The Xbox One from a BLind Gamer’s Perspective

Posted on by

Well folks, I have now spent a significant amount of time with the Xbox One, and I feel I can now report accurately on its accessibility. This post has been a long time coming, but as it turns out, that’s a good thing. Initially I told you all that I would not be able to experiment with the Xbox One’s TV functionality, as we didn’t have that kind of setup in the room where we game. Well, some things have changed, and the result is that the Xbox One is now in our living room, connected to the cable box. So, as it happens, I can report on that aspect of the console as well.

Let’s start with the basics, though. The console, much like the PS4, is extremely easy, though for a different reason. The menu of the Xbox One is sort of reminiscent of the Xbox360 in the way it controls, though I do not believe you’ll find things are in the same place. Yet still, the menu structure of the PS4, as I’ve already explained in its article, is even easier than that. However, what makes the Xbox One so simple is the voice control. Ladies and gentlemen, the voice control is fantastic. I can very, very easily launch any game I like, I can search for things on Bing, (though I’m still working out how to interact with those things once you find them), and yes, I can control the TV and cable box with ease.

Remember the problem with Killer Instinct I talked about in the “What we Know” article? Well, it turns out that’s not actually a problem at all. The new Killer Instinct is called Killer Instinct, but the older game is called Killer Instinct Clasic. Refer to them this way wit your voice, and you’ll be fine.

I also talked about using pins as a way to find things easily, well I’ll be honest, I haven’t used them at all. Why? Because I don’t need them. Voice control has worked so well with everything that I no longer see as much of a need for them as I originally did.

One of the Xbox One’s greatest features is it’s Game DVR. This enables you to record and share clips of your gameplay over the Xbox One community. Anyone can watch them, and your clips may end up featured on the game’s store page, where they can be watched before someone purchases a particular game to see how that game is. It should be noted that game clips can actually be viewed from the Smartglass app, not just the onsole, making it possible for us to view them as well. Yet even so, for the sighted, the PS4′s ability to record game clips is better. You get 15 minutes maximum per clip on the PS4, and only 5 minutes on the Xbox One. But you see, this is one of those things where the way the Xbox One works gives it the advantage here.

My favorite command right now is “Xbox, record that.” Why? Because that’s literally all you have to say. Say that, and the Xbox One, which is always recording the last 5 minutes or so of your gameplay much like a DVR for TV records all the time to enable you to pause and rewind, will grab the last 30 seconds of your gameplay, convert it into a clip, upload it to the community in general, and share it with your friends. All that, with one command. Sure it’s only 30 seconds, but if you do something awesome and you want to share it, that’s a really easy way to do so. There doesn’t yet exist a PS4 command that will allow us to do that, so recording and sharing gameplay there would be much, much more difficult.

Now, Xbox One does have an upload studio from which you can capture and share longer clips, (up to 5 minutes as mentioned before), but I don’t yet believe that is accessible to us. It can be controlled with voice commands, but it seems as though you have to know which clip number you’re dealing with, and I don’t think it’s possible to trim the clip down to what you want to show with your voice. I may do more research on that later, though. Maybe with the controller, something could be memorized regarding that. You can even add commentary to clips, so it would be interesting to find out how that works.

One of the greatest features of the Xoox One is the ability to scan in redeemable codes with the Kinect instead of having to enter them manually. Best of all, this is something we as blind people can do. Say “Xbox, use code,” hold the card with the code on it up to the Kinect, and wait a few seconds. There is unfortunately no audio indication that the code was successfully scanned, though it visually presents the results on screen, telling you what the code will give you. Still, if you then say “confirm,” and the Xbox responds to it, you know your scan was successful, and the code redeemed. Whatever it was you redeemed should then begin downloading, and you’re set. Yes, we can use the web site for codes we get in emails and so on, but this enables us to redeem those codes we can’t necessarily read by ourselves. That’s pretty big if you ask me.

Now, let’s talk TV. Not gonna lie, I would recommend sighted help with the initial setup. You have to choose what type of TV you have since the Kinect can function as your remote, you have to choose your cable provider, and what type of cable box you have, and so on. Once its all done, though, it works great. Since the Kinect is also your remote, you can use it to control even things like your TV volume by saying things like “Xbox, Volume Up.” And changing channels is also easy. I wanted to wathc wrestling Monday night, yeah I do that. So down I went to our living room, and I said “Xbox, watch USA.” A few seconds later, it went straight to that channel. I pumped up the volume, and enjoyed. It’s that easy. The one drawback right now is that you have to call out the channel name, and cannot use channel numbers. I predict this may change in the future.

