We're technically five years into the current generation of consoles as the 3DS came out in 2011, so I want to ask...

Soon or later this will happen. VR took the next step this year and I expect it to become more and more sophisticated within the next 5 years.

I appreciate the last gen. I was kind of annoyed with it at the time but given what we have now, it's hard to look back on it with anything but affectionate derision.

I still use my modded PSP and hacked Wii every day, playing titles I missed. And the 360 and ps3 have their places too, with small exclusives and such

it needs to be ~100fps to keep you from puking, and each eye needs to be rendered separately. The screen is two inches from your eyes so the resolution needs to be really high to not look like shit. You need a rig capable of running at a solid 200fps in 4K resolution… that's not coming for a while

It feels like a bunch of people on Holla Forums made the manufactured this generation for sole purpose of destroying the gaming industry.

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Nintendo started to almost stop making every game pure shit, with MK8 and Splatoon actually being really good, but whatever internal influence convinced them to do those good things didn't save Pikmin 3 or Star Fox Zero or Mario 3D World or Zelda.
W101 was awesome and Bayonetta 2 was a let-down.
I don't regret my Wii U just because I got to see something good from Nintendo for the first time since gen6.

The 3DS was a complete waste of money. I don't like smash or rpgs. The selection of good single-player action games was limited to Kid Icarus and Sega 3D classics.
I left it in my car during winter and the upper LCD broke.

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How in gods name did you go from saying that consoles aren't powerful enough for VR to saying that the manufacturer that is well known for making the least powerful consoles is the only one that can make it happen?

Sony picked up on MS's bad practices, like paid online. Consoles stopped being convenient ways to play vidya, and now they're update machines. The controllers are neat at least, and something might come out of PSVR.
Wii U is neat if you play couch coop. it's the machine I wish I had as a kid. 8 player Smash, Mario Kart, the ability to play at night under my bedsheet like I'm a kid again and backwards compatibility for the last 10 years is amazing. Downside is that it's a niche console, and the games only look good because of their artstyle. Also the gamepad is gimmicky and you can't force the console to route all sounds through it. It's good if it fits your specific tastes, otherwise it's pointless.
3DS is nice. The new 3DS should have been what originally came out though. It went from a nogaems machine to having a fuckton to play on it. It could have been handled better, and that fucking right nub thing is horrible outside camera control, but it's good enough.
Vita was a sad case. It was a neat idea but Sony tried to use it as a normalfag machine and the normalfags didn't care. It's great for it's niche weeby stuff, and it has some really clever games on there, but fuck those memory cards. Also the ergonomics are annoying and the rear touchpad is stupid. I don't regret getting it but it deserved more.

If you stick to Nintendo + Vita it's a decent generation. I wouldn't bother with the PS4/X1, especially since PC gaming isn't that much more expensive nowadays. But I don't trust microsoft to not fuck up PC gaming too

Unless you have a rig that's $2300+

I feel like the normalfag appeal is what killed the Wii U, too. Instead of accepting that the Wii U playbase was made up of autists and core gamers and then stabbing them in the back next generation, they decided they wanted to continue the "famiry consoru" route and no normalfag gives a shit about a niche console with Bayo2 and Xenoblade.

It's alright.

I think it's probably the worst generation yet in terms of actual games. Last generation did the most damage to the industry by letting any random fuck easily access multiplayer games but this generation could well be the end of consoles as we know them.

You're not old enough to remember this, but the Gamecube was the most powerful console in its generation. The PS2 won that gen, so Nintendo learned that the best way to dominate the market was getting cheap hardware out first.

Laffo

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Judging by Sony working on PSNow, what happens at this point?

Will console companies instead just forego console hardware entirely, and turn their services into game streaming platforms instead? Because that actually sounds like a pretty awesome next step. Especially if it means I get to play vidya from my PC.

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Nintenfaggot here.

