gaming

microsoft-sure-seems-to-be-thinking-about-some-sort-of-portable-xbox

Microsoft sure seems to be thinking about some sort of portable Xbox

gaming, microsoft, Phil Spencer, portable, xbox / /

Grist for the rumor mill —

Spencer talks up “different form factors that allow people to play in different places.”

–

A demo of

Enlarge / A demo of “Project Xcloud” streaming running on a mobile device, circa 2019.

Yesterday’s news that four unnamed Microsoft games are coming to “the other consoles” was a bit anticlimactic after weeks of now-refuted rumors about games like Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle going to the PlayStation 5. Yet even as those rumors die, Microsoft seems to be actively feeding new rumors regarding plans for some sort of portable gaming device.

In an interview with the Verge accompanying yesterday’s “multi-platform” business announcement, Microsoft Xbox CEO Phil Spencer was asked directly about any handheld hardware plans, including his recent penchant for liking some social media posts discussing handheld game consoles. While Spencer said he had “nothing to announce,” he talked up a lot of other handheld gaming hardware when talking about how Xbox could capture more “player hours.”

So, okay, what keeps people from playing certain hours? Well there’s some sleep, school, and kind of normal life, but some of it is just access. Do I have access to the games that I want to play right now? Obviously we’re kind of learning from what Nintendo has done over the years with Switch, they’ve been fantastic with that. So when I look at Steam Deck and the ROG and my Legion Go, I’m a big fan of that space.

Spencer went on to say that “real work” still needs to be done to get Windows to work better with controller input and on smaller 7- to 8-inch screens. That’s the kind of OS work we’d note would be very useful if Microsoft is planning to release a Windows-based gaming portable of its own (we’re assuming Microsoft would not want to ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS). “That’s a real design point that our platform team is working with Windows to make sure that the experience is even better,” he said.

Spencer gave even more direct hints along the same lines in an interview with Bloomberg, where he mentioned “early plans” for new consoles and promised, “We’re going to be able to do more innovative things in hardware, the more the game side of the business is having success.” He added that he “get[s] excited about different form factors that allow people to play in different places,” which sure sounds like the kind of thing a portable game console allows for.

Remember the “Xboy”?

Rumors of a Microsoft gaming portable are far from new, dating back to at least the Xbox 360 era and popping up periodically ever since. As recently as last year, insider reports suggested Microsoft had prototyped a “cloud-focused Xbox handheld” in the past, including work on a “lightweight” Xbox interface designed for handhelds.

At the moment, it’s hard to know whether a theoretical Xbox portable would be limited to streaming (either from an in-home Xbox console or the cloud), as those reports suggested. While a streaming-focused handheld could definitely be cheaper to produce, it would be necessarily limited by a smaller selection of games, the need for a reliable Internet connection, and the ever-present latency issues that streaming games have yet to shake (and/or the need to be on the same network as a local Xbox).

Could Sony's PlayStation Portal provide a roadmap for a similar

Enlarge / Could Sony’s PlayStation Portal provide a roadmap for a similar “portable Xbox” design?

Sony

Regardless, some industry pundits have also recently taken to arguing for Microsoft to make a portable gaming move as well. Earlier this week, The Verge proclaimed that “it’s time for Microsoft to build an Xbox Steam Deck” (in a piece timed almost suspiciously closely to the site’s hint-filled Spencer interview). And Jez Corden at Windows Central argued earlier this month that an Xbox handheld “isn’t just likely… it’s absolutely necessary,” (in a piece that also received a like from Spencer on social media).

Then again, a Microsoft “Roadmap to 2030” document from May 2022 (revealed through leaked court documents during the Activision Blizzard merger case last year) listed a portable console as “not in scope for 1st party” as part of Microsoft’s plans at the time. And in 2020, Microsoft’s former head of Xbox, Robbie Bach, discussed three previous times in Xbox history where proposals for an “Xboy” portable were shot down because “we just didn’t have the bandwidth to do that.”

But Bach’s tenure at Xbox (which ended in 2010) was a very different era in the portable gaming market. Today, Valve’s Steam Deck and its imitators have proven there’s a space for more PC-like gaming handhelds that go beyond Nintendo’s longstanding iron grip on handheld gaming. Even Sony recently re-entered the portable gaming market with the PlayStation Portal, though that device being restricted to in-home streaming from a local PS5 puts it in a different class than many other gaming handhelds.

The new rumors also come at a very different time in Microsoft’s own hardware-making story. In 2010, the ill-fated Microsoft Zune was on the verge of ending its short market tenure. Today, Microsoft’s line of Surface laptop-tablets has spent over a decade successfully establishing its place in a competitive market. Maybe Microsoft will take some of those Surface lessons forward if it decides to enter the handheld gaming market for the first time.

Microsoft sure seems to be thinking about some sort of portable Xbox Read More »

our-unbiased-take-on-mark-zuckerberg’s-biased-apple-vision-pro-review

Our unbiased take on Mark Zuckerberg’s biased Apple Vision Pro review

Apple, apple vision pro, gaming, mark zuckerberg, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest Pro / /
No way would Zuckerberg be photographed wearing a Vision Pro, but let's just imagine he's looking at a picture of one in his headset here...

Enlarge / No way would Zuckerberg be photographed wearing a Vision Pro, but let’s just imagine he’s looking at a picture of one in his headset here…

@zuck Instagram | Aurich Lawson

Since the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, it’s not been hard to find countless thoughts and impressions on the headset from professional reviewers and random purchasers. But among all those hot takes, the opinions of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand out for a few reasons—not least of which is that he and his company have spent years of development time and lost tens of billions of dollars creating the competing Quest headset line.

