Tag Archives: Sony

Editorials, Games, PlayStation, Xbox

Thoughts before tomorrow’s announcement

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So in all likelihood we’ll be looking at the first of the next-gen consoles by tomorrow. Sorry, Nintendo, but it’s true.

I’d forgotten how exciting all this can get. There’s news to talk about, specs to argue over, and fanboys getting far too emotionally invested. I expect the usual sieve-like memories as gamers gush over the graphical prowess shown off in CGI trailers and imagine that developers will use this newfound hardware power to make things run at 60 frames per second, only to be disappointed when neither happens. Again.

Sony

Now I’m assuming that we’ll get some glimpse of the PlayStation 4 tomorrow. If we don’t, a lot of the media is going to be looking very silly, and the initiative is with Microsoft. I don’t expect that, though. Just like glimpses of The Last Guardian, new hardware announcements have to happen some time, and this generation has gone on quite long enough.

Although I’ve happily played for both sides this generation, it’s clear from my collection – 105 Xbox 360 games to 30 on the PS3 – that the 360 has been my console of choice. Unless the PS3 version of a game has been demonstrably better (Portal 2) or once, as in the case of Dark Souls, out a desire to keep both instalments in a series on the same platform, I’ve plumped for the 360 editions of multiplatform games. Controller preferences, a better online experience and generally superior 360 ports made that an easier approach.

Now that we’re on the verge of a new generation, though, I find myself much more excited about the prospect of the PS4 than whatever Microsoft announces in the next few months.

In the last couple of years I feel like we’ve had a glimpse at what a console landscape dominated by Microsoft would bring. Kinect integration everywhere; dashboard updates whose main function is seemingly to put more adverts into a service you’re already paying for; an increasingly dull first-party line-up that consists of four or five franchises on a rotation you can set your watch by; more and more functionality hidden behind a service that, though good, is increasingly hard to justify for £40/year; restrictions on developers that want to offer free DLC. Word on the street is that, as a rule, Microsoft will only allow DLC to be free when it’s offered as such on rival platforms, and I think that is the best possible evidence of the importance of competition.

At this point in the previous console cycle, Sony was insufferable. The astonishing arrogance that came out of the domination of the PS2 era and culminated in that price tag and a console that wasn’t a complete failure, but was certainly a disappointment based on previous sales performance. That coupled with two consecutive tonkings in the handheld space give me the feeling that Sony has learnt some humility.

The talk is that the PS4 is built on familiar architecture, not the powerful but esoteric nightmare that was the PS3. It sounds like it’s built to be straightforward to develop for, rather than as a vanity project for Sony’s hardware labs. That hardware allowed for spectacular first-party productions but meant multiformat development still suffers next to other versions of the same games. This time, if the rumours are correct, platform parity is much more likely, and we can still count on the talent of Sony’s affiliates to push boundaries more than I suspect we will from Microsoft’s, who have been gutted over the years while Sony’s have expanded.

Take these things on board, and improve the user experience of the PS4 – no important functionality sloppily implemented at a later date (trophies) or not at all (cross-game chat), no mandatory installations, and no downloads that lock you out of doing anything while they unpack – and I feel like Sony has a good chance of rising back to the top this generation. It was quite rightly chastised last gen, and in a climate where conventional gaming has more competition than ever for people’s entertainment time, a resurgent Sony, focused on producing a fantastic, powerful games console above all else, is a very good thing.

Editorials, Games, PlayStation, Xbox

The dark side of blocking used games

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I don’t tend to buy games used unless it’s unavoidable, which I suppose makes me fairly indifferent to the fearmongering that comes along frequently regarding the eventual prohibition of playing used games on consoles. Now that this could actually happen, I’d like to draw attention to my caveat in the previous sentence: unless it’s unavoidable.

The last used game I purchased was the original Darksiders, which was a couple of years old at the time and not available new anywhere, as far as I could see. I wanted to play the game because of the good things I was hearing about its sequel, so I got a copy on eBay for around £5. I’d have happily paid £10, £15 for a new one, but that wasn’t an option.

Availability of back catalogue games is a serious issue (see also: Pirates or Preservationists?), even beyond the way that the generational march and decline in backwards compatibility cuts us off from running yesterday’s games on today’s hardware. It doesn’t happen with film, where just about any major movie from the dawn of cinema up to the current Oscar contenders is or shortly will be available to play on a shiny disc, and the same goes for music and books. I can find The Beatles, Beethoven and Jane Austen readily, even separated from them by decades or even centuries.

