That suspend gameplay thing will work exactly like it does on Vita. Press a button, you'll instantly go to home menu thing and can use the store or whatever you want.

Everything except play another game probably.

 

Well, that's one way to suspend the game on the Vita, but not actually the one they're talking about. What they're actually talking about is the feature where, when you press the Vita's power button, the Vita will go into sleep mode. When you hit the PS button or power button again (and swipe to unlock the screen), the game will immediately resume from where you left off.

A fun note: this works wherever you are in the game. Even mid-cutscene. For example, if you're in the middle of watching an anime cutscene in Persona 4 and suspend it, when you wake the system back up the cutscene will keep playing like nothing happened.

This is actually a huge feature. It is not useless. And really, even if you add in a quicksave (ala PC games), you still have to quit and reload the game. With this feature, if you're just pausing the game to do something else for a while, that's not actually necessary! The game will just resume exactly where it left off. No console start-up, no game start-up, nothing.

Of course, it won't do anything about if you want to play another game. I'm pretty sure that the way consoles dedicate memory/CPU would make that impossible?

These aren't useless features though? They're really useful. People enjoy streaming games, and having used systems with a suspend feature, that shit is incredible.

No shit you can't keep your game suspended if you actually turn your system off or want to play another game. This is asinine.

Sometimes checkpoints are a little further away than you'd like. Sometimes games are developed with save points (or checkpoints) fairly far away from each other. Hell, sometimes you have to restart the level when you turn off the game, regardless of checkpoints! These are all legitimate problems if you have to do something else and you don't want to lose progress without a suspend system. Granted, you could probably just turn the TV off or something, but there are reasons you might not want to do that (conserving power, for one. Then there are games like Dark Souls, where you actually basically can't pause.)

EDIT: Man, this post is way too long. :|

 

lol? then how does this differ from a fucking pause button that games have had since the early 90's (or before? I dunno the first game with a fucking pause function), listen to yourself, it's not asinine. What's asinine is claiming your system offers a pause function... as something noteworth... something that games have had for decades now.

It's not asinine. They could design a way to save the entire state of the system by serializing bits, or something. That would be a feature that would save developers from having to all implement fancy save game code.

 

Because it can pause at any time (regular pause buttons can't pause during cinematics, for instance), and it allows you to put your console into sleep mode and/or screw around with its other features instead of being forced to just leave it. It's a lot more useful than a regular pause, and it's one of the things that I love the most about my 3DS. So yeah, noteworthy enough to include as part of an ad.

 

It's handy, yes.

But it most certainly shouldn't be pointed out on the add for a next gen console.

 

Which is already included in the 360 by pushing the Xbox button once in the middle of gameplay. Essentially every game I've ever played on the 360 can be 'hard paused' this way, and it almost always extends to cutscenes as well, unlike the standard pause button.

This is not revolutionary, and you should feel bad for backing them up on the idea that it's a selling point. The 360 already had this, and I'd be surprised if the PS3 did not as well, though I never owned one so I can't be sure. This is like them claiming that they have this new revolutionary feature where the mechanical box will extend a tray to accept a shiny disk in lieu of you having to pray to the sky gods Wi and Fi for your gaming experience.

 

Except in a lot of games, pressing the middle button doesn't stop the cutscenes and sometimes not even gameplay. And leaving it on too long enough times will result in red rings. (From my experience)

 

I've never gotten a red ring except on my first 360 which died quite some time ago, and it doesn't stop cutscenes in maybe three games I've played. And unlike most people nowadays, I keep all my games, and I rent new ones every weekend. I've played a lot of games.

This isn't a feature. They're just taking a tool that was only really used to market themselves at you, and making it more blanket than it was before. And the only reason it wasn't that way to start with is because they hadn't figured out yet that they could get some idiots to go buy more things from them in the middle of a cutscene.

Explain to me why anyone should be impressed.

 

No trying to argue, just saying that I appreciate this feature (or whatever you want to call it) and the news of it especially if it means buying one Xbox to last me the generation.

Who knows, maybe I can download games during sleep mode? That'd be pretty kickin/useful.

 

As far as the Vita is concerned, you can download games while it's asleep, but only if it puts itself to sleep. It's weird.

This is not a pause button and it's not the same as returning to the XMB/Home screen. This is effectively turning your system off without actually turning it off (by instead putting it into a low-power state where it maintains whatever you were doing when you put it to sleep.)

Yes, you can compare it to a pause button or the home button, but it really is different enough to be notable.

 

Not as a feature it isn't. What you're describing is "sleep mode," and it's not a feature to brag about. It's pretty standard. That they have to smear this around as an endorsement to their machine tells you just how hard they're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

 

It's pretty standard to everything except consoles. For whatever reason, up until this gen, consoles haven't had a sleep mode feature. Handhelds picked it up with the DS/PSP and improved on it with the 3DS (and especially Vita), but home consoles? Never had it.

Also I think pausing your in-game state and saving that while it's asleep makes it a little different from a normal sleep mode, but I've never tried putting my PC to sleep while watching a movie or something, so I'm not sure.

 

Sorry, I had to post this here, just for the singing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfGdMfO8CEg