PVG

As of the writing of this post, Grand Theft Auto IV is the best game ever according to GameRankings. It has dethroned The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and right now it looks like it’s going to stay there.

I’m not here to argue about the merits of GTA IV versus OoT. From everything I’ve read and seen, GTA IV deserves to get perfect or near perfect scores. What this ranking shows is the weakness of the GameRankings system. OoT is a significantly older game which also has much fewer reviews on file. In other words, OoT still gets new reviews posted today, and they are more likely to give less than perfect scores just because the game looks a bit more dated now and its innovations are harder to see because we’ve taken them for granted. And any slightly lower score for OoT will have a greater impact on its average because there are fewer total reviews on hand for the game. By contrast, GTA IV is new and has almost twice as many reviews on file compared to OoT.

Another weakness of the GameRankings system is highlighted by their decision to rank GTA IV on different platforms separately. For whatever reason, the Xxox 360 version has a lower average than the PS3 version. As of this writing, OoT’s average is within literally a hundredth of a percent of the Xbox 360 version which means if somebody posted a 95% score for GTA IV on the Xbox 360 tomorrow, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would have the interesting distinction of being simultaneously better and worse than Grand Theft Auto IV.

So at this extreme, I think the GameRankings system has been exposed as a bit flawed (not that they ever claimed to be perfect) and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But what I want to talk about is a deeper question brought on by something I’ve noticed in a few reviews: GTA IV is currently ranked as the best game in history, but in the few times I’ve been able to find opinions from reviewers regarding the relative merits of the two games, all reviewers seem to agree that OoT was a better game than GTA IV. It’s worth noting that most publications which gave GTA IV a 100% (or equivalent) also gave OoT a perfect score if they were around to review it. It’s just that OoT is “more perfect” than GTA IV, apparently.

What does it mean to be the best game in history, and what does it take to be better than OoT or GTA IV? Obviously, such a game must present the highest possible quality in graphics, sound, design and pacing not to mention impeccable controls. But to truly be the best, in my opinion, requires a little bit more. The games which are generally acknowledged to be the best all have some element of innovation that make them unlike any game ever before, and usually this innovation is such that no game developed afterwards is quite the same. Mario 64 was the first third person platformer ever made and set the standard by which they are all judged. The Orange Box has Portal which is a genuinely new kind of puzzle game never seen before. Ocarina of Time arguably has three major innovations which have changed the face of gaming: it was the first to use auto-jumping, context sensitive buttons and lock on targeting. Virtually every third person 3-D game developed after OoT now uses at least one of these innovations to some extent (GTA IV itself has lock on targeting).

I wonder if we could say that GTA IV has the same sort of innovation that will affect game design over the coming years. I don’t think that we really can. The game’s hallmark feature is of course its open world, but that hasn’t been a new idea since three prequels ago. What GTA IV brings is some options that are truly new to the series but not really new to gaming in general — like online multiplayer — and a polishing up of the general system so that the graphics don’t look quite so messy any more. And from all accounts, it executes everything just about as well as we can expect. But it doesn’t mark itself out as a major landmark in gaming history, and you’d think that the best game in the world would do that.

Which raises another question: what exactly does it take to dethrone Ocarina of Time? At this point, it has sat securely at the top of the heap for almost a full decade with only a brief challenge from Super Mario Galaxy. If we don’t believe that GTA IV is the game that should permanently take the top spot, then what game will? Even if your game has the best technical design in the world, how do you make it more innovative than the game that invented lock on targeting and arguably the first three dimensional game where everything just worked? There simply will never be another period in gaming like the one that produced OoT. We’re never going to have another 3-D revolution. We haven’t had to learn and adjust to a paradigm shift in thinking about gaming. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem like a game should be hailed as the best ever just because it does things very well but little more. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem fair that a game should receive permanent enshrinement due to the circumstances when it was developed.

Of course, maybe what we should really be doing is figuring out what review scores should mean these days. But that’s another blog post (or twelve).

Iron Man is engineering porn. If you’ve seen Transformers, then you are familiar with Optimus Prime’s entrance in which he slowly transforms into his robot form and the camera lingers over every plate sliding into place, every gear turning and every little doodad that connects with another doohickey in some rather impractical but very spiffy looking way. Iron Man is that kind of movie where we gaze in awe at the robotics that Tony Stark welds, solders and hammers together. The people in the props department deserve their paychecks on this one. I chose the term “engineering porn” quite deliberately. This movie gives us the fantasy of one man devoting his life to performing extraordinary and impossible feats (of engineering) while we sit back and marvel at the totally unrealistic beauty of his work.