For that reason alone, Zuckerberg’s Instagram-posted thoughts on the Vision Pro can’t be considered an impartial take on the device’s pros and cons. Still, Zuckerberg’s short review included its fair share of fair points, alongside some careful turns of phrase that obscure the Quest’s relative deficiencies.

To figure out which is which, we thought we’d go through Zuckerberg’s review and give a quick review of the points he makes. In doing so, we get a good viewpoint on the very different angles with which Meta and Apple are approaching mixed-reality headset design.

There’s “high-quality” and then there’s “high-quality”

Near the start of his analysis, Zuckerberg says that the “Quest 3 does high-quality passthrough with big screens, just like Vision Pro.” This is only true in the most technical sense. Saying both headsets have “high-quality passthrough” is like saying an old 720p LCD TV and a new 4K OLED both have “high-quality screens.”

Compared side by side, Apple’s array of cameras and higher-resolution displays combine for a much sharper and more dynamic view of the “real world” than the Quest 3, which barely limps over the “good enough” passthrough threshold, in my experience. That display quality extends to the “big screens” Zuckerberg mentions, too, which are noticeably clearer and easier to read on the Vision Pro.

A view of my mixed reality

Enlarge / A view of my mixed reality “office” in the Quest 3 app Immersed.

Speaking of those “big screens,” the experience with 2D virtual displays is quite different in both headsets. The Vision Pro seems built from the ground up with the ability to place and resize thousands of flat iOS apps anywhere around your virtual space. Those virtual windows react to the light in the room, cast gentle shadows in your virtual view, and get occluded by objects in the real world, adding to the sense that they are really “there” with you.

The Quest, on the other hand, was built more with immersive VR experiences in mind. Yes, recent Quest OS upgrades added the ability to snap selected flat apps and system tools (e.g., the store) into place in your Quest “home environment.” But the system-level “huge floating screens” experience is still much more limited than that on the Vision Pro, which offers easy free positioning and resizing of all sorts of apps. Quest users looking for something similar need to rely on a third-party tool like Virtual Desktop, which also has its own quirks and limitations.

Our unbiased take on Mark Zuckerberg’s biased Apple Vision Pro review Read More »

after-weeks-of-rumors,-microsoft-says-four-games-are-going-to-“other-consoles”

After weeks of rumors, Microsoft says four games are going to “other consoles”

gaming, microsoft, xbox / /

Breaking out of the box —

But Starfield and Indiana Jones are staying exclusive to Xbox and PC.

– Updated

After weeks of rumors around its strategy regarding Xbox console exclusives, Microsoft announced today that it is “going to take four games to the other consoles.” The company stopped short of announcing what those now non-exclusive games would be, but it did point out that neither Starfield nor Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would be appearing on other consoles.

All four of the soon-to-be multi-platform titles are “over a year old,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer said in an “Updates on the Xbox Business” podcast video. The list includes a couple of “community-driven” games that are “first iterations of a franchise” that could show growth on non-Xbox consoles, as well as two others that Spencer said were “smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives… I think there is an interesting story for us of introducing Xbox franchises to players on other platforms to get them more interested in Xbox.”

The Verge cites “sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans” in reporting that Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded are the four multi-platform titles Microsoft is referencing today.

“The teams that are building those [multi-platform] games have announced plans that are not too far away,” Spencer said, “but I think when they come out, it’ll make sense.”

This is not completely new territory for Microsoft; Spencer noted in the podcast that the acquisitions of Activision Blizzard and Bethesda parent Zenimax mean that Microsoft is already “one of the largest game publishers on PlayStation.” Microsoft has also spent years pushing the ability to play Xbox games on other screens via Game Pass streaming.

Spencer stressed during the podcast that this limited multi-platform move does not represent “a change to our fundamental exclusive strategy.” He added that “we’re making these decisions for some specific reasons,” citing “the long-term health of Xbox and a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises.”

And Xbox hardware will continue to be the “developer target” for Microsoft’s multi-platform games, according to Microsoft President of Xbox Sarah Bond. “Our developers can build the specs of our hardware, and we invest to make sure when they do that the games are going to run great on our hardware, but they’re also going to be able to be accessed across any screen because of all the other investments we make,” Bond said.

Wave of the future

Spencer cited the recent expansion of multi-platform releases in stating “a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry.”

“We’ve seen this inversion over the last five years where it used to be that the platform was the biggest thing, and the games would tuck in within the platform,” Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty added. “Today, big games like a Roblox or a Fortnite could actually be bigger than any one platform, so that has really changed the way we think about those things” (oddly enough, Booty did not mention Microsoft’s own bigger-than-one-platform mega-hit, Minecraft, though Spencer mentioned it later in the presentation).

Bond added that “when you just step back and you look at the history of the industry, we’ve moved from a place where it used to be that someone built and launched a game to accelerate hardware, to actually the things we do with our hardware and with our platform are all in service of making those games bigger.”

Despite the opening up of select franchises, Booty clarified that “Game Pass will only be available on Xbox” and will continue to include all first-party Microsoft games “day one.” That will soon include games Microsoft acquired through the recently completed Activision Blizzard merger, starting with Diablo IV on March 28.

