SiN

Mine is also from Grim Fandango, and equally as useless: "My scythe, I like to keep it next to where my heart used to be" There's just a certain elegance to it. I too say/think "I'm not putting my lips on that" in the context of anything I don't want to touch. Much more random: "What is your plan Qui-gon?" from the intro to the Phantom Menace game. I had to watch that scene repeatedly as I tweaked & tested settings to get it working on ye olde crash-prone PC. Finally, as I'm playing through Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, I'm fond of saying, "An [x], huh?" regarding common and/or mundane things. "A forum thread about odd quotes, huh?"

The UI actually changes annually (ish), so it's not stagnation. The article is worth a read, but to summarise: (also note that games, the thing I bought this console for, is *four* tabs away!) and this:

Totally right, and even without technical aspects, people forget that porting from one input type to another is not trivial. There are games that I've prototyped on a controller that would just not work with mouse+keyboard, vice versa, and so on. Because Ouya plays Android games, you're going to get a lot of bad ports. Even the "virtual dpad" games ... there are different design decisions between that and a real controller. I get the feeling that an Apple TV (box, not display) + App Store will be this. Same price, *much* better visibility, distribution, devkit, App Store, etc. The only piece of the puzzle that's missing is the controller. I'm pretty sure they won't make a conventional controller, but devs are smart ... we'll adapt.

Re: NSMB2 being a step back I'm guessing (read as: hoping) that Nintendo will maintain both the "New" and "3D Land" series. I don't see one as better than the other exactly... they're both really interesting/innovative in their own ways. It'd be a shame to see either go away. And yeah, totally love the million coins concept.

I don't play MP games, but yeah, I'm pretty sure XBL does a better job. In terms of the marketplace, I don't think so. Before NXE, I'd say Xbox for sure, but now: 1) games are buried deep in the menus, 2) you can only view 5 tiles at a time, 3) there's a lack of "curated content" because of all the ads, so I'd actually say PSN is better. Also, shouldn't paying for a service mean less ads!? Both are really awful compared to Steam, or even the App Store.

Buying Spelunky was an exercise in frustration. I'd be "okay" with ads if they didn't completely ruin the practicality of using the Xbox. Steam, the App Store, heck even the Xbox Dashboard of yesteryear, do a tremendously better job of curating great games, and making it easy to buy stuff. It's really, really disappointing to see where Microsoft's priorities really lie. :/

As I said on the last page: If they just came out and said, "yep, we're early in the process, this may take some time, we're working on dev support (you guys can help!)", etc, etc, I'd be more willing to support them. What they did instead is set an unrealistically early deadline, and name-dropped important people and games to sound more legitimate. With Kickstarters I *really* feel like you need to be open about the process/what you've achieved/what risks lie ahead. I'm not feeling that here.

I believe the GP2X fared much better given it had a bunch of emulators (including SNES and Megadrive) available for it.

I mostly buy stuff on store.steampowered.com ... seems to work better for me.

No, he means the GP32 and GP2X. Those were actually released, and well before the iPhone too. Those consoles were the only legal way to play indie (or as it was called, homebrew) games on a handheld device. I wouldn't say they did badly, I mean they were definitely successful in that they turned a profit. But yeah, compared to the overall gaming market they were a very tiny niche.

Pretty damning article by Ben Kuchera on PAR: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-reality-of-the-ouya-console-doesnt-match-the-hype-why-you-should-be-ske I'd like for these guys to succeed, and I'm all for giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not cool with how disingenuously they pitched this thing. Especially the "free to play" part.

I'm actually okay with the concept (if I were a PA fan I'd happily pay a bit of cash to get rid of ads), but yeah, those rewards are ... something. I'm not even sure condescending covers it. This one is even worse: Uhh, what? That's not how employment works. AND SOMEBODY BOUGHT ONE, WHHHHHHHY!?!?! I think Your World transcends best/worst comparisons.

iTunes is also totally DRM free, and it seems to let you redownload stuff.

A console doesn't need: a 3G radio chip, GPS, display or battery. The latter two, I believe, are especially expensive. It also doesn't need to be miniaturized to the same extent. I'm pretty sure that even at $100 they're making a profit, albeit a tiny one. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if they skipped out on mentioning the specs and Android, people would be amazed by the hardware. As it stands (some) people are dismissing the specs as "smartphone quality" which is actually ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL. By some metrics, a modern smartphone has more graphical power than even our current gen consoles. On the latter bit, while I agree MS & Sony are stagnating right now, there's no reason why another big company couldn't disrupt the market. After all, Ouya is basically copying the business model pioneered by Apple. As I mentioned before, for something to disrupt the console market, it *really* needs a critical mass... I worry that *only* a big company could pull that off. Then again, maybe it'll be a slow and steady rise in market share? As you said, Firefox pulled this off. There's a tonne of consumer candy, it's just a bit harder to notice. A cheap, powerful instant-on device, with downloadable games is an amazing, amazing thing. Convenience *is* a killer feature. It's what I wish Sony and Microsoft would try for their next-gen consoles, but ... *sigh* probably won't. I think the controller looks ... alright. Given all the iterative design they did (judging by the kickstarter video) I'd expect something more refined. This is super frustrating because there are a million different ways to tweak a conventional controller, and they're having none of it, apparently. And yeah, given the apparent attention-to-detail, it's hard to believe they'd miss the colour blindness thing. The touch surface is a neat idea though! (can you tell I'm an obsessive about usability and interface design yet?)

I was guilty of outright dismissing this thing when I first read the headlines, but I've come around a bit since. The biggest issue I see is the chicken & egg problem: devs will only flock to a platform if there are customers, and customers will only buy into a platform if there are games. Even with Ouya's current success that's still around ... 20,000 customers. It's a tiny number compared to 60 million Xboxes, 300 million iOS devices, or who-knows-how-many PCs. Also: am I the only one who thinks the console (and controller) are kinda ugly looking? I'd *kill* for a console that looks like a Jambox, so I'm kinda disappointed by the design given the brains behind it. :/

Carmack was talking about TVs in particular, not monitors. TVs do all this awful image post-processing that can sometimes take up to 100ms to complete. The money quote though, is that he said an Internet packet can get across the Atlantic faster than some TVs can display a frame from your wired console.

Two reasons: 1. the hardware would be *super* cheap. Think $50 console around the size of an AppleTV. That said, I'd imagine an annual subscription would be mandatory to play the console at all. 2. Cloud computers wouldn't be limited by Moore's Law. They wouldn't have to worry about heat/size issues in the conventional fit-it-in-a-tiny-box sense. Hardware costs would be significantly lower, since computers would be 1-to-many-users.

Cloud gaming doesn't work well to be *the* way to play games, agreed. But for demos I'd be all over it.

I WAIT IN EAGER ANTICIPATION FOR THIS MIND-BLOWING EXPERIENCE. (-ign.com?) (serious though, definitely looking forward to it)

Want!

Also: I have no idea how this is going to be playable on an Xbox controller! I had a hard enough time with Portal (1), and this seems to require far more precise movements.

Yeah, this is my biggest issue so far. Basically, Unreal engine wasn't really designed to do this stuff, and it definitely shows. Still working through the game... I've found that after getting the third dimensions, the puzzles get a lot more interesting. A few had me stumped for a while!

Aside: the original song plays at the end of an episode of Mad Men, but I was like, "wtf, why are they playing Millennium!?"

I wanted to love TF2, but I got Orange Box on Xbox. By the time I got my act together nobody I knew was playing TF2, and that was it. Q3A and CS were the last multiplayer FPS games I seriously got into. I'd love to be as obsessed with another FPS.

Very classy. I'm done here.