Deus Ex for Xbox 360 sat on my shelf for months.

Finally, I gave it a shot. Loved the game, hated the performance on 360 (had been playing my recently upgraded PC a bit lately)

Gave in and bought it on Steam for $25 (all in USD). This was honestly 2 days ago.

Now it's the weekend deal at 75% off for just $6.24. What a dirty, smelly, phallus of a situation.

While my girlfriend was preparing tonight's heroin, she asked me:

"Do you think if Gran Turismo 5 came out when it was supposed to come out, you'd be keener on the PS3 than the 360?"

Hmmph I thought. That's a damn good question. Possibly the best gaming question ever asked of me, and my Mrs asked.

My bittersweet relationship with the Playstation 3 began shortly after the release of Metal Gear Solid (MGS) 4. It released to much critical acclaim and fanfare, but I didn't have a PS3.

Value is important to me and I don't like wasting money, so I got to work keeping an eye on auctions on TradeMe (think ebay). In the meantime, I looked for other games to play. Heavenly Sword, Motorstorm, Haze, Resistance, this was back in mid 2008. I kept an eye on some of them too.

Anyway, eventually I had a PS3 which I paid the right money for, and MGS4. Great game, thoroughly enjoyed it. Heavenly Sword, Motorstorm, Haze, Resistance - couldn't get in to any of them. MGS had so many cutscenes I didn't consider another playthrough a fun idea at that time. The free-for-all online was dominated by trolling players attacking people on their own team just for lulz.

So now I've got this machine, and I kind of like it, I had a PS2 and PS3. I wanted a reason to hold on to it and luckily, Gran Turismo 5 had a release date of October 2008, not far away. Obviously we're in the future now so you know that it was delayed much to my dissatisfaction. What reasons were there for me to hold on to the PS3 now?

I already had a 360, but back then I pirated the games (I have been Legit since late 2009), as you might expect I didn't subscribe to LIVE then either. Back then you couldn't pirate games on PS3. PS3 I found attractive, but I couldn't justify it above the 360, she had to go. I got my money back on the hardware but not on the game.

So enough history, what's the answer to my girlfriend's question?

I think she has really hit the nail on the head here. Because GT5 never happened my experience with the PS3 was - it's a one game machine. So I continued using the 360 as my primary gaming device. No I wasn't paying for games but I was paying for accessories and earning achievements on a silver profile. Gamerscore was only about 5K. Eventually my console was banned from LIVE. What was I to do? Well, I'd just signed up for a year's worth of LIVE, I already had all the accessories, so I bought a used 360 and went legit.

Off the topic of the blog, but it's only marginally more expensive to buy and sell games legit rather than to pirate them! Not to mention the frustrations which disappear if you're legit on PC.

Perhaps if I'd been able to play GT5 before playing Forza 3 Sony might have had a chance to get me on their platform. If GT5 weren't delayed, I wouldn't have sold the PS3. Down the track, my Xbox was going to get banned anyway, and if I had both consoles then, maybe I would have just switched over? But then again, Gears is one of my favourites.

I guess I can never know the answer, but this GT5-centric sequence of events was off-putting to say the least.

My 3DS review - 10/10.

10 because the 3D effect is novel, interesting, and doesn't hurt my eyes. PushMo is great, it's the only 3DS game I've played so far, but I have also played a few demos and a great deal looks appealling to me. The hardware seems fast enough, and some of the titles don't slouch compared to the Vita. I'm trying to get a good deal on Super Mario 3D Land, RE Revelations, Kid Icarus, Mario Kart 7, or Prof. Layton & The Miracle Mask - and that is just off the top of my head. There's a bunch of great titles.I am happy to have spent the money on it, and I look forward to playing a few more titles on the system.

Now regarding this upcoming 8th gen, I have a funny prediction. There will be an emerging market for games which have deeper emotional stimulation of the player. Why do I suspect this?

This post sums it up nicely for me. It's long, so to sum it up for you - "Video games are a medium which offer little variety, often the experiences presented are not new. This causes gaming to feel unfulfilling, perhaps even -boring."

I'm 28 years old and I know that there are older gamers. I'm starting to outgrow the standard formula of shooting non-human entities directly in the face whilst performing fetch quests. Yes - I'm making an absurdum reductum here.

