I'm just reading the Engadget review of the PlayStation Vita.
PS Vita appears to be the culmination of Sony's efforts not to understand how the video game industry works at all. Like the Nintendo of old (and the Sony of always) they're trying to push the hardware side of the business with seemingly no actual idea of what people would actually *like* to use.
When it was announced with its quad core CPU, 5" screen and other goodies, promising 'PS3-like graphical quality' I couldn't help but feel like I'd seen this dance played out before with the PSP. Sony are once again offering current-gen console graphics in a handheld that seemed determined to sacrifice battery life and portability for pixels, polygons and vertices.
The reason this amazes me so, is that the precedent for consumers wanting the opposite is well established. Not that I think you should give consumers what they think they want - I'll write an article on that at some point no doubt - but there have been three major victories in portable technology that put life span and potability ahead of all other aspects of the device, and these have been the iPod, the MacBook Air and the Nintendo Game Boy.
Paint me an Apple fanboy if you will, but hear me out at least. With the iPod, Apple had a portable media player that put accessibility and battery ahead of virtually all other aspects of the hardware. Every major revision boasted improved battery life and functionality, whilst things like video playback were relegated to a long-delayed afterthought despite the competition all offering a healthy market of PMP devices which would play music, movies and radio (all with terrible battery life). I recall reading about a PMP with a large LCD that would give only an hour of video playback - that means you couldn't even watch a full movie on it - who was the real market for this device? Most of these PMPs were the size of a 3.5" hard drive, which meant they were hardly pocketable.
The MacBook Air followed a similar philosophy - try and optimise battery life and size/weight. In the original (and oft mocked) model, the hardware was severely compromised: the CPU was extremely slow and tended to overheat easily, the GPU was slow, the price was exorbitant, the supplied hard disk was slow as molasses and contributed to the poor overall system performance. After the first major revision however, the MacBook Air became a kind of gold standard for laptops, something Intel is now aggressively pushing all PC manufacturers to emulate. Intel were also extremely ready to abandon the high clock speeds they were aggressively pursuing when they saw that portable designs were taking off. This is what effectively ended the Pentium 4's architecture as they moved development onto the Centrino platform to develop the 'core' CPUs (Centrino itself was actually a side project to make low power CPUs based on the Pentium 3).
The Game Boy (getting on to actual video games!) was chunky, but followed two main design considerations - battery life and durability. The Game Boy was durable as heck, and compared to every single competing system, it had a battery life to kill for. Game Boy remained stagnant in the hardware department for a decade, before the extremely minor upgrade in the form of Game Boy color was released. Game Boy Advance followed the same principle, and Game Boy Advance SP took it to (arguably) the ultimate level, being perhaps the ultimate in portable console design (regrettably, hardware isn't timeless). Nintendo DS began to eschew the battery life ratio in favour of a radical new design and philosophy, but the course was corrected with DS lite, though the lite was pushing the boundaries of durability that Nintendo usually had.
Nintendo 3DS changed all of that though. Though smaller than the DS lite, it seems chunkier. The battery life is extremely disappointing - I cannot leave mine in sleep mode for longer than a day or two or it will go flat. Sony has once again sacrificed battery - three hours with default settings is simply awful, and consumers shouldn't settle for Sony's 'solution' - an external battery. Nintendo should be celebrating PS Vita though - in comparison the PS Vita makes the 3DS longevity go from 'barely adequate' to amazing!
I feel the biggest issue that will plague the Vita will be its power. We are looking at quad-core smartphones this year, and looking at some iOS and Android titles I'm seeing the gap closing quickly. I'm also still not convinced that extreme graphics are even a compelling reason to buy a handheld. The best handheld titles seem to be the simple 'pick up and play' sorts. I have found Super Mario 3D Land much more playable than Resident Evil: Revelations, for example, though Revelations did try to tackle the short-form style admirably. A great example is probably The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is a little too true to its console roots and lacks a save system that complements portable gaming.