Another small feature that is nevertheless an important one is the Kinect’s way of signing in. When you set up your profile, you can have the Kinect create a facial recognition ID for you, and you will then be signed in automatically whenever you walk into the room with the Kinect in it.Trust me guys, this really works, even if someone else is standing in front of the Kinect when you walk in. Its field of view is extremely large. But hey, even if you don’t want to do that, there is another great way to sign in. Just say “Xbox, sign in,” and then your real name, and in you go. All I have to say is “Xbox, Sign in Brandon,” and it’s done. Another thing made easier with Kinect.

I think it’s pretty obvious what my conclusion here is. The Kinect is finally, finally where we wanted it to be 3 years ago. It is, in fact, the key to the accessibility of the entire console, what with its ability to get to apps quickly, the code-scanning, the quick and easy gameplay recording and sharing, and even the sign in functionality. Smartglass is also a big help to us, but the Kinect is really what makes this console work well for the blind. Does that make it the best console? Absolutely not. I know for a fact some people don’t like talking to their devices. Some people may always prefer an accessible and easy controller-based interface, and I think the PS4 wins out there. Still, the Xbox One has shonwn itself to be a perfectly legitimate choice for blind console gaming. Thanks for reading, all, and as always feel free to comment on this post, or send me an email at superblindman01@gmail.com or contact me on twitter @superblindman or whatever you prefer. I would be glad to discuss both consoles, and I hope all these posts have provided you with something to think about. Thanks again!

Introducing Mainstream Console Gaming to the Blind Podcast!

Posted on by

Greetings, folks,
What follows is something I forgot to link to when it initially came out. It’s a podcast I was a part of along with Orin and John Moore, and the topic of discussion is mainstream console gaming. The target audience, though, is not existing console gamers, but blind people wishing to break into the console gaming scene. We explain how this can be done, make a few recommendations, and give a few examples of playable games. Below is a link that will take you directly to the podcast’s page on the Blind Geek Zone. Enjoy!

http://www.blind-geek-zone.net/an-introduction-to-mainstream-gaming-for-the-blind/

Xbox One: What we Know

Posted on by

Well folks, the Xbox One is out. I don’t have mine yet, but I’d like to take the time to go over what we know from an accessibility standpoint regarding the Xbox One. I’ll talk about further coverage at the end of all this.

Let’s face facts. The Xbox 360 is already a pretty accessible console, just as the PS3 was. I suspect that, just like with the PS4, this preexisting accessibility will feed into how accessible the Xbox One is. For one thing, we’ve got Kinect. The Kinect 2.0 is supplied with every Xbox One, so everyone who gets one will have this device. Now, I did rant about the Kinect before, but it’s because I didn’t like the fact that at the time, we were going to be forced to hook it up whether we wanted to or not. Now that that’s not the case, it is good to know that Kinect functionality has improved. You can be more precise and direct with voice commands. Whereas on the 360 you still had to memorize menus, (where your games were and what page they were on), that’s not true with the Xbox One. Just tell the Kinect to “go to” the game you want to play, and you’ll be there. I’ve heard this requires a bit of precision on the title of a game, though. For instance, I heard one testimony that if you get the Ultra Edition of Killer Instinct, and then say “Xbox, go to Killer Instinct,” it will actually launch the arcade port of the original Killer Instinct that comes with the Ultra edition. So to be truthful, I have no idea how to launch the new Killer Instinct with your voice, since as far as I know it’s also just called Killer Instinct.

Now, we talk about the menu. Yes, the new Xbox One is using a Windows 8 style tile system, but honestly from the sounds I’ve heard so far, it kinda still sounds like it should be just about as easy to move through as the Xbox360. Furthermore, there may be an aspect of the menu that you might think we would have no use for, but may actually be quite useful for us. One of the Xbox One’s new features is called pins. It allows you to take your favorite things, be they movies, games, or even songs if I understand it correctly, and pin them. If this works the way I think it does, it may actually mean an easy way to get to what we really want to play even without our voices. If we can find where all our pinned items are, they should never change unless we change them. So maybe, hopefully, this is the answer to the Killer Instinct problem as well.

