"Sony Didn't Reveal the PS4 Console!"

It seems that the gaming press has their knives out for Sony after the PS4 announcement. One of the big complaints is, "Sony didn't show us the PS4 console! Sure, they showed us what it can do, but we still don't know what the system itself looks like! Therefore, Sony didn't reveal the PS4, Microsoft is going to win the next generation automatically, and Sarah Palin is automatically the president." I'm really annoyed by this complaint for several reasons.

First of all, the part that you will be interacting with the most frequently is the controller. You're going to be handling it almost exclusively. That's the most important piece of equipment that you need to worry about. They showed that.

Next, you're going to want to know what the system can do in terms of power and graphics, as well as social aspects. They showed that.

If you want to know how the PS4 console itself is going to look, I have a world-exclusive description. Hold on to your butts, it's about to get real in here:

• It will be black.
• It will be a box that's about the same size as the PS3.
• It will have a slot to put in a disc.
• It will have a power plug.
• It will have USB ports.
• It will have an HDMI port.
• It will have a clear plastic panel through which you can be mezmerized by a still-beating unicorn heart that beats faster the harder the system is working(unconfirmed).

There you go! Hope I didn't blow your minds too hard.

I understand that there's a little bit of annoyance. "They said they were going to reveal the PS4, and all they showed was the controller." I get that, I do. I'm curious to see how the console proper is going to look myself. That doesn't mean that it was a bad presentation, though, since they showed off all of the important stuff.

Why The Relative Power of the Wii U Isn't A Big Deal

A quick look at the differences between the Wii U's specs and the PS4's specs shows something that's been hinted at for a while: The Wii U is going to be way behind the next generation of hardware. Even just the processor and RAM tells the story:

Wii U's CPU: Three cores
PS4's CPU: Eight cores

Wii U's RAM: 2 GB (1 GB usable for games)
PS4's RAM: 8 GB (almost all of it usable by games)

So this means the Wii U is doomed, right? Well, slow your roll. It certainly means that the Wii U isn't going to get the hot third-party releases as the console's life span rolls on, but that doesn't necessarily mean a gloom-and-doom outlook for the system in general.

In the past, we've talked about how Nintendo doesn't need the third parties as much as, say, Microsoft does. That only tells part of the story, though.

Sony has some great franchises. Let's list their most popular ones as well as what genre they belong to.

• God of War: Action/Adventure
• Gran Turismo: Racing Sim
• InFamous: Action/Adventure
• Jak and Daxter: Action/Adventure/Platformer
• KillZone: Action/Shooter
• Little Big Planet: Platformer/Builder
• PlayStation All-Stars: Fighting
• Ratchet and Clank: Action/Adventure/Platformer
• Resistance: Action/Shooter
• Sly Cooper: Action/Adventure/Stealth/Platformer
• Twisted Metal: Battle Racing
• Uncharted: Action/Adventure
• WipEout: Speed Racing

I'm sure you see a bit of a pattern. They have a lot of action/adventure franchises and a few racing franchises under their belt. There's not a lot of diversity.

Before I get angry commenters, I want to stress: Sony makes games other than these. They have other minor franchises. And yes, these are almost all really good franchises. I personally like almost all of them. The point has nothing to do with the quality, but rather that their main draws aren't very diverse.

Compare this to Nintendo's main franchises:

• Animal Crossing: Social Sim
• Brain Age: Brain Training
• Fire Emblem: Tactical RPG
• FZero: Speed Racing
• Kirby: Platformer
• Mario: Platformer
• Mario Kart: Cartoon Racing
• Mario Party: Party Game
• Metroid: Action/Adventure
• Pikmin: Strategy
• Pokemon: RPG-Lite
• Punch-Out: Boxing
• Smash Bros: Fighting
• Zelda: Action/Adventure

Not only does Nintendo make all of their own games in-house, they have a diverse roster. You personally may hate Mario and Zelda games, but there's bound to be one or two of those franchises that you love.

That's where Nintendo gets you. Somewhere along the way, they'll rope you in to one of those crazy franchises despite your better judgment. You'll be like, "I know Animal Crossing is silly and that Tom Nook is a slavedriver, and yet..." Next thing you know, you're down a K-hole of catching fish, digging up fossils and rearranging your house from which is there is no escape.

