The PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One launch sales figures are in, and it’s a dead heat. Black Friday madness is over and the next-gen console makers are crowing over how well their products have sold.
Microsoft says the Xbox One sold through (that’s a measure of how many consumers actually bought an item versus the sales to the retail outlet) over 2 million units worldwide in the 18 days since launch. According ot their data, 1000 Xbox One’s were ordered a minute on Amazon.com during the peak.
Don’t fret Sony warriors! The PlayStation 4 sold terrifically as well. According to their numbers, the PlayStation 4 sold (no word on whether that’s sold through to customers or sold to retailers) 2.1 million units since its launch. Keep in mind that unlike the Xbox One, Sony’s newest console launched in the US and Canada first, followed by other markets after two weeks.
Pop the cork and celebrate, console fanboys! You all win! You can wrestle over Christmas numbers after the New Year.
I have a certain sickness for indie games. I buy them all the time. I’m in so many alpha and beta tests right now that it’s humanly impossible to play them all. Some games stick with me and some games don’t. My latest purchase has completely captured my imagination.
It’s been twenty years since Doom put players knee-deep in the dead on Mars. Imps, zombie sergeants, Pinky Demons, and the BFG9000 exploded onto gamers’ computers and forever changed the landscape of videogames. Do you remember the first time you stepped into Doomguy’s boots? What about the first time you dragged your PC over to a buddy’s house to play some multiplayer? John Carmack, former guru of id Software, spoke to Wired about Doom’s anniversary. The one tidbit that stands out is this thought from Carmack regarding id’s infamous “when it’s done” motto.
The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: “It’ll be done when it’s done.” And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by – if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game.
Trying to imagine an id Software that didn’t work on an extended development cycle all throughout the 90’s up until their buyout by ZeniMax is almost impossible. Waiting for Doom 3 was as much an experience as playing the game.
Tom Chick and Scott Dobrosielsky will play through all eight worlds of Super Mario 3D World, writing an entry after each world for the next two weeks. What makes these grown men qualified to guide you through the worlds of Nintendo’s latest family-friendly platformer? Glad you asked.
Okay, all you whiny Steambabies, listen up. Race the Sun, the endless runner that’s way more than just an endless runner, is now on Steam. That’s one less reason for you not to play it. It’s only ten bucks, and it’s even got achievements and some lovely trading cards, if those are your thing.
And for those of us already sold on the game, we can log into our Flipfly accounts here to get our Steam keys.
Sightseers was directed by Ben Wheatley, a sort of UK Tarantino who arrived on the scene with his Pulp-Fiction-meets-Wicker-Man hybrid called Kill List. But Sightseers is not a Wheatley movie. He just sort of ably corrals it. From start to finish, Sightseers belongs to the tremendous Alice Lowe. You might recognize Lowe as the female quarter of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, gamely holding her own alongside Matthew Holness, Matt Berry, and Richard Ayoade. Her comedic timing is impeccable. In Sightseers, she alternately beams and sulks, murderous, adoring, confused, unconcerned, seething, idiotically oblivious. Lowe’s performance drives this movie into its strange crannies. She can accomplish with a forlorn glance what it took Will Farrell an entire career to achieve and squander.
Sightseers is the creation of Lowe and an actor named Steve Oram. Over the years, they developed these characters from a series of sketches about an English couple traveling England to see the sights, doing inappropriate things along the way. This distillation of those characters is a masterpiece of black humor, mean-spirited and nasty, cruel and uncompromising, uniquely English and drab. It knows enough to be understated. Some of the best moments are Lowe and Oram just riffing with each other. She licks a cave. He tries to explain pictures he didn’t even take. It’s so goddamn precious and mundane in the bits between the mayhem, the vulgarity, and the sociopathic rampages. It’s the opposite of True Romance or Something Wild. True Prosaic. Something Mild. Bonnie and Clyde as unsexy mousy Brits without anything better to do.
But most importantly, it knows when to go over the top without flying off the handle completely, and it knows how to do it smartly rather than gratuitously. It has a respectable sense of the absurd. “I’ve never hurt an innocent person before,” Lowe muses after a nasty accident. “He’s not a person, he’s a Daily Mail reader,” Oram replies without any hint of a wink. English, mean, and smart.
Sightseers is out on DVD today. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon.com or watch it instantly on Netflix.
Rockstar will begin letting people create their own multiplayer content today in Grand Theft Auto V’s online mode. The Content Beta will allow players to set their own deathmatch areas, plot race routes, and generally go nuts Trevor style with some of the same tools the developers used. Player created content will be shared through the Rockstar Club site, where other open-world mayhem aficionados can check them out. The best content may even get chosen by the developers to be shared community-wide.
The Deathmatch and Race Creators will come to you via a free update, and you’ll need to have a Social Club account that is linked to your Xbox Live Gamertag or PlayStation Network ID to use them.
Rockstar also announced that the addition of a capture the flag event is planned for a later December update.
This week we see the Coen brothers’ love letter to existential despair by way of folk music, starring Oscar Isaac, an awesome cat, and some pretty good folk music. Then, at the 42-minute mark, we discuss things we’ve never seen in movies, or some such thing. It makes sense at times.
