Tag Archives: PlayStation 4

Stream of Change

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Since I got my PS4 about 3 years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time streaming the games I play to the internet. For the most part, I do it to entertain my friends more so than as a career choice or a side gig. That hasn’t stopped me from wanting ad revenue or donations; who couldn’t use a little extra money, right? Well, Maxx — my troublemaking, artist best friend — has started pushing me towards being more professional.

So, there’s changes coming. The first of which is that I joined Restream.io which lets me stream not to just one service, but to as many as I setup and choose. In my case, I stream to Twitch and YouTube, but from the PlayStation, I can only choose one or the other. While Restream isn’t [yet] available as a target to stream to from the PlayStation, it is from PC. So, likely in a few weeks when/if my job situation changes, I will be getting a game capture device, to stream through PC. As I’ve been testing the waters with streaming from PC from time to time, I’ve already found a favorite broadcasting software (XSplit Broadcaster) and have found that I like and appreciate Restream.

To that end, and because this is in effect a sales pitch for something that is free, if you stream, go use Restream.io and use my referral link to get there:

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https://restream.io/?ref=J6DzP

They’re having an affiliate contest right now and I would appreciate your help in getting some loot. One of the prizes, in fact, is an Elgato game capture device that would allow me to start doing the enhanced broadcasting sooner. In theory at least. Any help would be appreciated, though if you would rather just make a donation, you can do that as well by clicking here.

My broadcasts can be watched at Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and, soon, Ustream.

Destiny: Rise of Iron and Me

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Hi guys, it’s been a while since I’ve posted and longer still since I said “fuck Destiny.” That doesn’t mean that I’ve moved on from Destiny as my go to game to relax, nor does it mean that Bungie has solved all my complaints. In fact, in some ways, Bungie seems to be trolling me… Any way, the newest, and probably last, expansion to the original game was released a few weeks ago, and I thought about “reviewing” — I guess that’s what I technically do here with my rants— it on release day, but I was busy playing and stressing about a the latest in a series of job interviews for a big company. (Incidentally, I’m still stressing out over it as I wait to find out whether they’re going to hire me or not.) So I’m only now getting around to talking about the latest changes.

First of all, the most cursed thing about Destiny is still there: the random number based loot tables. As always, no matter how well you do in the Crucible, strikes, daily missions and [probably] raids*, you have no idea what the hell your reward, if you even get any, will be. (*I added an asterisk because I’ve been in the unfortunate position of having never done a raid, so I don’t know the loot outcome. I just suspect it’s the same as everywhere else in Destiny. If you want to carry me in a raid, let me know!) This means you might have to grind away at an activity that you’re pretty sure will drop your desired loot until you actually get it. That’s just wrong if you ask me. I’m not going to bitch about it today, I’ve bitched enough about it here already. (1 2 3 4 5)

As I mentioned in parenthesis above, I’ve never done a raid. Why? No one to do them with. My best friend stopped playing Destiny for several reasons, not the least of which is the random loot issue. I have a few other friends that play Destiny occasionally, but honestly I’m probably the best player of my actual acquaintances. So that leaves me with three options: matchmaking in game, which Destiny does not support for raids; use the PlayStation 4’s Community feature to find a group; or cobble together a group through Bungie’s forums or somewhere else. Since the first of these is apparently a non-issue and will not be resolved by Bungie, I’ll address the latter two. For the moment at least.

The problem I have with both of these two options is pretty much the same: sure I could get in touch with hundreds of people, but these are all players that value their time enough that they want a perfect or near perfect run. I’m good, but when it comes to a raid or strike I’m not good enough to feel that I’m carrying my weight in the game. I would much rather play with people I know personally and/or have played with regularly and are playing casually— despite the time a raid may take — rather than demanding perfection from me or them. After that, I’d rather play with completely random strangers that have just as much — or little — faith in my abilities and once the raid is over, we never have to see, hear, or play with each other again. Matchmaking makes that possible, but Bungie is extraordinarily confused on the issue despite their stance that they will not add matchmaking to raids. Why, then, do they have a matchmaking system for strikes? Why not just do the same thing there? The Nightfall strikes once used the matchmaking system, but has since stopped. So why not either implement it for raids or kill it for all PvE? (PvP is different since you have to have enemies after all.) I don’t get it, Bungie. You have it both ways but it shows you’re seriously confused about what your vision is.

