It’s also bigger, which means more value for money.

Digital Foundry Declares Xbox One the Unanimous Winner of Next-Gen Technological Showdown

There have been many spurious rumours floating around regarding the supposed superiority of PS4 ports of certain next generation multiplatform ports, yet until now gamers have been unable to compare the games directly, and it seems that the Sony defense force might be in for a bit of a rude awakening. Richard Leadbetter, the technical mastermind behind Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, has spent some time with both next-gen consoles, and has come to the simple conclusion that the Xbox One is hands-down the more capable console.

Much has been made of the PS4′s resolution, yet extensive analysis has revealed that the Xbox One is able to trump this easily through the use of Microsoft’s patented super pixel technology. Super pixels are essentially the same thing as regular pixels, yet have the potential to be rendered up to two times larger. What this means for Xbox One games is that the same scene can be rendered using fewer pixels, meaning that the Xbox One can dedicate additional graphical resources to improving core graphical effects which the PS4 must instead expend on rendering out pixels.

The Xbox One’s advantages do not end there, as the console features many fixed function proprietary components designed to enhance gameplay, the most notable of which is the console’s use of high-latency dedicated lag buffers. Many credible sources have noted that when frames are displayed after being rendered the alacrity of their appearance can serve to make a game’s control input noticeably twitchy. The Xbox One’s lag buffers are able to mitigate this phenomenon by synching rendered frames and the game’s control input scheme to a later timing, making for digital experiences which are much more consistent.

Finally, the Xbox One is set to be the exclusive home of a number of next-generation rendering techniques only supported by Microsoft’s newest Direct X 11.69 revision. These techniques include: cartographical mapping, parasol shading techniques, and the newest advent in particle effect technology, granular particles [the Xbox One is practically packed full of the things]. All these qualities combine to make Xbox One the true home of next generation gaming, while the PS4 struggles to keep up.

Achievement unlocked 1000G: You are an American.

Microsoft Execs Promote the Powerful Xbox One

When you have a machine that is as undeniably powerful as the Xbox One, it should practically sell itself. Nonetheless, this week Microsoft executives have been talking up the absolute sense that a day-1 Xbox One purchase makes for every consumer. Microsoft’s Phill Spencer believes that the current nonsense over game resolutions will blow over once consumers buy an Xbox One on launch day, and are able to experience those super pixels for themselves. Games after all are about fun, not arbitrary numbers like 720p. The Xbox One is all about the games, and more powerful platforms such as the PC cannot hope to match its impressive line-up of exclusive software, like Titanfall. Moreover, the platforms competing with the Xbox One certainly are not the best all-in-one machines, so consumers looking at the PC or PS4 to serve as all-in-one devices will be sorely disappointed. Devices which utilise outdated some-in-one technology are unable to play TV, which makes their status as gaming consoles appear somewhat untenable. Only Microsoft and Xbox One will allow gamers to collect achievements and generate gamerscore by watching TV!

“Go play the games and tell us what you think about what they look. Right now, gamers don’t have the games to go play. They can’t walk into their local store and play the games. So, it doesn’t really surprise me that they’re going to focus on the specs that they can. I don’t criticize anyone for doing that. In the end, we play the games, not the resolution. I think it’ll blow over as people get to play the games.

If people want to get hung up on the numbers, they can do that, but really what they should be looking at is what’s on screen, with the controller in their hands, and play[ing] the game. If they really care they can go play Forza at 1080p / 60 fps; a beautiful game. But games should be defined by more than their framerate and resolution. I think this is an industry about fun and people should put the controller in their hand – or gesture – and play the games and decide what they like. I think that’s the soul of what this industry’s about.”

Microsoft Canada’s director of marketing, Craig Flannagan, is of the opinion that the Xbox One is so powerful that the next console generation will span more than a decade! To him the Xbox One is by far the superior proposition on account of its superior raft of services, such as TV. It is for this reason that the Xbox One will constitute the the best Christmas gift for gamers this, or indeed any other, holiday season.

“Xbox One is going to start ahead, in terms of the experience we can deliver,” Flannagan said. “And because we’re built for the future, we’re going to stay ahead. I think there is not a better experience you can buy this holiday, and there will not be a time this generation where there’s a better experience you can buy than Xbox One…And it’s probably going to be a pretty long generation. We’re probably here for a while because we’re built for the future. This is a console that will last you, conservatively a decade, if I had to put a bet down today.”

