Things I like about the PS4 controller:

• The headphone jack is pretty useful for playing late at night without disturbing the neighbors.
• The ‘share’ button is neat, and I will have to be careful to not spam the hell out of everyone once I get around to authorizing the PS4 for Twitter.

Things I dislike about the PS4 controller:

• Comes with a charge cable that is way too short to use while playing. My chair is right next to the console and it’s short, I can’t imagine using it in the usual arrangement of the console under the TV. It seems to be a pretty ordinary USB cable on both ends, so I’ll probably be replacing it with one that’s comparable in length to the 8-10′ charge cable that came with the 360; I don’t know what the hell Sony was thinking when they decided 6′ was enough.
• Battery runs out super fast. I could get like a whole lost weekend of cordless playing on the 360, the PS4 barely lets me play for a whole day without having to recharge. (Or is it just that I never really noticed recharging the 360’s controller because the cable made it possible to seamlessly move between wireless play and charging?)
• That stupid light on it. Why does my controller need to light up the room. Games can control its color but you can’t actually see the light as it’s aimed completely away from you so it’s not as if it’s really conveying any information; supposedly it is maybe there to work with the camera, but I have a projection screen and will thus never, ever be getting a camera. You can dim it, but you can’t turn it off. I suspect this is not helping the battery issues. I stuck some tape over it; I don’t need to have an eerie blue light cast on my thighs while I’m lounging there playing games.
• The ‘options’ button (which tends to get used for pause/menus/etc) is way too close to the giant touchpad, and hard to hit quickly.

I spilled water on my external keyboard the other night. Some keys are now just Not Working even after letting it dry out; I think it’s time for a new one.

I just tried taking my old white/clear 109-key keyboard out of the closet and plugging it in. Oh god this thing why did anyone ever think it was a great keyboard. Huge keys with a long throw distance and loud clacky noises. Plus I have to hit the space bar super emphatically to make one. Guh. I have gotten so used to the light touch of Apple’s laptop keyboards; this is maddening. I mean it’s clear the space bar is a little misaligned or something, but even so. This thing is so NOISY.

Today’s first to-do item: get new external keyboard.

The back of my brain keeps saying get a ps4 lately. But the front keeps saying there are not any ps4 system sellers for me.

So this post is me figuring out which console I actually want for the next generation. I’m kinda reluctant to have ALL OF THEM!!!!, I don’t want to return to the days of a massive stack of consoles dominating my living room.

Nobody seems to have any backwards compatability, so the tempting backcatalog of a lot of funky little pretty indy PS3 excusives, as well as stuff like Okami, is not going to be a factor in the PS4. If that did exist it would pretty much be a no-brainer.

Stuff I have coming from Kickstarter:
Hover. Open-world Jet Set Radio. PC, Mac, XBone, PS4, Wii U.

Night In The Woods: whimsical 2D spooky metroidvania, PC, Mac, PS4, possibly others but it’s hard to tell.

Hyper Light Drifter: 2D turbo Zelda. PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Ouya (snicker).

Shantae, Half-Genie Hero: 2D hair-whipping festival. All the consoles.

The Fall: PC, Mac, Wii U.

So basically the Kickstarter vote is a mild push towards the PS4; I was perfectly happy playing the first part of the Fall on my computer.

XBone ($350) exclusives that interest me:
Sunset Overdrive. This looks like the bastard child of Ratchet & Clank, Jet Set Radio, and Saints Row. Building my own crazy-ass character then going rail-grinding with a bunch of absurd weapons? In a colorful world? Yes please this is my happy place.

Scalebound (2015): You are a dude and that is a major strike against it for me – I have realized that I am basically done with big-budget 3d games that require me to be a dude, I spent thirty years pretending to be one iRL, I don’t need to keep doing it in video games. But you are a dude who has lots of dragon friends and fights lots of other dragons, plus it is from the people who did Bayonetta.

Cuphead (2015): Side-scrolling platform shooting, done in the style of Fleischer cartoons. Will also be on Steam, but it seems to be Bone-only for consoles, which is really where I prefer to do my gaming. (And who knows if there’ll be a Mac version on Steam.)