That's why the power of Nintendo's system isn't as huge of a deal as it should be. Nintendo's systems only need to be powerful enough to handle their own franchises. If a Nintendo system can't play the latest Duty Honor: Hero's Call of Medal, it's not that big of a deal, since other systems have a bigger problem: They can't play Mario.

NES Replay: Alien3

Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: LJN
Released: 1992
Can Anyone Hear You Scream?: Yes, because
you're not in space so please stop screaming

In NES Replay, we play every Nintendo game from A-Z and see if they're any good. This week: Alien3.

Alien3 could have been so much better. That goes for both the movie and the game.

Quick history lesson: Alien3's original teaser trailer made it look like it was going to be about an alien invasion of Earth. The script went through various rewrites and studio retooling, and then after the movie was finished they recut it without the director's permission, making the movie a giant mishmash of garbage.

What relevance does this have with the game? None, really. In Alien3, you're infiltrating various installations and rescuing crew members while gunning down xenomorphs. There are a few things that conspire to make the game kind of dull. They're all things that developers have mostly figured out by now, but at the time this was about the best they could have done.
We've talked before about how gaming began in the arcades, and a lot of games made for consoles still kept the same principles that were laid down by the arcades. For example, restraint wasn't a key of arcade games. There were no arcade game makers saying, "Let's amp up the tension by reducing the amount of enemies but increasing their deadliness" or "Let's remove a time limit in order to give the player more time to explore." Arcades were all about getting your money by any means necessary.

OH NO A XENOMORPH I GUESS I WILL
JUST SHOOT IT I GUESS IT WAS NOT
"GAME OVER, MAN"

Alien3 would have benefited from less of an arcade mindset. In Alien3, the xenomorphs are everywhere. They're running around, hiding in ceilings, holding bar mitzvahs, playing poker, starting impromptu dance parties and taking family photos. You would think that having so many around waiting to eat your throat would be scary, but even if they attack you and knock you over, they take away just a tiny sliver from your large life bar. They've turned one of the scarier enemies around into cannon fodder.

Next, you have a time limit on each of the levels. Time limits aren't bad in and of themselves, but for this particular game, it's the wrong choice. Alien3 would have been better served by having the player move slowly and carefully through the installations, but with the time limit on the levels that's not a possibility.

The time limit combined with your enormous health bar leads to some hilarious moments. For example, there are some times where you have to go down long shafts while landing on platforms in the shaft. Your character takes fall damage, but not much. Why carefully jump down the platforms and waste all that time when you can just fall from the top, land face-first, lose a tiny bit off of your health bar and keep going? Every time I made my grizzled space marine belly-flop on the floor, I giggled. That's probably not the mood that the developers were aiming for.

Now, I know that lighting effects and other mood-enhancing effects were unavailable to developers on the NES. I get that. However, Metroid created a mood of isolation and fear several years before Alien3, and that was with lesser technology. If the developers would have really applied themselves, they could maybe have made a game worthy of the brand. As we know, though, licensed games were never really made with a high level of quality in mind.

Alien3 plays decent, though, assuming you're looking for a run-and-gun shooter and not a game that feels like, you know, "Alien." It's just sad to play, because you wonder what might have been with an application of a few more modern design techniques.

Final Rating:

Next Week: All-Pro Basketball

Sony's PS4 Announcement

The PS4 was announced last night. Here's what we know so far.

The PS4 will not block used games. This is very welcome news, and a wise move by Sony.

After the security problems and early price problems with the PS3, Sony couldn't afford another PR debacle. It wouldn't surprise me if locking out used games was on the table in the early planning stages of the PS4 but got scrapped at some point.

Sony has a distinct advantage over Microsoft, which may have led to this decision: Sony has a rather robust stable of franchises to draw from. Like Nintendo, Sony can control a lot more revenue streams. They still have to rely heavily on third parties, but even if the third parties abandon them, they'll still have franchises like God of War and Uncharted to draw in players.

As we've said before, Microsoft doesn't have this advantage, so they're more beholden to the third parties. Honestly, what franchises does Microsoft have? Halo, Forza Motorsport, and... Kinect Sports? Viva Pinata? Crackdown? Is Crackdown still a thing?