Ultimately, Rise of Iron really adds very little that’s truly new, not counting story. Gameplay mechanics haven’t changed really, though you get a few new patrol types in the Plaguelands. Yes you can use a flaming axe at various points and places, but it behaves almost exactly like the Sword of Crota with the exception that it has an ammo counter that counts down even when you’re not swinging it and you can extend the allotted time by finding a fire pit from which to pull flames to recharge it. Beyond that, there’s the Archon’s Forge which I’m sure you’ve heard all about, and it operates very similarly to the Court of Oryx, though even the initiator can get locked of the event. Don’t ask me how I know. Any way, Archon’s Forge is fun enough if you can find players to join you AND one or more of you have offerings to allow you to actually trigger it. There have been a number of times that my fun in the Forge has come to a halt when all of us collectively just ran out of offerings. So, needless to say, the drop rate for the offerings is low enough that you can easily run out of things to do and you can only carry one at a time. To be perfectly honest, I wish they made that change to the Court of Oryx — or better yet, put it somewhere in-between — because I’m running around with more than a hundred Stolen Runes, Reciprocal Runes, and Antiquated Runes right now.

As for everything else in Rise of Iron… Well, the new Fallen are interesting, but they’re still basically the same. The new social area is nice looking, though it may have a few bugs that still need to be worked out. What I mean by that is that one of the bounties/missions requires you to climb up on the mountain in which the Temple of Iron  is built, and apparently there’s nothing to stop you from going beyond what you’re supposed to do. Similarly, the Iron Banner opened this week and opened a section you couldn’t go into before (though you technically came from there in the mission to liberate the area), and you can just keep on going very far away from the Temple. I don’t know if these “bugs” are to enable some future event(s) that might take place there, or just left open for the sake of leaving them open, but it definitely reminds me of the alpha and early release days of Destiny when you could go into the upper court at the back of the Tower and poke around the edges.

I think the biggest single change in Destiny actually launched just before Rise of Iron: private Crucible matches. I think they’re probably a great way to train as part of a clan or fireteam for the public Crucible, but I haven’t actually had anyone to train with… Oddly, you can still launch a private match solo, and run around doing… whatever… At the very least, it’s a good way to get yourself familiarized with the various maps.

So, in the end, I can’t say that Destiny has really improved or captured my imagination and attention this time around, but it’s sufficient to keep me going for now. Destiny 2 is rumored for release next year, and while I may buy into it, I’m probably not going to pine away for it the way I initially did with Destiny. Bungie kinda killed that level of interest for me with the random number loot and the lack of universal matchmaking. If raiding requires more than one person (or you to be a superstar with the game), then you need to have matchmaking. Even World of Warcraft has matchmaking for their raids and instances. Unless Bungie changes their stance on the issue and the random loot, Destiny 2 will have to wait for me to get around to buying it. Sadly, I don’t think that Bungie will miss me.

Destiny Weapons (and More) Update (Updated, Ironically)

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As I sit here waiting for this 17 GB update to download on my current impossibly slow internet connection, I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you about this new update. At this point in time, I’ve been waiting about 24 hours on the download to complete and my PS4 is reckoning another 18 hours before I’ll be able to really see the changes. That said, let’s take a look at my preferred guardian on my personal account. (Although I do have a warlock on my “work” account, it’s not yet high enough level to warrant looking at and doesn’t have so much as a single exotic item.)