The next-gen consoles will likely offer all retail releases as downloadables for those who are so inclined, treating the symptom of availability, if not curing the disease that my PS4 likely still won’t play my PS3 games. Hopefully, by the time we’re looking at the next next generation, it’ll be possible to log on to each system’s respective online service and download a minor gem from 2013 that I might have missed the first time.

There’s one problem, though…

Download prices

I don’t trust the platform holders to loosen the reins on digital pricing in the way that Valve has done with Steam. They’re too beholden to keeping retail partners happy to let publishers sell a game for 75% off mere months after release. Stories already abound of digital-only games being stuck to rigid price tiers or limited in what free content they can offer, as the platform holders – Microsoft in particular, it must be said – are out to monetise everything.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and cutting the used game market out will allow for more aggressive pricing of digital games. If books, music and movies going digital has taught us anything, after all, it’s that publishers are keen to pass the benefits on to consumers, right?

The money men won’t see the value in selling games for deep discounts, for not sticking to the American model where the RRP/MSRP is not so much a suggestion as a commandment. It’s not like here where new games are routinely £10 or more under the recommended price on day one. Who actually pays £49.99 for a new Xbox 360 game?

A few exceptions due to licensing aside, every Xbox Live Arcade and PSN game released for their respective platforms is still available. They’re usually still the same price as they were on day one, which kind of proves my point, but at least the issue of long-term availability of games could be close to being solved. That said, my experiences with always-online games haven’t been good, and I can’t help but think back to the odd enforced disconnections, like when I’ve moved home and had to wait to be hooked up, when I’d suddenly find my £50-a-time ways to pass the time being unavailable when I most need them.

Hopefully this turns out to be nonsense, because a console that can’t work offline from Microsoft makes the choice of which next-gen console to buy first much easier.

Games, iOS, Nintendo, PlayStation, Tech, Xbox

A Gimmicky Peripheral I Can Get Behind

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Motion gaming has been and gone, I hope, and it seems like the fad to see us into the next generation has been chosen, and it’s secondary touchscreen inputs. E3 2012 had its fair share of horrors, but I don’t think this is one of them and, oddly, I think Microsoft has the best implementation. The Wii U led the way and the PS3 will shortly gain the ability to use the Vita as a PS3 controller, while Microsoft unveiled a software solution in SmartGlass.

SmartGlass

Some of what SmartGlass will do will depend on what the companion apps support, but assuming it has some kind of 3D capability, it has all the upsides of the other platform holders’ efforts and none of the downsides.

First of all, it works on devices that I and many others already have. I wouldn’t have put it past Microsoft to limit it to Windows Phone or Windows 8 tablets, but putting it on iOS and Android was a masterstroke, meaning pretty much anyone with a penchant for tech already has a piece of SmartGlass-enabled hardware. The Wii U obviously requires a whole new console and the PS3 puts the functionality on an expensive handheld with a questionable future. An iPad or other tablet has a higher cost of entry, true, but they have applications far beyond games and people already own them in huge numbers. I had SmartGlass in the room three years ago without even knowing about it.

The second point applies mainly to Nintendo’s way of doing things. The Wii U GamePad has an increasingly long list of caveats – not least its negative effects on game performance – and isn’t even that technically advanced. It still uses a resistive touch screen, for instance, which was ancient tech when it appeared on the DS back in 2004, while even the cheapest Android tablet will have a multitouch display.

SmartGlass, on the other hand, suffers from none of these. We don’t yet know to what extent it’ll be able to leverage the graphical grunt of its host hardware, but the GPUs in decent tablets aren’t inconsiderable, and if SmartGlass is allowed to use them we could have similar full-fat second-screen functionality to the Wii U. It doesn’t have to be limited to glorified menus, without throttling the main hardware like driving a second screen on Nintendo’s machine seems to do. And my iPad will do this with a ten-hour or more battery life, versus the 3-5 that Nintendo’s official figures present.

Most of all, though, my enthusiasm for the idea of personal gaming screens like this is because it’s another example of how far ahead of its time a certain system was. Never forget.

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 2012 Conference Review

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If last year felt like games were running on fumes, desperate for a bit of fresh blood, it didn’t take much to predict what we were going to be seeing this year. Although I don’t think anyone anticipated it being this bad.

For reference, you can find my last few E3 conference reviews here.

Microsoft

Ugh.

It seems like the days of actually using these shows to announce things and get people excited about your platform are long gone, at least if you’re Microsoft. Where were the big, surprising reveals that get people talking, that get them excited for the coming year? There weren’t any. The handful of games that actually impressed were ones we’d seen before and were mostly venerable franchises being supplanted by their “cinematic action game” successors in which you hammer a button and cool stuff happens. Or, if you’re Black Ops II, you do the last game again with Human Revolution’s piss filter on it, which tells you that it’s the future.