I would love to see a game come to the forefront with some real emotional depth. A game which doesn't take death lightly, a game which provides you emotional challenges which are consequential.

I think it's perfectly acceptable for gaming to be little more than an outlet, a time sink. However, if moving forward developers want to maximise their earnings from older gamers, well I think it might be smart to try for something emotionally richer.

OK. Here is what is coming:

Bought for $300NZD

• 3DS Normal in Aqua Blue
• 3ds Nintendogs and Cats
• new super mario bros
• mario kart ds
• Mario & luigi
• donkey kong jungle climber
• Quantum of Solace
• art academy
• donkey kong mayhem

Bought for $75NZD

• Pokemon Black DS
• Super Mario 64
• Nintendogs - Chihuahua and Friends
• This also came with 5x GBA games which I need to sell on the used marketplace.

My girlfriend wanted a 3DS XL for Christmas. I don't really want to pay retail for it, 1 you can only lose money, 2 what if she doesn't play it? I figured buying these two bundles would be a great idea because:

1 we straight away get some great titles like mario kart, new super mario bros, Pokemon and super mario 64, 2 I've done the maths against this and the current used marketplace and there is almost no way we can lose money, 3 if she gets a lot of use out of it, then we'll just wait and see what specials come up over the holiday season for the 3ds XL, then sell the normal 3ds. 4 Christmas / Her birthday comes early.

I've been thinking about a 3DS for a while, and I'm quite excited to dip my toes in the water. The main thing I'm concerned about is the ability to back out of this and not lose money if she/we don't play the 3DS. I feel covered.

Hopefully this gets a lot of use, it looks to have some great titles.

The entire purpose of this blog is merely to keep a record of this ridiculous next-gen prediction.

http://misterxmedia.livejournal.com/100515.html

Insider Daily: Nintendo forced MS and Sony to change their specs

misterxmediaSeptember 10th, 19:12Insider:......

.....

.....

Don't put it on your blog please, but you can use main things:

8000+ gnc 2.0 "Venus XTX" based gpu 20mn
8 core Richland x86 cpu With 8000 core series hd apu 28nm
8 or 6 gig of ram
Reports are 4.00+ TFLOP of graphics processing power.
Misterx: ok, by my own words:

- Next xbox x86 officially
- Next xbox will be 4T+ in power. 5T reports are true.
- Next xbox will have 8 to 6 gigs of ram. Sony now target 4gb.
- Sony and MS had phone calls not to put next gen at E3 in order to delay it and make Nin look absolete. after Nintendo changed their 5000 specs to 7000 series specs.
- MS changed 70% of their gpu/cpu design recently after that.
- MS should not delay xbox next
- Next xbox will be a moster for a console. the price should be around $450 but that is not a fact for now.bullsht artist

I would be willing to bet almost anything that this is untrue. If there are still no announcements by the end of 2013, only then do i see this having any chance whatsoever.

He was 100% cow, whereas I am manticore of percentages which vary daily, depending on my experiences and their offerings etc.

What a shame, he made me laugh. Some couldn't stand him.

I will miss the lols, but not the jelly.

Someone created a thread asking about the future of gaming. I wrote a lot, so I thought I'd mirror my post here:

What could be the future of consoles?

Motion controls? No consoles at all? Smartphones and Tablets taking over? OUYA?

Ricardomz

Reading this and your other posts it seems you really want people to predict the future of consoles. Sure, I'll play this game. But even though I think this goes without saying, I want to make clear two givens:

1. I don't know the future, nor do I claim to have the predictive capability of Michael Pachter (may peace be upon him).
2. What you're asking people to do is put their nonsense fantasy up there, so it can then be criticised by other members of system wars because it conflicts with their nonsense fantasy. *sigh*

Here's what I think. 10-20 years, that's too big a range to guess as hardware will be way different in 20yrs than 10yrs. That's a "gen-and-a-half" gap alone. Anyway, generically:

