For some reason I found myself playing Killzone 1 today (I have many, many, better games to play but I felt an urge to play through the Killzone franchise and I picked up the HD trilogy cheap a few months back so...)

Here are my thoughts on the first five or so levels:

-The presentation stinks. I thought this was supposed to be an AAA PS2 game, but when I think PS2 AAA I think God of War or MGS 2 or 3, or whatever. I've recently played through GoW 1, Jak and Daxter 1 and 2, and Prince of Persia Sands of Time on HD collections so I think I have a decent idea of what HDified Ps2 games are like, and well, this is by far the ugliest and seems the most dated, even though Jak and Daxter was 3 years older. The voice acting in Killzone is frequently really bad, the environments feel like they're out of a PC game circa the first Half-Life and the cutscenes are stitled and lame.

-The gameplay is about as bad as expected. It's pre-CoD4 console first person shooting.

-The enemies have no AI to speak of and come off as super generic. Maybe this will change.

-Oh those checkpoints...I have not died far from a checkpoint yet but if I do I feel like it might be the end of the road for my run with this game. Brutal.

Despite all those flaws there are some interesting aspects that make me want to continue playing, at least for now.

+The Hellghast squad chatter is somehow engaging even though it seems like it shouldn't be. Basically the Hellghast speak the same way that your squadmates do. They come off not as videogame enemies placed there to be killed but rather soldiers on a mission who happen to be on the other side. It's pretty cool.

+The game is a corridor shooter but seems not to know it. Lots of open rooms and side areas. Plus the level geometry sometimes allows for multiple approach. In level 2 there is a room of Hellghast above the street who are meant to shoot at you as you pass by, but there are stairs leading up to the room from below and you can go up and machine gun them from behind. This feels like the game trying to break out of corridor land but being forced back in because of the PS2's limited RAM.

The game really shows how game design was different back in the Ps2 era, especially first person shooters. It makes no effort to be a CoD style rollercoaster or tell a great story like Bioshock, or to present interesting environments and mechanics like Metro Last Light or Bulletstorm. It just plops some brain dead hellghast down in some generic settings and says go shoot them. And it was well-received at the time.

All in all the game feels incredibly dated but in an interesting way. I think I'll explore a little further.

I never much cared about gamerscore. Achievements are cool because they A) Give you a small incentive to pursue side stuff you might not otherwise care about, like finishing off collectibles or whatever, thus extending the fun of a game and B) Serve as a nice reminder of the games that you have played and finished. Services like True Achievements and the PS4 also tell you how many players completed a given cheevo or trophy, which can be interesting. I have no problem with achievements.

But Gamerscore attempts to quantify achievements and it does so in a weird way, letting developers assign score (previously based on whether the game was retail or XBLA) regardless of difficulty or length of the game. It was always a dumb idea, since finishing some early 4 hour games would net you a thousand points while other achievements have ridiculous requirements. Microsoft, however, at least tried to compensate for this by assigning different numbers of cheevo points for downloadable games, which at the start of the 360 generation tended to be smaller in scope, if not always easier.

Downloadable games got a lot more complicated as the generation drew on (From 50 Megabyte maximum sizes to 2 gigs or over now, and from Geometry Wars to fully fledged story-based games like Shadow Complex.) Last year Microsoft lifted the points max of XBLA games from 200 to 400, which made sense for a game like CoJ: Gunslinger but maybe not for Brothers or Zuma's Revenge, and on the XBONE all games will just be games (Fair enough, since there's no reason Gunslinger is less of a full fledged 360 game than the old King Kong retail game) but rather than making tailor made achievement amounts (possibly too much work and too many politics) they will all have 1000 total points, which means that Peggle 2 has the same amount of gamerscore in it as Assassin's Creed 4.

This means that score is absolutely meaningless. Why keep it? Is it just a legacy product? Do they think they are still selling games to cheevo hunters? It just seems weird and stupid. Even weirder and stupider when you consider that MS gave away Killer Instinct and even XBONE systems to people with high gamerscore. So the score is meaningless and debased but you can get real world items up to $500 in value for having a high one?

I feel like this is really dumb and Microsoft hasn't caught enough flack for it.

First off this is not a review. I will wall off spoilers below, but this is a discussion of the complete game.

Brothers got a lot of good press and is showing up on top ten lists. It's very cheap on XBLA right now so I finally picked it up and played through it today while off from work.