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Destiny Warlock

What we see here is that my level is 32, light level 145, with 34 intellect, 45 discipline, and 51 strength. For the most part, the latter three stats can be ignored. Until yesterday’s update, the light level and character level were inextricably linked past level 20. By that I mean that once you fought and quested to level 20, you had to get equipment with various light ratings to go any further, which is a fundamentally flawed system. Frankly, for all that I’ve done in Destiny, I should long ago reached level 34 but because the fucking random number generator in the loot system didn’t see fit to give me equipment with a higher light level than what I have, I got stuck at level 32. This leads me to believe that I could only have gotten higher if I had the opportunity to raid (Vault of Glass and Crota’s End) at all or hit the Crucible a lot more. (More the former than the latter I’m sure.) As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really a PvP type of person, and I only know two people with PS4s and Destiny, and I rarely even get to play with them, let alone contemplate doing the raids because Bungie is too high on themselves to institute the grouping system on raids. Bastards. (This MAY be mitigated by a feature in the upcoming PS4 3.0 firmware update.) So, bottom line, no matter how hard I worked over the last year, I could never feel that sense of accomplishment by reaching level 34.
That changed yesterday.
With yesterday’s update, light level became a reflection of the quality of your equipment and was separated from your experience point total. This means that completing raids, missions, strikes, and just flat out killing things for the hell of it once again matter. I know I nitpicked about the stupidity of the light level, if not in a post here, then certainly with my aforementioned friends, and my inability to climb higher on the level ladder is a perfect demonstration of why it was bad. Perhaps it was intended to showcase the power of the exotic items or make you feel all the more powerful and fortunate once you got them, but to those of us that haven’t been able to raid, it’s been a source of constant frustration. So I applaud Bungie on realizing that this is an issue to many players and resolving the issue.

While I still, apparently, have between 14 and 24 hours minimum depending on the way the wind blows before my download is complete, I’ll delve into the new light level. In the past, the light level came from the total amount of light your equipment possessed at any given time. I believe the light only came from your armor, and as I mentioned above, it determined your level above 20. Under the new regime, the light level comes from an average of your armor, equipped weapons, your Ghost’s shell, and a new piece of equipment called an “artifact.” Without having a special Ghost shell or an artifact at this point, my light level is currently 145 based on my weapons’ and armor ratings. Considering the new maximum for “Year 1” equipment after this crucial rebalancing of ratings is 170 for weapons and armor, I’m doing pretty well. I should note that my currently equipped exotic weapon, Plan C, hasn’t been fully upgraded yet (I need an exotic shard from Xur) so that rating will increase once I get one. Assuming it’ll be sometime this weekend, I can probably expect my light level to increase to 150-155 or so once I upgrade the weapon or swap to a different, fully upgraded weapon. I don’t expect to hit 170 until I get an artifact and/or shell for my Ghost, but it’s possible those things won’t actually become available until next week’s launch of The Taken King. Which, I would like to point out, you and everyone else (except me, naturally) have already downloaded.

That’s right, I said you’ve already downloaded the next expansion. While I have no evidence to back this up, think about it. Why the hell is a weapon rebalancing update so big? I’d give the update 1-2 gigs if the only things it was doing were changing some of the core files to handle the new balancing system, updating the sound files for the Ghost voice from Peter Dinklage to Nolan North (not sure if the switch-over was activated yet), and a few performance and tuning changes. In these days of high speed broadband, which I’m sorely lacking at the moment, terabyte sized drives, and 50 gigabyte games, we tend to forget that 1 gigabyte is a huge amount of data. Having worked with audio recordings as part of making films, a few megabytes can record many hours of high quality sound, and most of the weapon balancing data could be done in a XML or even comma separated values file probably less than 5 megabytes in size. So why is this weapon balancing update 17 gigabytes?

The simple answer is that it downloaded all the new assets necessary for the Taken King, including the Dreadnaught, the Taken themselves, new weapons and armor, new audio files, and god knows what else Bungie needed for next week’s launch. It makes no sense that Bungie would launch an update this large this week, and then turn around and do another one on Tuesday. For those of us that already have Destiny, yesterday’s patch IS the next expansion. When next Tuesday rolls around, those of us that pre-ordered the expansion digitally will probably see a very small update take place that unlocks all the new content, but it’ll be just that, a very small update. Bungie wants players to start diving into that new content immediately, so it makes perfect sense to put it in place ahead of time. It wouldn’t surprise me to see videos showing exploits to get at the new content early start popping up at some point today or tomorrow.

That about covers everything… I think I’m going to sit back and listen to the Ramones while I wait for this turkey to finish downloading… By the way, what’s up with AT&T? They promised U-verse service in Detroit over 7 years ago, and the best I can get in my centrally located home *IN* Detroit, is their 1.5 MB downstream DSL. What the hell is up with that?

