Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Jacob Kastrenakes

Sony appears to be lending Spider-Man to Marvel in exchange for the studio’s expertise — not its money. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel won’t be paying a dime to put Spider-Man in one of its upcoming films, despite the fact that Sony still holds the character’s film rights. Instead, Sony reportedly sees the free exchange as a way to bolster the Spider-Man franchise, which by most accounts should be doing far better at the box office than it currently is. Marvel is hugely successful at making superhero movies, and that means Spider-Man should be in much better shape the next time Sony puts him in a solo film.

That’s a really interesting exchange for a whole host of reasons. Marvel’s side is perhaps the simplest. For one, it’s great news for Marvel’s fans, who have wanted to see it take back Spider-Man for a long time. It’ll also prime the studio’s movie universe should it ever manage to reacquire the hero’s film rights. But more importantly, the Reporter notes that Marvel still holds Spider-Man’s merchandising rights, so there’s still plenty of money for it to make off of Sony’s films — especially when they’re successful.

What’s more notable is that, with this deal, Sony is basically admitting that it’s not very good at making Spider-Man movies. Under the agreement, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige — who’s generally seen as the mastermind behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe — will co-produce Sony’s next Spider-Man movie. Sony retains final creative control on the films, so there’s plenty that could go wrong, but the intention is quite clearly for Feige to work his magic. After all, Marvel isn’t about to put its other characters into Spider-Man movies that it doesn’t have faith in.

The Reporter bolsters that understanding of this agreement with new details of how the film will be made at Sony. According to its report, producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach — who had been overseeing the Amazing Spider-Man franchise and its planned universe of spinoffs — will merely be executive producers on these new films. While that’s a nice title, it reportedly means that they’ll have little say creatively. That’s a big change, and one that seems to show Sony stepping away from its existing ideas about the character.

That said, Variety reports that Sony is moving forward with its plan to create a world of Spider-Man spinoffs, including Sinister Six, Venom, and an additional movie focused on women. Feige, reportedly, is not expected to have any involvement with the spinoffs. Even so, it’s possible that he’ll be around for the pictures focused on Spider-Man himself. Variety also makes it sound like we shouldn’t be surprised to see Spider-Man pop up in more than one Marvel movie.

How this partnership plays out in the longterm still remains unclear. Sony and Marvel intend to keep working together to some degree, but it isn’t obvious how close that’ll be. If fans want good Spider-Man movies, they should hope that Marvel remains intimately involved. It wouldn’t be surprising for Sony to want that as well: the studio could use a huge franchise, and Marvel’s involvement is the closest guarantee it can get to making a hit.

by Paul Tassi

Thirty years after the debut of the NES, Nintendo still finds themselves as a leader in the video game industry. That’s an unprecedented position to be in, as all Nintendo’s rivals have fallen to their might, and stranger still, Nintendo persists in being the “model” example of many of the best practices of the industry.

DLC has been a huge topic of debate for years now in the industry, with players constantly feeling overcharged or ripped off for content they expected to be in the game in the first place. Nintendo resisted putting DLC in their games at all for years, but now that they have, they’ve shown everyone else what substantive, fairly-priced DLC should look like. Their packs for Mario Kart 8 and Hyrule Warriors are incredibly well-made and offer a huge host of maps, characters, items and more for a below-average price of around $12. Only Nintendo could take a first crack at something like DLC, and end up knocking it out of the park.

Past that, I recently wrote an article detailing the persistent problem that Microsoft and Sony are both having to deal with in this current console generation. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have a distinct lack of good exclusive games. The piece was inspired by the recent lackluster release of The Order: 1886 on PS4, but the trend has continued since launch, and includes Xbox One as well. The two systems have precious few worthwhile exclusives, with all their best games being third party releases. Of course, Nintendo is the exception once again, as it dominated 2014 in terms of high quality exclusives from Mario Kart 8 to Super Smash Bros. Wii U to Bayonetta 2. In an age where Sony and Microsoft are losing their footing when it comes to first party hits, Nintendo is as strong as ever.