Wii U was OK. Better than the Wii, worse than the GameCube. Took way too fucking long to get some good games, and then when they did start coming in, it was a goddamn trickle. I've played more GameCube through dolphin than I have Wii and Wii U combined, and I got both Wii and Wii U on launch days.
3DS was definitely worth the money. Shit console, in my opinion, but with a wealth of good games. The good 3DS games started coming early and didn't dry up for a long time. I had more good games than I had time to play them (while my Wii U sat and gathered dust between releases). Really proves that a console is really nothing more than the quality and quantity of the games on it. I don't know if it really beats the DS library, but it comes close at least.

I honestly think that Gen 6 was the best so far, because it was pretty much the last generation where game systems were primarily game devices, rather than glorified multimedia centers that sometimes can play games. The days where you could put a game in, turn on the system, and be playing within 15 seconds are sadly over.

Not to mention Nintendo would be actively searching for ways to work around their low-power niche with VR. But this is all just a pissing contest anyways given that Nintendo wouldn't be caught dead chasing the VR meme, the only people pushing it nowadays are Sony pretending it's a high-demand feature and Valve.

If you like Steam's problems magnified to insane degrees, sure, and all without Valve's half-hearted promise (made a decade or so ago and probably with no intention of making good on it anymore, knowing Valve) that if they ever go under they'll release DRM-free/Steamless patches of all the games you own. Also an absolutely colossal amount of bandwidth and high up/download speeds available to you, Christ streaming video takes a hell of a lot of data and space, let alone streaming interactive media on the intensity level of a video game. Such a thing would be wildly unpopular nearly everywhere for a variety of factors.

Also no it wouldn't mean you get to play that vidya on your PC, chances are it'd mean you get to play it from their proprietary streaming box + $60 controller. AKA a digital-only always-online console.

Looks like we are sitting in a half gen now anyway, both the PS4 and Xbox One are getting half upgrades and the single release of the switch is a bit much to call Gen 9 a thing. I'm fine with Gen 8.5 being a properly recorded generation too, it's going to be funny to read the history of video games and for there to be a gen 8.5 slapped in between 8 and 9. If the reliable rumors about the Switch are true it will probably be the best system of the entire generation.

This has got to on all levels be bait, or a repost from Neogaf.

I don't recall valve ever making that promise, but Steam games are easy as fuck to crack, it's easier to crack a steam game then to no-cd a store brought game.

Wtf i was going to get a 3ds
now im never ever going to get one
maybe 10 years later when they are $10 at a yard sale

Because Holla Forums has never had consoles or discussions about consoles. It's definitely newfaggotry causing Holla Forums to delve into this uncharted territory.

Quick Google gave me a plebbit source on it from a Steam Support rep. reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam_support_what_happens_to_my_games_if/

Steam games are easy as shit to crack, true, but imagine trying to crack a streamed game or even have it in any offline format.

I remember when OnLive tried that same shit, and the reason it bombed so badly was because US infrastructure is absolute garbage.

Isn't that basically current consoles now?

I remember playing Sega Channel back in the day, and that ended up being pretty fucking awesome.

Not bait, so much as I'm legitimately curious. I haven't owned a console since 6th gen, and even then I was largely a LAN-partying PCfag, so I'm out of the loop when it comes to console stuff, and I want to hear the actual downsides to this idea.

They at least pretend that the plastic circle you get in the case for their download code has some value nowadays, with that it'd be dropping all pretenses. If anything Nintendo's fairly handily avoided that trap despite all their other Judaism.

Microsoft keeps trying to push a locked down version of Windows to replace the Xbox (they're doing this with Win10 already) and abandons hardware. This will likely fail but they'll move their exclusives to PC anyway. Expect to see more winstore/gfwl style nonsense to compete with Steam in the short term. They might possibly sell a locked down PC for the sports/CoD crowd but it will literally be a locked down PC bundled with controllers rather than custom hardware.

