Author Archives: Jonathan Cresswell

We start with a disclaimer.

It doesn’t matter that none of it is gameplay. Then let’s get a quote on the screen.

Maybe some blood fades over the quote too.

A silhouetted man walks slowly through the plains, or a ruined city. A man, remember, this is a video game.

A voiceover monologue talks about how things were before it happened and how we live in times of desperation like he’s some sort of fucking poet when he should be more concerned with surviving.

Some light beams through the clouds as the atmospheric music plays. Maybe a choir.

Blackout.

It’s dramatic. Voiceover pauses. “And that’s… when it all changed.”

Boom. The music kicks up, maybe some metal, we’re moving away from dubstep. A tiny bit, anyway. This section is all CG. Sorry, in-engine. Some shootout. Real close up.

The fight concludes with a slow-mo shot of a gun being held above a head. Man, he’s so badass.

Fast cut to the car chase

More close-ups that clearly won’t represent how it is to play – cars bash in to eachother and nothing slows down despite the fact you’ll be heavily penalised for driving like that in the game.

A car swooshes by the camera in slow motion. REAL slow. Show off those reflections. Stick on a good sound for that swoosh-by for good measure.

Top down shot of the action. It pulls back to reveal a view of the city. It stops, to think that’s the end OH WAIT NO, let’s pull back to reveal that it’s the ENTIRE WORLD.

That’s right – a persistent online world. No-one thought of that.

Pull back again. Reveal the world is being shown… on a tablet.

Someone taps the screen to make a helicopter strike, because we don’t want to look out of touch and we know what these popular “tablets” are, just not what you’re actually using them for.

Boom. Fade to title.

It’s also coming to the PS4 but Microsoft gave us some cash if we shut up about that for now.

If you’ve read Microsoft’s explanation of “how game licensing works on the Xbox One” and thought, “wow, that sounds a bit difficult” then don’t worry – as we’ve got an easy step-by-step guide of what you can do with your Xbox One.

Step 1: Get your Xbox One

Step 2: Take it to a store

Step 3: Trade in the Xbox One and get anything else instead

See, it’s easy!

You’re no longer the key demographic, it’s an event about the platform not the games, and all tech announcements tend to be met with cynicism.

Those things are all true, but let’s get them out of the way because it doesn’t stop the criticisms being true either.
The new Xbox One is supposed to be “simple, instant and complete” however in reality it seems to be “instant”, at best. When you’re setting out a bold new preposition to sell your new, expensive electronics box, it’s probably best to give people a reason to buy one over their perfectly usable existing Xbox.

So if we accept it’s no longer just about games – and judging by the time spent on it last night – it’s all about entertainment. That’s fantastic, I spend much more time using the video-on-demand services on the 360 than gaming, but am yet to see how the new Xbox considerably improves on that. There’s voice commands, which just reminds me of a scene from 30 Rock where the TV turns itself off because someone said it on a show. It’s a silly thing that decent technology could prevent, but people watching the announcement last night reported that it kept cutting off as each time the video showed a voice command, their original Kinect was listening and trying to do it. That really bodes well from the future.

Pressing “TV” and “HDMI” on my remote is hardly a difficult experience that needs revolutionising, and besides, you need a separate approved tuner box to provide the TV source, it suffers from the same issues as Google TV where it can’t really control the recorder on a tuner so you still need to switch back on your TV AND this isn’t even coming to the UK at launch. Simple, instant and complete.

The all in one system… if ‘one’ means requiring a new console, Xbox Live subscription and set top box.

How else do they plan on improving that experience? Personalisation and recommendations. Lovely, but they probably should have gotten round to that already. You’ve got basic multitasking with the ‘snap’ feature to have a browser or app alongside your TV viewing – but people have already decided how to do that with their phones and tablets, they’ve moved on. How does having the extra things on the TV screen inherently improve it? That’s yet to be proven, and this is just playing catch up.

Multifunctional consoles are great – but for that to thrive they need a more open ecosystem for apps (not mentioned) and those functions to be considerably better than how they work on my 360 to justify a replacement! And I may be biased because of my involvement in it… but why not try attracting the radio industry? If they’re all about woo-ing big partners, there is more than just sports and TV out there.

