Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by L.W. Barker aka ‘Sarge’

I was watching a movie with my family yesterday evening when I glanced down at my phone to see a post from my Sr. Editor, Reuben Karnagerulz Juarez baring the sad news of Satoru Iwata’s death.

My heart dropped like a rock as I reacted…and so strongly was that reaction that my wife paused the film. I was in anguish and totally saddened by this latest Industry loss. It seems so unfair for someone who was on the verge of realizing his biggest ‘NX’ dreams to just be dead! But then I gathered my thoughts and began to write.

Iwata-san, as he was honorably known, was a giant in our Industry who has left behind foot prints on gaming that will be analyzed, admired, and hopefully copied for as long as there are gamers. He was a man with a vision for Nintendo and even through harsh criticism for the few failures in his tenure as CEO, he remained calm and kept that vision going. And not because he was stubborn, but because he believed in his company’s brand and its unwavering ability to deliver quality products to his fellow gamers. A trait that won him Industry-wide respect and made him legendary within our community.

Now with his death, that vision will not die. The essence of Satoru Iwata lingers in the games he created, the memories we share of him, and even in projects yet unborn. Thank you Iwata-san for a job well done. Your enduring legacy is forever.

by Doug Bolton via Belfast Telegraph

A German court has fined a 23-year-old man after he admitted to giving his girlfriend a sedative so that he could keep playing video games with his friends.

As reported by The Local, a court in Caxtrop-Rauxel, a town in eastern Germany, heard that the man’s (now ex) girlfriend had arrived home while he was playing games with his friend one night in August last year.

Keen to keep playing after she came home, the man put sedative in her tea, causing her to sleep until midday the next day.

He told the court: “I only put four or five drops into her tea.”

Even when she awoke from her sleep and heading to work the next day, she said she was still nodding off from the effects of the drugs.

The man admitted what he had done the day after the crime, and she told the court that he had been on drugs at the time – something which contributed to their break-up a few days later.

Ordering the man to pay a €500 fine, the judge said: “Your girlfriend slept long and deeply, which didn’t harm her, but his is certainly a premeditated bodily harm.”

Speaking to the Westdeutche Allgemeine Zeitung, the man said he was now on a straighter path – off drugs for 10 months, and soon beginning an apprenticeship.

by Paul Tassi via Forbes

Once upon a time, companies other than Nintendo thought that the Wii U might replicate the success of its predecessor and become a hit. They thought it was worth it to design exclusive games for the Wii U in the hopes of creating new, lasting franchises incorporating Nintendo’s unique control scheme. This story does not have a happy ending.

One of those companies was Ubisoft, who today has pulled nearly all of their series from the Wii U from Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry, but way back when in 2012, they were one of the system’s biggest supports. They developed what remains one of the only critically acclaimed, non-Nintendo-related games for the system, ZombiU.

Now, three years later, it seems that ZombiU is coming to Xbox One and PS4 as well. Previously, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot complained that despite their best efforts to create a solid product, ZombiU was not profitable due to the Wii U’s install base. Now, they’re hoping the combined ~20-30 million PS4s and Xbox Ones out there will allow the game to rise from the dead.

The hitch here is that the news has not been officially confirmed by Ubisoft yet, but there are a number of signs that indicate this is happening. In both Taiwan and Australia, ratings boards have already passed judgement on the game’s PS4 and Xbox One additions, which naturally can no longer really be called “ZombiU” and is now simply known as “Zombi.”

It’s unclear what kind of visual update the game might get considering it’s jumping to better-performing hardware, and we have no screenshots from the new versions yet. It’s also interesting to note that the original game was very much designed with the Wii U’s gamepad controls in mind, but again, that’s a problem that’s probably easily fixable with a few new menus/minimaps in a more traditional format using Microsoft and Sony ’s traditional systems.

Zombie U’s 77 on Metacritic didn’t exactly make it a GOTY-contender at the time, but for a Wii U game that had no Nintendo involvement whatsoever and was from a Western developer, it’s a solid score, and the game included many unique concepts including permadeath where your old character would turn into a zombie if they died and you’d spawn as a completely new civilian in a safehouse.

