The next generation of gaming consoles will fail to reach same audience

Over the last twelve years, Sony has sold around 154 million PlayStation 2 consoles, making it the best-selling devoted gaming machine in history. Nintendo is the only company that’s come close to toppling the PS2, selling just over 151 million Nintendo DSs in the past eight years. The current crop of home consoles, all of them growing long in the tooth at between seven and six years old, doesn’t even come close. Nintendo has sold around 95 million Wiis, Microsoft around 67 million Xbox 360s, and Sony around 62 million PlayStation 3s. The age of the devoted gaming console may not be over, but its zenith is past and the next round of machines will continue the trend according to one analyst.
Wii U, Sony’s Orbis, and Microsoft’s Xbox Durango will not match even their predecessors in total sales.
Speaking with Gamasutra on Monday, Piper Jaffray analysts Michael Olson and Andrew Connor said that they expect the next round of consoles to underperform by a wide margin compared to existing boxes. How much? Over its first fourteen months on shelves, the “disappoiting” hardware specifications of Wii U will cause that device to sell just 35% of the volume of the Wii over the same period in 2006-’07. Sony’s PlayStation 4, or Orbis as some rumors suggest, expected in 2013 will sell just 50% over the same comparative period. The Xbox 720, sometimes called Durango, will sell just 55% of the Xbox 360’s volume over the first fourteen months when it releases they project in 2014.
Why? The same things leeching console software sales already: Mobile games and social games. “We believer console gaming will continue to be a time-share donor to social networks, mobile games, and tablets. We therefore favor companies with increasing exposure to social/mobile gaming, including Zynga and EA.”
Whether big publishers like EA and Zynga retain their financial power in the coming years remains to be seen, but considering the downward trend in physical game and game machine sales since 2008, it’s hard to argue the analysts’ point. Console and retail game sales have shrunk dramatically ever year since the recession, and new machines won’t reignite the market. It’s not that people aren’t spending on games or playing them, it’s that they are increasingly paying for them in small doses on handheld devices and PCs.
Wii U, Orbis, and Durango won’t sell as well as Wii, PlayStation 3, or Xbox 360. It’s almost impossible. Whether they will or not isn’t the question that players, game makers, and businesses need to ask at this point though. The real question: What will be the universal device that people play and buy games on? Will it be smart TVs that are cross compatible with tablets and smart phones? Will Apple become the dominant manufacturer of gaming platforms?by anthony john angello

Crysis 3

Most gamers will have shot down opposing forces in almost every scenario that you could reasonably imagine. We've fought them on alien planets, we've fought them on the wide streets of modern American cities and the winding, cloistered alleys of ancient European ones, we've fought them in Russia (a lot), we've fought them on deserted islands, in jungles, and literally on the beaches. And yes, we've shot at stuff in New York before, too. But it's never looked like this.

My first thought upon seeing that Crysis 3 would be set in a literal urban jungle was that this was going to be Crysis 1's astonishingly verdant scenery grafted on to Crysis 2's vertiginous New York cityscape layout – as if Crytek, having run out of ideas for settings, had just decided to combine the two that they'd already had. But this isn't just a New York covered in vines, it's a city that's rapidly evolved into a diverse rainforest: the former Chinatown has become a flooded swampland, where other well-known sections of the city are suffocated by vegetation. Glimpses of shop signs and advertisements peek out from between dense vines, and chandeliers are still hanging in grand rooms whose carpets have long succumbed to the undergrowth creeping in through crumbling walls.

It looks good – extremely good – but importantly, there's unexpected variety in the rainforest aesthetic. Crysis 3's New York is split up into seven regions, each with its own environmental quirks and weather conditions. In that way at least, Crytek's overgrown future version of New York resembles the real one: depending on where you are, the look and feel of the place is completely different.by keza macdonald ign uk


Crysis 3 is set in 2047, when New York has been enclosed in a giant bio-dome (or nanodome, as the game calls it) for many years in the aftermath of the Ceph alien infestation. The Ceph themselves have continued to evolve inside; there are plenty of the same robot/alien crossbreeds that Crysis 2 players have already fought, but new breeds like fire-spewing Scorchers and flying recon droids that can remotely disable your dynamic camouflage have also emerged. You take control of Prophet, a returning hero for the series, on a revenge mission against the corrupt CELL Corporation, which installed the Liberty Dome in the first place – and have now abandoned it to the Ceph.

