Thrik

If wiring were possible I think it'd be just as easy to wrap up a bunch of extra-long HDMI and USB cables and do it that way, alas I rent and it's not an option — the layout of my apartment just doesn't accommodate it. That still looks like an interesting technology but sadly not suitable for me. I'm really looking for a 'just works' solution that can not only receive a real-time HD picture, but also receive and then transmit wireless controller signals to/from my PC (most peripherals have very limited wireless range so going directly to the PC is problematic). The closest I've seen is WHDI, which is basically a proper wireless HDMI specification (The future!). Unfortunately it's some time away from prime time, and existing devices are laggy and/or super-expensive. That still leaves the controllers, anyway. I think this is a great gap for Valve to fill but I wish there were more easy options here.

Nothing, I can't even find anything to buy that'd allow me to do this without significant latency. Two main barriers are input (multiple doors and walls between sofa and main PC) and lag-free wireless HD output — every device I've seen just has too much latency for gaming, especially with something as accurate as a mouse or trackpad. I'd be legitimately delighted to be made aware of a way to do this.

I downloaded some 'Vine' app and was immediately overcome with an insatiable desire to act like a tit.[1]

Better that than Gabe's nipples.

Tangentially related: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? What one Windows XP feature am I most proud of?

I've discovered during the past few days that unless I'm missing something, there's no satisfactorily lag-free way of streaming a game running on your PC in another room to the TV while also using living room-specific control peripherals regardless of what fancy dongles you buy (except perhaps NASA-grade ones for £10m). If Valve can crack that alone, they're on to a serious winner. I'm currently building a powerhouse desktop for projects and gaming, and my dreams of being able to also use it to play sofa games were promptly shot down unless I literally wheel it into there. I guess that is one big reason for me to get the basic Steam Machine. I mean, if things like OnLive and Gaikai can get this shit working over kilometres you'd think it'd be relatively straightforward to get it working between a few rooms. I guess Valve is just the first company well and truly trying to make this happen.

Haha, excellent.

What is Super Mario Bros 3's multiplayer doing in that video? What is going on?? This game does look amazing, though. If I weren't about to sink my hardware funds for the foreseeable future into a new PC I'd probably get a Wii U for this and Mario Kart alone. As it is, I'm going to enjoy catching up on some good-ass Nintendo games in a year or so.

God damn there are going to be some conflicts coming.

Haha, I'm with Virgin though so I don't think that place affects me. In fact, the ADSL speeds in my block were shit a year ago because they hadn't installed Fibre yet (don't know if they have now) and copper is so bad at retaining speed that by the time it gets to the seventh floor it's down to like 8mb/s. But I work in Grantham and both BT/Virgin have fibre all over the place here, and the same goes for where I used to live in Mansfield. I am very surprised by how fast things are going, I was expecting it to take ages. Having 100mb/s easily accessible in many parts of the country was borderline unimaginable not many years ago.

A lot of the UK is now served by Virgin fibre (30mb/s–100mb/s) or BT Infinity (38mb/s–76mb/s). In such areas it's possible to get 60mb/s like I do for ~£30/month. I'm sure there are plenty of areas stuck on copper, but a huge amount of the country has been covered with fibre during the past five years or so. Most people I know in the Midlands have it (or could have it). This is far better than the universally shit connectivity available in 2006, although even back then I was able to get 20mb/s via copper in a small town so copper isn't all bad — it just loses its speed very quickly over distance, unlike fibre.

Any UK person has likely heard this group's songs a million times over in certain adverts, but I'm finding a lot of good beyond the high-exposure tracks. They have a very good grasp of how to build up a crescendo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qptBI9flBDY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meIqG_CABdQ

I think games like Battlefield 4 and Planetside 2 are already giving a taste of what kinds of things cloud computing will bring. They're not truly using 'the cloud', but they do a lot of server-side processing of water wave physics, vehicle physics, etc. Granted, it's mostly out of necessity because they're multiplayer games and you can't have each player seeing totally different tidal waves, but it's an example of something that is only practical in today's age because EA and Sony run all the beefy servers for those games — servers which, incidentally, probably run in Microsoft Azure or Amazon cloud farms. As the cloud is just lots of virtual servers, we'll probably see similar things being implemented. But then, a lot of incredibly sophisticated stuff can be done without it and there's always the latency penalty, so I'm very sceptical it's going to be as big a deal as Microsoft is implying. Requiring an internet connection is one thing, but a persistently fast and stable one?

Haha, I think that's the exact moment I favourited the video. I did genuinely enjoy it though, made me realise my pinball play has largely consisted of wildly hitting the ball as hard as possible and hoping I get some pretty lights and sounds.

Haha. That game is worth it for the guy's walk animation alone.

I'm guessing they did a lot of research into what kind of capacity would be the sweet spot. It was uncharted territory with the last generation, but this time around the manufacturers should be able to make pretty accurate usage estimates based upon the last seven years. There's not much point in inflating costs and muddying the market when they can just make changing the hard drive a cinch and let people decide what's best themselves and/or upgrade as necessary (it's extremely easy to transfer from one disk to another). After all, for every person saying 500GB should be 1TB, there'll be someone saying 1TB should be 2TB. I imagine that 500GB will be just fine for the majority of people — just not people like me who store their entire music and video collections on their console. Which brings me to a fun fact: the PS3 chokes if you try and have more than 512 items in a playlist. They'd better have that shit sorted out.

