only at 900p while the XO is at 720p.

Terrible comparison video, but I can't see any difference except there's more jaggies and flickers on the Xbone.

720 vs 1080 or whatever? Take your console money, upgrade your PC, plug that baby into your TV/projector/large screen display device of choice and laugh at the graphics/performance of the new gen consoles. Find a closet to hide in and weep for 5 minutes over the 1 or 2 good titles that never make it to PC in the next 8 years, then come out and give the finger to MS and Sony while sipping some Pappy Van Winkle with the money you saved from not buying both consoles.

If I actually scrolled back through this thread I'm sure I'd find I didn't just say anything that hasn't already been said many times over.

This is a slightly better comparison video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWzkw32amOM). Blue line is PS4 framerate, Green line is Xbox1.

Why is the (so we're calling it the XO now?) so much darker in both videos?

PS3 media server is how I streamed *everything* to my TV. DLNA sucks complete ass, essentially works at random around 30% of the time. I'd pay for a PS3 simply to get something that PS3 media server works on. If that shit doesn't work on PS4....well then PS3 will be my media box.

Difference in configuration and full/limited range HDMI output.

They also, by default, adjusted the contrast to hide some things.

If people wanted to get Wii U for the holidays, I can't figure it out but this seems like a good deal:

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/wii-u-32gb-black-deluxe-set-w-super-mario-u-super-luigi-u/256845224.html

Basically WiiU Bundle+2 games for $260.

That's just the standard Wii U Delxue Set for $39 off the regular price:

http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu/buynow/

They have offered those bundles for quite some time now.

There's the Zelda WW HD branded deluxe Wii U with a Wind Waker styled gamepad and a download code for Zelda:WW HD in the box, the Mario/Luigi branded deluxe version that contains copies of Super Mario Brothers U and Super Mario BrothersLuigi U (part of Nintendo's 'year of Luigi', yes that's a thing) and also a Monster Hunter branded Wii U that contains - you guessed it - a copy of Monster Hunter.

As far as I know the differences between a normal Wii U and the deluxe version are:

white (normal) vs. black (deluxe)
8GB (normal) vs 32 GB of storage (deluxe)

deluxe version contains a Wii sensor bar, a console stand and a gamepad stand in addition to the power brick and charger
normal version only contains power brick and charger.

Still, that's like 15% off.

Edit: Aaaand it's gone.

It's pretty astonishing just how much PR effort is spent at the moment decrying the notion that the PS4's clear psrformance advantage matters. Gaming sites and mags are running whole interview features about 'why game devs stopped worrying and loved the XBox One'. A significant portion of the games media is basically trashing the PS 4  by presenting the issue as if performance doesn't matter. Only featuring studios that develop XBone exclusives.

I can't remember when mags have been that partisan even going so far as to defend MS for issues the PS3 got criticized for at launch.

What's happening here?

The Wii U deluxe also comes with a Pro Controller IIRC and a 10% credit back program on digital purchases for a year I think.

MS has lots and lots and lots more money than Sony, along with the usual "gaming journalism" payola.

In the end the PS4 will likely end up getting a reputation as having the superior versions of multi-platform ports among the consoles due to hardware superiority and more importantly having better tools (which devs have openly said are better) and that'll be that.

Well apparently Microsofts entertainment division is still bleeding cash so I guess that the XBone has to be a success.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-per-year-from-android-patent-royalties-2013-11 (conjecture but interesting nonetheless)

Choice quote: "Sherlund says that if you back out the Android profits, Microsoft is probably losing $2.5 billion on Skype, Xbox, and Windows Phone. Of that, $2 billion in losses are attributable to the Xbox platform."

Also: "For the past few years, Microsoft reported the revenue and operating losses of Entertainment and Devices, which was the group that housed Xbox, Windows Phone, and those Android royalty payments. That group always seemed to be profitable, but Sherlund says it's largely because of the Android money."

If that's true then  :ye_gods:

Wii U Deluxe does not include a Wii U Pro controller.  It does have a 10% cash back program for digital purchases, or at least it did before the price drop.

Some of the original Wii U Deluxe bundles, like the one with ZombieU, did include the Pro controller. The current Deluxe bundles do not.

lol

Just fyi the PS4 can play single-player disc-based games on day one with no update, and if you don't have an internet connection where the console is the PS4 has the same feature the PS3 did where you can download the update from their website, put it on a USB thumbdrive, and install it that way.

 :facepalm:

Launch day patch mandatory --> server crash --> nobody can play

Perfect!

Demand far exceeded our expectations. Thank you for your patience, or:

bend over just a little bit farther...

"We don't know how the servers crashed and the hackers got your CC info... I mean, it was all encrypted so please settle down and buy a Zune."

Download in progress, 1% complete. Estimated time remaining: 15 minutes.
8 hours later...
Download in progress, 3% complete. Estimated time remaining: 4 days.

I'd like to hope it crashes their cloud and brings down everything but they routinely push out Windows updates to eleven jazillion computers so it will be fine.  Especially considering how few machines they were able to build and put on sale for launch day.

So some retailer accidentally shipped a bunch of XBones early and MS promptly started bricking consoles with permabans. An unboxing video got DMCA'd. Their PR only just wised up and Major Nelson is now doing damage control on Neogaf and trying to get the bans reversed.

 :uhrr:

http://kotaku.com/and-heres-another-guy-who-seems-to-have-an-xbox-one-a-1461279632

The day one patch shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.  They announced a day one patch would be required way back when they announced they were stripping out the DRM.

*edit* IGN has a 17 minute dashboard walkthrough if anyone is interested: http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/11/08/xbox-one-dashboard-walkthrough and a 12 minute demonstration by microsoft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhe6jV-APwM)

We knew there would be a day one patch, we didn't know that the system was unusable in any way until it was over.  You can't bring it home, put a disk in it and start playing, video games don't work.

The Xbox One is out soon?

meh

whatever

Actually canceled my PS4 preorder too.

Just couldn't get excited about this stuff.  Maybe next year.

Come on dude don't you want to play ...

... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ...

...Knack............?

Basically.

I was trying to psych myself up to Killzone but I'm a FPS-PC guy first, so FPS on consoles generally resound in a meh from me.

So it was a few indie games that sounded interesting and that was it until the Japanese PS4 release, when there's a bunch of games that looked interesting.

Shit, I might buy a WiiU.

I have a three-year old, a beefy pc and no interest in ps4 exclusives.  I'm hoping there will be a good deal for a Wii U on black friday.

There is literally one (maybe 2) launch/launch window titles I'm interested in playing, and unfortunately I'm not shelling out 500 dollars for a box to play Killer Instinct and Dead Rising 3 (The latter of which has adopted the "everything is brown" approach to visual design).

Jesus, when was the last time a console release was actually exciting? N64? PS2?

If you had signed up early enough to get a launch day unit you could have resold it for one or two extra hundred bucks.

I put my name on the ps4 wait list thinking I'd buy Assassin's Creed for it and maybe Knack.  But now I've seen a side by side ps3/ps4 comparison video of AC4 and they look the same to me so I don't know.  I'm sure I'll buy one eventually so I may as well get it now I guess.

Is that true Miasma? I definitely will have a day 1 PS4 (preordered it like 5 minutes after preorders were available), but the more I think about it the more I know there will be literally NOTHING I will want to play on it for a good 6 months, so I was wondering "what's the point?". At the same time, since I will certainly buy a PS4 later (and not so late) I thought "why should I cancel since I am getting it anyway?". So I started wondering if I should wait cause launch units are certainly gonna have more issues then the ones coming a few months later, and then again "but maybe my older unit will have some cool features that will get stripped off later ones", so I really can't decide.

But of course, if I can make money out of the preorder I should totally go for it.

They're going for between five and six hundred on ebay now, many of those people bought it online and will just change the shipping info so they don't have to pay for that either.  Not much time before stuff starts shipping so it could be risky.  I have no idea what will happen to the prices once they ship.

It's not like you can get crazy money for a console like launch day for xbox 360 and ps3 because the most hardcore were able to preorder this time.

Edit:  Don't make any financial decisions based on my half assed research.
Edit2:  There is a fair bit available on PS+ that aren't actual boxed games.

What I've seen of the ps4 launch titles has not excited me so far, but I haven't canceled my pre-order, figuring it'll replace my ps3 as bluray/dvd/netflix/amazonvideo box and as with last generation, the playstation exclusive stuff will be more interesting to me than the xbox exclusives.  On the other hand there were fewer games I bought and played on ps3 than ps2, and that may shrink further on ps4...

The PS4 unboxing video is a recreation of the unboxing vid for Random Access Memories. Heh.

Console launches are almost always terrible. If you're buying a system on day 1 it's mostly likely it's because you like the concept of being a day 1 owner. With Sony and MS I'd be weary just for hardware reliability issues. You know there is going to be a hardware revision that is some combination of quieter, smaller and less prone to breakage in the not too distant future.

It's amazing that Mario 64 was a launch game. It was one of the first 3D platforming games, one of the first games to use an analog stick, and still one of the best 3D platformers of all time. Nailing it that well right out of the gate was insane. Meanwhile Knack probably isn't as good as Mario 64.

Firstly I'd like to say that MS's PR department seems to be in full on containment mode and seems to be hellbent on fixing some of the initial PR clusterfuck. Everywhere op-eds are popping up being apologetic about MS's efforts. They either offer a 'comparison' of the PS4's and XB1's specs with the focus being heavily on the XB1, exclusively showing XB1 footage and only quoting MS executives (just look at the most recent Ars Technica op-ed http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/the-xbox-one-and-ps4-share-similar-specs-but-the-devils-in-the-details/ to see an example of what I mean) or they outright dismiss the powerformance difference as being not noticeable.

Lastly for a sector that obsesses about graphics and system performance and that outright dismissed the Wii and Wii U for being sub par and 'not next gen' it's actually beyond ridiculous. It's silly that they now adopt the talking points of a vocal fraction of gamers who've always said that gameplay > graphics and that have been largely maginalized by the press just because their favourity console hasn't the upper hand. You usually only see that amount of cognitive dissonance with full blown schizophrenics.

I've finished WW HD yesterday and I still have access to a Gamecube and the original version of Wind Waker so I thought I'd do a little experiment of my own. Since most of our gaming media are suddenly of the opinion that a 50% performance advantage of the PS4 over the XB1 doesn't matter, that a resolution increase from 720p to 1080p is 'not really noticeable' and that gamers shouldn't be too focused on the graphics because 'it's the game that matters not the graphics' I thought I'd compare WW classic and WW HD on the same TV at the same viewing distance.

Yeah the comparison is ridiculous but what the hell. Also according to our gaming media pundits the WiiU is just a 'cranked up Gamecube' anyway so probably not that much more powerful and 'resolution doesn't matter', so there really should be no difference between the GC and WiiU version of that game, right? Unsurprisingly though the game is so much better looking on the WiiU that it's not even funny anymore. Well, duh! Everyone except the gaming media is inclined to expect that anyway, so what's the deal? After all if you compare a VW beetle to a BMW 3-series you tend to notice the difference.

The deal is that not only are the graphics significantly improved, so much in fact that the game looks more like a real cartoon than a computer game (I mean that as a compliment) and not only that the game runs at 1080p which is 7 times the number of pixel of the original 480p/i GC version because that's pretty much expected and obvious. It's the improvement in fidelity and clarity of the picture that is most noticeable. As a person that has bad vision and is far from the perfect 20/20 vision most game developers obviously assume people have I struggle with many current gen games if I have to play them at the normal viewing distance from couch to TV in my living room.  Even though I own a 46'' TV and I'm only sitting 3m/10 ft. from the TV. I should notice the graphical improvements even less because at my vision and at that distance, at least according to general consensus, the added resolution shouldn't matter. (According to the lit. you'd need a 50'' screen to actually notice the resolution increase from 720p to 1080p at distances of 3m or more)

That's where for me the updated graphics really shine though. The picture clarity and fidelity is so much bettter on the WW HD version that I actually can play it while sitting on the couch instead, in contrast to of a lot of 360/PS3 games where I have to inch closer to the TV to be able to make out everything.

Well irrespective of the obvious point that the added performance could also be put into other gameplay elements like improved AI etc. you could do a lot of things on a graphical level that would make things better for the player even for multiplatform titles that usually are the same games on all platforms and even if you stayed at the same resolution the XB1 version does. You could add more effects, you could increase the detail level of models and textures, you could use additional shaders, increase the viewing distance, add FSAA and anisotropic filtering etc. or you could up the resolutio and still offerthe same graphics as the XB1 at 720p.

All of these things will be noticeable. You might not actually 'see' the pixels of a 720p version at your viewing distance (btw that's the ONLY thing about the'resolution increase isn't noticeable' that's actually true) but the added fidelity and clarity of the picture and the better overview an increased res might give you will be. Even on multiplatform titles that usually only vary in the graphics feature sets among platforms and keep the gameplay the same.

my eyes

Once again, as an owner of multiple launch PS3s, PS2s, PSPs and PS1s, my sample size of like 13 or something dismisses the fact that Sony has reliability issues. They're just as reliable as Nintendo has been over time. The only reason I'm even responding to this is you clumped it in with Microsoft who makes literal shit disguised as hardware.

What are people eventually excited to play on a next gen console? The only console game on my game radar right now is darksouls 2 in march, and thats coming out for ps3/360. The only thing so far I've managed to get somewhat excited for is a few passing references to a twitch app on ps4. I'd really like the idea of watching some dota2/lol matches on my tv instead of reruns of shows I've already seen all the episodes of while eating dinner (realistically) or working out (hypothetically.) Someone point me at a game or 2 coming down the pike before I just spend my next gen console money on a HTPC instead.

I'll tell you what I played on PS3 that justified the purchase. Note these are all games I couldn't have played on a PC (or not before a long awaited possibly mediocre port), which is still my favourite gaming machine, and pretty much express why I want a "next gen" console.

- Disgaea 3
- Disgaea 4
- Gran Turismo 5
- Final Fantasy 13
- Grand Theft Auto 4
- Soul Calibur 4
- Demon's Souls
- Heavy Rain
- Dark Souls
- Journey
- Catherine
- Dragon's Dogma
- Beyond: Two Souls
- The Last of Us

These are the ones I completed and loved. Of course I am not counting all the other games I have played extensively and enjoyed a lot but were somehow less important and/or I could have played on some other system, like Pro Evolution, Madden, NHL, Midnight Club and many more. It might look like not much but it was more than worth it for me. For the PS4 I am looking forward to Gran Turismo 7, Dark Souls 2, the next Quantic Dream, the next Naughty Dog, and then the usual amount of Japanese things I will absolutely love but could not predict.

(http://brutalgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/reggie-wiiu.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/RYdqd4Y.jpg)

So much  :awesome_for_real:

Not I, but the son was excited to get a Wii U so much that I let him buy it himself.  He's all jazzed to play Rayman, Scribblenauts, the Lego games, etc on it.  Neither he nor the daughter give two squirts about the PS4 or Xbone, so I get to pocket funds this gen.

I bought the PS3 for God of War, FF14 & 14-2 for the wife and Soul Caliber.  I own a total of 20 games (I just counted) 4 of which are Lego or Assassin's Creed variants the daughter bought.   It was not a good investment, I'm going to skip this gen.

In this case it's multi-platform games being compared, so "gameplay vs graphics" doesn't even factor in. It's graphics vs graphics with the same gameplay for both versions.

I think there are a lot of reasons why this is happening, including MS being a US-based company, being better at cupping the balls of the press, the press being antagonistic just for the sake of it, etc - but it clearly is happening. All last gen we heard about how the 360 was better because the mutli-platform games were better on it and thus even multiplats were differentiating strengths.


The whole "you can't tell the difference" thing is a straight up lie. Anyone with working eyes can tell the difference.

Huh?

Ha, Sony handed out free PS4's with personalized engraving to all the journos, who predictably flocked like kids getting free candy. Embarrassing pics and tweets ensued:

(http://abload.de/img/screenshot2013-11-11a7wpou.png)

(http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/341/i3m7.jpg)

(http://i633.photobucket.com/albums/uu55/Sunburnt-Corpse/greg.png)

Could you tell me for what sort of games media outlet they work so that I can avoid it like the plague in the future? I'd be much obliged.

Who knows. I'm pretty sure Gameovergreggy follows Blue's Clues on Nickelodeon though.

It's IGN as per the watermark.
 
Also I have no idea what Blue's Clues is.

When people accuse the gaming press of bias / influence the response is typically some reductive "it's not like we trade reviews for compensation." Then stuff like this happens and even that looks silly.

Going from 720>upscaled>1080p to native1080p isn't nearly the same thing as 480i>1080p.

Also, the differences will be relatively minor in a lot of 3rd party games, as they develop for ease of conversion along the lowest (mainstream) common denominator of the "big two" of the day (no-one cares about Nintendo anymore). 99% of the stuff that you list that devs "could" do they won't do, particularly in the first year of titles. Anything that one has over the other will be idiot Kinect connectivity or other gimmicky touchscreen controller shit. Where the PS4's extra power will shine will be in exclusives, and you won't be able to compare those anyway.

Also, caring too much about the idiot gaming press is a bad idea.  :why_so_serious:

No I pretty much expected nothing less (or more?) in that case. Mainly confirms my suspicions.

It's blatant, yes and it would violate the code of conduct and terms of your contract if you were employed at any 'serious' news organization, i..e it would get you fired. This is the gaming media though and so it pretty much just confirms the suspicions most gamers have had already though.

Making it seem like you are a gay couple that just came back from adopting a baby and has to share the joyous experience with the world is just added hilarity/facepalm-worthy.

Well I didn't really claim that and I realize you don't imply I did but going from 720p to 1080p is a 2.25 increase in the number of pixels pushed (1.5 times the number of pixels in each dimension). Granted it's not a 9-fold increase like Wind Waker did when going from 480p to 1080p (3 time increase in each dimension) but WW HD is essentially the same game as the GC version just with high res textures and more detailed models. While it may be exaggerated for comedic effect if the argument that 720p and 1080p is pretty much the same would be valid you shouldn't notice a visible effect just by a game being blown up from 480p to 1080p with little extra graphical resources added.

As it stands though it shows just how different and better a game can look when you use the added resolution and additional processing power for even just a little bit of additional graphical work.


That was true in the PS3/Xbox 360 days because harnessing the additional power of the PS3 would have required a wholly different optimization path.  PC versions have almost always had added additional graphical effects or higher res resources even for multiplatform titles because it was basically just a 360 version with a different set of graphical options - something a modern gaming engine could quite easily support anyway. Also the PS3 came out a whole year after the 360 so it didn't make sense financially to fund a lot of additional optimization work for a platform that initially offered little additional sales.

Since both consoles are now basically the same architecture I expect to see a lot more graphical differentziation between both systems since targeting all three platforms has gotten a whole lot easier. On the contrary though I expect most developers to not really utilize the embedded SRAM on the Xbox 1 since doing so would require additional optimization work to be put into the XB1 version wrt. the PS4 and PC versions of the same game at least if you really use it to offset some of the performance hit you get from the DDR3 memory.


