Days of future past.

I've been neglecting the blog. And it's the fault of Persona 4.

Somehow, a PS2 game has really got it's claws into me. Living a life as a Japanese high schooler, only with less work and more climbing into TVs, has been so compelling that I've completely ignored both Max Payne 3 and Tekken Tag 2, a pair of titles that I've been really excited about finally getting my paws upon. In fact, the only time I've turned my 360 on in the past two weeks was to finally finish Braid last night.

I have, however, been ruminating on whether or not I want a Playstation 4. At the moment, the answer is not until I've seen more games. The signs are good though. Chief among which is the appointment of Mark Cerny as the system architect. What this man does not know about making games is probably not worth knowing. He was a producer on the seminal Sonic 2 and has been a design consultant on pretty much the entire output of both Naughty Dog and Insomniac games. It shows Sony's commitment to making the PS4 a console led by developers rather than engineers.

The PS3 has a reputation of being a bit of an animal to work with, mainly because of it's arcane proprietary architecture. It's exclusives show that when a developer can get to grips with it, the PS3 is still capable of some really amazing stuff, take The Last of Us as a perfect example. However, for me personally, the simple fact of the matter is that the 360 is a better games machine. Multiplatform games, particularly Unreal Engine based games tend to run better on the 360. Couple that with a superior online storefront and the ease of getting a game going and unfortunately for the lifelong Playstation fans, and I count myself as one, the 360 wins out.

Getting into the games on the PS3 is a headache. When I started Resistance 2 I had to wait half an hour for the console to update, another half an hour for a patch to download and install and then just to really rub it in, I had to wait for the game to install as well. While the 360 does all of this, console updates are infrequent, patches never take more than a few minutes and installs are optional. The barrier of entry is lower.

Anyway, enough of the rant, because thankfully it looks like Sony have spotted the problem and are fixing it. The PS4 is always on, always connected, and will download updates and patches in the background as you play. Hooray! Lay on some clever social features such as auto downloads of demos for games you may be interested in and a feature which looks to crib from Windows remote assistance and the PS4 looks set to fix the patching and online bugbears of the PS3. It makes the whole shebang look more attractive to me as a result. Having trouble with that boss? No worries! Hit up a mate and let him or her take over to show you how it's done. Best of all is the mooted streaming tech. No more waiting for that game to download, now you can play it as soon as you hit buy.

Unfortunately the games are the sticking point at the moment. With the exception of Jonathan Blow's latest and Watch Dogs, I'm not seeing a lot new. It basically boils down to more Killzone, more Battlefield, more Assassin's Creed (as much as I do love it), and more Infamous. Sequels basically. Although saying that, the recently announced Thief does look interesting as does Drive Club, but it doesn't really feel next-gen. On a brighter note, there are heartening rumblings that Sony will be embracing the indies, which is fantastic. Some of the best and most imaginative games of recent years have been independently developed, and if Sony really gets on side with the indie studios, helping with discoverability and marketing, we could possibly see something of an indie golden age during the next console generation.

There has been a bit of bitching about the lack of native backwards compatibility, but the fact of the matter is that the architecture of the PS3 and PS4 is so divergent that Sony would have to add a cell chip into the PS4 hardware to make such a thing happen. Anyway, what's wrong with keeping your old consoles? I still have all of mine, I'll be building a shelving set to house them all soon. It's a bit of a bummer that all your PSN titles won't carry over. Maybe Sony can rig up a work around with their new streaming tech. We'll probably have to pay for the privilege, but it'd be worth it to be able to keep playing Journey.

So in conclusion, the prospects are exciting, but really it's all about the games. If the new hardware can fire up the creativity of the developers, then the PS4 will definitely have my attention. I'm interested to see not only what all the extra horsepower can facilitate in terms of new gameplay mechanics, but also if the new Move enabled DualShock with it's touchpad will be less of a useless gimmick than sixaxis turned out to be. It's supposed to be due for Christmas. Watching the PS4 hype machine for next few months is going to be entertaining.

There has been another console announced recently that you may not have heard of. It'll blow the minds of all you retro gamers out there. It's called the RetroN4, and unbelievably, it plays your vintage games through HDMI on your snazzy new HDTV. Does that not sound amazing? As far as I understand it plays both PAL and NTSC NES, SNES, GBA and megadrive cartridges. It packs six controller ports, two for each console, with the SNES pads probably doubling for the GBA. So you now have no excuse to be ignoring those carts gathering dust in the depths of your games collection. It's definitely no looker and I have no idea how it actually works. I'm guessing hardware emulation. And if that's true then I'm hoping it has 2X SaI filtering. It magically polishes up the look of your old games to match your rose tinted memory of them.

I'm wondering how much of a legal grey area it is. We know that the major games companies, Nintendo especially, HATE emulation when it's not them doing it. This is because downloading a rom is piracy, even if the title has been out of general circulation for years and the company that made it isn't making money from it. Will emulating a console using genuine cartridges change that? I was expecting Ouya to become a hotbed of homebrew fullscreen vintage console emulation due to its open source nature, but the RetroN4 sounds slightly less likely to land you in any hot water with the law. Besides, you know it'd be way cooler to be playing your old games on their original carts with genuine control pads than with roms on the generic Ouya pad. Google the RetroN4 and tell me you don't want one.