It’s that time now where I’m being increasingly asked which new console I’m going to get (ignoring the two slightly more likely options of either getting neither or both of course). I mean, really? What’s the odds of me just getting one if I decide I want in on this console generation?

The answer is that I pre-ordered both in a no cash up front kind of way so I could get one if I wanted and am fully prepared to cancel either or both if somebody doesn’t start saying something to excite me soon.

I have an easy enough set of requirements that put consoles onto the plus side of the decision:

• A controller that I don’t hate. This is the reason why my PS3s never became my console of choice. Points to MS and Sony here so far it seems, but of course I need a hands on with them to be sure.
• Unprotected game video footage for recording. Points to MS here for announcing it, while Sony need to make a statement one way or the other although the PS3 sets a bad precedent due to its locked down HDMI. Before anybody says anything, no the inbuilt video capture is useless for what I want due to recording lengths on both platforms.
• Fast times from switching on to playing games. No lengthy patches, no lengthy installs, just playing games. Provisional points to both sides as they are saying the right kind of things. Again, seeing the results is the only way to know for sure. It’s also going to need to not throw up an error message and lengthy recovery task every time you boot from having pulled the power cord out to shut the damn thing up (looking at you PS3)
• A good range of exclusive games. I think Sony may nudge it here, but not by much. Either way the number of games that I’ll not be playing on PC instead is rather small in the first six months or more.
• Good media remote. One of these consoles would replace a PS3 as a blu-ray player so it needs to have a nice remote. On the previous generation the 360 had an awful one that could be replaced with a universal remote and the PS3 had a great one that couldn’t due to lack of IR (some limited HDMI based control works for some TVs as well, which is cool). Neither companies have announced their replacements as far as I can tell, but MS certainly support IR remotes. I’m going to predict that the company who is also a TV manufacturer will probably come out on top again.
• Proper independent game support on the console. Sony have already said no, their self-publishing isn’t what I’m after. MS are announcing their support at Gamescon, so maybe they will have what I want, which is something like their Indie Arcade on 360. If it supports Unity then frankly they’ve got a sale. I’m not hopeful.
  The real test is how much use a new console would get in the first few months, and with the way things are I think that’s going to be quite limited unless it’s your primary games platform. Buying both is probably unwise at this time, as is buying a console if you already have a good PC. Will that stop me though? I’m not sure yet.

We have new consoles coming out in a few months! This is a cause for celebration no mater what type of games you play on whatever platform you prefer.

The main gain is that it moves the state of play for what we still insist on calling AAA games from 512mb up to 5gb of memory, and this is massive win for gamers everywhere. Even the PC gets a massive push as the basic game designs will expand and then the other 10gb of memory we have on our PCs over that initial 5 can be used for stupidly high resolution textures and the like. Happy times for all.

I do have a worry about the consoles, and it’s one that comes from the sad reality of the 360 and PS3: the stated resolution for a game is most likely utter bollocks.

A common practice with console games is to render the game at sub 720p resolution and then scale it up so that it fits. This means that you might have SD content that has only gone through a scaling process and so, and I’m sure everybody has seen this, looks so jagged it’s painful. The reason for this was that the hardware in the consoles just wasn’t powerful enough to do what they wanted to do at the proper resolution.

This is of course the point where PC owners get to be smug as a new graphics card has always been seen as the solution to the problem there rather than upscaling. This is mainly due, I suspect, to the fact that it’s easier and cheaper to just make it the PC gamer’s problem of running games as intended and, generally, PC gamers are happy to have that responsibility to keep their rigs up to speed.

I should of course say at this point that we are so far away from seeing final games on these consoles that this is all speculation, but I suspect that we’re destined for a repeat of last generation in this matter anyway, especially when it comes to the Xbox as it lags behind the PS4 on paper, much like the PS3 lagged behind the 360 for most of the generation.