Update: Now that this gigantic update/expansion is finally installed, nearly 48 hours after it was released, I’ve had a little bit of time to play around with it. First of all, like I mentioned, the levels are now completely experience based rather than light/equipment based. That left me free to climb to level 34 ahead of the official release of The Taken King. But I think that that ascension was a little too fast. I literally went from 32 to 34 in the span of minutes as I did several bounties and quests. Minutes. While I acknowledge some of them were experience heavy, Bungie should have tweaked the level profession at higher levels to reflect the increased difficulty in leveling. Maybe it was a fluke, I’ll find out as I work on my other characters.

Another thing is that a fair amount of content that shouldn’t be available until Tuesday is now through various bugs and that’s even affecting rewards. Faction specific quests should probably be avoided until the official launch.

Also, don’t forget to visit the gunsmith and try out the prototype weapons; the ones for which you do the telemetry testing are supposed to be sent to you free of charge on weapons day. Well… One at least. It’s unclear if you’ll get all of them if you test multiple ones

The Game I’m Dying to Tell You About…

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Whether you’ve gotten the idea from this page or not, the fact is that I love movies, books, games, and writing. Not necessarily in that order, but that’s the order my fingers demanded I write them in. So there’s that. I’ve played a LOT of games, I’ve written about a few here, and I talk about them frequently with my friends. Hell, I’ve been streaming quite a bit on Twitch since I got my PS4 a bit more than a year ago. (I still find it strange mostly talking to myself, so I don’t often broadcast with my microphone on.) If you’ve been paying any attention to my Twitch page recently, then you know I’ve been playing a LOT of Dying Light.

A few things you need to know about me and my relationship with horror, the undead, and the horror-survival videogame genre. I don’t generally write in horror; it doesn’t interest me much, and never really has. On the whole, I find horror films silly and mostly going for over the top gore and cheap theatrical tricks to scare the audience. I find suspense much more appealing; what you see on screen in a horror film is make up and faked. What is done in suspense films is almost purely mental, and almost certainly possible; what one can do with such tools… Well, lets just say that I’ve taken pleasure in plying psychological warfare in a few stories. But I don’t write much about the undead… In my opinion, the old stories, legends and mythology are the best. What they don’t cover, Dungeons & Dragons covered to my satisfaction, so with the rare exception, I don’t write about them. They’re fine as they are.

While my bias against horror films can’t really be carried over to videogames (the characters, while perhaps photorealistic and carrying verisimilitude, are completely fictional and you don’t identify with them in the same way as actors on screen) I just haven’t been interested in the gore factor for the most part. I played the original Resident Evil on the first generation PlayStation, along with its sequel, but as I write this, I’m finding myself hard pressed to name a single horror genre game that I played since that time until the release of Left 4 Dead and its sequel. Truth be told, I played those two for the social interactions with some friends I rarely get to see, though I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t enjoy them.

A few years ago, Dead Island came out to rave reviews and I considered picking the game up. A few friends raved about it but I wasn’t in any hurry to play it. It just wasn’t my thing, though I was admittedly curious. A couple years passed, I got engrossed in The Last of Us, which while technically a horror game was, I’d say, far more of a suspenseful game than horror. But then (to get to the point)… Techland released Dying Light. My buddy, looking to use a Sony supplied weekend coupon accidentally purchased it after watching some streams of it being played by some reviewers. Upon release, he immediately got sucked into the game and ranted and raved about it. But he’s far more into horror than I am, I thought. It’s right up his alley.

And it is. He suggested I check it out but acknowledged that it might not be all that interesting to me, so using SharePlay over PSN, I played for a couple hours on release day. I’m not going to say it was the best experience of my life, but I found it very engrossing. I did get slightly motion sick, which I attributed at the time (and apparently correctly) to the disconnect between my PS4, the approximately 2,000 miles between us, and uncounted miles that the digital video traveled from his home in the Seattle area and mine in Detroit, and for the control signals I sent back to have effect. Mind you, everything was nearly instantaneous,  with no noticeable lag, but there was something that caused me to develop a headache in that short time I played. Nonetheless, I played for another 3 hours over SharePlay two days later. The next day, my payday, I bought the game, and I’ve played almost nothing but Dying Light ever since.

