Frenetic Pony

This is the new (console) shit!

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I've heard the PS3 boomerang was actually really comfortable to use.

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Impossible. The left analog stick is still in the wrong place, where you have to stretch your thumb to reach it.

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What if the recently redesigned Move patent is the new controller?

You know, this one:

u9QZv.jpg

Perhaps it could attach to some manner of inflatable horse bag.

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I think that this generation will further close the gap between how impressive console hardware is and the performance of off-the-shelf PCs. It's kind of inevitable when consoles are targeting 1080p resolution and PCs are targeting multi-monitor or 2560x1440 specs at the spear-tip. That said, consoles will still outperform PCs in some critical ways that are sure to improve user experience.

That Digital Foundry article for instance notes that the Orbis will pack a dedicated core beyond the CPU and GPU that will likely significantly help with running the XMB (or equivalent) and other system-level operations like voice chat in the background. It's much like Nvidia's Tegra mobile technology that has a separate low-power core that tackles standby mode/simple tasks as well as helps initialize the GPU cores when starting up gaming applications.

This kind of specialized hardware is what will give consoles a solid lead on PCs for a while until PCs can simply brute force these operations by having a ton of power.

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Yeah... But the PS3 has an extra core to run system software and it's slow as hell. It's a damn pain to use.

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Well, the extra core in the Cell is actually just another dedicated CPU core. In the Orbis (according to DF), it's actually a GPU core which grants a lot more computational processing than the typical CPU core. That's why when these people try to make supercomputers out of off the shelf parts, they always use multiple high-end graphics cards rather than multiple processors.

I also have a feeling that this will be a much more substantive feature than in Cell because AMD has already been doing this for ages. Their APUs have been putting pretty powerful integrated GPUs on the same die as their high-end CPUs, which can then be utilized as more computing power for calculations when a discrete graphics card is added. You can also configure the APU's built-in GPU to basically contribute more to the graphical power of the discrete card, which can provide a pretty decent boost to mid-range AMD cards.

While this hardware news might seem somewhat underwhelming, I'm pretty excited about the prospect of more power-efficient, high-end mobile chips running the show because it drastically reduces the chance of hardware failure. Plus, the simple fact that this will be a locked in target will make console games get a whole lot more out of these chips then regular PC games could.

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Perfection, but old:

8f78ffd8a05237fc60121f4eb6c50378.jpg

Razer's version of the 360 gamepad. But that being said it does feel old.

And while I'd love to see advancement, I can think of a thousand things I'd rather have than a separate touchscreen. From what I've gathered of the Wii-U the absolute ONLY actual advancement the extra tablet like screen has offered so far is that you can switch off the TV and play your game on there.

Where's our biometric sensors, pressure sensitive face buttons, improved haptic feedback? Imagine directional forcefeedback, knowing which wheel is going off the track or where you're getting shot at from just by feel alone? I'm sure there's other stuff out there to do besides trying to force players to multitask between 2 screens at once.

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Those Razer pads are awful, they're just horrible. A nice list of appealing features, but the build quality is atrocious. Every single person i've talked to about that thing has said theirs broke within a month, mine broke after only a few days. Never buying another Razer product again.

Additionally, the Dual Shock 2 and 3, as well as all the Microsoft pads on both the original X-box and the 360, all already have pressure sensitive face buttons. It's just nothing uses them. (What would you really even do with them? Nobody really ever figured it out, so they're still there, but they may as well not be.)

As for wishlists, let me throw this dumb one out there: I want extra buttons on the back of the pad at the inside of the handles. I have three extra fingers on each hand that are doing nothing when i play. Cramming more buttons and features on the face and up by the triggers just makes it harder to do simultaneous actions.

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The only pressure sensitive button game I can think of is mgs2, when you arr hiding inside a locker and you press the button to look through the slots. If you pressed it hard snake would smash his face against the inside of the locker making noise and attracting guards. I though that was a nice little touch. It makes sense for a stealth or horror game making you input controls softly and carefully to remain silent in game when opening doors and stuff

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Problem with analog buttons is that there isn't enough "give" to make them useful. From my MGS experience, it's really hard to do a half button press consistently.