This resurrection is a pretty unusual step, as it’s not quite a remaster the way we’ve seen with other games. That process is usually reserved for outright hits, while ZombiU, as Ubisoft said, doesn’t meet that definition. Rather, this is an attempt to salvage a creative project that went nowhere, with many blaming the hardware itself for the failure.

It will be interesting to see how even a revamped version of the game is received on Xbox One and PS4. It’s a problem of standards, where what was considered a solid third-party game near the launch of the Wii U may not look as good two years into the lifecycle of the PS4 and Xbox One. There’s no way on earth I can picture this being a full $60 box title, but Ubisoft has yet to announce anything about pricing, or even its existence, for that matter.

Many will likely compare it to Dying Light, a multiplatform, open world zombie title that is a few ticks lower on the Meta-scale at 74 for PS4 and Xbox One. It’s much larger in scale, but less creative in concept than ZombiU, and not enough of a smash hit to make interested PS4 and Xbox players ignore the new (old) zombie title, most likely.

Nintendo, meanwhile, obviously needs to get back to a place where developers can trust them again to bother making exclusive games like ZombiU. Nintendo is obsessed with creating a “better way to play,” and have mentioned that philosophy will carry through to the NX as well, which will probably experiment with some kind of new control scheme as the last two consoles have. But for two generations now, there have been precious few third party hits on Nintendo consoles. There were a few on the Wii, but almost none on the Wii U, so developers like Ubisoft are going to be wary of being burned again after previously futile efforts.

We’ll see what about Zombi has changed from ZombiU when Ubisoft finally confirms the existence of the new release, which will likely be soon after these leaks.

Update: As everyone is now reminding me, Bayonetta 2 is probably in fact the best non-Nintendo Wii U exclusive. I forgot that series went Nintendo-only for the sequel, and I’m generally not a fan to begin with so it slipped my mind. But if we’re going based on scores and general fan sentiment, yeah, Bayonetta 2 is probably on top here. I wonder if there’s any chance the sequel could go multiplatform if Nintendo’s deal with the developer expires.

by Owen S. Good via Polygon

A Finnish teenager who claimed responsibility for the cyberattack that brought down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network last year has been convicted of more than 50,000 instances of cybercrime.

His punishment, according to Finnish media, is a two-year suspended prison sentence and a requirement to speak out against cybercrime.

Published reports said Julius Kivimaki, 17, known as “zeekill” online, was part of the Lizard Squad group whose denial-of-service attack over the Christmas holiday culminated a monthlong war with another hacker group. Lizard Squad members justified the attacks saying “chaos is entertainment,” in a short email to Polygon at the time.

Both United Kingdom and Finnish authorities made arrests soon after the attacks, which were substantial enough that PlayStation Network later offered subscription extensions, purchase discounts and other premiums to compensate members for the lost time.

At the time of the January arrests, reports suggested Kivimaki faced four months to four years in prison.

The Daily Dot spoke to a victim of Kivimaki’s online harrassment, who said he was “absolutely disgusted by the ruling.” The victim, an American, said Kivimaki called in false threats that sent American law enforcement to his home, and demanded the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation step in.

Model CUH-1200 gets picked apart.

by Gamespot Staff via CNET

The latest iteration of the PlayStation 4 is quieter and more power efficient than previous models Sony has released into the market.

According to analysis conducted by Pocket News, translated and reported by Eurogamer, model CUH-12000–currently only available in Japan–features a smaller motherboard with a new GDDR5 memory configuration.

As opposed to the 16 memory modules the previous PS4 models used, the new version features just eight, which in turn makes it more energy efficient.

The site notes while the size of the main processor is still the same, it has received a new designation, suggesting something has changed internally.

Other changes introduced in the new PS4 model include a new Blu-ray drive design, a new HDMI controller, and a new power supply, which is 80g lighter than the previous one and has a lower energy output.