• Starting with Wii U & PS360's successors - even that won't be the last 'gen'. Some people think Gaikai/OnLive will end gens - it won't. Though it is true, consumer internet access bandwidth is changing, it's only getting more accessible, faster, and cheaper. Deployment of cloud computing server software is enjoying the same changes. It can't end gens. Internet outages happen. People who don't want to pay for the internet, or just pay for it as part of their cellphone plan happen. Playing on a laptop on the bus and not having mobile internet there also happens. Mobile internet would have to be incredibly cheap for me to pay for it. People will both want and need to play offline - more gens.
• That doesn't mean that in the future, you won't find yourself subscribing to a cloud computing gaming service for a month to enjoy some of their exclusives, or to play a couple of 5hr movie games you've had your eye on but don't want to pay retail for. Maybe there is a graphics king which renders better on their hardware than your own.
• As long as cellphone games keep selling as well as they do, there will be a massive push among some graphic-phillic developers to push cell hardware to the limits. Cellphone makers love the excuse to make new cellphones, semiconductor fabrication facilities love to fabricate newer faster semiconductors and sell them. I think it is given that battery technology is devloping over time to give greater total capacity, and capacity per unit weight, microprocessors are getting more capable whilst using less power, it's a given tech is improving. This tech will eventually get so capable that you can cheaply make hardware equivalent to today's top end PC hardware, but for a mobile device, this could take at least a decade. It only makes sense that eventually this technology might be used in a kind of reversed Wii U, majority of the power in the gamepad, and it is portable. The base station is for TV Output, maybe some auxillary processing and connecting traditional controllers, whatever. It could be powerful enough that it could target my demographic (no need nor want to game away from home), but you discover it is incredibly convenient in a power cut.
• I think eventually you might see a cellphone with an accessory of VR glasses. Touch screen on the cellphone is the controller. Yes it would look embarrassing on the bus, at least at first. Perhaps one day they'll have a discreet design as though you're wearing sunglasses.
• At think at some point in the next few gens an expensive graphics beast console will be released, again - at a premium price, by this I mean essentially it's selling feature is not Kinect/Tablet Controller/Blu Ray it is 'graphics'. I think if that's a manufacturer's machine's cleverest innovation, that such a machine is likely to fail. Nevertheless, anything is on at the right price - if it's cutting edge but inexpensive and traditional - there is a big market for that, no doubt, I admit a games console doesn't have to be novel.
• I think there will always be significant demand for traditional games. Press A to jump.
• This is a wild one, but I think we will see a rise in deep-plot centric games, but aimed at the female demographic. "According to" a "study conductedby the Entertainment Software Associationin 2010, 40% of the game playing population is female, and women 18 or older now comprise 33% of all gamers." (Wikipedia). Though many girls that play games are like my girlfriend & don't miss not having these games, I've heard from many that do. Not My Horse and Me, something proper.
• Better hardcore motion control games.
• I think more publishers will try to nickel-and-dime us especially with pay-to-win games.
  
  

That's it, that's all I can really think of. Please abuse me my body is ready.

Despite being born in 1984, I have never owned a Nintendo console. I have considered it many times, however:

• When it was NES vs Sega Master System, my parents bought me a Sega.
• For early on, and for a very long time, I had a Commodore 64.
• When it was SNES vs Sega Genesis, I skipped a Gen.
• When it was Playstation vs Saturn vs N64, I bought a Playstation.
• When it was Gamecube vs Xbox vs PS2, I bought the Xbox and the PS2.
• This Gen, I have had a 360 almost the entire gen, and I have had PS3's on and off.

Just in time for the weekend I got myself a Wii and five games.

1. Super Paper Mario
2. Super Mario Galaxy
3. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
4. Super Smash Bros. Brawl
5. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Thus far I have sunk a few hours into Super Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy, and Metroid Prime 3. All in all, I'm glad that I have decided to give the Wii a bit of a swan song by giving it a go. Even if it is this late in the gen.

So far I've been having a lot of fun with these, and I look forward to finishing work, going home and playing some more. A sensation I haven't had for quite some time ...

Big lols. Obviously, I shall do no such thing. Despite the bad reputation System Wars has, I think it's a great place. It's my #1 forum of choice. The best thing about it is the speed at which news drops, and the great lengths people go to in order to inform others, and prevent the spread of misinformation.

By posting this blog I imagine it will give me the push over the cliff I need in order to reach level 10. No jelly pics, no proclamations of superiority over others, if I go to make a thread it will be because I consider the content notable and the thread would not yet exist.

PS - I find this song quite amusing.