Also, Sno: are you sure the Xbox/360 controllers have pressure-sensitive buttons? I'm almost positive they don't...

Anyway, on controller design, my take is not so much adding more buttons, but refining what we've got. I wrote about this a while back, but here are the strongest points:

On analog sticks:

More importantly, analog sticks and triggers need variable force feedback. That is, the sticks and triggers should feel tighter the further you push them. With feedback, players become conscious of how far the stick is pushed allowing them to tweak their input on an almost subconscious level. In other words, it creates a tighter feedback loop.

On button placement:

Making the A button on an Xbox controller even slightly larger would make the controller far more approachable. When you have four equally important decisions to make, the decision is overwhelming. When one decision seems even slightly more important, the problem becomes a lot more approachable.
the trigger and bumper should switch positions. Players tend to use the trigger with their index finger, so why isn’t it placed right under the index finger?

On analog triggers:

I'd love it if analog triggers had the same "click" function that the GameCube controller has.

On those stupid "press the analog stick in" buttons

[They] need to go. They are difficult to press intentionally and easy to press accidentally, exactly the opposite of how a good button should act.

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The problem is giving buttons full analog control. They're just tiny buttons. Cameras have had two stage shutter releases for ages -- you half-press the button to focus, then fully press it to trigger the shutter. This sort of two stage control could actually be useful.

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The original Xbox had pressure sensitive buttons. They dropped the feature for 360.

Only game I can think of that used it was, erm, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.

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Alright, yeah, looks like i was wrong about the 360.

The dualshocks definitely have em` though, i remember San Andreas having the accelerator mapped to X and the applied pressure changing your speed.

On those stupid "press the analog stick in" buttons

[They] need to go. They are difficult to press intentionally and easy to press accidentally, exactly the opposite of how a good button should act.

I have to point out how important these are to many games for being an extra button you can hit without taking your thumbs off the sticks. (I've also never had a problem with accidental/intentional clicks,)

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I think that this generation will further close the gap between how impressive console hardware is and the performance of off-the-shelf PCs. It's kind of inevitable when consoles are targeting 1080p resolution and PCs are targeting multi-monitor or 2560x1440 specs at the spear-tip. That said, consoles will still outperform PCs in some critical ways that are sure to improve user experience.

That Digital Foundry article for instance notes that the Orbis will pack a dedicated core beyond the CPU and GPU that will likely significantly help with running the XMB (or equivalent) and other system-level operations like voice chat in the background. It's much like Nvidia's Tegra mobile technology that has a separate low-power core that tackles standby mode/simple tasks as well as helps initialize the GPU cores when starting up gaming applications.

This kind of specialized hardware is what will give consoles a solid lead on PCs for a while until PCs can simply brute force these operations by having a ton of power.

Actually... While both the cpu's of the 360 and PS3 were disappointing, when the 360 came out it had a GPU more advanced than anything you could actually buy on the market. Essentially an ATI x1800xl, modified with EDram, access to 512mb of ram, and advancement beyond DX 9.0c. CPU aside it was equal to the best, top tier PCs you could buy in many ways. With a better GPU.

On the other hand, the claimed specs for the PS4 should easily be beaten by a top of the line PC. I wouldn't be surprised to see a GTX 780 with 4gigs of ram in and of itself, not too mention whatever system RAM you have. Combined with top of the line Intel CPUs no doubt absolutely crushing the console CPU performance; As Intel has done reliably for years now versus AMD, ARM, and specialty shops like Oracle and IBM alike, it overall means a top of the line PC will still be far and away a higher performer. Especially if you get into ridiculous stuff like triple SLI/Crossfire cards and high performance SSDs.

Also, I'd no idea there were pressure sensitive face buttons on the Xbox! Huh, guess developers really couldn't find any use for them.

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Actually... While both the cpu's of the 360 and PS3 were disappointing, when the 360 came out it had a GPU more advanced than anything you could actually buy on the market. Essentially an ATI x1800xl, modified with EDram, access to 512mb of ram, and advancement beyond DX 9.0c. CPU aside it was equal to the best, top tier PCs you could buy in many ways.