Though it is indeed a horror survival game, it’s like saying Grand Theft Auto is a driving game. There’s so much more to the game than simply surviving. There are tons of side missions to be performed, and when you don’t feel like doing a mission,  you can roam and explore the open world environment, fighting and killing the various types of zombies for fun and profit. There’s a distinct role playing game element to it as well, as you don’t just look for weapons to kill all these monsters, but you learn new skills to fight and evade them, not to mention learn how to craft new tools and weapons along the way. Unlike Destiny, not all of the missions are “go here, kill that”; more than one has been to find and recover something for some one, or to go save someone in trouble. One of my favorite missions… Well, you’ll just have to play it yourself…! Get bored just running around? Play with a friend! The game supports at least 4 players in co-op mode, though they only recently fixed a bug that kept me crashing back to the PlayStation home screen.

To make it even better, I don’t know how many hours I’ve put into it thus far, but I’m only just now reaching the 50% completion mark. I don’t mean to pile on to Ready at Dawn’s problems and join a bandwagon bashing the apparent 5-10 hour length of The Order: 1886, but if you get into Dying Light, you will be playing it for a very long time. Techland did a kick-ass job on Dying Light, in my opinion, and it makes me wonder what I missed with Dead Island.

The game isn’t perfect, however. There are the occasional bug that you’ll hit, like the co-op crash I mentioned above, and there was an easy way to exploit another bug (a race condition I do believe) to duplicate items but it was patched. Though that particular duplication bug is history, there’s another one that’s slightly more difficult, but just as reliable. It’s only a matter of time until it’s patched too, but as you can see, there are both positive and negative bugs in the game. I’m sure Techland is hammering away on them even as I write this, but aside from the now dead co-op crash, I haven’t encountered any show stoppers.

So what do I think of Dying Light? If you like killing zombies, you will probably love the game. If you like parkour, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun in the game as well. Is it worth the $60? I personally say hell yes, and I’m definitely considering the season pass to get any expansions that might be released. Should you buy it? That’s up to you. Take a few of my broadcasts for a drive and decide for yourself.

PlayStation 4 Announced!

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So the currently least well kept secret in the gaming industry has been unleashed, the Sony announced the PlayStation 4 this evening. You know what? I’m not completely blown away. I’m satisfied, mind you, and I’m looking forward to owning a PS4, but I’m not blown away by anything that was demoed tonight. Well… Maybe Killzone: Shadow Fall… but then, I’m a Killzone addict.

Frankly, I liked what I saw for the most part, and I think this is going to be a fun and interesting system to own. I have little to complain about the PS4 itself. It’s using an x86 processor, in all likelihood, one of AMD’s Trinity APUs since the term APU was thrown around repeatedly and they, frankly, are about the only game in town when it comes to an APU. Connected with that, by extension, will be an AMD Radeon based GPU in all likelihood, which will allow graphics performance to be improved via Radeon’s hybrid Crossfire X technology. Undoubtedly these will be customized processors, designed specifically for the PS4 and not commercially available, but ultimately, as Sony stated, this will be basically a PC machine. I’m both pleased and disappointed by that… The Cell architecture was really advanced and I think another generation of it in a game system probably have blown us all away with its processing capability, but then as was pointed out several times this evening, the complexity of developing for it has been getting in the way of PS3 development. Similarly, it’s an acknowledgment that at some point, I could put together a machine with similar or better specs, and perhaps find a way to get PS4 titles to run on my desktop… Not what they want, obviously, but possible… However, by using mostly off the shelf components, it’ll drive the cost of the machine down tremendously; I paid $500 for my PS3, and I don’t regret it, but if I can pay $300 or less for my PS4, I’ll be hysterically happy…

Of course, the long standing rumor is that the next Xbox will also be based around an x86 processor, and has even been rumored to use Radeon GPUs as well… I suppose you could say that the day of the consoles is over, despite the constant proclamations that PC gaming is dead [thanks to the consoles]. Even with Valve’s upcoming Steam box, it’s little more than a PC running Linux… Ultimately, it’s very interesting to see that the PS4 and Xbox could literally be kissing cousins, and I wonder how long it’ll take the hacker community to figure out how to get a PS4 up and running on a next generation Xbox’s OS and vice versa, possibly to multi-boot the operating systems and have one console to rule them all… The advantage of exotic hardware is difficulty in bootstrapping it and then getting a compatible OS to run on it, or developing such an OS… PC hardware… well, let’s just say that the hardware is extraordinarily well known, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone running Linux on the PS4 or next-gen Xbox on release day.

