What is it about taking chances that scares people, chills them to the bone and causes them to return to what is comfortable in life?

Try as you might to deny it, you know it's true.  You eat the same foods most often.  You drive the same route to and from work/school/etc.  You stay the course in a dead end job because it's what you know.  You even stick to favorite brands in the face of obvious problems facing those companies, and whats worse...you defend them to the last breath.  You can't help it.  Humans are resistant to change and you are human, aren't you?

There seems to be a bit...no, A LOT...of this going on in the gaming industry right now.  You would think I might be talking about Microsoft and Sony in reference to the impending next-gen war about to kick off, but I'm not going to discuss that here.  I'm simply going to address the games themselves.

I happen to be one of those gamers that has to have a small taste of everything the industry has to offer.  I'm a huge fan of what many might consider "arthouse"games.  Games like Okami, Ico as Shadow of the Colossus pushed the PS2 into a direction that many haveen reluctant to follow.  Those 3 games received high critical praise and suffered from very low sales figures because games like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor have dominated the mainstream gamers' livingrooms for over a decade and all it has gotten us are next-gen offerings of the same formulaic run into a field/oom/building, clear it, collect an item and move on.  But what if there were more games that push the story a bit, shed the multiplayer aspects...just, did something different?  Would we like it?  Would we follow along?

I decided to take a chance on something different.  Very different!

I'm in my 40's.  I'm a heterosexual male.  I'm educated and I even have a masculine job.  But I went and bought a copy of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f.  The ridicule has arrived in the form of relentless wave after wave (very much expected in my line of work) and it even extends to the blogs and forums on the internet at various sites.  My question is...since when does anyone have to play GTA5 or CoD MW or even Gears of War to be considered a serious gamer?  Admittedly, there is no blood to speak of in the visuals for the game.  Come to think of it, the most violent aspect of the game is your vocaloid/character/avatar "violently" strumming a guitar.  While there is no overt violence in the game, it can be challenging, engaging andmost of all, FUN!  There...I said it...the"F" word!!!

My thoughts on this subject are as follows: we have arrived at an apex in the gaming industry and we are faced with a very powerful decision to follow the comfortable, boring, same course we have followed in previous generations, or...we can choose something different.  Diversity means strength.  Without diversity, we would all look the same, act the same and worst of all, we may think and behave the same.  In the same way individuality defines who we are and provides a strong differential in our lives, diversity is absolutely necessary for our beloved gaming industry to survive ITSELF!

I'll step off my soapbox now and let you soak it in for a bit, but keep in mind that the evolution and survival of our species meant diversity was necessary.  It's no different in business or, in our case, videogames.  Look into evolution and how we evolved...I promise you it's there.  Meanwhile, I'm gonna go and be different for a while...

I was just a bit surprised to see a new emblem in my profile for Game Expert (achieve 75% trophies/achievements or more in a game to attain this emblem). I've been particularly good at action/adventure games and have gone out of my way in games like Dead Space, Portal 2 and the Uncharted series just to name a few. It's been nice to get the trophies for my PS3 games, and now it will be double-sweet to see know this is part of my Fuse profile. Who knows...maybe someone will even ask me for some advice :D

I am happy to hear more and more about Indie development coming to the Playstation brand.  It seems a lot of the smaller developers didn't like the cold business nature of Microsoft and appear to be coming to Sony in droves...like "rats on a sinking ship" which might be an accurate analogy given the missteps by Microsoft in the past week.

I wish the PSN had more demos of games, especially independant games like Knytt and Guacamelee.  There are a lot of indie developed titles coming to the PSN soon and it would be nice for the consumer to have more content to demo, as well as being nice for the developers to get their product out there in the hands of consumers to generate some interest.

This week, Guacamelee hit the PSN.  I had played a short demo in Gamestop and it was incredibly fun.  The biggest surprise was how well it controlled (the graphics are a given on the PS Vita...you have to TRY to make your game look bad on this system).  I also didn't realize how deep the combo system was in the game until I kept going back for more training.  Some of the combo lengths would make Street Fighter fans jealous and along with the tight controls, upbeat Spanish influenced music and well thoughtout levels, this game has been an absolute blast to play.