It also seems that Sony has reduced the amount of noise the PS4’s fan makes, though this has yet to be confirmed. For a more in-depth list of the changes, take a look at the site’s breakdown using the link above.

In June 2015, shortly before E3, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has certified two new PS4 models for release in the US.

A new PS4 model was announced for release in Europe on July 15. Dubbed the “Ultimate Player Edition,” the new model will be available in “select Europe and PAL territories.”

“Offering twice the storage of the existing PS4, you’ll be able to download more of the games you love to your PS4, extend your play with more great add-on content and save and share even more of your best gaming highlights,” Sony said of the new model.

The new model is also 10 percent lighter, weighing a total of 2.5 kg, and also uses 8 percent less energy. Its hard-drive bay cover has a matte finish instead of a glossy one.

by Michael Thomsen via Forbes

Over the last year, there has been much contention about who actually plays video games and what they want from them. A new survey by games research firm Quantic Foundry suggests that much of the vitriol and factional conflict comes from marginal groups at odds with the majority of people who play video games.

Taken from a sample of 1,127 people, about half of whom were regular played massively multiplayer online games (MMO), 66% of agreed or strongly agreed that video games need to be more inclusive in terms of gender and ethnicity. Only 14% disagreed or strongly disagreed, while 21% were neutral. 69.8% of respondents were men, and the average age was 36.7 years old, a slightly above the ESA’s average game player age of 35.

The survey also undermined a number of common assumptions about games and gender, with 91% of respondents disagreeing with the proposition that women “biologically-wired” to prefer certain categories of games. 98% of respondents rejected the idea that video games should serve an “exclusively” male audience, and 85% affirmed the idea that relationships begun through online games can be as “genuine” as those started through face-to-face meetings. A plurality of respondents disagreed with the proposition that Facebook games aren’t “real games,” and 79% rejected the idea that Wii games aren’t “real games.”

The findings are an apt capstone to the last year or so of aggression and abuse directed mostly at women and trans people for criticizing video games’ uncannily homogenous characters and play styles. There was little unusual or offensive about the critiques, and it was largely a reflection of individuals performing services for the benefit of the community that major developers and publishers weren’t. The narrative justification for antagonizing those asserting their right to exist and participate on equal terms in the video game community was built on fear of infiltration from outsiders, people interested in violating the fundamentals of commercial games through an agenda of nepotism and identity politics.

Quantic Foundry’s findings suggest this reaction was indeed reflective of a relatively small group within the wider population of video game players. In part, this is due to the fact that people often talk about the home console industry and the companies that serve it as metonymic with the entire form. As the Electronic Software Association has long enjoyed pointing out in its annual survey of game players, there are more than twice as many women over the age of 18 who play video games than there are boys 18 and younger. The average age of women players is 43, eight years older than the average male player. Though the survey regrettably doesn’t acknowledge trans people, the split between men and women is nearing an equilibrium point at 56% men and 44% women.

These statistics seem surprising in part because the console games industry often feels excessively male-centric, something that’s helped create an anomalous culture of desperate over-identification with a narrow and self-replicating set of experiences. There’s an economic logic underwriting all of this, with the console games industry’s profitability founded on the mania of abandonment, machines that have almost all been sold at or close to a loss in order to profit from games licensing. This has created a culture of perpetual doubt about the sufficiency of the present, something that needs regular proving through testimonial and the displacement of present needs toward future products—the unannounced game, the exclusive for a system you don’t own, the sequel that’s even better.

For years Activision has been the world’s biggest games publisher—though it was finally passed this spring by Warner Bros.—with annual revenue in 2013 topping $4.8 billion driven in large part by 25 million units of Call of Duty: Black Ops II. By contrast, developer King.com had more than 500 million installs of Candy Crush Saga but earned only $2.4 billion in 2014. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 2.8 billion times over the course of its life, and 600 million times in 2014, reaching a group of players far beyond console favorites like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, yet the company made only $169 million in 2014.

