1416: Rooted

I haven't embraced the next generation of video games consoles as yet — except for Wii U, which people keep insisting doesn't count — and, barring something absolutely astonishing coming out on Xbox One (still a fucking stupid name) or PlayStation 4, I have very little intention of doing so until I absolutely have to for professional purposes.

Launch lineups are rarely much cop anyway, but it's not just a weak selection of games that's putting me off this time around; no, it's more the fact that neither of the two boxes really offer anything I particularly want out of my gaming time at present. That may well all change when they both have some decent exclusives — not to mention the variety of indie games we've been promised on both — but at present, they're two shiny black boxes that do a bunch of things I don't give a toss about and occasionally, if you ask them nicely, play games.

Let's take Xbox One first, because this is by far the least appealing of the two systems. Xbox One is a sprawling mess of "entertainment apps," rolled together into an OS that has seemingly been designed by someone who had no idea what things actually worked about the Xbox 360's already imperfect OS. Gone is the facility for cross-game party chat; gone is the ability to pop up the guide and quickly check your friends list in game; gone is the ability to see how much fucking hard drive space you have left — and instead we have "Snap" functionality, that allows you to do two things at once.

I do not want to do two things at once with my console. I barely even care about the limited social functionality already built into the PS3 and Xbox 360. I certainly don't want to make a Skype call while I'm trying to immerse myself in a game, and I definitely don't want to watch television at the same time as I'm playing a game. When I play a game, I devote my full attention to it; anything less is, to me, disrespectful to the people who worked hard on it. I won't turn off the soundtrack and listen to my own music — except in racing games, where the soundtrack is usually generic bland-o-rock anyway — and I certainly won't listen to podcasts or watch videos while I'm playing. I don't play games as idle wastes of time or just "something to do" — it's my chosen means of entertaining myself and consuming cultural content, so it deserves me showing it that much respect, and Xbox One doesn't appear to be built with that in mind.

PlayStation 4 is less offensive to me in this regard but it's still stuffed full of features I'll never use. I seriously doubt I'll ever use the video recording facility, for example, and I still do not see the appeal of streaming as either a broadcaster or a viewer — particularly if every bastard person in the world is doing it. The system is, at least, on the whole, seemingly designed more as a games console than an entertainment megabox, so there's that, but without any compelling games — save perhaps Resogun, which I'm certainly not buying a new console for — there is precisely zero reason to pick one up just yet.

I'm not convinced either of these systems have been designed with players like me — people who have grown up with the video games medium almost since its inception — in mind. I know for a fact Xbox One certainly hasn't been — it's trying desperately to replace the "family friendly box" reputation that the Wii had and the Wii U has, so far, failed to replicate, and in the process has decided to vomit a bunch of features only useful to those with chronic attention deficit disorder all over itself. Balls to that shit. Also, Microsoft's "experiments" with microtransactions can go eat a thousand dicks.

I will almost inevitably get both systems at some point in the future, either for work purposes or if some particularly compelling exclusive emerges — something from any of my favourite Japanese devs appearing on PS4, for example — but at present I'm more than happy working through my substantial PlayStation 3 backlog, dipping occasionally into a few Xbox 360 titles I'm yet to play and spending the majority of my gaming time on PC. Not to get all master racey, but PC still beats the pants off both consoles in terms of both performance and flexibility.

1246: Eeeeee Three

It occurs to me that I don't think I've written my own personal thoughts on E3 and the stuff therein yet. Allow me to rectify that.

Let's start with the Xbox One. While it would be tempting to just write "HAHAHAHAHAHA" and leave it at that, Microsoft's strategy, if you can call it that, bears some examination.

The Xbox One was received very negatively when it was first announced, thanks to the reveal's focus on the box's TV aspect. Things didn't get much better when Microsoft revealed an FAQ document detailing the fact that yes, the things everyone had been fearing — the console needs to "phone home" once every 24 hours via the Internet; publishers may choose to restrict the resale and/or trading in of games if desired; you can "pause" Kinect but you can't turn it off — were all true.

The company's E3 presentation was reasonable, but didn't show anything that particularly blew me away. We had Call of Duty: Roman Wars, sorry, I mean Ryse: Son of Rome and a host of other stuff so uninspiring that I can't remember a goodly proportion of it. The few things that were genuinely interesting and outside the "norm" were glossed over; Below, a new title from Sworcery and that weird Might & Magic puzzle RPG that was actually really good developer Capybara was given a minute-long trailer with no explanation, for example.

However, as I wrote over on USgamer the other day, these press conferences aren't designed for people like me — they're designed for people who, for want of a better term, don't know any better. They're designed for the more casual gameplaying public and shareholders, in other words, and consequently need to show off the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking. It's unfortunate that a significant proportion of the "core" gamer population is growing increasingly weary of the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking, particularly as their favourite studios regularly suffer rounds of layoffs when, say, their five million-selling game "isn't performing to expectations" or some such nonsense.