All these things, combined with the existing web accessibility and the seemingly useable Xbox One Smartglass ap, do make the Xbox One look promising from an accessibility standpoint. Despite all the negativity the Xbox One has suffered, even over the past week, it is here, and it is a next gen console. It is a choice for those seeking to break into the next generation of gaming, and so you can be assured that I will cover it as best I can, in an effort to definitively answer all these questions, and maybe find out a few more surprising things along the way.

However, this brings me to how I’m going to cover the xbox One. I will do so, no question, but the problem is that I have to work. I will not be here when the Xbox One arrives, and I work weekends. So if it’s fast coverage you’re looking for, you may have to settle for blogs, written in the time before I have to go to work based on what little we’ll be able to try with the time I have. I may do a stream next Tuesday or Wednesday, as I don’t have to work those days, but what I do will be very dependent on what people want me to do. Yes, folks, I’m seeking your feedback. Send me an email, message me on twitter @superblindman, message me on facebook if you want. Let me know how you want me to approach this, as no matter what it will be different than the PS4 launch. This isn’t by choice, it’s just the way it is. Regardless of how, though, I’ll see you guys very soon with more Xbox One coverage.

PS4: First Impressions

Posted on by

I have now spent about 2 days with the PlayStation 4, and I want to take some time to let you all know what I’ve found so far in terms of accessibility of the console. I’ll put as much here as I can, but I’ll also probably forget something, so I encourage you to send me questions via twitter @superblindman, or email me at superblindman01@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to answer anything I didn’t answer here if I know it, or if I can find it out. For now, here we go.

First, and for some most important, menus do not wrap. This appears to be true in all cases. Every settings menu, the row of apps and games, everything. This makes navigation nearly a breeze for us blind folks. Just the menu memorization we’ve already grown used to, and we’re done.

The apps and games area of the PS4 is indeed organized as I thought it was, with one slight change from what I thought before. It is basically 2 rows, the bottom starting row being your apps and games, and the row above that essentially being the system management. However, if you’re downloading a game at the time, that game will actually be the first game in the list regardless of whether you’ve played it or not. (Remember, the play while downloading feature). Also, your games and apps do not start on the extreme left side of that list. The What’s New option is always the leftmost option, and that’s something that to my knowledge we never actually need to use.

An additional note here, yes and no dialogs that occasionally pop up also do not wrap, however unconventionally, yes is on the right and no is on the left. In all the cases I’ve found, you actually start on yes, and will be on no if you move to the left. Definitely important as there are situations where you do have to answer a question.

And speaking of such situations, here’s one. If you play a game on the PS4, then hit the home playstation button to exit it, that game is still open. You can return to it immediately by simply selecting it in the menu again, or using the “back to game” voice command. However, what I’m getting at here is this. If you want to launch a new game, the PS4 will display an alert, letting you know that doing so will close the previous game, and asking if you wish to proceed. So this is an example of one of these yes and no dialogs. You’re automatically on yes, so if you want to play that second game, just hit X again and it’ll launch. However, if you reconsider, go let to no.

Another thing to note. As I’ve said, games can be booted and played even while they’re installing from disc or downloading. There is actually a way we can play these games as soon as they are playable. As soon as the disc begins to install, or the download begins to, uh, download, the game becomes available in your games menu as the first game. So remember, that’s actually one to the right. If you click on it, the screen says “installing application.” However if you just stay on that screen, the game will launch as soon as it is able to. Some games appear to have a small secondary installation which is very short, so the music will fade as if the game was launching, then a few seconds later it will come back. Just select the game again, and this time it’ll work.

Now regarding voice commands. They do indeed work, but they can be a little wonky. First of all, the option to allow them is enabled by default, which is good. However, something I didn’t find out for most of my first day, you actually have to press the left trigger once before you can start speaking. The thing is, though, there are a couple of problems. First, whatever engine powers the voice commands can go faulty on you, causing you to be unable to use voice commands until you reboot the consoee. I suspect this will be fixed in a patch, but hey these are my first impressions, so there ya go. Second, though, there are some games for which voice commands don’t seem to work at all. I can’t tell you how many times I was trying to tell my PS4 to ptart Injustice with no result. It was hearing me, (there’s an audible tone to indicate this), but it just didn’t seem to understand Injustice, or Injustice: Gods Among Us, or any variant of the game’s name I could think of. I’m unsure whether or not this can, or will be fixed, as it might just be some weird omission from the PS4′s dictionary of words or something. Fortunately, as I’ve said, the menu structure is easy enough that I could figure it out. Still, voice commands are a quick and easy way to navigate the UI when they’re working.

