What Went Wrong with the Vita

Sony massively overestimated the appetite for downports of hit PS3/360 action games. The action game fanbase is tired of PS3/360 hardware and is eager for new consoles and newer devices with dramatically better technology. Taking mass market favorites like CoD and Assassin’s Creed and cutting down the already aging graphics and frame rates and game complexity and giving them a baby experience of the real game is just a losing proposition.

I predict a similar outcome with Killzone Mercenary. The excitement for new, dramatically more powerful hardware is going to steamroll over any interest PS3 and sub-PS3 graphics technology.

What Went Right with the Vita: Up Ports

If downports of PS3/360 games didn’t work, up-ports of PS2/Wii games really did. Persona 4 Golden was a ton of fun. I suspect Muramassa will be another gem. You’re not getting an almost-as-good version, you’re getting a heavily improved version of an amazing and unique game.

LBP and Disgaea are two other amazing Vita games, that despite coming from the more powerful PS3 hardware, are generally best experienced on the Vita. LBP really works well with the hybrid touch screen controls and Disgaea style strategy RPGs fits so naturally with the handheld form factor.

What Went Right with the Vita: Portability

People still want portability. In the past, portable hardware demanded sacrifices that limited it’s appeal, but the demand is still there. Despite the grouchy naysayers, who plan to cling to their living room setups, it’s inevitable that the mass market will shift towards portability. There will always be a place for big event-style gaming on a large screen just like movie theaters still have their place, but portability will increase.

What Sony Should Do

With the Vita, up ports are much better than down ports. Focus on the “got to take it with me” games that are built on clever hooks rather than showcasing bleeding edge technology. Generally speaking, the movie theater, main event style games will always be better on a non-portable console or a high-end late model tablet/laptop. And games that don’t need game pad controls will generally thrive on the touch devices instead. But there is a wide range of games that really work better with proper game pad controls that make the Vita worthwhile.

However, while the Persona 4′s and Muramassa’s may be much loved enthusiast favorites, I don’t see those ever being CoD style blockbusters.

I would also suggest that Sony pursue three new platforms:

• PS3 Successor: From various leaks, we know they are already pretty far along on this one. Gamers want another fixed hardware, mass market, no compromises platform. This may be a safe bet, but the mere thought of the best studios creating titles on a system that is an order of magnitude better than the PS3 is mouth watering.
• Android/iOS Tablets: Sony has a reputation of scouting and cultivating the best talent, producing the highest quality games, but being held back by their walled garden platforms. Sony has long functioned as a third party publisher of Windows games like Everquest and Planetside 2. They should expand this and publish games for tablets. Not with their crappy PlayStation Mobile initiative which imposes lots of technical limitations, but as a true third party publisher that focuses on driving actual platform-neutral games to a large audience.
• VR: Occulus Rift has shown some amazing prototypes and demonstrated that excitement exists. However, as a third party platform-neutral add-on, this concept is limited. A full platform designed exclusively around the VR I/O paradigm is needed to really take this idea to its fullest. Sony is better suited than any other to do this: They already are a leading competitor in displays and game platforms

Experiments within Sony’s R&D department are thought to have been extensive. Versions of the new PS4 pad include biometric sensors on the grips and an LCD touch screen, the development source claimed.

A second source, working in a separate part of the industry but still connected to Sony, said PlayStation engineers are “trying to emulate the same user interface philosophies as the PS Vita”. This is likely a reference to the touch-screen capabilities of the PlayStation handheld, and a suggestion that Sony will tightly integrate its portable and home systems.

The new console – codenamed Orbis – will be revealed in a matter of weeks, not months.

For every product or idea that reaches a finished product, there are dozens that don’t. It should be pretty obvious, that there are probably thousands of wacky PS4 ideas and experiments inside of Sony that get cut. Knowing the video games news cycle types, people can take scraps of information from an internal brainstorm and over read into that and extrapolate that into the final direction of the PS4.

The known I/O paradigms are:

• Traditional sticks/buttons and a living room type standing TV setup
• An all-in-one tablet device that doesn’t need an external TV
• A Wii U type tablet/TV hybrid scheme
• A TV + motion wand like the Wii or PlayStation Move
• A TV + controller free motion detector like the Kinect
• VR headset like the prototypes from Oculus Rift

Out of all of these, I would take the safe bet that Sony takes the safe bet with a PS3-style control scheme with some clever enhancements. My personal hope is that Sony is building a gaming platform entirely around VR. The Oculus Rift team is currently the leader of publically demoed prototypes. The big downside to the Oculus Rift is that it’s an add-on peripheral and doesn’t seem like it will attract a lot of my favorite development studios: Rockstar, Atlus, From Software, Insomniac Games, and all the Sony first party teams. I’m hoping that Sony’s big PlayStation reveal will be VR hardware and a VR platform but that seems a long shot right now with no rumors or leaks pointing in this direction.

However, I’d bet against a Wii U type touchscreen controller or a biometric sensor controller being a flagship controller for the PS4. Neither of these concepts fits PlayStation’s games at all.

For many developers and tech users, Linux is such a dramatically better workstation OS than Windows. Here’s why:

The Command Line (or shell)

For leisure, tablet style touch interfaces are fantastic, but for workstation use, when you are creating content, writing code, working with servers, managing lots of files, etc, command shells really cater to serious power users and are frequently superior to mouse-heavy GUIs.

For example, how do you convert an image between formats (say .png to .jpg)? The typical GUI user has to find some freeware tool and do a ton of time-intensive point-and-clicking. A good command line user can do this with a simple one-line command that easy to run on a batch of files. Same thing goes for extracting a clip from a video file or resizing an image or many other common workstation tasks.

