RANDOM VIDEO GAME NEWS

[BruceVC]

This one is for LadyC:

 

Catlateral Damage - A game where you play as a cat and your task is to cause as much mayhem as you can in your owner's home.

 

 

 

This one is for LadyC:

 

Catlateral Damage - A game where you play as a cat and your task is to cause as much mayhem as you can in your owner's home.

....

My cats don't break things, but they sure are havoc on cloth furniture.

 

 

That's very cute Keyrock, good one  

 

I'll give that game a try as well

[Zoraptor]

 

Same games play on both systems, basically, have the xbox be a tech specification for a specialised, cheap, gaming PC and revise the tech spec every four to five years. You'd have the advantages of the PC system (lots of vendors, hardware competition) remove the loss leader in the equation (making the hardware yourself) and keep the bits which are profitable like online services and (potentially) game licence fees. There would be other potential advantages like better back compatibility and thus longer shelf life for games.

The major appeal of consoles over PC is that they're meant to be less complicated (e.g: pop in the disc and play) I don't think that they would be willing to actually deal with choices, much less deal with manual installation.

 

You don't need manual installs, just imagine software installs with you pre clicking 'OK' a half dozen times and that is what you'd have. Manual installs are useful for PCs because you want options on where to install and the like, with a closed box PC it is basically a console, no need for install options and you can have an auto installer. After all, the  PS4/ On3 are both built on fairly standard PC hardware, and they won't have any significant manual install options.

 

On backwards compatibility; it is very possible now since all it takes is a simple shader algorithm to update the graphics. There are no major changes in a console generation that would prevent them from playing previous gen games but then publishers wouldn't get to re-release HD packs.

It's... a bit more than that, as Ocelot says.  It'd actually make it easier to do HD remakes if the hardware had been standardised and iterative between generations.

[Orogun01]

You don't need manual installs, just imagine software installs with you pre clicking 'OK' a half dozen times and that is what you'd have. Manual installs are useful for PCs because you want options on where to install and the like, with a closed box PC it is basically a console, no need for install options and you can have an auto installer. After all, the  PS4/ On3 are both built on fairly standard PC hardware, and they won't have any significant manual install options.

Then how would you handle hardware upgrades, by sending the console to a store so they can change the parts? Also with complexity comes more problems, with the PC a quick search on some forums will usually yield results. But with closed box it becomes more complicated to fix, so basically this console pc hybrid would essentially be a Mac.

It's... a bit more than that, as Ocelot says.  It'd actually make it easier to do HD remakes if the hardware had been standardised and iterative between generations.

The leap from current gen to next gen isn't so big that they couldn't have developed their architecture with backwards compatibility. They just don't want to support it.

 

But whatever, I can still play BG2 on my PC which by now is 3 gen old (BG2 not my PC). No skin off my back if consoles don't want to prolong the life of their products.

 

Edit: It just occurred to me, point of clarification: are we talking about consoles playing games in its hard format or just the software? 

Edited August 28, 2013 by Orogun01

[Nepenthe]

Yyyeah, seems that the fondest wish for many people is to get a console (with plausible deniability that it's actually a PC) with Valve instead of Microsoft or Sony...

 

 

That backwards compatibility statement is a fine example of the fact that MS had reached almost Daikatana levels of hubris before launch. 180, indeed. Let's see them back up on this one, as well. There's the one reason that could persuade me to buy their console.

[Humanoid]

They should ship PC games on SSDs, and you'd insert them into a 2.5" removable drive rack mounted in a 5.25" external bay. They could call them 'cartridges', and you'd not need to install anything, and your save games and settings would be saved on the game cartridge itself!

 

Totally novel idea, I know.

[Nordicus]

Capcom holds on to their promise of bigger emphasis on mobile games, and Viewtiful Joe is the newest victim (previously it was Breath of Fire)

 

Why Capcom? All we want is a Viewtiful Joe 3 so the story can have an ending. Is that too much to ask???

 

Edited August 28, 2013 by Nordicus

[Monte Carlo]

I honestly thought I was going XboxOne... never imagined I'd go PS4 but I've pre-ordered. After Win 8 and the XBoxOne shenanigans I think M$ has jumped the shark.