One final, and unfortunate thing. The audio visual thumbnails the PS3 had don’t appear to exist in the way I thought they did. It seems that in truth, only some games have them, and you will only ever hear them when that game is open. Each game does have its own menu which you get if you press the options button on that game, but nothing plays unless the game is open, and it actually supports these things. This is unfortunate, but not a total loss, given how easy overall navigation appears to be.

And I think that’s it. Again, if I forgot something I won’t be supprised, and I’m perfectly open to questions. But I will say this. From an accessibility standpoint, the PS4 is awesome. The menu strutture actually makes it easier to navigate than the PS3, which was still pretty easy. Voice commands, which will probably be fixed and will work better soon, are a speedy way to jump to where you want to be, even if you’re not sure where it is in the menu. And with our access to the PlayStation Store and the accessibility of the PlayStation app, the entire console’s accessibility potential is quite high. It may even increase as features are added to the console and the app. Only time will tell. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these first impressions, and I hope a few more games blind folks can play come out for the PS4, so you guys will start considering buying one. I need more friends! Signing off for now, but I’ll see you guys next week sometime when I shall be blogging about the Xbox One!

On the Verge:PS4 Edition

Posted on by

We are just hours away, ladies and gentlemen. The next generation is truly almost here, and we kick it off with the Playstation 4. Here, I offer you all a blog, once again from a blind gamer’s perspective, on what we know so far regarding the accessibility of the console, and what I cannot wait to confirm in less than 1 day.

Firstly, the PS4 does indeed support voice commands, and you actually don’t need the Playstation camera to use that feature. The mono headset the PS4 is packaged with will do just fine. I think this is great. I sort of see this as all the great things about the Kinect that blind people like, without the Kinect. Now, to be fair, the voice commands will be limited at launch, but the essentials are there for now. Launching apps and games is already possible, and turning the playstation off when you’re done can also be achieved with your voice. Sony has said that voice functionality will be expanding in the future. Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Secondly on my list of stuf blind people will want to know about, one of the features advertised at E3, the feature that allows you to share your controller with another of your friends online if you’re stuck in a game, will not be available at launch, but will be released in a future update. This isn’t especially critical, but there is potential for this feature to be helpful to us blind folks in certain instances, and will be a nice addition once it’s released.

Thirdly, in my previous ramblings about the PS4′s controller, I mentioned that I had heard it might have a speaker. Well, it’s confirmed that it does, and that speaker is used for exactly the sorts of things I hoped it would be. Killzone Shadowfall, for instance, uses the controller’s speaker while playing audio logs you find throughout the course of the game. Look, I know it’s a sort of gimicky thing, and I know that it’s not necessarily going to help us play any better, but dag nabbit I love it. Increases the emersion in a game if you ask me.

Alright, now let’s talk a little bit about the UI. There are 2 very important things that I want to mention here, both of which I just recently learned, and one of which I cannot wait to confirm for myself. Firstly, from what I’ve read and heard, it appears that as soon as you boot the system, you’re dropped right into the menu that contains all your games and apps. This is an immediate plus, as it means all our stuff will literally be right at our fingertips.

Now for the part that could cause some confusion. If what I heard is correct, games and apps will automatically be reorganized in this menu depending on use. Now we don’t know yet if menus are going to wrap on the PS4, but if they don’t, this may not be all that big an issue. You’ll just know that if you play a certain game a lot, it’ll be at the start of this menu always and that’ll be great. However, if menus do wrap, this may present a small problem. Of course, there’s always voice control to fall back on, and this next tidbit I picked up.

OK folks, here we go. This one could be big. This is what I was so hyped about not too long ago, and what I said I would only share here, in this blog. Some of you have heard me talk about what I like to call the Audio Visual Thumbnails on PS3 games. Well, folks, unless I am extremely mistaken, those are alive and well, and have been taken to the next level. Oh yes.

I listened to a little bit of Gamespot’s presentation on the PS4 UI. Each game now is going to have its own menu. These menus will of course allow you to start the game, but they’ll also have other game-specific things. Battlefield 4 for instance has a link to sign up for Battlefield premium in its menu. But what I’m getting at here is this. It’s when you’re in these game specific menus that the audio visual aspect seems to be present. Unlike the PS3, the PS4′s UI has its own background music. However, when the Gamespot presenter dropped down into Battlefield 4′s menu, that faded, and was replaced by what sounded like the background of a war torn area. Wind blowing, possibly distant gunfire… It was difficult to hear over all the talking, but if this is true, that whole organization thing may actually not be a problem at all. Quick check of the game’s menu, yep, that’s what I want. Start, and done.