As for the rest of the announced specs for the PS4, they’re interesting… Though it’s also interesting what wasn’t announced in those specs. So we know we’re getting 8 GB GDDR5 RAM, which should give developers lots of memory to play with. A constant criticism of Sony’s consoles over the last 13 years has been the limited amount of memory they have. 8 GB goes well past the rumors I heard just today; this morning I read that it would have 4 GB RAM. Still, 8 GB seems like a lot, and it might be enough to last a long time, but one of the complaints I’ve seen about x86 hardware is that it typically requires more RAM for some things, not to mention that there’s still that legacy memory hole between 640k and 1 MB. Not that that’s very big or important these days, but it may have been more advantageous to include 16 GB RAM rather than just 8. Back in the days of the PowerPC Macintoshes, many applications running on the Mac required and used less RAM than the PC version of the same application. Maybe it was MacOS versus Windows, or big-endian versus little-endian. I don’t know. But this may be an issue.

As I mentioned, it’s curious what wasn’t mentioned in the specs of the PS4, though there may be good reason for that. We can assume it will have a Blu-Ray player, but it wasn’t discussed. There was no mention of network connectivity besides the fact that we know it will connect to the internet. Will it still have an traditional ethernet port? Or will it be wifi only? What wifi standards will it support with 802.11AC coming up soon? We know the current PS Move controller will work with it, but will Dual Shock 3 controllers? Does it even have Bluetooth, or did it go with a proprietary wireless technology like Microsoft did with the Xbox 360? It has a hard drive, but what size? Will the hard drive be removable and user upgradable? Will it have USB ports, and if so how many? Will games be encouraged to allow keyboard and mouse where applicable, such as in a MMORPG or certain FPS games that have a history on the PC? It’s not going to be directly backwards compatible with the PS3, but they stated that you would some how be able to play PS3 (and earlier) games eventually, possibly through Gaikai technology… Will that be free? Will I have to mail in my PS3 games to play them on the PS4?

There are lots of unanswered questions, though I think a lot of them were deliberately left nebulous for two reasons. The first and most important reason is so that Sony has some flexibility in adjusting the final specs before the console goes into mass production, in order to maximize profit (or at least minimize initial loss), without being accused of scaling back the features and power prior to release. That’s why we didn’t hear an official gigahertz speed being bandied about, and I, personally, didn’t hear anything about an 8 core processor being used even though that’s the top raging rumor at this point. As hard drive prices fluctuate, APU and GPU processor production yields vary, and whether or not 802.11AC gets made into an official standard or not, Sony can take its time and evaluate which combination of technologies will go into the final production version of the PS4, and they can determine a suggested retail price for when the release actually occurs, all without taking fire. Well, any more fire than they probably already will for moving away from Cell. (I should note, however, that IBM, the primary producer of the Cell processor in collaboration with Sony pretty much stopped active development of the technology some time ago, so the best we’d have gotten would have been perhaps a multi Cell processor game system or one with a souped up clock speed; not necessarily a better processor or better technology.)  I suspect the second major reason that we haven’t gotten an official announcement about all those things left unsaid about the PS4 is that Sony didn’t want to reveal any more information than necessary considering that we all know Microsoft’s Xbox division was sitting there watching this announcement (despite their proclamations that no one cared what was happening tonight).