I don't care, at least I think I don't. It's quite interesting though to see an industry or even a lot of the same people do a complete 180 on everything they said at a time when the 360 was king and the PS3 just because the PS4 now has the performance advantage and lower price.

I have played both 720p and 1080p games on my 55" TV and I have honestly never noticed the difference.  GW2 the only difference I noticed was a difference in the UI sizing.

1080 just gives you better overall image quality. It's not a night and day difference, but for the same game running at 720 vs 1080 it should be pretty obvious.

As far as other differences between PS4 and XB1 versions, I would expect things like more physics-based animations, better water, etc on PS4. Basically ancillary stuff. (For multi-plats I mean)

VIDEO

(http://i.imgur.com/2VKflmL.png)

GAMES

So he (Adam Sessler?) whined until he got a debug unit for review purposes and then went to the party to get another, personally engraved retail unit?

Phat lewts indeed.

SRS BZNS

Game reveiwers are whiney douchebags just looking for free shit - film at 11.  :grin:

They're like Finnish politicians, so inept that they sell themselves for a pittance. 400 bucks worth of plastic and they willingly debase themselves on Twitter.

 

The politicians?

Well there was this one guy who got lured with free drinks and then the yellow press had a field day with photos. But that felt more sad, taking advantage of someone's addiction.

I really want to meet you in real life because I think you'd be a great Bud Abbot to my Lou Costello.

Honestly? The same shit we're playing now in next year's iterations. So with that in mind, I'm looking at 6-12-18 months before I bother seriously looking at buying one (which will be a PS4, because fuck MS and their XBone) If they ungimp the PS4's media capabilities, so much the better.

There's this great beer house if you ever visit Helsinki. And one place that makes their own blueberry cider.


----

In console war news, there's an amusing thing brewing on Neogaf. Seems like some "journalism" outlets have posted comparison videos of CoDGhosts, both games running at 720p. Then saying the games look identical.

I guess the PS4 media embargos and such are now gone so you can go to your least hated video games "journalism" source to see reviews, livestreams, rants raves and all that.

People do not like that Knack game.

It seems pretty likely now that CodGhosts is actually 720p on PS4 single player and nobody noticed until someone counted the pixels. People with the game have just been going "gee this 1080p sure looks just like 720p".   :why_so_serious:

Also, Knack is Mark Cerny trying to recreate Crash Bandicoot, it was never going to be good. I like how PS1 the whole idea feels, but Resogun is where it's at. Tech demo and good retro gameplay.

Knack was never going to be good since it looked like it was entirely designed to be a tech demo and not a game.

Tech demos stretched out to a few hours is what console release titles are all about.

Fabricated why are you posting a twitter tirade from a retarded person? Have you read that guy's Twitter stream?

Debug units have nothing to do with piracy. It's not like debug units have some exposed keys you can get at and break encryption with. Nor are debug units highly prized, MS gave them out like candy last gen. It's very common for people in the media to have debug units. (In part because they can play early versions of games that aren't pressed onto retail discs)

Apparently the issue was that retail PS4 units don't let you capture video directly. For someone who does a video show this is obviously a legitimate issue. Considering that this guy's job (Sessler I mean) is producing video content not having a debug unit would adversely affect him. I don't know if vague rants on twitter was the best approach for dealing with it, but I can certainly see why he'd be miffed.

Like any other device that has to adhere to the HDMI spec. An issue that is neither really new nor uncommon.

It's confirmed, Activision is releasing a patch day 1 that changes Cod from 720p to 1080p on PS4. And nobody noticed anything until now! This launch is the best thing to happen in a long time.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-13-day-one-patch-makes-call-of-duty-ghosts-single-player-1080p-on-ps4

Horseshit Megathread is paying off.

Is DTM still in business? I am gonna visit in May for a hooping workshop,if you feel like sharing a lonkero.

This launch is pretty amazing.

By that I mean it's pretty standard, but people had such lofty expectations that it's turning out to be a hilarious mess.

Not picking on you exactly, but who are these people you are referring to?

Every PS4 review so far, according to IGN (http://www.ign.com/games/reviews?platformSlug=ps4&sortBy=score&abthid=528402d1e9329d2979000021), and some  shocking announcement from Hideo Kojima (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/11/13/kojima-shocking-ps4-announcement-coming-this-week)coming this week.

People on other forums and twitter, notably Neogaf and Gamefaqs.

Yahoo writer predicts,  Xbone will win because of Kinect  (http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/game-over-fastest-selling-tech-device-history-end-130353968.html)
 :awesome_for_real:

 

Win what?

Our unending derision and contempt?  :why_so_serious:

Some guy firing a .50 cal anti-materiel rifle at the ps4.  I dunno. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5dvWGY2bAd0#t=83)

(http://i.minus.com/iR9ftcAhUmJxj.gif)

I had preordered a PS4 and Amazon and UPS did not fail me -- it was waiting on my front step when I got home Friday evening.  Had to waste some time on a 300ish MB OS update, resetting my long-forgotten PSN password, setting up my PSN account on the PS4, and so on.

The PS4 in general is snappier than the PS3, not always smooth (especially when you have a game paused in the background), and has removed some of the clunkiness -- when you hit the PS button the active game is immediately backgrounded and you get back to the homescreen in a hurry.  If you launch another game or app it'll ask if you want to end the one that's paused.  Getting in and out of the PSN store is faster -- app and game launch time in general is faster than PS3.

The share button takes screenshots when you tap it and allows for uploading them (to twitter) and uploading videos (live to twitch.tv or ustream or offline to... facebook?! wtf, where's a youtube option).  Oddly there is no mechanism I can find to view screenshots or videos on the PS4 itself -- they're listed in the share UI but just as thumbnails.

The launch titles available at the moment are not terribly exciting (though AC4 seems to be getting positive reviews).  I grabbed Resogun which is a pretty slick shmup.  Enjoying it a bunch.

Download from PSN can be painfully slow, and background downloads kept failing while I was using Amazon Instant Video (not sure if that was a multitasking problem or a PSN problem). 

Lack of support for the PS3 AV remote is annoying.  Crap integration for bluray playback is annoying as well -- no way to resume where you left off if you hop back to the launcher with the PS button, unlike games.

I really like the feel of the dualshock controller but am scratching my head about the big 'ol headlight on it -- would like to be able to turn that off and save some battery.

DTM went bankrupt a few years ago and then another company bought the rights and opened one up in a different location. I've no idea how it is.

We can totally go for a lonkero if I'm around in May!

On topic: It's even possible I have a PS4 at that point.





 

(http://i.imgur.com/bTtGg7z.jpg)

Apparently you do need to be online to start up games you downloaded from the PSN.

That's designed to counter the rampant account sharing from the PS3.

It's kind of admirable how determined some parts of the press are to stick to the narrrative.

At first the claim was '1080p doesn't matter it's all in the games' (might as well, would be a welcome change from the current state of gaming).
Then the claim was that 'just because a lot of people claimed they have pre-ordered a PS4 it doesn't have to translate to sales'.
Then the claim was that 'Kinect and media integration offers a unique package that people might prefer'

Then Sony announced that they sold through 1 million consoles in North Amerca alone during the launch (biggest Sony Playstation launch yet) and now the claim is that 'a strong launch is nice, but it doesn't necessarily imply long-term success'.

I recently realized the PS4 is coming out in February 2014 in Japan, three months after pretty much every other place in the world. Considering it's their console, I thought it was weird and wanted to check out what was going on. The explanation makes a lot of sense and basically makes me feel like the stereotypical first world idiotic consumerist which wants the new shiny even though there is fucking nothing worth playing on it. Japan, not being obsessed with Christmas as some other countries, and wanting to launch their new product with a decent lineup of games people actually want to play, is gonna give developers a little more time.

Considering I don't feel like canceling my preorder (PS4 is coming out next week in Europe) for the reasons I mentioned above (idiotic consumerism, new shiny, etc.), I am grateful to Japan for showing me a side of myself I was conveniently overlooking, and to teach us a tiny lesson about patience.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-20-sony-explains-why-ps4-will-launch-in-japan-after-the-west

I'm going to sound like a PS fanboy and also like a nationalist but bear with me.

The Xbox 360 might be the sales and mindshare leader of the current gen in the US or North America. On a global scale however the US and the UK are the ONLY markets the 360 has a lead over the PS3 even though it launched a whole year earlier.

Yet the big assumption by most US or UK based media coverage seems to be that the 360 was always the 'dominant' console and the platform leader and that it was so on a global scale. If you want to understand why the PR and product startegy of Microsoft failed as disastrously as it did please keep in mind that this viewpoint is myopic and that you are professionally blinkered if you think that the US/NA situation is or was any indication of how things are in other markets. The PS3 managed to match the sales figures of the 360 even though it launched a year after the 360. It did because it managed to outsell the 360 in most major markets except US and UK.

I mention this because the Xbox 1 focuses even harder on the supposed needs of the customers, developers and advertisers in its two core and leading markets to the detriment of potential buyers in oversees markets. This is bad news especially in light of the recent PS4 successes in North America. If Sony manages to sell a record number of consoles in the US/NA market where its competitor has the biggest advantage imagine what this might lead to once the PS4 launches in markets Sony traditionally is stronger than MS.

The XB 1's media integration features are essentially custom tailored to the needs of North American consumers and the US media landscape. Most of the features will not work anywhere else at launch, some features will not be needed anywhere else at launch (HDMI passthrough and TV overlay for example) and if the 360 is any indication most of those features will not work anywhere else in the world ever. European and Asian Xbox live buyers still get a lot less features yet still pay more for the service 8 years after the 360 launched for example. In fact many features of the 360 were too focused on the US market as well, with the most famous blunder being that the original Kinect camera didn't work in many EU or Asian homes due to being developed for the average US living room layout. Yet MS is doubling down on the features that US buyers or US media companies might like yet probably won't translate well to other markets. For a globally invested company MS has always managed to be just too US focused, pathologically so, a trait it shares with rival Apple.

Sony despite its many failings this generation has always been a much more globally oriented company and the effects are already noticeable this time around. Sony even manages to build a global developer and designer mindshare while MS at least seems to be only focused on the NA developer base. COD is by no means that much of a cultural phenomenon globally as it is in the US yet MS gave the stage exclusively to Infinity Ward and Activision to present it at its launch event. The message was clear: If you like Call of Duty, American Football and media integration entirely focused on US TV then this is your thing. Somehow this didn't even convince many of the potential buyers in THE core market the message and product was entirely tailored to and because of that MS is in trouble.

Yet most of the US based gaming press doesn't seem to get why the PS4 is so popular right now and this bothers me to no end because for me it signals that not only are the people responsible for building the new Xbox out of touch with their global customer base, the gaming media is as well. So the US market is too much of an echo chamber so much so that the people involved failed to even realisticly assess the needs of their own domestic customer base.

Things like performance or price aside it's the fact that Sony's PR campaign strategy was focused and tailored to most if not all potential global markets. They work with, promote and listen to the needs of developers worldwide (something of a turnaround for Sony), are present at trade shows and industry events in all major markets and didn't design their product around a feature set that is and probably always will be only useful to customers in ONE core market, while sacrificing features that would be useful for all markets. MS on the other hand coudn't even tell potential buyers at this years GamesCom in Cologne which of the XBox One's features will ever be usable or useful for potential buyers in the EU or other oversees markets. They couldn't even present a time frame of when certain features will be available if ever.

Every time an industry expert says something to the effect of 'the Kinect was a success' or the '360 is the globally dominant console' I flinch a little because the latter is only arguably true and the former objectively isn't, at least if you don't hear the 'in North America' that should be added. For potential buyers in the EU the value proposition the PS4 offers makes buying one even more of a foregone conclusion. $100 less gives me a piece of hardware that is significantly more powerful, a platform that has a much more globally oriented developer mindshare and I won't have to purchase a lot of features I probably won't be able to use ever on a console that has gutted an aspect of its feature set that would be useful to me (performance for example) in favour of a design approach that is probably only useful for a certain subset of people in one core market.

MS's product strategy failed in large parts because the people involved managed and implemented it very incompetently, but MS's product strategy was doomed to fail regardless. The success of the 360 this gen had as much to do with Sony's failures as it had with Microsoft's efforts. If Sony had been that strong and that focused at launch of the PS3 as it is today then MS probably would have been trounced last gen especially at a time when 1/3rd of all 360 consoles failed with a RROD. That nobody at MS seems to have gotten this baflles me, that nobody in the mainstream gaming press has gotten this baffles me even more. A product that needs global sales and a huge global installed base to be even marginally profitable cannot afford to be focused too much on a single market - even if sales in that market are undeniably strong.

If the rumors are true and MS is still losing billions on the Media and Entertainment division and its core product the Xbox then this spells trouble and it should be picked up on by the press and the publishers

Falconneers post adds into the point I'm making in that we are too much focused on a single market and mindset and that anecdote might as well be further evidence that Sony is actually thinking about each market indicidually this time around.

This brings me to the biggest elephant in the room - the Wii.

Nobody even mentions that both the Nintendo Wii and the DS/3DS individually managed to outsell both the PS3 and the 360. Nintendo sold in excess of 120 million Wii and even more DS/3DS. In any other business, except gaming, companies would get serious flack from investors and the press if they completely ignored an installed base and potential customer base of that magnitude. Yet big companies that are listed on the stock market can publicly state that they simply won't offer products or target a potential audience of > 100 million and nobody bats an eye.

EA and the other big publishers seem to be of the opinion that if AAA titles like Battlefield aren't easily portable and aren't getting bought on that console then they won't do anything for it and this sentiment seems to be largely OK with the press and investment circles. Hell even the PS3 got flack because it wasn't 'easy to develop for' and made PC ports harder and more expensive.

An Ars editor recently called the Wii the 'Nintendo Dust Collector 1000' and while it is true today that the Wii has somewhat failed despite being a sales hit but this has probably more to do with the lack of industry support the Wii got by the big three publishers than with Nintendo itself troubling relationship with Nntendo and its third party developers or not.

Imagine the CEO of any other Fortune 500 company going on record with the statement that they simply won't bother to go after a 120 million plus segment of consumers despite being a significant market compared to your traditional segment (Wii's approx. 120 million vs. 90 million 360 and 90 million PS3). He would get fired and laughed out of town. Now imagine that CEO's of the major game publishing houses not only said exactly that but that the press and pretty much most of the investors are pretty much OK with that.

I don't know what my opinion is of a business that has a habit of ignoring huge potential markets because 'it's too hard' or 'we don't want to' and has such control over the conversation and 'story' in that sector that those topics completely fall out of the public's perception even.

Wii trounced the current gen on sales and Nintendo completely failed to translate that into any kind of mindshare or exploit it in any sort of way that would lead to a strong position let alone 'market dominance'. As much as that is Nintendo's owm failure it got compounded by an industry that is nesting so comfortably inside its bubble that it couldn't predict let alone capitalize on the Wii's success and found it easier to just pretend it didn't exist. The fact that there seems to be a huge untapped potential of customers THAT THEY DIDN'T EVEN KNOW OF probably was too much for the collective psyche. The Wii's initial success seems to be such an aberration and such an explicable event that the existence of the Wii and even the DS/3DS seem to have been completely blocked out by most industry insiders. It's as if the whole system never existed or is part of an Alien incomprehensible world where the mythical 'casual gamer' roams freely amongst Women,  Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster.

It somehow seems fitting that professional product managers and marketing people actually deluded themselves into thinkling that everybody liked Football, Call of Duty and US broadcast and cable TV and are probably really confounded as to why that isn't the case

Great Caesar's Ghost

As a postscript to my - somewhat psychotic - ramblings.

The game industry is also the only industry I know of where people can publicly claim that their customers are wrong and that their opinions are wrong and don't matter. Look at most of the PR after MS tanked its presentation and at most of the articles defending Microsofts strategy afterwards for an example ofbwhat I mean.

A lot of industry professionals came out and flatly told people that their opinion about the Xbox 1 and its always on DRM were from or ill-informed and who were outright dismissive of the opinion of their customers. How often have I seen the written sentiment that people who bought a Wii are not 'real gamers' are not indicative or any trend or are simply 'stupid sheep', how often have I read somebody in a professional capacity being apologetic about gender issues, sexism and misogyny etc.

The games industry can do that because its consumers are of a few categories:  1) Morons  2) Fanbois who will slaver up anything 3) AdultChildren who can't get their fix anywhere else.

You see Software companies doing the same thing as they solidify their shares and competitors are bought-out or go out of business for being too small to have a chance.  Or was the market REALLY clamoring for The Ribbon in Office (and all the apps that followed-along)

I'm going to need this in APA format.

You know that console that wants to be about more than games, that wants to be the centre of your entertainment universe, that wants you to do all you social network crap on it, that wants to be a hub?  It can't even get twitch streaming to work. (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/11/19/xbox-one-wont-have-twitch-gameplay-streaming-at-launch/)

"One"

Thanks to that link, I know AOL still exists.

Here's all you need to know about why the Bone is a failure. It wasn't designed for CONSUMERS. Every feature, everything they highlighted as a positive for the box from the beginning has been about features media companies want, not consumers. The design document might as well have been a bullet point list of "things no consumer has ever asked for but every media company who will pay us a dollar wants us to implement so they get paid for every micro-viewing of their product."

Yeah, I think you nailed it.

Yep, and that's why I will never own one.

All the stuff you say about the Wii (particularly in your previous rant) is batshit insane. A lot of people bought that thing as a Wii sports machine, and a lot of other people bought it for Nintendo games. 3rd party ports were obviously going to sell like shit because most people interested in any of those games already had a 360 or PS3 where they could play them in HD. That meant that publishers had to make exclusive games that were still aimed toward the hardcore gamers or try to compete with Nintendo doing their kind of games. The former category gave us stuff like MadWorld, No More Heroes, and Sin and Punishment: Star Successor which reviewed ok and sold abysmally. The later category gave us Zack & Wiki and Boomblox which also reviewed well and sold abysmally. Ubisoft had a good-sized hit with the Just Dance games, but EA's only breakthrough was EA Sports Active which sold 1.8 million copies (which then had a huge drop-off for the sequel). Epic Mickey received somewhat less favorable reviews, but even there you could see that at least a lot of effort had been put into making a Wii specific title (lot of publicity, Warren Spector heading development, one of the best known characters of all time) and was still met with failure.

The idea that the Wii was some untapped mother lode of sales if only developers had just tried is ridiculous.

Why exactly? For me it sounds entirely like a self-fulfilling prophecy. '3rd party ports were obviously going to sell like shit because most people interested in any of those games already had a 360 or PS3 where they could play them in HD' seems to make this a foregone conclusion.

Studios were caught completely flat-footed by Nintendo's success with the Wii.  It was completely sold out through most of its first year run. 'A lot of people bought that thing as a Wii sports machine', come on, really? Might that have anything to do with the fact that for the first six months of the Wii's run this was practically the only game you could get with a 15 title launch lineup that wasn't exactly great?