Microsoft’s limited multi-platform announcement comes as information from a Take-Two financial report suggests the PlayStation 5 has outsold the Xbox Series X/S by a roughly 2:1 margin. That’s similar to the sales lead the PS4 maintained over the Xbox One in the last console generation.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Spencer stressed that he wanted the Xbox ecosystem to continue to focus on backward compatibility, comparing it to PC gamers’ ability to still play Windows games released decades ago on modern hardware. “When we look at future hardware generations and what we’re going to support, making sure that we respect… the investments that people have made in Xbox going forward is fundamental.”

This story has been updated with more detailed information from and analysis of Microsoft’s announcement video.

Listing image by Barone Firenze | Shutterstock.com

After weeks of rumors, Microsoft says four games are going to “other consoles” Read More »

deep-rock-galactic:-survivor-is-a-fine-entry-point-into-the-auto-shooting-depths

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a fine entry point into the auto-shooting depths

auto-shooter, autoshooter, autoshooters, deep rock galactic, gaming, ghost ship games, steam early access, vampire survivors / /

Vampirock Stonevivors —

This fleshed-out Early Access version could convert first-timers to the genre.

–

Bugs overwhelming a player in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor

Enlarge / Your author actually made it out of this, but not that much further.

Kevin Purdy/Ghost Ship Games

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor started as a talk over a beer between two development teams, according to Søren Lundgaard, CEO of Ghost Ship Games. Ghost Ship, ramping up its publishing arm after the multi-year success of Deep Rock Galactic, gave Funday Games license to graft its quirky dwarven corporate dystopia onto the auto-shooting likes of Vampire Survivors.

I’m glad they had that beer, and even more glad they’ve offered up the resulting game for Early Access on Windows PC via Steam (and Steam Deck, and Linux via Proton). Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is my favorite of the genre I sometimes call “strategic walking.” I am, of course, biased by the flavor and familiarity with Deep Rock Galactic (DRG). But the elements of DRG Funday has put into DRG: Survivor makes for a fun, cohesive game, one that’s easy to play in sessions and not be overwhelmed—mentally, at least. Bug-wise, you are absolutely going to get trampled.

Launch trailer for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

We peeked at Survivor in June, and it’s gotten a lot of polish since then, along with entirely new character classes, biomes, and upgrade mechanics. The basic mechanics remain the same: You complete mission objectives and mine resources while an increasing horde of insectoids chases you, and your weapons automatically fire at them. Some weapons shoot in wide patterns, some blast up close, and others do things like hone in on the creature with the most hit points. The big decisions you make are where do you move, so as to pick up dropped experience points and angle your shooting, and what do you pick for your upgrades when they come available.

You start out with only one class available, the relatively balanced Scout, and no bonuses. As you accrue resources, experience, and hit achievements, you unlock permanent upgrades to things like damage, item pick-up radius, mining and walking speed, and toughness. Play a couple of sessions, and you can see the build possibilities come to life, with things like critical hits and reload speeds able to be pushed far beyond balance.

That’s just the one class, though. Each of DRG‘s classes gets a spot in DRG: Survivor, and what they do in that first-person game translates surprisingly well to an overhead shooter. Diggers move through stone and harvest more quickly and have their weapons oriented toward protecting them from behind. Gunners, well, shoot a lot, which means a different kind of movement so that you’re looping back on enemy hordes and mowing them down from the front. Engineers set up turrets and shepherd the mobs through them. Each one offers strategic variants, too, like the Digger that leaves trails of acid behind them as they burrow.

  • A moment where your author had things relatively under control. Which way should he go next?

    Kevin Purdy/Ghost Ship Games

  • An Engineer in a magma-ridden world.

    Ghost Ship Games

  • The Digger, choosing acid as his keep-away tool.

    Ghost Ship Games

  • Inside a multi-level mission, you’ll make choices between levels about how to spend your gold and Nitra.

    Kevin Purdy/Ghost Ship Games

  • Between runs, you can make universal upgrades to your characters, upping their damage, defense, criticals, speed, and other values.

    Kevin Purdy/Ghost Ship Games

  • The stat layout from one of my earlier runs.

    Kevin Purdy/Ghost Ship Games

Having played a few other auto-shooters since my first run with DRG: Survivor, what I appreciate most is how the procedural landscapes and inherent greed of mining challenge your thinking and reaction times. Rather than looping around a seemingly endless space, DRG: Survivor makes you think about the dynamics of a giant crowd of bugs that will always take the shortest route to get to you. I felt a bit like an ant in a glass-paned farm sometimes, digging into stone to avoid getting pinched or eking out an escape on the very edge of a map.

There are other DRG-related change-ups, too, like an upgrade station that will only land if you clear the space for it, and the familiar secondary resource objectives you can try and collect on each map. And there’s the core trade-off of stopping to chip away at a valuable resource with your pickax while the aliens not only grow in number but slowly get more powerful as time wears on.

I’ve only had a few hours with DRG: Survivor, but I’m already eager to see what kinds of builds can be unlocked through some combination of luck and stubborn upgrade choices. While there is likely tuning and some fan-requested upgrades to be added on (and the developer promises more capabilities for your robot assistant), it feels quite full for an Early Access release, and especially at $9. It feels like a good first risk/reward decision to make before the game puts hundreds of smaller ones on you.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a fine entry point into the auto-shooting depths Read More »

f-zero-courses-from-a-dead-nintendo-satellite-service-restored-using-vhs-and-ai

F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI

F-Zero, gaming, Nintendo, satellaview, super famicom, Super Nintendo / /

Ahead of its time and lost in time —

There’s still a $5,000 prize for the original Japanese Satellaview broadcasts.