Brothers has a lot going for it. The aesthetics are fantastic. I loved the music and while I wasn't impressed by the graphics in the beginning, as the game got more fantastic (as in based in fantasy) I became more impressed until by the end I felt it was one of the best games I've ever played from a graphical design perspective. The game also chooses not to explain its world at all, leaving it for you to explore and inhabit, and that is a choice many more games should make. The game goes further down this path by using a nonsense language, which helps for immersion but damages characterization.

In addition to these aesthetic choices, Brothers features very little combat, has an unusual (though not unique) control scheme, and gameplay primarily consists of traversal and puzzles. In a world of endless modern warfare and space marine shooters, Brothers stands out. Not having combat, in particular, is an excellent design decision that other traversal games could learn from. Brothers is a short, focused, experience without much padding, and is unlike almost anything else out there (though The Cave tried something similar)

So what's wrong with it?

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For one thing there's not much game there. The puzzles are generally extremely easy, not requiring much brainpower or dexterity, and the traversal tends towards the easy and obvious. Mechanics like the rope tying the brothers together are introduced and discarded rather than being built upon. Partially this is a function of length, but the game also just doesn't seem very interested in being a game. It wants to tell a story and show aesthetics. I get that. The level where you traverse the battlefield of the Giants is truly spectacular and is a world I would love to spend more time with. But without good gameplay, Brothers has to fall back on its aesthetics (very good) and its story...

About that story...

A lot of people have been saying they were deeply affected by the story, and I get that, but for me it has some serious problems. The simple tale of two boys going to get medicine for their father is a fine framing device, but there is almost no character development along the way. The younger brother has a hallucination, the older one a flashback, that's about it. The sights you see are spectacular, sure, but you are just tourists. No meaningful relationships or deepened characterizations. That makes sense given the nonsense language, but leads to my biggest issue with the story.

The older brother's death is unearned. The brothers free the spider woman from what appears to be an angry horde, they follow her, reasonably, and while the older brother starts to romance her, pulling away from his younger brother, and pushes them to enter the den, he has no reason to suspect what she really is. When he is then punished after the boss battle (and from a gameplay perspective it's kind of cheap to have her strike the mortal wound right after you defeat her, there's some ludonarrative dissonance there) it's unclear what he's being punished for. And yes, it can just be random, but that doesn't seem like the kind of story Brothers is trying to tell. If the story did more to flesh out who the older brother is as a person and let his attributes be his downfall it would be closer to the fairy tales its world draws inspiration from, and, in my opinion, more satisfying.

Without gameplay or story to drive the experience what's left then is a bunch of good elements and ideas put together into something adequate but not great, which is what Brothers is. Perhaps, somewhat ironically since most games are too long, it could have benefited from being a longer experience, giving the player more time to identify with the characters and doing a better job of characterization, with more interesting side stuff like the achievement tasks (a nice touch) and even an opportunity to develop the spider woman. I could easily have spent another 3-4 hours in that enchanting world. But without that, with what's there, I'm left with a few striking memories based on aesthetics, an appreciation for what the mechanics were trying to do, and not much more. Is that enough to make it a good game? Sure. I don't regret dropping $5 on it. Is it one of the best of the year? I don't think so.

There's just not enough substance.

When I first heard about Ryse it was on a bunch of podcasts where everyone was saying that it looked absolutely terrible and would be the worst launch game for either of the new systems. Because of this I didn't even consider pre-ordering it. Then the XBONE actually came out and reviews, even from those podcasters, were that the game was shallow but pretty, hyper violent, and reasonably fun. I am really in the mood for a game like that, and I thoroughly enjoyed Conan, which seems like the 360/PS3 equivalent, but I know the experience will be disposable and I can't justify spending $60 on a digital game that will just sit on my hard drive/account like a badge of shame for the rest of the time I own my console, reminding me that I paid more than it was worth, which in my twisted mind is worse than buying a game at a good price and never playing it.

A game like this is a guilty pleasure, to be bought for $15, played over a weekend, and put away. Even though I can afford the game I know I'd feel bad about buying it at full price, taken advantage of. But launch titles tend to lose value slower than most because there will be nothing else to play on the Xbone for the next few months, and lots of folks will be getting Xbones for Christmas, looking for stuff to play.

I guess I'll just try to play Remember Me from my backlog and then break down and buy Ryse while drunk at 1:30 in the morning.

P.S. Whenever I think of Ryse I am reminded of Gladius, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I guess with Lucasarts gone we'll never see a sequel. Another reason to hate Ryse! Damn it Ryse, why aren't you a Gladius sequel?