All in all, I was left underwhelmed by Xbox One. I didn't see a single title that sold the system to me, and Microsoft's determination to make the platform even more closed off and irritating than it already is is just baffling. It's like they're looking at feedback and then doing the exact opposite. That can't be good business, surely.

—

As for the PS4, I was impressed. I can live without all the social nonsense, though I can see that being a bit of fun on occasion — so long as you can turn it off. The fact that Sony simply said "we're doing things the way we do now" and they got a round of applause says it all, really, though; it's not a case of people being "set in their ways", it's a case of people actively wanting to resist the suspiciously anti-consumer practices that Microsoft are trying to put in place.

Let me go off on a tangent to explain for a moment.

I like owning my games as physical copies, particularly on console. I feel less strongly about this on PC for a reason I haven't quite worked out, but given the option between getting a physical copy and a digital download on console, I will always, without fail, go for the disc.

The primary reason for this is that I want to always be able to play this game, even if, say, PSN no longer exists one day in the distant future. A secondary reason is that I enjoy displaying my collection the way a movie buff displays their DVDs, a music lover displays their CDs and/or records, and a book lover displays their books. There's a growing movement to "declutter" our lives from all this stuff we've collected over the years, and I really dislike it, because it encourages us to think of things as impermanent. While it can be a pain to store and move all this stuff, I know that if I got rid of any of it, I'd regret it. Sure, once I'm done with, say, Ar Tonelico Qoga it's unlikely that I'll go back to it in the immediate future, but what about five years down the line when I hear a snipped of EXEC_COSMOFLIPS and think I'd really like to relive Aoto's adventures?

I'm saying all this for a reason: PS4 fills me with more confidence than Microsoft does in this regard. Xbox One will have disc-based games, sure, but it's abundantly clear that Microsoft mean business on the whole "you are licensing this piece of software, you don't own it" thing that everyone ignores in EULAs these days. We still don't have a straight answer in place for them on what happens when Xbox Live goes down, or when you don't have Internet access, or when your account gets banned or hacked… or years into the future when the Xbox One is a "retro" console and Xbox Live doesn't exist in the same form, or perhaps at all. Can you still play your games? Or does the lack of authentication render them completely useless?

Video games are the only art form where I see this discussion happening, and we're drifting in the wrong direction. As modern games get more and more advanced, they become more and more worthy of preservation as genuine works of art. And yet with each passing console generation seemingly determined to get more and more restrictive and based around connectivity, it's a real concern to me that some of these titles will one day be lost forever.

Anyway. It remains to be seen whether Sony does anything stupid between now and the PS4 coming out — because this is Sony, let's not rule it out — but at present, I'm feeling much more confident about them than Microsoft.

—

As for Nintendo, well, they're Nintendo. Nintendo has always been happy bumbling along doing its own thing… and I'm absolutely fine with that. I have no need for them to try and compete with PS4 and Xbox One or try to become yet another Call of Duty machine. I have no issue with the third-party support that people were whingeing about all the way through the Wii's lifespan but which didn't hurt its profitability at all.

What Nintendo machines do are provide "pure games" — experiences which tend not to have any aspirations to be considered "art", but which provide excellent examples of simply entertaining and fun things to do. For this reason, I'm actually relatively excited to see things like Wii Party U, as Nintendo Land is a big favourite any time friends come over; having something with even more games to play together will be even better.

Anyway, I'm not sure if anyone "won" E3 for me, because I didn't really come away from the show thinking "I MUST BUY THIS GAME THE SECOND IT COMES OUT" with regard to anything, but it was certainly an interesting show. The coming console generation is going to be an intriguing one to watch, and I have a feeling that Microsoft is going to get its nose bloodied more than once in the process. Whether that will take them down completely or just relegate them to the position Sony spent most of this generation in remains to be seen, but it's going to be a hell of a fight to watch.

1132: Stop Calling it "Gen4"

The eighth generation of video games consoles is upon us — yes, despite the fact that EA desperately wants everyone to believe that it's the fourth generation it is, in fact, the eighth. Don't believe me? Allow me to prove it before proceeding further.

First generation: Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Tele-Games Pong, Coleco Telstar, Nintendo Color TV Game
Second generation: Magnavox Odyssey2, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision
Third generation: NES, Master System, Atari 7800
Fourth generation: TurboGrafx-16, Mega Drive, Super NES, Neo Geo
Fifth generation: 3DO, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64
Sixth Generation: Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox
Seventh Generation: PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360
Eighth Generation: PlayStation 4, Wii U, something from Microsoft.