I don't intend to write a review...it's already been done on Gamespot and IGN, so I will just say that if you like Metroid and Castlevania style platformers, along with some clever dialogue, beautiful graphics, excellent level design and an difficulty level that seems "just right", look no further than Guacamelee.

On a side note, you might also want to give Knytt a try...but after you save the world as a Luchador in Guacamelee.

I've been a fan of Sony's Playstation since the beginning.  It all started innocently enough with a demo version of Wipeout.  I was in Germany at the time and those of you who are in the Armed Forces have become intimately familiar with the BX, PX or NX.  My wife was working in the AAFES (Army and Air Force Exchange Service) PowerZone electronics department inside the Base Exchange at Vogelweh just outside Ramstein AB.  It was January 1996 and they had just received their first shipment of Playstation consoles and a demo unit with "Playstation Picks", a compilation of a few PS1 demos that included a number of videos of games and a few playable levels of games including Wipeout and Jumping Flash.  I tried the demo for Wipeout, found myself piloting the hovercraft through the turns and up and down hills and got motion sickness.  Normally, this would cause most people to put down the controller and walk away, but I was immediately hooked.  If something could give me motion sickness like that, from a videogame, I had to see more and I definitely wanted one for myself.  The exchange was out of the console at the time and I actually considered getting the Sega Saturn, but then reconsidered and held out (for only 2 weeks) until another shipment arrived.

Since that time, I've played countless games on all of the Playstation hardware and was an early adopter of each and every piece of hardware with the exception of the PS Go (I don't think anyone will discredit me for that one).  Sony has had an incredible run for the past 17 and a half years since the release of the original PS1 in September 1995.  They have had the usual ups and downs experienced by any company, but for the most part, they have continually provided the consumer what they wanted and right when they wanted it.  Here are a few examples.

Original Playstation

Sony probably saw the successes enjoyed by Nintendo and collaborated on the add-on device for the SNES that would eventually become the Playstation after they had their falling out with Nintendo.  Sony's move to go with the CD format was brilliant since this allowed for cheaper manufacturing of the games (physical memory for cartridges was incredibly expensive at the time).  The Playstation was also considerably more powerful than the 16-bit systems and it also handled 3D gaming much easier than the 16-bit systems.  Sega tried to keep up with the 32x, but it only served to weaken Sega's position in the marketplace leaving the door wide open for a Battle Royale between Nintendo and Sony.  Nintendo responded with the launch of the N64, but by the time that system hit the market, with a processing chip 3x as fast as the one in the Playstation, Nintendo's claimes of smoother textures and better 3D were easily matched by the game developers simply working out the problems with programming for the Playstation and what the hardware was incapable of, developers found ways through software to match the N64's "superior" graphics.  With production costs being much lower than the N64, Sony's fledgling Playstation was a runaway success and kept Nintendo in their rearview mirror for 2 generations of consoles.

 

Playstation 2

In October of 2000, Sony set the stage again for dominance in the marketplace, but this time, Sony was aiming for complete control of the living room.  Sega had come to the market a year earlier with the Dreamcast, an incredibly well designed console that ran on a modified MS Windows operating system that made development much easier than it had been for the Sega Saturn.  The Saturn suffered greatly because it had terrible support for 3D based games, an arena that Sony's PS1 excelled.  Sega probably thought getting to market with the Dreamcast a year early was a smart move, but Sony found a way to trump even a year head start by making the PS2 DVD compatible.  DVD had arrived in 1995 and Sony had helped in it's development.  This played a huge part in Sony's move to use DVD discs for their games and to allow the console to play DVD movies.  At the time, DVD players were very cost prohibitive and allowing the console to play DVD movies meant that even if you weren't interested in the games, you might be interested in the DVD player which was competitive with DVD players on the market at that time in terms of both price and quality.  This, coupled with Sega losing a number of 3rd party developers and publishers caused Dreamcast sales to dwindle less than a year into the console's lifespan.  Within 2 years after release, the Dreamcast was dead, Nintendo was still trying to push the 4 year old N64 and Sony again took the top spot.