Look Nintendo pretty much killed any sort of momentum it had by sticking with cartridges at a time when the industry had already begun to embrace the CD-ROM and by how they treated their third party developers, I don't deny that. The game cube had non-standard discs with lower capacity and by the time the Wii came around Nintendo was already seen as an 'also-ran' where only first party titles sell and that has a 'kiddie-console' image. The gamecube had a pretty decent games lineup, decent third party support and featured a lot of 'grown-up' games yet the 'kiddie' label stuck while 'grown-ups' bought a PS2. By and large Nintendo was seen - even in 2006 - as a company that had its audience and that sold consoles and was profitable but whose customers bought it to give it to their kids or to play the newest Zelda and Mario games. The Wii was also completely orthogonal to most companies' strategies at the time, significantly less power and a different control scheme meant that they couldn't do straightforward ports of 360 or PS3 titles.

Then the Wii sold 600.000 consoles in the first week - more than the PS2 did in its first week - and pretty much the whole industry did a double-take. According to their market research this shouldn't or couldn't have happened. It was seen as a novelty Nintendo fans would probably buy. According to them the platform could safely be ignored and most of the customers - many of which didn't even own a game console or had owned one before - shouldn't even exists. A lot of articles were written at that time trying to make sense of a situation NOBODY saw coming not even Nintendo. A lot of it was simply rationalization hence the 'casual gamer' myth, a person that doesn't really play much and that largely bought the Wii for the hype and Wii sports.

At this moment the Wii features 1220 games yet it still has the image of a console that had none. If you look at release dates most of those games came out from 2008 onwards, two or even three years after release. By that time any sort of interest the general public had about the Wii was gone. I had already sold mine by that time and I know a lot of people who patiently waited more than a year for SW that didn't come and moved on. I mean the two biggest titles of the first year were Twilight Princess and Rayman fucking Rabbids because even Super Mario Galaxy came out a year after launch.

I don't blame the publishers exclusively because Nintendo botched it as well and worse they don't even seem to get that they've botched it. I also get it. Nobody expected the Wii to be the success it was and so it took them years to finally release games that were not rush jobs and were actually made for the console. By the time the games rolled in most of the people who had any interest in the Wii or gaming had already stopped caring.

The image of the Wii as a platform that has no games, that's a Wii Sports device, where nobody sold anything on is entirely shaped by the first two years of its run when publishers either scrambled to put anything out for a console that wasn't really on their radar or simply had nothing and by the time some titles did roll around people had already sold their Wii on ebay or simply moved on. Also iPhone which came out in 2007.

Epic Mickey came out in 2010
Sin & Punishment was 2009
Boomblox was 2008

Only No more Heroes and Zack & Wiki even came out in 2007.

The Wii's 'out of left field' success is also pretty much what they've now have to deal with with the Wii U. Still significantly less powerful than the Xbox One and PS4, still a somewhat different control scheme albeit less of a problem. But now it has the addditional problem of having to work against the Wii's image as the most successful failure in console history. Pretty much the everybody claims that the Wii U will probably end up like the Wii as an interesting console that collects dust and that doesn't have any games except Nintendo First Party titles.

There's no market for more casual games with actual gameplay instead of half baked features and more cutscenes on a lower res device!  None.  Because muppets.

I'm loving Resogun on PS4.  Otherwise waiting for more compelling titles, but tempted to try AC4 since I've never played an AC game and people seem to be loving this one, especially all the sandboxy pirate ship stuff.

Jesus, don't make me SirBruce this thing.

Yes, it was a foregone conclusion that 3rd party ports weren't going to sell well on the Wii. Due to the hardware, they were always going to be the inferior versions. I'm fairly certain sales numbers will back this up in the instance of almost every single game that got ported to the Wii (Guitar Hero 3 being the only exception I know of). Almost every original game made for the Wii outside of games made by Nintendo also sold poorly. Now your argument is that the games didn't come out early enough in the consoles life cycle? Elebits, Wii exclusive came out in 2006 to decent reviews. Failed. SSX Blur, Wii exclusive came out in 2007 to decent reviews. Failed. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, mutlipatform but noted for good use of the Wii controls. Failed. Carnival Games, Wii/DS shovelware that got horrendous reviews, released in 2007 and somehow managed to sell over 1.5 million copies probably because it looked enough like a Wii Sports/Wii Play experience to people who were looking for more of that. By all means though go through the first couple years of PS3 releases and mention all the awesome 3rd party games that were coming out that didn't make it to the Wii which clearly is what caused the two to go down such different paths.

They released a patch yesterday to up the resolution on AC4 to 1080p and add in more powerful anti aliasing so now it clearly does look better than the PS3 version.  Earlier side by side comparisons showed almost no difference.  People really do seem to love that game, I'll get it once I get a PS4.  Also Need for Speed is getting unexpected praise.

I guess Killzone looks nice but the single player campaign is kinda shitty and annoying, multiplayer is good though.

A lot of people are also talking about this Flower psn game that I hadn't heard about, looks interesting.  If you have a PS3 version you get a free PS4 version apparently.

Flower is part of a set of three games that include Flow and Journey.

He's gone psychotic.

Here's an example. Sure, it's anecdotal, but I don't think it's by any means unique.
There are about 35-odd people in my workplace. I'm one of only 6 men working there presently. One other guy there has a Wii (unless he sold it?) and a PS3, which he enjoys sports games on. At least 4 of the (many) women own Wiis, none of which seem to use them any more from what I gather. Now you can argue gender bias or anything else, but they got their Wiis as Wii Sports machines, and one also got into Just Dance. Out of the 6 of us who owned Wiis, exactly two of us are interested even vaguely in "core" games, while none of the women I work with who bought their own Wiis would even be vaguely interested in Call of Duty 4 or GTA4.

The two of us who might be already owned a PS360.

Maybe I have gone of the rails there, I don't know how to get my point across though except for being a rambling lunatic it seems.

What I see or at least what I feel is that the game industry has basically resigned itself to a certain business model that somewhat works, that is practical given the huge budgets necessary but that has no room to grow and is largely pandering to the same old audience. The lack of room for growth is offset by games and business models that are essentially cost cutting measures (more profit with the same sales numbers), free to play, online and social integration, DLC and season passes are just methods of extracting more cash out of the same user base.

To justify that it gets rationalized to an extend that people now often actually believe it. Maybe that impression is totally and utterly wrong and I should stop listening to the voices in my head (just joking on that part) but if we go with numbers of consoles sold then the 'dominant console of this generation' is actually third in a group of three and only because its two core markets, the US and UK, are exceptionally strong. The Wii would have 'won' (for certain definitions of winning) and the PS3 would be in second place. This is probably the only industry were the nominally third place system can set industry trends continually and consistently and the platform that sold the most units is completely forgotten and ignored.

Each console has sold about 100 million over its run with lots of overlap and multiple buys and consoles that just sit in a cupboard somewhere and collect dust so the individual user base is probably lower. That's what Apple or Samsung sell in a year or even a quarter. And even hit games only achieve a 1% conversion rate (more only if you are COD or GTA). The industry seems to have resigned itself too such an extent that nobody could even imagine that something like the Wii could happen or that it could become such a success and worse once it did happen nobody knew how to capitalize on it. I stand by it the Wii is the most successful failed product ever because nobody - not even the company that designed it - could handle its success. Also Nintendo doesn't even understand what went wrong or that the Wii - even though it sold inane amounts of units - is essentially the albatross around its neck.

The whole 'casual gamer' debate always felt like rationalizing that unlikely event away as being a fluke although no one could ever fully explain why people who had no interest in 'real' games and just liked things like Wii Sports chose to buy a $300 device that could do nothing else than run games even if it was just a Wii. It's the same hand-wavey thing for me as claiming that 'women don't play video games' and I always in my mind translate it as 'actually we don't really know how to make and market games to audiences we're not familiar with' instead.

Both new consoles are now essentially PCs. X86 CPUs, DirectX11 compatible graphics hardware, similar performance to an average consumer PC and industry standard APIs so even that process has been streamlined to an extent where porting and multiplatform releases becomes even more easy and what platform you play on is essentially just a matter of which industrial design you fancy the most. The manufacturers guarantee that the hardware won't change for the next five to six years at least to protect the investments into tools and assets those companies need to make and Nintendo is stuck in a loop of producing Zelda and Mario games over and over again because that's what they know how to do.

The customer base is stagnant because the industry is stuck in a feedback loop of only catering to the audience they know because that's 'easiest' and therefore only ever attracting the people who would have bought that stuff anyway. Most recent trends haven't been anticipated by the big publishers and once they acknowledged them they couldn't capitalize on them so they got rationalized away as being flukes or by describing the segment as not being worthy of attention or investment anyway. The whole indie-games sector, social gaming, the Wii phenomenon, iOS and Android gaming the recent board game boom - to name a trend from a different sector - all saw a huge influx of people and money. People the established companies didn't even know existed or were interested in gaming.

So they claim that those segments wouldn't buy 'real' games anyway or wouldn't even play games if they weren't free or easy to play. At the same time the meta-discussion about gaming is largely dominated by segments that feel discriminated against or are feeling disenfranchised by the current situation so there seems to be a disconnect between the assessment of the publishers that those people wouldn't be interested anyway and the claims by certain segments that they would be but that the current crop of games doesn't pique their interest or actively discourages them.

This leads to a situation where a platform can sell over 100 million units and everyone pretends it doesn't exist or it doesn't matter which seems even more insane to me than my own ramblings.

TL;DR: It seems to me that the gaming sector has resigned itself to extract more money out of the same customer base or to create more 'value' for their products by expand to other entertainment sectors because it doesn't know how to grow its audience anymore even though there seems to be a significant potential there.

Most of the embargos are being lifted for the xbox one today.  Even taking into account (the well earned) Microsoft hate it is getting pounded fairly hard.  All their kinect, voice commands and TV TV TV stuff is the poorly implemented mess you would expect from Microsoft.  The cross title games run noticably worse on it.  Their exclusives are also rating poorly.  Dead rising isn't as good as the last ones and looks pretty bad due to texture pop in.  They aren't letting the embargo drop for Ryse which should tell you all you need to know.

If they wanted the xbox one to be a media hub and also play games (sometimes at the same time) then they really should have given it a lot more powerful hardware.

Edit: I guess the ars review is fairly good. (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/xbox-one-review-more-than-a-game-console-less-than-a-living-room-revolution/)

Well rumour has it that MS is pretty far behind schedule on many of its SW features so I pretty much imagined some of the features to miss release or being half-baked. To be fair though all of the PS4 reviews mention that the PS4 has 'potential' which is also essentially saying that things are unfinished at release.

This was the main crux of the Wii's problem and why I think it's a failure despite all the money it made (for Nintendo - it didn't make dick for anyone else because 99% of the third party stuff sold like shit). Gaming companies didn't want to make a game for a single console, they wanted to port one game to three consoles. You couldn't do that with the Wii, the control scheme either required you to THINK when developing for it, or just half-ass it like most of the ports did. So you either end up with an expensive game that's not going to sell as well because it's market penetration is 1/3 what you'd see on a port or you end up with a shitty port on an inferior machine with a painfully obvious control port to waggle and nobody buys it because it's painfully obvious that it's a half-assed piece of shit.

It likely didn't help that Nintendo cares about 3rd party developers like a pimp cares about his ho's.

Really? From the places I read I am hearing the polar opposite reaction - the hardware isn't as good as PS4, but on the software front they are much further along. The voice commands work much better and are an actual good way to use the system, logins are good and fast with either face detection or voice, it can be a universal remote and use the Kinect to IR blast and turn all your shit on, and it appears that across the board most of the reviews on the launch games seem to be liked more.

I already have my PS4 and I enjoy it greatly, and my XONE is showing up later in December, so I'm interested in fiddling with it more.

This thread went Wall of Text over the last few days.

The XBONE still sucks right? We're all agreed there?

I just keep seeing posts about glitches and problems.  Too many to remember but off the top of my head:

- There is no disk management system that tells you how much space you have.
- That snap skype while playing a game isn't currently possible.
- The ir blasting will shut off everything if it's already turned on, because xbox doesn't know.
- There is no way to tell what the battery level of the controller is at.
- It has problems understanding voice commands.
- Much fun is being made of the Redbox command, you can't simply say "xbox redbox" You have to say "xbox go to redbox instant by verizon", because "instant by verizon" is part of the name.
- Anything higher than stereo sound is being stripped out of sources fed through the xbox so no 5.1 surround from other inputs.
- Setting the language for the system and kinect seems painfully restricted.  For example you can't pick Spanish if you set your region to United States.
- There is no indication if a voice command is said wrong or does not exist.
- Patching some games seems to reset them.
- Cold boot takes over one minute.
- Lots of silly things like the command "xbox on" only works in five languages, there is no "xbox off" command.

Voice Commands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caJpUpVKyzk

Face Recognition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5D0050sxio

An achievement for watching five Kevin James movies? (http://news.xbox.com/2013/11/xbox-one-redbox-instant-by-verizon)

It's really the type of thing you won't know if you hate it or love it until you actually try to work with it.

Yeah, it sounds like in a real-world scenario there are a ton of kinks. Also the hardware is worse than the PS4 AND reserves power for simultaneously running apps, which means it's even less powerful than it first appears.

In non-xb1 haterade news, apparently some PS4s are getting bricked (http://www.geek.com/games/bricked-ps4-reports-are-very-real-no-replacements-available-for-months-1577464/).

Too many griefers :awesome_for_real:

Honestly, why would I want to buy either or these machines over a PC?

Don't ask me, I have no intention of getting either

Dark Souls 2.

And more seriously, you know, exclusives. The Gran Turismos, The Forzas, the Naughty Dogs and Quantic Dreams, edit: The Soul Caliburs! and all those supercool Japanese games. If that stuff doesn't really excite you, it's a very good move to pass.

Anyway, your answer is: games exclusive to consoles. And you know it.

EDIT: I guess some people get a console because they know they are gonna have a working, powerful gaming system for the next seven years. As opposed to a powerful gaming system (PC) that requires a 1000$ (or so) update every four year.

Yeah they don't excite me. The fact they have to artificially create a market speaks volumes about the quality, and then the systems are either failing or trying to scan my retinas.

The biggest reason is, most people lack the skills to build their own gaming PC and are unwilling to pay the inflated price of a pre-built one.

Haemish gave some more good reasons on the Why. And yes, people bought a $300 Wii Sports machine. A significant number of them were/are adult women. And no, they don't care about Call of Duty.

Also, you seem to care WAY too much about this, and I can't quite figure out why. From current information, it looks like I might be picking up my PS4 around this time next year, when the bugs are worked out and there are a bunch of games worth caring about. I was done with being an early console adaptor 3 generations ago.

I've sort of surprised myself but doing so, but I'm still nursing a hate-on for Sony over the whole cd-rootkit thing.

I don't like to think of myself as being that petty, but the evidence suggests otherwise ...

That wouldn't surprise me given that Sony basically started over on PS4 with a new freebsd-based platform.  The menu system, etc, on PS4 is nice and snappy, but there are definitely little features missing here or there and annoying sony-ui-isms like "you can delete videos/screenshots from the *list view* but not from the *item view*".

I'm a smug PC player who looks down on those poor people who don't get to use keyboard+mouse and have to deal with those subpar graphics but even I have to admit some games are just better suited to the console, unless you are willing to both configure a controller to work with each game and stream your PC output to your nice, big TV.

Anything with melee controls like Arkham Batman, Assassin's creed etc is better on a console.

Anything using analog controls like driving and most sports games are better on a console.

Ironically, many multi player games have a wider pool of people to play with on consoles.

Plus yeah, exclusives and not having to wait a year to play the latest GTA.

You do realize most games you can hook a 360 controller up and bam, no setup.  Also most laptops and desktop video cards have hdmi out.

Dude.

I know  :why_so_serious:

But seriously 8 paragraphs is considered a wall of text now? It's not '25 pages of John Syracusa reviewing the latest MacOS at ArsTechnica' levels of text.

I would say it begins to feel "intense" when it is the fourth 8-paragraphs post in about 24 hours on a topic no one seems to care that much anyway.

And the cover of Edge magazine's PS4/Xbone launch month is...


 :ye_gods:

GTA 5 was really the straw that broke the camel's back because while everyone kept fawning over that game and how it was 'the best game of this generation' all I saw was lots of wasted potential. If you look closely most of the gaming mainstream today is just lots and lots of that. Big Budget productions by big publishers are becoming more and more of a serious constraint that strangles the business and the creative side. The Wii had potential, Kinect was basically a direct reaction to the success of its motion controls but it was also too different in both performance and approach for the big studios to make sense of it. It didn't fit into their business model.

The next gen consoles are basically designed to maximize reuse and profit options for the publishers. Microsoft has gone all out by integrating probably everything the companies wanted and they got a lot of backlash but even the PS4 pretty much fits the template of what they think developers and publishers want from a console, down to using standard X86-based CPUs and DirectX compatible hardware. The next gen PCs and consoles have essentially become Call of Duty machines because that type of game seems to be the only one publishers still know how to make and sell and they have been fine tuned to extract more money out of a customer base that hasn't grown.

I fear that the time of experiments - outside of the indie fringe or steam greenlight - is over. You can be the most successful thing yet, if you do not fit the mold and are incompatible with the standard business model you are pretty much out. Games like X-Com or Rayman have become so rare that it is pretty much a sensation when they come out and a miracle if they sell well and games like the Stanley Parable or Legend of Grimrock are indie games made by a bunch of enthusiasts in their spare time, self published and self-marketed and if they sell a few hundred thousand units it's sensational in a way as if Big Foot gave an interview on national TV.

I've probably had the most fun this year with Hotline: Miami, which makes me extremely sad because that game could have been made on a Commodore Amiga. Maybe I'm just a bit burned out on gaming though but gaming has become less diverse than probably any other type of media even movies and also the only business that essentially failed to grow its audience in the last ten years.

Hotline: Miami or Guacamelee!. Games that could have been released on an Amiga or Sega Genesis vs. GTA 5, the probably biggest technical achivement I've ever seen and that has been completely wasted on a mediocre story and half-baked mechanics and that never even comes close to the industry standards on even the core mechanics like shooting, cover and driving. 250 million dollars wasted on the most pretty but also most empty and superficial sandbox ever.

No, it's  :drill:

Time to buy that WIIU!

I'm not sure why you're upset over big budget gaming when you acknowledge that there's really good indie stuff being made. I don't know, it just seems like you're trying to be really angsty over the state of the games industry when the fact is there seems to be a bigger variety in the games being made right now than at any other time in the history of video games.

I think the state of the video games industry can be summarized as, "some great games despite themselves".

Because the initial Xbox One as it was presented at E3 was pretty much designed for the needs of the big publishers, game developers and media companies. Always connected, online only, no physical media, social and multiplayer features integrated into everything, media center extensions that tie you into their cross media campaigns and ads, no indie developer support, features and APIs that have built-in support for nickel-and-dime-ing your customers etc.

