Next-Gen Wish List

IGN has posted Your Most Wanted Next-Gen Feature and it is a compiled list of what they see as the community wanting the most in the next batch of consoles which should be coming out in the next few years. I’ll break it down here and post my thoughts.

Focus on Entertainment

I’m torn here. I really don’t care that much about the entertainment options in my gaming console, I really don’t. I think that the console is going to be pushed back even more as TVs continue to gain the needed entertainment features and more and more consumptions is moved to other computing devices. This might be the place I want the manufacturers to spend the LEAST amount of time from this list.

Carry Everything Forward

A nice thought if it can be done. We have seen this featured touted, not used, and then finally dropped on almost every console available. The funny thing is that looking back at the start of the industry it was even worse.

Physical cartridges pretty much killed any chance at backward compatibility.

It would be nice to see the new consoles carry 100% compatibility with this generation, but it just isn’t something I’m going to cry home about. This becomes more of an issue, however, when you starting bringing digital downloads into the mix. Add in the fact that the increase in gaming networks and you get a mess of questions:

  • How long do we support old games?
  • How long do we NEED to support old games?
  • Should that digital download work with the new hardware?

That’s just the beginning. The question becomes one of resources: how much do you want to give up for more advances in hardware and software?

Digital Rentals and Streaming Games

Digital rentals would be awesome. Make ’em cheap, make ’em quick, make ’em fun. That’s about it.

Not sold on streaming games mainly because I think people really overestimate the level of broadband that the majority of the world currently has. Also, it gives LESS control to the gamer and only brings up more questions of who owns what and when a game will just go “dark” because they don’t want to support it anymore.

More Motion and Touch Tech

“There be dragons here!” Be careful what you wish for.

I’m a huge fan of Skyward Sword, but even I understand the limitations of motion and touch technology. I shudder to think about what types of games are going to come out as people just start bolting on stuff for the heck of it (and to check off another box).

If you are going to do this, go all-in and do it right. Please. The majority of the Wii titles are a huge warning to the whole industry about what can happen when you don’t care.

Wireless Everything

Oh. My. Gosh. No. Please, PLEASE include wired options. This is such a bad idea I can’t help but think that whoever recommended this has never actually worked with any kind of wireless technology … ever. Such a terrible idea.

Wireless is wonderful, but for something like a game console that is not going to be moved you really want to be able to hardwire that thing into place as much as possible. If there is one thing I wish my Wii had, it s an ethernet port.

Controllers? Sure. Headsets? Alright. After that, what you really want is a person who has a clue about what they are talking about.

Social and Community Focus

Nintendo really needs to step up here in a big, no HUGE way. Xbox Live is really the gold standard for community focus and the idea of being able to share certain things is nice, I just caution against spending too much time here and not enough on actually making a game console that … goodness … plays games.

I  believe we have enough narcissism in the world.

Modifiable Hardware

Wow, we are really going off of the deep end here. Part of what makes console gaming attractive is that you DO NOT MODIFY THE HARDWARE. You buy a console and you have the same experience as your friend. It is bad enough when console manufacturers sell a crippled piece of hardware (looking at your Microsoft) at the lowest price point to drive sales, but allowing people to then mod their hardware?

Besides, you already have PC gaming and the buggy drivers and inconsistent performance. If anything, you want one canonical piece of hardware that never changes … giving developers only a single run of hardware to aim at.

Of course, that would require more thoughtful hardware in the first place and … we can’t have that.

Playable Used Games

With digital downloads and required gaming accounts, this becomes a much stickier issues than it used to be. I, for one, would be very sad to see the used game market go away if for no other reason than it would kill the joy of playing older games after that console is EOL.

The fact that we are even at the point where this is an issue is truly sad.

Closing Thoughts

Most of what was brought up really doesn’t matter. I’m thinking that if you want this console it is already there … in the form of an awesome PC.

If this is the way that next-gen consoles go, we are in for a very bumpy ride.

Nothing mentioned really helps the gaming experience at all. If there is one thing that I would recommend, it would be: Eliminate. Loading. Screens.

Wait, I already did.

Loading Screens

One thing I have noticed since playing A Link to the Past again is the extreme absence of something I had just gotten used to: loading screens.