Sony's shit will continue to sell in Japan because most japs hate playing on PC. Outside of Japan sales will slump and they'll eventually give up. I'd even expect Japan to see a slow decline in console usage but we're talking about a country still using fax machines for cultural reasons so don't expect it overnight. Die-hard western fans will import. I'd expect exclusives popular in the west to move to PC, perhaps on a Sony-only store. Alternatively they might integrate with Steam/Valve since they've done that a lot in the past (Portal 2, Rocket League).

Nintendo will keep pushing niche consoles long past the point they are profitable in the west and again will continue to sell in Japan. Handhelds will make a comeback as specialised devices against smartphones (this has already happened really) largely because smartphones have terrible interfaces for vidya: nobody wants to put analog sticks on a phone. It'll be the same as when cinema reinvented itself due to competition from home TV.

On a related note, how much will be enough for Windows stalwarts like Rockstar and Ubisoft to jump to Linux/SteamOS?

Actually that sounds fucking horrible. If your internet ever goes down in the middle of your game, tough shit, you can't play until it comes back up (This should especially never happen for singleplayer games.) And thats not to mention when the service will eventually be shut down, theres no way of replaying or reviving the games because it died with the server & good luck asking them for a copy (Its worse with DLC.) Plus (In America as far as I'm aware) the jewish cable companies still use arbitrary datacaps that fuck over a lot of people.
Always-Online was & always will be the worst practice that should never be encouraged.

You're never going to get one because you saw that didn't have the foresight to think "things freeze when they get cold"? Are you retarded? At least give a better fucking reason than that.

Read my meme arrow segment, that's only a few of my problems.

It's not even Holla Forums "anything the mods don't like is shitposting" hotpocketry, you're just being a 'tard.

Ironically, sounds like in the long term, Nintendo's the only one doing things right, despite all of the other stupid shit they've been doing. aka the Wii and Wii-U.

Abandoning hardware sounds logical to me. It's expensive, it holds progression back, and gaming as a whole has suffered because of it. I'd rather just download an app, and play whatever I want with a flat monthly sub to Sony/Nintendo/whoever. Pipe-dream talk, probably, but it's not like shit can get any worse, right?

In the long-term, I'd just like to be able to play anything I want on PC without being dependent on emulation, or Windows in any shape or form.

That's a really good point. Fuck.

Nintendo does their own thing instead of following along trends, for better or for worse. So far it's lead them pretty well.

Customers moving. That's all they care about at the end of the day. Customers won't move until you can play with no hassle. For that to happen, among other things, DirectX must die. For that to happen it must become standard to support OpenGL or Vulkan/Mantle in the industry (which is possible).

With as shitty as Microsoft has been treating devs over the past decade, I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. I fucking hate how DirectX is the standard that nobody wants to move away from.

Oh and R* are hardly what I'd call Windows stalwarts. They're terrible at porting shit to PC for a start.

This is another possibility though I still think Sony would be more likely to go with Steam integration (that also frees them from having to run an account system/social network). They tried letting you link PSN accounts to Steam way back. Subscription fees are unpopular.

We'd all like this but that's very much pipe-dream talk I'm afraid.

Oh dear.

This game represents most of what is wrong with the early 7th Gen.
BS:I represents most of what is wrong with the late 7th Gen.
Bioshock has always been shit.

Heres another thing I forgot to mention: With streaming services (It happens with places like Steam but at least people can still archive & make backups), there are some games that get released on there…and then poof! It's gone because one of the licenses of the music, characters, whatever expired and thus, you're shit out of luck to play it! Even though I own pic related on the Dreamcast & people can easily emulate it, it goes to show that if you didn't buy it while it was up for purchase, fat chance of it coming back, the only thing that will be archived will be let's plays & other videos. Imagine that being the standard for future vidya. Or there could be an instance where the game needs an update because they didn't bother to check for bugs and then that update just makes the game unstable, you can't go back to the older more stable version, they're not going to offer you that option.

You're my bloke, mate.
Also Sapphire boxes objectively look the best in the market.

Or to expand on 'oh dear' Nintendo spent a good few years running at a pretty major loss. It's worth looking into their finances to see that stubbornly doing things the old-fashioned way is not always smart.