No amount of hardware will make many of the best portable games any better. PS Vita's lacklustre additional 'abilities' make it a poor contender next to the iPod touch or iPhone, which are realistically its most direct competitors. Nintendo should have released 3DS much cheaper, and I still think it should be cheaper than its RRP today, but Nintendo have almost found a sweet spot by remembering their original market - children. Nintendo have never lost their stranglehold on that market, and whilst the adult market is now larger by an order of magnitudes, it gives a steady user base.
PS Vita also continues Sony's long tradition of needless proprietary junk by using a Vita-exclusive memory card, which is many times more expensive than standard micro SD cards. Presumably this is to protect their software, but realistically this will be hacked within days (if it hasn't been already).
If the PS Vita does well I will be genuinely surprised. If the PS Vita does well because of the appearance of third party console emulation and pirated games via hacks, I will not be surprised. I am currently preparing to not be surprised. Go team.
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Monday, 13 February 2012
Brütal comic
Penny Arcade
This comic rang particularly true for me, because I really thought Brütal Legend was rubbish. Basically, it was 15 minutes of a good game (the intro) and a heck of a lot of generic game with Jack Black once again trying to place himself among the legends of rock and roll by playing the 'gatekeeper to rock', something no other human being has ever been able to comprehend apparently.
My dislike of Jack Black aside, Brütal Legend was really a terrible game. Clunky, repetitive, and as shallow as a puddle. The humour wore exceedingly thin about a quarter of the way through, and the boss fights were kinda neat but poorly executed (actually, thinking of the boss fights in Brütal Legend is only giving me flashbacks of League of Legends...ugh).
I have no insights into anything in this post, so maybe we can call it a review. Yep, this is the first game review on Gamer Ant. If I can save at least one person from buying this game, then I've done some good in my life. Seriously - get the demo. The demo contains the only good bit in the entire game.
This comic rang particularly true for me, because I really thought Brütal Legend was rubbish. Basically, it was 15 minutes of a good game (the intro) and a heck of a lot of generic game with Jack Black once again trying to place himself among the legends of rock and roll by playing the 'gatekeeper to rock', something no other human being has ever been able to comprehend apparently.
My dislike of Jack Black aside, Brütal Legend was really a terrible game. Clunky, repetitive, and as shallow as a puddle. The humour wore exceedingly thin about a quarter of the way through, and the boss fights were kinda neat but poorly executed (actually, thinking of the boss fights in Brütal Legend is only giving me flashbacks of League of Legends...ugh).
I have no insights into anything in this post, so maybe we can call it a review. Yep, this is the first game review on Gamer Ant. If I can save at least one person from buying this game, then I've done some good in my life. Seriously - get the demo. The demo contains the only good bit in the entire game.
Saturday, 11 February 2012
A treatise on the console wars
I like games. I like the game industry. However, I like talking about games more than playing them these days, because I mostly think most games suck. I have decided that my over-opinionated self needs an outlet now that all of my friends have blocked me on Facebook, so I've started a blog. A Blogger blog. Thanks Google, don't be evil and all that (yeah, right).
I have biases, but I always try and be objective when considering the industry and the direction it is heading. I'm an old-school Nintendo fan, I'm half on board with Microsoft, and I usually berate everything Sony does (because Sony seem to have absolutely no vision). I also did deadly combat with the floating head of Ken Kutaragi, so that may have left me with a bad impression of the company as a whole.
I might as well start off with some summary opinions of vidya gaem companies to kick this baby off.
Sony
The PS3 is in a worrying position right now, I think. Sony lost a bucket load of cash on the console (thanks to the overzealous designs of Ken Kutaragi) and are in a bad position as they continue to try and recoup. The hardware was crippled by the last minute design changes, taking it from a dual-CELL CPU powered machine that could probably time travel, to the inferior single-CELL and GPU combo, which slapped a last minute GPU in that was actually *older* design than the Radeon core used in the year-old Xbox 360. Ouch.
Going into the next gen, Sony will have to be careful. Management will surely want to see some of the awful losses from the PS3 recouped before cash is doled out on a new console. However, depending on what Microsoft and Nintendo are planning, it may not be a matter of when Sony want to deliver, but when the market demands it. The Wii suffered from a lack of cross-platform support, and if the PS3 falls behind it will possibly get left behind, no matter how much the fanboys insist that it has 'so much potential yet to be unlocked'.