And lastly, yesterday I published a lengthy piece detailing the struggle to get AAA game pricing down to $40 for shorter games like multiplayer-only Evolve and single player-only The Order. I said that right now that $40 price point doesn’t really exist, and then I was promptly corrected when readers reminded me that Nintendo prices some console games at $40, and most of their 3DS games are that price as well. Nintendo even has mastered nuances of the industry I didn’t even know about.

All this is to say that Nintendo has the potential to be in a dominating position in the market, and yet as we all know, they’re lagging far behind. They constantly miss their sales projections, and now the Wii U is officially the slowest selling major Nintendo console of all time. With so much going for them, the world would seem to be Nintendo’s, but what’s preventing them from taking the crown?

If I had to sum up Nintendo’s central problem in one idea, it’s that they are failing to modernize. That manifests itself in a few different ways, all of which are bringing the company down as a whole.

Many of the minor ways Nintendo resists modernization are evident recently, like how a lack of a unified account system makes transferring games between systems cumbersome for Nintendo fans. Or how Nintendo’s apparent fear and misunderstanding of YouTube has caused them to try and negotiate a contract with video content creators that’s far more controlling and overreaching than any other in the industry.

But above all else, Nintendo’s failure to modernize comes down to a much more tangible problem, their hardware. It’s why the Wii U has struggled so much as of late, and before that, why the Wii burned so many bridges, despite being a worldwide phenomenon among non-gamers.

Though Nintendo has never relied much on multiplatform third party support for games, and have been content to let their own games be their brightest sales stars, times have changed. Though Nintendo still makes great games, so do third party publishers. The problem is that Nintendo has now gotten to a point where they practically have no third party support at all. After anemic sales on the Wii and then the Wii U, many of the biggest developers have abandoned Nintendo entirely. Worldwide hits like Activision’s Call of Duty and EA’s Madden are no longer released for the Wii U. Ubisoft, after disappointments like ZombiU and hardships like the Wii U port of Watch Dogs, has announced that they will no longer make “adult” games for the system. That was demonstrated this year as they released both a new-gen Assassin’s Creed (Unity) and a last-gen one (Rogue) and somehow neither came out for the Wii U.

All the biggest third party hits of 2014 were nowhere to be found on the Wii U, from Dragon Age to Far Cry to Mordor to Destiny. Sony and Microsoft may not have produced more than one memorable exclusive each during the year, but both of them had the distinct advantage of having all these games in their roster while Nintendo had none.

All of this comes down to their hardware, both in terms of power and concept. Nintendo has struggle painfully getting their hardware to match whatever the current standard is set by their console rivals. They previously bemoaned trying to make the leap to HD in an era where their competitors had crossed that bridge years earlier. The result was the Wii with last-gen capabilities in the era of the Xbox 360 and PS3, and now we have Nintendo finally catching up to those systems, but now once again the industry have moved on to the Xbox One and PS4.

Every time this issues comes up, fans will bemoan the fact that “better graphics don’t make better games.” That’s largely true, and yet that isn’t the issue here at all. By designing a system without the capability to play these modern games that use more powerful engines, Nintendo is slamming the door in the faces of countless hit titles. Combine that with Nintendo’s recent need to have some sort of gameplay gimmick as a core part of their new systems, either the Wiimote waggle or now the Gamepad’s second screen, and developing for them is just too exhausting to bother with. Many developers learned that the hard way for the Wii, a huge-selling console, and now they’re far less motivated to even try for the Wii U, which has only sold a fraction of the amount of its predecessor.

Xbox One and PS4. They have far and away the best first party exclusive line-up out there, including 2-4 of the best games of the year in any given year. They would be an absolute powerhouse if they had access to the other seven games that make up yearly top ten lists. And yet, their inability or lack of desire to keep up technologically with their competition has made them fall far behind instead.

So what to do? Ignoring the much-hated suggestion of Nintendo getting out of hardware entirely and focusing on games, they need to produce a console that catches up or surpasses the current generation in terms of power, during that generation, not afterward. They need to allow their games to be played with a normal controller, and not invent a new gimmick as the focal point of the system, only to end up rarely using it at all.

Though this would have been great advice four years ago, I have to wonder if it’s even possible now. It does seem likely that Nintendo will be the next of the big three to come out with new console hardware, given that the Wii U is older than the other two and Nintendo has already admitted they’re working on something new. And yet, it’s hard to know if A) they’re up to the challenge of making the kind of system they need to and B) if a mid-generation release would be a hit or a disaster.