Though these companies operate on dramatically different sales models, the larger point is that even the most popular and well-regarded console games reach only a small minority of the overall gaming population. Yet, the degree to which the values and aesthetics of console games have become interchangeable with games culture as a whole has distorted several generations understanding of what games and play are. This has left us with a socially alienated group of consumers encouraged to think they represent a majority that must defend some fundamentally valuable culture that would be lost or diminished through accommodation of others.

The debate about inclusiveness in games thus rests on the assumption that there is something innately valuable in video games, a supposition that becomes kindling for conflict, fueling antagonism by creating a social script of risk and embattled morality that becomes ironic fuel to keep all parties locked in a battle over consumerist identification for a particular subcategory from which only a small group of companies profit. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, theorist and professor Moishe Postone glossed the Marxian idea that the “boundless strivings of capital and its narrow basis are tied to each other” in a kind of dream of “utter boundlessness, a fantasy of freedom as the complete liberation from matter, from nature. The ‘dream of capital’ is becoming the nightmare of that from which it strives to free itself—the planet and its inhabitants.”

In these terms, believing in the value of something that cannot be imagined separate from a process of industrial production, such as a video game, eventually leads one to a faith in the goodness of industry, which comes to justify itself by characterizing everything not industrially driven as a threat, a nightmare from an alien realm. This is a direct violation of the spirit of play, which depends on empowering people to continuously engage with one another in a performative negotiation over what should and shouldn’t be valued, an impulse that rewards curiosity and adaptability over dogma and discipline and cannot have meaning without an openness to all.

Play requires neither games nor video games. It should be of no surprise that people most interested in play also tend toward tolerance and recognition of those outside their own experiences. And it should be more shocking than it is that the companies feeding off that culture have made that attitude seem like an alien presence that must be beaten back at all costs.

by Anthony Domanico via CNET

Here’s the bottlecap collection Seth sent to Bethesda last week. Who knew it would pay off for him?

If you’ve played any of the Fallout video games, you probably know a thing or two about bottle caps, one of the primary forms of digital currency used in the game’s post-apocalyptic United States.

One Fallout fan named Seth loves the series so much that he started collecting bottle caps — the tangible kind you hold in your hand — in real life. Seth amassed quite a collection during 7.5 years of college and grad school, and estimates that he has around 2,240 caps in his possession.

After seeing Bethesda’s announcement for the hotly anticipated Fallout 4, Seth came up with a brilliant idea to see if he could use his bottle cap collection to buy the game when it’s released in November for Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PCs. The first game in the open-world role-playing series came out in 1997 on PCs and Macs.

Seth posted pictures of the caps, as well as the accompanying letter he sent to Bethesda, to an Imgur gallery, hoping his story would become so popular that Bethesda’s PR department wouldn’t dare turn him down. Seth got his wish answered Wednesday when he received an email from Bethesda’s Global Community Lead Matt Grandstaff, who ended up on the receiving end of the 11.2-pound (about 5-kilogram) box of bottle caps Seth sent to Bethesda.

In the email, which was confirmed Thursday by CNET, Grandstaff told Seth he would receive a copy of the game when it’s released, and that Grandstaff plans to take the bottle caps to the People’s Bank of Point Lookout post-haste. That’s a nerdy Fallout joke, of course. For the uninitiated, the People’s Bank of Point Lookout is a fictional pre-apocalyptic bank in the Fallout 3 expansion Point Lookout.

While Seth was successful in getting Bethesda to promise him the game in exchange for bottle caps, Grandstaff was clear that this is only because he was the first to attempt the stunt. Anyone else who wants to play Fallout 4 in November will have to preorder the game with good old-fashioned pre-war money.

by Kristofer Wouk via Digital Trends

As news began to break about the numerous issues affecting the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, players of the console version breathed a sigh of relief and got back to playing the game. Now players of the PlayStation 4 version are having problems of their own, albeit much less severe ones.

Players firing up Batman: Arkham Knight are still able to play the game just fine, but they’re being greeted with a message about the game’s leaderboard support: “A connection to PlayStation Network cannot be established. Gameplay will continue without leaderboard access until a connection is made.”