That's the direction EA, Activision and the other big media companies want consoles to go in. Design us a platform where we can monetize everything more easily and with less effort on our part and where consumers have a lot less rights that would prevent us from maximizing profits. I don't really believe that MS was disconnected from the needs of the gamers when they designed the One they just really didn't consider those needs because in reality their stakeholders were the publishers and the gamers were seen as the product. It's a concept that tried to secure and stabilize as many of the traditional business models as possible.

MS really didn't consider that it could get that much backlash, for them it was clear cut. We are the dominant platform,we have publisher support, everyone will buy the next Xbox anyway and we need the business support and so will prioritize the needs of the publishers over the experience of the users. The only reason this has failed was because everybody already considered Sony to be on its way out and that it would fade into obscurity eventually and so they didn't really lean on Sony as much as they did lean on MS - dominant platform you know.

Yes Indie gaming is offsetting some of that but the Xbone tried to explicitely raise the barrier of entry for indie developers on the XBox Live marketplace with requireing a publisher to even get listed and the way they select the number of games they actually let into the store each week.

If it weren't for Sony getting its shit together which left gamers an option and an 'out' because they had a platform to go to, all of the consumer backlash would have probably not mattered in the slightest and we would have gotten the Xbox One in exactly the way that it was presented at E3.

Just because we won this round doesn't mean that publsiher will simply stop pushing for those things.

I am gonna admit that I read the first three chapters of your saga Jeff Kelly but I can't bring myself to read the most recent ones in full, so I might be missing some important passages in the context. But springing from the last line of the post right above this one, I will say that in a time when pretty much everyone can make a great game and find a way to distribute it globally, I am not worried one bit about what will big publishers do anymore.

Also, what Velorath said. And PS4 paying so much attention to indie games, something that would have been unthinkable five years ago, makes your argument pretty invalid in my opinion.

I'll read Jeff's posts in full once the paperback comes out.

Today I mostly learned that I need to wait for the PS4 Slim.

I will get a new console the same way I have always gotten consoles. A few years late and substantially discounted with some sort of huge practically free bundle of games.  You know what I am talking about, that huge price reduction because the manufacturers have sucked every last dime out of the early adopters, and they know that the only way they can increase sales is to make it attractive to the people like me who will not spend 500 hundred bucks on a console.  I am old enough that I really don't need to play it now and sometimes not even later.

The real problem that these companies are going to face is that my current mind set about spending money with them will carry over into my purchasing decisions for my son, and I will work hard to make him skeptical of spending money with the big companies as well.  Daddy is going to show him that if he saves his summer money then he can buy a bucket load of games on steam during a super sale and really get some value for his money.

The new Mario game does look pretty amazing tbh. Video reviews in particular (http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/super-mario-3d-world-review/1900-6415544/) show that it's more exciting than anything going on for PS4/XB1 right now.

I'm going to have to wait for the new consoles until my son and I can both put pressure on my wife.  If it's two of us asking, she'll break in no time.

How old do you think a kid has to be before they could fully understand and play a game like Mario?  I imagine my nephew is still too young, maybe I should test out Mario myself...

Also, if you downloaded the day one patch Microsoft put up yesterday and printed out the confusing instructions so that you could enable your xbox one to not need to connect to the internet, too bad.  Today Microsoft (http://www.joystiq.com/2013/11/21/microsoft-pulls-offline-usb-updating-instructions-for-xbox-one/) pulled that webpage and said the whole thing wouldn't work, you still have to connect to the internet and there is no other way to apply the patch.

I was playing Super Mario for the NES at 6? I was fucking terrible at it.  I was a lot better at Excitebike and random crap I could play at Round Table Pizza.

My son's 4 and he has spurts where he's really interested in iPad games like Angry Birds (every version), 300 Bowl, Fruit Ninja or True Skate.  All of those have simple controls and are not difficult conceptually.  I do not think my 6 year old brain would have dealt with a 3D Mario and a modern controller well.  However, as much as I was in it from the start, technology is much more integrated into my son's life than it was in mine at that age.

That being said, he's not being introduced to console gaming or anything more than casual iPad gaming at this time. I'm sure he'd love the Wii and Wii sports, but we'd rather he keep doing shit like reading and drawing and the like.  Outside of the weekends, he honestly doesn't have a ton of free time due to school and generally needing a shit load sleep (kid does 11 hours a night).

I listen to a fair number of non-gaming podcasts that sometimes discuss video games and the reaction to GTAV on them was pretty level-headed.

In video game media print everyone is like "this is the best game of all time", in video game podcasts people sheepishly admit that it has problems or that they put it down after a few hours, in non-gaming podcasts people complain about it. Video game criticism is in a a really bad place, and the more formal it is generally the worse it is.


Mid-tier games (which are the games I like most) are definitely drying up, and I fear that indie games are poised for a crash as well. They look really healthy now but I can't see it lasting - people have dozens of unplayed games in their backlogs and the math of production doesn't work out.

Say it takes 800 people to make Assassin's Creed IV and the game takes 2 years to make. Now say those 800 people split into teams of 10 and make indie games. I'll assume it still takes 2 years. That's now 80 games being made instead of 1 in that same time span. There's just no way a market can support that - the vast majority of those games will spectacularly fail and the market will become absolutely flooded with crap, discoverability problems will run rampant, etc.

This happened on Facebook and it's happening on mobile. To some degree it's happening on PC. On consoles it's happening the slowest because of the higher barrier to entry, but I think it will still happen. By "it" I mean extremely negative average return on investment, in thanks part to rising user acquisition cost. Making indie games is already extremely risky, and although there are success stories the majority of stories are of people who try for a few years, lose money, then return to "real" jobs. Relying on people to leave their jobs, create one or two decent indie games essentially out of charity, then return to those "real" jobs is not sustainable or healthy.
---

Personally my favorite types of games are solidly B titles - titles that would be considered AAA today had the game industry evolved more out of the 16-bit era without the infusion of PC developers. Indie games don't scratch that itch at all. So even if indie games continue to flourish (which they won't) it doesn't make my gaming life much better.

Fifteen minutes of highlights (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbjes4_vL7Y) from the twelve hour stream of polygon which you might remember got $750,000 from Microsoft.  Lot of cognitive dissonance between their ratings (including giving the actual consoles ratings which is borderline retarded) and what they actually experience.

wut

Microsoft paid for that?

No they didn't pay that for the stream itself but they have given polygon buckets of cash.

For what exactly? I'm assuming ratings.

Microsoft paid polygon $750,000 to make a documentary about... polygon.

That is totally not meant to influence their feelings about xbox at all.  It's for the entirely legitimate purpose of shitting out 90 minutes worth of self shot video about themselves.

I wasn't buying an XBOX, but shit like that makes me report to everyone I know that knows I like games, not to buy one.

That may have been the most unintentionally funny thing I've seen in forever. Or at the very least in the last 5 minutes.

To expand on Jeff Kellys point about M$ being focused on US/UK thinking... and to reinforce paelos thinking he will be begging people not to buy an XBone, I give you...

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7908572160/hE00B808B/


:facepalm:

Oof, that was rough to watch...

Watch this space for my Kindle Single  :why_so_serious:

Well it could be worse, they could have hired Piers Morgan instead

BTW even the UK won't get the full set of media integration features and TV functionality until some time in 2014.

via Eurogamer:


The TV guide feature  and voice command integration for UK will also not be available at launch and will be released 'some time in 2014'


And according to Sky, Sky Go and Now TV won't be in the 'first wave of TV apps' in Spring either and are slated for a 'Summer 2014' launch instead.

Moderator A: "You don't have to yell"
Moderator B: "Xbox doesn't hear very well"

 :why_so_serious:

Moderator male: "Xbox!"
Moderator female: "ehh"
Moderator male: *whispers* "Shhh! Don't chat real quick. I am talking to Xbox"
Moderator female: *whispers* "ok....Sorry"
Moderator male: *whispers very softly* "Shh"

Oh god, I am literally laughing all through this. So funny.  :grin:

Edit: It get's better:

Moderator male 1: "Soo..... *Xbox menu screen pops up* XBox stop listening!"
Moderate female: "Why did it do that?"
Moderator male 1: *mumbling* "I don't know"
Moderator male 2: "Stop listening Xbox! Stop listening"
Moderator female: *turns towards mod 2* *whispers* "It's always listening"

"Xbox - It's always listening"  :ye_gods:

I am not a console buyer anyway, but that creepy thing is not getting in my house, even if it was free.  :uhrr:

Xbox just wants to be your friend...


and report on all your buying habits and personal thoughts.

Can some company pay F13 $750,000 for a documentary?

*snap zoom to a scowling jew, smoking newports while on the phone with GoDaddy*

*Meanwhile, a blindingly white midwestern college student with $100 to his name farms porings on his pirate Ragnarok Online server instead of scanning divorce files at his job as a legal intern*

"That's when I knew we were on to something big."

[light jazz music]

^{*apologies to schild in advance for suggesting he smoked newports}

'HE BOUGHT WHAT?!"
*furious typing*
"OH THAT DOES IT! HE SAYS HEX!"
*FURIOUS CLICKING followed by unscrewing of mountain dew cap to take a swig*
*BURP*

I read somewhere today that if you turn the Xbox off you can't watch TV anymore...is that correct? Is this thing hooked up in such a way to make that impossible? Always listening because it is always on!

The xbox has an hdmi pass through port, if you decide to hook your cable box up to it instead of directly to the TV then you can't watch TV without the xbox being powered on, that is correct.  It does not seem to have a passive hardware method to just send the signal through, xbox is decoding it so that it can do its overlay and "snap" stuff.

Using the hdmi pass through also strips out surround sound and apparently changes the image by forcing it through a shaprness filter and crushing blacks.  That might be fixed at some point.

The XBONE is now doing their best to present these features on every NFL game. YOU CAN SKYPE AND TV AND NFL AT ONCE OMG BUY IT DON'T ASK WHY!

Not new news, but I think this is a good time to bring it up:


and, not less creepy:


Be a good boy, watch the commercial and you get a carrot!

Exerpt of patent 1:
(http://i.imgur.com/6aDQb34.png)

I am willing to bet they'll implement this as soon as a market study tells them they can get away with it without too much backlash.

The newest generation of tech users do not give a shit about their privacy. This is well documented.

Just because it's patented doesn't mean it'll be implemented.  For example, Sony's patents about using voice commands to end commercials:

(http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/sonyadpatent_2-580x472.jpg)

I broke down the opposite way of what "breaking down" usually means and canceled my PS4 preorder. I will get one soon, but considering how little there is out there for me at the moment it would just collect dust for at least 6 months while spending "warranty days" for nothing. I'll get it with the Japanese in February, I guess.

That was my plan as well, but after tax season. Now? I'm not sure I even want to bother.

"Press Reset (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFECD492AC5E3201F)" has moments of unintended hilarity. Like when they talk up the depth of their interview coverage, but the one they focus on is about a composer who lives on the same street as Russ Pitts.

This. I'll get one of each eventually, but right now all the "killer" games are months out. The only reason to get either now would be to play BF4 on something that doesn't shit the bed when stuff gets hairy and my Macbook Pro handles that job quite well.

I don't know how the PC version of BF4 is doing but both consoles are so buggy and unstable that multiplayer is nigh impossible.  Typical dice release.

In other "next gen" news an EA executive (http://www.easports.com/nba-live/news-updates-gameplay/article/nba-live-14-open-letter) felt the need to apologize for how bad NBA Live 14 is.  I don't follow sports games but by comparison 2k14 is graphically amazing.

Video comparison. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8OBiMMo7Ao)

(http://i.imgur.com/e6iPsMZ.png)

Both games look like shit.

Lebron's still gonna win.

On a serious note has anyone here bought either the xbox or ps4?  I think I saw Quinton say he had a ps4 but that's about it.

I'm on a wait list for ps4 but I'm not too excited about it, plus I'd be surprised if I get it before Christmas.

Yup, I pre-ordered a PS4 for launch because I loved some of the exclusive titles on PS2 and PS3.  Have never owned an Xbox of any variety.  I'm enjoying Resogun a bunch, but that's the main use I'm getting out of the device at the moment -- I mostly bought it because I anticipate there will be some exclusives similar to the ones I loved on PS2 and PS3, not because the launch title list really grabbed me.  It seems decent enough, but I do wonder how well this console generation is going to fare vs steambox / livingroom gaming PCs -- right now the PS4 is sitting next to a shuttle cube with a quadcore ivy bridge cpu, gtx760 gpu, 8gb ram, ssd, that handles anything in my steam library on 1080p just fine.

These consoles are going to sell well this month and into December, but I suspect in January / February sales are going to look pretty bad. There is almost nothing interesting coming out for either system until March, and the launch lineups are far from impressive.

I think Japan has the right of it.

PS4 NA Launch: Beta Testing for Japan

Am I the only one that thought you could apply this statement to every console release ever?

Well some have had more epic launch titles which may have made up for the wait for more titles or driven more sales.  Super Mario 64 on the N64 was a game changer, I think.

I'd be interesting to look at the list of exclusive titles at launch at say lauch+3months for the last few generations of consoles....

There are a lot of systems that had really weak overall lineups, but had at least one great game that made it feel worthwhile buying the system. With the NES, SNES, and N64 you had SMB, SMW, and Mario 64. Dreamcast at least had SoulCalibur. Xbox had Halo. The Wii of course had Wii Sports.

i lolled

I bought an Xbox One, I'm not completely sure why. But I did, so anyway.

The voice commands are really cool, when they work. I have my cable box using the xbox as a passthrough, and the Xbox guide is really nice. My main problem is that my cable remote doesnt work with the xbox guide (or OneGuide as they call it). The voice commands work well for navigating between apps, but to often fail, or give undesirable results. You also have to be very specific. I sat for about 1 minute saying "Xbox off, Xbox shutdown. XBOX OFF. XBOX SHUTDOWN" when in fact the command was "Xbox turn off". It also has real problems with scrolling commands "Scroll down" (the xbox scrolls up).

I can really see potential here, but it will probably be a good few years until its really ready for Joe Public.

To quote my wife at one point as we where trying to navigate the TV.

"Xbox, do better".

Does the creepy eye follow you around the room?

File this under "this didn't take long"

http://www.dailydot.com/gaming/twitch-ps4-striptease-sony/


People on a chatroom on twitch I was on this morning were saying that Playroom has gone insane. No further details were reported, thankfully.

I love, hate and fear the Internet.

And now, so will casual gamers.

I'm just desensitized I guess, because I don't see how this is news. People use their PS4's webcam to strip and/or act like assholes. Who gives a fuck?

How long before underaged porn laws get broken?

Yesterday?

Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

And by "Total Fuckwad" I mean sex offender.

I'm not trying to start a debate over the pros and cons of people doing dumb shit on webcam. I'm just pointing out that all of this shit has been happening for at least a decade, and screaming about it now is pretty stupid.

COBRAAAAAAAA.  :awesome_for_real:

Chatroulette says "Hi"

Though doing said nonsense to your wife/ GF is a new level of low to my knowledge.  Guess it'd have to be your wife, since random_drunk_chick can press charges while the wife will be more limited.

I think we all expect this of the internet, but while the internet is largely the frontier that we know it is, the consoles are specifically owned by one company. I would think they face harsher liability for allowing/not-policing underage nudity, given that their customers are in many cases underage.

It certainly provides a challenge for their "heart of the family room" ambitions...

It just illustrates why we can't have nice things.  :why_so_serious:

My console war has been decided -- I'm getting a 3DS for Christmas. I

I think it's worth the buy.  I play it more than my PS3, at least.

The Ballad of Xbone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N14_V3WU8)

Why... why does it make that noise?

DVD drive failure.  Most sound like it's just jammed but the last one is the disk spinning so fast it might just explode the disk.  Yes, that's a thing.

Ed: Also this was apparently a common flaw of the 360s as well. YouTube of how to fix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcZtfNv524w

There's a gear in the Blu-ray drive that's out of alignment causing the grinding noise (gear teeth slipping against something). You can whack the Xbox One a few times to knock it back into alignment, though :awesome_for_real:

Seriously: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDoDqTaIwIc

Clown shoes!

Not surprising given the rush to produce machines for the launches. Lots of PS4s are DOA as well.

Less than 10,000 in an initial shipment of several million is lots now? That's a less than 1% failure rate for probably both consoles.One dude uploading a video of a failing unit doesn't equal lots of broken units.

Oh loom the red ring defense can get recycled. I was worried it would go away.

I'm not defending anything here. RROD affected 1/3rd of all consoles shipped. If the reported issues begin to approach 2 - 5 % even then yes people should be concerned and yes this might be an issue. As it stands now though the issues only seem to affect less than 10k of PS4/Xbox One units and a .5 to 1% failure rate is par for the course for pretty much any consumer electronic device.

Well considering that the scuttlebutt had Sony asking Amazon to stop selling (and allowing 3rd parties to list) the PS4 because so many were arriving DOA I would say that is a lot. Right now, depending on the PS4 model that you pick on Amazon, up to 1/3rd of all reviews are 1 star because of these issues. Yes the actual failure rate on the PS4 and Xbox One may fall within "industry norms" but times have changed and problems like these are being magnified by the Internet to a far greater extent than when the Xbox 360 and PS3 were released.

I just bought a new computer because it's cyber monday and I don't really think these consoles are going to offer me anything like Steam can in the next year and change.

As of today and according to Sony's own official press release, Sony managed to sell 2.1 Million PS 4 in the last two weeks - about 1 m in each launch market. They managed to break the launch sales record of 180,000 units in the UK previously held by the PSP, outsold the Xbox One 2:1 in the UK and already managed to surpass the lifetime to date sales of the Wii U in the UK. By the end of the year the PS 4 will have sold more units than the global lifetime to date sales of the Wii U

If they manage to keep up stock they might end up with 4 million units sold by December 31st.

MS hasn't released official numbers yet but they seem to be significantly lower than the PS 4 numbers in all markets according to 'insiders' even in the US and UK.

The launch of Super Mario 3D World doesn't seem to affect Wii U sales at all. It has launched abysmally in almost all markets even Japan - in fact it was the worst launch for a Mario game ever in Japan. In most markets the game didn't even manage to enter the top 10 of the sales charts.

With that in mind I'll be surprised if the Wii U sells more than 10 million consoles.

regarding the discussion in the 'So what are you playing thread' regarding Nintendo competing against Sony/MS.

I seriously think that they don't know how they can compete except by being different. I suppose they don't even know what went wrong or how to fix it.

