Be Excellent To Each Other

I liked the Gamecube. But Sega really designed the best looking consoles. The 1st Master System (the red and black one) is a beauty and the Megadrive is the coolest looking of all time. Only the Saturn was a bit tame.

Not particularly relevant but I liked this comparison of the PS3 Slim vs other consoles to see the change in modern console designs.

Gamecube = prettiest console. Fact.

I think I may have been a bit hasty earlier.. Yeah, the Gamecube is pretty nice AND it has a handle! What other console has a handle built in? I can't think of any.

I don't really care what they look like tbh. As long as they're quiet and they fit in my tv bench they can look like Craster.

All handhelds?

HER: Oh, lets play double dash!
HIM: PLEASE WAIT WHILST I POP THIS TINIE TINY DISK IN
EVERYONE: AAAAAAWWWWW!! Look at it!

BRUUUUUUUUUMMM!

Never beaten.

Mine is purple.

And the GameCub...etc

The Wii is pretty nice, too.

I'll fit in your TV bench and keep you entertained, Z.

I'm not terribly quiet though.

I like the look of PS4. But then I liked the look of PS2, too. God, I remember buying T3 when they had a Steve Jarratt preview of it. Those two look like cool bits of hi-fi, so it's fine with me.

But yeah, GC looked awesome. I was telling someone at work how much I like the pad for that one, and its green 'do stuff' button.

I'm sure you would.

*looks for cleaver*

Taken from somewhere else but i really dont think they understand what they are doing

This is a pre-presentation interview with Don Mattrick

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/silm ... y--stream-

The corporate shill, Doritos Pope guy basically asked "what do you think about peoples reactions?"

Marrick replied: "we've innovated for appropriate scenarios moving forward"

Ding-ding-ding we have a boardroom speak winner.

Priceless.

Jesus, Geoff guy is the worse games journo in the world (and hence very successfully). You get a chance to actually do journalism, something he's stated his wish for, and he does none whatsoever.

Look at the heights you've reached by being a corp's media outreach tool.

Sharp intake of breath at how willingly EA threw MS under a bus there.

It's a Computer Game of Thrones.

*sits by phone and waits for BBC radio 4 comedy dept to ring*

*golfclap*

Then I guess

(spoilers for GoT 3x09)

Dammit, I've forgotten how to POTW on the normal site. To the batphone!

Story is spreading -- Engadget have it: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/12/don- ... 0-offline/

Great header pic on that story.

Spreading? What? From what I can read engadget haven't even mentioned my amazing joke.

*wipes dust from silent phone*

The Doritos Pope isn't really a journalist. He's a cheerleader for hire.

Aye, I wonder if he really thinks he is anything else? You've got to be concerned you are doing something wrong when MS are actually willing to give you an interview (and whats the bet he's paid for his services).

In fact thats the big problem with gaming, there are so many people who would love to be 'games journalist' that their are too many willing to work for free, or free stuff, or to pander to ensure further attention.

Where's the Paxman of gaming?

Just going back to the thing about party chat on PS4 - obviously I've got no idea whether they are implementing anything like that, but there is a Group Chat function built in to the Vita, so I'd imagine they'd put something similar in to the PS4.

As for this whole DRM debacle - when I moved in to the flat I'm living in now, it took nearly two months to get ADSL installed and that was after calling round about 4 different ISPs. Just no engineers in the area to do it, apparently, even though no actual physical engineer ever showed up - the ISP I went with just sent me a router and it worked when I plugged it in. But that two months would've been time I wouldn't be able to play on my shiny XBone. As it was, the offline mode on Steam crapped out after a while, so I had to go a few weeks without that.

As an aside, I was tethering my phone to my PC at the time, so I could still go online for basic internetting, but Steam would not authenticate going through mobile data (on O2). What's to say MS's solution would be any different?

Edit: besides which, being told what you can and cannot do with an item you have purchased is a basic infringement of statutory rights, isn't it? It's alarming how many people I've seen online who seem to think "well, it's not that bad, my Internet never goes down, it won't affect me!" It's bullshit, and we shouldn't put up with it.

I've spent this last week playing Megadrive games with the missus - turns out she's a dab hand at Streets Of Rage 2. That console is nearly 25 years old. Would Microsoft's XBone authentication servers still be running by then? Would they fuck.

Statutory rights aren't all that detailed (or up to date with things such as digital rights) and certainly aren't consistent around the world, although ours are harmonised by the EU (and noted that the EU cases mentioned above). However, when you agree to a license agreement you waive a lot of them, in theory.

What I think will be interesting is that prevailing practice for this, and any previous generation of games is that you could sell them. Sale of Goods requires full disclosure so that you have a reasonable expectation of what you are buying and the limitations - therefore any shop is going to have to add some serious advertising saying that the games can't be resold so that purchasers (say, parents in the christmas rush) aren't felt to be misled when they buy games in anticipation that they can be resold based on that experience previously. Shit written on forums and in magazine articles isn't going to stand up in court in defence if anyone challenges this.

Note also - it is not Microsoft that gets sued under sale of goods act - it is the retailer.

Microsoft attempt to clarify their ideas for Xbone: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/m ... e-policies

Thinking about it, maybe Microsoft's entire fault here was to keep a disc option for what is clearly meant to be a digital platform. Without the discs there would have been no licensing confusion. It wouldn't even have had to have any always online requirements.