An observation about the PS3: It was over-designed and overpriced. It has an inferior texture cache. It has an inferior central memory system. It has some weird bus issues (and bottlenecks) when talking to the GPU. It was released alongside the arrogant assertions of its creators that it would bend time and space. The observation? I could have just described the Nintendo 64.
Microsoft
Microsoft are playing runner-up to a T. Even when they're ahead, they're acting like they're losing. I'm not even sure what the hell goes on in Redmond. I'm pretty sure they're all partying non-stop, because that's the only way to explain their bizarre E3 presentations. Too many celebrities, not enough games. Don't even get me started on Kinect - the motion controller they had to have. Sony were copying Nintendo, dressing it up with some superior tech and trying to say they always meant to do that. Didn't exactly take off, but that's life. Microsoft set a record with selling the Kinect add-on. But where the heck is the content? Oh, their 2011 E3 show was virtually only Kinect content? In that case, where is the GOOD content?
Microsoft surely must have noticed that Kinect was furiously limited when they were testing, but were so determined not to be playing copycat (even though they were) that they simply released some hardware without any real idea of what to do with it. When reading pre-release interviews where they were talking about the ridiculously-pronounced 'Project Natal', often they were asked how it would work in to the average gamer's play. Examples were given of being able to throw grenades...and stuff. There was no real talk about how to play real games, and in my opinion that was a worry. Press releases and press demos and television spots all hyped what it could do - motion tracking, depth tracking, all that fun stuff. They showed off some admittedly impressive fitness games. That thing was MADE for fitness applications. Brilliant. But outside of 'Wii Sports' style compilations, there was little to actually do - and in real life it was a little finicky about things like room size and furniture, two things Microsoft dismissed constantly despite doing every 'hands-on' preview in large, empty spaces.
Microsoft have had success with software, and Xbox is finally profitable. Microsoft have been capitalising on that. But Microsoft are proving that they still don't know how to handle success and combat repeating failures. They hit gold buying Bungie and releasing Halo, and now that Bungie have gone they have a new company taking the reins; 343 Industries. The first thing they do? Retcon the content. Immediately I am concerned that retcons will be common whenever Microsoft want a spin-off (I heard rumours that Microsoft/343 specifically demanded that Halo Reach feature SPARTAN-IIIs, presumably to introduce them to the audience to show that there was more 'beyond' Master Chief). The anime Halo shorts were awful, the Forerunner 'prequel' novels are unnecessary, and the general feeling I'm getting is that Halo is about to be flogged to death over a gruesome few years.
Nintendo
What is there to say about Nintendo, except for them having no long-term strategy? Nintendo are showing something that's fairly endemic of the old-school Japanese hardware manufacturers; they don't 'get' software. The Wii was almost a total fluke - the 'channel' interface was developed in the last six months before launch according to Iwata, meaning that it was a serious case of hardware first, everything else later. The Wii wasn't just like a souped up Gamecube, it WAS a souped up Gamecube. The firmware of the console literally booted itself into 'Gamecube' when you popped a Gamecube disc in (that's why you couldn't return to the home menu). When new hardware was released like the WiiMotion+, it was impossible to add compatibility to old games because the Wii had to revert to 'firmware 11-2007' when you stuck an old disc in. This also prevented DLC and patches. It meant that the channels offering additional content and interactivity were never really coming, because the Wii simply wasn't capable of doing much at all.
It added to Nintendo's woeful online service, a lack of competitive online offerings and really compelling after-sale feature expansion.
Add Nintendo's normal hostility towards third party publishers, and the third party publisher's rather unusual apathy toward such a popular console, and there were the makings of a mid to late life crash. Nintendo lucked out again with WiiFit - a game that actually made the 'casual' market walk into a store and pick a game up off the shelf. But third party publishers weren't having the same successes. Nintendo took some time off 'core' titles to develop their 'casual' audience material, anticipating that the third party publishers would pick up the slack. Yet no-one seemed to bother. Disappointingly, despite being a Gamecube over clocked x2 the third parties only seemed to be capable of making games that looked like PS2 games, even when they weren't multi-platform. When Resident Evil 4 - a previous gen game - is among the nicest looking games on the console, one really has to wonder why no-one was putting more effort in, particularly when there were spectacular efforts from Nintendo themselves with Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword and Smash Bros. Brawl among others.
