After rightfully rejecting Nintendo from the discussion, IGN quickly gets on with the list.

First item on the list, first sentence.

“We don’t need a hard drive.”

Stop laughing, it can’t be as silly as it sounds.

“Let’s enter a future where all our games and all our saves live somewhere else, instantly accessible on our next-gen console as well as on associated mobile devices.”

Okay, maybe it is. I was sort of thinking it was the usual silliness of saying everything should stream off the disk and nothing should install to the hard drive. Or maybe even that flash storage should be used instead of hard drive technology due to its low latency. Which is of course, the biggest problem with what he’s saying; latency. There is some. For certain types of game, this kinda ruins the experience. Don’t get me wrong, OnLive is a great service, and they have executed the idea of cloud gaming beautifully.

There are fundamental problems with cloud gaming though, things like physical distance away from the player, bandwidth, consistency, infrastructure (lack of). Yes, there are still people who don’t have 2-5Mbps consistently. I get about 6Mbps myself on a BT connection. I’m quite typical. Typical Virgin users get higher average speed, until they use their internet a bit, then for the rest of the day they suffer crippled bandwidth. Not to mention the QoS (lack of) in a lot of wireless devices which means lack of prioritisation of traffic, which means, well, jittering. I’m not the only gamer in the house, I have a partner and a child, so that 6Mbps is shared between three. Even then, physical distance means high latency, which means a delay between something happening in a game, and you experiencing it, then another delay as your input then has to travel back to where the game is physically running. Fast action games where reactions are important? For most people, forget about it.

Maybe the mainstream of the gaming industry will move to cloud gaming when every household that has had a PS2 in it has fast fibre-optic connections to a speedy internet, and 20+Mbps (per person) connections with almost zero ping so we get similar fidelity and latency to what we get out of locally connected consoles. It seems doubtful that this will happen next generation when, chances are, most of the specifications are already set and very probably don’t include taking out most of the hardware and making a tiny OnLive box, as cool as those things are.

I suspect the author doesn’t really understand the technology anyway since they say, “Before long, we could be streaming games straight from our consoles.” We already do that, it’s called an HDMI cable and gamepad. Or perhaps he meant streaming game content from a home console to other devices over the internet? Ever checked how fast your upload connection is?

I’m of course, not against having access to cloud-based content, and backing up data online is a great feature too. Let’s not go too far and pretend that the next gen can be replaced by it.

Both Sony’s and Microsoft’s next consoles will have hard drives as standard, if not, as I suspect, mandatory features. Why? Hard drives are faster than DVD and blu-ray. By a lot.

Let’s be generous and look at the maximum speeds, a 12x DVD going at the full speed it generally doesn’t: 132Mbps.

A hard drive? Just a normal laptop hard drive, the sort you’d get when you buy a budget laptop, nothing fancy: 700Mbps.

That’s being very generous.

“We don’t want to have to go to a store and pick up a plastic box.”

No, you want to download the game to your console that doesn’t have a hard drive.

Okay, reading it more generously, they want you to be able to stream it from a cloud service. I’m sure all the publishers who’ve been crowing about not making money off of used sales don’t care how it’s done, they just want to used market to go away. Not realising that people very probably won’t want to risk $60 for a game when they can’t recover any of that money via the used market.

Let’s look at another of the problems with online-only content as a replacement for boxed. Waiting. Don’t want to go to a store to pick up a game, huh? Not interested in waiting for a game to install, even?. Welcome to downloading 16Gb of Mass Effect 2 when the smallest BT package for internet gives you 10Gb a month. That’ll take several hours, so long as no-one does anything else with the internet, and you don’t hit a daily limit. Oh, and the servers aren’t crowded that day. And no, Mass Effect 2 isn’t the biggest game I could have picked. Even a slim ‘n’ trim Skryrim is 6Gb.

Moving beyond that – if you don’t want a physical disk and you don’t want a hard drive, what happens if your Internet goes down? If the service you’re using to stream goes down? You can’t play any games – for however long it takes to get online access again. What about all those parents who buy their kids games? The advantage of having an offline physical system is you (as a parent) can control fully what your kids play, and they aren’t subjected to the Internet in all its racist, homophobic, yelling glory. Finally (and while it may be hard to imagine) things aren’t guaranteed to last forever. It’s one of my long held hopes that Facebook – just like MySpace before it, will die. And so could the online cloud streaming service you’ve invested money in – what happens then?