For a decade now, Nintendo has shown that they just do not have the capacity to match the technical capabilities of their competition for whatever reason. It’s hard to understand how at this point they could just flip some magic switch and produce a console to rival the PS4/One. If they do, it seems like it would take long enough to develop that by the time it does come out, the cycle has begun again.

Secondly, if Nintendo did release a new console, a powerful one, in the next three years or so, how would it sell? Existing Wii U owners may be dismayed they have to upgrade to another Nintendo system already, and current Xbox One and PS4 owners will have already made their choice for the console generation, as only a fraction of the market owns more than one major console given their high cost. Nintendo would be debuting a new console in the middle of a generation that’s already saturated with consoles, and years out, would probably have lower price points to boot compared to a brand new Nintendo system.

But if Nintendo is to stay in the hardware game, this seems like the only plausible way forward for them. Despite Zelda and Starfox supposedly coming in the next year or two, the biggest games of any Nintendo generation, Mario Kart and Smash Bros, have already come and gone. The Wii U will continue to feel more and more dated as time goes on, and it’s hard to imagine a resurgence for it. Recently Nintendo executive have said that “one great game” could save the system, pointing to how Pokémon extended the life of the Game Boy for years, but it’s hard to bank on Nintendo pulling that same rabbit out of the hate twice. Ironically, the only game I can see doing that would be a fully-fledged console Pokémon RPG, something Nintendo seems determined never to make for reasons that forever elude me.

It’s a frustrating situation because Nintendo does so much right in the industry right now, and it’s maddening to see that their biggest problem is their inability to make a modern console that can play the kind of third party games that Nintendo needs to bolster their roster and better their market position. But all the solutions seem like hard, if not impossible answers. Nintendo has survived a good long while now, but their decisions about what comes next for them are going to be incredibly important if they want to remain a fixture in the industry for decades to come.

by Jacob Siegal

2014 had so much potential.

Watch Dogs was going to change the face of gaming as we knew it. Destiny was going to bring MMO conventions to the console in the most incredible mash-up of the generation. Assassin’s Creed Unity was going to revitalize one of the most popular franchises of the past decade.

But none of that happened.

Instead, what we got was one of the sloppiest collection of game releases in recent history. Half of the most anticipated games of the year didn’t work correctly at launch and the other half were delayed to 2015.

Plenty of digital ink has already been spilled over the dangers of preordering, but they say that repetition breeds success, so I’ll throw my hat into the ring.

If we hadn’t preordered Destiny, Bungie and Activision might not already be neck deep in the development of overpriced expansions and a full-fledged sequel due out in 2016. If we hadn’t preordered The Master Chief Collection, we would have known that the multiplayer component of the game was broken before it was sitting on our shelves collecting dust.

This year, make it a priority to avoid preordering games. Yes, you might miss out on a day one release on occasion, but who wants a broken video game on release day anyway? If Evolve launches next month and you can’t get online, it won’t matter whether or not you own it.

So when you find yourself perusing the local GameStop this year, stop and think before putting down $5 for the next big release. Why not wait and see if the game actually works before investing in a product that the developer didn’t finish?

by Steven Tweedie

Oculus showed off its newest Oculus Rift prototype at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and the virtual reality headset has an incredible new feature.

It’s called “spatial audio”, and it makes the virtual environments sound like you’re truly there.

To test this new feature, I was ushered into a room padded with foam to allow for better acoustics.

Spatial audio is incredible: it means if a bird flies overhead in a game, you can hear its chirp travel from behind you, to over your head, and finally to in front of you. If you turn around, the audio responds accordingly. This only adds to the realism.

I got to try a version of the latest “Crescent Bay” Oculus Rift prototype that didn’t feature spatial audio last month at Business Insider’s Ignition conference. More than a month later, I got to try the same demos, but this time with spatial audio, and I can say it certainly makes a big difference.

In one demo created to show off what the spatial audio can do, two giant robot arms that look liked like they belonged in Elon Musk’s Tesla factory faced off in a battle using magical wands. The robot arms moved in circles around me, sending sparks at each other. Thanks to the inclusion of spatial audio, the sounds always matched the physical position of the robots.