If this does not constitute proof that the Xbox One will dominate the video game industry for the next decade, then one does not know what would. The Xbox One UI features 100% more television integration than either of its competitors, so by that metric we can determine that it is the clearly superior gaming console. At this point the console’s only detractors appear to be Japanese racists who hate our freedom.

Xbox One is much more streamlined, meaning that it goes faster!

Developers Speak Out in Favour of the Xbox One’s Power

Developers love the Xbox One! The console gives them the power to make the best looking games of the next generation, with technologies such as super pixels and granular particle effects set to positively differentiate it from the less advanced competition. The development community loves the Xbox One so much that a broad selection of the development community this week spontaneously decided to reach out to game journalists in order to speak out in favour of Xbox One development.

For Dan Greenawalt, the creative director of Turn 10 who has been involved in the development of Forza 5, support for a 1080p resolution is something developers have to plan from the beginning, which is why PC gamers are unable to force 1080p for the handful of titles which do not support it, such as Dark Souls.

“You don’t happen your way into 1080p, it doesn’t matter how much power you have. You plan it from the beginning. And 60fps is even harder – it has to be in the culture of your team that every little aspect of content, the code, everything has to be developed that way. You start off with that plan and you build that plan.

For Danny Isaac, an executive producer for Rare who is currently working on Kinect Sports Rivals, the next console generation is more about innovation than it is about power. Isaac recounts the way that his game accidentally ended up with a 1080p resolution, and makes the extremely important point that the human eye can only notice changes in resolution up to 900p, and no more [making emerging technologies like 4k more than a little superfluous]. He also notes that with Kinect the Xbox one has the greatest controller that the world has ever seen, a development that Sony’s PS4 is ill-placed to match.

“We actually started at 720p and we didn’t think we had a problem there. The world still looked lush. The water looked fantastic. We went up to 960 and it got a bit crisper, and I remember looking at it going, ‘actually, yeah, that’s a big improvement.

One is really an amalgamation of a number of things. You have great graphical fidelity and power, but then we’ve got the sensor. We have a great controller.”

Crytek design director, P J Esteves, highlights the absurdity of gamers who fixate of arbitrary details like 720p, by noting that games already looked just fine on last generation’s consoles, so there is no real need to do anything differently. He also points out the absolute fact that there is absolutely no perceptible difference in image quality between native 1080p and a 900p image that has been stretched to fit a 1080p resolution [the trick must be in the Xbox One's superior use of nautical scaling].

“People just get really caught up because that’s what some people want to talk about, because I don’t think they have enough games to really sink their teeth into to figure out what that really means. But Crysis 2 was running at 720 and that game was beautiful on Xbox 360 for that time. Crysis 3 as well. Go figure.

The difference between 900 and 1080 it’s like… when some of the best rendering programmers in the world, when we sit down and look at the difference and they’re like, no, 900 is fine, the difference is infinitesimal that you’re not going to really recognise it.”

One is most pleased that the foremost technical minds of the development community decided to come out and dispel some of the myths surrounding this so-called 1080p business. This will no doubt allow most anyone who was on the fence about whether or not to buy an Xbox One to make their purchase with full confidence that the Xbox one is the most powerful console available for five hundred dollars.

Leviathan as depicted in Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy Versus XIII Resurfaces as Final Fantasy XV

Lusipurr.com has long been tipping Final Fantasy Versus XIII‘s rebranding as Final Fantasy XV for next generation consoles, and this week’s E3 has seen this prediction borne out as fact. Not as accurate was the Lusipurr.com prediction that Final Fantasy XV would remain a Sony exclusive. This prediction was based on insider information that Sony were assisting with the game’s development; Sony’s assistance, if indeed there was any at all, must have been extremely marginal in nature, as the game has also been confirmed for Xbone release.

Final Fantasy XV‘s reintroduction at Sony’s press conference was an occasion for much excitement. The game itself looks beautiful, with an attention to detail to environmental modelling rarely found outside of games developed by Naughty Dog. The game does a good job of justifying its upgrade to a next generation title, with a tempest of visual effects swirling around the battlefield at all times, and the Leviathan fight quite simply must be seen in order to be believed.

