console gaming Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

On Exclusivity and Microsoft

August 13, 2014 by Belghast

GamesCom Bombshell

Yesterday was the first day of the GamesCom conference in Cologne Germany, and generally speaking during past conferences we have for the most part seen a repeat of what was just announced at E3 a few months before. This year however we got quite the bomb shell dropped during the Microsoft press conference, in the form that they claim that Rise of the Tomb Raider is going to be an Xbox One exclusive title. This of course caused a wave of outrage through the community in part because up until this point all signs pointed to this being yet another Square Enix multiplatform title. In fact during the E3 event, this appeared as part of the Sony PS4 press conference and was not even shown during the Microsoft event. The outrage that I see so far is far less about Xbone vs PS4 but the fact that at least on initial pass it seemed like it would not be coming to PC either.

If you dissect the message that was delivered you can see something subtle happening. Every single time they mentioned that this was exclusive they played with the words a bit. They kept repeating the carefully constructed phrase “coming exclusive for holiday 2015”. Over and over at least four separate times they used that exact same wording. So that screams to me that they are putting a lot of hype behind something that may or may not be the case. There are always a number of 100% platform dependant titles on a console. The best example of these are the classic titles that you can only get on a Nintendo console like Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Kirby and Kid Icarus to make a few. Then there are titles that come out first one a given console, but later on ship on every other console.

On Exclusivity and Microsoft

This is after all a card Microsoft has played for years, trumping the supposed exclusivity of a given title that then not only comes out but in part becomes far more famous on another platform. If you remember both Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect were XBox exclusives, yet in both cases the franchises came out on the PC and with Mass Effect it now exists on all of the consoles and was a massive sales juggernaut. Similarly even during this generation both Dead Rising 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome were supposedly platform exclusive titles but in both cases they are being released on the PC. There was even the situation of Ninja Gaiden II that was a platform exclusive, and then later Tecmo released the game as Ninja Gaiden Sigma II so that they could break their exclusivity agreement. All of this leads me to believe that this is just more marketing chicanery from Microsoft and not actually a platform exclusive title.

Ultimately games are developed to make money, and right now with 5 million Xbox One units being dwarfed by 10 million Playstation 4 units, it simply does not make sense to ignore the larger platform. Ultimately this was a master stroke on the part of Microsoft however if they manage to pull it off. I wouldn’t exactly call Rise of the Tomb Raider a platform selling title, but it certainly helps to buff up a console that has floundered a bit in its first year. A good friend of mine has this rule that he refuses to buy a console before there are five titles that he wants to play on it that he cannot get anywhere else. I personally have found this to be a pretty good rule so far, and ultimately this lead me to purchase my PS4. If I reached a point where I had five titles for the Xbox One… I would consider getting one, but for the time being I just don’t have any interest.

Results of Poor Messaging

Microsoft has reached this point out of some phenomenally poor messaging. When the console was announced they made a series of blunders in trying to guess exactly what their console buyers would want. All of the touting of its television features really lost me in the process. I barely watch television, and when I do it tends to be for a specific purpose… to watch one show and then move on to the next thing. The only channel I watch with any frequency is Cartoon Network, more specifically Adult Swim. Even then the last time I sat down in front of the television to actually watch television on purpose was well over a week ago. So the focus on the initial marketing message of the console by demonstrating all of the admittedly interesting things it can do with television… really landed off in left field.

Since then he has been struggling to out message Sony who has quite frankly dominated the news cycle with some pretty innovative features. For sake of fairness I personally own right now 2 Xbox 360s, a Playstation 3, a Playstation Vita and a Playstation 4. So I am not exactly an unbiased observer here. I have clearly chosen the Sony Platform over the Microsoft one in part because all of these consoles work so well together. The other thing is that Sony has focused in with laser precision on a very specific message. “This is a console about video gaming, and we want to provide you an awesome gaming experience.” So far this message has worked and resounded with folks looking for a next generation gaming console and not necessarily a next generation media pc.