The difference between this movie and Transformers is that by and large, the CGI doesn’t upstage the actors. In fact, in strict minute-count terms, the special effects enhanced action takes up a pretty small portion of the movie’s running time. The rest is devoted to laying out the story and developing the relationships between the characters. And once again unlike Transformers, the non-action scenes are enjoyable to watch. At the center of it all is a movie-carrying performance by Robert Downey, Jr. as the millionaire genius playboy who is forced to see the devastation wrought by the weapons he builds and cannot look away again. What’s especially nice is that his character development is not presented as a sudden about face. By the end of the movie, as at the beginning, he is still basically an arrogant, fast-talking and eccentric cad. It’s just that by the midway point of the movie, he has decided to turn his powers to good.

In a movie such as this with a lead performance such as Robert Downey Jr.’s, the secondary characters are truly secondary and are mostly made memorable by the actors inhabiting the roles. Gwyneth Paltrow gives us a nice turn as Tony Stark’s Executive Assistant whose relationship with him is intimate and flirtatious without quite crossing the line into romance. As Stark’s best friend, Terence Howard isn’t given quite enough lines to convey his more disciplinarian attitude and exasperated loyalty, but he manages to get it across with body language and expressions. And Jeff Bridges, playing the corporate head of Stark Industries, neatly straddles the line between an executive who is callous and one who is merely pragmatic. You will note that all four of these principal leads have been recognized with Oscar nominations (and a win, in Paltrow’s case). It shows — this movie won’t win any acting awards, but it at least has people who are worth watching when things aren’t exploding.

Iron Man will inevitably be compared to other comic book movies, and I think those comparisons will be useful in highlighting what I find to be its main weakness. Quite simply, the Iron Man story doesn’t have quite enough of its own identity to separate itself from its peers although this movie gives it a game try. Because it involves an otherwise non-superpowered millionaire playboy turning his corporation’s resources to his own personal quest for justice, Iron Man will draw comparisons to Batman Begins, but it doesn’t have the same mythic qualities or insights into the human psyche. Moreover, Iron Man is cheerfully implausible while Batman Begins makes you believe that with enough money, expertise and time, you could actually build your own Batsuit. On the other hand, you could compare this movie to Spider-Man whose main character follows a similar arc as he awakens to his own personal responsibilities and has to learn who he can really trust in his personal quest for justice. Spider-Man, however, had more fully realized characters other than the main hero himself. Spider-Man 2, in particular, had a villain who was almost as well developed as the main hero and a romantic relationship that was central to who Spider-Man is. When you get right down to it, Spider-Man and Batman Begins were movies trying to relate to us and our world, featuring characters in whom we can recognize ourselves. Iron Man by contrast is a full on superhero who lives way beyond anything most of us will ever experience. Admittedly, this is mostly the result of source material rather than the movie script. Spider-Man has always been an everyman sort of hero who just happens to have superpowers, and Batman was conceived as the pinnacle of human self-achievement and development. Iron Man, on the other hand, is a supergenius on a level evidently beyond Batman’s, and so towering is his intellect that he can turn himself into a human tornado of destruction within a matter of a few weeks instead of having to spend a lifetime traveling the world and studying.

For me, the most apt comparison is to Fantastic Four. Iron Man is a hero who feels a certain responsibility but nonetheless basically has fun with what he does. Similarly, the movie is brash and colorful and not really all that angsty. In fact, if Fantastic Four had been better written, better directed, better acted and featured better action scenes, the experience of watching it would probably be very similar to what watching Iron Man is like. The major difference is that unlike most other comic book heroes, he has no qualms about killing. He most definitely kills some people on screen over the course of the movie, and it’s sort of an interesting point to think about it. It’s not as if the famed weapons manufacturer has suddenly become a peacenik. He has simply decided to personally make sure only the people who deserve it get killed and not the people who don’t.