If a noise occurred in front of me while I happened to be looking down, the sounds actually moved above my head, which is how it works in reality too.

The best example of the Oculus Rift’s new 3D audio was during a tug-of-war between the two robots for a tiny, squeaky toy rubber duck. After trying to wrestle the duck from each others’ robotic claws, one robot arm grabbed the toy duck and flung it over my shoulder, and I was amazed at how the squeaks traveled from in front of me to directly behind me. I even found myself turning accordingly, just as you would if someone yelled something from a car driving by.

The Oculus Rift already has full positional tracking, meaning you can bend down, lean in, and walk around a small area. This is possible thanks to the new infared camera that tracks the headset’s position at all times using the dots on the front and back of the Rift.

With your movements so closely tracked, tracking audio in the same way is the natural next step, and Oculus is also releasing its spatial audio software to developers so they can add it to their games for the Oculus Rift’s consumer edition launch.

There’s no doubt, however, that this was hands-down the best virtual reality experience I’ve ever had — and I’ve tried the last three virtual reality headsets Oculus has worked on.

This proves it takes more than visuals to trick your mind into truly believing you’re in a virtual environment.

Oculus is still being cagey on when the Oculus Rift consumer edition will launch, so unfortunately virtual reality enthusiasts will have to continue to play the waiting game for now.

Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.

by Steven Tweedie

Virtual reality is coming, and leading the charge is Oculus VR with its highly anticipated Oculus Rift.

But even after being acquired for $2.3 billion from Facebook earlier last year, the Oculus Rift still has its fair share of skeptics who are quick to say it will flop or that people aren’t interested in gaming with a headset strapped to their face.

One look at the Oculus booth at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, however, tells a different story, and proves how popular the Oculus Rift has become.

Oculus had one of the biggest booths at CES this year. Its massive two-story structure housed multiple padded rooms where people could try the most recent prototype of the Rift.

It’s especially impressive when you look at where Oculus was just two years ago. At CES 2013, Oculus didn’t even have a booth. The team ran private demos from a suite at The Venetian, and it was pretty tiny compared to the towering booth this year.

Every time I walked past the Oculus booth while exploring the show floor, there was a line wrapped around the booth as people eagerly waited to try the Rift.

So regardless of what the skeptics say, the Oculus Rift is coming, and all signs are pointing to a truly enormous launch.

by Stephen Totilo

Laura, Chris, and Jenn—I merely asked if a great video game must impress us so much that we’d play it twice, yet now we have Chris and Laura rethinking whether a game they each gave 70 hours of their lives to was worth playing once. How perverse this medium is that those of us who love it are left wondering if it just gave us a great new experience or merely robbed our life of a few days. But it’s not the nature of a video game to be easily consumed, and some of the best ones spar with us. If a game makes me want to pull my hair out, it wasn’t necessarily a bad game. In fact, it might have been excellent.

by Paul Tassi

As I expected, I played a lot of video games over the holidays with family and friends around, and also as expected, I played most of them on the Wii U.

While I’ve played games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. previously, this was the first time I really got to experience them in full, surrounded by other people on my couch. It reaffirmed the notion that Nintendo has produced some of the best games of the year between those two and Bayonetta 2, and the narrative that Nintendo “won” 2014, a year full of otherwise unfortunate news in the gaming industry, holds true.

Nintendo has stepped up with their exclusives in a way Sony and Microsoft MSFT +0.43% haven’t this year. In the endless amount of top ten lists you’ll see littering the internet this time of year, you’ll easily see Mario Kart, Smash and/or Bayonetta on many of them. But if you find more than one or two Sony/Microsoft exclusives, I’d be amazed.

And yet, the argument for the Wii U still is not really an argument for the Wii U. It’s an argument for Nintendo and their ability to make good games. And in turn, that makes us circle back to an old debate. Why does Nintendo have to keep making console hardware?