It’s About the Value

The primary reason why I jumped allegiance during the last generation is admittedly just how amazing of a value Playstation Plus is, or more so how disappointing a value Xbox Gold was. PS Plus is a $50 dollar a year subscription that gives you tons of free content as a result. I just made a list of titles I have gotten in the two years I have been subscribed to the program.

Dust 514, DC Universe Online, Ratchet and Clank Collection, Dead Nation, Unit 13, Gravity Rush, Wipeout 2048, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Hitman: Absolution, Outlast, Resogun, Pinball Arcade, Infamous 2 , Little Big Planet 2, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, Malicious, LIttle Big Planet Karting, Uncharted 3, Mod Nation Racers: Road Trip, Thomas Was Alone, Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark, Lone Survivor: The Directors Cut, Zen Pinball 2, Worms: Battle Island, Labrynth Legends, Zombie Tycoon II, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee HD, Hotline Miami, Grid 2, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Payday 2, Metro: Last Light, Closure, Knytt Underground, Dyad, Bioshock Infinite, Darksiders, Saints Row: The Third, Batman: Arkham City, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Poker Night 2, Joe Danger 2: The Movie, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Borderlands 2, Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny, Tekken 6, Galaga Legions, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Castle of Illusion, Jet Set Radio, Binary Domain, Vanquish, The Cave, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Street Fighter X Tekken, Dragon’s Dogman: Dark Arisen, Remember Me, DmC Devil May Cry, Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection, Mega Man 9&10 Combo, Tomb Raider, Pro Evolution Soccer 2014, Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Trine 2, PixelJunk Shooter, PIxelJunk Monsters , Velocity Ultra, Soul Sacrifice, Stick it to the Man, Limbo, Puppeteer, Surge Deluxe, NBA 2K14, Warframe, Flower, Strider, Towerfall Ascension, Doki-Doki Universe, Terraria, Muramasa Rebirth, Vessel, Dead Space 3, Fez, Dragon’s Crown, Metrico, Rogue Legacy, Proteus, Road Not Taken, Crysis 3

That is 94 individual titles that I have gotten for free through either the console itself or the Playstation Plus service. In many cases those titles are available on multiple platforms and as a result I get a copy for every platform it is avaialble for. This is a huge deal for me, and not only do most of the titles have what Sony calls “cross buy” where if you buy a copy for any platform you get it on ALL platforms… you also get “cross save” on the newer games. Lately I have been playing quite a bit of Rogue Legacy, and I can start a game on my Vita and then pick it up later upstairs on my Playstation 4. On top of that if I have a game I want to play on my PS4 I can pick up the Vita and use it as a remote screen and even play it remotely. Admittedly playing from your PS4 while not on the same network is a bit laggy, but the simple fact that it exists is mind boggling to me.

Now I realize that “Games With Gold” is a thing that exists now and they have been fighting to catch up, but at this point there have been 35 titles to Playstation Plus that has released 148 PS3 titles, 14 PS4 titles, 48 PS Vita titles and 87 psp/psone/minis titles. I am admittedly bitter however for having paid for years of Xbox Gold subscription for what amounted to the permission to play games online and watch Netflix. Since then they have reversed this decision and made Netflix a free software, but when I initially got my Xbox 360 you had to have the full gold subscription to use it. Sony is just as much of a corporate monstrosity as Microsoft, but they have been doing a much better job of disguising that fact and giving me warm fuzzies along the way. Since I still have all three of their most recent platforms, and even a PSP if we want to go back that far… they are doing an awesome job of giving me reasons to care about each and every platform and more specifically the interoperability between them.

Share Play

Hands down the most interesting thing to come out of GamesCom for me was the announcement of Share Play. The Playstation Now game streaming service has been announced for some time, and it is currently happening playable in beta, but for the time being it just is a poor value. What Share Play does is take that same game streaming technology but flip it around to make it extremely useful. Right now if you want to play with a friend, you both have to own the same game and log into it at the same time to meet up and play. What Share Play proposes is that you can be sitting on your couch and your friend on theirs, but be virtually playing the same copy of the game together. The idea is that you send your PlayStation network friend an invite to join your current game session. At this point the game is then streamed to their console and you are playing together in the same session.