Ori and the Blind Forest (2015): Looks like a very very pretty 2D platformer. Not a system seller but it looks like it could be a nice bonus.

Wii U ($300) exclusives that interest me:
Bayonetta 2. IT’S A GAME ABOUT BEING A SUPER SEXY WITCH WHO KICKS ASS.

Also there are a few games that are kinda in the ‘eh I guess’ level for this but basically it is Bayonetta, I give zero shits about Nintendo’s own characters except maybe if the new Zelda is really really really pretty.

PS4 ($400) exclusives that interest me:
I don’t think there’s a single PS4 exclusive that would sell me the system! There’s some kinda-maybes – From Software’s next game, which basically looks like ‘Dark Souls in Victorian London’, the utter nostalgia fest of a Shadow of the Beast reboot, reissues of a few interesting indy PS3 games (Unfinished Swan, Flower, Journey, etc), but do all of these bits of mild interest plus maybe Night in the Woods win?

(Hmm, also Transistor is a PS4/PC only…)

The XBone definitely wins on exclusives right now.

The PS4 is, from what I can see, generally doing better on framerates and resolution. So the next question becomes, what does the cross-platform landscape look like to me? Answer: lots of games where you are a gritty grim dude doing gritty grim things. And eventually Saints Row 5 (or maybe not, apparently sr5 DROPS THE CHARACTER CUSTOMIZER?) (It’s also worth noting that my projector only goes up to 720p, so the PS4’s ability to do 1080p is kinda useless.)

Also I just asked Jeff Minter what his platform plans are, yes that is a factor. “Ps4/Morpheus”, he says. Well that’s a vote for the PS4.

edit. On the gripping hand, the 360 and PS3 came out in 2005/2006, it has been eight years since the last new systems. I got my 360 in like 2012. I don’t think it’s out of line to imagine the new machines sticking around for a decade, and myself buying whichever of Bone/4 I don’t buy now about five years down the line. And maybe even getting a WiiU when I find one used for like $50 next to a copy of Bayonetta 2. Sorry, Nintendo.

(And for fun, here is a rough list of the different generations of video game consoles, and how long they lasted. The start and end dates are about the middle of the release years for each wave.)

odyessy gen0: 72-75 3y

o2/pong gen1: 75-78 3y

2600/intellivision/coleco gen2:78-83 5y

The Crash: 83-86 3y

nes gen3: 86-90 4y

snes/genny gen4: 90-94 4y

ps/n64: 94-2000 6y

dc/ps2/gc/xbox: 00-05 5y

ps3/x360/wii: 05-13 8y

ps4/xbone/wiiu: 13-?

Stuff I did today:

• Dealt with a bunch of email, including nailing down a little drink-&-draw meeting I’m putting together this week.
• Cleaned up the studio some.
• Laundry. It still needs folding; I’ll do that tomorrow. Everything is clean, though.
• Installed a new power strip in my living room and neatened the hell out of all the cables tangled up between the projector/speaker/360.
• Ordered a video cable long enough to hang the projector from the ceiling so I can get my living room table back.
• Cleaned the bong.
• Played Amalur for a while. Again.

Stuff I did not do despite putting it on my to-do list for the day;

• Draw Rita!

Eh. It’s barely 5. I can still do that while eating dinner. There’s panels to rough out. And my apartment is finally starting to recover from the chaos incurred by shipping book 2, and lots of back-to-back travel.

Edit: Roughed out two of the… four? panels remaining on the next page, plus panels on four later pages. And wrote some dialogue for those next few pages too; I’d been putting Rita4’s farewell speech off for a while.

Tonight, I went to Jason’s game night for the first time in a while. We played two games: Cosmic Encounter, and Viva Java.

Cosmic Encounter should need no introduction to most of the people reading this; it’s a classic game of light-hearted space treachery for nerds. In my opinion, any game of CE where people have to start analyzing the rules to figure out exactly what should happen is a win for everyone involved, and this game went well:

I was the Masochists, whose special power is that they can win by losing every single one of their tokens. I’d quietly put my last few tokens into allying to defending against an attack that would have won the game for the attackers; when the defenders win – which they did – defensive alles go back to any base their players own. But if you have no bases on anyone’s planets (yours or the other players), your tokens go into the same place all the other dead tokens go. Which meant I won when the next turn began. After the other players looked at the rules, and decided that yes, this sure sounded like what was supposed to happen, nicely played you magificent bastard you.