Even when they have the more powerful platforms they lose out and if it weren't for the unexpected success of the Wii (which will prove to be the Albatross around Nintendo's back eventually) I don't know if they would even make home consoles anymore. The Nintendo 64 was on paper a much more powerful platform than the Playstation (One).  93 MHz 64 bit MIPS processor, SGI-based graphics co-processor with 64 bit and 62,5 MHz, 8 MB of RD-RAM, unified memory architecture with a bus bandwidth of 250 MB/s. The playstation on the other hand had a 33 MHZ, 32 bit MIPS processor, 132 MB/s bus bandwidth, 2 MB RAM and a weaker graphics co-processor. The Playstation had similar performace than the Sega Saturn, but the hardware architecture of the Saturn was so weird with dual CPU and six (!) co-processors on a shared memory bus, that it didn't gain any traction with developers. The Playstation had a hardware codec and video (de)-compressor chip on board and could decode FMV, which the Nintendo could not

The Nintendo 64 was also the cheapest console at launch going for $199 vs the Playstation's $299 and the Saturn's ridiculous $399.

Yet the Playstation outsold the NIntendo 64 4:1 (120 m vs 30m)

Same deal with gamecube vs. Playstation 2. The gamecube was much more powerful on paper. 485 MHz PPC CPU 162 MHz Ati graphics co-processor, 42 MB of RAM vs. 192 MHz 'Emotion-Engine' MIPS processor, 32 MB of RAM and a 147 MHz 'graphics synthesizer' co-processor.

Yet the PS2 outsold the gamecube nearly 8:1 (155 m vs. 21 m) and even the original Xbox managed to sell slightly more than the GC.

The explanation always was that Nintendo's insistence on using proprietary storage formats (because license fees) led them to a point where the more powerful platform couldn't compete on content. The Nintendo 64 had 64 MB max for cartridges and obviously couldn't compete with the CD-ROM based FMV capable Playstation games and the gamecube's Mini-DVD only stored 1.2 GB vs the 4.8 GB of the PS 2's DVD-ROM.

Sony also had more third party support than Nintendo because they treated them better and the initial 'buy-in' to develop for the Playstation was lower than for Nintendo platforms.

Nintendo also doesn't want to sell their consoles at a loss even if it is a small loss. They want to be profitable from day one so they couldn't offer a similar package to the Xbox One or PS 4 which both lose around $50 - $70 on each sale let alone being cheaper than the other two.

So I don't see how they could compete with Sony/Ms except by 'recreating the magic' and somehow having another Wii on thier hands, which probably won't happen.

I want to say the PS1's popularity came from how easy it was to pirate the games. Lined up with CD burners becoming affordable.

Anecdotal, but that's 100% what happened in Italy. People got the PS1 because they knew once they shelled out the money for the console, they had access to a virtually unlimited game library for a nominal fee. Pirated games were sold for the equivalent of 1$ to 3$ in temporary stalls in front of grocery stores or pushed to you by foreign underpaid illegal workers at any relevant venue on weekend nights.

All of a sudden people who never cared about videogames wanted a Playstation, cause it was cool, fun and so incredibly cheap.

I wonder why it didn't kill the PS1 like it did the Dreamcast then?

Most likely because the PS 1 sold 108 million units over its lifetime and the PS 2 sold 150 million units but the Dreamcast only sold 10 million units.

If my memory serves me right then the average gamer buys four to five games per console and even blockbuster titles only manage a 5 - 10% conversion rate. An installed base of 100 million or 150 million units may create a viable market for publishers despite rampant piracy while an installed base of only 10 million might not.

The number one best selling title on the Dreamcast was Sonic Adventure with sales of about 2.5 million, on the Playstation it was Gran Turismo with about 11 million and on the PS 2 it was GTA San Andreas with about 17.3 million units. More people bought GTA San Andreas on the PS 2 than owned a Gamecube or Dreamcast.

With pirated games the PS1 also brought the first generation imports as well.  Bringing over Japanese games was HUGE, I remember my company bringing an original dance dance revolution game+gamepad from japan back in 2000 or so as a game to play at conventions and watching how it took off in America shortly after.

What happened here is we would just rent the game from blockbuster and anyone who wanted a copy would bring a blank CD over.


The Dreamcast was covered by Sega's stink. Most kids here thought of Sega as a dead end. I want to say it's launch window was weird too? I dunno anymore, its all muddled in my head.

The Magic of the Wii was a cultural MacGuffin.

Everyone wanted one, when deep down they either didn't want a console, wanted a PC or wanted a PS2 and didn't even know it. The PS3 isn't even relevant when it comes to games as the PS2 managed to surpass the SNES in "number of unbelievably good games on one console."

Wii Sports was a red herring while the board game industry rebooted itself. THANKS CATAN, NOW GO AWAY, YOU SUCK (YOU TOO FELICIA DAY/WIL WHEATON (AND DR. WHO FOR GOOD MEASURE), FAMILIES ARE HAVING FUN AGAIN).

Huh? The Wii came out before the whole board game geek-shiek movement.

No it didn't. The modern board game era starts with Settlers in 1995. If you want another milestone, boardgamegeek.com has been around since 2000.

I like that that youtube show made me realize how true this is.

the wii u gamepad is too expensive, and thus the wii u is too expensive.  the gimmick is fine, and you can always play with a wii u pro controller.  had a non gamer friend over the other day and he picked up the wii u pro controller and remarked how nice it was.  the nunchuk/wii remote setup is pretty neat for some games too.  and, nintendo probably has the most AAA exclusives, depending on that definition i guess. 

the problem is the price, and the originall wii blue ocean strategy that, as schild said, was basically a cultural macguffin, aint working this time.  so, if the wii u were $200, im sure it could have a profitable gamecube-esque future selling 25m units as a supplemental console.  but theyre locked in with an expensive gamepad that apparently costs like $100 to manufacture.

i guess wii u is fine until it isnt.  if it stops being stocked in major retailers its done.

I really like the Wii U gamepad, and I think they will do a lot of really clever stuff with it.  I don't actually care if the Wii U only fills a small niche, as long as they continue to kick out the requisite Zelda and Mario titles, and I am pretty sure they will.  Right at this moment, it is the only one of the new consoles I even care about.  I might care about a PS4 later.

A friend of mine cracked his Wii U gamepad screen in a move, apparently Nintendo refused to replace it, and offered to sell him a replacement for $150.

Not cool, Nintendo.

Not surprising they didn't replace it considering he, you know, totally broke it himself.   But 150 sure is a lot.

My son absolutely adores Luigi and is getting a Wii U for Christmas so he can play Super Luigi World.  I find myself just as excited about this as he is, and I have't owned a console since the Nintendo 64.  I could still care less about the PS or XBox.  As others have said, keep me in Mario and Zelda titles and I'll be fine.

How is Luigi a thing for people under 18?  Did you prime that pump?

His mom has always been real worried that I would do that.  She knows I'm a gamer and she is definitely one of the "it's a huge waste of time and you could be doing other, more important things" type of people.  Knowing this, I have studiously avoided ever mentioning anything about the subject to or around him.  His aunt, of all people, got him hooked.  She is the target Wii audience and plays it a lot when she is watching him.  Mom was of course infuriated, but not at me, thankfully.  But she is also smart enough to know that you cannot unring that bell, so she is now the one buying him all the games and the Mario toys.  I smile quietly to myself.

Not planning on buying either XBone or PS4. XBone is a maybe (had an old XBox before I gave it some kid in the hospital) but it just too much money and all the dough I got is going for a new computer this month.

Had a Sony PS2 for a little while but gave that away -- generally avoid Sony products as just about anything I've bought with a Sony label on it during my lifetime has died prematurely.

With some extra contract work over the summer, used the proceeds to pick up a 3DS XL and a few games -- Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem: Awakening, SMT. Still haven't dented FE yet. Had fun with the Pokemon Dungeon demo and a few other DL titles but there just isn't a lot of games for this. Though it just did get the youTube app and a Hulu app :D

Wii U even has less games. It could be interesting but I just don't see this getting critical mass -- Nintendo had a window when the Wii was selling like crazy and they fumbled their chance to parlay it into something bigger.

I just bought my first PS3. :) Well, as a gift for my kid. (He's wanted one). It's got a deep library, I got a 250 gig model and two games for a decent price, and he's been wanting one.

The PS4 and Xbox One weren't even on the list for either of us. Even the friends I've got who are interested are very much "Maybe in a year".

Heh, I've had a Playstation, PS2, PSP, and a PS3.  Not even the slightest problem.

My XBox had multiple games that would crash it.  My 360 died in the middle of Mass Effect 3.  I gave my controllers and games to my nephews.

I think I'd rather get a 3DS than any of the current gen machines.  But, it's getting to be the time in my son's life, where me getting toys is going to make him a bit jealous.   I can wait.  Maybe my nephews will give me one of their old ones.

As I get older, it's starting to feel like I'll be happy just getting shit on the PC.  I don't seem to have enough free time to outpace my Steam backlog and actually care about other systems.  Well, other than when I'm pooping, and the iPhone covers that.

I think this animated gif (http://www.somethingawful.com/video-game-article/aaa-first-minutes/) sums up what's killing my enthusiasm for video games.

They were $150 online on Black Friday.  Was seriously seriously tempted.

That would have been more tempting before I had to spend $500 getting a growth removed from my cat's ass.   :uhrr:


Man, that's depressing.  I tend to avoid a lot of the AAA titles, although not out of any effort to avoid that nonsense.  Assassins' Creed, bro-bro shooters, etc just don't do a lot for me anymore.

To clarify, the XL was on sale for $150. And I was so tempted I bought one. Sadly did not get to a target in time to swindle them out of the Zelda version, but I'll be happy with the Black one I nabbed.

You should consider getting him a 3DS if he doesn't already have one. Luigis Mansion 2 is fantastic and there are a bunch of other 3DS games with Luigi too. NSMB/NSLB are sort of terrible by contrast. 3D World on Wii U is great stuff though and Luigi is playable there, so it's not all bad.

Two words sum up the issues with the N64: FINISH HIM!

Just when the N64 should have been beating up on the Sega Genesis nevermind Sony, Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by bowing and scraping to the Clinton administration, Leiberman, and the rest of the nanny-state "protect the children" types. They made their choice right there when they censored the fataliities in Mortal Combat. It was a very direct statement: Nintendo is for young children, not for adults.

Sony said the exact opposite: the PS is an expensive game for adults, wink wink you can even play porno video CDs on it.

If you did buy an xbox there is an image making the rounds that pretends to "unlock 360 games" but actually puts the system into an infinite reboot cycle, so, you know, don't do that.

This is made possible because if you push the trigger buttons in a certain order you can put the console into a "developer mode" and mess with stuff you really shouldn't be.

 :ye_gods:

Don't know where else to put it but I need to ventand this thread seemed the most appropriate.

God is GAF a cesspit of stupidity.

There are two reasons to read GAF:

1. Get news
2. Laugh at idiots
3. Bonus optional reason - troll said idiots

It's great if you accept it for what it is.

*shrugs*

I don't get the hate on Gaf. Yes there's a vast number of idiots, but it has such an insanely huge population it's bound to have. There's still a lot of decent conversations there - and it's not like anywhere else doesn't also have it's idiots and terrible threads.

I do find the number of people obsessing over the slightest detail on sonic games or JRPGs slightly unnerving however...

Incidentially the VGX or whatever it was happened and...hoo boy. Video games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaCso_b_PtY

A lot of people seem quite upset Joel McHale mocked such a very mockworthy "event".  I've watched a few of these clip videos of his hosting and I think it was fantastic.

This was actually part of what triggered my 'GAF is bullshit!' post.

They all complained that VGX was an embarassement, a corporate shill event and a big circlejerk, yet most complained about McHale's hosting because he 'didn't treat the event and the people  with respect'.

I say that the only way you can approach such events is by mercilessly mocking everyone involved.

I'm sorry... respect? For what is basically an industry fellating itself on television for its least creative endeavors?

EDIT: Also, was this shit live? Because it was fucking amateur hour and expecting a comic not to go off on it was kind of stupid.

lol, mchale was so off script and made everyone else so uncomfortable im guessing he was intoxicated.  pretty funny.  "i live in the quantic dreams multiverse." lol

He did say he took a shot whenever he heard "next-gen".

This is amazing.

I don't even know what VGX is or is supposed to be. Does gaming need awards?

Can't we go back to the days when the only public faces of gaming were Miyamoto and Will Wright and they were awkward enough to make everyone else seem normal?

That coverage of gaming is the best yet. "How much did you pay him?"

I was rolling.

Eh it wasn't most. They did a community poll and 60% of them preferred Mchale over Keighley.

The best thing about VGX talk is the idea that developers were insulted by Joel. Sure, maybe 2 were. I'm pretty sure everyone else took it in stride and understood what was happening.

VGX and it's participants got exactly the amount of respect they deserved.

For a community that claims to be passionate about 'gaming' they're too keen on shitting on everything that GAF as a whole doesn't deem to be part of the gaming orthodoxy. The community still perpetuates too much of the 'gamer bullshit' found nearly everywhere in NA gamer culture. Hating on gamers or games that are not 'core', classification of games as 'non-games' just because they don't follow traditional mechanics or difficulty levels, the same misogynistic bullshit I'm entirely tired of reading about, confounding being popular with being great ('a GotY list without Bioshock Infinite and The last of us is worthless') while at the same time hating on AAA culture and the masses gobbling it up (the GAF game of the year thread features a level of cognitive dissonance that is mind boggling), confounding 'hard' with challenging or dismissing 'easy' games as non-games etc. ('should be more like Dark Souls' is seriously a thing over there which is a stupid opinion whether you like dark souls or not)

There are decent conversations but they all degenerate into the usual bullshit once the general population of GAF has found the thread and started shitting it up which for me makes GAF only marginally better than most other forums out there where the neocons of gamers are enforcing the status quo against those pesky casuals and women.

Lately the thing that's driving me crazy about gamer culture is they all think "dark and gritty" means sophisticated and adult, when it actually means "made for teenage boys."

Lately?

You're just substituting one false generalization for another.

(https://24.media.tumblr.com/5fe1a4fcb402182500b9058f2d758ce5/tumblr_my6ja942mF1re86uzo1_500.jpg)

CES announcements:

Xbox One sold through to customers 'over 3 million' units in 2013
PS 4 sold through to customers 4.2 million units by Dec. 28th.

PS4 will likely outsell Wii U's lifetime to date sales by end of January.

If I read the numbers correctly PS 4 has on average sold 40% more units than Xbone in every territory where both are available.

Anecdotal evidence from Germany. PS 4 still sold out everywhere, XBox One has been available in large quantities from every retailer since before Christmas. Right now every big box store in my city has at least 30 Xbones, no PS 4.

Playstation Now? (http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/07/sony-reveals-its-streaming-service-playstation-now?zeta_id=15925416&utm_source=Targeted%20Blasts&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Playstation+Now_22961_1286699_1286707&utm_content=15925416) Do we care?

Could be cool. Great for older games.

Yeah, but I still can't play my old PS2 discs on there, can I?

Naw, but whatever.

Well, I don't currently have a system and if I could just buy a PS4 and get all the functionality out of it, that would be sweet.  Otherwise, I'm off to hunt down a used, backwards-compatible PS3.

Phildo.

#0: http://pcsx2.net/

#1: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23421.msg1230427#msg1230427

#2: http://wiki.pcsx2.net/index.php/GSDX#Quick_guide_to_the_settings

#3: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23421.msg1232215#msg1232215

So what are the chances Nintendo meets its target of 9 million Wii U's this fiscal year? 

Maybe but Hell has to freeze over first and then some pigs need to fly.

In all seriousness: never, ever will they meet that goal it was always unrealistic.

if you want to reach the moon you have to aim for the stars.   :grin:

That sales target was so ridiculous thatn it raised a lot of eyebrows among investors and industry insiders. Nintendo hasn't released numbers for december yet but the forecasts put Nintendo at 4.5 million consoles lifetime to date as of 31st of december. Iwata would have to move the same amount of merchandise by the end of Nintendo's fiscal year in march - a ridiculous proposition if there ever was one.

In fact missing that goal and finally having to admit that the Wii U is a commercial failure that probably won't even reach Gamecube numbers could lead to a shift in Nintendo's overall strategy and could even lead to some reshuffling of executive positions inside the company. There's even talk that Iwata himself might have to step down once the reality of the Wii U's failure hits.

I don't know what Nintendo's chief executives have been smoking when they made that forecast but it had to be good stuff for them to go so far off the deep end. Nintendo will likely miss the projected sales number by several million units and it will be a very bad day for Nintendo's stock and overall value. I mean Sony sold thze same amount of PS 4 consoles in 6 weeks that Nintendo took more than a year to sell. By march the XBone will also have surpassed Nintendos LTD sales numbers and Nintendo can be very happy whn they reach 10 million units by the time the Wii U get's replaced (if it will be replaced).

I was thinking about buying Xenoblade Chronicles and since the wiiU is backwards compatable maybe getting one, so I finally took a look at it.  That controller looks, and is, a gimped tablet that only has 3-5 hours of battery life.  Despite the fact that people seem to like that new Mario game a lot they did not create a console bundle for it.  Shipping them out with two choices of system based on a laughably small amount of flash memory, 8 or 32 gig, almost makes me angry.  It costs too much for how weak it is.  Their online system is still badly managed.  I guess I would have to buy a wii controller for some wii games.

If they came out with a bundle that included mario and the much better "pro" controller and reduced the price I might buy one.  It was also painful trying to look up info because they gave it such a stupid name.  A lot of people don't even realize they are different systems.  It is so unpopular google auto "corrected" many of my searches that used "wiiu" to just be "wii" and I had to use the "No search for what I actually typed damn it" option.

Then I found out Xenoblade is some sort of rare hard to find game that sells for twice the original msrp, used, so fuck that.

The WiiU was doomed the instant the Xbone and PS4 architectures were decided.

If everyone had stuck with the previous gen designs where it's some wacky cobbled together board based on some custom chip or repurposed PowerPC thing maybe, but now you have two architectures for modern consoles:

PC, PS4, Xbone - x86 architecture, desktop style AMD GPU, lots of RAM.

and

WiiU - Some PowerPC thing again and a custom AMD GPU?

And it's also the least powerful of all the consoles and has a gimmicky ass controller. Not a good recipe for getting multiplatform titles.

One would think they could do pretty well just copying the competition's hardware and then having their 1st party games on it.  But I guess they feel that strategy sucks after Gamecube.

WiiU is doomed, with lackluster sales despite holiday ad blitz (I don't watch much television but it seemed like WiiU ads were everywhere, on networks, on Hulu, etc.…).

If the price was lower, it might be more viable but it's probably too late for that now.

Meanwhile, Nintendo sold ~8M copies of Pokemon X and Pokemon Y in last couple of months and lifetime sales of 3DS now >40M (and I cannot recall ever seeing a TV ad for 3DS though I'm almost certain Nintendo must have done at least a little TV advertising). It doesn't have a robust library of titles either but there are half-dozen to dozen games making it a worthy purchase.

