CAGcast #338: Hot Air Machines

Bring TiredJohn on the show once in awhile. Everything he says carries extra weight because of his accent. And he seems to have some strong opinions which is always good podcast fodder.
Yeah, he's great - as was Cheapy's idea to bring him along to E3. *cough*

 
The concerns about the range of the Tesla is the reason I like the Chevy Volt. It's an electric engine that can be recharged at home or charging stations but as a fallback it has a tiny had powered engine to make electricity. In my opinion that's the most practical solution for an electric car in present day.
 
The concerns about the range of the Tesla is the reason I like the Chevy Volt. It's an electric engine that can be recharged at home or charging stations but as a fallback it has a tiny had powered engine to make electricity. In my opinion that's the most practical solution for an electric car in present day.
Yeah but that Tesla is so damned sexy! :cool:

 
In terms of console vision, I think Microsoft has actually been fairly consistent in their desire to market towards the "Mountain Dew/Doritos/Call of Duty/football" crowd. Their initial vision for the Xbox One was a football-watching device that also plays Call of Duty, and they've mostly stayed true to that. That isn't necessarily a bad thing- they have found an emerging market and are aiming towards it. That specific market didn't really exist 8 years ago when the 360 launched as games were still considered "nerdy" back then.

Sony wants to market to hardcore gamers. They have designed a game machine that can do other things like Netflix on the side. Their vision of the PS4 is a games platform that has a lot of indie games, unique games, and weird crazy Japanese games.

Both approaches have their benefits and issues.

 
I agree with Wombat about the GTA mini-map. It's just like how everyone plays through Metal Gear games by just looking at the upper right corner of the screen and playing it like a Pac-Man game.

 
The way you guys described Steam Family Sharing makes it sound bad. Giving out login info/password just so they can be kicked off when I'm playing a DIFFERENT game? Sounds like a hassle and not at all like lending physical games out. You can pretty much already do this with Steam, but you'll be using same account, cloud save, and achievements, but does anyone care about those?

I have an idea for Steambox that might make sense to you guys and blow your mind: Make it priced exactly the same as, and do the same thing as PS Vita TV. Replace PSN with Steam and people will eat it up...oh snap!

 
I'm worried about the Kinect as well.....not once have we seen a flawless demo of this new Kinect. People keep saying give it time, time my ass we're less then 2 months away from launch. If you're going to pack in this thing to every system then make sure it works at least 99% of the time.

We'll see what happens.....I could always unplug the damn thing
 
One of my friends won the PS4 prize from Taco Bell a couple of days ago. I'm pretty jelly.

 
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My problem with some one brings up a negative story about Kinect is they often forget about the positive stories.  Like perchance the following article.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/20/kinect-sports-rivals-proves-kinect-20-actually-works

It also ignores the fact the game has been pushed back to 2014 so what the build they showed may not be representative of where the game is at. Of course my biggest problem is I don't think Kinect's best function has to do with games per say.  It is about providing a great control mechanism for everything else you do with the console.  It is like complaining about the touch screen on a smart phone because some games do not use the screen that well. You wouldn't throw away the touchscreen just because you can't use it with a first person shooter game. 

 
Wombat is the Gaming prophet! Who knows..

I do agree that consoles will sell games. The main reason is that we've all said that this gen was the end of exclusives. Titanfall introduce as an exclusive and everyone believes that it'll be out on ps4. That game isn't going to sell consoles because everyone will wait for it'll be released on another console. It's up to the consoles to sell themselves, the games will follow. The exclusives will give a boost, but it's going to be thy overall library that will push consoles, right now the libraries are similar that it boils down to the console.
 
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I also have to disagree with Wombat's assertion that a game can't sell a system.  A great game is exactly what it takes to sell a system. Could TitanFall give that edge to the Xbox One next spring?  Absolutely.

The idea that everyone has already decided which system they are getting at this point in the game is ridiculous.  Sure a bunch of rabid geeks have declared PS4 the winner and preordered.  A smaller number have preordered the Xbox One.  But many people, including myself, will wait and see how it plays out for a few months.  Many post launch factors could make the decision of which console to buy an easier choice.  Just because Microsoft lived and learned through the red ring of death, doesn't mean their new hardware won't be shitting the bed too.  Just because Sony is now charging for online play, doesn't mean their online is not going to suck.  None of the launch games are great on either system anyway, a killer app like TitanFall could easily be the jumping in point to the next generation, assuming everyone's hardware and networks work fine.

 
can't believe basically only a minute was spent talking about Hiroshi Yamauchi, and it was only Wombat talking aside from Cheapy making sounds as Wombat attempted to pronounce the name.  I don't recall how long Cheapy talked about Steve Jobs when he died, but I recall him saying he cried and trying to tell the guy's life story to Tai.

If next gen really will be "consoles will sell games" then Microsoft/Sony will really need to work on their services.  Otherwise, I figure most people will just gravitate towards PC for most non-mp games.

oh and Cheapy needs to lock the Cheapy awards forums.  People have been posting since April or whenever the voting period should have stopped thinking it's current.  How long does it fucking take to announce the results after already putting up polls a month late?