Not all players are experiencing the issue, but from the number of reports on the game’s message boards and Sony’s community help pages, a significant number of players are affected. Leaderboards are used for the game’s Gotham’s Greatest feature, which lets players see how their friends measure up as Batman.

This isn’t the first time this has happened with a Warner Brothers game at launch. Mortal Kombat X also suffered from similar issues at launch, GameSpot points out.

While it’s surely annoying for some players, this issue pales in comparison to those affecting the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. Bugs and performance issues ran rampant, even for those with powerful graphics cards like Nvidia’s Titan X. Nvidia released a new driver which helped some graphical issues, but file integrity bugs still caused players to have to re-download multiple gigabytes of the game.

Problems were severe enough that Warner Brothers eventually suspended further sales of the game while it worked to fix the issues. Players who had already bought the game had the option of keeping the game and waiting for a patch, or trying out Steam’s new refund system.

At the time of this writing, reports are still coming in regarding PS4 leaderboards, though neither Sony or Batman: Arkham Knight developer Rocksteady have issued a statement.

by Ben Gilbert

Nintendo’s latest home video game console, the Wii U, is a retail failure.

The Wii U simply isn’t competitive with the likes of Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4. Despite the Wii U launching a full year ahead of competition from Microsoft and Sony, Wii U sales lag far behind those of its competitors: the Wii U has sold around 7.5 million units worldwide, while the PlayStation 4 topped 20 million this past February, and the Xbox One is somewhere north of 10 million units as of last holiday.

Nintendo’s chocked up the failure of the Wii U to a handful of factors across the past few years, but has largely settled on one reason: a poor job explaining what the Wii U is and why you should buy it.

The name, for one, makes the Wii U sound like an extension of the original Wii – the wildly popular Nintendo console that pre-dates the Wii U. The fact that the Wii U’s gamepad looks like a weird iPad didn’t help with the perception that the Wii U was simply an extension of the original Wii.

The man who created Super Mario and Donkey Kong, Shigeru Miyamoto – who now oversees the entire games department at Nintendo – offered a more thorough explanation for the Wii U’s failure in a recent interview with NPR. His first reason comes down to price:

“Unfortunately with our latest system, the Wii U, the price point was one that ended up getting a little higher than we wanted.”

But the Wii U launched at a relatively affordable price: $300 for the base model, and $350 for the “deluxe” version (which came with more space to store digital games). That’s at least $50 lower than the price of the PlayStation 4, which launched one year later. Not only did Nintendo have a jump on the competition in terms of launch timing, but also the cost of the system to consumers.

Thankfully, Miyamoto wasn’t done explaining why he thinks the Wii U failed. The bigger issue, he says, is that the defining tech is a tablet-like gamepad, and actual tablets were far, far more powerful.

“What ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii [U] system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them.”

In short: the Wii U’s “unique” characteristic was trumped by the companies that invented the category. Companies like Apple and Samsung were releasing newer, shinier, more powerful tablets every year while Nintendo was simply reacting to the popularity of the tablet phenomena. That remains the case today.

Miyamoto didn’t say anything about Nintendo’s next steps in the hardware world. The company’s repeatedly discussed its successor to the Wii U – currently codenamed “NX” – as well as some form of “Quality of Life” initiative.

He did, however, express his hope for a more positive reception from consumers next time around: “After Wii U, we’re hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.”

by Alex Newhouse

Remember all of those games that you played when you were a kid? Now you can go buy them again. Starting today, GameStop is selling retro games and systems online and in its stores.

Games are available from six consoles: Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, and the original PlayStation.

Be cautious, however. All of the games being sold in this new program are pre-owned. You’ll have to turn to Ebay or another retailer for any mint-condition factory-sealed software you’ve been looking for.

The most expensive games include:

• Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the N64 — $79.99
• Suikoden II for the PlayStation — $89.99
• Cannon Spike for the Dreamcast — $79.99

This marks the beginning of vintage hardware and software sales for the store, which often phases out old games in favor of newer consoles. The store stopped selling PlayStation 2 games in 2013, but began again in March because of high demand.