The Wii U might have succeeded had it been the hardware they released for the Wii - i.e. an HD graphics capable motion sensor game console. They failed to take any real advantage of the motion-sensing controls when the Wii came out by forcing 3rd party developers to make 1) a game with motion controls and 2) a game without HD graphics in order to be on the Wii. #2 alone meant that any 3rd party dev that wanted a multi-platform game would have to create 2 entirely different versions of the game with the most expensive part of game dev - art assets. I thought not having HD graphics wouldn't hurt the Wii and it didn't - but it DID hurt Nintendo's long-term prospects because of how much distance it put between 3rd party devs and Nintendo.

Yes.

The ghost game is very cool.  Not enough software makes use of the pad.

A little too imbalanced as the ghost.  I've played it a lot with different people and it's extremely rare the ghost loses.

If it's any consolation, the 8 GB model has been discontinued and the system supports external USB drives or cheap SD cards. The gamepad does have a pretty awful battery life at 3-5 hours, but the deluxe (32 GB) models come with a nice charging dock so it's easy to just sit the gamepad on the cradle between uses. I don't play games for more than 3 hours in one burst anymore these days, but the Pro controller has a much higher battery life if you expect that to be a problem. The only time I get annoyed by the battery life is when I'm using the system to stream a couple hours worth of Netflix/Hulu, in which case you can set it on the charging dock while you watch.

Super Mario 3D World would have been a nice bundle pack-in, but it's pretty rare for the new killer-app on a system to be a part of a discounted bundle. Still, New Super Mario Bros U, the game that was included in the recent holiday bundle, is trash. I feel bad for anyone that got the system for the holidays without any other games.


Also looks like blurry shit unless you play it on Dolphin, which is more effort than I'm willing to put into playing a JRPG in 2013/14.

Edit: If you're looking for a game that does a great job making an argument for the gamepad, check out Rayman Legends. The Wii U version is definitely the best version of the game and there are a lot of really clever ways the game uses the gamepad.

Xenoblade C looked really great on Dolphin; it was unstable though.  I kept getting screen tears and lockups, so I bought the Wii version which I found unplayable due to the crap graphics.  Great game, terrible platform decision.

It goes unplayed due to my inability to rip the disc.

I never had any problems with it on Dolphin, once I got everything configured properly.

So about Titanfall:

(http://i.imgur.com/VZFYSIV.png)

lol

One more than a MOBA.  SHOOT FOR THE STARS!

If it's what makes the game the most fun rather than just a technical limitation then I don't see what the issue is, not that I'm really interested in the game either way. Much like with MMO's it's easier to get a good team of 6 people together as opposed to playing with 30 other random people.

It's actually got loads of bots in it, they're labeled "militia" in all the vids. My pet theory is that games journos loved the game at trade shows because they thought they were massarcing human opponents.

Actually I remember now that I sort of groaned while reading about configuring a controller for Dolphin.

A Dolphin's Tale, The Story of GameCube (http://www.dromble.com/2014/01/07/dolphin-tale-story-of-gamecube/).

A long but great text about the design and development of the GameCube with lots of quotes and background info. Also relevant to understand why Nintendo does things the way they do.

Titanfall 6vs6? This could be a dealbreaker for me. What the fuckin hell.

Kinect trolling. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZLa4AnN5k)

That video rules. Like every one of those players sounds either stoned or like they're 10 years old.

It's COD so the latter.

It's CoD, so odds are that for many of them, it's both simultaneously.  :P

The design of the game is very intentionally that everyone gets to feel good about themselves because they can rack up kills on bots even if they suck. I suspect the more hardcore shooter people are going to have serious issues with it.

I agree that the raw numbers don't really matter, but the game does feel like it's catering to casuals.

I can't wait for the Militia Exp Booster, exclusively for Titanfall Premium, only $59.99 on Origin!

I think y'all are getting your panties in a twist over a game you haven't played yet. I watched a few full matches at E3 with their devs playing, and I don't really think there's anything to worry about. The bots are more like moba-style creeps you gotta keep an eye out for or you'll get swarmed, but they aren't super hard to mow through. It's to be an impediment more than anything.

I tend to prefer smaller player counts anyways. There's always BF4 for my large playercount fun.

It just clicked.

Titanfall is built on the Source Engine but will only be available on Origin?

Valve needs to lay the everloving smackdown on shit like that.

Why bother? Just let them hoist themselves on their own petard. Everybody already hates origin, and will hate them for using origin. No reason for Valve to make themselves look like the dicks here.

Wait what? Is Titanfall really based on source?

Yes. They took the modding capability out of it to boot.

It is absolutely hilarious though that the Titanfall people left Activision in anger, and then decided to sign up with EA and a MS console exclusive.  

edit: also, there's a small chance that the reason we have seen so little Titanfall content is because there's a problem and it's not ready. In which case the shitstorm will beautiful.

Well, they're basically doing it on their own terms still which is better than they had.

Well, there's "on their own terms" and there's "only on Origin". These two combined make for many interpretations, but I don't think any of them are good.

Hard to say "on their own terms" when EA just ups and decides not to release the game on playstation because of some deal they made with microsoft.

Doesn't matter, big budget console fps games are like the reality singing/dancing shows of video games.  They're all garbage but people will still lap it up.  Fucking CoD Ghosts sold a metric shit ton.  Best possible outcome is titanfall causes a schism in the CoD community causing its user base to be cut in half and making both games less profitable.

Who am I kidding people will just buy both the same way they watch both american idol and dancing with the stars or whatever.

Oh, I could be wrong but I think the reality show of gaming is Madden 25.  I've never played a Madden game before, unless maybe you count one on the Genesis, but this thing was apparently programmed by monkeys.  It's just a terrible, terrible program.

I doubt this game will be as terrible as the naysayers are predicting. They are making something totally within their wheelhouse, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since they made MW2, which is my favorite in the series.

They've been working on it for what, three or four years?

A nice little inside story (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret-developers-wii-u-the-inside-story) by Digital Foundry on the experience of developing for the Wii U pre launch.

A few gems from the article:

About the maturity of the toolchain:

"Nintendo had provided an integration of their development tools into Visual Studio - the de facto standard for development - but it didn't work, not even close. So time was spent trying to get this fixed up, while reporting the issue to the platform holder. Eventually we received a solution from Nintendo via another third-party company who had also been working on this issue for a while.

So now we could make the code visible in Visual Studio and get it compiling, which was good, but the compilation times were really slow, even for minor changes. Then it had to do the link step, at which point you could happily get up, make a cup of tea, have a chat and get back to your desk before the link was complete. Link times were measured in multiple (four or more) minutes on Wii U compared to around one minute on other platforms."

about the NCL support experience:

"After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week !"

about the networking and social features:

"(we) asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?"

Interesting read and if only half of it is true then Nintendo seriously dropped the ball in more than one way.

Nintendo apparently licensed the compiler toolchain from Green Hills. For anyone who doesn't know them Green Hills is one of only a few major toolchain companies providing products to the embedded sector. Since Nintendo still uses Power PC cores the selection of viable tool chains is basically limited to Green Hills, Wind River or Freescale's own Codewarrior tools (only viable though if you use Freescale ppc cores). All providers of embedded development tools because PPC is pretty much only used for embedded products today. This is also pretty much the reason why they all suck.

I'd kill for Visual Studio integration for any of those products for example. Unfortunately using those products means that you are stuck with tools and GUI interfaces that are as comfortable to use as Borland Turbo C/C++ from 1990 yet offer even less features.

Since I've had the unfortunate experience of having to work with their tools in several embedded projects I can relate to the developer in the OP. Green Hills exemplifies what is wrong with embedded development. They provide you with tools that are horribly out of date, have horrible UI and a user experience stuck in the middle ages and are as well documented as the incoherent ramblings of a madman while charging you $10,000 per license for the privilege of using them. I can't blame them though since their competition is pretty much as bad.

Switching PS 4 and Xbone to X86 wasn't just a great move to make things easier for multi-platform titles because of easier porting it also meant that companies are no longer stuck with absolutely horrible embedded tool chains and can instead use Visual Studio or Eclipse based IDEs and LLVM/CLANG or Intel's ICC as compiler/linker.

Is codewarrior still a gigantic pile of dogshit?

I haven't really heard a good word about from anyone I've ever known who has been forced to use it.

Yes but now the dogshit is based on a haphazardly adapted eclipse installation instead of their own GUI.

You can still find references to the Gamecube's gecko ppc processor in the ppc startup code that comes as part of the installation. Which means that those parts haven't been touched since 2001.

As embedded tool chains go it's pretty par for the course though. It's all pretty much overpriced dogshit.

This reads like dramatization of typical launch issues with someone who had no previous experience working with any Nintendo hardware. I would not take what some anonymous doom caster on the internet says at face value. I say this as someone who has done both Wii and Wii U development. It ain't hard.


Nintendo games compile with GCC/cygwin type stuff, which you can integrate into Visual Studio and Incredibuild in minutes if you know how to write a makefile and invoke a command-line compiler. If you are someone who has only done windows / xbox development your entire life and never had to touch a makefile I guess this is minorly challenging?  The fact that it took this person a long time to get "Hello World" running says to me that they are either extremely unfamiliar with non-windows development of any kind or kind of suck at programming.

This sounds like the type of person who when confronted with someone slightly different from what they are used to struggles and whines.


I did all my Wii development in Visual Studio. (PS3 as well) I used CodeWarrior for like a couple days then realized how bad it is. IIRC I did use Codewarrior for debugging (which it is perfectly fine for) but not for editing / compiling. Visual Studio and Incredibuild are both perfectly capable of invoking command line compilers, even in distributed fashion, so build/compile times there aren't any longer. IIRC when comparing link times on 360 / Wii / PS3 the 360 was by far the slowest. By far. I assume because of all the windows cruft that gets included.

It really sounds like this guy doesn't understand command line / makefile style development and could have solved his issues relatively quickly had he bothered to try.

As far as things like needing a big patch day one and some features being poorly documented - welcome to game development launches?

My experience is that developing for Wii and Wii U is pretty painless unless you are a giant scrub or a windows-only guy frightened and confused by anything slightly outside your comfort zone. The actual APIs are very clean (much cleaner than legacy windows stuff) and the tools are fine, other than Codewarrior / editor, which you don't need to use.

Well I do most of my professional development in the embedded business and here it's much more common to set up your own build chain with command line tools and build/make setups.

It's easy when the whole code and toolchain has been built with that in mind (as most embedded projects are), it's also easy if you have access to the source for everything or your middleware and engine framework is designed for cross platform wotk and is designed to be tool/compiler agnostic. If not then it is a major pain in the ass to even 'just' switch compilers even if you stay on the same architecture. Incompatible language extensions, incompatible syntax for preprocessor commands, undocumented and incompatible ABIs etc.

This basically means that you'll have to completely ignore the IDE part of whatever compiler you use except as a debugger GUI and to rely solely on the command line capabilities for everything else. If you've been a professional developer long enough or if you've worked on projects or platforms where this is basically the norm (Unix development, most embedded work etc.) then this is not that big a deal. If you are used to 'PC style development' though this will be a major culture shock for you. If the platform vendor chooses to give you some parts of the code as binary lib only you're basically locked into whatever compiler they've used since most embedded compilers use proprietary ABIs by default or 'extend' well known ABIs and debug formats to support their own special debug and profiling features.

So you're relegated to Unix style development where you use one tool for editing your code, a command line setup for building and a separate tool for debugging. Which is entirely doable but get's more and more unwieldy as project and code size increases. This is not that bad but I imagine that their shop had basically only worked with a Visual Studio setup up to this point which means that they'd either have to wait until the integration into VS works or that they would need to set up their whole development workflow from scratch.

I can relate to the developer not because what they faced was exceptionally difficult or uncalled for but simply because I too like the comfort and features of XCode and Visual studio and wished that embedded toolset providers would at least offer some of those features. Also because it is a pain in the ass to 'convert' an IDE based workflow into a command line based one with documentation being what it is (mostly crap or non-existent)

Nintendo today published its modified financial forecast (http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2014/140117e.pdf) prior to the end of the fiscal year in march and it's dire.

The projected net profit changed from 55 billion Yen (520 million USD) profit to 22 billion Yen loss (210 milion USD).
The sales projections for the Wii U got cut from 9 million to 2.8 (!) million units.
The sales projections for the 3 DS got cut from 18 million to 13.5 million (!) units.
Total revenue changed from a üprojected 900 billion Yen to 450 billion Yen.

Iwata failed to meet any of his forecasts. What's worse is that Nintendo not only failed to meet its Wii U sales projections (which everybody knew where shit anyway) but also sold much fewer 3 DS than expected.

I wonder if he can recover from that.

They need to stop dicking around and actually start competing again. The gimmick smoke and mirrors shit needs to go away.

Reading the very long article, I don't know that Nintendo will get away from gimmicks anytime soon.  Unless Fils-Aime takes Iwata's job, but more likely this spot will be filled by a JP exec.

For all of that, the 3DS was still the top selling system in the US for December:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/16/december-2013-npd-xbox-one-outsells-a-supply-constrained-playstation-4/

Also of note: XBone is outselling the PS4 in the US (not overall yet, but for December) and the 360 is still selling a lot of units itself.

I played more 3ds than I did PS3 last year.  I mostly play at home, too. 

Yeah, everybody I've talked to about it has said they bought an Xbox.  Most said it was because they felt the xbone had so many more features than PS4, and so was the obvious choice.  Hrm.

?

No one I've talked to (mostly college students) has bought any next-gen system yet and most said they were going to get a PS4 if anything which is odd.

Same, althought I know less college student. Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned the lack of games at release.

Everyone I know got an XBO.  I got a PS4, because, man, those Japs sure know how to cook up a good video game.  Also have a WiiU.  So spice.

Yep.  The wife was going to give me $500 at Christmas to buy a PS4, but I told her to wait.  The only game I'm interested in that I can't get on PC is the new Infamous which isn't even out yet.  Not to mention traditionally the first run of consoles is higher in failure rates.

More importantly, my taste in games has changed.  Really looking forward to Divinity OS and the Obsidian RPG over anything else this year.

They should've died and gone into software only when the Playstation landed. All they've been doing is delaying the inevitable.

market reacted as expected. nintendo's stock dropped by 20% after the announcement. Iwata already proactively declared that he 'will not resign' as CEO.

I don't understand how the xbox one could be keeping pace with the ps4.  Unless it's purely because sony can't produce enough units to fill demand.  There are piles of xbox ones all over but the ps4 is sold out most everywhere.

I hope nintendo realizes how badly they are doing and decide to make some major changes.

Purely supply and demand. The PS4 has already won the next 5 years. Their only competition is a potential Valve-made Steambox.

For all intents and purposes steambox is a pc and will not beat consoles for all the same reasons.

And the consoles are just PC's... the fight will be in software and exclusives.

Of course consoles are essentially pc's but the differences are incredibly important.

A console is a console is a console:  When you buy an xbox or ps4 or wiiu you know exactly what you are getting, steambox is not consistant on any level.
Games, exclusives and the like:  Right now steam can't even get mass effect 3 for the pc.  If you have a pc you can play it, if you have a steam box....maybe? PC's still win out when it comes to variety.

Steambox also looks like with so many developers for the different versions it will be less a console than a dvd player.  Reliability and functionality is going to vary wildly except they will all be labelled "steambox" so any bad apples on the manufacturing side could spoil the whole bunch.

Last but certainly not least, anyone can just connect their pc to their tv and use a controller for most games so who are the steamboxes actually for?

The PS4 appears to be supply constrained. Worldwide they're going to crush the fuck out of the Xbox One, but I'm a bit surprised about how well its doing in the US so hey maybe some competition there.

The WiiU is already officially "That box the remaining Nintendo fans use to play Smash, Zelda, Mario, and Metroid", which is fine really if Nintendo is willing to live with it. The Gamecube was the same but I don't regret owning mine.

I wouldn't regret owning any Nintendo console if the cost wasn't more than $300.

If they'd aggressively put their back catalog on the virtual console of both Wii U and 3DS I 'd guess that many people would actually be OK with that.

I would murder a nun (a mean one) if it meant they'd put more decent previous gen titles on the 3DS.  Before I grabbed the system, I imagined the virtual console would be a massive library of all their old stuff, at least in terms of Game Boy titles (given that each version of the system has been able to emulate the previous one just fine).  They're sitting on a gold mine of old titles, I wonder why we don't see more of them.

For that matter, I kind of wonder this about most of the old game companies, especially on the PC.  I guess the projected sales must be close to zero or they'd already be doing it, but I can't help but wish we had the option to buy the old Mega Man or Chrono Trigger games on Steam or Gog or something.

With a lot of games I'd suspect there are licensing issues because likely all contracts specify what platform they can be released on and a virtual console would count as a new platform so each and every deal would need to be renegotiated.

An alienware console will be an alienware console... the fact there's some "hopefuls" hoping they'll sell millions of steamboxes or it will help their boutique PC business are just that. And really PC incompatibility issues have faded because the hardware has gotten less interesting and more standardized. Plus a bit of competition helps stop some vendor think they can ship hardware and not upgrade it for a decade.

The steamboxes are for people who are too scared of PC's and don't need the flexibility an open system can provide... you know, like console players as your post identified.

Last thing I'm doing is dragging my PC up and down the stairs every time I want to use it on the big TV. Also I don't really want to put a full blown second PC in the living room.

So I guess steambox is for me.

Even if I can only play a minority of steam games on it, even just indie titles, I'm good with that.

I don't really care if it takes over the world or not.

Some people brought up console hardware consistency, only thing I'd add, is that it is much less important than it used to be, because there is so much more middleware between the developer and the iron, and because there is less temptation to address the iron directly given how overengineered it usually is now.

It's still a thing, but not the thing it used to be.

Look I'm not saying it's a guaranteed flop or anything and for some people it'll be great but it's just not a contender in the console wars like, at all.

Has the PS4 released in Japan yet?

No, Feb. 22nd I believe.

So that's another Jillion ps4's sold and negative fifty Xbox's.

can't argue with that logic.

It probably isn't.. consoles are for people to play the "blockbuster" titles massive advertising has convinced them they must play. It will be more fun to see if it can build a base, refine the platform and then start challenging the market as the current consoles flag in 3-5 years.

I don't really care, I have steam and there's nothing on consoles / mobile I care about.

Valve is betting that consoles are going to be sidelined in the next couple years when head mounted VR goes mainstream. Reason being that the processing powered needed to deliver the minimum for convincing VR is beyond current gen consoles and will require a beefy PC for the indefinite future (since VR will scale in quality with increasing PC specs far beyond what we currently have). That combined with their bet that VR is _so compelling_ an experience beyond normal media that people will be tearing down the walls to get it.

http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf

I'm not sure how VR interacts with the living room / sofa / big screen TV environment that consoles and steambox are aimed at. It seems to be somewhat in conflict.

... though I hope it's good and I want it for my PC!

I can see VR overlapping with the last generation of consoles more than the current one.  It seems like consoles are moving more towards all purpose media boxes.  I can't see people sitting there watching Netflix while wearing VR goggles.

VR also clashes with the multi-tasking nature of a lot of gaming these days.  Play a round of X, read the news.  Go do 5 quests in an MMO, idle in town while I write an e-mail.  Watch netflix while playing Plants v. Zombies on my tablet.  VR requires 100% of your attention for as long as you're playing.