–

Box art for the fan modification of F-Zero, BS F-Zero Deluxe

Enlarge / BS F-Zero Deluxe sounds like a funny name until you know that the first part stands for “broadcast satellite.”

Guy Perfect, Power Panda, Porthor

Nintendo’s Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released.

That includes a host of content for Nintendo’s own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live “Soundlink” CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts.

Recordings from some of the F-Zero Soundlink broadcasts on the Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in the US).

As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming’s informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week “Grand Prix 2” event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are “north of 99.9% accurate,” according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM.

A re-creation of the “Forest I” level from the lost Satellaview broadcasts, running in a modified F-Zero ROM.

F-Zero Deluxe, as the patched version is called, includes four new racing machines on top of the original four. There are two new “BS-X” Leagues with all the resurrected Satellaview race tracks. And there is “ghost data,” or the ability to race against one of your prior runs on a course, something that F-Zero games helped make popular and was subsequently picked up by other racing games. There is even box art and an instruction booklet. It is a notable feat of game preservation. It thereby makes us nervous that Nintendo and its attorneys will take notice, but one can hope.

Speaking of which, a key tool used for the BS F-Zero Deluxe release comes from engineer FlibidyDibidy. In his efforts to create a “living leaderboard,” he wanted to show every Super Mario Bros. speedrun all at once. That required a side-by-side speedrun tool that could analyze game footage and show exactly what input was being pressed during that frame, then produce an emulation of that footage that was frame-perfect. That tool, Graphite, is currently missing from the author’s website and from GitHub, though a GitLab copy remains. We’ve reached out to FlibidyDibidy for comment on this and will update the post with new information.

F-Zero courses.” height=”446″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-12-at-5.35.51%E2%80%AFPM-300×446.png” width=”300″>

Enlarge / A frame from the machine learning tool Guy Perfect used to read inputs from a VHS recording and re-create long-lost F-Zero courses.

Guy Perfect

Using Graphite as inspiration and having the data from the original Grand Prix broadcast as a baseline, an F-Zero superfan going by Guy Perfect built a tool that could reproduce the controller input from a miraculous VHS copy of the missing second Grand Prix. Following this reverse-project process, Guy Perfect re-created most of the courses and then fine-tuned them with manual frame-by-frame authoring. The backgrounds on the courses required the work of a pixel artist, Power Panda, to finish the package, and Porthor to round out the trio.

Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was. Here’s hoping the results, which by all indications are fan-created and non-commercial, stick around for a while.

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diablo-ii-streamer-finds-1-in-3-million-item-drop,-instantly-sells-it-for-laughs

Diablo II streamer finds 1-in-3-million item drop, instantly sells it for laughs

Blizzard, Diablo, Diablo 2, Diablo II, gaming, speedrun, steamer, twitch / /

Gold digger —

Many players have never even seen a Zod rune drop over decades of play.

–

Mere seconds before an epic livestreamed troll moment.

Enlarge / Mere seconds before an epic livestreamed troll moment.

The Zod rune has a mythical place in Diablo II lore. The incredibly rare socketed item, which can make other in-game gear indestructible, has just a 1 in 2,987,183 chance of dropping from the game’s highest class of enemy, according to one calculation.

To this day, it’s not hard to find dedicated players admitting online that they’ve never seen a legitimate copy of the rune despite years of play (though duplicated versions made using glitches can be less rare).

So when Diablo streamer and speedrunner Kano saw a Zod rune drop during a livestreamed Diablo II: Resurrected run Wednesday (as noticed by GamesRadar), it was something of a legendary moment. And when Kano sold that rune for a relatively unimportant 35,000 in-game gold mere moments later, it was something of a legendary troll.

“Please, for the love of all that is holy…”

“Yo, that’s my highest speedrun rune—here we go,” Kano said calmly on-stream when the rune dropped, projecting a cool detachment that belied the import of the moment. “That’s the first-ever Zod I’ve found, by the way. Like, ever.”

Viewers seeing the moment live on Twitch chat were not nearly so detached. “That’s easily the rarest thing ever dropped in a speed run, lol,” Twitch user R__A__C__E stated, probably accurately. “I just opened the stream WHAT THE F hahahha” Twitch user creatingmadness added.

The chat’s mood changed mere moments later, though, when Kano left the dungeon, walked to an in-game vendor, and quickly sold the incredibly rare item. “Do not vendor that!!! Please for the love of all that is holy,” YouTube viewer Ragnar begged, to no avail. “YOU ASSHOLE,” Twitch user R__A__C__E added in all-caps outrage.

Kano just chuckled a bit to himself at the reactions he was getting from his viewers. “What, dude, it’s 35K, it’s good… it’s good money,” he deadpanned. Later in the same stream, he feigned ignorance over why the sale would even generate controversy. “Why would they be angry at me for selling a Zod, dude? It’s 35K gold. I don’t get it. What’s the problem? I think I should be more angry at people who keep a Zod rune, to be honest.”

Kano’s full stream. The Zod rune drops at around the 8: 15: 30 mark.

Elsewhere in the stream, though, Kano dropped the act and fully appreciated what had just happened. “I can’t believe it, like, that’s so sick,” he said. “Hello, it’s my first ever Zod rune, dude. Now, whenever people ask me the question ‘What’s the highest Rune you’ve ever seen in a speedrun?’ I can finally say it’s a Zod, man.”

Diablo II streamer finds 1-in-3-million item drop, instantly sells it for laughs Read More »

what-would-an-xbox-without-console-exclusives-even-look-like?