In all, the game appears to be quite polished, mature, and fully-featured. One of the most initially exciting aspects of Square Enix’s E3 presentation was the reveal of Kingdom Hearts III subsequent to Final Fantasy XV. This was because Tetsuya Nomura has frequently stated that production of Kingdom Hearts III would not begin until Final Fantasy Versus XIII neared completion, as the Kingdom Hearts team is responsible for Final Fantasy Verses XIII‘s development – this looked to seemingly indicate that Final Fantasy XV was nearing completion. This excitement was quickly doused however, when Square Enix announced the following morning that Kingdom Hearts III would be developed by the B-team responsible for 2010′s mediocre Birth by Sleep. This means that once again there is no ETA on the game’s release, as there was no predicted launch window mentioned during the game’s showing.

As for Kingdom Hearts III, one would not expect it any time soon – Square Enix is notorious for announcing games well before they are ready to do so, and this looks to be no exception. By Nomura’s own admission:

“Since the release of Kingdom Hearts II, I believe that many fans were feeling impatient due to our continuous releases of spin-off titles, so we decided to announce it at the same time as Final Fantasy XV. However, looking at the current development status, I think we may have announced it a little too early.”

In Square Enix parlance “a little too early” means greater than seven years from release.

Don Mattrick

Xbox One Only Works in One Country

Last week Microsoft’s Craig Davidson boldly claimed that “We will kill Sony at E3“, and nothing could have been further from the truth. In all fairness Microsoft probably did have a slightly better showing of third party exclusives – but not may of them looked very interesting. The Microsoft exclusive to garner the most attention, Titanfall [360, Xbone, PC], is a grey-brown borefest created by the guys behind Call of Duty; so nothing new there. Capcom have served up another exclusive helping of Dead Rising, but the Keiji Inafune magic is long gone, as the game is just a grey-brown zombie game which, by Capcom’s own admission, is seeking to court Call of Duty players. The only Xbone third party exclusives which looked to have any real promise were Remedy’s Quantum Break and Sweary 65′s episodic adventure game D4. While this may provide Xbone with a notional edge over PS4, it is more than neutered by much weaker showings in terms of first party and indy titles – with only Halo 5 and Forza 5 being worth a mention.

Xbone’s E3 showing has also seen the uncovering of many details pertaining to the console itself – none of which cast it in a particularly flattering light. Anything which could have gone wrong for Xbone this week did, starting with a fairly staggering pricepoint: $499. This week several anonymous Lusipurr.com sources confirmed to us that Gamestop employees had received specific instruction that they were not to recomend the purchase of an Xbone to their customers, and that in the event of a customer wishing to purchase Microsoft’s console, they were to try and convince them to buy a PS4 instead; this coincides with reports that Gamestop has stated that they are willing to buy every PS4 console that Sony can manufacture this year. This perhaps explains why Microsoft has announced this week that they will open 605 Microsoft stores inside of Best Buy stores within the North American region; 500 of which will be located in the US, and 105 in Canada. This seems like the sort of move that an out-of-touch manufacturer pursues when not too many retail stores are overly interested in stocking their lackluster products.

But nothing has been more injurious to the Xbone throughout this E3 than Microsoft’s own ham-fisted attempts at PR. When asked what he would like to say to Xbox fans unable to meet the internet requirements of Microsoft’s DRM disaster-box, Don “Alf” Mattrick stated:

“Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity. It’s called Xbox 360, if you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device.”

Let them eat cake indeed! Similarly, it has come to light that an Xbone console will only be functional within the IP range of a supported country [of which there are significantly fewer than the supported launch territories for the 360]. This means that importing an Xbone console and games from a foreign market simply will not work, and that people will not be able to take their Xbone consoles with them when traveling in foreign lands, as the console will not be able to connect to authentication servers. When asked by Twitter-user Gregor Ivesic about what these IP restrictions will mean for travelling Xboners, Xbox Support 2 helpfully stated:

“You’ll be able to play when you return home. I travel with an Xbox 360 for road gaming.”

It stands to be said that Xbox Support 1 did not fare much better at articulating the virtues of the Xbone. When Twitter-user Mark Doherty queried them on what would happen should an Xboner have their XBL account banned for poor conduct, Xbox Support 1 replied:

“If your account is banned, you also forfeit the licenses to any games that have licenses tied to it as listed in the ToU.”