Here's something that wouldn't surprise me in the least: What if Sony started this furor over used games to trick Microsoft into coming up with their own used games "solution?" Microsoft implements their solution, Sony backs out, now Microsoft has to either forge ahead with it or hastily scrap it. Since Microsoft leans on the third parties to prop up their library, they may not be able to back out.

If that was Sony's plan all along, that's positively delicious.

It appears that the PS4 will be x86-based. For the uninitiated, that means that the PS4 will be, more or less, like any other computer out there, like the 360 and the Wii U. I mean, not exactly, because there's a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes that I don't understand, but closer in architecture to a typical PC.

This is absolutely huge for developers. The backstory: The PS2 had kind of a weird architecture that offloaded instructions to the PS1 chip, but people still developed for it because it was popular. The PS3 used the Cell architecture which was a gigantic mess. For example, Bethesda refused to put out their Skyrim DLC on the PS3 for the longest time because it was so hard to develop for the PS3. Valve avoided patching up The Orange Box because they hated the PS3.

By switching to the x86 architecture, that means that the PS4 is going to be easier to make games for, leading to better ports and better utilization of the raw power of the system itself. We never got to see how powerful the PS3 really was because of the screwed-up architecture, so this is really exciting.

The controller has a touchscreen. Meh. It seems like it'll get used more like a cosmetic thing than anything else. Either Sony needed to go big, like Nintendo did with the GamePad, or ignore the touchscreen entirely.

The PS4 will support Remote Play with the Vita.

The PS4 will not have downwards compatibility, but will instead stream PS1, PS2 and PS3 games using Gaikai.

That's a tough one to judge. On the one hand, kudos to Sony for hopefully coming up with a solution for a tough problem. This should help keep the price of the system low, since they don't have to implement the PS3's messed-up Cell architecture on the PS4 or try and hack in a software fix for PS2 and PS1 games.

One the other several hands, here are some questions that need to be answered:

1. If I have the disc of a PS2 game, does that mean I have to buy the game again using Gaikai?
2. Do I have to pay a subscription fee for this service?
3. Will every game in their library be represented? That sounds almost impossible.
4. How well will Gaikai work in a real-world situation?

Finally, we don't know how the PS4 will look yet. They didn't show us that, weirdly enough. They also didn't tell us any prices, which wasn't unexpected but still annoying. Rumors place the system at about $429, but that's very unconfirmed.

However, based on this little information that we have, we're raising the ceiling of the PS4. The ceiling is now at Wii/PS2 levels and the basement is at PS3 levels, which were mighty respectable.

Wii U and Vita Have Poor Sales

The Wii U had an abysmal January, only selling 50,000 units in the US. The Vita did even worse, possibly only selling around 35,000 units in the US. One of these systems will survive. One of them won't.

There's a brief window at the beginning of a console's life cycle, after the launch, that the purchasers end their initial honeymoon with the console, look around and ask, "OK, so now what?" If the console has a steady stream of games on the way, the purchasers continue onwards happily. If there isn't, a bit of a rebellion starts to form.

Let's look back at the 3DS. The 3DS launched with a crappy original lineup, and afterwards the cupboard was bare for months. The best game from the original launch was Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, and it remained the best game on the system for months afterwards. Nintendo had to respond by dropping the price on the unit and offering early adopters free games to mollify them.

With time the games came in, and the 3DS now has a surprisingly robust lineup, with plenty on the way. Of course, now the 3DS sells well and the early hand-wringing over whether or not a system with glasses-free 3D would work is mostly gone.

The PS2 experienced something similar back in the day. If you'll remember, the launch lineup for the PS2 wasn't very good,. There were just a few games: Tekken Tag Tournament, Fantavision, and a few other middling games. However, two things propped up the system: 1) Downwards compatibility and 2) The ability to play DVDs, since DVD players were pretty expensive at the time. That led to people buying the system because it was a cheap DVD player and they could still play their PS1 games on it. After that, the games started coming in and the PS2 sold like wildfire, becoming arguably the best system of that generation.

All right, so the Wii U has underwhelming sales right now. That's because so far there are only about two or three really good games for it. There's no hype about anything new coming out. After some initial excitement, everything appears quiet.