At this point, Iron Man is pretty much review proof. It will make big money at the box office no matter what the critics say, and all I will report at this point is that it’s good enough to deserve the dollars. It’s a bang up summer action movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you won’t regret spending $10 for a ticket. But for me, personally, I want comic book movies to be about more than eye candy, fun dialogue and exciting fight sequences. At this point, plenty of movie before have demonstrated that comic books are capable of telling much richer stories, but I have a feeling that Marvel Comics doesn’t want to reach that far.

I have often bemoaned the video game industry’s tendency to stuff big releases into the holidays and argued that publishers need to start paying attention to the rest of the year if the industry is to grow.

Now comes Dan Houser, a senior manager (or something) at Rockstar who agrees with me. Houser points out that a game like Grand Theft Auto IV will sell regardless of whether it’s released between in the fall or not. Really, if you think about it, smart publishers would do well to only release one of their guaranteed major hits in the holiday season and save the rest for the other nine months of the year. Nintendo has been doing this for a long time. This year, Super Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit are all being released outside of the holidays, and they are setting records as they do.

So it’s nice to finally have a little vindication. If only publishers would put something out in the summer, too.

Yeah really. It’s another edition of Shadowcast, and you didn’t have to wait six months for it! Click the links below and listen in as Shadow Fox and I discuss what we’ve been playing lately as well as answer reader mail.

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Platform: Nintendo DS
Genre: Action/Adventure, Strategy
Released: August 2006
Reviewed: April 2008

The Star Fox franchise has definitely seen its share of ups and downs. Star Fox, the original tech-demo for the SNES FX Chip, was a classic 3D shooter with long-standing appeal and gameplay. Star Fox 64, the follow-up wowed gamers with stunning 3D graphics, full voiceovers, and a revamped flight control system, complete with rumble as a pack-in. The series then took a surprising return when Nintendo decided to morph the then N64 title Dinosaur Planet by Rare into a Star Fox game. The end result, Star Fox Adventures, garnered generally above-average press, but was shunned by the majority of fans by its severe departure from the main series’ gameplay aspects. Star Fox Assault, the Namco title attempting to return the series to its roots, was met with mediocre critical acclaim for too many on-foot and land missions. Star Fox Command for Nintendo DS takes the story from Star Fox Adventures and Assault and mixes it up with a semi-strategy game interface between battles, but is this a formula of genius, or is this one a day late and a dollar short?

Star Fox Command contains quite a bit of story progression. Fox McCloud returns after the events of Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox Assault. Andross is dead, and his ghost haunts the galaxy. Fox’s love interest, Krystal, has left the Star Fox team and joined Star Wolf. Falco is AWOL, Slippy is engaged on his home planet Aquas, and Peppy has replaced General Pepper as Conerian Commander. Fox is alone with R.O.B. 64 to fight the new Anglar forces that have attacked the Lylat System so they won’t revitalize Venom and terrorize the universe. The story progresses with each decision made, and there are a total of 9 different endings that cater specifically to certain characters for a completely different experience each playthrough. Although multiple endings are not new to Star Fox games, a total of 9 is unprecedented, and a definite plus. These endings tie up many loose ends from Adventures and Assault, and continue forward to some slightly-surprising plot twists and actually has pretty decent character development throughout what was once a group of mainly one-dimensional stereotypes.

Star Fox Command must be played to be understood gameplay-wise. The core gameplay is actually more focused on strategy rather than dogfights, which may come as a surprise to many. Instead of selecting a course or path to Venom, you are instead doing so by playing through a series of branching paths in the storyline, which guide you to the next planet based on your decisions. Once you get to the planet however, there’s no simple rail-shooting level to be carried through- you are brought to an overhead screen similar to RTS titles, and here you plot your attack (or defense) wherever you encounter enemies or bases onscreen. The main focus is now more about protecting the Great Fox moreso than yourself, since you can loose several lives dying in a level, whereas the game is immediately over if the enemy (or enemy missiles) reach Great Fox.

To do this, you must select your units with the stylus (Fox or other pilots later on) and drag them to your destination in a series of turns. Colliding with enemy ships, enemy missiles, or enemy bases will trigger an action sequence similar to Star Fox 64’s “All-Range Mode”. In these sequences you fly around and blast enemies in normal Star Fox fashion by using the stylus to maneuver the Arwing and any face button to fire. There are special enemies that need to be destroyed to obtain stars in each sequence and clear the level of enemies. You can only go so far each turn, so you must plan your course carefully to take out the objective. Once all the enemies on the overhead map are cleared, you advance to the next level.