I guess what I’m ultimately saying is that the PS4 looks like it’s gonna be a pretty accessible console. Even the Playstation companion app, available on IOS and Android, seems accessible enough for use by us with very few problems. And actually, clicking on the store link from within that app just opens Safari to a mobile version of the store, so we already know that’s accessible. This will of course require further testing once I can connect it to an actual PS4, but guys, the implications of the app are pretty huge. We’ll be able to receive notifications, messages, and invites and actually know for certain who’s sending them, and theoretically we’ll be able to accept all those things right from within the app. Remember, nothing on that confirmed yet, but it’s another layer of possible accessibility to consider, and is ultimately better than what we can do with Smartglass if it’s all true.

So as you can see, this hasn’t been what you might call a regular blog post. I’m focusing in on whether us blind people will or won’t be able to use this system. There is other information out there, but I think this is the most relevant to those who may read this. The most important thing is this. Right now, I’d say it looks like a pretty solid “will.” Check back post-launch for more, and if you can, prepare yourself as I intend to actually live stream my first experiences starting right from the PS4′s arrival. It’ll be an opportunity to ask questions of me while I’m actually working with the system itself, assuming I can get the old stream back up and running. Be assured that you will be notified if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter.

And that’s it for this post, folks. If you’re a blind person reading this, I hope it has given you some real hope that the PS4 may just be the most useable console yet. And if you’re sighted and reading this, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little peak into what us blind folk must consider when evaluating gaming systems like these. Like I said, stay tuned for more, but Brandon Cole signs off for now!

Adventuring Blind: How I believe Point and Click Adventure Games Could All Become Accessible

Posted on by

Back in the day, perhaps about the mid-nineties, if you said you wer playing an adventure game, as long as the word text wasn’t in front of it, you were usually talking about just one thing. You were talking about the then popular style of game now generally referred to as Point and Click. There are bunches and bunches of these games, and not all old either. A few developers, perhaps most noteably Telltale, still make games like this, and some of them obtain a uge amount of popularity. But what is the point, you ask? Why does all this matter to the blind gaming community? Well, I’ve thought about this or a while, and I genuinely believe that pretty much every single point and click style game could be made accessible. Best yet, I think they could all use the same basic interface. So I’ve decided to blog about it here as something to mull over, and perhaps, just perhaps, something we might want to pursue.

Here’s the dream. One program that you launch in conjunction with whatever point and click game you want to play. The program detects what game it is, and loads up the necessary files it’s going to need. This program, you see, would act as a sort of overlay to the games themselves. It would probably have to be constantly updated, or alternatively a site could be created where woe would download the necessary addon packs for the games they wanted to play, but I really think it could work.

When the game and the overlay program are loaded, the overlay begins constantly monitoring the state of the game, presenting you with lists of options based on the context of what is going on. At first, this would be the basic new game, load game and so on, but wen you actually start the game, this overlay would then keep track of the room you’re in. This is where it gets fun.

What I see in my head are a couple of combo boxes, and maybe a few buttons. The overlay would use standard windows controls so as to easily be read by a screenreader. When you started your game, there would be multiple lists on screen. One would be the list of known objects in the room, another would be the list of known exits from the room, and a third would be your inventory, though perhaps to save on clutter, there could just be a button that pulls that particular list up. All of these lists would have to be allowed to change overtime, as quite often, both objects and exits are hidden until you perform certain actions, and you’re always gaining and losing inventory items. The inventory list in particular would likely have to allow for small submenus so items could be examined or combined and so on. Come to think of it, room objects should work the same way.

But here’s the thing. For the most part, (the rest I’ll get to shortly), that’s basically it. As I said, these point and click style games all worked basically the same way. You enter a room, pick up any objects in that room or solve any puzzles there, and you move on with the story while you do it. Of course, there is hidden depth here, which I’ll get to along with the reasons there would have to be just a little more with each game.

First, despite the simplistic interface, one must consider how this would have to work. The configuration files, or packs, or whatever you want to call them, would likely have to be created by the sighted, so we can’t really do this alone. Essentially, though, what you’re looking at is this. The sighted person would first reveal everything in a given room tat they could, then record their individual mouse positions right down to the pixel. Then, a name or short description, (small furry creature tensed to pounce), would have to be added. This is what the player would see as they browsed through the object list. There would be a variable that would tell the overlay if the object was hidden at any given time, so it wouldn’t appear in the list initially, but every time an object was interacted with, the game could recheck the room for interactable objects, (usually indicated by a change in the mouse pointer itself), and cross reference that with the positions marked by the configure to determine what object had been revealed. Inventory item lists may have to be storeed locally to work properly, but maybe not. That’s one point I’m not clear on.