Edited August 28, 2013 by Monte Carlo

[melkathi]

Game Dev Tycoon is sending out Steam Keys to the people who bought the game from their site. I recieved mine a few minutes ago, so if you bought the game back when a bunch of us were playing it, check your mail

[Keyrock]

I honestly thought I was going XboxOne... never imagined I'd go PS4 but I've pre-ordered. After Win 8 and the XBoxOne shenanigans I think M$ has jumped the shark.

Microsoft started crumbling long before the XBOne fiasco.  XBOne isn't even their biggest problem.  Microsoft's biggest **** up was missing the mobile boat.  Once upon a time Microsoft had, for its time, a halfway decent phone OS and a small foothold in the market, albeit far behind Symbian and Blackberry.  Then Apple showed up with their trend/hype machine and blew the mutha****ing market up.  Mobile exploded and Apple went from afterthought to industry leader practically overnight.  Google jumped into the fray while the market was still exploding, gained a foothold, skyrocketed, then eventually took over as the new boss in town, relegating Apple to their familiar #2 role.  Meanwhile, in Redmond, Microsoft was slow to respond then stumbled again and again and again in their effort to get Windows Phone 7 out the door.  Had Windows Phone 7 arrived a year earlier, they could have caught the tail end of the market explosion and gained a foothold, instead, by the time it arrived the market explosion was effectively over, Android had been established as the far and away market leader, iOS settled into a distant, but solid #2 spot, Blackberry was fighting for its life to remain relevant, and everybody else was scrambling for a meager few percentage points of the market.  Since then Microsoft has been trying to get a foothold in the mobile market and been for the most part unsuccessful (I think they managed to surpass Blackberry for the VERY distant #3 spot).  They still dominate the desktop, though their dominance there is slowly starting to slip (Windows 8 certainly didn't help), but desktop is a shrinking market, mobile is where the real money is right now.  They still have Windows server, but even with their victory of finally supplanting Unix as the #1 server OS they weren't able to completely dominate the market because Linux made significant inroads and effectively took over where Unix had fallen.  So now they're left with a strong position in server, Office, a slowly slipping dominance of a slowly, but steadily, deteriorating desktop market, an uncertain future with XBOne, and an uphill battle to become even relevant in mobile.

Edited August 28, 2013 by Keyrock

[AwesomeOcelot]

The leap from current gen to next gen isn't so big that they couldn't have developed their architecture with backwards compatibility. They just don't want to support it.

They wouldn't do it in hardware, because it's so different architecturally, they'd need to have the previous generations processors in there (which is what the PS2 did), that would be expensive. There are patent issues with the PS3 to PS4, since Sony is moving from Nvidia to AMD. If they were going to do it, they'd do it in software, but that takes a lot of effort, for instance to get Xbox games running on the Xbox360 they have to create profiles for every game, they had to emulate the CPU, they had to convert the shader model to work with the new GPU. Developers had a lot of freedom in how they created games for consoles, that meant implementations that couldn't be easily converted to new models but converting is preferable performance wise than full software emulation, some Xbox games will never run on Xbox360 because of this.

 

But whatever, I can still play BG2 on my PC which by now is 3 gen old (BG2 not my PC). No skin off my back if consoles don't want to prolong the life of their products.

This is nonsense, BG2 is not "3 gen old", it's 6/7 GPU generations old, or 11 CPU generations, and in that time Windows still uses the NT (5.1-6.2) kernel, it's still on x86 (x86-64 to be exact), still running DirectX (8.1 to 11.2), they're designed to be backwards compatible and often that restricts what they've been able to change or update. It's a lot easier when you haven't changed the architecture or platform, like Xbox going from x86 to PowerPC to x86, out of order to in order to our of order, Nvidia to AMD.

[alanschu]

Yup.  I don't think it's fair to say that it wouldn't have been a big deal to do backwards compatibility.

[Keyrock]

Nintendo announces 2DS

 

I wonder why they went away from the clamshell design for this.  Is it really that much more expensive to make it clamshell?  That thing ain't fitting into too many pockets.

[Labadal]

Wasteland 2 Prison Level Demo.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmGthYqTbo

 

I'm liking what I'm seeing.

[Guest Slinky]

Wasteland 2 Prison Level Demo.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmGthYqTbo

 

I'm liking what I'm seeing.