What would an Xbox without console exclusives even look like?

console wars, exclusives, gaming, Halo, microsoft, PlayStation, ps5, rumor, Sony / /
The world's most expensive domino set.

Enlarge / The world’s most expensive domino set.

Aurich Lawson

It’s been a busy time in the Xbox rumor mill of late. Last weekend, the Verge reported that Microsoft was considering launching a version of Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PlayStation 5, alongside plans to port last year’s Hi-Fi Rush to other consoles. That same weekend, Xbox Eras published more lightly sourced rumors suggesting that prominent Xbox exclusive Starfield would be getting a PS5 port.

While Microsoft hasn’t directly commented on these reports, Xbox chief Phil Spencer wrote on social media that Microsoft is “planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox.”

The churning rumor mill has set off something of an existential crisis among some Xbox superfans, content creators, and influencers, who are worried that Microsoft is planning to essentially abandon their favored console. “Genuinely feel terrible for convincing my sister to get an Xbox instead of a PS5,” XboxYoda posted in a representative social media take. “Like I actually feel like I let her down… .”

“If you like being lied to that’s a you thing,” social media user XcloudTimdog posted. “I have a set of standards, that’s all. Cross them and, well, I respond.”

These and other more apocalyptic reactions might seem like hyperbolic whining from territorial console misanthropes. But they also have the germ of a point. Exclusive games have long been the primary way console makers argue for players to choose their console over the competition. If Microsoft effectively changes that argument in the middle of the current console generation, Xbox owners will have some legitimate reason to be upset.

A world without Xbox exclusives

To see why, start with a simple thought experiment. Say it’s early 2020 and Microsoft announces that it is abandoning the idea of console exclusives entirely. Upcoming Xbox Game Studios titles like Halo Infinite and Starfield would still be released on the upcoming Xbox Series X/S, of course, but they’d also all see equivalent versions launch on the PS5 (and sometimes the Switch) on the same day. Sony does not respond in kind and keeps major franchises like God of War and Spider-Man exclusive to the PS5.

Spider-Man 2 on the same console?” height=”427″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Starfield_03_ExploringPlanets-800-1024×683-1-640×427.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / You mean I could have visited this planet and played Spider-Man 2 on the same console?

In this hypothetical world, convincing someone to buy an Xbox becomes much more difficult. On the one hand, you have a PlayStation console that can play all of the major big-budget games published by both Microsoft and Sony. On the other, you have an Xbox that doesn’t have access to the significant Sony half of that gaming equation.

There are other reasons you might still consider an Xbox in this world. Maybe you think the reduced price of the Xbox Series S delivers more “bang for the buck.” Maybe you prefer the Xbox controller layout or some of Xbox’s system-level OS features. Maybe you’re convinced cross-platform games will look or play better on Microsoft’s machine.

But in the console market, these kinds of concerns often take a back seat to the prospect of a system’s exclusive games and franchises. The biggest exclusive titles are called “system sellers” for a reason—they’re the games that make many gamers plunk down hundreds of dollars on hardware just for the possibility of spending more on this must-have software.

In this hypothetical, Microsoft would essentially be trying to sell the Xbox without any exclusive system sellers.

What would an Xbox without console exclusives even look like? Read More »

disney-invests-$1.5b-in-epic-games,-plans-new-“games-and-entertainment-universe”

Disney invests $1.5B in Epic Games, plans new “games and entertainment universe”

Disney, epic, epic games, fortnite, gaming / /

Steamboat Willie in Fortnite when? —

Major move continues Disney’s decades-long, up-and-down relationship with gaming.

–

What is this, some sort of

Enlarge / What is this, some sort of “meta universe” or something?

Disney / Epic

Entertainment conglomerate Disney has announced plans to invest $1.5 billion for an “equity stake” in gaming conglomerate Epic Games. The financial partnership will also see both companies “collaborate on an all-new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences,” according to a press release issued late Wednesday.

A short teaser trailer announcing the partnership promises that “a new Universe will emerge,” allowing players to “play, watch, create, [and] shop” while “discover[ing] a place where magic is Epic.”

In announcing the partnership, Disney stressed its long-standing use of Epic’s Unreal Engine in projects ranging from cinematic editing to theme park experiences like Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Disney’s new gaming universe will also be powered by the Unreal Engine, the company said.

Content and characters from Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars subsidiaries were some of the first third-party content to be included in Epic’s mega-popular Fortnite, helping establish the game’s reputation as a major cross-media metaverse. Disney says that its new “persistent universe” will “interoperate with Fortnite” while offering games and “a multitude of opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters, and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.”

While a $1.5 billion investment sounds significant on its face, it only represents a small portion of a company like Epic, which was valued at $32 billion in a 2022 investment by Sony. Since 2012, nearly half of Epic has been owned by Chinese gaming conglomerate Tencent (market cap: $356 billion), an association that has led to some controversy for Epic in the recent past.

Here we go again

In announcing the new Epic investment, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the partnership “Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of games… offer[ing] significant opportunities for growth and expansion.” But this is far from Disney’s first ride in the game industry rodeo; on the contrary, it’s a continuation of an interest in gaming that has run hot and cold since Walt Disney Computer Software was first established back in 1988.

Two logos plus an X means a partnership is official, right?

Enlarge / Two logos plus an X means a partnership is official, right?