I worry that 2014, good as it was for Nintendo, will be the year the Wii U peaked. The biggest games of any Nintendo console generation are almost always Smash Bros, Mario Kart and a new Zelda game, and we’re already at two out of three. Yes, Nintendo has many other well-known first party franchises, but those are the big trio, and after they’re out, it’s usually time to start looking ahead to the next system. With Zelda set to (supposedly) debut in 2015, that could be soon, and many are speculating that Nintendo will start talking new hardware shortly. I wouldn’t think this year, but maybe the next.

The way I see it, there are two ways Nintendo could go from here. They could come out with a new, solid piece of hardware that manages to catch them up to the PS4 and Xbox One in terms of power. Not because their current line-up of games looks particularly crappy on the Wii U, but because the relative lack of power combined with gimmicks like the gamepad have resulted in the Wii U losing almost all third party support. A system that could combine their stellar first party line-up with the cross-platform games Xbox One and PS4 share could be gamechanging, and kill the unfortunately true “released on everything but Wii U” meme.

But looking at history, I’m not sure how likely this is. For its last two consoles, Nintendo has been one step behind in terms of the power and scope of their hardware, and their lack of third party support is practically snowballing beyond redemption at this point. As much as I’d love to believe that Nintendo can magically produce a Super Wii that brings them to the generational level of the PS4 and the Xbox One, I’m not sure that will happen.

Rather, the other option is for Nintendo to simply focus on software for consoles rather than hardware. Because the third notion, making another unnecessary, underperforming console, in my eyes, isn’t an option.

I love Wii U games, but I still don’t understand the Wii U itself. From a purely technical perspective, it’s outright worse than its competitors, from horsepower to online capabilities to a hard drive that has less storage space than most of my USB sticks, and can hold about a game and a half before filling up. And that’s the larger version.

But past that, there has been nearly nothing to demonstrate to me why I am better off playing these great games on a Wii U rather than another system. The gamepad was supposed to convince me of this, pitched as a unique way to play, but instead, if anything, it’s a deterrent to the system and even Nintendo hasn’t made good use of it in the biggest games of the year.

When you tap the touchpad of the gamepad screen while playing Smash Bros, the match disappears and you see a simple readout of character portraits and damage percentages in its place, something that adds exactly nothing to the game itself, and actually takes away information. Mario Kart is a little better in terms of what it offers, a horn, a listing of who is in what place, and track map that shows where everyone is, yet it’s impossible to actually use. Looking down even for a half second to try and find data on the gamepad screen is an invitation to instantly hit a wall or wipe out in the game. In other words, trying to use the functionality actually prevents you from performing better in the game.

Past that, the gamepad has missed out on opportunities that should have been slam dunks for the concept. A Pokemon Snap reboot where the gamepad is used as a camera seems like a no-brainer, but a few years into the console’s lifecycle and we haven’t even heard rumors of such a thing. A third party game like Watch Dogs, where the central character uses a touchscreen to do most actions, still only relegated the real-life touchscreen of the gamepad to be mostly a glorified map.

Rather, what the touchscreen seems to do better than anything is drain battery life, as a constantly unplugged, lit-up device like that is bound to have a short fuse. For every one time I charged my Wii U Pro controller, I probably had to recharge my Gamepad four times. In general, the Wii U is incredibly controller-confused, allowing players to use two new-gen controllers, the Pro and the Gamepad, last gen Wiimotes, and now even last-last gen Gamecube controllers through an adapter. Some may appreciate that level of diversity, but to me it just makes the console look messy, and helped to contribute to the initial confusion about whether or not the Wii U was a new console at all. Even as late as last week, I found out I had a game-playing friend who thought the gamepad was originally sold as an accessory to the Wii.

The only real advantage I see for the gamepad is offscreen play when someone else wants to watch TV or play a different system. But outside of that? The point is that without a technically better system, and without gameplay gimmicks that actually contribute to games in meaningful ways, there is just no reason for the Wii U to exist. Nearly every point in its favor has to do with Nintendo continuing to make good exclusive games for it. That’s great, but again, doesn’t do anything to convince me that Nintendo wouldn’t make a hell of a software-only company unbound by lackluster hardware.

