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.

Not unlike Capcom in the penchant for disappointment.

Capcom Is an Abusive Parent

Exalt Breath of Fire fans, the day of thine fondest yearning draws near! Breath of Fire has lain dormant for ten long years, and anon most people never truly expected to see a sequel, yet the hardcore Breath of Fire faithful never fully gave up hope that they would one day hold in their eager hands a gilded digital treasure in the form of Breath of Fire VI. Breath of Fire fans can finally rejoice this week, as Capcom has heard their earnest pleas, and has responded by indulgently granting them a full multi-platform sequel to their cherished franchise. But lo, what devilry is this? What wretched and crippled thing has clad itself in Breath of Fire‘s garb? What is this social monstrosity that is so sorely maligned by an ugly flash-based veneer, and belabored neath the heavy yoke of browser gaming?

Wonder upon wonders, Breath of Fire has shown not a sign of life in ten years, yet funnily enough the franchise now feels deader today than it did last week. Yes, Breath of Fire is to receive the full browser/smartphone social gaming treatment [replete with the exclusive use of touch controls] – delivering a concerted ‘fuck you’ to fans who have stuck with the franchise over its many ups and downs. Breath of Fire fans commenting commenting on gaming media have been suitably caustic towards this penile slap in the face from Capcom, yet happily for Capcom the Cat Fancy brains trust are a mite more forgiving.

Incidentally, just this week the world of gaming has seen the net result of Capcom’s ongoing franchise abuse of the Resident Evil series. Hot on the heels of Operation Raccoon City [over two million units initially sold across PS3 and 360] and Resident Evil 6 [4.8 million units initially sold across PS3 and 360], Resident Evil: Revelations, indisputably the strongest entry in the series since 2005′s masterful Resident Evil 4, has sold a mere 900,000 units across PS3, 360, PC, and Wii U after two and a half months on sale – a figure which is substantially the same as the sales generated by its earlier 3DS release alone.

If a company continually abuses its franchises, then little by little they will go away. That said, it is not like Capcom was doing anything with Breath of Fire, so this only really stands to hurt their reputation, which could not really be lower at this point. At any rate, one is heartily glad not to number among the Breath of Fire fanbase, as the week’s news would be soul-crushing elsewise.

The Microsoft hivemind remains operational.

Next-Gen News

This week Microsoft has confirmed that they have increased the speed of Xbone’s GPU by a scant 53MHZ, constituting a gain in performance of 6.62 percent from this modest overclock. It is perhaps a tad churlish to damn Microsoft when they fail to compete in the technological armsrace, and then turn around and damn them when they finally do – yet their past history with adding last minute features to their consoles inspires little confidence when considering an Xbone overclock, and nor do reports that Microsoft were already having trouble controlling the core temperature of the Xbone’s APU on account of its large size and five billion resident transistors. So, any takers for Xbone early adoption off the back of this news?

At any rate, Lusipurr.com makes the bold prediction that the only next-gen specification which will now matter to Xboners is the GPU frequency, because goodness knows performance will always scale linearly with a graphics chip’s clock.

Elsewhere on the internet a follow-up to last week’s PS3 rumours has emerged. Readers may recall that Digital Foundry ‘journalist’, Richard Leadbetter, claimed to have viewed official Sony documentation which he claimed confirmed that PS4 developers would only have access to 5.5GB of RAM [a floating figure which he later revised down to just 5GB of RAM]. As it turns out PS4 developers have subsequently been lining up around the block to inform Leadbetter that he is full of shit. Vblank Entertainment’s Brian Provinciano [of Retro City Rampage fame], a confirmed PS4 developer, took to Twitter to bluntly state:

“It’s absolutely false. Absolutely ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, a verified industry insider by the name of Thuway has confirmed on NeoGAF that the amount of RAM available to PS4 developers is actually 6GB – presumably 5GB of dedicated RAM and 1GB of flexible RAM, with only 2GB being reserved by the system’s OS.

