[Felix]

I'm expecting something slightly worse than PS4; vaguely interesting but not really relevant to me

[Felix]

now let me set up the aspiration

[Felix]

now let me (unh) set up the (unh)

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

[Felix]

I don't like myself for watching this

not one bit

[Felix]

XBOX, GO HOME

[Felix]

WE ARE GOING TO MAKE TELEVISION USEFUL

[Felix]

DELAYED GRATIFICATION IS A THING OF THE PAST

[Felix]

XBOX, AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIATION

[Felix]

XBOX, OPIATE MASSES

[Felix]

XBOX, PRESERVE DECAYING COMMERCIAL EMPIRES

[Felix]

at Xbox, we don't tuck our shirts in

[Felix]

I just absentmindedly put some porn on in my other monitor while watching this

[Felix]

did that guy just say 9/11 changed everything

[Felix]

FUCK 1999

FUCKING SHIT

[Felix]

I guess Australians heretofore haven't had much occasion to pronounce the world "revolutionary"

[Felix]

I want to show you my ludonarrative stream

[Felix]

holy shit it's Tim Allen

[Felix]

Xbox ONE runs exclusively on fossil fuels

[Felix]

admitting that you think the television screen is more "important" than, say, a terminal through which someone may access wikipedia in their home is actually fairly appalling

[Felix]

we are cheering lost productivity and someone who inherited an overcooked franchise but hey at least it's a lady

[Felix]

STEVEN SPIELBERG'S HALO: TINY TOON ADVENTURES ZWEI: THE PIXELS OF PONG

[Felix]

in point of fact I am expecting this game to be as initially impressive as Modern Warfare and then diminished by having inadvertently defined half a decade of samey crap

although maybe without the anti-war message

[Felix]

remote, I think you're a little overenthusiastic about the 3DS right now

EAD finally produced some non-shit, and the alternative is pretty unattractive currently, but it has all of maybe two games which will be remembered in five years and their closed marketplace is vastly inferior to Steam in terms of both cost and selection

it's vaguely decent, which is saying something, but don't hold it up that high

[Felix]

[Felix]

[Felix]

Continuum Shift is on PC too though not officially -- it turns out that x86 is so dominant these days that it's what the few remaining arcade-native titles are using, and the official release tends to get leaked and will run fine in a wrapper.

[Felix]

[Felix]

I just typed this on facebook w/r/t Leigh's piece if anyone cares:

Alex Garnett except that it seems somehow grounded in a belief that consoles should somehow be better than this, which I've never understood. this is how big media companies are expected to behave -- race-to-the-bottom targeting of the suburbs and people who don't think of Lem or Vonnegut when the presentation talks about how YOU DESERVE INSTANTANEOUS CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
2 minutes ago · Edited · Like

Alex Garnett people tend to think I'm somehow being superior when I say "if you want to play games and respect yourself, get a PC (or put wine on OSX or linux, it works well, honestly, stop being frightened when I say that, come on, people), download indies, ta da." somehow there's this belief that what I'm proposing is too complicated and gets away from the games themselves, but ... you can't decide that you only want X amount of marketing vs. convenience. this is what gets sold to you. you have options, exercise them.
15 minutes ago · Like

Alex Garnett I know that I tend to view the world in a way that always has me saying "well of COURSE big bad corporation acted this way, what are you so upset about?" but I guess I just underestimate folks' affections for What Game Consoles Are Supposed to Represent or something. in any case, the PS4 actually looks remarkably classy by comparison, though I'm still hoping that the x86 architecture will just encourage PC ports so I don't actually have to buy a PS4 proper.
11 minutes ago · Like

Alex Garnett I'm cool with the fact that this is not a product for me, I was bitter about the 360 introducing those gotdang immersion-breaking popup achievements eight years ago and never forgave them for that (never bought anything xbox-related, though I was surprised at how much of the gaming intelligentsia decided the 360 was a good thing -- I ignored this gen until getting a PS3 in 2011 so reserving judgment there). I hope it does okay with its intended audience. as usual, I am hard to disappoint
3 minutes ago · Edited · Like

[Felix]

I think the main problem is her use of the word "privileged" instead of "suburban"

or "non-participatory" or "consumer fetishist" or whatever but you get the idea

[Felix]

let it be said that Android games remain pretty bad and the situation isn't all that much better on iOS

[Felix]

iOS has been better than devs for Android up until very recently, I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that the stuff on these platforms still pales by comparison to $5-$10 steam indies, with exceptions that can be counted on one hand. I mostly still believe this will change, but it's not quite there.

I actually thought the momentum was better a couple years ago between Pac-Man CE and Infinity Gene and HookChamp.

[Felix]

while thatbox's point about sorta sinking her own ship with the iDevice "counterpoint" is a good one, I maintain (in part because I have the same bone to pick) that her only real error in trying to make a statement about class is apparently not understanding that plenty of lower-middle-class folks build their homes around their TV sets too

[Felix]

[Felix]

as I've said, I don't think you ought to expect the consumer technology company who wants to monetize whatever they can and may have sound engineering reasons for making backwards compatibility difficult or impossible to take up the burden of digital preservation.

I also think the fact that game consoles up until recently have been stable targets that can be counted on one hand over a period of half-decades (and pirate groups generally take care of firmware differences in later-model consoles) makes the digital preservation burden significantly less than it is in other computing genres. I think your response to this is that you want videogames to be independent of technology, and to be somehow as transferable from one medium to the next as music and film are perceived to be, but that's an entirely unreasonable desire.

tl;dr people are working on this. there are ways to make this effort.

[Felix]

because they are going to sell it with a contract through comcast in lieu of the DVR thing you currently get from your cable company, duh

[Felix]

as benren pointed out to me not long ago, both the Cell and the 360 CPU use a newish PPC core which is well-documented for emulation on x86 (hence why Wii emulation moved as fast as it did), and while Cell will pose the problem of keeping a lot of different elements in sync and probably require a fair amount of CPU overhead (as PCSX2 does), it's far from impossible.

one of the reasons that progress on emulation of the original Xbox stalled is that people assumed that because it's also x86 it would be possible to just write an interpreter like Wine to handle directX calls and that sort of thing, but reverse engineering it proved surprisingly difficult for the handful of folks making an effort, and apparently the GeForce 3 derivative in there has a lot of undocumented registers.

[Felix]

[Felix]

a lot of us are broken records in plenty of other respects (we are, after all, arguing on the internet), don't begrudge Benren his Wii loving.

also, seriously guys, the extent to which Microsoft is DGAFing. They are going to sell this through cable companies and they now have the worst policy on indies.

[Felix]

given it's the same architecture and most games have a higher postprocessing load than anything else these days, at least at the higher end, I imagine it'll just be a matter of devs turning off ambient occlusion or AA on xbone ports.

[Felix]

the thing is that some of those postprocessing libs are pretty close to being off-the-shelf (see: the popularity of enbseries and FXAA on PC lately) so we're talking like a couple days work to ensure that your ps4 port of your xbone-native title takes advantage of the extra muscle

it's still directX vs weird sony openGL fork but current HLSL dev tools make that a nonissue

or, as bennett said, just don't lock it to 30fps, or run a higher resolution.

[Felix]

http://thepiratebay.sx/search/xbla/0/99/0

they are not lost. see? there just isn't a good way for end users to access these yet.