 
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I dont go to the movie theater anymore. $10 is too expensive for 1 hour worth of entertainment. I wait to pick up movies for free or $5 on black friday. Avengers was good but still haven't seen Ironman3. 

I like the navigation as is. You just need to get quicker at switching your attention between the GPS and the driving. The more you play GTA games the better you'll get at doing it effortlessly. GTA V had a substantial upgrade with the GPS actually. It displayed elevation better than previous games in the series.

I cannot wait for GTA Online tomorrow.The writing is definitely the best they've ever done. They will have a hard time outdoing all the satire in this one. The characters are definitely the most interesting they've ever done. Trevor in particular is my favorite character they've ever come up with. He's more complex than just being a psychotic killer. The Housers said in an interview that you're supposed to root for Michael dealing with Trevor early on but then midway root for Trevor dealing with Micheal until the end where it flips the story on you again and you have to decide how you want things to go down between them all. Also something about Michael being the ego and Trevor being the Id who acts on impulse. It's a really well done story imo. I was hooked. I never really felt any drag at all.

Steambox has multiple targets. It targets the console crowd who doesn't want to deal with building a pc, but wants to be able to upgrade their console components WITH LESS HASSLES than regular pcs and it targets rich pc guys who want an additional way to interact with their pc libary in their living room on the couch. It could also potentially target a younger audience who just wants to play non demanding games like minecraft, indies or dota 2. They might release a 150-200 dollar version similar to the Wii to drive up their user base. I'm not really interested. The only thing I want to play on Steam is DotA 2 and you can build a $300 pc to max that out. 

That said, i'm not interested in the PS4 or Xbox1 either. I had a PS4 preorder, but decided to cancel it. I've got a pretty good intuition and I was just getting a really bad vibe about it. I think cheapy pretty much nailed it when he said it looked good, but nothing blew him away. That's pretty much how I feel about next gen. I'm more of a games type of guy rather than one of the guys who gets excited about having the most powerful hardware and all the games i'm most excited for (GTA Online, DKC, Evil Within, Dark Souls 2) are all going to be on current gen. Sincerely best of luck to Sony tho, they pretty much checked all the boxes for keeping their customers happy and being laser focused on them. Should be a good launch for them. i just prefer keeping my money.

Also I don't think Steam really knows who they're trying to sell the device to. I think that's why they're having a beta with so many different types. They're testing them all out on people to see what sticks and where they think they can carve themselves into the living rooms of gamers.

 
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GTAV is great compared to IV, but falls apart if you compare it to most other recent open world games.

Like Wombat said, the lack of on-screen directions (see: Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row IV drawing giant arrows in the air) distracts me from GTAV's beautiful environment too much. I think that's something they should have just blatantly stolen from Sleeping Dogs for player convenience. Or draw a line on the actual road like racing games, if giant directional arrows is "too unrealistic".

The gun combat is awkward and for some reason, not as good as Red Dead Redemption. Kotaku said it better than I could in an article.

The car controls are below average and the helicopter controls are almost unplayably bad. And the hand to hand combat feels very dated especially after playing games like Sleeping Dogs.

GTAV looks nice graphically but the gameplay is not great. It's frustratingly dated. And it did bug me that Cheapy says "how can you give Saints Row a high score when GTA is coming out?" They're completely different games and you can enjoy one more than another. It really doesn't make sense to compare them anymore when one is a superhero simulator and one is a Grand Theft Auto game.

 
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I have a similar setup to John and Cheapy that allows me to stream HDMI wirelessly to the TV in the lounge and I did suffer some screen-tearing when using my AMD HD7850OC but once I changed to a Nvidia GTX670 the screen-tearing has not occurred since.

I use Steam's big-picture mode as part of this setup but it's certainly not without its problems. Game's that have secondary splash screens after initial launch cannot be accessed by controller (which Shipwreck briefly touched on with his wireless searching issue interuppting him) which means either needing a wireless mouse or going back to the PC to manually acknowledge the message. The experience is certainly not seamless and little things like this will need to be corrected within SteamOS but will surely require some compliance by game developers in order to do so.

Despite the reservations, I will be very interested in building a small PC for the lounge once Valve release the minimum specifications for SteamOS and the requirements for streaming over my home network.
 
Cheapy, my son (the one you met last year at PAX) eats Taco Bell like 2-3 times a week and would go every day if we let him.  It's one of the few things he will eat.  Kids, you know...  Fortunately my other kids are not enthralled like that.  I used to like Taco Bell occasionally (like once a month) but I can't stand it now ;).

 
When ever you need an Xbox apologist on this show just listen to Shipwreck, always giving MS the benefit of doubt.  :)

 
I can't believe what a pussy cheapyd has turned into. Where's the guy that almost made wombat cry on that post E3 episode? And you sound like a delusional nutcase not playing the story mode of GTA5 and just hoping against hope that the PC version will come out soon. Haven't you realized that games will always come out on console first and will likely be the best version (see Diablo 3 and Minecraft). Why would anybody make a pc game as anything but an after thought when there are so many more consoles out there.

Wombat when you try to imitate Cheapy with that whiny voice I mean seriously someone needs to kill you and your entire family.

Shipwreck, good show.

 
I just wanted to say thank you for another great CAGCast.  The last few shows have been really entertaining and have made me laugh out loud. 

 
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