One interesting point in the article is made in the sidebar. It seem that the idea of 10 friends going together and sharing games might actually work, the only limit being not being able to play the same game at the same time. That could make sense if Microsoft is going to focuse on multiplayer experiences even more than they already have. Here in Spain there are basically two kinds of Xbox 360 owners: Those who play CoD multiplayer exclusively, and those who hack the console and play for free. Only nerds like myself actually buy and play single player games.

No you don't. A contract (and an EULA isn't even that strong) can't be used to waive statutory rights.

At least that used to be the case in the UK and I don't remember being extraordinarily angry about a change - and I would have been extraordinarily angry.

I wrote that badly. What I meant to say is that you restrict yourself when you accept a license, not waive rights. But the rights remain somewhat limited in scope.

Indeed, this is interesting timing. Sale of goods act and all other statutory rights are to be scrapped and replaced with an enhanced 'consumer rights' bill that was published today. The headlines are:

"Under the draft Bill consumers will have the right to:

•get some money back after one failed repair of faulty goods (or one faulty replacement)
•demand that substandard services are redone or failing that get a price reduction
•get a repair or a replacement of faulty digital content such as film and music downloads, online games and e-books.
"

There's Rock Paper Shotgun, even though it's not as good as it used to be. Too many news, not many features.

Which doesn't affect first sale doctrine but it would nice if it mentioned it.

Still, good to have consumer protections for software which have always been excluded from SoGA protection. Shame about the other stiffing assuming its still there -the previous attempt wanted to harmonise way down from UK spec.

Edit: MORONS differentiating digital on disk and downloaded.

They can't ditch the physical discs though because they'd be committing all their customers to massive multi-GB downloads every time they bought a game. Even if you accept that all their customers have a reliable internet connection that can be used for frequent phoning home (which isn't true) not everyone can afford or wants uncapped internet connections that would allow such massive downloads. Also, depending on the speed of your connection, such downloads could take days so they'd likely be losing people on a number of fronts if they went fully digital. This way they can lose loads of customers for completely different reasons.

You've pretty much nailed it there.

I wonder how this would have panned out if they'd dropped discs altogether.

I did think yesterday that if you'd actually planned the Xbone strategy from the outset, rather than what seems like a cobbled together set of circumstances developed over time with no 'big picture' view, you'd actually sell the games as demo discs for a nominal amount, and have them all subject to activation at a cost.

Telegraph (note, not a nerdy news venue) interview with Phil Harrison

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/v ... extra.html



Pretty sure the PS4 brings down my choices and recommendations and downloads stuff in the background too, Phil. And I'll never have to tether it to my phone to play a game.

Note: when Harrison worked at Sony, it was him who described rumble as a "last gen feature" when the PS3 launched.

That cunt has obviously never lived at the end of an exchange line.

or in the real world

THE POWER OF THE CLOUD COMPELS YOU

When did he change sides? I was thinking PH was a PS man.

He was. He moved to Microsoft a while ago. While at Sony, he famously declared rumble to be a 'last gen feature' and said touchscreens wouldn't take off. You can see why Microsoft snapped him up.

J Allard! That's who the XB dude used to be. And good old Ken Kutaragi in charge of Japanese PS. That's my era. Anything after that is a blur.

It took me ages to recall XTREME J ALLARD's name after his fat doppelganger was on the Xbox TVTVTVSPORTSTV thing.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/m ... -policies/



"We don't care that we've pissed you guys off, the world is full of stupid people who'll buy an Xbone because they won't notice the shit we've built into it."

Microsoft have also announced the 21 countries that will get the Xbox One at launch. Apparently, it seems the DRM won't work if you import a console from another country (so we've gone from region locked games to region locked consoles!). Poland, where CD Projekt Red is based, isn't on the list. So the Poles can make The Witcher 3 -- which was featured at Microsoft's E3 address -- but they can't play it.

Staggering.

Deary me. The Last Of Us now outselling the Xbox One at Amazon UK.

More importantly... Animal Crossing!

It is worth keeping in mind that whilst, at the moment, Sony are so far ahead they are a small dot in the distance, they don't have a track record of being nice for the sake of it.

They simply could not have pulled the online authentication route even if they had wanted to (unless they were stupid) given how recently PSN was down for ages. It would have been an own goal way larger than that of MS.

Also, don't they have history of removing stuff from consoles via updates? And these updates taking forever? I seem to recall anger at them closing some loopholes that people were already using for stuff. Sorry to be vague, I wasn't paying much attention.

In short, I remember a year or two back everyone thought that Sony would be dying right now due to their business decisions and poor infrastructure. Just because MS are now the bigger asshats, let us not forget Sony are not angels.

That said, I'm 99% on Team Sony right now.

Sony removed the OtherOS feature that allowed you to boot Linux because some hacker figured out a theoretical exploit for it that would have allowed pirated games (although they were only trying to work out how to do homebrew). This was a dick move, in my opinion, although it only actually mattered to the six of us that ever installed Linux on their PS3 so ultimately not much fuss was made.

Patches take forever on the PS3, yes. It's been confirmed this is mostly fixed on the PS4 via background downloading when it's in standby.