Thus, should an Xboner be found guilty of conduct unbecoming, it is goodbye games library – a prospect which is at any rate immanent, owing to the inbuilt redundancy of Xbone games once the servers are switched off. It also stands to be said that not all accounts are banned for legitimate reasons, as the process could not be any less transparent and accountable if it were administered by Barrack Obama himself.

Finally, it has come to light that Microsoft had all of their E3 demos running on Windows 7 PCs with Nvidia GTX 700 series GPUs. It is not uncommon for trade-show demos to be run from PC development kits which are made to mimic the capabilities of the console they are purported to represent – but the Xbone runs on Windows 8 kernel with an AMD graphics chip, meaning that Microsoft were not even trying to mimic the performance profile of their Xbone!

PlayStation 4 Game Sharing Method

Sony Wins E3 Handily

After Microsoft’s complete bollocksing of the Xbone all that Sony needed to do in order to come out smelling of roses was to not fuck it all up – one is happy to report that Sony went beyond the call of duty in this regard. Sony’s announcement that their PS4 console would not be subject to the same shitty DRM and used game restrictions as the Xbone lent an atmosphere of festival celebration to the remainder of this year’s E3 proceedings. In an inspired move Shuhei Yoshida even appeared in a Youtube video detailing the process involved in lending a PS4 title to a friend [a transaction which is as simple as handing over the game, and being thanked for it]. Sony’s support of the used game industry gave jaded gamers a reason to once again regard the eighth console generation with hope instead of bitterness, but the real cherry on top of the presentation was when it was announced that the console would be available for $399, a full $100 cheaper than Microsoft’s failbox. Lusipurr.com readers will also not be terribly surprised to learn that Sony’s PS4 is once again region-free, which contrasts wonderfully with the Xbone’s complete inability to function outside of one’s domestic boarders. In short, PS4 is the obvious choice for gamers who want to game, and who care about gaming.

In terms of games, the PS4 did not feature much in the way of surprising corporate third party exclusives [the only one of note being Final Fantasy XIV], yet boasted a metric fuckton of interesting indy titles. In terms of Sony exclusives Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is probably still the title to watch, but Compulsion Games’ visually striking platformer Contrast, and Supergiant Games’ highly anticipated turn-based strategy title Transistor are definitely shaping up as titles to own. In terms of first party software Killzone: Shadow Fall, Infamous: Second Son, and Knack continue to look like promising affairs. Infamous: Second Son in particular showcased footage which looked nothing short of spectacular, making it a launch-window title to pay attention to. Finally, a completely new PS4 announcement was made in the form of Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886, a game which looks to combine Victorian England, steampunk technology, and Arthurian references with good old fashioned monster slaying. The game looks quite promising in terms setting, but any actual gameplay was not in evidence at the Sony conference, and so the title remains very much an unknown quantity. Interestingly, two of the four first party franchises underpinning the PS4 are completely new IP, which contrasts very nicely with the predictable first party offerings of rival consoles.

The Wii U is buried. With honour.

Nintendo Did Not Manage to Turn the Ship Around

Nintendo were this week in the paradoxical position of showcasing the most recognisably enjoyable exclusive titles of any of the three console manufacturers, yet nevertheless being seen to come up woefully short. Due to the flagging fortunes and scant library of the Wii U, Nintendo really needed to unveil at least one piece of software capable of surprising and intriguing gamers. Nintendo regularly recycles their existing IP, which is OK, but in order to wrest back Wii U sales momentum they really needed to bring a fresh and exciting interpretation to the existing IP [think Mario 64, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime]. Instead what Nintendo unveiled was a bunch of Wii U franchise games which were heavily based on their 3DS counterparts. Mario 3D World and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze are, at a glance, visually indistinguishable from their 3DS/Wii counterparts, Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8 are utterly known quantities and will not be available until mid-2014, while Wind Waker HD is just a GameCube HD port. Monolithsoft’s X still looks quite lovely and is due for release in 2014, while the next proper installment of Zelda will no doubt be spectacular, but is probably several years away from actual release. The Wii U has a finite window of opportunity in which to turn around its fortunes. It needs games which are both novel and delightful, and the games that Nintendo showcased will not get the job done. Given that Nintendo’s E3 showing featured many games which will not even see release until 2014, one can only conclude that they have nothing on the immediate horizon capable of saving the Wii U. Mario and Donkey Kong do look very nice though.