Windows is really designed for point-and-click. The cme.exe command shell is extremely basic and primitive next to the stuff you find on Linux or even Mac OS X. Windows has weaker support for I/O piping and weaker support for soft-links (aliases). You can get an add-on shell for Windows, and Microsoft tried to build their own power user friendly tool with Microsoft PowerShell, but they just aren’t as good as using Linux.

Linux is really designed with serious command line operation in mind. It defaults with the decent Bash shell, but you can easily use nicer shells like Z shell (zsh) which offers useful features like integration with Git source control. Speaking of Git, the major Windows port of Git, msysgit, comes with its own Bash shell, since there are some tasks you can’t do through regular Windows command shell.

Central Software Repository

Windows users get a lot of their software via finding it on the web, and manually installing and managing. Sometimes this is adequate, but other times it’s problematic. Some apps have cross product dependencies, like you can download a Python app or tool that on Windows needs to be semi-manually configured with the correct Python installation. Linux, makes this kind of thing much easier. Also, Windows manual installs run the risk of install/uninstall bugs, compatibility issues, unnecessary background tasks, ad-ware, mal-ware, and crap-ware. For example, once I installed a game on my Windows system, forgot about it, and months later realized that it had an auto update process running at all times, even when I never played the game, that was hogging CPU.

The Linux software repo system protects you from most of these types of issues.

Less bloat-ware and crap-ware

The typical Windows system comes with a ton of bloat/crap ware. Even if you reinstall Windows and are aggressive about minimizing crap-ware, Linux makes this easier. For example, many VPN clients, SSH tools, and even some printer/scanner drivers have annoying GUIs on Windows, while Linux has cleaner, crap-ware free support for these things.

Negative: Games

This is the one thing Linux is currently really poor at. PC gaming is mostly synonymous with Windows gaming. Web browser games, Flash games, Java games (Minecraft/Wakfu), and some Google Chrome NaCl games work natively on Linux, and the occasional rare C-based game has a Linux port, but everything else requires some type of emulation layer to run, which sometimes works well, but can also be troublesome and hinder performance.

Currently, if you are a serious gamer, Linux is a poor choice, but this may actually start to turn around.

Microsoft Only Productivity Tools

A lot of people are dependent on Microsoft office (Word/Excel/PowerPoint) or Microsoft dev tools. If you are a die hard Microsoft fan, you really should stick to a Microsoft OS. However, I’d argue that there are much superior products:

• Microsoft Word: If you can get passed the initial learning curve, markup-based tools are far superior. WYSIWYG products like Word and LibreOffice are clumsy and sloppy in comparison. Think about this: serious web designers universally scoff at point-and-click web page creation tools and insist on hand-coding HTML for precise control and beautiful output. It’s the same thing with documents. If you want your documents to look better than everyone else’s or you have a technical mindset and want a more logical (and completely free) document writing tool, this is really worth trying out. Personally, I am a fan of LaTeX. Try googling for LaTeX output if you want proof that these tools produce better looking output. To get started, I’d recommend installing TeX Live (expect this install to a few hours! really!) and using a light weight editor like Texmaker or something similar. Another great alternative is Sphinx which is excellent for writing for both web and print. Sphinx was originally designed to create the Python documentation.
• Microsoft Excel: Google Docs does everything most people use Excel for in a much better fashion. If you really need an offline tool, LibreOffice is completely adequate for most purposes.
• Microsoft PowerPoint: HTML like reveal.js are very simple and look beautiful. LaTeX is also an excellent choice for making .pdf slides.
• C# and Visual Studio: Scala is a far more elegant and advanced programming language than C#.
  For a simpler, easier language with the most vibrant community, Java is a great choice. I was recently comparing various NoSQL distributed data stores for work, and glance at Wikipedia to see which implementation language is popular. For IDEs, use a command line build tool like SBT (for Scala) or Gradle (for Java) along with a full IDE like IntelliJ (community edition is full featured and free) or maybe Eclipse.

Quick Summary: This game is awesome. This is definitely the most fun and addicting action game that I’ve played in 2012. I would go as far as to say that this is a contender for all time favorite tower defense, strategy, and solo platforming (haven’t tried the multiplayer features) game.

Most of the game mechanics are familiar from past R&C titles: the weapon wheel and upgrade system, bolts, grind rails, hover boots, Mr. Zurkon, etc. But they all seem to fit perfectly with this tower defense + exploration hybrid game.

A few other points:

• The strategy game element works. You have to choose which weapons to get, which to power up, which towers/barriers to buy, where to place them, and when to stay close to your base and play defensively, when to explore, when to farm for bolts for defense, when to farm for weapon upgrades, and when to take out the enemy level objectives.
• This is a challenging game, but the good kind of difficulty and not frustrating difficulty. I’ve been restarting levels a lot, but every time I learn the mechanics a little bit more and I am excited to try some new strategy.
• Graphically, this game is unusually smooth: The frame rate is completely stutter-free which is uncommon for a top-tier 3D game and the Pixar-movie-style character animation system is unmatched. These aren’t really new to the R&C series, but they really make the underlying strategy game more enjoyable. I know most of the online crowd, including readers here, hate stereoscopic 3D, and I see that feature is hidden from all the promotional coverage, but wow is it amazing to experience. For the first few hours I played without this feature, but when I turned it on, I really felt like I could see and perceive lots of little detail that I couldn’t before. The stereoscopic 3D is unusually good for this title.