 

PSP

In late 2004 and early 2005, Sony made the jump to the handheld market.  This was a different game though, as they would discover throughout the lifespan of the PSP.  Nintendo has historically been better than anyone else in the industry in the handheld games market and this would prove to be the same for them.  What they couldn't do as a home console developer, they were able to outpace Sony with their handhelds, even with the much more powerful PSP compared to the Nintendo DS.  The PSP was a nice piece of hardware that was expensive at the time and failed to attract the 3rd party support like Nintendo's handheld, but it was an excellent multi-media device if not a bit bulky.  Not much changed throughout the lifespan of the PSP despite Sony's attempts to scale down the size and even make a version without the battery draining UMD drive.

 

Playstation 3

About a year after the arrival of the PS2, Nintendo finally got around to releasing it's GameCube with slightly better specs than the PS2.  It probably wouldn't have made much of an impact anyway without the DVD playback capabilities of the PS2, but to further complicate matters, Microsoft entered the home console market for the first time with the original Xbox.  The Xbox was a very powerful piece of hardware that easily should have outperformed and even outpaced the PS2 since it also had DVD playback capability, but Sony's first party games, along with it's 3rd party support was was massive and the Xbox seemingly became know for little else outside of first person shooters.  Despite that, the Xbox made enough of an impact to warrant another generation of hardware and in November 2005, the Xbox360 arrived on the market, a full year ahead of the PS3.  Sony had been down this road before if you remember the release dates for the Dreamcast and the PS2, but things weren't as certain this time around when you considered Microsoft had the publishing rights and in-house development of one of the biggest games to ever grace home consoles - Halo.  In spite of this, Sony took it's time and hit the market a year later with something even more compelling than a single game series - BluRay playback.  In 2008, after a few years of a battle with Microsoft and it's HD-DVD format (which was included on the Xbox360 later as an add-on), Sony's part in the development of BluRay payed off as HD-DVD capitulated leaving BluRay as the defacto standard in high definition movie playback.  Sony's move to make their games on BluRay discs proved a huge success in battling Microsoft, but with Microsoft's year long lead and excellent 3rd party support, Sony continued to play catch up throughout it's PS3 lifespan.

 

PS Vita

In late 2011 and early 2012, Sony released the successor for the PSP in an attempt to gain more ground in the handheld arena with the PS Vita.  The Vita is a pretty slick device, great at multi-media (especially online movie and television viewing), and there are rumored uses for it when the next Sony home console hits the market, but the jury is still out on the Vita at the moment, mostly because of a lack of 3rd party support.  It seems like things rarely change in the handheld market.

 

PS4 vs Xbox720

So, here we are, nearly 18 years after the arrival of the Playstation and so much has changed, but in ways, so much remains the same.  Sony is about to release it's PS4, the successor to the PS3, to a consumer base that has embraced mobile gaming, has other options such as the pending Xbox720, SteamBox, OUYA and who knows what else (the Nintendo Wii U is simply not in the same market) and they have traded battling Nintendo for battling Microsoft who by all accounts is considered somewhat of a juggernaut in the home console market.  Recently though, the Xbox720 has shown it's hand to the public and the backlash has been immense.  The Xbox720 is calling for an Digital Rights Management based machine with an "always on" connection (which is believed to prevent piracy of games) and mandatory use of the Kinect 2.0 sensor (which may have the ability to look into your personal space...wherever the eye of the camera is facing).  These poins have not been popular with many consumers who have attacked each report of the machine with thousands of angry posts/comments.  It's hard to see how Microsoft believes they will ultimately make this a popular feature of the system and it's clearly showing Sony that the opportunity is there to take advantage of the consumers fears that this type of machine will cause more problems for the consumer than solve the problems it was designed to address.  At this point, the only thing Sony would need to do is secure 3rd party support (which is well underway), allow the use of used games on the PS4 (current information suggests the Xbox720 will not allow this to happen) and make certain features optional (PSN is free to play online, but XBL has not been free since it's inception).  The PS4 will also include BluRay playback, which probably won't make it into the Xbox720 system and if that weren't enough, Sony's purchase of GaiKai in 2012 will allow streaming of PS1, PS2 and PS3 games.  It's not entirely clear how the consumer will purchase these games, but the fact that the PS4 will have some form of backward compatibility, even through a separate online streaming source, once again trumps the Microsoft system without breaking a sweat.