“This cannot be repeated enough. No matter how many times this was said, there is “disappointment” and an insistence that Sony is crafting a machine that isn’t focused on gaming. Stop it GAF.
WITH THIS SAID: There are games in development that are using 6 GB of RAM. I will not say any more about this.
I will say: the RAM situation on launch, will not reflect the RAM situation in two years, and not reflect the RAM situation at the end of the console’s life cycle.
Another hint I’ve been trying to drop is that there is potential for an upclock a few years into the console life cycle for both Xbox One and PS4. This can give a late generation graphics boost similar to the one on PSP. (Optimistic parrot hopes for a 2.4 TF 1 GHZ GPU).”

At any rate, the damage has been done – both to Sony’s PR efforts and to Digital Foundry’s reputation. As Brian Provinciano puts it:

“What’s worse is the ripple effect. A quick Google search shows headlines going from “Rumor” to “Report: Nearly Half…”, to “BREAKING”, to flat out “HALF Of PS4 RAM Saved For OS” . Suddenly there are gamers screaming that they’re cancelling their pre-order. Someone else tweets “It’s true. Sony’s basically admitted it in their statement”, misreading the official comment. This is sadly how things work. It’s a game of telephone.”

A game of telephone indeed, when a man is not as good as his word.

Vanille and Fan Translation Patches are things of which Lusipurr.com wholly approves.

An English Patch for Final Fantasy Type-0 Is in the Works

How often are readers able to say that they have read a piece of positive gaming news on Lusipurr.com? Once or twice yearly? At any rate, it is perhaps advisable to brace one’s self because we have the motherload of eagerly anticipated JRPG news inbound. It is almost as though the colossal shittiness of Capcom’s weekly antics was sufficient to substantially throw-off the cosmic scales of global JRPG karma, and thus obliged something good to happen in order to redress the balance, because it would seem that in return we are to receive an English patch for Final Fantasy Type-0 [AKA that game that should have been released instead of a billion Final Fantasy XIII sequels].

It will perhaps never be known quite why Square Enix have refused to release Final Fantasy Type-0 in the West. One rumour has Square Enix butting heads with Sony over whether or not the game would have a physical release [and effectively shelving a game which had been predominantly translated], yet, given Square Enix’s atrociously poor efforts in releasing their most popular PSP games [Crisis Core, Birth by Sleep] to PSN, it is wholly possible that Square Enix simply skipped Western territories due to entirely irrational reasons. At any rate, Square Enix have failed to to release the game in a timely fashion, and so the gamers at Sky’s RomHacking Nest have taken matters into their own hands. Surprisingly, the project looks fairly far along.

As of the 22nd of June 98 percent of the romhacking has been completed, 90 percent of graphic translation [i.e. non-text-file writing] has been completed, 40 percent of the story text has been completed, 20 percent of secondary text has been completed, and zero percent of videos have been completed. Hearteningly, perusal of the relevant Sky’s RomHacking Nest project page reveals a moderate sample of completed gamescreens and captured footage, which ostensibly appears to range from decent to great in terms of translation quality.

Perhaps the only disheartening aspect of the game, is the fact that watching the sample video seemingly confirms that one of Final Fantasy Type-0‘s party members is a virtual carbon-copy of Final Fantasy XIII‘s Snow in terms of personality. One fondly remembers the days when the designated ‘tough guy’ of a Final Fantasy title was able to be cool like Auron, Shadow, and Cid instead of a noxious knuckle-head.

[Editorial Note: this post has gone live with placeholder pictures because pictures were not provided to the editorial staff before the cut-off time.]

What will it be next week?

Another Day, Another Xbone 180!

Another week, another flip-flop from a Microsoft intent on aping the success of Sony’s highly regarded PS4. Does this sound like old news? It bloody well should! Microsoft has this week elected to ape Sony and Nintendo’s* next generation policy of allowing indy developers to freely self-publish games on their digital storefronts. Funnily enough, Microsoft also elected this week to reaffirm their commitment to Kinect, which probably means that they will backflip on that feature next week – and they may as well, seeing as their one Kinect launch exclusive, Kinect Sports Rivals, has been pushed back into 2014 on account of being too shit.