Flight with the stylus is responsive, but takes some getting used to. For one, you can’t properly steer and drop a nova bomb simultaneously because it’s only activated by dragging the icon for it onto the overhead map with in All-Range Mode. The same thing bodes for U-Turns and loops, since you must press those “buttons” at the bottom of the map screen. Barrel rolls are also difficult to do while turning since the barrel roll requires a quick scribble of the stylus. It’s also heavily recommended to map fire to any of the d-pad’s buttons for right-handed gamers, as the stylus and your hand are more than likely to cover the normal X, B, Y, and A face buttons. After growing pains in learning the controls, the stylus is pretty accurate. Also as an added bonus, the game supports the DS Rumble Pak VERY WELL, and with each boom you’ll literally feel as if you’re in the cockpit with the Star Fox team.

The single-player campaign overall is a very welcome addition to the Star Fox franchise. The storyline is very well written, and it’s clear that Q Entertainment spent quite a deal of time nailing down the quirks and backgrounds of each character in the Star Fox universe. Having multiple endings, plus the added rewards for playing through the game as quick as possible, or with the most kills really increases the replay value and fun-factor. Each mission is gradually harder than the last, while not being entirely too difficult for the novice or beginner to blast through. The entire affair clocks in under 8-10 hours the first playthrough, and about 2-3 each subsequent playthrough depending on how you strategize on each level.

There are also a wealth of multiplayer options. You can opt for traditional SF64 deathmatch over local wireless LAN with up to six players with just one game, or play with more multiplayer options with two carts and two players. There’s even Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection online play with up to four players via friend lists, national, or global matchmaking. This is the traditional “steal the star” gameplay, where a downed player releases a star that other players can grab for points. This adds for intuitive, fair gameplay where entering the fray is encouraged and distance sniping will only help out other players nearby the targeted ship and not yourself. The online for the most part is smooth and lag-free, with the occaisional hiccup here or there. The only drawbacks are dropout whores who, at the hint of a loss, will quit the game, and kill any stats you were to gain from that match.

The graphics in Star Fox Command are some of the best the DS can offer. There are extremely detailed locales given the hardware, and there’s even a hint of bloom lighting in a few areas. There’s slight pixilation on some larger enemies and occasional slowdown, but for the most part the game glistens at 30 frames per second with loads of geometry and special effects. The visuals are on-par to the DS’s capabilities, which puts the game somewhere between N64 and GameCube in polygonal throughput, realtime lighting, and texture mapping.

Sound is cleverly handled in Command, since given the graphical appraisals, the sound obviously had to be sacrificed in some form. Instead of being plastered with .mp3 quotes in games like The Simpsons on the same platform, Star Fox command uses garbled speech again for spoken word within the game, akin to the original Star Fox game for SNES. As an added bonus, players can opt to submit a voice test to have their own voice sampled in the main game’s gibberish. Outside of voice, the rest of the sound is phenomenal, from great remixes of the Star Fox soundtrack to rich, deep bass in explosion sound effects (seriously, play this game with bass headphones or through a home theater) and it’s perfectly placed for the mood of the main missions as well as the boss battles.

All-in-all, there is quite a bit of fun to be had in Star Fox Command. The game is highly replayable, the strategy overhead map is a welcome change, and the main story is a great deal of fan service to those following the franchise. With some of the best graphics on the handheld, rumble support, and a wealth of multiplayer options both online and offline, Star Fox Command is easily one of the best games in the series, and one of the best games to be played on Nintendo DS. Highly Recommended.

Shadow Fox bottomline: 9.3 out of 10

I’ve previously written about the flap that the trailer for Resident Evil 5 inspired. Now comes Joystiq with a post that has set people muttering again.

It’s nothing the post says that has got people in a tizzy. The actual post simply confirms that the game is set in Africa. Rather, some people are starting to get worked up (just starting, because it hasn’t become a full blown controversy yet) over this image:

“It’s set in Africa and he says it’s a game about light and darkness!” some people are crying. Is Jun Takeuchi indeed suggesting that because this is a game in which a white man shoots black people that it’s about the clash of light and dark? Does he equate the Chris with light and the African zombies with darkness?