The entire game is, more of less, seamless. You just keep on going without too many breaks in it besides the occasional telepathic communique from someone. Otherwise, it is a lot of walking and sword-swinging. It’s refreshing.

The introduction of optical media really introduced us to loading screens as the consoles needed to load the larger textures from slow media. Larger capacity coupled with slow disk drives really killed the “flow” of games. I distinctly remember how different it was playing a Final Fantasy game on the Playstation compared to The Legend of Zelda on the N64.

Granted, I liked both games.

As the graphical capacity of the games has gotten greater, the information involved has gotten larger, and the disks have gotten bigger. Sadly, game consoles don’t carry the amount of RAM needed to load the entire game up before you begin and so you get longer and longer loading screens.

Mass Effect Elevator

A game that tried to mask loading screens was the Mass Effect series. The first time you rode in an elevator you were essentially sitting through a slightly-interactive loading screen. of course, they were still there throughout the game, but it was clever.

However, with the next batch of technological advances are we going to see the removal of loading screens (within reason)? Will the advent of viable SSDs, dropping price of RAM, and multi-core processors allow a game to both load faster and and also do more in the background. With digital downloads, will disks go away and thus allow faster access to the data again?

One can only hope. Of course, there are other hurdles involved, but it looks like there might be a time in the future when loading screens are a thing of the way past … and just the past as well.

Categories
Technology

FreeNAS Update

Time for a little update on my FreeNAS work over the last week. If you want to take a look at what I’m doing, you can read my past article.

Tonight was the big “let’s rebuild this thing” night, but I think “big” isn’t the right word. The plan all along was to try it out as the bare minimum setup and then move to something a little more permanent if it worked out in the end.

It worked out pretty darn well.

My wife’s MacBook has been backing up to Soteria since Tuesday without any problems. She also took it to dance practice and then back and the next Time Machine backup went by without a problem. I’m using nothing but spare parts I have around and I have the space for it under my bench.

The next thing was to make the following changes:

  • Install an IDE-to-CF adapter and then install FreeNAS 8 on the CF card
  • Replace the 80 GB hard drive with a 500 GB drive for more storage
  • Replace the 10/100 switch with a gigabit one
  • Setup a large ZFS dataset for Time Machine backups
  • Setup both laptops to use the FreeNAS box for backups
  • Setup a smaller ZFS dataset for general storage
  • Seal up the box … set it and forget it

So that is what I did tonight. I now have one large ZFS volume, striped, at almost 830 GB and two datasets, one at 750 GB and one at 77 GB. As a really simple and unscientific benchmark, my wife’s MacBook now lists the entire Time Machine backup at 4 hours where it was 8 hours before. If that will really happen, who knows, but it is a TON faster over wired gigabit with the new striped ZFS volume.

What about the future?

  • Larger case which holds either more hard drives internally or more external hot-swap bays
  • Get more hard drives … big ones
  • Learn more about ZFS and ZFS tuning to maybe squeeze out some more performance and learn as much as possible about RAIDZ
  • Get more hard drives … big ones

I’m hoping to expand the storage as needed, but for now just having a central repository for Time Machine backups is such a great big “win” for me that I’m smiling right now. I’m hoping that it just becomes a part of my life that I don’t really need to worry about and it “just works”.

What does $200 get you?

So, Matias announced their Tactile One Keyboard and I would love to have one.

At $200, I can’t justify it.

Seagate Buys Samsung’s HDD Business

Today it was announced that Seagate has purchased Samsung’s HDD business. If Western Digital’s bid to purchase Hitachi’s HDD business goes through (and I would think that allowing Seagate to do the same should grease the wheels a tad), that would bring the entire HDD business down to these three:

  • Seagate
  • Western Digital
  • Toshiba

You can guess which one is the minority partner in this relationship.

Couple this with the news that Seagate and Western Digital are cutting the warranties on consumer-grade drives and you get the picture that the “spinning rust” business isn’t as rosy as it used to be, even outside of the drive shortages that have propped up prices for the foreseeable future. It is hard being in a commodity business, especially one that is as driven by price as traditional storage.