“We have no plans to introduce an Xbox One without Kinect. We believe in Kinect and the value it brings to both games and entertainment, and believe $499 is a great value for what consumers receive with their Xbox One.”

In addition Microsoft have absurdly trotted out some half-baked assertion that Xbone owners will be able to program games on their new system, making a [presumed] pitch to the same market as the Ouya, along with all those odd British home computers of the 1980s.

“Our vision is that every person can be a creator. That every Xbox One can be used for development, that every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox Live. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox Live. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August.

Opportunities for more kids/students to learn to program and build games is a great outcome of this policy.”

One must call bullshit right here. If Sony had to remove highly restricted access to Linux on the PS3 to maintain their system’s security, then there is no way that Microsoft intend to expose the Xbone’s innards to curious programmers over the long-haul – especially not when this plan has seemingly been in development for all of a week! This is yet another instance of a desperate Microsoft telling everyone what they assume they would like to hear, while charting no committed direction for their indecisive console.

Additionally, Retro City Rampage‘s Brian Provinciano has stated that he is under the impression that self-publishing on the Xbone will not actually allow developers access the the Xbone hardware, but rather is a cynical attempt to manipulate indy developers into developing apps for the Windows 8 storefront:

“This is yet another example of them changing policy, but it sounding better than it is when the whole story is revealed, make no mistake; while this is a great thing, it’s again not the equivalent to what other platforms offer.

On PS4, for example, developers can tap right into the system; use every bit of RAM and all of its power. Indies have access to everything that the AAA studios do, from platform support to development and release. The indication on Xbox One is that it’s essentially XBLIG 2.0. Instead of XNA, it’s Windows 8. Windows 8, which is already struggling to gain developer interest, will gain a boost from developers wishing to target the console. However, it won’t be as full-fledged as published games on the system.”

Is there a point at which an intense combination of greed, laziness, dishonesty, and incompetence can truly be said to be evil? If there is, then Microsoft has surely passed it several miles down the road.

*Interestingly, Japanese indy developers cannot freely self-publish on Nintendo's regionally schizophrenic console.

“I’ll take that RAM!”

[RUMOUR]: Sony’s PS4 May Have Significantly Less Available RAM than Initially Thought

Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter last night made the proclamation that of the PS4′s 8GB of RAM, a mere 4.5GB would be available to developers as a fixed memory pool, while 2.5GB would be reserved by the OS, and 1GB of flexible RAM would be available to developers provided that the OS did not require it – which would make for a very odd and nonsensical design choice indeed. Leadbetter claimed to speak from a position of authority after gaining access to this information by way of “current PlayStation 4 documentation shown to Digital Foundry by a well-placed development source“, yet part of this information was disproved by a Sony statement, while other aspects of the information were later contradicted by Leadbetter himself.

Sony did indeed confirm that the PS4 will contain one fixed and pool of RAM and one flexible pool of RAM, yet, contrary to Leadbetter’s claims, both pools will be under the full control of the developer. Sony would not be drawn on the numeric figure of both pools of RAM.

“We would like to clear up a misunderstanding regarding our “direct” and “flexible” memory systems. The article states that “flexible” memory is borrowed from the OS, and must be returned when requested – that’s not actually the case.

We have no comment to make on the amount of memory reserved by the system or what it is used for.”

Since the initial publishing of the article, Leadbetter has also satisfied himself in a subsequent reckon that the PS4 will actually have even less available RAM than initially reported, with only 512MB of RAM available from the pool of flexible RAM, as confirmed by “A new source familiar with the matter“. Leadbetter contends that this new mysterious source has confirmed that only 512MB of the flexible memory is physical, while the other 512MB is virtual memory space, the use of which will lead to paging issues. Unfortunately, Leadbetter’s second source proves to be just as unreliable as the first, confirming that “only 4.5GB of the PS4′s 8GB GDDR5 memory pool is guaranteed to game developers right now“, which was later debunked by Sony.