So things start to seem a little more complicated, but here is where we come to another problem. It’s one that I feel could be resolved with a little work, but it is something that should be addressed. Some point and click games like to break format for short periods of time. The Walking Dead from Telltale has several examples of this with its action sequences, and a funny little game called the Book of Unwritten Tales has this as well with things like potion mixing. So there’s good news and bad news about this. The good news is the very fact that these things are very segmented. They’re a brief break from the format, which is then returned to. This would make them easily detectable. The bad news is there’s no universal way these parts of the games work, so they would have to be coded for accessibility individually. Still, I think this could be done for each game as a sort of subroutine of the overlay. Additional functions the overlay executes when one of these events occurs. This would potentially save on the developer having to recode anything at all, (unless they were the ones who helped with this of course), and what coding anyone else would have to do would be relatively minimal. Just enough that the part of the game in question could be got through.

Now of course I know that’s not everything. Surely there would be other little nuances to consider, such as how exactly combining of objects is handled, what is remembered within the program and what isn’t, and so on. And maybe, just maybe, all this is incredibly stupid. I’ve done a little programming, and I think I know enough about it to at least understand what would need to be done, even if I also don’t know enough to actually pull it off myself. But hey, I could be wrong. Still, as I said, this is something to mull over. A nice little dream that, if ever achieved, wouldn’t just make one or two games accessible to us, but potentially hundreds. Pretty cool, huh?

Another Nod for all us blind gamers out there!

Posted on by

Ladies and gents, a new article has been written by a gentlemen named Richard Moss, (@MossRC for all those who will surely desire to shower him with adoration following this post), regarding gaming as a blind person, both accessible games and audio games. Basically every aspect of gaming and being blind. This article was written for Polygon, a mainstream media outlet, and let me tell you, it’s awesome! I urge you with all the power my urger can muster to check it out. Like it, comment on it, spread it around! It features both Liam Erven and myself, as well as several others who have made contributions to the blind gaming community. And now, a link.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/6/4550490/blind-games-rock-vibe

Again, spread that around everywhere you can. We’ve gotta make sure as many people as possible see it. Enjoy!

The Xbox One Lives!

Posted on by

I post this blog both just in case you didn’t hear the news, and because it is the kind of thing you post about. Today, Microsoft almost completely reversed its policies regarding the Xbox One. No longer do you have to check in every 24 hours, you can now trade your games amongst friends and/or sell them freely as well as lend them, and there is also no region lock. In short, all its DRM policies have been nixed. Now, it will be more like the Xbox360 is, which is a very good thing.

There is an interesting tradeoff here. Up until now, with the DRM policies in place, it was implied that once your games were installed, you did not have to insert the disc to play them. Now, much as you do with 360, you will need the disc to run a disc-based game. It’s a change, but certainly not one anyone’s complaining about. That’s what they’re used to as it is.

But just as important as the good changes Microsoft made today are the things that didn’t change, which still need to be taken into account. Firstly, the price. Xbox One is still $100 more expensive than the PS4. Secondly, the Kinect requirement. Yep, that still needs to be hooked up when the Xbox One is turned on. These may seem like smaller concerns now, and I’ll admit I’ve backed off on the Kinect a little since Microsoft has said you can apparently turn all that off if you want, though again it still needs to be connected, but to some people, these are still valid concerns, especially the price. Good news or no, the PS4 still remains the economy choice, and some will purchase the PS4 for that reason alone.

There are even some who actually view this as no change at all. Some say the PS4 should still be praised over the Xbox One for sticking to their guns, and remaining all about the consumer. They say that Xbox One is not making these changes for you, they’re making these changes to give themselves a shot. This is reactionary to Sony’s announcements, and to the tons upon tons of negative feedback they’ve received since the Xbox One’s announcement. To an extent, admittedly a great extent, I agree with these points of view. Microsoft is trying to save themselves, I believe that. These are not changes made because Microsoft loves us, I believe that as well. Still, the fact remains that they did make these changes. This is a step in the right direction, and as my own little way of showing that, I have actually replaced my Xbox One preorder, which some of you may know I had canceled just this past weekend. I just hope this doesn’t mean my fiancé will forget the PS4 exists.