But at least you can search Bing and browse Internet Explorer in Spanish now, so that’s something.

In fairness, Halo 4 looked nice, SmartGlass is a very good idea, and Matt Stone and Trey Parker had a good line. And I’m interested in LocoCycle based on that teaser, simply because it’s from Twisted Pixel. That’s it. Thank God they were smart enough to make SmartGlass cross-platform so that I don’t need a Windows Phone to use it, as otherwise it would have been dead on arrival and the sole highlight of the conference would have been two guys who didn’t really want to be there taking the piss out of it.

I’m writing this on Monday evening and crossing everything that Sony and Nintendo bring out the big guns to definitively show up that nonsense as the shite it was.

I didn’t hallucinate that they brought out Usher, did I?

D

Sony

(Full disclosure: I didn’t stay up until 4am to watch this and so my opinions are based on retroactively reading live blogs and watching videos.)

Like last year, I thought Microsoft had left the door open for Sony to steal the limelight, and once again, Sony resolutely failed to do so. Arguably even more so.

First of all, I suspect that Sony has given up on the Vita. Its sales have been poor and there’s been a negative buzz around it, but at the time of writing, with an hour-long Nintendo show dedicated to 3DS software coming up tomorrow, all that was given to the Vita in two hours of Sony setting out its stall for 2012/2013 was a brief mention of exclusive versions of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed. We’ve been here before with the PSP and it didn’t work, and that was several years after release when the hype had dried up and nobody cared any more. To let the Vita get to this point is bad, but to do it within six months of launch is shocking, and if I’d dropped £230 or more on this thing I’d be fucking angry at this non-showing.

The PS3 fared better, but like the situation with the 360, it’s clear that the big guns are tied up on bigger and better things. God of War: Ascension? I don’t care. Like Gears of War: Judgment, it’s a B-team project based on a franchise that has run its course, and that demo could have been any of them. The best and worst thing about any David Cage game is that it’s a David Cage game, and I can’t stand Ellen Page so Beyond is immediately on the back foot for me. Wonderbook is interesting and ambitious but is doomed to be another failed initiative like Move. If I want to read a book I’ll, you know, read a book.

The Last of Us was the best of the show by far, showing Sony’s reliance on Naughty Dog to consistently pump out the kind of experiences that this generation promised. You’d think it would be working on it’s big PS4 title, having wrapped up Uncharted so nicely – and it probably is, in reality – but this shows that there’s at least one new big hitter left in this generation. Two if The Last Guardian ever makes it out, but every missed trade show makes me less convinced that it will.

The Microsoft and Sony conferences were closer than some would like to admit, with one undeniably impressive game each and not a whole lot else, and certainly no major announcements. Sony’s was better because we saw more new games, but it goes without saying that next year is a big one for both of them. Their current consoles look like they’ll be on life support by then.

C-

Nintendo

The expectations on Nintendo’s shoulders were perhaps unfairly high given the failure of the first two conferences to show us anything worthwhile, but even with a new console to show off and such a low bar, Nintendo failed to jump it.

I’m frankly shocked at how bad it was. They actually got Ubisoft, which had knocked it out of the park yesterday with some brilliant-looking games, to give a demo of Batman: Arkham City. That game will be a year old by the time the Wii U launches, and it’s not like it was brimming with new features and content to get us coming back to it. Gimmicky touch controls that people have complained about for as long as iOS has been hosting games are now a fixture of Nintendo (Wii U), Microsoft (SmartGlass) and Sony (Vita) games. Enjoy.

Pikmin 3 was the highlight and then it was downhill from there. No Zelda or Metroid whatsoever. Two indistinguishable Mario games. Dance and fitness games. No price or firm release date for the Wii U, with the only notable announcement on that front being that it supports two controllers – a downgrade from pretty much every system since the N64. Oh, and it halves the frame rate if you run two of them. Have fun.

My Twitter feed was full of people hoping, praying for one ‘megaton’ before the end. An HD Zelda would have done it, at least giving us something to cling on to. Some were even talking about GTA V, notable for its absence at the other two conferences, making a surprise appearance. Nope. It was a collection of mini-games, wrapped around some social features like a Mii-filled PlayStation Home. It worked for the Wii when it was breaking sales records, so here, with no competition in the next-gen console market, is Nintendo sticking to what it now does best.

At least E3 2003 had Pac-Man VS.

D

Worst E3 ever? It’s up there. After all that build-up, the potential for a showing from certainly one, possibly three new consoles, the best showing of the whole thing was Ubisoft. Who saw that coming?