I have owned every Nintendo console and handheld except the Virtual Boy and the Wii U, starting with the NES when I was in kindergarten. I grew up on Mario, Metroid, and the Legend of Zelda (original gold cartridge.) I love Nintendo. Recently I went into the Black Friday shopping season wanting only one thing, a Playstation Vita. One Amazon flash sale later and I walked away with a 3DS XL and a copy of Mario 3D Land instead. Not 100% sure how it happened, but it did. And so, a couple years after packing my Wii into storage I am back in a Nintendo state of mind...and baffled by some of the decisions they seem to have made.

The Games are Still Great.

I'd like to say from the outset that I'm not unhappy with my purchase. Pushmo is as great as advertised, I've enjoyed Mutant Mudds and I'm looking forward to Donkey Kong and Fire Emblem. Since I bought my 3DS Super Mario 3D Land is my most played game on any system and I love it. I hear 3d World is even better and I've considered a Wii U because of it. I hear the new Zelda is fantastic and I'm excited to try it. The quality of the games means I want to see Nintendo succeed even though

The Digital Rights Management and eShop interface are a decade out of date

Wowza. Buying stuff on the eShop reminds me of the first iteration of the iTunes store, only that was better, groundbreaking, and is 10 years old. Games are hard to find, require a ton of clicks to buy, and there's an absolute ton of stuff not on there. I have a 32 Gig SD card (kudos for letting us use those) so I have plenty of room, and with a portable I love having my collection accessible at all times. I shouldn't have ANY cartridges. But there are a good number of games only buyable in cartridge form and buying the games that ARE on the eShop is a pain. It's almost 2014.

If that's not bad enough, although classic Nintendo games are available I can't transfer any of the games I bought on my Wii. I can't even see what I had because there's no way to tie the accounts together. If THAT'S not bad enough, the selection of classics is absolute crap. I'm pretty sure I can't get a Link to the Past on my 3DS even though the direct sequel is the new hotness for that handheld. Awesome. Playing Super Mario 3D Land remind you of Mario World for the SNES? Fool, you can't even get Mario 3 for the 3DS. What were they thinking? Nintendo's strength is its deep library, but that deep library is locked away. Guess I could break my Wii out of storage to play some decent Virtual Console selection but why should I have to?

If THAT's not bad enough, there are no sales! I mean literally there are SOME sales, but they suck. Every other digital games distribution platform from Steam to PSN to XBL has deep sales on a regular basis these days. The 3DS still sells virtually everything at original retail (unless you want to hunt for cartridges...and I don't want to carry cartridges around!) and then occasionally offers up something like the inferior NES version of Donkey Kong reduced from $5 to $3.50. Be still my beating heart. First of all why are we getting the crappy NES version instead of the arcade version? Don't tell me the 3DS can't emulate both. Secondly...NES games should regularly be on sale for 99 cents. They are a source of great value, but on Steam sale I can get copies of hottish newish titles like Fez for $2.50 NES Donkey Kong for $3.50 is an insult in comparison.

IF THAT'S NOT BAD ENOUGH the games are tied to the system....FOR NO REASON. Want to transfer to a new 3DS because you thought the Luigi Dark Moon one looked sweet? Be prepared for a painful process. Lose your system or have it stolen? Be prepared for pain. This system was released in 2011 not 1994. The Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and I can still transfer my purchases to a new one because games are tied to account. There is no excuse for this whatsoever and frankly it is yet another thing pushing me towards cartridges and I DO NOT WANT CARTRIDGES. I don't want games that can be stolen or fall out of my pocket. It's the end of 2013 PEOPLE! HOW IS THIS ACCEPTABLE?

The hardware sucks

The 3DS is obviously underpowered. The screens are low resolution. The hinge is low quality. Spot pass doesn't really work. The 3D is so finicky that everyone turns it off. The 3DS is not a well-designed games machine and the fact that the XL sells for the same as a VITA is ridiculous.