The original Wii succeeded because its gameplay gimmick worked. It was indeed a novel concept to swing a Wiimote like a golf club to hit a virtual ball, and the console quite literally became an explosive fad on the back of that tech (albeit a shallow system overall, in my opinion). And with Nintendo’s handheld scene, they’re in a different market position given that their only straight competition is tablets and smartphones, with the Vita barely making a dent comparatively in the space. But the Wii U, with its unnecessary gamepad and 3rd party desert, is being held afloat by a scarce few games alone, with almost no argument at all to be made for the hardware itself.

I don’t understand the comparisons to SEGA whenever this conversation comes up. While it’s true SEGA has fallen a long way since it made consoles, that decline is not directly attributable to their lack of hardware, nor is it a company that can be directly compared to Nintendo. You’ll be hard pressed to name more than one or two truly great SEGA franchises, but you can rattle off a dozen of Nintendo’s with ease.

In this day and age it seems like a tough sell to ask consumers to shell out for a technically inferior console whose sole benefit is the fact that it plays an exclusive strain of games. For as much as I enjoy my time with the Wii U, I can’t say I also wouldn’t enjoy playing Mario Kart or Bayonetta on PS4, a console which could then also play Far Cry, Dragon Age, Mordor, Wolfenstein and the rest of the GOTY top ten. The Wii U exists best as a supplemental system, and in a crowded market where a double console purchase is a hefty proposition, that’s not really a place you want to be.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a handful of solid Nintendo games is enough for those who pick up a Wii U, and the console has moved 7M units to date (to PS4′s 13.5M, with a year’s head start). But for as much fun as my friends and I had while playing Nintendo’s best games these past few weeks, when I asked them if they’d think about buying a Wii U or swapping their PS4 or Xbox One for it, they said no. As much fun as the games were, there were just too few of them released too infrequently, and they were downright stunned when I told them the Wii U had now completely lost major franchises like Call of Duty and Madden altogether. A certain level of third party support was just assumed, but many may not realize how bad it’s gotten.

I hope that Nintendo pulls together to release some kind of Super Wii console that is the best of all possible worlds, but I’m not sure that they can survive another lackluster console like the Wii U, which is only classified has having “won” the year on the backs of its exclusives alone. But the hardware itself is behind the times and an unnecessary hindrance to a wider audience enjoying Nintendo games.

I’m not sure what 2015 will hold for Nintendo, but I do know Microsoft and Sony will be stepping up their exclusives game between Halo 5, Uncharted 4 and so on. As always, I want Nintendo to succeed, but I think they’re becoming further and further isolated in an industry that’s increasingly reliant on collaboration and finding as wide an audience as possible. I’m not sure hardware is required for that, when Nintendo’s greatest strengths are so clearly rooted in software.

by Philip Wythe

As Grand Theft Auto V approaches a Steam release, gamers have continued to question whether the series will implement a female protagonist. Some fans have argued for a Bonnie-and-Clyde storyline, while others still believe the series should only have male protagonists. This week, we explore some of GTA’s history with female characters, and how a female protagonist would fit well for the open-world franchise.

In early 2015, Rockstar Games is scheduled to re-release the immensely popular Grand Theft Auto V onto PC. Rockstar’s long-awaited Steam version features a brand new first-person view, which utilizes high-end graphics in order to portray Los Santos and Blaine County with immersive detail.

However, GTA V’s PC release follows only shortly after a much larger debate in the gaming industry about GTA’s misogynistic content, after an anti-sexual violence petition led Target Australia and Kmart Australia to pull the game from stores shelves. While some gamers protested the decision, writers such as Polygon’s Colin Campbell have simultaneously rejected in-store removal, while defending the original petitioners’ concerns about misogynistic content.

GTA’s relationship with women has indeed been an ongoing issue over the past two decades. Last year, The Guardian’s Matt Hill hosted an interview with Rockstar Games’ co-founder and head writer, Dan Houser, in which Hill asked Houser about the lack of a female protagonist within GTA V. Houser originally responded, “The concept of being masculine was so key to this story,” disappointing many gamers hoping for a female protagonist.

Houser later expanded on Gamespot, stating, “… it’s one of the things that we always think about.” He argued that a female protagonist “didn’t feel natural for this game,” suggesting that a woman player character was “definitely for the right game in the future–with the right themes, it could be fantastic.”