I have no clue what the ramifications of this technology will be and what sort of internet connection you will need to make it work. Thankfully however most of my friends that I hang out with on a nightly basis also have some pretty beefy internet connections. So I can see us getting a lot of play out of this feature. Want to try out a new game, awesome… pop in my game and play with me and see if you like it. Want to work together on some achievement, awesome… let me send you an invite and we will work on it together. That is the thing I like the best about the PS4 experience so far is that it feels very socially connected as I am constantly able to see what my friends are playing and especially during the Destiny betas we have been able to pop around freely. The only negative I have so far is that the voice chat system is horrible, and as a result I still prefer to use teamspeak.

Wrapping Up

I realize that I am not an unbiased voice about the whole Microsoft versus Sony debate. In truth there really isn’t much of a debate to be had in either direction. Buy whatever console has the games you want to play on it and ignore everyone that is spouting off about your choice. I made my choice based on the fact that it had more games that I wanted to play on it, and with the Playstation Plus service from the day I brought my PS4 home I already had a half dozen titles to play on it that night. PS Plus and all the other consoles do an amazing job justifying the purchase of MORE Sony Consoles. As far as Rise of the Tomb Raider, I am taking a wait and see attitude. I think right now that this exclusive agreement is just a carefully marketed and cleverly worded announcement. Will it ship on Xbox One first? More than likely… but will it be followed up within six months to a year on every other platform? Almost assuredly so, because so far if it is popular and demanded enough most Xbox titles see a PC release… I am looking at your KOTOR, Mass Effect, Fable, Dead Rising and I imagine every other blockbuster that gets released for a Microsoft Console.

#XboxOne #PS4 #RiseoftheTombRaider

Raiding Tombs

July 5, 2014 by Belghast

Process Automation

One of the things I have figured out over the years is that things work really well only if you aren’t thinking about them. For example if I have a repetitive data entry task, I can seem to do it awesome and at full speed… only until I actually stop to think about what I am doing. Hell even typing itself works amazingly well and I can compose perfectly at the keyboard with zero typos… until I stop to think about what my hands are doing. At that point I screw everything up and get the sequence completely out of whack. As a result I try and commit as many things as I can in life to a sort of ritual. This frees me up to daydream about whatever the hell I want to, while still performing the task at hand on autopilot. My morning routine is much like this, a sequence of events that happen essentially on their own, and works awesomely until I am forced to think about it. When I do have to think about whatever I happen to be doing the process breaks down completely.

Each morning I get up out of bed, walk across the room to turn off the alarm clock. I turn on the television, make sure it is on the local news channel, walk to the kitchen and turn on the keurig and then hop in the shower. When I am out of the shower I get dressed, make coffee, deliver a mug to my wife and take mine upstairs into my office where I sit down at my computer and do a blog post. After I’ve finished that I head back downstairs, feed the animals, give our eldest cat her medicine, run back into the bedroom to say goodbye to my wife, grab my chromebook and then leave the house. At which point I head to QuikTrip, grab breakfast and consume said breakfast while I drive to work. Finally about the time I reach work I am capable of physical exertion because my body is for the most part finished “booting up” and I walk leisurely the 1000 steps or so it takes to get into my office. After sitting at my desk for thirty minutes or so checking email and catching up on my blogroll, I am finally at that point ready to engage in conversation. All of this happens pretty much on its own, and any false step along the path causes the whole sequence to fall apart.

The weekends have naturally had an abbreviated version of this process, as a lot of the activities simply do not need to happen. However the last two mornings I have decimated this process entirely, and I have been paying the price. At first yesterday I thought maybe I just was not awake enough to go walking. So I got up, sat up in bed and watched an entire episode of Pokémon, thinking that surely my body was fully awake at that point after having to explain why Ash Ketchum cares about collecting gym badges to my wife. But still, even after that prep work… my body had no clue what in the hell I was doing to it. I feel like maybe I could add a walk into my existing process…. but essentially that would defeat the purpose, since I doubt I would be awake enough to perform until I have at least had a shower and some caffeine. I think today will be the end of this experiment and I will return to my modified weekend process tomorrow, because right now I feel completely out of sorts.