I don't get the whole PC/Console dichotomy.

For all the boasting about 'Master Race' etc and the small renaissance Indie devs gave the platform it's pretty much stayed a marginalized platform. Steam and Steam machines were never about becoming the dominant game platform that's a ridiculous prospect anyway. It's about keeping the PC intact as a game platform to prevent Microsoft from managing to kill it completely.

Consoles have been the highest revenue generating platforms for a while now and even though on the surface the PC still has a large market share most of that money is tied up in revenues for MMOs (2/3rds in fact, also the reason why dev houses are so keen on being the 'next WoW'). Depending on the research data consoles in 2013 had between 43% ond 48% of the revenue share in the gaming business with mobile being a distant second with 18%. 'Classical' PC boxed games or downloads had only 9% of the revenue share (about 6 billion dollar vs. about 30 billion for consoles). Mobile gaming on tablets and phones already garners twice the profit that 'traditional' PC gaming does and the MMO sector garners nearly three times the profits of the 'traditional PC gaming sector.

The problem with the stance of 'consoles are on the way out and PC gaming will be on the upswing once $technology hits' is that the PC is already being squeezed out by tablets and phones as far as normal computing needs are concerned and traditionally 'gaming PCs' have always been a niche for the hard core enthusiast crowd - a lucrative niche but a niche nevertheless. NVidia already has huge problems because the enthusiast crowd can no longer support their business and they have no presence in the current gen of consoles or a significant share of the 'integrated graphics' market.

A significant fraction of users already doesn't really need a PC anymore. They usually own one that's either old or dirt cheap for the few things they still need a real computer for (text processing etc.) and use their mobiles for pretty much everything else. This will pose to be an even greater 'barrier of entry' for PC gaming, especially if you want them to invest into a system that offers significantly better visuals than the new consoles. As much as Valve and the oculus guys want it to be the case it's unlikely that a significant portion of their market will ever invest in a $1200+ PC 'just' for gaming with better visuals or to be able to use an oculus rift. One reason that indies even managed to somewhat reinvigorate the PC as a platform comes from the fact that most games are so 'lo-fi' that even a three or more year old PC can run them. Windows as a platform is under siege on the business side from Apple and Mac OS X and on the consumer side from iOS and Android and the value proposition of mobile and tablet computers.

If it weren't for the business sector, the PC market would have already seen a huge crash as tablet and phones sales are practically eating their lunch and if it weren't for DirectX being the de facto standard and PCs being the dev platforms of choice for console development we'd see even less PC ports than we already do and they would probably be even more shitty (also Europe as being basically the last bastion of PC gaming). The Steam Machine is basically Valve's way to try and save the PC as a viable platform once Microsoft completely abandons gaming on the PC as part of their strategy or is becoming so marginalized because of tablet and phones that nobody would care for it as a gaming platform anyway.

The enthusiast crowd is very seriously living in a bubble if it thinks that consoles will be going away any time soon because of the PC becoming a viable platform again. More likely the whole console business will crash because of mobile eating away at their profits eventually.

Then they're fucked, because that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Thanks for that link.

This. Microsoft released Windows 8 and basically took one giant shit all over the desktop as an entertainment platform. They don't want you on the PC at home, they want you on a laptop/tablet/phone or the XBone at home and on a cloud-controlled desktop at work. The home PC is an impediment to Microsoft these days. It's a pain in the ass to support and people with PC's tend to want to control what software and media is consumed on it. They've walked that back a bit with the utter disaster Windows 8 has been but even Windows 9 is probably only there to make people forget 8. Valve was smart enough to see this and knew that the Windows platform was getting strangled as a gaming platform. Linux is a viable games platform but it needs hardware that works and it needs software.

Insert SteamOS, which is really Steam-flavored Linux with much of the difficulty of Linux removed. I.e. it's like the Mac OS only not controlled by a bunch of dickless Apple mooks with their walled garden. It's a reason for game devs to add Linux ports/development to their repertoire and hardware to make that more palatable to the non-neckbeard PC audience.

Valve is also heavily investing in development and profiling tools for Linux.  One nice thing about Linux is that since you have the full OS and kernel source, you can build instrumentation that's all but impossible for anyone but the OS vendor to do on closed platforms.

http://richg42.blogspot.de/2014/01/vogl-opengl-tracerdebugger-bonus-content.html

The gaming that happens on mobiles / tablets has very little cross-over with console / PC gaming. I agree that idiots with ipads are a huge and growing market (as where wii-sports and pop-cap games) but they're largely irrelevant to people wanting an immersive and deep gaming experience.

"'Classical' PC boxed games or downloads had only 9% of the revenue share"

Valve reports their sales data?

No, the businesses selling their stuff on platforms such as Steam do.

A lot of Titanfall footage has leaked. It's pretty much a reskin of CoD with mechs. I was struck by the bad textures and small maps. Mech battles in a phone booth!


http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19x61p_tf_videogames (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19x61p_tf_videogames")

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19yzeh_tf2_videogames (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19yzeh_tf2_videogames")

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19x14l_titanfall-alpha-gameplay_videogames (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19x14l_titanfall-alpha-gameplay_videogames")

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19yv4f_titanfall-closed-alpha-gameplay-directfeed_videogames (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19yv4f_titanfall-closed-alpha-gameplay-directfeed_videogames")

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19z0fe (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19z0fe")

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19v9ni_titanfall-closed-alpha-offscreen_videogames (http://"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19v9ni_titanfall-closed-alpha-offscreen_videogames")

I heard Dead Rising 3 got a 13GB patch today.  That's...really big?  I mean, I know we're in the age of broadband and all, but really, 13 gigs?  There was that much fail in trying to rush the game out the door?

I just wish it would release so I could stop hearing a few folks at work tell me how it was going to revolutionize/ reinvent FPS gaming on consoles.  I don't even care if it does, I just want to stop hearing about it.

Microsoft is apparently paying Machinima members for mentioning the XBone.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth-marketing-microsoft-paying-youtubers-for-xbox-one-mentions/

edit: also the way they did it might be against FTC rules.

http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/03/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines

It still blows my mind that people see that and think it's a CoD reskin. That just seems like an incredibly close-minded viewpoint, I saw all that footage and got super excited for an arcade shooter with an emphasis on mobility and robots.

Y'all are even cynical when it comes to shooters.

EDIT:

Not gonna lie, that gif is kind of awesome.

Valve are not stupid enough to think VR is the core future game mechanic, or to think processing power will kill consoles.

What might hurt consoles current model is the death of physical media and rise of low rent microtransaction gaming that isn't really compatible with an onerous certification process. Nobody expects the Xbox or PS to go away, but valve aren't beyond the pail in thinking the disruption means a new entrant with something to offer can grab a slice.

Valve's model of working with indies is very well aligned with the android / ios model, as well as appealing to old non-dudebro gamers.

I'm a Battlefield 4 survivor and I even played Brink. MP shooters always disappoint in one way or another.

So, the PS4 has this generation's red ring of death bad press:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/21/ps4-error-corrupting-save-files (http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/21/ps4-error-corrupting-save-files)

Thankfully for them this will be fixable with a firmware patch and I wouldn't be surprised if it only takes days to do but it's still not something they want especially in the early going. My guess is it will be fixed before the Japanese roll-out at the latest.

The Titanfall gameplay footage was very meh. Giant robots shoehorned into phone booth of death level design. There were some cool graphical things going on there, but I'd much rather have Battlefield 2142 Part Deux than 6v6 arena fighting with mechs.

I'd agree with you if the studio didn't have the pedigree it does. Love it or hate it, that team knows how to make the style of game they want to make. I'm pretty sure they're going to do some sort of an open beta of the game before release, though, so people can go in and hate it on its own merits.

MS PR apparently hasn't learned anything from its recent blunders and is currently putting its foot back in its mouth with regards to Tomb Raider Definitive Edition for PS 4 and Xbox One.

For those who haven't heard, Tomb Raider will run at 1080p/60 on PS 4 but only at 1080p/30 on Xbone (confirmed by Crystal Dynamics). This obviously didn't go over well with Xbone owners, has lead to all kinds of hilarity and stupidity - including an epic 70 pages Neogaf thread and hyped up fanboys in all 7 stages of grief - and has MS PR at their inept best trying to contain the situation.

It started with Square Enix issuing a statement that sounds as if a MS rep made them read a written statement while he was standing right behind them : "Both platforms offer the same outstanding Tomb Raider experience. Delivering the core Tomb Raider gameplay at native 1080p and running at 30fps was always our primary goal given the type of experience Tomb Raider is and the exploration we want players to do. Anything beyond 30fps for this version is gravy."

Today Albert Penello 'lead planner' for the Xbox division and PR mouthpiece par excellence (citation needed) chipped in with an interview he gave to the podcast GamerTagRadio.

“Look, I had a lot of time to think about this and I believe in what I said. I believe that the differences between the boxes [PS4 and Xbox One] is not all that great and I know what is going behind the scenes and I have access to more information about some of this thing than a lot of people. Sometimes people tend to neglect the points that are in my favor and they like to highlight the points that tell me I am wrong. I still think Ryse is still the best looking game on any platform. Period. End of story.”

“I think if you look at the title which we launch, which were multiplatform titles, The bulk of them were the same. I think there were 12 titles released on both platforms [PS4 and Xbox One], leaving three all of them had the same performance on both boxes. Everybody wants to focus on frame rate, there is the Tomb Raider, there is a resolution thing going on and OK, there could be a lot of reasons why that could be true but we are just a [few] weeks in, we just shipped, it’s a long generation. People who bought an Xbox One are going to be in for an awesome generation of games that are only going to get better. I think these little things get way overblown versus like the quality of the games and the real differences in experiences which are pretty minor.”

As you can imagine these statements did nothing except put even more fuel to the already red hot fire of internet rage. Meanwhile the die hards are looking for any reason they can find that might explain the disparity between versions. Starting with the fact that the PS 4 and Xbone versions were developed by different devs, so obviously the dev responsible for the Xbone version fucked up, citing ominous 'driver problems' for the Xbone's problems or going as far as to accuse SE of purposefully gimping the Xbone version on the behest of Sony.

This is really going to be a long generation if any new release provokes such an intense reaction. The power disparity between both systems won't magically disappear after all.

PS4 - GRAVY EDITION

STERIODS

Microsoft: Uhhhh, well if you trade in your PS3 we'll give you $100 towards and xbone! (http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/30/5361146/microsoft-offers-100-to-ditch-your-ps3-for-an-xbox-one)

:psyduck:

This isn't really that serious, just amusing (http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/01/31/ooops-microsofts-xbox-team-caught-tweeting-android-device/?_escaped_fragment_=t3yGm#!t3yGm)
MS Xbox team caught tweeting from an Android device!

(http://cdn0.sbnation.com/imported_assets/2038395/BfRqxP1CUAADbt0_medium.png)

PS3 better media played than both PS4 & XBone (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-ps4-vs-xbox-one-which-is-the-better-media-player).

Very disappointing how bad both new consoles are at media playback, if that article is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it) given how much marketing emphasis was put on their multimedia capabilities. Definitely just staying with my PS3 for now.

This is not shocking. Outside of not playing a couple super common formats, the PS3 is a superb home media device.

PS3 media server is outstanding.  This is why it's still being held hostage by my wife.   

No, not shocking, I agree. Just a bit sad to see them going backwards.

I don't think Sony or MS consider it going backwards. They want us to get content from sources they can make money from. If people download media onto their PC either legitimately or not and then stream it to their TV through a console, MS and Sony don't get anything out of it. Some family members actually got me a PS4 for Christmas, but my PS3 is going to remain hooked up for a long time to come.

I'm also not really sure if we are going backwards. We're still quite young in this cycle and as I recall the PS3 didn't launch with all those nice touches.

That being said, the PS3 will probably move to the bedroom soon as the bedroom Blu-Ray/streaming device.

There needn't be a conspiracy behind it. Unless they keep features like they are for the foreseeable future it's just prioritizing development resources. Sony switched from PPC + Cell to X86 and Microsoft from PPC to X86 also so both had to redo their whole development ecosystem. Tool Chain, including compiler, linker, libraries, frameworks etc. The whole OS needed to be ported or implemented.

I'd prioritize getting the basics ready + stability over supplementary features like BluRay playback every time. Shit had to get out of the door and most of the missing features can be delivered via OS updates in the future.

That both consoles have a decent feature baseline and are pretty stable apart froma few minor glitches is half a miracle in the first place.

Y'know, time was, people had a hankerin' for consoles over them finicky peecees 'cuz they "just worked"   :geezer:

From the 'what the hell have those guys been smoking?' Department: Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told investors during today's earnings call that the publisher expects "Destiny will be the best-selling video game in history".

This will totally not come back and bite him in the ass.

Can a CEO get dumped for being a straight up liar to investors? Because that's the kind of shit that deserves an immediate vote.

Just for the record, what is the best selling game of all time?  I'm sure the snarky answer is 'Solitaire', but I'd like some frame of reference for what he's dreaming about.

I don't know the answer, but it probably matters if you mean dollars earned or units sold.

Wiki says it's Wii Sports at ~82M units (which would admittedly include the pack in copy almost everyone that bought a Wii got).

Super Mario takes #2 for the same reason, which to me says the true winner is #3: Minecraft.

Yea, that kind of rigs the contest. The rest of the top ones were interesting though: three Marios, Minecraft, Tetris. Three GTAs in the top 12.

Top PC game on their list that I actually bought as a PC game (GTA is a console game to me): Skyrim at 20 million units.

Tetris was bundled with the Gameboy.

Minecraft has also been bundled.

The fact that Wii Sports was bundled actually makes it MORE impressive, not less. People were paying the price of a console just to play one game. It's not like people were thinking "well, I want a Wii and hell it comes with this 'Wii Sports' game."

Wii Play, sure. That was an example where the game just sweetens the deal.

Why would you assume people went out of their way to get their hands on wii sports?

Offhand, both my mother and my aunt bought Wii's pretty much entirely for Wii sports.

Later they did other stuff with them, and I think my mom even used or uses that weird little exercise stand thingy, but it was pretty much bowling and golf that made them get the Wii.

Um.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ3_hyZbo3c

Wii sports was the main reason people originally bought the Wii for.

That's why almost everyone I know who bought a Wii, bought a Wii. Hell, it was a big part of why we got one.

It's pretty much the only Wii game I happy still play. Bowling is still fun. :)

Giant Bomb has a video thing on Titanfall. It's not just a CoD reskin, it's a CoD reskin where you mostly fight braindead AI mobs.

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/unfinished-titanfall-02-11-1014/2300-8489/

Nod. That's why everyone who I know personally bought a Wii as well, including myself.

Reports coming out of Japan about large PS4 stock on shelves doesnt sound very promisingl

It's not sold out everywhere day one but it seems to be doing fine.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced an xbox titanfall bundle, it's the same as the base system but includes Titanfall.  They didn't increase the price though, it's still $499.  So they've had to add a free game to the base console to try and move them.  They also just outright cut the UK price.

I've heard a lot of speculation that if Microsoft ever sold off the Xbox division that Amazon might be interested. That kinda breaks my brain but with all of the major tech companies throwing money away buying companies that don't have any method of monetization or no profits who knows.

330K sales of the PS4 in Japan in two days, so slightly higher than the WiiU and definitely "doing fine". given the lack of Japanese orientated games right now that's a strong start but theyw ill need to follow it up with software fairly fast otherwise it will crater like the WiiU did.

Meanwhile, you can now get an Xbox One plus Titanfall for £370 in the UK. After MS slashed the price and added in a free copy of titanfall, Gamestop then went one further and cut the price even further. You can only speculate at how bad the initial numbers were looking for feburary and how many units were taking up space in warehouses to justify this sort of rapid price cuts.

Think about how much more they could advertise to you if they had direct access to your living room?  And they could also extort fees from services like Netflix for continued appearance on the platform.

Also, the KindleBox would probably sell a shitload based on brand recognition.

Is it possible that both these consoles will have a very mediocre reception for this generation?

To an extent, probably.  Though I think PS4 will generally be better off.

I think that a major problem they are facing is that there simply isn't (at this point) much to differentiate it compared to the last generation.  Ignoring the library, think of the technical leap from the PS2 to the PS3.  It is HUGE.  The leap into HD and the massive improvement in overall graphical quality.  Not to mention the other benefits (media server, netflix, blu ray capability, online store, etc.).  It was such a big difference that I, for one, absolutely HAD to get one.  Same with xbox to 360.  Night and day.

Now?  I don't really know.  We are still talking the same resolutions, and in a lot of cases the same framerates.  The graphical fidelity is better from a PS3 to a PS4, but it isn't like the difference is gigantic at this point (I think it will be later on probably).  In short, there isn't anything there to make me go "I GOTTA HAVE IT!!"  And it won't happen until there are a few more exclusives out.

I'm skeptical of Amazon pursuing a $400-500 console strategy.  I think they'll just content themselves with ensuring Amazon Instant Video is available for all the pricier consoles.

What would make far more sense would be for them to take the guts of their latest-gen kindle fire, stick it in a little box with HDMI and a controller/remote in place of touchscreen and battery, and sell it for $100 or less to compete with roku, apple tv, etc -- serve up amazon video, amazon music, shopping, android apps, etc.  I bet all the developers who expended effort developing or porting to Ooya and it's couple of 10s of thousands of users would scramble to get their stuff on an amazon device that would likely see millions of users in short order.  

I'd be surprised if Ouya has that many active users. still.  Also, from what I've read I think a lot of devs gave up on the Ouya early on.

I won't swear by it but if I remember correctly they are already outselling their predecessors given the same amount of time since release.  Whether or not that keeps pace is anyone's guess.

On Microsoft selling off the xbox business I have even less idea.  When idiotic, useless companies that don't make money are buying other useless money losing companies for billions of dollars based purely on how many users and "potential" they have I don't think rational estimates can be made.  I mean xbox live has millions of users, most of which are in that highly sought after younger demographic.  Its main problem is how incredibly hard it would be to cut it out of the Microsoft collective as a separate entity.  I doubt it would be possible, for technical reasons.

Sorry, should have said "units", not "users" there.

They could partner with Xbox and release Xbox One Amazon Edition.  Remove the disc drive.  Double the storage.  Pure digital downloads. Link XBLive with Amazon Prime. Sell it at $300 with the condition of advertisement.  Call it XBox Prime.

Microsoft has rewarded Stephen Elop for destroying Nokia by giving him the Xbox division.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5444160/microsoft-management-shift-elop-larson-green-devices-services

Doesn't bode well for xbox that they put him there (http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2014/02/25/new-head-of-xbox-considered-selling-the-business/).  :why_so_serious:

Just noticed no one chimed in. They sold 322k PS4s in the first two days. Well ahead of the 88k that PS3 sold but still less than the PS2 which sold 630k.

Was about to ask what they could possibly be playing on the PS4.

