I have already decided that I will never purchase this console. I have multiple reasons but the big ones are that the cost of the system is inflated by non-gaming related hardware, online play is not free, Kinect is a Trojan Horse for privacy invasion, and you never really own the games.

So long as you are required to connect to the internet to play any game; you never really own it. You are just renting it until the day they turn off the servers.

While Nintendo and Sony are offering free to play online services; Microsoft is charging $60 per year for Xbox LIVE. When you factor in the cost of the console and just five years of LIVE; this console is costing you $800. Add in the 7% sales tax and you are paying $856. Once you buy a game; you've spent $920. No thanks. No game in the history of forever will ever be worth $920.

There have been some rumors that The Man of Steel and Justice League are going to take place in the same continuity as Nolan's Batman trilogy, but I don't see this happening because Warner would be giving up future Batman sequels. There would be no going back to bank robbers and terrorists once you drop aliens like Superman and Darkseid into the world. The next Batman film begins with Robin Blake becoming the new Batman, Scarecrow on the loose, and Gordon waiting beside the new bat signal. The Suit: The new suit that Blake creates; with the help of Lucius Fox, should reflect how he works differently from Bruce Wayne. Robin isn't the physical machine that Bruce Wayne was; even with the exoskeleton technology that Bruce employed in Dark Knight Rises. Robin's Batman should be about stealth and flexibility. The body of the suit should be a stretchy material to allow for better fight scenes. As in the Batman Beyond series, the face should be entirely covered and the memory material created in Nolan's continuity should be built into the arms and back of the suit and deployed as a wing. The Villains: There would be three villains-- Scarecrow, Riddler, and Penguin The Scarecrow character serves as a metaphor for the terrorist in his obsession with fear. The Riddler, however, would be misconstrued as a terrorist by detonating an EMP, descending the city of Gotham into darkness on Halloween (with references to The Long Halloween story and the real life blackout caused by hurricane Sandy in 2012) when in fact he/she is planning a huge heist (or some other crime) and the blackout and chaos that follows are purely a distraction. It would draw a contrast between a terrorist and someone who does something for money or other gain. Penguin's role is simple-- he is the marriage of the organized criminal and politician; two different character types in the background of all three of Nolan's previous Batman films. The Penguin's motive should be to achieve the office of mayor under the pretense of bringing security (read, Brother Eye) to the city. He could be in league with The Riddler or he could simply exploit him; as well as Batman, to rise to power and profit. In a potential sequel, the Penguin would have made a police state of Gotham, with cameras everywhere and cops using armored tank-like cars. It would be about the escalation that Gordon alluded to at the end of Batman Begins. The Cast: I would cast Javier Bardem The Penguin, and Cate Blanchett as The Riddler (never confirming the character's sex).

I imagine that the film will begin 30 years after Return of the Jedi; as the actors are thirty years older and Luke's son, Ben Skywalker, would be about the age that he was in the original trilogy. Queen Leia will have risen to the seat of Supreme Chancellor in the New Republic. Darth Sidious would be secretly resurrected via a cloned body and would take a new apprentice in Jacen Solo (below), whom I would picture wearing a suit that is reminescent of the visage of Vader, though with some accents of royal blue. In the absence of Luke Skywalker, who will have distanced his new Jedi order from the politics and power of the Republic; Jacen Solo would lead the fight for the Republic in a cold war in the divided galaxy. Boba Fett should escape the Sarlacc and go on to kill Leia. By falling into the Sarlacc pit, Fett was likely spared the death he might have incurred had he escaped the battle on Tatooine and returned to the side of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. It is because of Luke that Fett survives to return and totally change galactic history. With the death of Leia (in the first film); Jacen Solo (Darth Caedus) would rise to power in the state of emergency and the Sith would once again rule the galaxy with an iron fist. Darth Caedus' identity, as the son of Leia and Han would not be revealed until the second film. It would be something that some of the characters know, but the audience; like Ben Skywalker, is in the dark. The plot needs to revolve around a group of college age kids; Ben Skywalker and Jaina Solo, modifying and rolling around the galaxy in either the Outrider or the Millenium Falcon. It is key that the characters pilot a singular ship, with a name, through all three films; and that the movies heavily involve the characters flying around in that ship getting into trouble.