Raiding Tombs

I have to admit that I was never a big fan of the Tomb Raider franchise. Maybe I am not “male” enough, but I didn’t find the previous incarnation with its two big breasts and two even bigger guns that amusing. There were so many times in the games where I had no clue what was going on, and rarely made it more than an hour into the game before giving up. So when the 2013 reboot happened I had no real fondness for the series, and was not even really paying attention to it. That said something interesting happened… all of my friends raved about just how amazing the game was. Even more interesting to me was how most of said friends raving about the game… were Female. So I knew at some point I wanted to give it a try, but that said I have technically owned this game in one form or another for the better part of a year, but this weekend was really the first time I had given it a play.

Traditionally I do not go in for this sort of game. I have tried multiple times to play Uncharted, but the whole “playing a movie” aspect has always been a massive turnoff for me. Something I just realized last night is that for the better part of the last two decades I have had my head firmly in one MMO or another. During that time I have nibbled at single player experiences, but never really sat down to to the buffet. In that time we moved from the golden age of 90s sandboxy rpgs like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout… to a world where most games are cinematic on-rails experiences. The dissonance of this cultural shift honestly took some getting used to. I would poke my head out of MMOs long enough to consume the more free form gaming experiences like Fallout, Elder Scrolls and even to some extent Mass Effect that allowed me to go off the rails and wander freely, but I have resisted giving myself over to the “narrative experience”.

Stop Fighting It

Basically I give up… I cannot fight the direction my beloved game industry has gone in. I have spent my time resisting it, and as a result have essentially turned into an old man yelling at the kids to “get off my internet”. So after hearing yet another friend talk about just how amazing this game was… I decided to give myself over to the experience. To get the full effect, and keep myself from trying to use the old crutch of “mouse and keyboard”, I opted to play this game entirely on my Playstation 3. It was given away some time ago as part of the Playstation Plus package. For awhile I considered trying to pick up the double special extended deluxe remastered edition available for the PS4, but I really don’t care about how pretty her hair is… or how realistic her sweat movement is. The game looks gorgeous regardless of what platform you play it on, and in truth I kind of prefer the “clump” of hair rather than being distracted by seeing each individual particle.

I like this Lara Croft so much better than the previous one. Firstly she seems to have human proportions as well as human emotions. The previous incarnation was essentially Wonder Woman with guns, and felt like playing a guy with tits at times. I actually enjoyed the series of Angelina Jolie movies, but this Lara feels like a product of her circumstances, rather than someone trained and bred to be mind numbingly amazing. In the course of this game, your character goes through some truly horrific things… things no one should ever have to. Each time she becomes stronger for it, and you start out as this visibly naive girl and turn into a woman with razor will and a desire to survive at all costs. Quite frankly… everything about this franchise is just better than the previous incarnations. This is a Lara I would love to see in a movie, but in reality that is essentially what we are seeing… movies played out through our actions.

Many Narrative Elements

One of my favorite constructs in the game is that of the “day camp” system. Every so often in the game there is a camp spot, be it a formal camp or just a clearing with a makeshift fire ring. When you are at camp all of these interesting interludes happen. Sometimes it is interaction between two characters, other times it is Lara talking to herself… and then there is a series of asides that involve her watching pre-shot footage from the video camera of another of the characters. These little moments help to flesh out the story, and the character interactions making them all far more three dimensional in the process. This combined with the various journal entries you find scattered throughout the levels helps to create a very three dimensional feeling of Yamatai and the characters that inhabit it.

I think another aspect that has helped to make me fall in love with this game quickly, is that the setting itself is extremely familiar to me. Playing Tomb Raider is like playing out what happened to Oliver Queen on the island of Lian Yu in the television show Arrow. The fact that the best weapon Lara has at his disposal is a make shift bow… that slowly improves over the course of the levels really underlines this feeling. So it gave me a point of reference that I already cared about that I could latch onto with both hands and use to pull me closer to the story. The funny thing about surrendering to the narrative, is that it has allowed me to do something I rarely am able to… Play a female character and enjoy it. Most of my game play experiences have been about inserting myself into character character I happened to be playing. So as superior as the writing of “Femshep” might be, I could never disconnect myself enough from the character to make that work. Now it is not like I am playing a character, but instead watching a story unfold in front of me… and it is working.

