Game musings and news

[Thad]

I've admired all of Analogue's clone consoles but haven't actually bought one as of yet.

The Analogue Pocket seems like it might be the one to buy. It's portable but it's going to have a dock, and it's also going to have a second FPGA for homebrew cores. I'm not crazy about the form factor (horizontal handhelds always feel more comfortable to me than vertical ones), but nonetheless this looks damned impressive.

[Brantly B.]

I pretty much want one for all the features that have fuck-all to do with video games.

[Thad]

Outer Worlds, Obsidian's off-brand followup to New Vegas, is getting solid reviews. At launch the PC version will be on the Epic Store and the MS Store; it won't be coming to Steam until next year.

No word on Mac or Linux support yet. Obsidian has been great at Mac and Linux support these past few years, but that was before Microsoft bought them out. I'm hoping we'll see Mac and Linux versions later, but I'm not going to hold my breath, either.

[Thad]

Ars: Google Stadia launch review: Gaming’s “future” looks rough in the present

The one piece of good news (where "good news" is defined as "good for Stadia"):

When running on a wired Ethernet connection, Stadia just about performed as advertised. That means smooth frame rates that generally held at 60fps and controls that felt largely indistinguishable from those on local hardware (even with the Stadia controller connected directly to the router via Wi-Fi). While there was likely some additional input lag over local play, in Ethernet tests it wasn't enough to be noticeable to the naked eye, even for twitchy shooters and fighting games. Playing with friends online was similarly smooth, with no significant lag over a wired connection (though we weren't able to test out online voice communications during the pre-release review period).

The bad news is everything else, which is pretty much what we already knew or expected.

[beatbandito]

I'll believe the frames hold when they add a fighting game.

[Grath]

I'll believe the frames hold when they add a fighting game.

Samurai Shodown is a free inclusion with the premium subscription thing at launch.

[Thad]

And MK11 gets several mentions in the article. Though it bears noting that the article is written by Kyle Orland, not Aurich Lawson (Ars's resident competitive gamer and arcade collector).

I think it's reasonable to conclude that it works well enough for casual fighting game players (at least, under ideal conditions, which include a wired gigabit connection) but that competitive players would notice a difference.

Which is still a pretty impressive technical achievement, and inline with the target audience for Stadia (assuming that such an audience actually exists; how big a market *is* "people with high-speed internet with a very high bandwidth cap who are willing to pay full price for streaming games but don't want to pay for a console or a gaming PC"?).

[Mazian]

I question the "target audience for Stadia" there -- the big marketing push has been that you can play anywhere, not tethered to your PC/TV. That audience is still not going to fare well; for the traveler, hotels with uncongested and high bandwidth wifi are rare, and hotels offering wired connections of any quality are rarer still. Then there's mobile data, and well, we all know how great that is.

[Thad]

Oh, wifi is a whole other story.

Even the "bad" Wi-Fi experience was often "good enough" for slower-paced games like Kine or Gylt, where a bit of visual stuttering or a missed input isn't the end of the world. But on a game like Destiny 2 or Mortal Kombat 11, these frequent and unexplained quality dips did not make me feel like this was the future of gaming.

Perhaps other testers with different routers or Wi-Fi spectrum environments won't see the same wireless issues with Stadia that we did. For now, though, if you plan to use Stadia over Wi-Fi, we highly recommend you borrow a "buddy pass" from a pre-order subscriber and test how the service works in your own home before making the investment.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, the Wi-Fi seems disastrous. Maybe they're banking on 5G, but that's something that's really up in the air (haha) at the moment and certainly not to be counted on.

[Blossom]

I mean

[Newbie]

A fascinating and relevant thread:

[mharr]

Oh man, I'd forgotten those ever existed. We had Solaris blades instead of real computers back at the Uni of Wales graphic design lab. Everyone just used the system to invade each others' desktops with sexual horror, creepypasta and jump scares because the default user security setup was none whatsoever.

It's possible that first impressions such as these accelerated the idea's downfall.

I would note that Google made Stadia because spinning up a new internal project is how you advance your career inside Google. What happens to the project after you leave doesn't even begin to matter.

[pacobird]

I posted as much in the thread but it really would have been a solid idea for universities, since you have to bring thousands of users on board every year and it's always kind of a mess.

Can't speak to the security issues (I'm sure there would have been plenty!) but those would have had a chance to be worked out if anyone had actually used the system.

[Grath]

So far: I'm not good enough at SamSho to notice the latency, playing on my phone on wifi (albeit ~5 feet from the router, gigabit fiber internet) with wired controller which should be the worst case latency for my internet. Mainly I notice that I suck at actually doing fighting game stuff on an XBox 360 controller. (Stadia kit doesn't show up until tomorrow, but I had a USB-C OTG dongle and an old wired 360 controller which is supported (along with Dualshock 4, XBone, and [on Chrome via computer only, not phones] Switch Pro Controller.)

Haven't bought other games yet (seems to be typically 25-50% discount on buying games - most of these are old releases though - if you're paying for the subscription version) and I'm not playing Destiny on a controller, but haven't gotten around to trying it on PC yet.

[Mongrel]

Wait wait wait........

You still buy games on this thing?

[Grath]

Yes, there's a $10/month subscription model (only available version currently) and a free version (next year), $10/month gets you periodic free games (Destiny 2, Samurai Shodown at launch - Destiny 2 is apparently not cross-play with PC, dunno about SamSho but probably not crossplay) plus 4k graphics and discounted purchases of other games.

I'm likely gonna do Borderlands 3 on Stadia, depending on crossplay with EGS/eventually Steam, because I find it the lesser evil than Epic Games Store.

[Mongrel]

Huh. I might've expected a nominal unlock fee for a given game, but a discount that small is another thing that makes this feel like "Why would I even bother?"

[pacobird]

Especially when the world already has worthy gaming subscription services like PS Now and Humble

[Brantly B.]

Google being the lesser evil than Epic is... hm.