This week we return with tales of new PCs!We also talk about the following things:

• Galactic Reign
• Planetside 2
• Gears of War in PC
• Defiance
• Assassin’s Creed (on PC)
• Defiance (and the TV show…)
• Citadels
• Star Trek Online
• Unity, and why game development is great
• RIFT
• Why some online stores are rubbish because they lie about having A-Wings in stock.

Sometimes we put up with things that are just a bit old fashioned and primitive when we really should move on to something a bit more interesting and modern, it’s a fact of life. Often we are locked in by a closed platform and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Take Steam. The main Steam UI is pretty useless when you come to think about it. It’s primitive in many places, although it does do the basics of what needs to be done it never quite goes far enough.

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This week I’ve mostly been an Assassin in the Holy Land. There were also periods where I was Nolan North, but the less said about them the better.

I shall, for now, pretend that my assault on PC gaming has started with the start of the alphabet, but in reality I grabbed all the Assassin’s Creed games cheaply on Steam and decided to have a replay through them all as a preparation for the next game, which comes out later this year. I think I was one of the only people who actually liked the first game before it because a popular franchise (hipster warning) but I can really understand where people had problems with this first game.

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Self publishing on consoles is the new hotness; you can’t avoid hearing both Microsoft and Sony saying that they are going to do it. But what does it mean?

The truth is it means several things, but you would be hard pressed to know that going by just what is being reported. There’s a big answer and a small answer.

The big answer is that you don’t need to use a publisher as a middleman between you and platform holder. At this point they effectively become your publisher, you hopefully get a bigger share of the profits than you otherwise would and there are less people getting in the way with you getting on with making a game. The problem with this is that you need to be selected by the platform holder in the first place, which means you need to have a proven track record somewhere, probably on PC or at otheir studios. Calling this self publishing really isn’t true as you do still need to impress a publisher in the first place, it’s just that they happen to also make consoles and probably aren’t giving the support you would usually get.

The small answer is the one that I think a lot of people are more familiar with, and the one that I think is more useful for the term. This is the model that Google, Apple and Microsoft use for their phones and Microsoft and Apple use for their stores built into their operating systems. In these cases they are more distributors than publishers; they give you a place to sell your software in return for taking 30% of your cash. The only selection going on here are ones for basic quality (hopefully) and “objectionable material”, which is a vague concept that trips up people wanting to make political points.

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This week we’re back playing games!

• Mass Effect 3
• Galactic Reign
• Rift
• Grand Turismo 6 Demo
• Fez
• Arkham Asylum
• Defiance
• Minecraft
• Eve has cards now!

Hello! We took a week off, but luckily for you all we recorded a short episode the other week about the wonders of having enforced leisure time and it’s ability to let you get to know daytime TV better.

Normal service will resume next week, where we promise to talk about games.

Motion Control. Never have two words filled gamers with so much dread. The Wii got it right, it was enforced from the start and attracted a new generation of people to put a console under their TV, but Nintendo spectacularly failed to capitialise on this and most ended up gathering dust. Now the replacement isn’t selling well and Nintendo really haven’t managed to come up with a compelling argument (i.e. a good enough games catalogue) to justify buying a new one.

I wonder how important the compulsory part of the deal is. Microsoft are certainly going with that, but although Kinect hasn’t flopped (24million sold earlier this year, more now so any normal person might actually call it a success) it’s never really caught on with us. It works well for things like exercise games, which are really more like apps than games, but I’m hard pressed to think of a single “proper” game that used it well. Add to that living room sizes outside of the US and even the new better camera with the One probably isn’t going to work with most living rooms. From what I’ve seen it’ll work with my living room now, but that’s no good for me as I’ve taken to playing all my games sitting at a desk so I don’t take up the TV. That makes Kinect dead on arrival for me even if the games aimed at me do arrive, and going by past history I find that highly unlikely.

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This week we’re taking a look at Indie Game: The Movie, a look at the development of Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez. Will it turn us into game developers, or will it make us question why anybody would want to put themselves through the experience of game development?