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.

"Offline?" What's That?

Man ever since +Google+ introduced the new Hangouts app, I've never seen so much whining about a paradigm that no longer is relevant.  People just can't seem to move on, get past it, and wake up to the year 2013!

What am I talking about?  The old "online/offline" thing.  Here's the situation: in Google Talk there was a little dot indicator to show you someone's status.  Green meant online, orange meant away, and red meant offline.  In Google Hangouts, the app that replaces Talk, that indicator is no longer there...and people are freaking the hell out.  If you doubt me, allow me to share a few choice comments I've snagged from the Google+ Discuss community and a few from the comments in the posts of the peanut butter powered CM of Hangouts, +Dori Storbeck:

• "I want to see who is online... not second guess if they are or not." 
• "On desktop at least we have "green" for online people, but yeah I'd hope that basic features like "green" and "orange" would be on mobile as well."
• "Any chance you can add the ability to change status (Busy/Online/Away) in Hangouts? There is a bug (maybe a feature?) where if I use Hangouts strictly, people who are using Gtalk view me as offline."
• "hate that my contacts are no longer grouped online. I used to see friends online and just say hello. Now I have to search for individuals. Not crazy about the Gtalk replacement."
• "I WANT to see who is online..  ...... I don't want to look in Gmail to see my list of people"
• "It does matter who's online and offline.  If i want to contact someone offline, I'll send them an sms.  Sometimes I go offline so I don't have to receive IM's.  I don't want to come back online with a bunch of IM's waiting for me."
• "I don't need to chat with people who are offline.  I don't want to see a long, convoluted list.  I just want to see those of my contacts who are online, plain and simple."

I could probably go on, but I think I've made my point.  Bottom line is that people don't want this to change, but here's the thing: the way we use the internet has changed enough so that this very simply doesn't matter anymore.  

Think back to when Instant Messaging first came about and really got pushed into the limelight.  E-mail was the best way of getting in contact with people that were far away, long distance calling was expensive, but with IM you could have a conversation with anyone on the globe if they used the same IM service you did and were in front of their computer.  That last bit was the most important; they had to be in front of their computer and they had to be online (remember that dial-up was the standard back then, and people usually only connected when they had to).  Back then, you needed an indicator telling you what their status was.

Now let's fast forward to today.  Broadband internet is the standard; our computers are always online.  We carry around internet connected phones that are more powerful than the computers we used when we first sent men to the freaking moon.  You can have a live video conversation with someone on the other side of the world and it costs you just as much as it would if you were in a video call with your next door neighbor - and that cost is normally free.  Quick question for you, dear readers: are you ever actually offline?  Think about it.  You might not be sitting at your computer 24/7, but I'm willing to wager that your lovely internet-connected smartphone isn't more than 10 feet away from you right now.  Hell, for the majority of you it's very likely either in arms reach or you're reading this very article on one right now.

Online/offline is a bygone product of an internet era that is over, and has been for a long time.  You don't need to know if a person has their cell phone in their hand before you send them a text message, so why in the world would it matter for an instant message?  The world has changed.  The way we use the internet has changed.  I'd suggest that you all change with it.

The Next Xbox - What I'd Like To See

Earlier this morning we broke the news on +Geeks of the Round that Microsoft would be revealing its 8th gen console next month on May 21st.  Rumors have been flying all over the damned place about it, getting particularly heated after Sony revealed some details on the upcoming PlayStation 4.

Some of the rumors are good, and others are freaking horrible.  I'm sure most of you have heard the one about requiring an internet connection to function, which would probably be the stupidest fucking thing they could ever do.  Seriously, they go that route and they may as well just hand over the 8th generation to Sony (who said very specifically that they would not be doing that).

We'll be getting some much-needed details soon enough, but for now I just wanted talk about some things I'd really like to see in the next Xbox (whatever they end up calling it).

• Less Hardware Issues - Let's face it; the 360 was a damned trainwreck when it launched back in 2005.  The Red Ring of Death is something that still plagues the system to this day, but not as badly as it was back then when it had a fucking insane 30% failure rate.  That seriously cannot happen again; people will be far less forgiving if the same thing happens two generations in a row.  Fix that shit!

• More Real Exclusives - Let's be real here: the 360 sucks at exclusives.  Don't get me wrong here; games like Alan Wake, Gears of War, and the Halo series are fantastic, but most of the 360's bread and butter has been multiplatform titles like Assassin's Creed and all the Call Of Duty games.  Meanwhile Sony has been taking risks and gave us awesome exclusives like inFamous, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, LittleBIGPlanet, Resistance, Killzone, White Knight Chronicles, God of War - the list goes on.  Microsoft needs to get on the ball and and get their game studios working on content that simply cannot be found anywhere else.  If your best games I can just as easily play on Sony's console or my PC, what the hell do I need your console for?

• Seriously, Don't Require Online - This has been the rumor that has been killing their momentum for pretty much every gamer who's looking forward to buying a next gen console (sorry Wii U, but you don't count).  There are still people in lots of places around the world, even here in the U.S., that don't have access to consistent high-speed internet.  I know soldiers that take their 360s with them when they're on deployment so that they can play some Madden when they're off duty.  By requiring the console to be online at all times, you've totally eliminated all of these people from wanting to own your console.  This is stupid.  Don't fucking do it.

• Larger Storage Format For Games - Back in the early 2000s, DVD was a perfectly acceptable storage format.  It was fairly large, scalable to a degree, and was enough for most games at the time.  By the end of the 6th generation we were starting to see games that came on two DVDs, so clearly something larger was needed.  Sony's answer to this was the Blu-Ray format used in the PS3, which had more than five times the storage of DVDs.  Microsoft's answer was...to do DVD again.  What the fuck were you thinking!? This idiotic move single-handedly held back multi-platform 7th gen games because developers were unable to take real advantage of Blu-Ray's storage capacity to avoid alienating 360 gamers.  Games that were two disks on the 360 quite easily fit onto one of PS3's Blu-Rays with room to spare!  Don't do this shit again, Microsoft.  Swallow your pride and put a damned Blu-Ray drive in your next console.

What do you all want to see in the next Xbox?  Let me know in the comments below and we'll find out details on what we can expect next month!

Yay For Google+ Comments!

Google Plus and the Blogger platform finally come together in the absolutely perfect way, not only easily allowing G+ accounts to comment on Blogger posts without those annoying Captcha things, but also putting any public post that links back to your blog post in the comments as well which allows you to monitor all conversations about your post in one place.

Fantastic idea!  Might actually start blogging a bit more often now...no promises though, so your best bet remains to follow me on Google+.

Best. Voicemail. Ever.

You all know how I do; you send 'em, I post 'em.  This is probably the most epic one ever.

Yet Another Weird Voicemail!

Judging from the phone number, this is a local.  Wrong number maybe?  But the message is pretty funny, at least to me.  Take a listen!

So confused.

So, last night this happened.