Gamescom 2013 Is One Week Away!

On Wednesday August 21st 2013, the annual Gamesom convention will kick off in Cologne, Germany, but the press events will happen a bit earlier.  Sony's press event will be on the preceding day at 8am PDT, which you can watch on PlayStation Home or at the Gamescom page on Sony's site.  Microsoft will also be holding theirs a day early, but I haven't been able to confirm if there will be a livestream of it (if you find one, feel free to let me know!).

Yesterday I recorded a DeAno's Perspective video that outlined some of my thoughts going into this, which I've embedded for you below.

 

We should see a more information on both announced and unannounced games at the event as the battle for your eighth generation dollars heats up.  I said in my video that I didn't really care about Nintendo, and I still don't (let's be honest - they're not in this fight), but I'm hoping to see some positive news from them as well.  At this point, though, it'd pretty much take a Wii U2 to get my attention.  As far as Microsoft and Sony are concerned it's anyone's ballgame, so let's see how this all plays out!

Family Sharing Is Nothing To Cry Over Missing: It Wasn't What You Thought It Was

I fucking knew it.

I'm presuming that most of you, either through a previous post of mine or some other method on the Net, know that Microsoft took off all the DRM and online checks that the Xbox One was set to have.

Most gamers were happy about this, but there's also quite a few that were excited about many of the features the XB1 would support that it now doesn't/can't.  Some are rather benign like not needing to put in a disk for games (buy the digital version: problem solved), but one rather substantial feature the upcoming console would no longer support is Family Sharing.

As most gamers understood it, this feature allowed you to have ten different people on a special list and everyone on that list would have access to all the games you'd buy via a shared games library.  Anyone could play it at any time and when they were done someone else could have a go.

XB1 gamers were already assembling their ten players and planning who was going to buy what game so that all of them would be able to play everything, but I had serious doubts about this feature.  There was simply no way in hell publishers would go for it; I knew there just had to be a caveat.

There was.  A Microsoft employee laid it out via a blog entry in which he bemoaned the fact that this wouldn't get to happen.  I'll quote the relevant section for you below:

"First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy.  The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library.  Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world.  There was never any catch to that, they didn't have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone.  When your family member accesses any of your games, they're placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour.  This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to.  *When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game."

Did you get that?  Family Sharing was nothing more than a glorified demo, like the full game trials that PlayStation Plus does all the time.  Ten of your friends wouldn't just be able to play the full game from across the country - they'd get at best an hour of game time before having to buy it for themselves.  Just like the PS+ Full Game trials, your progress would be saved along the way and if you chose to buy the game you'd pick up from where you left off - that's the only benefit this had over a regular demo.

I know some of you were looking forward to the features of the XB1, but I'm happy they went ahead and made the changes now.  Can you imagine the shitstorm had the details of Family Sharing come to light when that feature was still on the table and people were using it as a selling point for the console?  Or worse yet - no one found out about the details until after the launch?  It would have been an unmitigated disaster!  So just sit back and relax knowing that you didn't miss out on some game changing feature; it worked out better this way, Xbox gamers.

Question time: Are you going to get a next-gen console this year?  If so, which and why?  Hit up them comments and let me know!

Does Backwards Compatibility Really Matter?

The 8th generation is here!  So far we've had the pre-E3 announcements for both Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One (the Wii U is NOT an 8th generation console - no amount of angry comments will change that, so get over it).  There's still much we don't know about either console that I expect we'll have to wait for E3 to discover, but something we know right here and now is that neither console will support games from their respective predecessors.  Indeed, no backwards compatibility whatsoever seem to be in the cards here, and I've seen some people that are really not particularly happy over it.

My question (in case you somehow missed the title of this article) is does it really matter?  It's easy to say, "Hell yeah it matters DeAno; are you fucking stupid," but really think about it, and be honest.  How many Gamecube games did you play on your Wii?  Wait, that wasn't a fair question; if you're reading this blog I very seriously doubt you bought a Wii unless you have kids.  Let me try again.  For you launch model PS3 owners, exactly how often did you play PS2 games?  Play many PSOne games on either your PS3s or PS2s?