Prophet comes with his own signature weapon, a collapsible composite bow that can fire several types of bolt (and reminds me rather a lot of Hawkeye's in The Avengers). When firing from a distance, the camera follows the bolt's trajectory before it embeds itself in the head of an unsuspecting alien. In situations when noise isn't so much of a problem, it can fire explosive or incendiary warheads to control crowds of aggressors. The reveal demo, set in flooded former Chinatown, starts off quietly, with stealthy reconnaissance and silent killing, before a rogue Ceph recon droid blows Prophet's cover, setting up a showpiece large-scale firefight.

Crysis 3 is an interesting game to watch because of the arresting contrast between the wild outdoors, which often isn't remotely recognisable as a former city street, and the still-intact buildings and interiors higher up in the city. It's true to an extent that this is a synthesis of both previous games; you leap and roll from skyscraper rooftops like you did in Crysis 2, and creep through drooping foliage on the ground like in Crysis 1. Inside one building, furniture and light fittings still decorate a grand room, whilst a crumbled wall reveals the jungle outside, crawling with danger.

Keeping quiet – stalking the undergrowth with cloaking engaged, stabbing Ceph through the head from behind and sniping with the crossbow – might be the least dangerous path, but there are other options. You can also fire immensely powerful alien weapons, which Prophet's Nanosuit has evolved to accommodate. It doesn't seem to like it that much when you tear a plasma grenade launcher off the arm of some Ceph behemoth, flashing INCOMPATIBLE HARDWARE in the corner of the screen in big red letters, but it works fine, firing balls of white-hot death with an almighty shudder, sending plumes of swampy water up into the air. The layout, with its high buildings and dense undergrowth, allows for an interesting combination of urban and jungle combat styles; one minute Prophet his hiding behind the walls of a former apartment block or sniping from a rooftop, the next he's dashing across old metal beams from building to building, avoiding fire from the jungle below.

The Nanosuit itself is still at the centre of Crysis, ever-present as an overlay on your first-person view of the world. It lets you scan the area for enemies, decorating the screen with tactical information that helps you to decide how to approach. It imbues Prophet with superhuman powers that can still lead to moments of elated disbelief as you pull through a situation that looks impossible or uppercut an enemy six feet into the air. Only one new ability was explicitly shown: Prophet can remote hack enemy turrets, turning them against the Ceph to create a distraction.

The demo ends ominously, with Prophet surrounded by Ceph outside a communications tower, his weapon knocked from his hand. Throughout the reveal presentation, he has been the hunter; once he's overwhelmed, it's clear that he's vastly outnumbered inside the Liberty Dome. It seems inevitable that this will define the pace of the game: the suit might make him almost superhuman, but Prophet is a vulnerable figure in these surroundings.

At the moment, Crysis 3's setting is the most interesting thing about it. Its artistic direction and extreme good looks are seductive, as is the sense of absolute power that the Nanosuit conveys, but gameplay-wise, everything in this reveal demo is something we've seen before (alien weapons are new to the series, but they're hardly new to shooters). We can safely assume, however, that Crytek has more to show in the coming months, and hope that the developer's traditionally strong enemy AI will keep the game as interesting on a minute-to-minute gameplay level as it is look at. It's currently planned for Spring 2013.

Xbox's Imperfect Buttons

Some old friends on the original Xbox I was given back in January reacquainted me with several happy memories—and the two worst features in the history of console video gaming controllers: The black and white buttons.

I realize we're more than five years removed from their reign of terror, but as the long memory of the Internet continually demonstrates, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against video gaming. Sitting there, tapping uselessly on the controller's shoulders with my index fingers, the recollection Oh, that command's on the black—and I truly did stop and facepalm—was like being reminded of some embarrassing thing you'd done and long forgotten.

Black button, you were reload in Hitman, which is why I always fired to the end of the clip. You were the pitch to the halfback on the option in NCAA Football 2004. White button, you were one of the most used controls in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic not because you really added any value, but because you paused and resumed combat. And combat always started out paused.