GET IT TOGETHER NINTENDO

I know that none of these are original complaints but you don't really understand how it all interacts until you have a 3DS. The games are there so it's a system worth owning but the games have to compensate for an awful lot. That's why I wanted a vita in the first place. You can argue that the system is designed for a younger demographic but with games like Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei IV they are clearly trying for the adult demo as well. Adults have smartphones and other consoles and they can tell when they are being abused. WE ARE BEING ABUSED. Nintendo needs to come up with a unified account system like YESTERDAY. I don't care that they're slowly inching towards it, not good enough. They need to fix the damn eShop. Their next hand held has to have less gimickry and more decent screens and build quality. I grew up on Nintendo hardware but if Nintendo announced it was going software only tomorrow I'd be happy. The truth is I love Super Mario 3D Land but I'd rather play it on a VITA, and the same goes for other games. Nintendo the hardware maker is basically holding us all hostage with the sweet Nintendo software and forcing us to put up with inferior systems to enjoy their product. Not cool. I want to want a Wii U for the same reason I wanted a PS4. Because it looks awesome and like a great platform, not because it's the only way I can get at specific games that would be better elsewhere.

I recently completed two open world games at the opposite ends of the open end revolution, Jak II and L.A. Noire.

Jak II came out soon after Grand Theft Auto III ignited the 3D open world trend and many reviewers at the time said that the open world was shoehorned into the design. That's a little unfair; Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy was technically an open world in that you could travel from any point in it to any other by the end, and Jak II does have a fair number of missions in the big city hub area. On the other hand these missions were often both simplistic and not all that much fun, and it's clear the designers had not yet mastered open world design. It's very easy to get the attention of the super tenacious guards and moving around the city is made more difficult by pervasive traffic that clogs the upper lanes. Fast vehicles can often blow up with one hit against another vehicle, not a lot of fun when controls are floaty and races often require taking blind corners at high speeds.

L.A. Noire on the other hand was released somewhat recently by a publisher virtually synonymous with open world games, and uses its open world not so much for action (though there is that) but also for atmosphere and sense of place in what is a sprawling adventure game. Like Jak II there's not a lot to do in the world outside of missions (collect random stuff) and like Jak II the traffic is supremely annoying. Here it rarely interferes with the gameplay, except during car chases, but rather obstructs your travel from one place to another frequently leading to a choice between driving carefully over what can be very long in-game distances, or putting up with virtually unavoidable ranking and suspension of disbelief damaging crashes every so often even if the siren's blaring (the A.I's reaction to the siren leaves a lot to be desired.)

In both cases the traffic seems to exist primarily to create a sense of atmosphere, which is good, but has the effect of interfering with gameplay. In Jak II it interferes with both missions and traveling to get missions, which isn't fun, whereas in L.A. Noire it heavily encourages the use of fast travel, which defeats the purpose of having a sprawling open world. The huge world of L.A. Noire cost a lot of money to make, and the game brought down the studio that built it, so to create something so sprawling and then encourage players to skip seeing it seems like a very strange use of development resources.

Compare these games to Red Dead Redemption, another open world game but one that, because of its setting, has very little traffic and lots of areas to explore. Red Dead had fast travel too, but many people didn't use it much because the horse riding through the awesome setting was just fun. That's good design. If you're going to have an open world then navigating it should be fun for its own sake and fast travel should be reserved for spots where you want to take care of something in particular or you've played a ton and seen everything already. The Grand Theft Auto series manages this with fast, fun to drive cars, unrealistically wide streets that allow for maneuvering, and gripping police chases.

I come back to traffic because of all the things for game designers to import into an open world it seems an odd choice. Traffic is something we generally hate in our day to day lives, and while a certain amount of it does provide a sense of a living breathing world, a little can go a long way. In Jak II the traffic just serves to show how barren the world is, with everyone circling endlessly despite there being nowhere to actually go. In L.A. Noire it makes driving through the city a little too real. I don't remember scenes in great film noirs where people sat at traffic lights listening to the radio because they were pinned in. It could be solved by putting stuff closer together (especially those damned street crimes, which were often on the other side of the city from the areas you were investigated) but the partner drive function just seems to be the game pulling in contradictory directions.

In both cases (Jak and Noire) it seems like once the decision was made for the world to be open, decided they needed traffic, and then tried to make the game work despite it, rather than starting with what would be fun and building backwards off that to create the world. It is especially a shame for L.A. Noire because the not so fun open world could have been excised or at least shrunk significantly, without impacting what's great about the game, potentially saving lots of time and money. To think that people were abused and pushed into constant crunch time to produce such a huge beautiful bland pointless digital map makes me sad. And the traffic is a very telling symptom of the things that make the world kind of pointless.