Then found out they had a Yakuza title out already.

-_-

Holy hell the PS2 sold 630k in Japan in the first two days??

Eternal Ring wasn't that great.

No, it wasn't. But the leap from PS1 to PS2 was massive. Also, it played DVDs.

I feel like people constantly forget that the killer app was playing DVDs.

When games no longer needed to come on four different discs?  Yeah, that was pretty sweet.

I do forget that, and it was a big deal.  PS3 went Bluray, and a load of other bells and whistles.  Not sure what the PS4 brings other than it is supposed to be easier to develop for.  As evidenced by the plethora of launch titles?

Yeah I'm unclear how the PS4 is better than the PS3. I'm very clear on why the XBone sucks ass.

More pixels.

I'm just kind of thankful that this generation is so easy to ignore for now.

I will eventually end up with a PS4 because I have 5 years of Playstation Plus or whatever thanks to a Walmart sale and I want those free games, but unless Demon's Souls 2 comes out on it, I don't see myself BUYING any games.

I'm probably going to get one too, just because I like JRPGs. There isn't anything in particular on the horizon that I'm excited for, since Persona 5 is hitting PS3 instead.

Yea, when I read that I said "Ok, then. Sticking with dat PS3."

According to the first official sales numbers Sony sold about 350,000 consoles in Japan in the first few days. The only launch that sold better was the launch of the PS2 with about 500,000 units. For a launch in a non-holiday month and with the current lineup (or non-lineup) of games this is quite an achievement, actually.

Well for me that kind of sums up the dilemma of japanese developers.

Persona 4 came out in 2008 in the PS2
P 5 will come out at some point this decade (it's Atlus, I couldn't resist) for the PS3.

Generally smaller teams and smaller budgets mean longer development times and an (over)-reliance on existing know-how. Japan also doesn't have many developers with PC-development backgrounds. A US publisher would damn well make sure that a high profile release targets the largest number of systems possible and (barring any sort of exclusivity deals) would also launch it on the next gen systems. A feat made quite a lot easier by the fact, that those systems are now even closer to the PC in terms of development skillsets.

PS4 hardware sales were pretty decent in Japan, but software sales were abysmal. There was one game at like 70k, one at 50k, and the rest hovering around 20k.

That says to me that people bought the hardware just to own the hardware, rather than because it has games they want to play, which means there will be a huge downturn in hardware sales past the early adopters.

Sony's VR set:

(http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/15583/sony_gdc_0460.jpg)

It bums me out this is the new thing since being partially blind all this 3d/VR shit does nothing for me.

OR has been working on VR for years and still can't demonstrate how it works for games other than spaceship piloting. There are a lot of fundamental problems that nobody has an answer to. Like "how do you control a character in a way that feel natural?"

Spaceship piloting works because as a pilot you can move your head around independently of controls-based steering. FPS games don't work, because you aren't piloting a thing, you are the thing, and all the possible control schemes feel off as they all map poorly to how you operate your own body.

At this point I consider VR a cool sounding gimmick that will quickly die. VR developers run into fundamental problems and instead of solving them just push forward and hope the sparkle of VR promise will carry them.

In may ways it's similar to Kinect. How do you control a character with Kinect? Nobody ever figured that out, and thus Kinect doesn't work for the vast majority of games. I expect VR to be a lot of "you're a spaceship pilot", "you're a tank pilot", "you're a mech pilot", "your a cyclist" games, and I don't think you can sustain a peripheral with that. There will be other types of games, but for say 3rd person games most people are going to try them for 20 minutes, realize the VR adds nothing to the experience and move on.

Skyrim with VR sounds fantastic.

I don't know much about the technology, but why not couple the VR with some existing ideas to help with the control?  I can easily envision scenarios where VR would work if you had an ordinary controller in your hand, and even something like Playstation's Move technology.  Or shit, give me some VR glasses and a steering wheel and let me play Gran Turismo or something.  That could be mind-blowingly good.

Not that I don't think you are wrong, this will probably end up as gimmicky bullshit, despite me wanting it not to be so.

VR would be a big thing for flight sim and racing sim players and that's...about all I can think of really. The hardcore racing sim (F1 20xx series, Project Cars, the two really aspergers-level racing sims I can't remember right now that real racers actually train with) crowd are pretty dedicated and you can buy some pretty crazy prebaked cockpit setups for them. I could see them going nuts over it.

VR only works if you can manage total sensory deprivation outside of the VR and as Margalis said, some kind of control scheme that feels as natural as body movements only without body movements. So we're really talking about some kind of thought-based control scheme that doesn't involve an intermediary device. I'm glad companies are still trying to fuck that VR chicken... but I'm not about to blow hundreds/thousands of bucks on a bulky ass set of headache goggles.

I think that statement is really limiting.  Keyboards aren't natural but feel that way after practice.

Also, Oculus just announced their new dev kit 2 is $350.

Madness. Can't wait until these toys hit <$200.

If you are a pilot for a thing it maps perfectly to VR - you are sitting in a cockpit, you can move your head around, you steer with controls. Questions like "how do you turn" and "how do you aim" map exactly to how you do those things in real life.

The problem is much more complicated for an FPS game. Typically in an FPS game you move in the direction you are looking, or relative to that direction. If you look straight ahead and hold "W" then look left and hold "W" you turn 90 degrees to the left. But with a human body if you run forward then look left while still running forward you don't change direction.

Basically the issue is that the VR goggles map to the human head, not the human body. And the human head moves pretty independently of the body.

If you try to solve this problem by making the body always rotate with the head it feels really off, because you can't look, you can only do a full body turn. If you try to solve this problem by separating out body control from head control it's awkward because you have no feedback on how your video-game body is positioned.

I don't know that these problems are unsolvable but so far nobody has a great solution. Maybe they'll hit on one, maybe they won't. I suspect that they won't get solved, a lot of games will feel slightly off, and people will stop using VR for them. And that's for first person shooters, a genre you think would map to VR perfectly.

With third person games your head is just a glorified right-stick camera and you're explicitly an observer so there's not much sense of immersion.

I can definitely see a sweet Gran Turismo setup working great with it, I just think the range of games that support more than short-lived gimmicks will be pretty narrow. You're going to see like 500 different "you're an astronaut riding around in a mars rover" games, at least for OR and PC. 

It's the same basic problem as with Kinect-style controllers, though.

You can't just control a game from natural movements that are intuitive, because the action in the game almost always needs to be a hyperexaggerated version of that real movement. If I swing as if I'm holding a real sword, either the game shows me as I really am, a slow middle-aged derpy-derp fumbling away with an imaginary sword or it makes me look like a fast, skilled warrior. But if I look in my movements in the game environment as if I'm fast and skilled, the action of my avatar in game has to be badly out of synch with my real-world movements. So instead I have to be taught a kind of kinetic, physical language in which small movements of my hands, arms and body "represent" or stand in for game movements. At which point you have to ask, "So how is that better than pressing four buttons and a thumbstick, or wasd on a keyboard?" It's not more intuitive at that point, it is at best no more or less intuitive than any other controller scheme. The VR doesn't ever solve the control/interaction problem, it's just something that might help with a feeling of immersion or give you a new kind of visual wow-factor.

It only helps with control/immersion if it's working straight from some kind of neural input, e.g., it's genuine Metaverse kind of shit. Which is not coming any time soon, assuming we even want it to come.

Well, for movement there is the Omni (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1944625487/omni-move-naturally-in-your-favorite-game) but thats a lot more effort than I want to put into gaming.

I am not saying you are wrong, because neither me or you tested this long enough I'd assume (scratch that if you did), but the part I quoted is exactly how 'mechs and tanks game work, and that becomes second nature pretty soon. I am sure it's totally different in a VR environment, but I think there's a fair chance it would become equally natural after a while. Problem is, perfect the technology to the point it doesn't give you headaches and reacts fast enough so that we can focus on that re-learning part without having to struggle to survive the goofy symbiosis/adjusting process.

I do not want to put myself in the game, I want to be the guy in the game.  I play as myself all day long.  Some game/hardware devs are way out in left field.

Really, though, what Yeg said.  Even if it were perfectly translating my movements right down to eye twitches, Kinect would still be a gimmick for this exact reason.  "Perfect simulation of everything" means you have a bunch of awkward kids and fat 30+ males trying to be Link or Conan or Mario.  .

Change to a different arena, like sports, and what's the benefit vs. actually playing?  Compensation for your own inability? That worked well for a while with Guitar Hero but died out.  Safety of VR vs. actual reality?  Well, then it's not going to be the exact movements translating to the game. (Which it can't be because you won't get hit or have a ball to kick/ hit)

Hm.

Yeah but even GH made it easier/more accessible by giving you five buttons and song notations that are easier instead of a real guitar.

The new titanfall bundle doesn't seem to be selling well enough for Wal-Mart's liking, they have dropped it to $450:

(http://i.imgur.com/9FauoYf.png)

Has anyone yet mentioned walmart is going to start accepting game trade-ins for store credit on anything? Goodbye gamestop.

That "mystery price" thing is hilarious retarted.   :oh_i_see:

Welcome to the wonderful world of price fixing :awesome_for_real:

There was some discussion on Marketplace about this earlier in the week.  The general sentiment from everyone is that GameStop still has the advantage in the quantity of games they have, but it'll be a question of how much people really care about that store credit.  If the answer is, "not at all" walmart isn't going to do much with it.

I have to imagine walmart would be as stingy with their trade-in prices as they are with their real suppliers.

And if you bought an xbox one before the price cuts and free games here is something (http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/03/03/xbox-one-owners-heres-how-to-get-titanfall-and-another-game-for-free/) I don't really understand that might work for you but it seems kinda iffy so be careful.

I don't think Walmart and Gamestop have a lot of crossover or are really in direct competition. By that I mean their customer bases are fairly different.

If walmart undercuts gamestop by even $5 a game which they can do easily, it's going to be slaughter.  Yes they don't carry as much variety as gamestop but that hardly matters.  They carry the big $60 new titles and gaming systems and if your used game money goes farther at walmart towards the next titanfall or going to a new system it's a no brainer.

Or hell, I have some games I don't want anymore, maybe I'll get a new coffee maker/keyboard/six pack of guinness.

Part of why Gamestop has that variety is their trade-ins though. If this takes off, and I think it has the potential to, suddenly there well be bins full of $5 dollar used games next to the movies. Not to mention wally world can afford to lose money on trade-ins for a few years until gamestop goes under. Don't worry though, I'm sure wal-mart will still have reasonable prices after they've cornered the market  :oh_i_see:

Fuck Gamestop, I hope Walmart crushes them.

I buy most of my (console) games at GS because I like buying the CEs for JRPGs, and Walmart doesn't stock those games at all usually (and when they do it's never the CE). I could probably get them on Amazon if Gamestop stopped being a thing or direct from NISA/Atlus/Whoever, but I wouldn't go to Walmart instead.

Best buy and amazon have matched walmart's $50 under msrp for the titanfall bundle.  Another "see the special price at checkout" for bestbuy and amazon tells you to use a code to lower the price.  The standard version is now getting Forza 5 bundled in.  Some people who bought the titanfall bundle at $499 have complained and managed to get the difference back.

I was weak and got a PS4 for infamous, because I love those games.

Infamous Second Son is easily the prettiest computer game I've player, even on my rigged out PC. I don't really understand ow it can look s pretty *and* be an open world game and not suffer horrendous frame rate drops, but it does. Graphically it's spectacular.

(the game itself is the usual combo of super powers, jumping over buildings, taking down mooks with hilarity and running across a city - ie. brilliant fun)

Infamous is the game at E3 last year that I thought looked most "next gen." (Really the only game that qualified as such) I don't know why I didn't put that in my E3 writeup, I could swear I wrote that somewhere.

Not just the graphics but also the total package of image quality, animation quality and variety, etc. I'm sure the delay helped (it was originally supposed to be a launch title) but even at E3 then it looked vastly superior to other games.

I watched someone streaming Second Son for a bit during the weekend.  I can feel a PS4 purchase in my future now.

 :oh_i_see:

http://www.play-asia.com/  ?

You must not have been in either of these stores recently because yes... their customer base absolutely dovetails, especially when you are talking about video games. Gamestop has become a wretched hive of shit-eating twats every bit as horrible to look at as the People of Wal-Mart.

And that's just the employees.  :why_so_serious:

Gamestop's buyback program seriously flirts with pawnbrokerage laws in some (?many?) states.  I don't think that's a can of worms that WalMart wants to open.  But what do I know?

Walmart can add that to the list of much more serious and criminal laws they already laugh at, it's not going to make any difference.

Best buy takes in used games, but since they take in more than games you have to give them your ID due to the pawn broker laws.

That's a state by state issue; GS has to copy your ID for trades too in some states.

Just imagine what we'll be getting in these deals next Christmas! Oh, wait. XBone. Ok, fuck that then.

Yea, wouldn't buy an XBone for $100.

I honestly wouldn't put one in my house if they gave it to me for free and just charge me for the games.

I'd have to uncable my WiiU for it, so no.

March NPD came out yesterday, everyone assumed the xbox would win due to the titan fall effect.  It didn't.  PS4 still outsold xbox despite being supply constrained, the massively hyped titanfall release and price cuts/bundles.

Guess the consumers aren't as stupid as XBOX hoped.

Permanent pricecut is likely coming, which will be hilarious as this will cause even larger losses in the xbox department.

Just spin it off and sell it to someone stupid like Amazon or something.

I don't know how they didn't see this coming from day one.

They announced their pricing before Sony did and then fumbled around when they realized the pricing difference was likely to be an issue.

Amazon is not even remotely stupid enough to buy the XBone, nor do they even remotely need it. Their Fire TV Gary Busey search engine box is already a more interesting set top box for TV stuff than the Bone will EVER be.

EDIT: Maybe Facebook wants it.  :awesome_for_real:

The XB1 is the culmination of an ambition that has been around since the Web TV days. Unfortunately for MS that ambition stopped making sense 10 years ago. (To rule the living room with a single device)

Spider-Man for XB1 was just delayed indefinitely. It seems highly unlikely to be a technical issue. Reading between the lines my guess is that MS tried to throw their weight around and get the XB1 version to come out earlier or have exclusive content or not lack content the PS4 version did and got into a game of chicken with Activision.

This is emblematic of how MS has approached this gen - with the mindset that consumers and game publishers are a captive audience. Rather than try to earn publisher and player support they've taken it as a given, which has informed everything they've done - the price, the emphasis on non-gaming, the lower power compared to PS4.

Is there anything worth playing on the new consoles yet? I'd like to buy a console for the new lounge, but I can't see any compelling reason to buy a PS4 over a PS3, but buying a PS3 when it's not the newest model seems odd.

The only game I'd like to play is Infamous:SS.  It's pretty hard to justify a ~$500 purchase with the game and tax for just that title.

Nothing you're missing out on by not playing, and there's nothing big scheduled for this year (that you can't also get on a PC) either aside from Destiny in Sept. With a new Mario Kart next month and Smash Bros. at the end of the year if you're into those things, the WiiU sadly does more to justify a purchase.

I still think Microsoft got blindsided by Sony. Remember MS wanted the 360 to last ten years. Kinect was their grand plan to prolong the console life cycle. Also the rumors about a new console were exclusively about a new Sony console at first.

MS now claims that they've been in development for as long as Sony but if you read between the lines they've started considerably later than Sony. Many of their issues are not only because they designed their product for a purpose that buyers generally didn't find compelling but also because they had to catch up to Sony.

How much does a PS3 run these days? Is there a 'slim' or whatever yet.

There's been a slim for a while now and I imagine they are going pretty cheap in the US...but the slim version has something like 12 gigs of memory built in, which is basically useless.  I assume you swap that out, but still.  It is 2014, for crying out loud.

The 12 gig is like, a budget model to compete with the 360's 4 gig; the standard PS3 slim comes with 500 gigs and Last of Us for $270.

My bad, I guess I didn't know there was a slim that also had the 500gb disk.

When the new slim (since the 2nd model was also called slim when it came out :uhrr:) released, there were 250 and 500 gig options; the 12 gig option is newer and terrible. One of the reasons PS3s are more durable than 360s is that most games are forced-install so you're mostly reading from the hard disk and not running the BR drive nonstop. That's not viable with only 12 gigs unless you literally only play Call of Duty or Madden (but not both).

I'm just amazed that both the PS4 and XB1 have sold as much as they have, with so little games and yet PS3 and 360 games can be gotten for cheap (especially used).

I picked up a PS3 with Last of Us and one of the Batman games for like 200 on Black Friday (well, the weekend long Black Friday. I ordered online). I think it was the 500 gig model.

And he was glad to get it, even at 17. There's just shit out for PS4 that he wants to play and a huge backlog of PS3 games he wanted to try that either were PS3 exclusive or we never got for the 360.

Plus, he's now got neftlix in his room. So bonus.

I still can't seen the Xbone or PS4 as anything but a waste of money.

It's a future investment!  :awesome_for_real:

Everyone on this board is going to wind up buying one at some point so why not do it now?

Hahaha no.

Because they'll never RAISE the price, they're likely to slash it, and later models will have more of a library, more memory, be more reliable and even if they never touched the price, be slightly cheaper due to inflation?

Why feed the troll/obvious sarcasm?

Is any of this shit backwards compatible yet?

Not from what I've seen. Another reason I'm not buying one.

I believe high sales in this round will mean a general lack of BC in the future.  Although I don't really know what the hold-up is at Sony with emulation of some sort.  I'd have a PS4 now if it played PS2 games, let alone PS3 games.

Concur.  Pretty sure I mentioned it already, but my PS3 got stolen right around the launch of the PS4 and I would have happily upgraded to the new system instead of buying a refurb PS3 from Gamestop if I could have played my old games on it.

There won't be any backwards compatability since the systems are so different, they would have needed to put in a cell chip basically.  Emulation is expensive and I doubt the ps4 is powerful enough to emulate a ps3 either.

Well the PS3 release was a total boondoggle if I'm remembering correctly, so should we really be shocked by 7M in sales of this console that has the "advantage" over the competition? Also, is 7M in sales that good? Even with the early issues, the PS3 sold 80M units. Granted it was after several price revisions and changes.

Yeah, you got me on that.  Good point.

As for BC, the original PS3 had a Emotion Engine in it.  I suppose it's not really feasible to put an entire Cell architecture inside a PS4, but I can emulate a PS2 on my PC.

7 million sales in the first 5 months is  *literally* the fastest and biggest console launch of all time.

Now, in a while the Wii will start to overtake it (due to the Wii's horrendous supply issues when released), but right now the PS4 is in a league of success of its own.

Also, re games - it has over 50 games currently available. Whilst folks here might not be interested, there are a large amount of games available, and it does have the best console versions of the worlds biggest selling games - CoD, Assassins Creed, Fifa. It's not a surprise it's selling at all - it's in a remarkably stronger launch  position than previous console  have been when it comes to games. For those of us who like to play games outside of our PCs, the PS4 gives you the best versions of the biggest games.