An Appeal To Console Makers

There's an episode in The Simpsons where Homer gets to design his ideal car, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" to be precise, and it all goes horribly wrong and bankrupts his brother Herb. This is clearly nothing like that and so I appeal to all console manufacturererers out there (and Sega and Atari too. Come on guys you can do another one!) to please make this awesome idea as your next console.

Ok, so I'm one of these people who can do anything better than the people already doing it. I even professed to that in an earlier post: http://cracking-glass.blogspot.com/2010/06/you-know-your-job-i-could-do-it-better.html. For a while now I've been working on an idea for my ideal games console. As well as being awesome it will also solve a few of the industry's problems too.

Firstly I thought I'd tackle the controller. It's important for the controller to be damn near faultless as this is the bit that the user will be clinging to for hours on end. If it wasn't for 3D gaming and the need for analogue sticks I'd be stealing the SNES pad in it's entirety but as it is I'll use that as a starting point. The L and R buttons are great and the way they curl slightly around the edge of the pad is nice. The Start and Select buttons win for me too as they need a definite press to work and can't be accidently bumped like Xbox 360's start. The D-pad is still a magical blister making machine but no-one's made a better D-pad since unless you like fighting pads but I don't. For triggers you need to strike a balance between an easy button press and a full trigger. The PS3 registers the press soon enough but is otherwise not great and the 360's triggers travel too far before they kick in. In essence I want the 360 pad to change it's clutch so it bites sooner. As for analogue sticks I've never been a connoisseur so anything will do. The 360's are a bit stiffer than the PS3's but are a bit smoother. The most important thing is placement. In my ideal world controllers must be symmetrical. That places the sticks below and in a bit from the face buttons and D-pad. 4 face buttons all analogue and fancy like on PS2 and the sticks should have L3 and R3 too.
That leaves the menu button like the xbox or ps buttons. Put it in the middle and leave it nice and simple. Wrap all this up with a Bluetooth transmitter and an internal battery which lets me stretch my spare fingers across the back and bob's your uncle.

Next up we need the console itself. I need my ideal console to be a lovely combination of form and function. It needs to sit near the TV and both blend in and jump out at the same time.

Over the years there's been some highs and lows in console design, the original xbox and NES at the low end, but in the end so long as it does the job it's not to important how it looks.

In the end it needs to have a place for games to go and all the usual sockets for cables and stuff. So, 4 USB sockets, 2 USB 3.0 sockets, 1 Ethernet port, 1 optical output, 1 HDMI socket and 1 A/V component output and at least 1TB of hard drive. As for the technical stuff on the inside I'll leave that up to the super developer who makes my console. I would assume a super next generation high power spec capable of running stuff more powerful than Crysis 2.

That leaves the most controversial part of my plan. The Games. For my ideal console the games themselves who be on cartridges. That's right, cartridges! The main reason consoles switched to disc based media is profit margins. CD's, DVD's and blu-rays are much cheaper than the solid state memory needed for cartridges but they are much easier to pirate. Cartridge based games would benefit from faster load times, flexibility with regards to capacity and other special perks like on board games saves and be able to store patches and DLC. Of course you could store these things on the console's hard drive but the option is there.

So that's it. SNES shoulders and D-pad and Start / Select, Xbox 360 triggers and sticks, PS2 face buttons, PS3 battery and Bluetooth for the pad. All the best tech for the machine and cartridges for games. But wait there's more...!

Firmware, is the curse of all modern consoles and as such it would need to be damn near perfect for my ideal system. I would want a quick and easy to navigate menu system that would allow the user to access games, videos, social features and online content from one place and without hassle. None of the current consoles do these things well enough. My console should feature a veritable best of of the features offered by Xbox Live as well as PSN and most importantly would allow online multiplayer for free. Video playback should allow for any codec to be installed and offer HD playback either from streaming, downloads or external media. Audio should offer the same as well as allowing music playback during games and cross game chat.
Unfortunately the intricacies of great firmware would take up way too much space but if any developer wants to take me up on building the best console ever I'll gladly help sort the firmware too!

So come on Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Amiga, Panasonic? Take me up on my idea for the greatest console EVER and make my dream come true.
Cheers,

R.

Pre Owned Games are a Good Thing!