Seriously though, I want to make sure this news is spread around. I want anyone who reads this blog to consider it carefully, both its positive and negative connotations, but most of all I don’t want you to take my word for it. I will totally give you all the link to the post in which Microsoft made these announcements, verified by news sites all over the globe. No, it’s not a hoax.
See? The link is right here!
I hope, as always, that this article has been informative to you all, and that you can now take a second look at where you’re going when the next generation arrives. Whether your attitude has changed, or whether it hasn’t, this has definitely now become much more of a fight.

E3 Day 4 Stuff

Posted on by

Well folks, it’s over. The final day of E3 has concluded, and I’m surprised to say I have a bit more to say this time than last. As before I’ll address the biggest thing first.

It was mentioned briefly, almost in passing, at the Xbox One reveal that achievements would now change, tailoring themselves to the player. That left everyone with a lot of questions, but Microsoft revealed some information about their new achievement system, and I can honestly say… It’s not at all like what they said at the reveal. Here are some details.

First, Microsoft wants all Xbox One achievements to provide an additional reward besides gamer score. It’ll provide that too, of course, but you’ll also get something else to go with it, be that digital art, a map, an unlockable character, things like that. It’s unclear whether they’re trying to suggest that DLC items, or to put it more accurately, items not already found on the game disc could or would be given out with your achievements, but I have to admit it’d be kinda awesome if that was the case.

The next thing to note is that there are now 2 types of achievements. Standard achievements provide game score and the reward I previously mentioned, but then there are what Microsoft is calling Challenges. Challenges are limited time, realtime achievements completely controlled by the developer. They’re cloud-based, and in this context that means that you don’t have to undergo an update to the game for more challenges to be added. These challenges also do not give you gamer score, which actually makes sense, as Microsoft wants to give everyone the same chance at having a high gamer score. Thus, if challenges gave you major points, those who don’t often play, and therefore miss challenge opportunities, would never be able to have those same chances. Challenges do, however, appear as unlocked achievements in your list of achievements for that game, have their own associated special icons, and can provide you with the same additional rewards, (art, maps, characters and so on), that achievements can. To provide perfect examples of what these challenges might be, just look at Rockband. Of course, Rockband isn’t an Xbox One game, but if it was, all those solo and community challenges could potentially unlock achievements or other things for their completion.

And yes, that is another thing as well. There are 2 types of challenges, too. Challenges for a single player, and for the entire community. The example the article gave was related to Fable. Some of you may know that you can, for some reason, kick chickens in that game. This became a popular thing to do, apparently. Well, if the developer noticed people were doing this, or talking about this, they could just say “Alright then, folks. Community challenge. We’ll call it Chicken Kicker 2013. A million chickens must be kicked by the end of the week, and anyone who participates gets the achievement, and this super awesome sword of everlasting doom…” Or something. Pretty neat.

Furthermore, (and I think this applies more to single player achievements and challenges than it does to community ones), the Xbox One will automatically save a Game DVR clip of you earning achievements when you get them. Just another way to show all your friends that you’re awesome, and they may or may not be so. I quite like this, if nothing else because it seems to imply that the amount of clips you can save is unlimited.

Now, there is a third type of achievement as well, but one I find a little less compelling. Ladies and gentlemen, there will also be achievements for nongame-related stuff. The video services will have them, the music services will have them, and so on. Nongaming achievements will also not give you any gamer score, as once again, to do so would be unfair, as it might force someone to listen to a certain song, or watch a certain video they don’t want to watch. The rewards for these achievements might be early access to some videos or music, sneak peaks, or otherwise unavailable bonus content related to them. Things of that nature. Neat, but not as neat as the game-related ones if you ask me. And yes, this is me admitting I’ve found something I like about the Xbox One. Has it changed my overall opinion of the system? No, but I can still recognize something cool when I hear about it.

OK, now a couple of other quick things. First, I talked a little bit about the Division, more in my audioboo than this blog, but I mentioned its pop in, pop out mechanics. I now have a little bit more information on the specific scenario they showed at E3. The person who joined in the game at that time was actually joining from a tablet. He was piloting a drone that flew into the area, and he used it to mark a difficult-to-spot enemy for them. It has also been suggested these drones have other functions as well, and this is not the limit of the ways in which people could have joined. That could have just as easily been another one, or several console players. This does, though, explain the sound effects I mentioned hearing around this part of the demo, and adds a cool little flare to that game I wasn’t previously aware it had.