Nintendo were back from the humble Gamecube years and released the excessively overpriced 3DS to a dismissive market, effectively blocking out the core audience of school kids who didn't own iPhones or the iPod touch - after seeing the 3DS launch price I am 100% sure a lot of parents would have tried talking their kids into the iPod for its multi functionality. Now the future of the WiiU is a question mark. Nintendo have to convince the core crowd they haven't given up on them, convince the casuals they want to own what may be perceived as 'the same thing as the Wii', and try (again!) to woo the third party devs.
It's gonna be tough to explain to the core audience what the difference between Wii and WiiU is, when I have known people who are reasonably switched on with technology who are convinced the 3DS is simply a Nintendo DS with a 3D screen. This is a real issue Nintendo have with brand differentiation considering they have stuck with essentially the same names for two generations of console.
That's my first rant about the companies involved, and a bit of a sneak peek at where this blog will go. I will mostly Ant on about articles/press releases/video game news I read, though there may occasionally be the odd actual-gameplay-rant (erm...Ant) if I ever find the time to actually play any games rather than just complain about the people who make them.
Woo
I have biases, but I always try and be objective when considering the industry and the direction it is heading. I'm an old-school Nintendo fan, I'm half on board with Microsoft, and I usually berate everything Sony does (because Sony seem to have absolutely no vision). I also did deadly combat with the floating head of Ken Kutaragi, so that may have left me with a bad impression of the company as a whole.
I might as well start off with some summary opinions of vidya gaem companies to kick this baby off.
Sony
The PS3 is in a worrying position right now, I think. Sony lost a bucket load of cash on the console (thanks to the overzealous designs of Ken Kutaragi) and are in a bad position as they continue to try and recoup. The hardware was crippled by the last minute design changes, taking it from a dual-CELL CPU powered machine that could probably time travel, to the inferior single-CELL and GPU combo, which slapped a last minute GPU in that was actually *older* design than the Radeon core used in the year-old Xbox 360. Ouch.
Going into the next gen, Sony will have to be careful. Management will surely want to see some of the awful losses from the PS3 recouped before cash is doled out on a new console. However, depending on what Microsoft and Nintendo are planning, it may not be a matter of when Sony want to deliver, but when the market demands it. The Wii suffered from a lack of cross-platform support, and if the PS3 falls behind it will possibly get left behind, no matter how much the fanboys insist that it has 'so much potential yet to be unlocked'.
An observation about the PS3: It was over-designed and overpriced. It has an inferior texture cache. It has an inferior central memory system. It has some weird bus issues (and bottlenecks) when talking to the GPU. It was released alongside the arrogant assertions of its creators that it would bend time and space. The observation? I could have just described the Nintendo 64.
Microsoft
Microsoft are playing runner-up to a T. Even when they're ahead, they're acting like they're losing. I'm not even sure what the hell goes on in Redmond. I'm pretty sure they're all partying non-stop, because that's the only way to explain their bizarre E3 presentations. Too many celebrities, not enough games. Don't even get me started on Kinect - the motion controller they had to have. Sony were copying Nintendo, dressing it up with some superior tech and trying to say they always meant to do that. Didn't exactly take off, but that's life. Microsoft set a record with selling the Kinect add-on. But where the heck is the content? Oh, their 2011 E3 show was virtually only Kinect content? In that case, where is the GOOD content?