I’d say there’s about an 80% chance that there was a product development meeting going on at Microsoft at the same time as and extending for several hours after the PS4 announcement this evening. Microsoft wants to make people think that it doesn’t care. Microsoft needs to believe that they know their new console will be so much better than Sony’s that they don’t need to lose any sleep over it. The fact of the matter is that they are losing sleep over it, just like Sony’s been losing sleep over theirs. It’s been a game of one-upmanship; always has been, always will be. Except that Sony didn’t quite do as good a job in the last generation as they should have. In my opinion, the PS3 was and still is superior to the Xbox 360, however it’s not as superior as it should’ve been for a console that came out a year later. They lost the initiative and as a result trailed the 360 for pretty much the entirety of the life-cycle of the generation. I still think that PS3 exclusive games look and play better than Xbox 360 exclusive games, but with the added development complexity and the fact the cross/multi platform games consistently look and play worse on the PS3 than the 360, I have to concede that Sony lost out. I also think that Sony failed to deliver in that generation with some of the features they promised would come along… Take cross-game chat, for instance… It was mentioned as coming soon as far back as 2008.  When PlayStation+ came along, it was stated that you’d be able to initiate a cross game chat as a subscriber, but it still hasn’t come to pass. Hell, the option to take screenshots was added to the PS3 firmware years ago, but most games don’t support that at all… And it’s things like that gave and gives the 360 the momentum and Microsoft the bragging rights in terms of popularity. As owner of both a 360 and a PS3, I’ll tell you that my 360 is extremely dusty and rarely used. I’ve never experienced a red ring of death because I haven’t used it sufficiently for it to happen. I hated the crappy headset that came with it, and the cable broke, forcing me to buy the crappy wireless headset that will only work with my 360. I HATE having to pay a subscription fee to play games with my friends online… But at least it came with a headset, my PS3 didn’t. I initially used a USB one I already had, then got the official PS3 Bluetooth headset which I’m currently also using with my cellphone. On the other hand, I had to buy a battery for the 360’s controller in order to use it wirelessly; at least the PS3 controllers have built-in rechargeable batteries which don’t get a memory nearly as fast as the expensive 360 batteries do. (The one and only battery I bought for the 360 became useless within months of buying the system. My PS3 controllers’ batteries are still going strong, and I’ve had them longer.) Yes, my PS3 is a little more dusty than it used to be, but that’s because I’ve been doing a hefty amount of writing, PC gaming, and reading as of late, but whenever I get the Netflix urge, or the desire to blow something away, it gets powered up immediately.

I love my PS3, and in the Sony-Microsoft war, I favor Sony. But in the last generation, they came second. PS3 was considered second for development of titles, and inferior products were often produced. I have to admit that.  I think that Sony announcing the PS3 so far ahead of even E3 is an attempt to gain the upper-hand this time around, and despite Microsoft’s outward indifference, they’re probably very concerned about what they saw tonight. Of course, Microsoft as a long history of assimilation that Sony probably didn’t take into consideration… Microsoft many times in the past has either bought out rival technologies and incorporated them into their own product, or just incorporated the features claiming to have had them all along. I think the only time they didn’t follow that pattern was with the Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD technology versus Blu-Ray. Now, I’m not going to reopen old wounds, but Microsoft had a huge stake in that fight and lost, and though they phased out the HD-DVD external drive for the 360, they never admitted defeat by producing a Blu-Ray drive for it. They would claim that the Xbox didn’t need it, or it didn’t fit within their platform design, personally, I think they were just holding a grudge and refused to swallow their pride. At the very least, I think they have to include it with the next Xbox just to stay relevant… After all, Nintendo didn’t and their Wii-U is looked upon as even more of a toy than the original Wii was now; they put themselves out of contention for the dominant next generation platforms.