 

Moving Forward

So many things are just not lined up for Microsoft as far as the consumer can tell at this point and if things keep going in this direction, I can't see how Microsoft intends to compete with Sony.  I believe it's a bad business model to a system that will control nearly every aspect of how the consumer interacts with their products to the point that not having an internet connection means you WILL NOT play your games that you bought.  This is the point of contention with the consumer at large for the moment is that buying a game for the Microsoft system means that you aren't actually "buying" the game.  Whatever it ends up meaning, it could spell disaster for Microsoft unless they find a way, and the proper motivation, to remove the "Always On" feature of the console.

We are only a few short months from pre-orders and eventually the launch in about 6 months.  It looks as if Sony continues to learn from it's past and push forward with features the consumer actually want while Microsoft tries to bludgeon it's way to the top and Nintendo is content to sit back and soak up the competition-less "blue ocean" approach they adopted with the original Wii.  Is Sony back on the rise?  It's been more than a generation since they were at the top of the heap.  All indications point to the PS4 blasting out of the gates and never looking back, but Holiday 2013 is still a ways off.  Only time will tell.

This is my first blog, and it will be fairly short (or maybe not), but I wanted to record my emotions for posterity...as in see how I was feeling at this time maybe 5 years or so down the road. Recently, Microsoft has been dealt a harsh blow after Adam Orth's tweets from his Twitter account were posted up by Kotaku and other gaming sites for users/gamers/consumers to read. In short, it was very insulting and showed that he was so out of touch with the general gaming public that frankly, I don't see how he had been gainfully employed by Microsoft as long as he had been (just under a year as of April 4th 2013). Orth, through a series of tweets, told another developer or programmer that he didn't understand why the general consumer was so up in arms about a console that would require a persistent internet connection, then made some snide comments about if the electricity went out that you wouldn't be able to use a vacuum cleaner so you better not buy a vacuum cleaner. The death knell came in the form of his parting shot when he left a hashtag message of "#dealwithit" and an image of President Obama with an indifferent grin on his face, shrugging his shoulder as he talked on a cell phone. Really!?! Are you that out of touch or just a complete **** idiot??? Since everyone else seems to be spelling it out on their own blogs, I'll do it here as well. At least I won't have to go read someone else's blogs to see what I really thought. Digital Rights Management, better know by it's acronym DRM, has been defined by Wikipedia as follows: "A class of controversial access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders, and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that are not desired or intended by the content provider. DRM also includes specific instances of digital works or devices." In a nutshell, you pay for the games and the machines, in some instances, but you don't really own them. If you did, you would be able to do whatever you want with them, but Microsoft is seeing fit to making it so that your future gaming experience will be crippled to the point of turning your console into a brick if you don't play by the rules. What has been said about how DRM will work for the next Xbox system is the system will require a persistent internet connection to use the machine. When you turn it on, you better have a connection or it won't start, and even after that, if the system detects a break in the connection for longer than 3 minutes, the system will suspend any programs running, including your games, and troubleshoot the network for a connection problem to repair. The main argument against this has been the fact that not everyone has a stable and reliable internet connection, but let's just say for the sake of argument that everyone did...including everyone who might own or possess one in a developing country with no internet access in some areas...why should a company dictate how YOU...the consumer...uses your own internet service? Microsoft certainly isn't paying for your monthly ISP bills, so who the **** do they think they are implementing something like this!??! This points to the title of this blog entry, "Elitist Gaming". I'm sure Adam Orth and the talking heads at Microsoft don't see the harm in this...I mean, how can they? They only want what is best for the consumer...right? And they also want to discourage piracy...that's all...right? I would have to say no on both accounts. Sure, piracy is going to be an issue, but punishing the consumer with such a rigid means of controlling your product does nothing good for the consumer and actually injures them by not allowing those who legally bought their