However, if there's one thing Nintendo knows how to do, it's make games that sell systems. They just need two or three exciting titles to turn this around. In a year or so, we might be talking about the Wii U's robust library of great games in the same way that we talk about the 3DS. It's still early in the Wii U's lifespan, so there's plenty of time to turn it around, build excitement, and continue onward.

The Vita doesn't have that luxury, though. The initial excitement over the spectacular quality of the hardware has died down. (And make no mistake, the Vita is a great machine.) They just dropped the price in Japan, usually a hotbed of portable gaming.

Most importantly, though, the release schedule for the Vita is empty. What's on the horizon for Vita purchasers? Best case scenario, a few games tossed in its direction that will be middling-to-good with a couple of great ones. Worst case scenario, lazy ports of Madden.

The ceiling for both of these systems has been lowered somewhat. The Wii U isn't going to trounce the competition like the Wii did, but it can hope for performance like the 360 and PS3 this generation: Solid systems that did good business and turned a profit. The basement is still the same: Something comparable to the Nintendo 64, a good system that tried some new things and wasn't as good as you remember it.

With the Vita, the ceiling has been lowered drastically. The best that it can hope for is something akin to half the sales as the PSP. The basement? Not as bad as the Nokia N-Gage, which sold only three million units worldwide. Still, with only about five million units for the Vita, it's not far behind.

NES Replay: Alien Syndrome

Developer: Sega
Publisher: Tengen
Released: 1989
What's the alien's syndrome?: It's SARS.

In NES Replay, we go through each NES game from A-Z to see if they're any good. Today: Alien Syndrome.

When I was playing Alien Syndome, I couldn't help but think, "This seems like it would have been fun to play when it was originally released in arcades." I also thought, "Boy, this game is glitchy."

Thus far, I've really only run into one game that struggled mightily with the emulators I'm using, and that was the execrable Action 52. Alien Syndrome is now another one. With two of the emulators I used, the game got horribly glitchy after the start screen. With the other emulator, I was able to play the first level, but it became glitchy in the second level. Still playable, but glitchy.

That puts us at a bit of an impasse. Was the game glitchy even on the NES proper, or is it just not properly emulated? You could make a case for or against.

I mean, Alien Syndrome is an unlicensed cartridge made by Tengen. That could mean that it maybe wasn't made right in the first place. However, if they used a different programming method that isn't supported by most emulators, it could show up glitchy in emulators but not on the NES itself.

Boy, I wish this space station had some
challenge in it...

There's the rub with emulation. Most of the time it works fine, but when it doesn't work, it's very hard to figure out if the emulator is at fault or the game itself. It could be so many things: A bad ROM dump, an unsupported mapper, emulator quirks, and on and on.

I could sit and dwell on this problem, but Alien Syndrome isn't so good that it'll keep me up at night. You can tell that Alien Syndrome is supposed to be a frantic run-and-gun shooter, where you're working against the clock to rescue your squadmates while aliens slowly overwhelm you unless you're quick with your trigger finger. That's apparently how it was in the arcades, as I understand.

On the NES, it's instead a slow-paced walk through a space station to find your squadmates who happen to be waiting around, totally safe. You can outrun any hostile alien without even trying or kill them with one shot. One wonders why your squadmates didn't just walk out on their own. The timer is incredibly forgiving, as you have ample time to find everyone and get to the exit.

...GAH! And his name is "Hugger"? Is it an
inter-galactic child molester?

That's what makes the end-of-level boss so frustrating. At least on the first level, he (she? it?) is incredibly difficult. It fires two projectiles that can be shot down, then two more that have to be avoided. One hit will kill you. You can't shoot in one direction while walking in another direction, so you're forced to have to stop moving long enough to quickly fire off shots in the bosses' general direction.

Oh, and by the way, the boss has a very small place where you can actually damage it. It's not the head, which would have made sense. There's no glowing or differently-colored area that shows where its weak point is, and there's no sonic clues that you haven't hit it, like a plink or higher pitched noise that would indicate that you've missed. Have fun!