Besides, people like owning physical objects as the not-death of blu-ray and books show.

Optional online content, and same-day (or even early) online retail releases would be great though.

After having a heading that talks about Retroactive Platform Parity over a paragraph that has nothing to do with Retroactive Platform Parity followed by an argument about unifying video services as a platform exclusive thereby making it not unified, the article does become more sensible, with things that are much more likely to be feasible this coming generation.

“In the future, we don’t want the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live to keep us offline when we don’t update. We want to talk to our friends while firmware version 2.0 downloads in the background, and automatically.”

I’m slightly torn on the issue of automatic updates, but I feel that the right approach with automatic updates is to have it as an option you can turn on and off, although, we shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege. Talking to your friends whilst you update is a nice idea, but allowing a compromised or outdated connection to a service that you pay money into? One that can be exploited by hackers? No.

“The PS3 played nice with UT3′s mods, but beyond that we haven’t seen much in the way of console cooperation with add-on content. (At least not the stuff that isn’t for sale.) These things are practically PCs at this point. Let modders publish their stuff on Xbox Live and PSN next time, and let us enjoy and get the most out of our favorite games.”

The fact that Unreal Tournament allowed it should clue you in as to how feasible having mods for the PS3 and XBox 360 is – let alone the next gen. Whilst some of it is a policy issue, most of it is down to game developers and publishers. Skyrim’s console is disabled when not on the PC, mouse and keyboard support is disabled, and splitscreen options are disabled on the PC version of Left 4 Dead when it works just fine on the XBox 360. Why? Certainly not because they can’t or are not allowed.

“Now more than ever, though, the idea of not being able to play older games on a new console really sucks.”

It does, although they miss the reason. DLC. I want my songs from Rock Band to carry on to the next generation’s Rock Band and all those games I bought from the Playstation network, not the Playstation 3 Network to work next console. Disk-based content would be only a part of that.

PSN lets us add the exact funds necessary to buy the items in our cart — this is a great system because it’s how we buy stuff everywhere else.

Really? As far as I recall the PSN requires you to add money in 5 pound or dollar chunks – rather than allowing you to pay the exact price for a game either via Pay Pal or a card (like Steam does). The PlayStation, the Xbox and the Wii all have their respective extra systems for money, the PlayStation just doesn’t translate it into a different word to help you think of it as money less. It’s better sure, but let’s be honest here – you’re still left with extra, annoying amounts of change.

The upshot of all of us is that it encouraged us to finish off our own attempt.

Peter:

Mandatory subtitles

We have mandatory trophies and achievements, yet whether or not we include the hard of hearing is left up to the developers. This should be fixed.  Here’s an idea too, make them available in the same place for every game.  No more guessing whether they’re in the game, sound, or display options.

Backwards Compatibility

I’ve had plenty of consoles, from the humble NES to the mighty PS3, but never before until this generation have I invested so much money into downloadable content and games. I think at this point, really, all new consoles should be backwards compatible so that owners of all of this content can still use it – at least in terms of stuff from the various online stores should still work on the next console upwards. If they expect us to buy new consoles that are basically the same thing, but slightly better, then we should expect all of our old content to continue working. I wouldn’t expect to have to lose access to all my games because of a Steam update, consoles should really work the same way.

Download All

You’ve bought several hundred songs since your last back-up, but alas, the hard drive has finally died on your console. Time to replace it, and get the songs back on the new drive, so we’ll just pop into the store and re-download all the songs. You go through the menus to Rock Band Add-On content and hit the “Download All” option to queue all the songs for download. Except you don’t because that option doesn’t exist, now it’s time to go through the song list finding all your content and downloading it individually, or wading through the Downloaded List. Let’s add Download All options next gen.

Cross-game voice chat

I neither care for, nor really understand the need for cross-game voice chat when you can send invitations to games and messages already. Chances are; I’m never going to use it. I mostly want it so that people shut up about cross-game voice chat. There are other issues that are far more important.

Michaela:

Global console options

Are you, like me, one of those people who always … always … always fiddles with options and settings to get then just right, before you can even play a game? And isn’t it annoying when you can’t find options you want, either because they don’t exist – or because it doesn’t let you change them until after you start a new game? Well, a better place to have options for subtitles and control options is on the console itself with the ability to change from the default for any given game. Are you one of those strange people who like to fly their characters? Well, how about an invert vertical look option that’s on-console rather than having to rely on games having it. The ability to remap all your controls in one step and the ability to, again, change from the default for any given game. Prefer R2 to R1? Change the option. Prefer to swap sticks? Change the option.

