Tomorrow Apple is expected to announce an updated Apple TV with a dedicated app store and more powerful hardware. That positions the device to compete directly with the existing PC and console gaming space. Yet it’s premature for console manufacturers and PC gamers to be worried. Nor is it a surefire success for casual gaming in the living room.
We’ve been down this road before. First, smartphone and tablet games were predicted to kill consoles. It didn’t turn out that way. PS4 and Xbox One sales have been strong, even better than the PS3 and Xbox 360 during its opening sale period. PC gaming is booming through eSports and on Steam. And while casual gaming is successful on mobile, it’s fallen flat elsewhere. The Ouya, Fire TV, and the existing Apple TV through AirPlay have all been gaming duds.
Granted, a revamped Apple TV is a step in the right direction. An Apple-based living room platform is bound to take some attention away from traditional PC and console gaming. And like most forms of tech, we can’t quantify Apple TV’s impact until months or years from now. Yet several early factors will telegraph the Apple TV’s success against the exiting games market.
Wonderful post by Miguel Penabella over at Kill Screen Daily on The Last of Us, the critically acclaimed adventure/horror PS3 game from 2013. There’s many parallels in The Last of Us with not just zombie and post-apocalyptic films, but also John Ford’s The Searchers. Penabella’s breakdown of the similarities in theme and tone is very well done.
Dave Tach, writing for Polygon about Tim Schafer revisiting Grim Fandango, an adventure gaming classic from the 90s:
Just because Schafer wasn’t making adventure games didn’t mean he’d left them behind, as evidenced by his determination to remake his old games. Now, thanks to Disney, LucasArts and Sony, he had an opportunity to revisit one of his best. And the first order of business was to figure out what Double Fine had.
File by file, the developers cataloged the information pulled from floppy discs and DLTs to recreate the original game as faithfully as possible. Now, what would they do with it? The answer is straightforward: Not much, because nothing much needed to be done. To Schafer, remastering should be about delivering the original game with the original intent, but tweaked to take advantage of modern technologies.
A wonderful remaster from earlier this year now accompanied by really solid, in depth reporting.
Strong E3 showings generate hype and set a company’s aspirations for the future. On that count, it’s hard to fault Sony’s strategy. They focused on a few hugely anticipated game announcements: The Last Guardian, a Final Fantasy 7 remake, and Shenume 3. Just one would have made many PlayStation fans happy, but we saw all three at once. Alliances with this year’s biggest third party releases (e.g. Batman, Star Wars) underline Sony’s status as the console market leader. And an upcoming exclusive, the futuristic RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn, was an E3 highlight.
Yet all the hype and big games for the future can’t mask Sony’s lack of big exclusives for 2015. That’s a problem given Microsoft’s strong lineup this year. And beyond the mega announcements, I found stretches of Sony’s E3 presser poorly focused. We barely saw a mention of Project Morpheus. There was little stage time for indies, far less than Microsoft. And Sony relegated 2015 exclusives like The Nathan Drake Collection to a few seconds of a sizzle reel.
Microsoft delivered their strongest E3 showing in years. This went beyond expected first party exclusives. Almost every element – pacing, lineup, presenters – came together to underscore the Xbox One’s strengths. Yet Microsoft wasn’t aiming new features and games at the general public. Nor those necessarily torn between the PS4 and Xbox One. It’s aimed at the 60 million Xbox 360 owners who haven’t jumped to this generation yet.
To cater to the Xbox core, Microsoft leans on sequels that call back to Xbox 360’s boom years. There’s Gears, Forza, Halo and Fable, all out in 2015. Xbox One backwards compatibility is another big feature, the most consumer-friendly announcement of E3. The initial slate of compatible Xbox 360 titles is small, about 100 by year’s end. But that’s will grow over time, and the message is less practical than psychological. You want to play your old 360 games on the Xbox One? Go for it, and do so for free. During the main presser, Xbox head Phil Spencer underlined this message: “If you’ve been waiting to move from your Xbox 360, now is the time.”
I expect stability and predictability from the big three (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony) E3 pressers this year. First, we’re a year and half into this generation. It’s past the bumpy launch window, but not far enough for new hardware iterations. PS4 and Xbox One sales are already strong, which reinforces a conservative playbook. And many games for the show have been formally revealed early or leaked. Yet there are unknowns that the pressers next week could help answer.
Wonderful essay by Alexander Kriss at Kill Screen regarding Lucasarts’ golden age of adventure gaming and its impact on the burgeoning gaming market:
In the mid–1980s, the similar albeit slightly less profound question, “How do I know this is a videogame?” would be answered very differently than today. Such a query might have yielded answers like, “There are discrete levels that increase in difficulty, therefore it is a game,” or, “Progress is tracked by a score system, therefore it is a game,” or, certainly, “If the player fails, she reaches a ‘game over’ state, therefore it is a game.” The medium was young and existed in a kind of philosophical terrarium, bound by certain unwritten rules carried over from arcade era of the late ’70s.
Out of this experimental haze came Ron Gilbert, a young programmer and game designer at Lucasfilms Games (later to redubbed LucasArts). Beginning with 1987’s Maniac Mansion (co-designed with Gary Winnick), he embarked on the impressive project of dismantling the assumptions that had become so ingrained that most game designers had forgotten they were there. Like Descartes, Gilbert sought to find the latent truth of the (gaming) world through the power of the intellect.
Patrick Lee over at The A.V. Club runs thorough analysis of Mass Effect’s well known Paragon vs. Renegade morality system. As Lee argues, 99% of the time, picking the “good” Paragon option results in success and no negative consequences. But what if there was more of an edge? Lee:
Would Paragon purists still be willing to free the captive rachni queen if she returned the rachni to their historical warmongering? Would they let that batarian walk free in order to rescue a dozen people if there was a real chance he would use his freedom to kill hundreds? It would obviously be overkill for every Paragon option to blow up in Shepard’s face, but by allowing Paragons to stroll infallibly through the galaxy, Mass Effect defangs a world it spends a lot of time insisting will bite.
Where would avant-garde cinema be without Maya Deren, whose authorship of her own work was challenged—as women’s authorship is almost always challenged? If the current Fine Arts climate can support both Kara Walker and Ryder Ripps, I am sure gaming can handle both Merrit Kopas’s Hugpunx and EA’s Battlefield: Hardline. The same corporations that sell us the idea of gamers as an imagined nation are experiencing a wave of diminishing returns on their franchises. What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive.
Give it up to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundary for being an unimpeachable source for hard-core tech/processing/graphics news within the gaming community. This scoop on the Xbox One – it’s past performance and how it’s likely to evolve with the SDK changes – is a great read.