The very last thing I want to discuss is Super Giant Games’s new game, Transistor. I said before that trailer revealed nothing to me, well now I’ve listened to the demo, and it is intriguing. It’s about a woman who survives an attempt on her life, then finds the weapon that was used to try and kill her, which is a sword called the Transistor. Furthermore, there is actually a person somehow inside it that talks to her, and guides her around, though she cannot talk back. She, for some reason, has no voice, but it is implied that she used to have one. Making this more intriguing, the person within the Transistor doesn’t really seem to know what’s going on, or what’s in the protagonist’s head, which is a huge contrast to Bastian’s omniscient narrator. And that’s not all.

The Transistor, of course, has special configurations that can be accessed as you play, all of which give it, and you, special abilities. One of the neatest ones allows you to stop time completely, and for as long as you want, to lay out a series of planned motions and attacks to accomplish an objective or quickly eliminate enemies, which will then actually take place once you resume time. But the most intriguing thing I heard was this. Transistor is going to be PS4 exclusive, and because of that they’ve been looking into finding unique ways to use the controller. They’ve already gotten the PS4 controller’s light bar, which is most of the time used for games that support the camera, to flash in rhythm with the speech of the man inside the Transistor sword, but what they said right after that got me, as to my knowledge this hasn’t been discussed at all. They said they were also playing around with the idea of having his voice come through the speaker. This seems to imply there’s a speaker on the controller, which again I don’t recall anyone mentioning. If that’s true, I find that extremely intriguing, at least if this speaker produces audio of a decently high quality, because if there’s one thing I really like about the Wii You, and playing games like Arkham City on the Wii You, it’s that. The voices coming through Batman’s radio actually coming through the Gamepad speakers really adds a new element. So we’ll see if that guy didn’t just weirdly misspeak, or if maybe this is yet another awesome facet of the PS4.

And that’s it. Really, it is. I hope I’ve given you a decent amount of news during the course of E3. I know it wasn’t half as much as some of the bigger gaming media outlets have provided, but hopefully the way I consolidated some of the interesting stuff served you well this week. It really was a great E3 this year, and the proof of that is how much I can’t wait for these games. I can’t wait for the next generation to begin!

E3 Day 3 Stuff

Posted on by

Alright, folks, there isn’t as much news today, but a couple interesting things I found out, and one correction as well. Let’s see what we’ve got.

First, the correction. This was just a misinterpretation, really. I said before that Sony announced they had 40 exclusives launching for the PS4 within its first year. This was incorrect. According to a Gametrailers interview with Jack Trenton, Sony has 20 first party exclusives, (still more than the Xbox One’s 15), and on top of that, 40 multiplatform games contain exclusive content just for the PS4. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me, and in some ways better than I originally thought.

Now, a couple quick interesting notes. First, Batman: Arkham Origins does not in fact retain the original voice actors for its characters, most specifically Batman and the Joker. As it is a prequel, they wanted to find younger sounding actors to fit those roles. The most intriguing of these, for anyone who follows voice acting in video games, is the Joker, who is now played by one Troy Baker, a very prevalent actor whose career only seems to be picking up. So hey, if you are going to replace Mark Hamil, he’s a good choice for a replacement at least.

The second bit of news is kind of a fun fact. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Borderlands, but it’s basically a shooter/RPG kind of game with a focus on its own sense of humor. There’s some DLC coming out for it later this month which is basically a parody of Dungeons and Dragons. This content’s main character, named Tiny Tina, is one of the best characters in the game if not the whole series, and now I know why. Today, I have learned that the voice actress, one Ashley Burch, is the sister of the writer who created Tiny Tina, Anthony Burch. Tina herself is based on a combination of Ashley, and a friend of the family. Guess there’s a lot to be said for good, old-fashioned family chemistry.

That was really about it. Uh, some folks said they like the PS4 controller, lots of folks just continue to like the PS4 all around, but nothing really major besides that first big one. Yes, I watched more game footage than that, but remember i’m not trying to talk about and cover every game, I’m just trying to bring up interesting news about games people tend to follow. Oh wait, there is one more thing I could mention, though there was little elaboration on this. Final Fantasy XV’s combat is not at all turn-based. It’s realtime, which is almost, though not completely, unique to the FF series. There, now that’s it. Heheh. Tune in for more tomorrow, when I expect we may find out about the next WWE game from 2K, and hey, if you’re me, that’s a big deal.