Microsoft surely must have noticed that Kinect was furiously limited when they were testing, but were so determined not to be playing copycat (even though they were) that they simply released some hardware without any real idea of what to do with it. When reading pre-release interviews where they were talking about the ridiculously-pronounced 'Project Natal', often they were asked how it would work in to the average gamer's play. Examples were given of being able to throw grenades...and stuff. There was no real talk about how to play real games, and in my opinion that was a worry. Press releases and press demos and television spots all hyped what it could do - motion tracking, depth tracking, all that fun stuff. They showed off some admittedly impressive fitness games. That thing was MADE for fitness applications. Brilliant. But outside of 'Wii Sports' style compilations, there was little to actually do - and in real life it was a little finicky about things like room size and furniture, two things Microsoft dismissed constantly despite doing every 'hands-on' preview in large, empty spaces.
Microsoft have had success with software, and Xbox is finally profitable. Microsoft have been capitalising on that. But Microsoft are proving that they still don't know how to handle success and combat repeating failures. They hit gold buying Bungie and releasing Halo, and now that Bungie have gone they have a new company taking the reins; 343 Industries. The first thing they do? Retcon the content. Immediately I am concerned that retcons will be common whenever Microsoft want a spin-off (I heard rumours that Microsoft/343 specifically demanded that Halo Reach feature SPARTAN-IIIs, presumably to introduce them to the audience to show that there was more 'beyond' Master Chief). The anime Halo shorts were awful, the Forerunner 'prequel' novels are unnecessary, and the general feeling I'm getting is that Halo is about to be flogged to death over a gruesome few years.
Nintendo
What is there to say about Nintendo, except for them having no long-term strategy? Nintendo are showing something that's fairly endemic of the old-school Japanese hardware manufacturers; they don't 'get' software. The Wii was almost a total fluke - the 'channel' interface was developed in the last six months before launch according to Iwata, meaning that it was a serious case of hardware first, everything else later. The Wii wasn't just like a souped up Gamecube, it WAS a souped up Gamecube. The firmware of the console literally booted itself into 'Gamecube' when you popped a Gamecube disc in (that's why you couldn't return to the home menu). When new hardware was released like the WiiMotion+, it was impossible to add compatibility to old games because the Wii had to revert to 'firmware 11-2007' when you stuck an old disc in. This also prevented DLC and patches. It meant that the channels offering additional content and interactivity were never really coming, because the Wii simply wasn't capable of doing much at all.
It added to Nintendo's woeful online service, a lack of competitive online offerings and really compelling after-sale feature expansion.
Add Nintendo's normal hostility towards third party publishers, and the third party publisher's rather unusual apathy toward such a popular console, and there were the makings of a mid to late life crash. Nintendo lucked out again with WiiFit - a game that actually made the 'casual' market walk into a store and pick a game up off the shelf. But third party publishers weren't having the same successes. Nintendo took some time off 'core' titles to develop their 'casual' audience material, anticipating that the third party publishers would pick up the slack. Yet no-one seemed to bother. Disappointingly, despite being a Gamecube over clocked x2 the third parties only seemed to be capable of making games that looked like PS2 games, even when they weren't multi-platform. When Resident Evil 4 - a previous gen game - is among the nicest looking games on the console, one really has to wonder why no-one was putting more effort in, particularly when there were spectacular efforts from Nintendo themselves with Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword and Smash Bros. Brawl among others.
Nintendo were back from the humble Gamecube years and released the excessively overpriced 3DS to a dismissive market, effectively blocking out the core audience of school kids who didn't own iPhones or the iPod touch - after seeing the 3DS launch price I am 100% sure a lot of parents would have tried talking their kids into the iPod for its multi functionality. Now the future of the WiiU is a question mark. Nintendo have to convince the core crowd they haven't given up on them, convince the casuals they want to own what may be perceived as 'the same thing as the Wii', and try (again!) to woo the third party devs.
It's gonna be tough to explain to the core audience what the difference between Wii and WiiU is, when I have known people who are reasonably switched on with technology who are convinced the 3DS is simply a Nintendo DS with a 3D screen. This is a real issue Nintendo have with brand differentiation considering they have stuck with essentially the same names for two generations of console.
That's my first rant about the companies involved, and a bit of a sneak peek at where this blog will go. I will mostly Ant on about articles/press releases/video game news I read, though there may occasionally be the odd actual-gameplay-rant (erm...Ant) if I ever find the time to actually play any games rather than just complain about the people who make them.
Woo
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