Disney / Epic

That publisher, which operated under several names over the years, mainly published lowest-common-denominator licensed games based on Disney properties for dozens of platforms. Disney invested heavily in the Disney Infinity “toys-to-life” line starting in 2013 but then shut the game down and left game publishing for good in 2016. Since then, Disney has interacted with the game industry mainly as a licensor for properties such as the Sony-published Spider-Man series and Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts 3.

After acquiring storied game developer LucasArts in 2012 (as part of a much larger Star Wars deal), Disney unceremoniously shut down the struggling game development division just six months later. But in 2021, Disney brought back the Lucasfilm Games brand as an umbrella for all future Star Wars games.

While today’s announcement doesn’t include any specific mention of linear TV or movie adaptations of Epic Game properties, the possibility seems much more plausible given this new financial and creative partnership. Given the recent success of linear narratives based on video game properties from Super Mario Bros. to The Last of Us, a Disney+ streaming series targeting Fortnite‘s 126 million monthly active players almost seems like a no-brainer at this point.

Disney’s stock price shot up nearly 8 percent to about $107 per share in 15 minutes of after-hours trading following the announcement, but has given back some of those gains as of this writing.

Disney invests $1.5B in Epic Games, plans new “games and entertainment universe” Read More »

new-6gb-version-of-the-rtx-3050-may-be-nvidia’s-first-sub-$200-gpu-in-over-4-years

New 6GB version of the RTX 3050 may be Nvidia’s first sub-$200 GPU in over 4 years

gaming, GeForce RTX 3050, rtx 3050, Tech / /

clearing a low bar —

Exciting? No. New technology? Also no. But it ought to be better than a 1650.

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New 6GB version of the RTX 3050 may be Nvidia’s first sub-$200 GPU in over 4 years

Gigabyte

Nvidia launched three new GPUs last month, part of a Super overhaul of the RTX 40-series designed to improve the value of the company’s $600-and-up graphics cards.

But today, the company is quietly doing something that it hasn’t done in over four years: launching a sub-$200 graphics card. As spotted by TechPowerUp, Nvidia partners like Gigabyte have begun officially announcing a 6GB version of the old RTX 3050 graphics card, albeit with less memory and memory bandwidth, fewer CUDA cores, and lower power requirements.

The announcement follows a few days of leaked retail listings, which generally point to an MSRP of roughly $179 for the new-old card. This would make it Nvidia’s first sub-$200 graphics card launch since the GeForce GTX 1650 Super came out in late 2019, a four-year gap caused partially by a cryptocurrency- and pandemic-fueled GPU shortage that lasted from late 2020 into mid-to-late 2022.

RTX 3050 6GB RTX 3050 8GB GTX 1650 Super GTX 1650 RTX 2060 6GB RTX 3060 12GB RTX 4060
CUDA Cores 2,048 or 2,304? 2,560 1,280 896 1,920 3,584 3,072
Boost Clock 1,470 MHz 1,777 MHz 1,725 MHz 1,665 MHz 1,680 MHz 1,777 MHz 2,460 MHz
Memory Bus Width 96-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 192-bit 128-bit
Memory Clock 1,750 MHz 1,750 MHz 1,500 MHz 2,000 MHz 1,750 MHz 1,875 MHz 2,125MHz
Memory size 6GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 4GB GDDR6 4GB GDDR5 6GB GDDR6 12GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6
TGP 70 W  130 W 100 W 75 W 160 W 170 W 115 W

We weren’t in love with the original 8GB version of the 3050—”weird,” “overpriced,” and “could’ve been worse,” we wrote of it during the depths of the GPU shortage in early 2022—and the 6GB version is cut down even further. Its 6GB of memory is attached to a narrow 96-bit memory bus. And while reports differ on exactly how many CUDA cores we can expect—TechPowerUp and Tom’s Hardware say 2,048, while Gigabyte’s 6GB 3050 product pages list 2,304—it’s clear that there are fewer than in the original RTX 3050, and their clock speed is lower to boot.

These specs should make it an OK card for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings, depending on the game. It should also be a decent fit for small-form-factor systems—one of Gigabyte’s versions is a low-profile card suitable for many office desktops—and its 70 W power requirement should mean that the cards can draw all the power they need from the PCI Express slot, without the need for an external power connector.

As a cut-down version of a 2-year-old card based on a 3.5-year-old last-generation GPU architecture, the RTX 3050 isn’t very exciting. But it gets more interesting once you consider that Nvidia’s partners are currently selling the old non-Super version of the GTX 1650 for around the same price. It’s difficult to predict how much the narrower memory bus will impact the 6GB 3050’s performance, but compared to the 1650, it has a significantly higher number of newer CUDA cores, ray-tracing support, another 2GB of RAM, GDDR6 instead of GDDR5, and support for Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology (albeit not DLSS Frame Generation, which remains exclusive to the 40-series).

The new card also complicates one of AMD’s selling points for its new Ryzen 8000G processors, which include reasonably capable 1080p integrated GPUs. AMD compared the cost of a $329 Ryzen 7 8700G favorably to the cost of a Core i5 CPU and a GTX 1650 GPU, which deliver similar performance for more money. But the RTX 3050 should decisively outrun the 8700G, and AMD’s pricing argument was already being undercut by the extra expense of socket AM5 motherboards and DDR5 memory.

Nice as it is to see at least some twitch of life in the entry-level GPU market, we’re still a long way from where we were in the mid- to late-2010s, when sub-$200 cards like the GTX 1050 Ti and the 1650 launched not long after the other cards in the same series and used the newest GPU architectures available at the time. There’s a laptop GPU in the RTX 4050 series, but a desktop version looks highly unlikely at this point—to say nothing of a desktop version at or under $200. But a belated, uninspiring improvement is an improvement nonetheless.