The Golden Age of Gaming is Over If you were a kid in the 80s and 90s; then you grew up in the golden age of video games, and like the VHS and the video rental industry, it is over. You lived through an era and the era is gone. You might not have yet realized this; you may have been asking yourself in recent years, is the magic gone or is it just me, "am I just not into games anymore?" I believe the answer is yes, gaming has turned into something different and less than it once was, and no, it's not that I just don't like games anymore; it's that I'm all out of road. This subject came up in an argument with a longtime friend about the state of gaming today and he criticized how few games I play these days. There comes a day when you've played it all, when you've seen all the worlds; when the interfaces are built to play the games from the previous hardware rather than the games of tomorrow, and you realize you're just doing the same stuff again. The industry has changed. It has become self serving and insular; creating games for a rabid small group of repeat buyers. What do those gamers want? More, always more. Eight dungeons in a Legend of Zelda game aren't enough; they want twelve, no seventeen. Why even make a world-- they clearly just want a string of levels. Who has time to play these games? It's no longer a 15 hour quest; it's 40-100 hours in some games today. Accessibility and replayability have been put down in favor of games that just go on and on. The root of the change has been this belief that games are a good avenue for telling stories, but they are not. The story of a game is the story of playing the game, and developers trying to make movies of video games need to just go make movies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BDHvnFafrQ The only place left for gamers to go is the undiscovered country of their imaginations as the player graduates to creator. Players can not only build and share levels thanks to features like Forge in Halo, but now they can build entire games on their own using ROM editors. The gamer doesnt have to be hired by Nintendo to build a (2D) Zelda game-- all they need is imagination and the design capability. The reason this is important is because, like with painting or writing, the audience has to be able to create their own games in order for the medium to ever qualify as art.

Entertainment Weekly asked Shigeru Miyamoto about the next Legend of Zelda and his response was, "With the last game, Skyward Sword, that was a game where you had motion control to use your weapons and a lot of different items, and I thought that was a lot of fun, but there were some people who werent able to do that or didnt like it as much and stopped playing partway through it. So were in the phase where were looking back at whats worked very well and what has been missing and how can we evolve it further." Shigeru Miyamoto is making a mistake in thinking that people stopped playing because of the motion controls. I am a person that stopped playing Skyward Sword, and the reasons were many, but the sword control was not one. The sword control; though it was basically eight directional, worked; but the implementation in battle did not. Nintendo did not design the sword fighting and AI around the experience of fighting another person; they designed it as a puzzle in itself. Fighting a real person; in a multiplayer mode, would be a totally different experience than fighting a Whack-A-Mole robot with auto-blocking. People quit Skyward Sword because of their frustration with its linearity, its forced five hour long prologue of bubble text, its forced fighting tutorials, its lack of camera controls and use of the archaic N64 targeting to center the camera behind the character, and the continuation of gimmicky items like a flying steam punk beetle. Nintendo needs to make the next Zelda for adults. That doesn't mean decapitations-- it just means that when the game starts; we should immediately be on our way in the direction we wish, with any control information contained in the control manual where it belongs. The purpose of motion control was supposed to be to alleviate the complexities of fourteen button game pads; not make them worse. What you do with the controllers in your hands; should be what the avatar does with his/her hands on screen. Putting the player in direct control of the character's hands does away with any question about what button swings the sword and how do I block. Given a next generation motion tracking controller; there is no need to instruct the player on how to play the game. If Nintendo wants more people to play the next Zelda-- the theme needs to be simplicity. The game design has to be simple in focus with fewer items. The world design needs to be simpler. The world needs to be open in every direction to the borders of the map; whether those borders are mountains or sea or both. Just let the player go in open valleys and forests that go for miles. Plant the dungeons/castles on the landscape, and stop trying to make such a controlled experience of the overworld. A naturalist world should be so much easier to build than elaborate paths; where everything is like a movie set.

Imagine you are playing a Zelda or Elder Scrolls game next generation and there are no artificial borders for a hundred miles in either direction. Through traditional methods of building worlds; this would not be possible for two reasons-- one, it's just too much work; and two, you couldn't put it on a disk. The way to create a large landmass is to first create the predesigned area in which the main quest takes place; and then implement procedural landscape generators with certain presets (such as range of elevation; densities of forests, grasslands, and bodies of water; types of plants and rock to be generated; etc) which create the land as the player ventures beyond the starting landscape and use the player's hard drive/flash card to save the data from the landscape as they generate it so it can be reloaded when the player moves through it again. http://youtu.be/xpGLIN4lfsE The player would be limited only by the amount of storage they have for saves. The developer could also put in rules that after the player travels X number of miles beyond the borders of the original valley; the game would load secret predesigned areas, castles, and characters. If the landscape can be randomly generated beyond the main quest; then it's possible to create settings to populate the generated terrain with friendly AI, wildlife, and monsters. The use of randomly generated landscapes with high level next generation graphics can not only be used for adventure games; the mechanic could be used to create a driving experience in which the player drives in one direction down a road for five hours. The driving experience may be even easier to randomly generate as you can already see random generation of cars and cops in GTA.