A fair few games do include OpenGL as an option but M$ spend millions pushing DirectX including 'persuading' the larger devs to stick with it. They'll also pay big devs to only develop for the newest version of DirectX to force people to upgrade OS. In the past it had some features that made it attractive independently of M$ too, of course.

I took for granted how big a jump game design made in the 90s. There were so many developers experimenting with controls schemes for 3D games before the dual analogue FPS control became so standard.

Also the creation of many genres. I can't think of any genre created post-2000 other than pseudo-combined genres. Perhaps indie rouge-lights? Even then I'm not sure.

Don't they still pretty much have more money than God? I don't know the exact numbers, all I know is they're solvent enough they can still get away with doing whatever they please.

Well the Wii made them fucktons of cash in hardware sales alone so I'd imagine they're fine for years to come. Still that was arguably a fluke, nobody really expected it to take off like it did. Much like the PS2 the perfect storm of conditions accounts for a lot of the success.

XPERIA PLAY 2
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because they're used to making games that, by all technical metrics, look like complete shit yet are occasionally redeemed by gameplay and art direction

Man you don't understand. I left it in my car for pretty much the entire winter; there were no games I wanted to play on it and I just forgot about it.
It's not like you can't travel with it when it's cold outside.

I got the other model on launch, that's just my second Vita.

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Yeah, i never understand that decision. Fuck, the only reason i even got a PS3 was the free online. And with every single game not having co-op or dual-screens anymore, why should i get a console? There's no reason for it anymore.

Wrong and wrong. it's actually just running one instance of 90fps at 1200p which is very capable nowadays. Specially with Zen coming up and the revised 2017 Q3 HTC, it's lookig good.

3DS - decent start but no delivery. Bloated with terrible titles and even the biggest games on the system are incredibly weak.
Vita - rough start but built up a respectable library
Wii U - dead in the water and was ultimately very disappointing, has a handful of games worth playing
PS4 - some games but they're taking way too long to come out, library looks like it's going to double in size in the next few months
Xbox One - still nothing actually worth playing on the thing
PC - 5 years of multiplats of questionable superiority at best and no interesting exclusives unless you are really nostalgic for the worst western rpgs of the 90s

Rough starts are Sony's entire history. Start with nogames memes and end up getting a decent library 6 months before Sony abandons the console.

The best thing about the current gen is that it made the past generation cheaper. Thanks to the PS4, the PS3 is cheap as fuck. Same with the NintendoDS and the PSP

This generation is the N64 of video games. A few standout titles that everyone will remember fondly but won't make up for how little there actually was worth remembering

I just emulate SNES games still, Im happy

Other than a very select few Wii U games, this gens console givings have been total shit. I cant think of even ONE worthwhile exclusive on the Bone or PS4. Not even one. In nearly 5 years. Thats pathetic.
At least if you count the 3DS it adds a dozen or so good games. But this is by far the worst console gen. At least with the Switch on the way it looks to be short-lived.

This.

Absoolutely abysmal excuse for a generation. It's clear that the intended launch titles were all ported back to the interminable 7th gen consoles, effectively crippling the reason for going 8th gen. The slow start has suffocated it and neither console makers nor devs seem able to get anything back on track anymore.

I miss last gen so bad. This is the gen of REMASTERS REMASTERS REMASTERS REMAKES REMAKES REMAKES. Because even the devs realize that this gen was shit, so they might as well remaster their old games.

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the golden age of Xbox 360. Xbox One is such a massive fucking stepdown from that system. Like, they literally JUST implemented listening to music in the background on the One… nearly 4 years into its runtime, when 360 had that tiny feature at fucking launch in 2005. What a fucking mess.

I find myself more excited at what games they add to backwards compatibility on the One rather than new releases, it's that bad.

The handheld this gen have been great, tho, I love my 3DS. But Nintendo is usually always at least decent, no matter what gen. Though I've never owned a Wii U, so I can't speak for that system.

Nintendo didn't have a decent handheld this generation. What they had is a company that cared at all about handhelds.