The current owners went bankrupt, and tried to sell the Darksiders license. No one bit at the time, so as it stands, the franchise is dead in the water, but Platinum tweeted that they're interested in acquiring it. So it's something that's potentially in the cards.

 

You know what would have worked very nicely as a Steam for consoles? Steam. Valve tried to make it happen back when CS was released on the 360 but MS shut it down.

 

I'm pretty sure you're just talking about THQ, who are not the current owners. If you're talking about the European company- Nordic Games- who bought it and talked about the acquisition process last week, then please, tell me more, because I've obviously missed something.

 

I got my information from Wikipedia. It may have been outdated.

[EDIT]

It is. The tweet was in January. So Platinum didn't get it. Pity. That could have been interesting.

 

Yeah, Darksiders was not purchased in the first round. It was later purchased by Nordic Games (along with a bunch of other properties). I'm not sure what they intend to do with the franchise.

A Darksiders game made by Platinum would have been incredible, I agree.

 

It's neat that Microsoft is backpedaling like a motherfucker right now and all, but I'm still not buying their shitty ass console.

It still has the goddamn Kinect, a piece of hardware I will forever be unimpressed with.
It's still less powerful than the PS4, so I'm more likely to see better graphics on my PS4, or on my PC.
Microsoft still treats indie developers like fucking shit.
The X1 is still more expensive than the PS4
PS+ is still cheaper than XBLG
PS+ is still a better deal than XBLG (Fucking free games. XBLG's little offer they put out will only last until X1 launches.)
Ports of Japanese games I want to play are always more likely to come over on Playstation than xbox. Microsoft is pretty much permanently dead on arrival in Japan.



The DRM pissed me off, but Microsoft would have to somehow fix more than half of this list before they could convince me to not jump ship from 360 to PS3/PS4.

 

If you thought that you don't know how steam came about, that or you really didn't pay attention. Steam became the biggest digital distribution service on an open platform (there's nothing stopping other competing distribution stores existing, and indeed they do) through standard capitalistic practice of competitive pricing, convenience and clever marketing (which is what TF2 and Dota 2 really are). People used steam because it became better for them than buying used games off the shelf, not because they couldn't. The existence of non-Valve steamworks only games is a relatively new thing.

What Microsoft wanted to do is create only digital distribution (effectively, since the disks would become pointless) on their own closed platform, therefore removing the only competition for their revenue. They wouldn't then have given competitive pricing on their games. What exactly would they be competing against? They planned on selling a massive installed userbase on brandpower alone (that would then be forced to use their online store, since unlike free digital distribution services, most people don't just change consoles even if they then realize it's a far better deal), that much is obvious by how shaken they were by the backlash that resulted in this current backpedaling.

Microsoft's plan was never to create a system like steam, it was to create its evil opposite.

 

Here's that interview I talked about. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty much all PR speak. Oh well, it was still at least somewhat interesting.

The company clearly refuses to acknowledge that some people don't want anything to do with Kinect (again unsurprisingly) and Whitten had no answer for Patrick's question about what happens with a cloud-based game (eg. Forza) that's offline, which is unfortunate; that could have been interesting.

 

http://www.house.gov/capuano/news/2013/pr061313.shtml

If they get this through it's another nail into MS's XBone BS.

 

I've heard something about a German law that the Kinect is gonna set off alarms regarding, too. They're being suspiciously silent on whether it's required to plug the Kinect in to use the console, and they haven't even said whether you can just put blu-tac over the camera or something without the 180 refusing to play ball.

Considering the recent NSA stuff, this has some admittedly silly people in something of a tizzy.

 

Very silly people, given they could just not buy a fucking Xbone. Viola, no Kinect in your living room, whether its made to watch you or not.

 

That's the same justification used by loan sharks, snake oil salesmen and con-artists of all stripes.
"Don't want to be screwed over, just take your business elsewhere."

The problem with your logic, is that people who aren't technologically (or economically, medically and so on) literate enough to understand when they're being taken for a ride aren't fair game. Consumer protections aren't there for the sake of the people who can spot a bad deal a mile away and steer clear, they're there for the people who can't.

 

Ah, that's a bit of a mistake on my part in reading comprehension and logic, probably because I need to sleep. I was talking in the context of people being worried about Kinect spying on them, not the use of Kinect spying on people as an idea being ethically ok.

Dunno how I managed to miss that train of thought.

 

Because 'fuck you, got mine' is apparently your first mental port of call?

 

Not sure how accurate this is but got a chuckle out of me when I saw it on tumblr.

 

Hey guys. I'm here to assuage your fears about the X-Box One... BEHOLD!

YOU CAN PAUSE GAMES!

 

The fact that they're including that as a selling point tells me that Micro$oft knows nothing about the gaming community. This despite making two very successful gaming consoles.

 

Uh, they mean "suspend" as in "put the console to sleep." This is a feature that both the PS4 and XBone are expected to have because it's a fucking incredible feature.

Seriously, having to find a checkpoint or save point or whatever (in games where you can't just save wherever you want) to stop playing is a massive pain in the ass. This also means you don't have to deal with the start-up process for games/consoles, either, which again is a pretty huge deal.

This is worth advertising. That feature is legitimately probably the Vita/3DS's best fucking feature (the Vita does a lot better at conserving battery life with it for some reason, though. Not sure what the magicians at Sony did to make that happen.)

In other words: the difference between having this feature and not having it is minutes of start-up (and probably a similar amount, if not dramatically more, on shut-down.) It's a huge deal.

 

I'm usually pretty "fuck yeah new tech and less load times," but at the same time, I'm sad that I agree that missing out on 90 seconds of my time by not having the suspend feature would bother me.

That is like the worst sentence ever. Oh well.

 

The PS4 and XB1 remind me a lot of this thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_com

Whenever a competitor is struggling to compete with its competition... they add on as many as useless features as possible to try and stay relevant. Sony at least has been trying to make their press, "About the games." Even if they're throwing this share stuff at you, among other things.

"Suspending play" as in, offering some kind of "freeze save" would be nice, but I don't think it'll work like that - you can freeze your game as long as the console stays on, or the person you're living with doesn't decide he wants to play a different game on your system.

Checkpoints being a problem is seriously ridiculous, if game developers programmed save features into their games (like 90% of PC games have), there wouldn't be any issue. Not that checkpoints aren't so incredibly generous most of the time, that it matters whether you save your progress or not, these days...