Old Dog Learns New Tricks

Now at this point I want to go back and try again some of the game that did not work for me in the past. So often times I wanted them to “let me play the game” and stop with all the “cutscenes” never really grasping that the game had changed, and I was simply not prepared for that sort of a game play experience. Another thing that has helped this process is that I have forced myself in many cases to start playing with a controller. Earlier this weekend I was playing Bioshock Infinite with a controller, and not absolutely hating it. I still feel like a controller does a poor job at fight targeting control, but for the most part it works well enough, and I have now reached a point where controlling my character with two thumbs has reached a place where I no longer have to think about it. Movement and Aiming is starting to become “ritual” and as such I am rejecting it considerably less.

Not every game is going to work out to be better because of this little revelation I have gone through. I tried to play the original Witcher again last night, and realized that “nope, it still sucks”. That game has one of the most uncomfortable and unorthodox control schemes I have seen in some time. No matter how awesome that storyline is… I will likely never play it, because I cannot get past how horrible it feels. This is the sort of game that I guess “lets play” videos exist, because while I would love to know what happens storyline wise… there is no way I am going to play it. I’ve given it three tries, at separate times and come up with the same rejection. I guess this is literally a case of three strikes and you are out for me. There are many games however, namely console titles that I look forward to dusting off and trying to play again.

#TombRaider #PS3

Recording Console Games

June 19, 2014 by Belghast

Bombing Run

Yesterday was an interesting day, partially because I dinged another level and am now officially in my “late thirties”. Most of the morning was spent in preparation for my wife to fly in, and doing a last minute run through the house to “pick up” a bit. Honestly this year I somehow managed to pick up successfully as I went and didn’t really hit the point where I simply stopped caring that there was a pizza box on the kitchen counter. So it really only took a few minutes, and I streamed some Warlords of Draenor while waiting. For a reason that I did not know at the time… none of my voice over was coming through in the stream, but I will get to that later.

I picked up my wife around noon and we ran across town to my favorite Indian restaurant… where I proceeded to order something completely new in honor of the occasion. My standby has always been Chicken Tika Masala medium hot, and no matter how many times I consider ordering something else… I always end up back on that. The new dish was a sort of super spicy egg fried rice with chicken in it that they call Desi Rice. In any fashion it was pretty freaking good. Overall the day was pretty relaxing, and it served as the perfect break in the working week. It was awesome to have my wife back, even if it is only for a few days as she flies out to the second conference of the year Sunday.

What completely overwhelmed me yesterday was all the well wishes from my internet family. Both my twitter and g+ feeds were blowing up with well wishes all day yesterday, and upon logging into teamspeak that night I got another round. I feel completely bombarded, and I thank all of you for that feeling. It kinda feels like the whole Sally Fields “You like me, You really like me” moment. But amazing friends aside… I find it always interesting to see which bot wishes me a happy birthday first. This year and I believe many of the other years recently… the reward goes for the WoW Ace Forums… who wished me a happy birthday at 7 pm on the 17th, which I can only assume is on Australian time? In all seriousness… I am humbled by the amount of support I get from you all.

Recording Console Games

One of the coolest things about the PS4 is that it can stream live to twitch. It also happens to be one of the most disappointing, since the twitch streaming rate is locked to 480p which shocked me. I pretty much religiously stream in 1080p so it was frustrating the first time I cracked open one of my Destiny Alpha videos and saw how blurry the footage was. The other nuisance is that it seems to only record MY voice chat as part of the stream, and not that of the other people I happen to be partied with. The end result is this disjointed experience of listening to an often times hilarious one sided conversation. I figured there had to be a better way.