New 6GB version of the RTX 3050 may be Nvidia’s first sub-$200 GPU in over 4 years Read More »

fans-preserve-and-emulate-sega’s-extremely-rare-‘80s-“ai-computer”

Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer”

ai computer, gaming, history, Sega, sms power / /

Welcome back to the stage of history. —

Prolog-based Japanese education hardware sported an early touch-panel, speech synthesizer.

–

Enlarge / “Expanding the Possibilities…..with Artificial Intelligence”

Even massive Sega fans would be forgiven for not being too familiar with the Sega AI Computer. After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware.

Thankfully, the folks at the self-described “Sega 8-bit preservation and fanaticism” site SMS Power have been able to go a little deeper. The site’s recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME.

An ’80s vision of AI’s future

The Sega AI Computer hardware, complete with keyboard and Sound Box accessories.

Enlarge / The Sega AI Computer hardware, complete with keyboard and Sound Box accessories.

The Sega AI Computer sports a 16-bit NEC chip running at a blazing 5 Mhz and a massive 128KB of RAM (those adjectives were much less ironic when the computer was released in 1986). SMS Power’s research suggests the device was “mostly sold to Japanese schools” between 1986 and 1989, which helps explain its overall obscurity decades later. Ads from the time suggest a US version was briefly planned but never released.

Despite the Japan-only release, the Sega AI Computer’s casing includes an English-language message stressing its support for the AI-focused Prolog language and a promise that it will “bring you into the world of artificial intelligence.” Indeed, a 1986 article in Electronics magazine (preserved by SMS Power) describes what sounds like a kind of simple and wholesome early progenitor of today’s world of generative AI creations:

In the prompt mode, the child is asked about his or her activities during the day and replies with one- and two-word answers. The computer program then writes a grammatically correct diary entry based on those replies. In more advanced CAI applications, the computer is more flexible than previous systems. It can parse a user’s natural-language inputs and evaluate the person’s ability level. It can then proceed to material of appropriate difficulty, rather than simply advancing one level at a time.

Besides its unique focus on an ’80s-era vision of AI, the Sega AI Computer is also notable for its use of a controller that features a large rectangular touch surface that could be customized with overlays included in the software to make a brand-new interface. The system also features a built-in speech synthesizer that could re-create basic Japanese phonemes and an FM audio chip that could play back samples like those stored on some of the system’s cassette-tape software.

A preservation mountain climb

These '80s-era Japanese schoolchildren are ready to learn about AI with Sega's help!

Enlarge / These ’80s-era Japanese schoolchildren are ready to learn about AI with Sega’s help!

While the general existence of the Sega AI Computer has been known in certain circles for a while, detailed information about its workings and software was extremely hard to come by, especially in the English-speaking world. That began to change in 2014 when a rare Yahoo Auctions listing offered a boxed AI Computer along with 15 pieces of software. The site was able to crowdfund the winning bid on that auction (which reportedly ran the equivalent of $1,100) and later obtained a keyboard and more software from the winner of a 2022 auction.

SMS Power notes that the majority of the software it has uncovered “had zero information about them on the Internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of actual software.” Now, the site’s community has taken the trouble to preserve all those ROMs and create a new MAME driver that already allows for “partial emulation” of the system (which doesn’t yet include a keyboard, tape drive, or speech emulation support).

The title screen of a Gulliver's Travels-themed piece of software for the Sega AI Computer.

The title screen of a Gulliver’s Travels-themed piece of software for the Sega AI Computer.

That dumped software is all “educational and mostly aimed at kids,” SMS Power notes, and is laden with Japanese text that will make it hard for many foreigners to even tinker with. That means this long-lost emulation release probably won’t set the MAME world on fire as 2022’s surprise dump of Marble Madness II did.

Still, it’s notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history. SMS Power’s write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site’s massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.

Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer” Read More »

convicted-console-hacker-says-he-paid-nintendo-$25-a-month-from-prison

Convicted console hacker says he paid Nintendo $25 a month from prison

gaming, hacking, Nintendo, Switch, team xecuter, XS OS / /

Crime doesn’t pay —

As Gary Bowser rebuilds his life, fellow Team Xecuter indictees have yet to face trial.

–

It's-a me, the long arm of the law.

Enlarge / It’s-a me, the long arm of the law.

Aurich Lawson / Nintendo / Getty Images

When 54-year-old Gary Bowser pleaded guilty to his role in helping Team Xecuter with their piracy-enabling line of console accessories, he realized he would likely never pay back the $14.5 million he owed Nintendo in civil and criminal penalties. In a new interview with The Guardian, though, Bowser says he began making $25 monthly payments toward those massive fines even while serving a related prison sentence.

Last year, Bowser was released after serving 14 months of that 40-month sentence (in addition to 16 months of pre-trial detention), which was spread across several different prisons. During part of that stay, Bowser tells The Guardian, he was paid $1 an hour for four-hour shifts counseling other prisoners on suicide watch.

From that money, Bowser says he “was paying Nintendo $25 a month” while behind bars. That lines up roughly with a discussion Bowser had with the Nick Moses podcast last year, where he said he had already paid $175 to Nintendo during his detention.

According to The Guardian, Nintendo will likely continue to take 20 to 30 percent of Bowser’s gross income (after paying for “necessities such as rent”) for the rest of his life.

The fall guy?