See? Proof. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Anyway. My point was not that people are getting the generation number wrong (I KNOW it's the "fourth generation of 3D consoles" but it's still stupid, so sod off) but that we are well and truly into the eighth generation now. One of the "big three" game console manufacturers has already released their new console (Nintendo with the Wii U) while a second has announced some skimpy details about what is to come (Sony with the PlayStation 4). We can doubtless expect something from Microsoft very soon.

It's going to be an interesting generation, I think, because the leaps hardware is taking forward with each subsequent generation are getting smaller. Graphics and performance still have room for improvement, sure, but there's actually been something of a backlash towards the striving for photorealism that has been the driving force behind most new game-related technological enhancements. Turns out people still like games that look like video games, which explains the popularity of heavily-pixelated titles like Fez as well as the heavily-stylized artwork of a lot of Japanese games. It also explains why people are so cynical about the "brownness" of Western games, though this is actually nothing new — I vividly recall my brother referring to the original Quake as "the brown game" before the turn of the century, so a drab colour palette is something we've been enduring for a while yet.

Because the leaps in hardware are getting smaller, though, that means each platform has to distinguish itself in different ways. Nintendo has fired the opening salvo with the use of its Gamepad for asymmetrical multiplayer in titles like Nintendo Land, and it works very well when used appropriately — we just need some more games that make creative use of this second screen. The lack of games isn't really cause for concern as yet, despite what professional industry doomsayers like Michael Pachter might say, because it also took developers a while to get their head around the two screens of Nintendo's last handheld the DS, and that ended up being the most popular handheld in the history of ever. There's no guarantee the Wii U will catch on in the same way, of course, but it's far too early to declare it a failed experiment as some have.

Besides, Nintendo are doing some other interesting things, too. The integration of the console's proprietary social network "MiiVerse" into a variety of different games is a really nice idea — complete a challenge in Nintendo Land, for example, and you can see drawings and messages from other people who are playing, and you can interact with these people. In games that are built for playing socially — think of the possibilities in something like Animal Crossing, for example — there's a lot of potential here, though from a personal perspective I really hope that it's not something that makes it into all games. Or if it does, I hope you can turn it off. Seeing silly messages after a go on Donkey Kong's Wild Ride or whatever the minigame in Nintendo Land is called? Fine. Seeing "lol i cant beet dis bossss lol xx" message while I'm playing an epic RPG? Not OK.

This "social" thing seems to be a big deal with the PlayStation 4 too, though I'm yet to review the information about the new console in any great detail. Apparently the controller has a "share" button right there, allowing players to do things like record brag clips and share them with their friends. Perhaps fun for someone 15 years my junior, but I personally don't really see the point for the most part — we'll see if it's used for anything interesting in the long run.

I'm a bit torn about the increased emphasis on "social" aspects of games consoles. On the one hand, it's quite fun to be able to see what other people are playing and talk to them about it. On the other hand, the vast majority of games that I enjoy are single-player experiences that I don't want interruptions from. I can't help feeling that my experience with, for example, the Halo series was tarnished somewhat by continually being frustrated by popup messages from friends inviting me to play multiplayer when all I wanted to do was see if the dreadful story was going anywhere. I could have just gone offline, of course, but it felt a bit "rude" to do that. Irrational and silly, I know. But it's the way I felt.

As for "sharing"? We're yet to find a really good balance of that. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 allow you to share Achievements/Trophies to Facebook to brag about cool things you've accomplished, but neither are implemented particularly well. Part of the problem is the tendency for modern (younger) Internet denizens to "overshare" and make absolutely everything they do public, which diminishes the meaning of these "brags". This is a trend which is perpetuated by a large number of mobile and social games, many of which post crap all over social networks without you really wanting them to or, in worse cases, bribing you to do so. It's a means of marketing the game, yes, but more often than not — among my circle of friends anyway — it's a turn-off rather than something that makes people want to check out the game in question.

I don't have much interest in the promise of streaming games to PS4 via Gaikai because 1) my experiences to date with game streaming via OnLive haven't always been optimal, 2) I like to own my games and 3) I'd rather the quality of experience I get from my games not be reliant on my Internet connection, thank you very much. I hope Sony includes some form of backwards compatibility in the PS4 through a means other than Gaikai, but I won't be surprised if they don't. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all made it clear that backwards compatibility is not a particular priority for them, and this is a trend I expect to see continue in the next generation. Consequently, I don't see myself getting rid of my 360 and my PS3 (or my PS2, for that matter) when the PS4 hits.

In short, I'm yet to be totally won over by the PS4, but yet to be dissuaded entirely either. A number of developers that I like have reportedly pledged their support to the new console, so that's something, but I'll have to wait and see if there's anything I want to play before I'm convinced to pick one up. Triple-A just doesn't cut it for me any more; I need something that appeals to my specific and peculiar tastes, and if it ain't there, it ain't getting my support.