There's a two-player mode in Alien Syndrome. I'm not sure how much fun it would be, since there's nothing for two players to really do. Besides, since it doesn't play nicely on an emulator, that means that you've have to track down an NES Control Deck and a copy of Alien Syndrome in order to try it out, and any friend that would go to such lengths just so you can play Alien Syndrome is no friend of yours.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Alien3

More Next-Gen Worries: Always-On Kinect! No Downwards Compatibility!

The XBox 720 and Playstation 4 keep looking worse and worse.

EA is reporting that it's highly unlikely that the next Microsoft and Sony consoles will be downwards compatible. This goes along with another report that the 720 will require Kinect to be on all the time and games to be installed to the hard drive.

Here's why all three are Bad Ideas.

1) Downwards compatibility is sometimes viewed as an unecessary expense. After all, getting the original XBox games working on the 360 cost a lot of money, and for what? How many people played XBox games on the 360? Downwards compatibility was eventually dropped from the PS3 (along, of course, with a host of other features) too. So why should we care?

Downwards compatibility has become the norm on consoles since Sony started doing it back in 2001 with the PS2. It works as a quick selling point for people reluctant to part with their old consoles, especially at the beginning of a generation.

"Don't want to ditch your old console yet? New games coming out you still want to play?" says downwards compatibility. "Here, buy the new console. Then you're still getting the best new hardware while still being able to play new games coming out for the current one. It's a win-win!"

So, Grand Theft Auto V was announced a few months ago. It appears to be on its way for the PS3 and 360. So, if you want to play GTA5, you have a choice: Buy new hardware that cannot play GTA5 yet, or keep your old hardware that can.

That's the problem when you take out downwards compatibility. You've just cut new purchasers off at the knees.

2) One of the ideas behind having Kinect on all the time is a good one: If everyone has Kinect on, then there's no fragmentation of the market. You can integrate Kinect controls into every game without fear that someone won't have Kinect.

However, Kinect works best in larger rooms. Does everyone have their consoles in large rooms? Some do, some don't.

If I'm using a game without Kinect controls, why does Kinect have to be on? Doesn't that use processing power and memory that could be better spent on other processes?

Finally, is Kinect sending any information about the people in the room to anyone else? This sounds like a stupid thing to ask, but think about it: The 720 will need an always-on internet connection. The Kinect must always be on as well.

Still don't get what the problem is? All right, let's say that I offer to hook up a camera to your brand-new TV. Whenever the TV is on, the camera must be on. I promise that I won't record anything or watch what you're doing. Would you feel comfortable with that? I wouldn't, and I doubt you would be either.

It's not that you would expect me to be peeping in on your house, necessarily. It's just the idea that there's something that could potentially be watching you that's disconcerting. Good luck explaining that to the average user without sounding creepy, Microsoft.

3) The 720 might ship with a hard drive in the neighborhood of 500 GB or higher. That sounds like a big jump. The PS3 launched with a 60 GB HDD, and they're now offering sizes in the 320 GB range. 500 should be more than enough, right?

Not so fast. From all accounts, the new 720/PS4 systems are going to have graphics significantly better than the current generation. With better graphics come more art assets, more in-depth programming, and more space needed.

So, let's say that right now a current game takes up 10 GB. That seems like we're lowballing it, but that number is slightly bigger than a DVD right now. If you have a 320 GB hard drive, you can hold about 32 games. Seems fair.

So, if all games are on higher-capacity Blu-Ray discs with more art assets, how much bigger will the discs be? Let's estimate that they'll start out at 20 GB. That's 25 games on a 500 GB hard drive. As time goes by, those games will get larger. Now your 500 GB hard drive is completely full. That's going to turn into a quick headache.

How do you get a bigger hard drive, then? Why, buy a new system, of course! You could crack open the system yourself and install a new hard drive, but that voids your warranty, don't you know. You could hook up an external hard drive, too, I suppose, but now you have an extra piece of equipment hanging around.

One might say, "Well, expanding game sizes were a thing in the last generation as well. The original 360 launched with a 20GB hard drive, for crying out loud." Yes, that's true. However, those games ran off the disc with small installs to the hard drive. They did not require that all the necessary content needed to be installed to the hard drive.

________

So, combined with the whole "no more used games" thing, how will this next generation of consoles fare? Unless Sony and Microsoft have something that's really going to knock consumers out, I can't see it doing well.