It’s early days for the announcement, but it’s not early days for the console. Microsoft and Sony’s attempts to wrangle a last year or two extra out of their consoles has led to some stagnation – we’ve seen some great games, but everything’s slowed down in anticipation. There should be more ready to reveal. People’s interest has moved on, and elsewhere.

And that’s what worries me – If you’re going to do entertainment, do it well. Big expensive development on games needs a bigger audience, and other things can help drive audiences to games (see: phones). Build up an app ecosystem, truly link together video services in a useful way. Don’t just add more voice control and act like that really is what people are after. People don’t need a console, make them want it. Make them want to spend the considerable amount of money replacing their existing console with a better one. And the earlier the better – not in three years time, where media and technology will have moved on elsewhere too.

At least the showing of Forza and Call of Duty means they’re aware they still do need to actually do things people want – you need to keep the existing audiences happy, absolutely – you need to go further to get people who aren’t still buying those. And I’m not just talking about Kinect. Maybe we’ll see that at E3. I’ll wait and see, and suspect some of this mess may become clearer. More features. More games.But after this long waiting for the console itself, we shouldn’t really be up in the air this much. There’s always going to be unanswered questions at this stage but there’s a need for more clarity – see the mess over preowned games and sharing with friends. Their attempts to clarify the situation have clarified very little.

But hey, simple, instant and complete. Maybe it feels like that for them. Just not for everyone else yet.

With all the excitement (and bile, there’s exaggerations both ways) over Google Glass now it’s in the hands of “explorers”, I was starting to feel a bit jealous.

So I decided to make my own.

For the radio show Connected, we’d already turned Instagram in to glasses, FIFA 13 in to Monopoly and Curiosity in to a home toy. So we’ve proven our ability to bodge things together in the name of technological development.

This time, I took the Instaglasses – and added an 808 car key micro-camera. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to make heads or tails of how it works and aiming it seems to be an artform science has yet to understand.

The idea was that they should try and slip away, it be subtle and not too obvious… But mysteriously everyone noticed them and kept talking about them.

So here’s my… creative attempts at photography. Introducing, the home made Google Glass project.

Turns out, a lot of work, money, research and development are actually necessary. Who knew.

There’s been endless discussion about the tone of discussions on social media about recent events in the news and it’s getting tiring.

So to address that, I’m adding to that discussion. By writing about the discussion. I’ll let you make your own Inception jokes.

In the last week, there appears to be two major themes when a breaking news story hits Twitter. First – there’s the people discussing an event. Second, the people discussing how you’re allowed to discuss it.

It’s overwhelming – don’t tweet this, don’t tweet about that, don’t tweet in that tone. While there’s no problem with the occasional reminder of tone (and some people clearly need it), it’s becoming dominant.

With the death of Baroness Thatcher, the instant reaction included telling us they were switching off Twitter because of what was to come – and telling us what we can and can’t discuss. Maybe it says more about who I follow, but I didn’t see this predicted barrage of vile without looking for it.

While with the terrible events of Boston, thankfully there was no such expectations of hatred, my feed still became self aware and discussed what was not allowed to be discussed until further notice. I appreciate the sentiment, but sometimes feels a bit much.

And we all know repeatedly telling people they can’t write something is a foolproof tactic on the internet.

I’d hope that despite generally often sometimes occasionally being a bit of an idiot, I’m not going to be as tasteless or insensitive during an issue like that. Sure, it’s not aimed at me personally (or at least, I’d hope so), but having tweet after tweet in my feed directed at the reader saying what they’re allowed to write, how dare they say such things, what you’re supposed to do next… it feels like I’m being accused.

That’s not to say this is intentional. The ‘Twitter mob’ is an interesting phenomenon, particularly because of their unorganised nature. Many people individually come to the same, sometimes reasonable opinions, but because everyone shares them you end up with a mass of messages that feels like an onslaught.

Because it’s easier to hear people you can actually get a sense of scale. Perhaps more people could search and use the retweet button? If you agree with the sentiment, just share it, so there’s less of a chance of annoyance through duplication. The power of numbers can be a very effective tool, but in these cases it’s very effective at winding me up.

Or as the great scholar of communication, Professor Ronan Keating once said, you say it best when you say nothing at all.

There I go, telling people how they should tweet. Ugh. So annoying.