While people associated with piracy often face fines rather than prison, Nintendo lawyers were upfront that they pushed for jail time for Bowser to “send a message that there are consequences for participating in a sustained effort to undermine the video game industry.” That seems to have been effective, at least as far as Bowser’s concerned; he told The Guardian that “The sentence was like a message to other people that [are] still out there, that if they get caught … [they’ll] serve hard time.”

Bowser appears on the Nick Moses Gaming Podcast from a holding center in Washington state in 2023.

Enlarge / Bowser appears on the Nick Moses Gaming Podcast from a holding center in Washington state in 2023.

Nick Moses 05 Gaming Podcast/YouTube

But Bowser also maintains that he wasn’t directly involved with the coding or manufacture of Team Xecuter’s products, and only worked on incidental details like product testing, promotion, and website coding. Speaking to Ars in 2020, Aurora, a writer for hacking news site Wololo, described Bowser as “kind of a PR guy” for Team Xecuter. Despite this, Bowser said taking a plea deal on just two charges saved him the time and money of fighting all 14 charges made against him in court.

Bowser was arrested in the Dominican Republic in 2020. Fellow Team Xecuter member and French national Max “MAXiMiLiEN” Louarn, who was indicted and detained in Tanzania at the same time as Bowser’s arrest, was still living in France as of mid-2022 and has yet to be extradited to the US. Chinese national and fellow indictee Yuanning Chen remains at large.

“If Mr. Louarn comes in front of me for sentencing, he may very well be doing double-digit years in prison for his role and his involvement, and the same with the other individual [Chen],” US District Judge Robert Lasnik said during Bowser’s sentencing.

Returning to society

During his stay in prison, Bowser tells The Guardian that he suffered a two-week bout of COVID that was serious enough that “a priest would come over once a day to read him a prayer.” A bout of elephantiasis also left him unable to wear a shoe on his left foot and required the use of a wheelchair, he said.

Now that he’s free, Bowser says he has been relying on friends and a GoFundMe page to pay for rent and necessities as he looks for a job. That search could be somewhat hampered by his criminal record and by terms of the plea deal that prevent him from working with any modern gaming hardware.

Despite this, Bowser told The Guardian that his current circumstances are still preferable to a period of homelessness he experienced during his 20s. And while console hacking might be out for Bowser, he is reportedly still “tinkering away with old-school Texas Instruments calculators” to pass the time.

Convicted console hacker says he paid Nintendo $25 a month from prison Read More »

palworld’s-pokemon-pastiche-is-xbox-game-pass’-biggest-ever-3rd-party-game-launch

Palworld’s Pokémon pastiche is Xbox Game Pass’ biggest-ever 3rd-party game launch

Game Pass, gaming, palworld, steam, xbox / /

everyone’s pal —

To compare, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have sold over 23 million copies each.

–

Palworld’s Pokémon pastiche is Xbox Game Pass’ biggest-ever 3rd-party game launch

Pocketpair

The unexpected success of Palworld continues to be one of the biggest gaming stories of 2024 so far, as developer Pocketpair says the game’s sales and Xbox downloads have exceeded 19 million, with 12 million in sales on Steam and 7 million players on Xbox. Microsoft has also announced that the game has been the biggest third-party launch in the Game Pass service’s history, as well as the most-played third-party title on the Xbox Cloud Gaming service.

These numbers continue a remarkable run for the indie-developed Pokémon-survival-crafting-game pastiche, which sold 5 million copies in its first weekend as a Steam Early Access title and had sold 8 million Steam copies as of a week ago. There are signs that the game’s sales are slowing down—it’s currently Steam’s #2 top-selling game after over a week in the #1 spot. But its active player count on Steam remains several hundred thousand players higher than Counter-Strike 2, the next most-played game on the platform.

Sometimes described (both admiringly and disparagingly) as “Pokémon with guns,” Palworld‘s unexpected success has driven some Internet outrage cycles about the possibility that it may have used AI-generated monster designs and allegations that its designers copied or modified some of the 3D character models from the actual Pokémon series to create some of the game’s more familiar-looking monsters.

The latter allegations circulated widely enough that The Pokémon Company issued a statement last week, saying it would “investigate” an unnamed game that matches Palworld‘s description; as of this writing, no actual legal action has been taken against Palworld or Pocketpair. Third-party modders who have tried to put actual Pokémon creatures into Palworld have apparently gotten some cease-and-desist letters, though.

Regardless, the game wears its influences on its sleeve. Aside from the Pals that look like Pokémon, the game’s progression and crafting mechanics owe a lot to games like ARK: Survival Evolved, and the actual monster-catching mechanics have a more-than-passing resemblance to Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

If you count the Xbox Game Pass numbers as “sales,” Palworld‘s combined numbers are on track to overtake those of the two main-series Pokémon titles on the Nintendo Switch, Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet. Nintendo says these games have sold 26.02 and 23.23 million copies, respectively, making them the sixth and seventh bestselling titles in the entire Switch library.

Nintendo doesn’t break out sales figures for each title individually, counting each sale of Sword or Shield toward the same total—this makes sense because they’re the same basic game with slightly different Pokémon, though it does mean there’s some double-dipping going on for fans who buy both versions of a given game for themselves. You have to look at proxies like Amazon reviews to get a sense of which individual version has sold better—Violet currently has more reviews than Scarlet, while Sword has more reviews than Shield.

Palworld’s Pokémon pastiche is Xbox Game Pass’ biggest-ever 3rd-party game launch Read More »