If you're anything like me the answer is yes...for that first year.  The previous consoles were still supported and had a great library while the current gen system really didn't have all that much going for it.  Past that first year, though?  Please.  Sure there are a few stalworth classics that were fun to have another go at, but by and large I was buying current generation games for my current generation console, and so were you.

Don't get me wrong, here.  Backwards compatibility is a cool thing to have.  I remember when it was announced that the PS2 would be able to play PSOne games; that shit blew my mind!  Sure we'd seen that happen before on Nintendo's handheld consoles, but for a main living room gaming console, it was a huge deal.  That and the fact that it could play DVD movies out of the box killed the Dreamcast in less time than it took for you to finish reading this sentence.  It sold more consoles than any other console in gaming history.  It was a game changer!

What would have happened if it couldn't play PSOne games?  Pretty much the same thing.  Even without being able to play PSOne games in addition to the CDs, DVDs, and of course PS2 games that it could play, people would have still bought the shit out of it.  While being able to play past games was very cool, people bought it to play the new games.  I know that's why I bought it.  Even when it came time to upgrade to the PS3 the biggest factor that played a role in the purchase was the expandable hard drive and the multimedia functions (and of course the fact that it played PS3 games).  I don't buy a new console to play old games.

I'm getting off topic.  This entire blog post started as me asking a very simple question on my Google+ page and went out of control from there, so let's get back to that.  Is this really an issue that you care about and if so, why?  Let me know in the comments; I'm really interested to know what you think!

The Xbox One Has Been Revealed, But Where Are The Games?

Note: This is a rant.  For those unfamiliar with my rants, I tend to cuss a lot.  You've been warned.

After all the rumors and speculation, today Microsoft finally showcased their newest console at a press event in Redmond, the Xbox One.  It has responsive voice commands, plays live TV, multitasks kinda like Windows 8's split-screen feature works, and there's some fantasy football shit and some other kinda TV bullshit and a fucking Halo TV series and you can Skype people (yay, it can finally do what my cell phone has been able to do for the past 4 fucking years; I'll plan the parade).

Don't get me wrong here; I liked a lot of what I saw.  It was damned cool!  The new Xbox has a lot of very impressive features...except for apparently the ability to play fucking games.  Did any of you watch the press event?  I counted; it was 28 fucking minutes before they even started talking about games.  They brought EA studios on stage to talk about their games, and they pretty much played a sizzle reel with a bunch of CG bullshit, and then it was on to talking about a Halo TV show (but not a game, why would they be talking about a game?) that apparently Steven Spielberg is involved with but didn't care enough to actually show up at the fucking event.

Then they started talking about the fantasy football shit, and just when I thought that they might show me something, they began to wrap up the show!  I was getting really upset at this point (I'll explain why in a bit), when they finally started talking about showing a game!  Just when I was getting my hopes up, they said the words Call of Duty.  I disconnected the livestream right then and there.

A couple of months back Sony revealed the PlayStation 4 and took a lot of grief for not showing what the console looked like.  Their argument was that what it looked like wasn't important; they showed the controller (the part of the console you'll spend 99% of your time interacting with) and they showed what it can do.  "That," they argued, "is what matters to gamers."  They were fucking right.  Here, look at this:

That's the Xbox One.  It's a fucking box with a slot in it so you can put a Blu-Ray into it.  Would you have rather known that or did you maybe want to see some of the fucking games that this games console can play?  During Sony's PS4 reveal, they showed off the features of the controller, they showed off the new interface, and they showed us actual games running the fucking console.  Meanwhile, hey at least we know that I can watch How I Met Your Mother live on the Xbox One...just like I can on the shit I already have.

Microsoft has a real chance to get me this generation, but unless they straight-up blow the doors off the place at E3, Sony is getting my money next generation.  At least they still know that at the end of the day, it's all about the games.