Edward Snowden’s classified document leaks continue to show that gaming is a growing target of intelligence surveillance. In the latest batch of documents, it was revealed that the United States National Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters have monitored Xbox Live interactions, sent virtual undercover agents to infiltrate World of Warcraft and Second Life, and made a “vigorous effort” to exploit gaming data.
The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich communications network” where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight”.
Games, the analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other.
Blizzard denied that they worked with the surveillance agencies in the documents to monitor their games and said that any spying was done without their permission. Both Microsoft and Second Life’s Linden Lab declined to comment.
To the agent that monitored my Live chat on September 12th of last year: I was totally kidding buddy!
Telltale Games announced two episodic games during the Spike VGX awards this weekend. The first game, (previewed in the above video) is a collaboration with Gearbox and will take players back to the world of Vault hunting and Claptrap. One of the strongest components of Borderlands 2 was the writing, so a point & click dialogue game of the type Telltale excels at making seems to be a good fit.
The second game, announced in this very short teaser, is going to be based on the popular Game of Thrones property. It remains to be seen how much sexposition we’ll get out of a Telltale game, but I look forward to the QTE.
The Guardian raises the issue of breast physics based on the laughable sway in the above scene from Ryse, the Xbox One swords-and-sandals launch title. Dom Clubb, an UK artist for a free-to-play iOS game, suggests the bad physics might have been a factor of rushed development.
A character mesh is made up of thousands of vertices. When the physics system is applied, each vertex is given a value — lets say 0-1 — depending on how much the artist wants the particular vertex to be affected by physics. This will make the cloth vertices sway and the flesh vertices stay rigid. But because Ryse was probably rushed to make the Xbox One launch, I’m guessing the character was given a single physics system for the whole mesh rather than one for skin and a separate one for cloth. If you were to do the physics properly, there are lots of parameters to deal with, like stiffness, sway and stretch, and the cloth on the breasts would have to deform separately. That would have been a computational nightmare.
That’s pretty charitable. I’m sure the gore in Ryse was also a computational nightmare, but one the developer thought was worth calculating. Like pretty much everything else in videogame development, you do whatever you have time to do. I suspect developer Crytek doesn’t care much about its breasts, or it just assumes its playerbase wouldn’t know how a real breast moves.
What stands out, so to speak, is the state of undress of whoever that chick is, which makes that scene all about the breast physics. If you can’t do it right, Crytek, cover it up. The worst kind of cheesecake is bad cheesecake.
Frozen Endzone, the new game from Mode 7 Games, has just entered beta. You can purchase it on the official site now and experience some simultaneous turn-based future robot sports in an unfinished state. Think arena football, or Warhammer’s Blood Bowl, but crossed with Mode 7’s previous game, Frozen Synapse. The matches take place on hovering platforms with randomly generated obstacles scattered about.
Gamasutra spoke to Mode 7’s Ian Hardingham about how they went from a tactical shooter to robot football.
“The key thing that I wanted to do differently from Synapse was, there was a lot of detail work in Frozen Synapse. You really had to spend a lot of time thinking about the angles, refining your plan to a really large degree. And that was awesome, but I wanted something I could play when I was a bit more hungover and [that played] a bit quicker.”
If there’s one thing to make the addition of Ashly Burch and her dad and her brother to Saints Row IV seem less like blatant pandering, it’s the addition of some beardyman from something called Yogcast to Sonic Racing Transformed All-Stars, or whatever that excellent Sega-themed kart racing game is called. At least the proceeds for this $5 DLC go to charity.
Ouya is accepting Bitcoins as a method of payment to purchase the Android-powered console. Using a tweet, the company announced the official Ouya store now has the option of using Bitcoins along with more common methods of payment like credit cards and Paypal during the check out process. Purchase an Ouya without the interference of those dirty Illuminati run banks!
Bitcoins are the virtual currency that uses peer-to-peer computing to generate money that exists as magic, or something. Bitcoins have gotten a bit of an unsavory reputation thanks to market volatility, recent trading house robberies, and their frequent use by people conducting illegalactivities. Because the virtual coins are difficult to trace, people trading in firearms and drugs have taken to using them in place of regular money. Bitcoins have also been criticized for being limited in usefulness and for being easy to steal because most banks do not recognize them as legitimate currency.
Now that I think of it, Bitcoins might be an Illuminati plot!
My high-water mark of pure gaming joy came as a ten year old on Christmas morning unwrapping a Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then I’ve had any number of great gaming moments. So when those Amazon boxes showed up on my porch, one launch day followed by the other, I had a flashback to those gloriously lazy days of my adolescence and early adulthood, of holidays and summer vacations spent playing games all day and staying up half the night.
At the start of this new generation I wanted to try and get back to that youthful exuberance. To spend less time thinking, reading, and posting about games and more time playing them. To ignore my steam backlog for a while, consign my old consoles to the closet, stack up all those unfinished last gen titles, and jump in feet first. I was fortunate to string together a few long weekends and an extended Thanksgiving break to just sit back and play videogames as a kid would. Like I had all the time in the world.
Now, after the jump, I have an hour before bed. Which controller do I grab?Continue reading →