games and machines, have used them without modifying them to play backups or burned copies, who don't cheat while playing online, and yet they suffer from an absolutely draconian means of ensuring there is no possible way they can use the products they bought without completely submitting to how Microsoft chooses how they use the product. That would be like putting a sensor in your toaster that determines that white bread is not good for you, so it won't toast white bread...oh, and it will be looking for an internet connection, even though you have no intention of sharing your toast online...or whatever you do with your toast. The point is, it's your toast...and no one should tell you what to do with the product you already payed for. As for the part about what is best for the consumer, I think most of us will agree that Microsoft doesn't really know you personally, outside of your shopping habits on XBL perhaps, so how could they know what is best for you? My guess is the "always on" internet connectivity will eventually serve as a means for product placement on the dashboard. Just another example of you paying for something, yet allowing Microsoft to tell you how to use it, or, to in fact, circumvent that boundary all together and just use YOUR machine how THEY see fit to use it. Personally, I'm tired of the whole internet thing with games. I have seen way too many games I bought on the date they were released, rush home to play, insert the disc in the drive and be greeted by a prompt to update the game. ARE YOU **** KIDDING ME!??! Did the developers NOT finish this game? That is likely what happened. Some pretty shitty beta testing that overlooked some glaring problems, so just address it in an update on Day 1. How would you like it if your doctor did that? "I have some good news and bad news Mr Smith. The good news is we successfully removed your gall bladder. The bad news is, we will have to go back in and retrieve the surgical tools...yeah...we left them in there and it might pose a problem later on down the road....in about 5 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience. Ok nurse...hit him with the gas!" I know, pretty dramatic, but you don't allow things to get to the consumer in an unfinished state. It just screams "Bush League" and amateur. Going back to the "Elitist" stuff, I sort of figured out what it will cost you to play with your new Microsoft game machine if you still choose to purchase it (you sucker!!!). Here is the breakdown that covers what most people use over the lifetime of a console: Console hardware - $500 (this is the possible price quoted by Microsoft for the system upon release) Additional controller - $50 (I'm being generous here since it is likely to be $60) Xbox Live Account - $300 (this is $60 per year over a 5 year period. It's likely the console won't be phased out in 5 years, but we'll keep it to a round number) Internet Service Provider - $3000 ($50 per month for 5 years) 7 new games - $420 (the average software tie-in ratio is 7 games per console with first release titles costing $60 each...and no, $420 is not some hidden meaning here, although it could be) Total - $4270.00 Keep in mind, this is not an exaggeration...it's a reality if this new system requires an always on connection and ISP fees are likely to increase in the coming years along with everything else. So, how many people do you know spend approximately $800 per year to play 1 game? That is almost what it amounts to. In fact, your first year alone will be fairly expensive at over $1200 to get the console by itself, one game, one year of XBL and your monthly ISP fees to keep that piece of shit connected to the mothership at Microsoft. All of a sudden, that $600 for the PS3 doesn't look as bad as it did in 2006, does it? I won't tell you what to buy, that is up to you. I'm merely pointing out the fact that Microsoft has seemingly gone off the deep end here with this DRM, "always on" crap. It clearly shows how out of touch they have become, and quite possibly, that the success they have enjoyed this past generation has gone to their heads. That is how an Elitist thinks. Since cost is no object to them, well then, it must be the same for everyone else. Either that, or they'll make due somehow. I mentioned in a thread about all of this that a direct comparison could be made between the leadership at Microsoft and Marie Antoinette. Marie is known for the famous quote of "Let them eat cake!" in response to hearing that the commoners did not have bread. Whether she actually said this or not is unknown since this is usually regarded as a journalistic cliche and there is no record of her ever saying that, but she was generally out of touch with what was going on outside the confines of the palace and was never concerned enough to find out the true nature of life outside her sheltered world. Things didn't end well for Marie...and if things continue as they are without "Microsoft" coming down from their ivory tower to see things as they really are, this next generation of consoles might go just as badly for them!