That way, with a control and option standard enforced, we don’t have to worry about learning a new console layout. We don’t have to decide if it’s worth getting used to a game’s different controls, for example, Burnout Paradise doesn’t let you swap the X axis at all, so if you prefer it a different way to the game you’re going to have to get used to it, but this wouldn’t be the case with global control support. You could put any game in and enjoy it straight away.

Better Social and Media capabilities

You know what would be nice? If I could pause a game on my powerful and impressive-looking next gen system and open a web browser to find some information out right then and there. If I could make a little post to the social website of my choice at the same time too. I could use my computer, or my phone for that matter…but I’d always hoped and assumed the console was moving towards actually being the only piece of hardware you really need in your house. Being able to conveniently browse the internet, send emails, update twitter (with a small picture of the game I’m playing, that can’t be impossible, right?) and watch videos easily – even while in a game.

But (speaking as a PS3 user obviously) this isn’t the case. The browser is sadly lacking…the YouTube version you get on the PS3 is ugly, blocky, and low resolution. I can’t, sadly, make a convenient post to a social website or send an email because that would mean relying on that awful web browser. It has a few redeeming features, sure, LoveFilm and BBC Iplayer programs that work decently, but it’s not enough – and took too long to get.

I’d like to have, in the future please console makers, a nifty console box that I can plug into a tv and stereo system and do everything I could want. Playing a game, then pausing to post about something awesome happening, looking something up or watching a video if I get stuck, having an easy to use browser experience for when I get a little tired of gaming or I could watch something online if I wanted to. Then I’d really be using my console.

In this episode, we talk a little bit first about news, including; Gran Tursimo 5′s upcoming update, the Silent Hill HD Collection, the Silent Hill Downpour delay and the long awaited Exterminatus DLC for Space Marine.

Our main topic for this podcast however, is all things Minecraft. We discuss the new Minecraft Pocket edition, Minecraft in general, and of course the big controversy of Bethesda vs. Mojang.

Featuring: Peter, and then Michaela & Bren not singing.

So we discuss which comics we’ve bought between us, what we think of the new restart, the female-led comics and of course the controversy surrounding Catwoman, and Red Hood and the Outlaws.

Featuring this episode: Peter, Brendan & Michaela.

Featuring: Brendan, Peter, Liam & Michaela.

Orks orks orks orks. Orks orks orks orks.

Featuring; Brendan, Michaela & Peter with this week’s guest being the cat Siouxsie Sioux (who wouldn’t stop meowing in the background).

This week we discuss what we’ve been playing, some gaming news including thoughts on banning the killing of children in video games. Mainly this episode we discuss used video games, while almost but not ever actually talking about Space Marine.

Tune in next week for Episode 7 – In The Emperor’s Name (working title), in which we finally discuss Space Marine.

Featuring; Brendan, Michaela & Peter, with guest, Liam.

This week’s guest is a recently graduated Computer Games Artist, who specialises in auto-mobiles.

We talk about HD Remixes, and how long the wait should be before-hand, why Remixes are sometimes preferable to remakes. We also discuss the various Warhammer 40k games, quick-time events, health systems, the idea of system-wide options for games, and various other stuffs.

This week’s guest is a recently graduated Computer Games Artist, who specialises in auto-mobiles. Hence the car talk.

This is episode four of the Corrosive Truths podcast, “It’s all Nolan North’s fault!”

In this episode we discuss the good and the bad in car video games ranging from serious simulation (Gran Turismo 5, Forza), arcade type (Burnout: Paradise), all the way to party type game (Mario Kart).

We have a discussion on the general low trend in character design of modern games, the unimpressive western every-man template that has been applied to many games over and what we’d like out of our characters in video games.

Finally we look at video game licenses of other popular media, looking at the mostly bad and the good that there has been including Die Hard, Silent Hill, Jaws, Jurassic Park and more.

And gerbils.

In this episode we discuss the idea of causal – what causal means, casual difficulty, casual horror, casual games and casual aiming. We also discuss difficulty bloat in recent games, the problems we have with difficulty bloat and common responses to complaints about difficulty that just don’t work. Finally, we discuss game sequels good and bad.

In this episode: Peter, Bren, Michaela and Bob.

Bob is a Computer Games Programmer, who works as Developer Relations for Imagination Technologies. Catch him at GDC.

In this episode: Peter, Bren and Michaela.