On the other hand, the claimed specs for the PS4 should easily be beaten by a top of the line PC. I wouldn't be surprised to see a GTX 780 with 4gigs of ram in and of itself, not too mention whatever system RAM you have. Combined with top of the line Intel CPUs no doubt absolutely crushing the console CPU performance; As Intel has done reliably for years now versus AMD, ARM, and specialty shops like Oracle and IBM alike, it overall means a top of the line PC will still be far and away a higher performer. Especially if you get into ridiculous stuff like triple SLI/Crossfire cards and high performance SSDs.

Also, I'd no idea there were pressure sensitive face buttons on the Xbox! Huh, guess developers really couldn't find any use for them.

I don't think it's particularly constructive to point out that a $2000+ PC will outperform a likely $400 because that's (hopefully) painfully obvious. You bring up a fair point that the GPU in the 360 was much better than what was in most PCs at the time, but you still really couldn't beat a 7800 GTX 512mb running Riddick or Age of Empires 3 on the PC. It made stuff like 360 COD 2 look old in comparison.

Regardless, I have absolutely no doubt that the consoles will have above and beyond the specs needed to deliver high quality, 1080p graphics. Even with this purported mobile GPU, it is more than enough. Just like it's just about pointless to buy a GTX 690 if you're only driving a 1080p monitor, it's similarly pointless to desire a high-end power sucking GPU that'll run continuously for hours on end when next-gen consoles are built for 1080p televisions. That's the real thing they're trying to tackle here - power consumption. Sure, the next Xbox could have some kind of equivalent to the Sandy Bridge Extreme paired with a GTX 690, but you would also need a 1200W power supply to run it and it'd be the size of a PC tower just to support heat dissipation.

Also, I feel I should point out that you don't need to wait for the GTX 780 to get a video card with 4GB of RAM - some models of the GTX 680 and all models of the GTX 690 have 4GB of GDDR RAM.

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Also, I'd no idea there were pressure sensitive face buttons on the Xbox! Huh, guess developers really couldn't find any use for them.

Like the trigger click on the Gamecube controller, it's one of those small controller innovations that just didn't really ever catch on in a big way.

The only game i can even think of that used the GC trigger click was Metroid Prime. (Where holding down the trigger would lock-onto a target, and then pressing harder for that last click would swap targets. I though that was a pretty good use of that feature, but even with all the games on the GC that feature a lock-on, the two Metroid Prime games were the only ones that did it.)

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I have to point out how important these are to many games for being an extra button you can hit without taking your thumbs off the sticks. (I've also never had a problem with accidental/intentional clicks,)

I absolutely hate thumbstick buttons. I'm always hitting them by accident and fucking myself up in some way or another, and can never get them to work properly when I need them. The worst is Halo, where it's the scope for rifles and such. Trying to aim while also clicking in the thing that you're manipulating to aim means that those guns are completely useless to me in that series. Can't agree more with the "lose 'em" sentiment. In fact, that the GCN didn't have them made me like that controller even more. While we're on that:

Like the trigger click on the Gamecube controller, it's one of those small controller innovations that just didn't really ever catch on in a big way.

The only game i can even think of that used the GC trigger click was Metroid Prime. (Where holding down the trigger would lock-onto a target, and then pressing harder for that last click would swap targets. I though that was a pretty good use of that feature, but even with all the games on the GC that feature a lock-on, the two Metroid Prime games were the only ones that did it.)

I remember Rogue Leader made pretty good use of it. If you pulled the right trigger to the point of click, but didn't click it, you'd coast at your top speed. If you clicked the trigger in, you'd enter a boost mode that closed your X-foils but deactivated your weapons for quicker manoeuvring. I really liked that. I'm sure there were more games that used it, but can't remember. I think maybe Mario Sunshine? Don't recall exactly what for though.

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I think the bigger issue here is really just the old "why the fuck don't console games let people remap the controls" problem. If you don't want to have something important mapped to the stick buttons, you shouldn't have to. I don't think those buttons should go away though, because they offer some fairly important functionality.

(Specifically about the click-to-zoom, Halo 4 has a control scheme that maps zoom to the left trigger like many other shooters do, something that i think feels bizarre and wrong in Halo, and you still end up with various other functions on the stick buttons instead.)

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