For some time I had looked at a capture card, but honestly that whole concept was foreign to me. After doing a ton of research I realized there was a huge problem there, with the way the streaming worked. The two consoles that I most wanted to stream from were the Sony Playstation 3 and Sony Playstation 4… both of which I absolutely love. The problem is that in both cases they use HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection aka a screwball system that tries to encrypt the video data from the source to the television. Apparently the Xbox One also struggles with this, and for some reason in all of these systems it is either on all of the time… or turned on the first time you play a movie and then stays on. Normally this would prevent you from recording gameplay footage, because the recording device is not “HDCP Compliant”.

The widely accepted workaround is to plug these consoles into the capture card using component cables. This however causes its own stream of problems as you take a digital signal… convert it to analog and then convert it back to digital. The end result is often blurry and color shifted and just not something I wanted to mess with. So after a lot of research I stumbled on the above video. Basically the idea is to use an HDMI splitter to get around the HDCP lockout without actually stripping the HDCP protection and making the device illegal for sale. All of this is voodoo to me to be honest, but I wanted to give it a shot. I managed to find an Elgato HD Capture device on Craigslist and got a ridiculously good deal on it, therefore enabling this entire thing to work. As of last night I had the set up going and it worked successfully, after a few attempts to work out the kinks. Sorry for the twitch advertisement spam on twitter.

Rube Goldberg of Streaming

This ladies and gentleman is my streaming setup. I decided to diagram it out in part because it made it actually make sense rather than the jumble of cables that I have running around my desktop. Right now I have both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up in this fashion and will ultimately move the Xbox 360 in here as well. For the setup I am proposing you need the following materials.

The Elgato comes with one HDMI cable and the necessary Micro to Full USB Cable. Like I said I got mine through a craigslist deal for $75 enabling this whole setup to work. So the only thing I was actually missing was the splitter. After doing a lot of research on the subject it seems like only a few splitters do what is needed. Thankfully the one I ordered and linked above is both tiny and works great. Ultimately I want to get some much shorter usb cables because right now… having all these 6 foot cables is a mess. Essentially you hook all of your game systems to the HDMI switch, and then hook the switch to an HDMI splitter, and then hook one of the two outbound ports to the Elgato. That then passes the signal to the television and your computer. You can download software from the Elgato website that does a decent job at capture, but I simply integrated all of this into my existing OBS setup.

Trial and Error

After a lot of trial and error I was able to produce a video of me playing Castle of Illusion on the PS3. I do a rather horrible job at playing the game, but that is entirely beside the point. Basically I could have died over and over and still would have been amused because the setup was working. The only problem is… I seemed to be unable to record any dialog from my microphone. I spent the better part of this video fiddling with my settings in OBS trying to make it function again. The video however looked great, and was streaming to twitch and exporting to youtube in glorious 1080p. The trouble with my headset started over the weekend when I decided to disconnect it from my machine and hook it to my ps4 for the purpose of grouping up in Destiny.

Being a USB headset, everything seemed to go wonky when I did this and everything from mumble, to teamspeak to obs treated the headset as though it had never been connected to the system, forcing me to remap everything. Then I remembered… I had hooked the headset previously directly into my machine, and was now trying to go through my powered hub. So I pulled the headset out, hooked it directly into the machine and bam… all of the sudden OBS started working again. This second video has dialog coming across and with the help of my good friend Ashgar, I managed to sort out the volume levels so that I could actually be heard over the game audio. So I feel like right now I have a repeatable solution for streaming HDMI connected consoles over twitch.

Now my specific setup is not a requirement… there are lots of different ways to do this. Some folks have had good luck installing a cheap capture card in their PC and streaming through that. The Elgato seemed like a more hands free solution to working out the finer points of video conversion. There however are a bunch of different devices on the market that do essentially the same thing. I wanted the Elgato simply because it did not require an additional power source and could draw power entirely from my PC over USB. Since the HDMI switch and splitter each have their own power supplies, this just cut down on the total number of cords needed. Right now the hole thing is a colossal mess, and at some point I want to hook it up with significantly shorter cables. For now however it works great and I am super happy to be able to do this.