Except I didn’t win, because another player tossed a Cosmic Zap card, which nullified that use of my power. So they had one turn to cobble together some other kind of victory. Everyone else was one base away from winning the game, and there were frantic attempts to try to pull together a 4-way or 2-way victory when the Destiny Deck dictated that I was not the person who would be attacked that turn. I don’t recall who actually got the official win – I think it was a 4-way – but damn, I pulled off a sweet move that triggered a moment of Rules Lawyering; in my book I pretty much won.

And then we tried a game our host had gotten off of Kickstarter a while back. It was this thing called Viva Java  that really wanted to have about seven players. Which, at this point, we had – a seventh had come in halfway through Cosmic Encounter and spectated.

This game mostly taught me one thing: if I’m ever doing the graphic design for a board/card game, test it in low light conditions. Because this game utterly failed to work in the moderate light of Jason’s living room. Like a lot of West Coast houses, there’s no overhead light. And this game? Well, this game has lots of brown in it, because of the coffee theme. We had to try and distinguish between brown bean tokens and red-brown bean tokens. We had to try and distinguish between black, red-brown, blue, and green icons, all of which were… pretty much black, unless we shone a flashlight on them. We had to try and parse reference cards printed in white on pale tan backgrounds. It was really gorgeously themed, with some really pretty art on the cards, but wringing any sense out of the damn thing took an awful lot of work. If there’s anyone colorblind in the group, you can put it right back on the shelf – it’s hard enough for people with full color vision to tell things apart.

It didn’t help that it is very much a Euro game. It’s hard to recover from Incorrect Play in your first few moves, it’s very very analytical and dry. And it kinda depends on holding a lot of state about which colors of beans other players are holding in their bags of beans in your head, when you can barely tell what color they’re picking up sometimes. And, well, I’m the one who proposed Cosmic Encounter. I’m an Ameritrash player. Its mechanics did support its theme interestingly, but honestly I got to a point where we’d all run out of wisecracks to make about its design problems and got bored waiting for my turn to come up, and took out my phone and started playing Threes. I might have lasted longer if I’d been able to actually tell what the hell I was looking at at a glance instead of having to squint closely at everything.

The general consensus around the table was that it needed work, even from the people who are totally into hyper-analytical Eurogames. Even playing the simple introductory rules felt like there was a little too much going on; it might have been improved by adding some more things from the full version, but I suspect there would still be some superfluous mechanics. Dunno. I doubt I’ll ever end up playing it again, in part because it requires seven people to supposedly get good, in part because it’s just not my kind of game…

Seriously people this is a wonderful SF movie, go see it. It gave me all the feels that 2001 was supposed to induce but never did for me. Sit back and let it wash over you in all its quiet magnificence. (Yes, quiet. All the extereior space shots are silent except for the occasional musical cue. YAY SILENCE IN SPACE.)

I’d seen some suggestions that it is kinda mauldin, but honestly for me it earnt its way to tugging on my heartstrings; I cried at a couple of bits and didn’t feel used and manipulated the way I do when I’m watching a Disney feature mash down on my emotional buttons.

Also in the cinema bathroom afterwards I discovered that no, it’s not just me, automatic toilets flush in the space between getting the tissue over the seat and you putting your ass down for cisladies, too. There is no secret lore my mom failed to pass down to me about those things.

There are three keys on my computer whose paint is starting to show severe wear: E, N, and O.

E is pretty obvious; it’s the most common letter in the English language. But I find it interesting that the next most common letters – T and A – look as good as the day I bought the machine.

I have a strong suspicion that N gets a lot of extra use on my computer because it’s the shortcut for the pencil tool in Illustrator. I hit that a LOT, from a slightly weird angle as I’m usually controlling AI with my right hand on the stylus and my left hand on the keyboard.

O, I’m not sure of – in Illustrator it’s the shortcut for the mirror tool, which is not one I’m constantly using. Maybe I just hit command-O to open files a lot?