Same here! Got a nice vibe from the music, very Redding from Fallout 2. The inverntory looks just as awful as I feared though, really don't dig that black/orange look.

 

Also: I'm Commander Danforth of RSM Enterprises, and I approve this message

 

Edit: And they used this for the bloody sheep  

Edited August 28, 2013 by Slinky

[Malcador]

 

It looks like Raven Shield slightly polished, but hopefully it's more like that than Vegas

[melkathi]

Didn't notice anyone posting this:

 

Lennart Sas plays AoW3

[Keyrock]

 

 

Is the entire game in slow motion?

[Nordicus]

Naah, though I expect lots of jank motion

 

Well, I suppose it's a $15 title. Maybe their next game will show more polish

Edited August 28, 2013 by Nordicus

[Malcador]

Is the entire game in slow motion?

Yep.

 

 

Doesn't look great, but eh, it's the NATO3 guy and $15 so my friends and I will be up for it.

[ManifestedISO]

2013 tech market business plan spotted on a coffee shop napkin:

 

1. Crowd-fund Android game console

2. Bork console launch

3. Irritate, enrage consumers; alienate developers

4. Scratch forehead

5. Initiate exclusive "double-the-money" incentive

6. Fabricate game title

7. Fabricate independent developer

8. Fabricate multiple backer profiles

9. Crowd-fund fabricated game title

10. Act innocent

11. Repeat 6-10

12. Cash check

 

 

 

As of this writing, the campaign has raised $78,340 from 137 backers. That's just under an astounding $572 pledged by each backer -- and that's a sharp decline from earlier in the campaign, when the average pledge was $626 per person. For comparison's sake, the average pledge per backer for Double Fine's adventure game, Project Eternity, and Wasteland 2 -- some of the most highly funded video game Kickstarter campaigns to date -- was $38, $54, and $48, respectively.

 

 

 

 

Adding further fuel to the fire is the fact that many of the backers used newly created profiles on Kickstarter. As noted on NeoGAF, among these are different profiles that have the same name as each another, and some which share the same last name as MogoTXT CEO Andrew Won. And, despite the large amount donated by backers, very few of the higher donation tiers have been chosen, meaning these individuals decided to pass up the rewards they were entitled to.

 

 

Bay Area tech business practices

 

I think Ouya is in on the whole thing, having started a fake game development incentive to get the market up. Fake, as in they are acting as both sellers and buyers of consoles and games.  

[Lexx]

Well, nobody needed that thing to begin with. I have no idea why so many people pledged for the console anyway. Guess it was simply the KS hype at that time or people expected a new PS3 / Xbox360.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Lexx

[Raithe]

So Saints Row IV has sold over a million units in the first week. Making it a fairly qualified commercial success.

 

 

"We are incredibly happy of the reception for Saints Row IV as a critical and now a commercial success," said Deep Silver parent company Koch Media CEO Klemens Kundratitz. "The development team at Volition is second-to-none as a driving creative force in the entertainment industry and we are very proud to have them as part of the Deep Silver family."

 

Now if only they'd get the goddamn physical game in the UK I'd give them my money for a copy.

[Malcador]

Huh, they're owned by the Koch guys ?

[Galomtala]

Huh, they're owned by the Koch guys ?

 

No, it's a german company, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Media

[AwesomeOcelot]

I don't think Ouya are behind the fake backers of GridIron, that's wild speculation, there's no reason to suspect their involvement.

 

I'm happy with my Ouya. I've played Broken Sword and Aquaria on it (side loaded Android versions from Humble Bundle), played Bombsquad and Hidden in Plain Sight with my niece, those games are really fun and easy to pick up. XBMC is now working as of this month, it has DNLA, SMB, NFS, and external HDD support, plays MKV(x264+DTS/ac3) at 1080p. Plex is available for free from the store. You can sideload YouTube for Google TV, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player, Netflix, Lovefilm, Soundcloud, and Spotify. There's a number of emulators that run on OUYA.

 

The Xbox360 and PS3 don't allow me to do a lot of that, I don't want to play any Xbox360 games I can't play on PC, and the PS3 costs 75% more than the Ouya. The Ouya is smaller and consumes less power, supports PS3 and Xbox360 gamepads so you don't have to buy more.