Well, no. If you’ve read anything about the game, you know that they’ve said many times before that lighting will play a crucial role in the game. Some places will be pitch dark and some will be bright. And it matters because if Chris is in the dark and then suddenly emerges into the light, he’ll be blinded for several seconds. So when Takeuchi says that it’s a game about light and darkness, he means it literally.

So if you meet somebody who’s all set to get offended over the implications of this quote, remind him or her that in this case, it’s just actual light and darkness.

I’m running out of titles for these posts about analysts, so I thought I’d open this up to you. Reply to this post with an idea for a title I can use for this post and if I like it, I’ll use it.

In a lot of ways, this post isn’t very surprising. Some Dutch guy linked me to an article with yet another analyst seems to have no idea what he’s talking about. I know these posts are getting kind of repetitive (and this particular article is old, to boot), but at this point I’m just writing these to document all the predictions people are making so that I can come back a few years later and look to see how close they came to hitting the mark.

So today, we are examining this howler written back in 2007 by Nick Parker and Screen Digest. It starts out innocently and reasonably enough.

At Leipzig, SCEE announced a series of exciting technological enhancements to PS3 and PSP. They are no doubt crucial to long term cross platform consumption and broad media supply for both devices. However, the industry reaction was luke warm because what the industry needs now is games, games and more games.

Both PS3 and PSP, despite price reductions will have a relatively disappointing Christmas as the Q4 games catalogue looks comparatively weak and there are few triple-A titles to drive hardware adoption.

Even this analyst, it seems, was not quite insane enough to claim that Sony would have a very strong Christmas season in 2007. This is not a terribly difficult prediction to make, but it’s reasonable enough nonetheless.

Unfortunately, from there onwards things get loony.

Publishers, who are frustrated with Sony, will come hurrying back once the short term vacuum is over, but significantly turning around development on PS3 will take longer and cost more than on Wii. However, if you ask the heads of publishers to bet their farms on the long term success of PS3, they would take the bet.

To be perfectly fair, he hasn’t specifically said in this paragraph that he thinks PS3 sales will explode upward, overtaking its competitors. He is merely saying that publishers are willing to bet on the long term success of the PS3. What exactly this means is unclear. Does he mean that no publisher believes the PS3 will fail and disappear within a few years? Surely that is obvious. Does he mean that publishers believe the PS3 will still be viable ten years from now? That may be true, but it is also nearly irrelevant because the relative positions of the three consoles will have been well established long before then. Besides, what does it matter what publishers think? These are the people who completely ignored the Wii until its appeal to the mass market became undeniable.

…Sony will have a difficult Christmas 2007, publishers are right to be nervous and consumers will continue to need educating about the benefits of PS3 and PSP past the new year. But by this time next year the industry should be repositioning its finances towards the two consoles and Sony will be in a better position to hold publishers’ hands along the path to its home media hub aspirations.

The problem, as you’ve probably figured out yourself, is Parker never says exactly how Sony will be in a better position or why the industry should be repositioning its finances towards the PS3 and the PSP. He doesn’t say it in the section quoted above, and the best explanation I’ve gotten from the rest of his article is basically that the PS3 will have more AAA titles next year. Which is true, except by that time so will the Xbox 360 and the Wii.

He has an analysis of the Xbox 360 next which doesn’t say anything particularly crazy. Basically, he says that Microsoft has been marginalized by overemphasis on a few genres and that although they will do well in Christmas 2007 (and they did), they will have a much tougher time going forward.

So let’s move on to the Wii.

As for Nintendo Wii, hardware sales seem to be unstoppable, driving its global installed base to overtake Xbox 360 by mid-September 2007 in less than a year. Although not quantifiable, erratic supplies have kept the lid on an even more impressive performance.

Demand for hardware seems to be driven by just a few familiar first party licences – no change yet in the Nintendo catalogue make-up from its previous consoles. This suggests that price and the unique gameplay features could be the primary purchase tipping points, allied with a marketing campaign to communicate how much Wii fun we can all have.

Debate still rattles around blogs and the web community over the longevity of the Wii. Even some financial analysts have started to raise questions about the potential fad nature of the console. This ‘fad’ will endure at least a few more years, providing tens of millions of installed base reasons for publishers to direct development funds there.