Yeah, one of the first things I did when I bought a PS3 was grab a big-ass Samsung laptop drive for less than £100. To this day I still have 100GB+ spare on my PS3 despite having never uninstalled anything ever and having literally 150+ music albums and hundreds of video files/trailers on it. Storage just hasn't been on my mind at all with the PS3, because once you replace the internal drive it's something you can just forget about. Conversely, with my 360 I'm always having to clear shit off because there's no way I'm buying one of Microsoft's drives and having it sat on my TV stand looking like a mess.

Big non-SSD drives aren't very expensive and they're constantly becoming less so. I don't think space is going to be that big an issue during the next generation.

Guy I know wrote an article about the Steam Machine, raised some interesting thoughts I decided to share on reddit.

Going back to GAMES, this long trailer for Super Mario 3D World is definitely making me want some Wii U: Stop it games industry, I have no money at this time of year! Is it me or is that music at about 0:22 onwards a more upbeat Zelda's Lullaby?

The backwards compatibility thing is still limiting the purchase to at most two generations, so unless a native version is released and you buy it (albeit discounted) you're still stuck with either losing or re-buying. I think that's the biggest thing that grates me, as if I invest in a collection of classics I don't want it to just stop working. I know for a lot of people this is a 'so far away I don't care' kind of thing, but I don't want to keep buying classic games practically every time I get the urge to play them (which is usually every 5–10 years). It is a big question indeed, and one that leaves us reliant on console manufacturers because they pretty much dictate how all this works. At least with things like Steam you can still happily play away on purchases you made on it back in 2004, which is a compelling point that makes the looming Steam Machine a very attractive choice — there is no longer the generational compatibility divide, your shit is yours forever. Console manufacturers should be thinking about how to get a similar concept in place for their digital shops (admittedly, Sony already is by moving towards streaming legacy titles). Some PC games do stop working optimally over time, but usually they can be coerced to work. I'm used to this kind of persistence, which is what primarily puts me off these console-based things. It's just so much easier to install an emulator on my laptop and enjoy old games for as long as I want. And what do I care about the legality of it? I've bought most of the games once or twice before.

It'll be interesting to see how the bigger game payloads will be handled during the next 5+ years. It'd only take me 1.5 hours to download 45GB assuming optimal speeds, but that would take me over my daily download limit like a million times over and result in me getting hugely deteriorated speeds for the rest of the day (something ISPs seem to be favouring over hard caps). With that said, the limit only affects daytime hours so I could download overnight with no penalty. Clearly if people are going to start doing this across the country, a serious amount of extra strain is going to be put on ISPs and download providers alike. I'm sure they'll adapt and invest as needed, but this will inevitably result in higher prices appearing somewhere. Also I guess things like the PS4's 'play while it downloads' feature will become less of a luxury that developers might occasionally implement, and more of an absolute necessity that developers will be compelled to support. I guess it's a good job that a lot of countries have been investing in internet infrastructure recently. At the beginning of this generation you were lucky to get 5mb/s in a lot of UK households, whereas now 50–100mb/s is quite easily attainable.

I was pretty satisfied with the Wii virtual console, in that it had every SNES game I was actually interested in playing. I was pretty disappointed when they decided to remove Donkey Kong Country 1–3 after some years though, as I hadn't yet gotten around buying #2 (but was just about to when I discovered this). Has it turned up on the Wii U's version? One thing I don't like about the whole virtual console thing is the fact that it does seem like your purchases are locked to the platform you bought them on? It feels kind of shit that when building up a collection of old games for consoles that're ancient history, you're building the collection on a console that is itself one day going to become ancient history. And what if your console just dies? What happens to those purchases? Even if they can be restored, what about things that've been removed from the store like DKC? Will the store even exist so things can be restored in 5–10 years? It's kind of weird to thing about things on this timescale, but with gaming (and us) becoming much older now that is a reality. I'm sometimes playing games that're 24 years old, so the whole 'How long will your collection last?' question is a concern. I don't want to keep buying the same old games again and again. It seems like you're much better off just buying a laptop/box and running an emulator on it beneath your TV (easy to sync up with, say, PS3 pads nowadays). Sony is the only one that seems to have the right idea at the moment, by building a robust streaming service to play old games indefinitely that can theoretically work on any platform. And the beauty of it is that as the service ages and the hardware is improved, it'll become less demanding to run the older games.

I expect a large part of it is developers rethinking how they produce visuals. In the past it has indeed largely been about poly count, whereas now you can almost not worry about that. But when it comes to animation, lighting, particle effects, physics, etc there is so much more to do — and they all fall under what I consider 'graphics'. AI is of course a whole other kettle of fish, but another thing that is unlocked by better hardware. I expect this next generation and the ones beyond it to impress the shit out of us all, but it's going to take developers some time to figure things out. I'd say that Battlefield 4 is currently the best taste we've got of where things are going, even if a lot of it is still scripted rather than actually procedural.

First I've heard of this game. I see it came out in 2002, which isn't far from when a whole bunch of us at Mojo were hopelessly addicted to Worms Armageddon to the point where I was frequently turning up for college the next day like this: We were so into the game that one guy actually programmed a web-based analytics application that could read the game's match logs and generate in-depth statistics for weapons, levels, chat, etc. We also found ways of getting into the in-game chat channels via IRC and running bots that reported everything going on. In hindsight, considering the time that went into making them it seems hilarious that these things never even made it out of our small circle. Good times!