There has been an unpleasant development in the world of gaming in recent months that is threatening to change the way we look at games. While the console war rages on unabated publishers and developers have drawn their own battle lines ready to engage you and I, the humble gamer, should we dare to buy second hand.
The pre owned market for games has been around for as long as there have been home systems to play them on and in austere times such as these it's growing. Just recently Tesco announced they will start taking trade in games , after a successful trial, joining the likes of Asda, Game, Blockbuster and Hmv. The trade in / pre owned market is clearly something retailers like the idea of and judging by the online forums, and my own experience, gamers think is great too. The only people who don't like the idea are the publishers. It all started with EA and "Project $10", a simple enough proposition to charge $10 for users to play online unless they enter a one time only code that comes with the game. In effect, EA want gamers who buy pre owned to pay play online. Then came THQ, Activision and Ubisoft, all with their own ideas to make buying pre owned a less attractive proposition. But no other industry does it! Why would they do this? Well, if you were to believe everything you read, buying a pre owned game takes food out of the mouths of developers children. Actual food! By not paying £45 for Modern Warfare 2 you're actually taking spaghetti o's away from poor Timmy...
The argument is simple enough: when you buy a new game the developer, publisher and retailer all get a piece of the action and everyone gets paid for the work they put in. When you buy pre owned only the retailer gets any money, so the talent involved in making the game gets nothing. This is obviously true but omits an important part of the picture, one the publishers don't want you to think about because they want their extra money. For every game purchased pre owned, every single game, there was a transaction before where the original purchaser was paid and that same purchaser gave up the right to play the game. What that means to this situation is that if I sell a copy of Fifa 10 to my friend, let's call him Bill for argument's sake, then I can no longer play that game, online or otherwise, but Bill can. The number of copies of the Fifa 10 sold by EA doesn't change, which is what they don't like, but the number of players online, using EA's servers and bandwidth and needing support etc., hasn't changed.
In essence what these publishers are saying is that if you were not the original purchaser of the game and therefore have not directly put money into their hands you can't play. They incur no extra cost thanks to the pre owned market but are seeking to charge some perceived loss. It's also important to consider the other feature of the pre owned market, one that the publishers should be embracing rather than alienating. A couple of weeks ago I bought Wet for PS3, developed by Besthesda Softworks (they of Fallout fame) and published by ZeniMax Europe Ltd. (The owner of Besthesda and others and who have yet to suggest any anti pre owned tactics). I bought Wet pre owned from Game for £9.99 for two reasons: 1) because I can't afford to pay full price for any game at the moment and 2) because Wet had mixed reviews and I didn't want to feel I'd wasted my money. At £9.99 it was just under that magic barrier where I felt it was worth the risk and as a result I now own a copy of Wet. I played that copy of Wet and thoroughly enjoyed it, in fact I went online as soon as the credits rolled to look for news of a sequel. A sequel which I'm more than likely to buy brand new as soon as it comes out. The same could be said for Borderlands, which I've also bought all the DLC for and several other games. You see what the big scary boys at EA et al seem to forget is that the more people who get their hands on a game the better. Better for the publisher, the developer, the retailer, the gamers. I've lost track of how many sequels I've bought over the years but what I do know is a significant proportion of those would not have been bought, new I may add, were it not for an initial pre owned purchase of a game I was unsure about.
So what's the solution? Clearly someone somewhere is feeling screwed or greedy and needs things fixing. Firstly, if developers are feeling short changed then they need to either find other ways of getting their work out there, Steam, Xbox Live and PSN Store all negate the pre owned problem, or they need to negotiate better deals with the publishers. Secondly, if the publishers want to sell more copies then they should reduce the cost to the consumer. £40 - £50 is a lot of money to a lot of people (but apparently not if you subscribe to Xbox Live in which case it's "nothing" according to web forums). If new games cost less then people would be more inclined to take a risk on an unknown title or, as many do, pay that bit more just to have new. We all know development costs have spiralled in recent years to that of movie budgets in some cases (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reportedly costing $40 -$50 million) but it isn't necessary to spend that much to make a great game, it isn't even necessary to spend that much to make AAA titles. When you consider the audience for games is growing and the chances of success hinging upon perceived value for money (as demonstrated by Braid, Flow, Flower, Limbo etc.) publishers should be more inclined to make games cheaper and get them into the hands of more and more gamers by any means possible.
I've seen people liken this situation to many other things, "Ford gets no cut of the resale of my car", but the best example would be the music industry, not least because it's structure mirrors that of the games industry quite closely. When I like a band, song, artist or whatever I tell all my friends. Quite often I'll make them a copy of a CD or send them an mp3. While this is actually piracy, far worse than resale, what often happens is my friends like the band, song, artist too and buy themselves the CD, vinyl etc. And then we all buy tickets to see them live. By sharing / spreading / disseminating the work in the first place the artist gets a larger return. It's the same with pre owned games, by allowing more people to experience the work of Naughty Dog or Bungie or Media Molecule more people are likely to buy games by them in the future.
Finally, there's the rest of the reasons why pre owned should be encouraged not penalised: Reselling a game is recycling it and therefore potentially saves resources. In times of financial difficulty pre owned sales help keep retailers in business and people in a job. Luxury purchases, which games are, become available to more people and help stimulate the economy. In the end there's no need to say, "but no other industry does it", there's just the truth: the big companies are looking for more money and could give a damn about customer loyalty. If it gets to the point where it costs too much to buy pre owned or we have to choose between pre owned or multiplayer then we'll stop buying those games. The industry will become less inventive, less likely to risk a new IP and eventually collapse again. No one wants that so maybe the war on pre owned needs to stop before it starts.
Cheers,
R.