Indeed, gamers have been wondering for ages whether Rockstar will finally design a female protagonist. The original Grand Theft Auto, released in 1997, featured four women playable characters – each from a variety of races and ethnicities. Since ‘97, the series hasn’t returned to women protagonists at all. And, as GTA V has reintroduced multiple protagonists into the series, many fans were disappointed to find that all three player options were male. Although Michael, Franklin, and Trevor are interesting and complex characters, the lack of gender diversity felt jarring.

When Houser notes that a female protagonist needs to “feel natural for [the] game” he’s largely correct. The right game requires the right protagonist, and creating a game setting which organically supports the player character is important for a strong narrative.

Yet, as GTA’s writers and developers have moved onto more mature and serious narrative themes, Grand Theft Auto certainly feels long overdue for a strong female protagonist. Rockstar’s 2004 rendition, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, took a critical view at Los Angeles gang violence and police corruption in the early 1990s. And 2008’s GTA IV touched on American socioeconomic class, wartime trauma, and class mobility in New York life.

Some fans have argued in the past that a woman protagonist would not necessarily “fit” into Grand Theft Auto’s world, suggesting that male protagonists are integral to GTA’s atmosphere and story. However, Grand Theft Auto’s core narrative themes – ambition, power, socioeconomic class, and cultural satire – are thematic concerns which a variety of female characters explore in the series alone. In GTA IV, socioeconomic oppression deeply affects Roman Bellic’s fiancé, Mallorie Bardas, who has a sexual affair with Russian mobster Vlad Glebov in order to settle Roman’s mafia debts. And women characters such as Candy Suxxx and Mercedes Cortez have examined sex work, and satirized the pornographic film industry in the process. Indeed, Grand Theft Auto’s maturing view at American society and culture means the series must seriously tackle women’s experiences in the American criminal world.

The idea of a female protagonist is not particularly foreign to fans, either. For years, gamers have been wondering whether a female protagonist would enter the series – and how she would appear. Some fans have suggested that a former sex worker would be an interesting protagonist; others note that an ex-FBI agent, military veteran, or police officer would provide an interesting backstory. Another recurring suggestion among fans is a Bonnie-and-Clyde storyline, between a male and female bank robbing couple. This idea seems to fit perfectly alongside GTA V’s introduction of multiple player characters, and even harkens back to GTA 3’s main antagonist – Catalina, leader of the Colombian Cartel, and ex-girlfriend of protagonist Claude Speed.

Likewise, GTA’s audience isn’t universally masculine. According to NPR, approximately 15% of GTA V’s fans are women gamers. Writers for Jezebel and Mashable alike have praised the game’s core gameplay, while also simultaneously critiquing its representation of women. Grand Theft Auto certainly does appeal to women gamers, and feminist critique of the series largely rests on its presentation of women characters – not, per say, its sprawling open-world gameplay. After all, a variety of open-world games with women characters – such as Saints Row, Assassin’s Creed Liberation, Fallout, Dragon Age, and DayZ – have been applauded for their engaging gameplay and freedom of choice, whether good or bad. Feminist concerns with GTA lie specifically with the series’ characterization and representation of women, not the game’s freedom of choice.

Needless to say, adding a woman protagonist into GTA VI does not inherently fix the series’ ongoing issues with misogyny – of which, might I add, would take an entire separate article to discuss. Indeed, many critics have noted that GTA V has serious problems with sexual objectification, transphobia, transmisogyny, shallow female characterization, male-dependent character relationships, and misogynistic humor that punches downwards onto marginalized genders. Among a plethora of other concerns.

Yet, a strong female character would be the right step for the series, and would demonstrate that the studio is working more towards creating satirical narratives that have an active role for women characters. Indeed, Rockstar’s writing team has constantly shown that they are capable of writing complex and nuanced male characters who deal with serious social, cultural, and political themes within the United States. So why not complex and nuanced women protagonists, too? Ultimately, a strong female protagonist is important for GTA’s future – the real question is whether Rockstar is up to the task.

by Giuseppe Nelva

With every generation of consoles, there’s always someone prophesying that it will be the last. At least according to Sony Copmputer Entertainment Executive Vice President Masayasu Ito, there will be a “next generation” for PlayStation, as he told to the online version of the Nikkei Shinbun.