The Wii installed base in Europe will be higher than the PS3 in 2009 but could be generating less software sales per console at that time. Looking at the Japanese charts in the past few weeks suggests that new titles on Wii are slow to come through and even the stalwarts of Wii Play and Wii Sports have fallen out of the Top Ten All Formats Listing.

Wait. So a sign of weakness for the Wii is that Wii Play and Wii Sports have finally fallen out of the Top Ten after being on there for nearly a year? Which games on the PS3 or the Xbox 360 have lasted nearly that long? Oh, and Wii Fit is doing very good business in Japan.

The potential weakness of the Wii offering is that the target market of younger teens could become saturated quicker than for the same demographic on the DS. Will the unique lifestyle-type games which work on a portable device much loved by girls, translate to a static TV-based console? Market saturation for the Wii is therefore more likely than a broader-appealing PS3 if Sony achieves the same level of popularity that it did for the PS2.

Here’s where I think things get a little nutty. He’s saying that the Wii’s market is limited whereas the PS3 will have broader appeal. I really wish I knew what data (if any) he was using to back up this assertion. The PS3 has broad appeal insofar as a segment of the population wants a Blu-Ray player, but there’s plenty of evidence that the Wii’s reach is broader still. How many PS3’s do you see in retirement homes or hospitals?

But now here come the numbers. This ought to be good.

WORLD: INSTALLED BASE BY PLATFORM…………………..

…………………………….2007…………2009………..2011..
Sony Playstation 2…….112.6m………119.9m……..121.4m
Sony Playstation 3…….7.7m…………38.7m……….67.5m
Nintendo Wii…………….17.1m………..41.9m……….59.4m
Microsoft Xbox 360……13.9m………..26.8m……….36.4m
Nintendo DS ……………60.5m………..99.3m……….142.9m
Sony PSP ……………….29.8m………..51.7m……….74.1m

Source: Screen Digest…………………………………………….

The key here is to look at the projected growths from year to year. The Xbox 360 sold 13.9 million units in its first two years, and Parker expects it to sell about another 13 million in the next two years and another 10 million in the two years after that. It’s utterly predictable and boring and will probably end up being wrong, but it’s not really that crazy.

What really made my head spin was the Playstation 3 numbers. He is expecting the Playstation 3 to go completely gangbusters between now and the end of 2011, selling an average of almost 15 million new units per year. This is behind the Playstation 2 which averaged about 17.4 million units sold in its first five years, and that may make the prediction seem reasonable. But the key here is to look at what happened in the first piece of data we have. The Playstation 3 sold 7.7 million units in its first year, and so in order to meet Nick Parker’s projections, it will have to just about double its sales rate and maintain it consistently for four years. That’s just totally unprecedented in the videogame industry. A platform that starts off slowly simply does not turn around and reach near-Playstation 2 levels of growth in the space of a year. Besides, there’s no reason to think the Playstation 3 is in any position to accomplish this. The Playstation 2 was so dominant that it was essentially the default console, to the extent that “Playstation” became a synonym for “videogame” to the non-gamer crowd. That’s not true of the Playstation 3, and it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which it achieves that kind of dominance.

Meanwhile, the Wii is predicted to do the opposite. After selling 17.1 million units in its first year, it is expected to drop down to about 12.4 million per year between now and 2009. I don’t know where he gets that number, but to say that the Wii will slow down is not too outlandish. What does seem loopy is that he predicts the Wii’s growth will further drop down to a pitiable 8.75 million units per year between 2009 and 2011 — less than the Xbox 360 which is supposedly in third place according to these projections. I just don’t know how he justifies this guess. Nobody truly knows what the numbers will be four years from now, but it’s fair to say that no console in the lead has ever plummeted so far so quickly. Even the GameCube never had such decline; in fact, it had a late surge thanks to a price cut putting it below $100.

It’s interesting to note that Nick Parker seems wedded to the notion that the Playstation 3 will triumph in the end somehow, and it’s worth looking at this analysis to see just what it’s going to take for that to happen. As we now see from these numbers, the Playstation 3 is not going to pull ahead of the Wii unless Sony stages a tremendous surge (somehow) and Nintendo suffers a catastrophic slowdown (for some reason). Maybe it’s worth reading analyst reports like this in order to make the case for the exact opposite conclusion.