Does this bring back memories for anyone? The Xbox controller was, on the whole, a good controller. Yes, its directional pad was a monstrosity, and it continues to be. But the controller's dual analogs were more ergonomically placed. And the inclusion of true variable triggers was inspired (one reason I just couldn't get into Vice City Stories on the PS2 is because I had no driving touch with acceleration on a face button.) But god damn, much more than the D-Pad, did they fuck it up with the black and white buttons, which were supposed to perform the functions of the PS2's L1 and R1, commonly known as the bumpers or shoulders today.

To refresh your memory, the black and white buttons were placed in locations where no one would think to find them. They were tough to reach with your thumb and their placement was basically disruptive to the mental map you made of the available commands, critical for fast-twitch gaming. On the first Xbox controller, the beloved Duke (pictured above), black and white were set above and right of the face buttons. The Duke already required really large hands for comfortable gaming—you could tell this thing was made for a North American market, not Japan. You had to shift your entire right palm off the controller to key the black or white, as straining up over the X/Y buttons to hit the buttons—which were smaller for some stupid reason—was physically impossible for many.

One the "Controller S" redesign, Microsoft put Black and White in an even worse spot—about east-by-southeast of the right analog stick. Playing on this unit required me to bend my right thumb inwards to hit either button. I ran the option a lot in NCAA 2004.

And even then, their naming had absolutely no correspondence to their position. Left trigger, right trigger, everyone understands that. It takes a second to figure out X/Y and A/B the first time you pick up the controller (and really, when's the last time you thought about the first time you held an Xbox controller) but still, their positioning goes left to right and bottom to top. Though most people say it "black and white," white was left of black. And the puppeteering they offered didn't make much sense either. They were completely throwaway buttons, maybe because Microsoft felt that putting true shoulder buttons on this—which it did, obviously, for the Xbox 360 controller—gave too much credit to Sony's design or conceded its superiority.

The Xbox controller was, on the whole, a good controller. But god damn, did they fuck it up with the black and white buttons

Nowhere was the atrocity of the black/white buttons more apparent than in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. After giving them noncritical functions in GTA III and Vice City (change the radio, change the camera) Rockstar did something that still is unforgivable in my mind. It made them the look left/look right command in a car. Look left equals white ... how? Look right corresponds to black ... why? But the worst aspect is that firing a gun from the car was now on the A button. Better than being a stick click in the previous two games, but utterly impossible considering your right thumb had to key two buttons at once. If you had a Duke, you would have to use two hands on that side of the controller, meaning you couldn't steer, accelerate or brake. PlayStation 2 partisans, here is where you should be cackling with delight.

I suppose someone at Rockstar figured the buttons were in close enough proximity that your entire digit could hit both in one gesture but, no. The smaller black/white button size, the angle of their placement and even the fact they protruded out of the controller face less made this unworkable. It made the Vigilante missions, which were required for 100 percent completion, impossible from a squad car. You had to do it from a police bike firing straight ahead, or wait until you got into the attack helicopter. Or, do like I did, buy a goddamn $25 third-party controller that actually had shoulder buttons. But the rubber always shredded and wore off their thumbsticks, which is another bitch session altogether.

Things are different today. Today, the Xbox 360 has proper shoulder buttons, and the eye-rolling you get from PS3 gamers when you call their L1 the "left bumper" and the R2 the "right trigger" underlines the fact this is a natural naming convention in addition to a natural alignment. Many PS3 games controls (mostly third-party, with some notable exceptions) feature the triggers as the dominant index-finger controls. I'm sure there are plenty of new or casual gamers out there who mistakenly believe the PlayStation 3's controller copied the Xbox 360's.

In the end, we have as close to standardized controls across the two dominant platforms as we ever have, something for which gamers and, no doubt, developers are grateful. But man, revisiting that six-month love affair with a game on the previous generation makes for some painful driveby shootings down memory lane.by owen good