Best of 2011, Games, GOTY, PlayStation

Best of 2011 #8: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

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In what was a quiet year for me, my ambivalence towards Uncharted 3 was one of the few things that got me on my soapbox. In that case, its inclusion in this list is either, like Gears 3, emblematic of the strength of the series, or possibly an indication that, outside of an obscenely packed tail end, the year wasn’t all that great for gaming. While there’s some truth in both answers, and I stand by my assertion that it’s an overrated game, there was enough to enjoy in Uncharted 3 to say that it’s mostly the former.

The fact that I found it disappointing is less a criticism of this game and more unmitigated praise for Uncharted 2, which still is peerless as a piece of cinematic action; if this had topped it, it would have been far more surprising. My complaints aside, it was just as much of an achievement for in-game characterisation and blending gameplay and cinema – even if the ratios were occasionally somewhat off, you had to admire it technically during sequences like the plane crash and its seamless transition to the similarly brave desert sequence – as it was a great action game… when it worked. It didn’t quite reach the astronomical highs of either of its predecessors, but it’s still fresh enough and done with such panache that it makes the lack of creativity in most action games all the more obvious.

What Uncharted 3 has left me with more than anything is anticipation for Naughty Dog’s recently announced new project, The Last of Us. I never much cared for ND’s games until this series, but talk of resources being diverted from Uncharted to the new game has me very, very excited.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Uncharted 3 is Way Overrated

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This is an industry with a media that seems built on hyperbole, and the embarrassment of riches that the last month has brought us has taken it to new heights. Arkham City was one example, even inspiring some hacks to further undermine review scores with hyperbolic trash like this, but I found it hard to get too riled up when the game turned out to actually be bloody amazing.

When it came to Uncharted 3, though, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the urge to come out against it is a reaction to the utter insanity provoked within the community by some very reasonable criticism of an apparent sacred cow, or maybe I’m right, thanks to having the unusual ability to look beyond the phenomenally pretty graphics and be put off by PS2-era design issues that have no business being in such a supposedly polished, modern game.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Opinions, eh? Yeah, fair enough, but I’d love someone to argue in favour of Uncharted’s pathetic enemy AI. I thought that old trick of all enemies suddenly gaining omniscience as to your position as soon as one of them is alerted had died out around the time of Metal Gear Solid, but it apparently stowed away on the trip from the 90s when Naughty Dog was dragging Indiana Jones into the present. Otherwise quite competent stealth sequences take a nosedive if you’re spotted, as laser sights converge on your hiding place after someone caught a glimpse of you 20 feet from your current hiding place. Dive under water and swim away, climbing up on the far side of a boat where no one can see you should help, right? Nope. They all know where you’ve gone.

But, hey, if the fight descends into carnage you can always just shoot them. Oh, wait. The gunplay is shit too thanks to inconsistent aiming and enemies who seem to shrug off headshots before dying from a bullet to the arm. The janky aiming has been acknowledged by Naughty Dog and will supposedly be changed to something more like Uncharted 2 – I’ve never been a fan of the shooting in these games, mind – in a patch, but how does it even make it into the final game? What wasn’t great has been broken.

One other complaint is one that’s more endemic to the game, though. Uncharted 3 is extremely linear, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing because I love a rollercoaster ride of a game as much as anyone, it does a terrible job of hiding the tracks along the way. It’s inconsistent in corralling you onto the right route, making what looks like a viable path – or evenslightly to the left or right of the one true path – result in a quick trip back to the last checkpoint. I’ve even had bits where an attempt to drop an entirely safe distance to the ground results in instant death, while scripted falls from much higher are taken in Drake’s stride. I’ve always treated Uncharted as a bit like the post-2003 Prince of Persia games, being great platformers once you get past the annoyance of substandard combat, but I felt like Uncharted 3 wasn’t nearly as solid in that respect as its predecessors.

My last complaint is a spoiler, so I’ll keep it brief and advise anyone who hasn’t finished the game to stop reading.

Besides the fact that fighting Ghost Rider is frustrating as hell when piled on top of the issues with the game’s combat, am I the only one who thought the game’s final act was Uncharted 2’s all over again? Swap the train ride for the admittedly awesome horseback chase; throw in another the lost city that’s somehow never been spotted from the air despite sitting in the middle of a perpetual sandstorm – an able substitute for Uncharted 2’s blizzards – full of annoying, apparently supernatural enemies; and then the escape by the skin of your teeth as it collapses around you with all of its treasures. Haven’t we been here before?

I didn’t hate Uncharted 3, as much as I might seem down on it; maybe it was inevitably going to disappoint after such staggering highs as Uncharted 2. I can’t escape the feeling that this was somewhat rushed, perhaps with Naughty Dog working on its new project, which, based on its existing pattern, will surely be Unkarted.