Now if you’ve made it this far, let’s have a little fun. I’m going to write more posts about industry analysts, but I’m running out of titles. Reply to this post here with your suggestions, and I’ll use the ones I like (or maybe even the others depending on how desperate for new titles I get).

Every once in a while, some prominent person in the videogame industry predicts that the console market as we know it will disappear and be replaced by a unified system of some sort. The exact details vary, but the end result usually ends up sounding very pie-in-the-sky. The benefits of such a system would be considerable. Developers wouldn’t have to spend so much time porting their games from one system to the other, all games would be available to everyone on one platform, and it would break the restrictions that console manufacturers place on developers.

The problem is it’s never going to happen. People like to say that we will soon reach the point where greater horsepower simply won’t matter and there won’t be much reason for console manufacturers to compete with each other to squeeze more computing power into their boxes. And indeed it’s true that graphics are quickly reaching a plateau beyond which further improvement isn’t going to make much difference. But there’s more to consoles than gigaflops, and we only have to look at this generation to see it. Suppose the industry had come together in 2000 to create such a uniform console and we were all now playing this one console containing all the best games from all third parties with no licenses being unavailable because they are exclusive to some other platform. The scheme would be that every once in a while, if it turns out that we need more RAM or more hard drive space, the industry would get together and come up with a new standard for us to play on. But such a system leaves no room for something like the Wii to come in and change the whole market. What we would have is predictable standardization replacing the potential for innovation and creativity, and that’s very important because the hardware advances of the future are not going to be about computing power but about features and new capabilities. Stuff like online connections or a motion sensing controller or the ability to synchronize with other appliances in your home. A group of corporations working by consensus would never be able to innovate on the same level as a single company willing to take risks.

Besides that, it would never happen. The console market is what’s known in economics as an oligopoly where the market is naturally split up among a few very large competitors. This is because the cost of entry is very high but at the same time, there is very little benefit to collusion. Any time a group came together to create a unified format, some other company would see a shortcoming — whether it’s lack of a certain function or a simple matter of price — and then produce their own platform which addresses the need. And the consumers, because they want the best, would buy the new format and leave the old one high and dry.

I’m saying all of this as a preface to comments by Sandy Duncan, the man who managed Xbox operations in Europe for a number of years. He predicts that within the next five to ten years, consoles will die out. He has a rather novel take on the idea, though. His vision is that various appliances will all converge on a set top box which does everything. But that’s not all. Eventually, the box itself will disappear and you will be left with virtual services provided to you over the internet in the form of streaming video and games which you play locally but which use computing power spread out all over the net. Mr. Duncan no longer works at Microsoft and has instead started up his own company, but it’s worth noting how closely this idea mirrors Microsoft’s own vision with the Xbox (and Sony’s to a great extent as well).

The problem is twofold. Firstly, the infrastructure just isn’t there to support this kind of thing and very likely won’t be available even ten years from now. For the vast majority of people, current broadband speeds are plenty fast enough, and nobody is going to pay extra so that they can have a connection fast enough to support video games on THIN client. The second problem is this setup doesn’t take into account the hardware advances yet to come. Motion control on the Wii is still far from perfect, but there are more ideas out there are still being developed and are on the cusp of wide implementation. Stuff like hookups which read your thoughts or head tracking gear to see where you’re looking or any number of other things we haven’t thought of yet. Until we have a version of Star Trek’s holodeck, there will always be a demand for more accurate, versatile and better hardware, and that means there will always be a need for some hardware manufacturer to step in and provide the gear for us. Certainly they’re not going to die out before I’ve reached my midlife crisis.

By all means think of the possibilities for the future. Dream of a day when all content is virtual and a vast network infrastructure provides all of our information and entertainment needs. But don’t expect to see it any time soon. The console makers are here to stay.

Everything in this post is false. These two sentences are absolutely, unequivocally untrue.

Yeah, it’s been a while, but Shadow Fox and I are back. In this episode, we discuss Brawl, upcoming games, the state of the PS3 and the Xbox, EA’s bid for Take Two and more. Shadow Fox has done an excellent job mixing the podcast together this time and I think it sounds better than ever although there were a few tricks we wanted to use that didn’t work out. We’ll try them next time which should be soon now that we’ve both settled down.

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