Rewind Review : Metroid Fusion

Our Unexpected Future…

Can you believe it’s almost been a decade? After an eight-year hiatus, Metroid returned to Nintendo consoles in 2002 with two spankin’ new entries. We’ll get to Retro’s legendary Prime at a later date. Today, we’ll focus on Metroid Fusion, Yoshio Sakamoto’s follow-up to his directorial apex, Super Metroid.
Also known as Metroid 4, this chapter (still the latest, chronologically, in the series’ canonical mythology) would be easy to call a departure. But that would also be incorrect. True, Fusion does not share the exact same progression structure or overall gameplay as Super Metroid, but Return of Samus isn’t a clone of the original Metroid, either. Each entry in the series tends to mutate a bit, and Fusion is no exception. However, it was also the first step down the road to what would become the most controversial and misunderstood game in the series. How does Other M’s forebearer hold up 10 years later? Well…

Sight and Sound

Fusion’s bright, pastel-heavy art style betrays its lineage as a pre-GBA SP game. It is undoubtedly dated. Yet, despite Samus’s atrocious-looking Power Suit, it has held up remarkably well as a pint-sized piece of 2D nostalgia. It manages to both jump off of the screen (a necessity before the SP’s back-lit revision), but maintain a sci-fi noir feel. It’s endearing…in a slightly garish way.
The aural presentation holds up much better, especially if you are able to plug a pair of headphones in. I played this game a few years ago during a particularly cold winter, and it’s amazing how a good set of headphones ups the horror leanings and overall icy feel of this adventure. Despite the heavily stylized visuals and small screen, Fusion sucked me into its disinfected-laboratory-gone-terribly-wrong world.

Story

How did this world, the Biologic Space Laboratory, go to hell in a hand basket? It seems the heretofore noble Galactic Federation has a seedier underbelly than we knew. The layers of Fusion slowly pull back, revealing in horrific fashion just how untrustworthy Samus’s employers appear to be. She is, to put it plainly, recklessly used by a faraway invisible hand.
If this sounds like there’s a lot of focus on our heroine, it’s because there is. The bounty hunter narrates throughout, and we learn a bit about her psychology.

Gameplay and Conclusion

Fusion might be the ultimate distillation of 2D Metroid gameplay: run ‘n shoot platforming bliss. The GBA’s layout – Dpad, two face buttons (jump, shoot) and two shoulder buttons (diagonal shooting and missiles) – compliments the series’ 2D hallmarks while also refining them. Missiles are easier to switch to than ever via a quick tap of a shoulder button. Unlike Super, there is no dedicated run button, but it isn’t missed. Samus is fast, yet planted in her agility, and shooting arm cannon beams in any direction is a cinch. This fast-paced ethos bleeds into the game’s overall length: your first time blasting through Fusion may take six to eight hours, but a competent gamer can easily best it in as little as two-and-a-half. Speed runners and Metroid fanatics? Halve that (at least).
Overall, it’s a blast to play, and there are enough optional power-ups and unlockables (based upon your completion time and collection percentage) to warrant quite a few re-plays.
So, interesting visuals, a standout soundtrack, an entertaining story, lots of re-playability and near-perfect 2D gameplay. Winning all around? Not quite.

There is the small matter of Fusion’s progression structure. It is mission-based, with little room for deep exploration along the way. If you’ve cut your teeth on bombing every possible block of Zebes, you will find yourself disappointed with this game’s more claustrophobic, quickly-conquered world. And although I’ve replayed the game several times (I’ve lost count, really), if you want an adventure you can really sink your teeth into for hours-on-end, this isn’t your game. At all. This is a damn good hamburger, not a steak dinner.
But after a decade, this game has grown on me more than I ever imagined it would. While an acquired taste, I’ve grown to appreciate it a great deal. Yes, it suffers in comparison to Super Metroid, but most games do. Fusion is worth accepting on its own terms, even though I can’t quite recommend it to everyone.

Final Score: 8.5 / 10

PlayStation 4 Will Launch Before Next Xbox

Sony is planning to release the PlayStation 4 before Christmas 2013, which is when Microsoft is expected to launch its next console.

The source stated that Sony is "confident" of beating Microsoft to market this time around. The Xbox 360 was out for almost a full year before Sony released the PlayStation 3.

"Top line publishers" already know about the console's specifications, with the source confirming that "Developers working with publishers – like Ubisoft, for example – already know what's going on. They're already working on it."

Most other developers will be briefed "by the end of this year", though some have been invited to events in May and June in the US.by daniel krupa

This news comes after it was widely speculated earlier today that the next Xbox would require a constant internet connection and would be out around Christmas 2013.