Any how, getting back to tonight’s announcements, I think the biggest disappointment for me was the Square Enix “announcement.” They basically got on stage, got screen time, and showed a demo that I swear they were showing a couple years ago. The Luminous game engine demo they showed was showcased at a prior time… It may have been last year’s E3, it might have been earlier, as I believe it was. I know it’s old, because I recognized it as soon as it started playing, and as an industry outsider, it’s impossible for me to have seen it running on the PS4 before tonight. But it was not something that was cooked up to demonstrate the PS4’s power, and I don’t know why they were allowed to claim as much. Unless, of course, when it debuted previously it was running on a PS4, but some how I doubt that. As a result I thought their announcement was pathetic and sad, especially when they then teased a Final Fantasy announcement at E3. As a friend of mine said during the presentation, “If it’s not a FF VII remake, I doubt if I will care.” Square Enix can spend all the money they want on new engines and developing new technologies, but the fact of the matter is they’ve lost their way with the Final Fantasy franchise. They are, like so many newer game developers, are showcasing pretty graphics and perhaps some interesting game play rather than telling a good story through their games. That’s why Final Fantasy 12-14 aren’t doing all that well… They forgot how to tell a story in their games. That’s why everyone wants Final Fantasy 7 to be remade. It was probably their last game that seemed to have heart and soul; the only think it needs is to be updated graphically. Square Enix claims it would be impossible, that it would cost too much to do, and take too much time, yet they want to waste their time on inventing new game engines and claim performance break-throughs that they aren’t actually demonstrating. Frankly, considering they’re sitting on the code to FF VII, I don’t see what the big deal is. Sure, a lot of it would probably need to be reimplemented to take into account the higher memory requirements of the high definition graphics, and yes they could use all sorts of more modern graphical techniques to accomplish some of the things they did in the original, but we’re ultimately not talking about developing a whole new game mechanic. We players were fine and happy with the old school game mechanics, and Square Enix’s own purported technology demonstration shows us that they have the time and techniques to update this classic game. So why not do it? I wish I had an answer. All I can say is that of all the things I saw at this announcement, I was most disappointed by their segment.

So…  That’s where I stand on things. The PS4’s hardware, at least as announced, isn’t exactly mind blowing, but I concede and acknowledge why they’ve taken the direction that they did. I’m more curious than ever about Quantic Dream’s Beyond, and although I knew that Killzone would eventually be represented on the PS4, I was fully expecting it to be a version of Killzone: Mercenary, not a completely new title. I nearly peed my pants when I saw Shadow Fall. I’m not kidding. But the one thing that was missing that I really, really, really wish had been present was an announcement from Insomniac Games stating that the Resistance franchise would be present on the new console.

The Resistance series really didn’t get the recognition it deserved. As one of the PS3 launch titles, it (Resistance: Fall of Man) was frequently compared to Gears of War, which it really shouldn’t have been. Yes, it was the launch shooter game just like Gears was, but it was a first person shooter versus a third person shooter, set in the past rather than the future on some unknown planet, and had a really deep storyline. And the multiplayer on all three games, though different in each case, was amazing in each case. I still love playing the first one and dropping air-gas grenades on my friends. I absolutely love the teamwork based co-op on Resistance 2 that involved several basic missions spruced up randomly by changing starting locations, events, and objectives. And the competitive multiplayer in R2 was exceeded only by M.A.G. (by the now defunct Zipper) in terms of simultaneous players! Resistance 3‘s story and multiplayer modes were even more fun, frankly, though the game definitely seemed to be Insomniac’s way of saying goodbye to the franchise… The end of the game seemed to say it all, and sadly I don’t foresee a new entry to the franchise on the PS4, but I strongly urge Sony and Insomniac to reconsider!

Similarly, since I mentioned M.A.G., I fear that it will not see a follow-up, nor will we see a new SOCOM on this generation now that Sony has closed the studio formerly known as Zipper. M.A.G. was flawed, big time, but it was and is a fun game. I think the concept is great, but I think it never got the polish it really needed, though Zipper was working towards accomplishing it. I think it’s sad, however, that the M.A.G. website and apparently development went quiet once SOCOM 4 got announced. Those the game is still playable, and I fully intend to pick-up my 2+:1 KDR as a sniper at some point, the game is practically abandoned. It’s parent is no more, and Sony doesn’t seem the least bit interested in continuing it. And once Unit 13 was shipped out the door for the Vita, the future of the SOCOM franchise became uncertain as Zipper was promptly dissolved. Will we see these games revived on the PS4 at some point? Seven years is a long time, so maybe we will see it happen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath…

Finally, as far as wishful thinking goes, I want a sequel to Heavenly Sword on PS4. As nice as God of War is, I don’t want another God of War game. I want to breathe new life into Heavenly Sword, another PS3 launch title that has long since been dormant. There’s no reason that Noriko should continue to be ignored; the game was beautiful, the game play was beautiful, and the story was amazing. I would sell my car today to pre-order the PS4 if I knew that a new Heavenly Sword game was coming, But alas…

So, there you have it. Everything that’s on my mind regarding the PS4, the next Xbox, a few kick ass games, the laments and concerns I have for a few franchises,  and one brain dead presentation. Take it as you will, and discuss freely.