“I think there will be a PS5. However, I don’t know what form it’ll have. It could be a physical console, or it could be in the cloud.”

“But even if the form might change, PS5 Games will be born. This is what we want.”

It’s reassuring to know that Ito-san is confident in the fact that this generation won’t be the last, even if it’s probably too early for Sony to know for sure what form it will have.

Personally, I definitely think that there will still be physical consoles in the next generation, including the next PlayStation. I seriously doubt even in ten years from now phone lines worldwide will be efficient enough to support major platforms fully based in the cloud, but the powers that be will ultimately be the ones making the final call. Gamers will vote with their wallet.

by Paul Tassi

In the next week or so, there will likely be many articles stacking up the three major consoles, the PS4, the Xbox One, and the Wii U, comparing price, features, graphics, games and so on as you try to understand which one to buy for someone (or yourself) this holiday season. I may even write a few of those articles myself.

And yet, I think there’s only one console that just really screams “Christmas morning” to me, and that’s Nintendo’s Wii U.

If we were doing one of those handy comparison charts, the Wii U has plenty of significant disadvantages when placed next to PS4 or Xbox One. It’s essentially a last generation system in terms of horsepower, with graphics matching what we’ve come to expect from the PS3 and Xbox 360, but lagging behind the newer versions of those systems. And recently the console has seen a nearly complete collapse in 3rd party, non-partner support. While Nintendo still have connections that lead to joint projects like Bayonetta, 3rd party staples like Call of Duty, Madden and Assassin’s Creed have fled the system for good, and new hits like Destiny or Dragon Age will likely never make it to the console.

It’s a combination of these factors that leads to continued speculation that Nintendo would be better off in the software business, putting their well-received first party games on other consoles, and becoming an enormous software powerhouse without console hardware on their mind.

While I’m not totally opposed to that notion (and have even supported it from time to time), this is the time of year when I remember why it’s important Nintendo’s hardware still does exist. The Wii U is the only gaming device on the market that directly encourages local multiplayer, and the best games for the system are ones played with friends or family sitting next to you, not playing on their own console across town or across the country.

As such, when millions of Wii Us are opened Christmas morning (or handed out for Hanukkah), it’s really the only console a family can get which can be set up and have the whole gang playing in practically minutes. Older games like Nintendoland and New Super Mario Bros. U, or newer hits like Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U were all designed to be played in groups. On Christmas, parents can play with kids, siblings can play with each other, friends can come over for holiday parties and play the new system. At a time where everyone is together, the Wii U is effectively the only console that can facilitate that. The PS4 and Xbox One can be plug-and-played as well, but it’s largely going to be a solo experience depending on the game.

Split screen gaming and local co-op isn’t completely dead. There’s definite fun to be had with a few Kinect dancing titles, and games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare have slid in split screen to at least one of its modes. And yet, that grand sense of local co-op community is inarguably the best on Wii U, where  everyone uses an assortment of increasingly ridiculous controllers from the Gamepad to the Wiimote to the Pro controller to now even decade-old Gamecube controllers.

Perhaps this is some amount of nostalgia talking, but it made me sad when I grew up and Sony and Microsoft MSFT -3.11% seemed determined to leave local co-op behind. Instead of having a friend over to play a game, I had to send him home to play on his own console over PSN or Xbox Live. When my gaming enthusiast friends would come over, there was little to actually do with the newest games we’d bought unless they’d brought their own console and TV with them. The only games we could actually play together were old ones like Halo 3 or one of the past Smash Bros. installments. Now that’s worse than ever, and local co-op is all but completely dead other than in a few multiplatform series like Borderlands, but most of the time its either stuck into a specific mode (COD’s Exo) or it simply doesn’t exist at all, even in games that encourage co-op (Dragon Age, Far Cry).

Obviously you don’t buy a console just for Christmas morning, so there’s plenty more to consider, but until Sony or Microsoft truly grasp the concept of family gaming and local co-op with friends, Nintendo is going to occupy a welcome niche in the console market, graphics and 3rd party support aside. I think it’s going to be a good holiday season for the Wii U, and its unique position in the market will help it stand out from nearly identical competition.