Richard Leadbetter claimed to have access to current PS4 documentation, yet his information proved to be about as accurate as Chinese whispers. This suggests that he was either lying, or that he and his anonymous sources were not knowledgeable enough to interpret the information accurately. The fact that his sources supplied information that contradicted one another is reason enough to suggest that neither should be believed, and that the figure of available RAM could just as easily be 2GB or 6GB &c.

Meanwhile, Sony’s refusal to supply clear numbers could be an indication that doing so would be to confirm people’s worst fears, or it could simply be due to the fact that they are uncertain as to how much RAM they ultimately wish to free up for developers. The PS4′s OS is still in active development, and Sony may want to hold on to a bit of RAM in case they wish to add additional features down the line. At any rate, One should not be terribly surprised to see a memory split similar in volume to Leadbetter’s description be confirmed anon, yet his article clearly does not hold up to scrutiny, and thus cannot be taken at face value.

It would not actually be terribly silly of Sony to reserve a large chunk of the memory for the OS, given that there is only a finite quantity of memory that can be used for a 1080p30 screen buffer – though developers could certainly use the excess RAM for caching information. The full [and heavily edited] article can be located here.

Hey, kid. Do you want to play a game? You just have to promise not to tell your Mom.

Disgraced Studio Launches Another Doomed Kickstarter

If there is one thing to be said for Precursor Games [other than they are a haven for rock spiders], it is that they are possessed of an optimism that is not entirely keeping with reality. The launch of Precursor’s prior two concurrent crowdsourcing initiatives for Shadow of the Eternals did not get off to a good start. The team responsible first defrauded Activision in order to produce their Shadow of the Eternals vertical slice, they then drove Silicon Knights into the ground, established Precursor to dodge their debts to Epic Games, set-up a Kickstarter asking for 1.5 million dollars in order to produce a two hour game episode, and then filmed a twenty minute video disputing a Kotaku article written about their misdeeds in the most unconvincing way possible.

Since Precursor were forced to pull their previous funding drives even more disaster has struck, with the company’s founder being arrested for distributing child pornography. Now they have once again resurfaced on Kickstarter, and are asking for $750,000 in order to produce an eight-to-ten hour game for PC, Wii U, and PS4. What in all of fuck possesses them to think that gamers would trust them to make good on delivering a full length game while supporting an extra platform for half of the cost that they initially allotted for their production of a two hour episode?

Things become even more amusing when this deeply unrealistic team begins to try and explain away why they had to pull their initial campaign:

“And that’s also one of the reasons why we wanted to restart the Kickstarter, because we had a lot of opportunities come up [like becoming official PS4 developers during the break, specifically for Shadow], and the only way to integrate those opportunities was to relaunch our Kickstarter. Once you’re locked in, you’re locked in on that campaign. It was the best option for us.”

That is right – they could not have supported PS4 without completely scuppering their first failing Kickstarter, and launching another! One supposes that is actually true enough, since they would be developing precisely nothing elsewise.

Precursor Games scarcely raised over three-hundred thousand dollars last time around from both of their funding pages combined, so one should think it unthinkable that they would raise over twice that amount with the current pedophilia scandal hanging over their collective heads. Indeed, their Kickstarter quickly grossed over $114,000 yesterday, yet has slowed quite considerably today, adding just twenty-five thousand. At any rate, [despite its great unlikelihood] one is in two minds about the game getting funded – is it better to see Dyack’s Kickstarter fail abysmally? Or would it perhaps be preferable to see the project funded so as to enjoy watching as the studio fails on a grander scale?

On a final note, a word of warning. The police may well think that they have their man, but pedophiles tend to hunt in packs, and Denis Dyack has never confirmed for a fact that he is not a pedophile. Think about it…