Recently there's been some excitement on the gaming podcasts and websites I look at about the summer drought of good new games coming to an end with the release of Darksiders II and Sleeping Dogs, followed by the release of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. While these both look like good games and have reviewed well, I don't quite understand how it's possible for people, in this generation, to be so hungry for new games and not have anything to play unless they play for huge chunks of time every day, or have very specific tastes. There's just so much good stuff out there playable on the current systems that I find it hard to believe most people don't have some four or five star game that they wanted to play but just never got a chance to for whatever reason. Even games journalists have holes in the library of games they've played, as demonstrated by discussions on the bombcast.

Personally I tend to play games long after they are released and the hype wave has receded. There are some exceptions; generally games that particularly appeal to me for whatever reason, but even games I know I will absolutely love often get put aside for months or more. The last 3 games I've played are Jak II off the HD collection, L.A. Noire, and now the original Darksiders. All three have held up fine, with Jak II definitely showing some age in design (checkpoints anyone?) but also being somewhat refreshing in its generational differences. I doubt they would have been particularly more fun when they originally came out, and I also don't feel like the newest releases necessarily have anything on them. Game design and technology does advance both from generation to generation, and during a given generation, but the advancements are slow and uneven, and the cream of the crop from the past tends to, in my opinion, outshine the generic filler games of the present. Super Mario Bros. will always be better than Blade Kitten, be it 2010, 2012, or 2099.

There are advantages to playing a game significantly after release too. The most obvious is the usual price drop, but also most of the DLC will have been released so you can decide if you want that and generally integrate it into your game experience, there will be FAQs if you get stuck, and there may even be a sequel already available if you fall in love with a game or story. Heck Jak II HD came with the sequel already on the same disc! These go against the disadvantages of potential spoilers and not being able to discuss the game with people currently playing, but the pros and cons are at least arguably balanced there.

The one obvious exception is multiplayer, which is often a ghost town by the time I get around to a game. I don't play a ton of multiplayer so this is not a huge deal, but even for those who do, there's a relatively small sliver of games whose multiplayer is worth getting into in my opinion. I loved Driver: San Francisco and played it while there was still a relatively robust community online, but I mostly played the multiplayer for achievement purposes and so I didn't have to give up the game, and if I'd missed out on the somewhat generic race and pursuit modes it wouldn't have done much to dampen my enjoyment of the experience. We live in the age of the tacked on multiplayer mode, and while games with great MP are worth buying upon release to experience that aspect (at least before everybody else has 200 hours of experience and any newb will get smoked like a salmon) those games are relatively few and far between.

I guess I just feel the games media and industry in general are into pushing the latest thing, and a lot of players seem to have the same mindset based on the fact that games sales numbers look like movie numbers now, with opening week or month amounting to the bulk of sales for most titles, and I don't really understand it. The big exception seems to be Steam Sales, where people will buy older games for a couple of bucks, but it's not like big sales don't happen on the console side with fair regularity. Obviously the industry wants to sell the latest games at full price, and the media needs new stuff to feed its need for new content, but I don't see the angle for gamers, especially when buying the latest means picking up an inferior new game over a superior older game you never got around to playing.

I've been playing through Fez, and it's fantastic. It's rare these days for there to be a game that actually draws me in to the point where I am sorely tempted to neglect important stuff to play it, but Fez definitely has me in that "Welll...I could file for an extension on my taxes..." mode. Part of it is the fun puzzle-based game play, but I think more than that I'm just really grooving on the sense of place the game creates. Despite being a pixel-art inspired group of floating islands clearly built from several tile sets and designed as a series of puzzles, the world feels real and organic. It's not just that it's open to roam through in whatever order you'd like (with some exceptions) but also that through all the branching pathways and little structures and graphical touches within the game it manages to be something akin to an abstracted version of a walk in the countryside. You run across a clock tower, or a lighthouse or just a little glade with squirrels and chipmunks playing and it feels like visiting a real place in some abstract way.

Fez also lets you do this all at your own pace, with no enemies to worry about and puzzles that range from easy to brain straining. Want to power through a complicated room for a nega-cube reward? Go ahead. Prefer to go off in another direction pursuing cube shards and opening up more of the map? Go ahead. The world is yours.

What it captures best of all is the sense of wonder and exploration from childhood. Anything could be around the next bend and there are treasures just over the other side of the ravine if you can only find a way to get there...

This sense of exploration and wonder is something that's often sorely missed from games with budgets in the tens of millions and levels with extremely detailed textures. Those worlds should in many ways be more exciting to explore and experience, but frequently they feel like the clapboard movie town in Blazing Saddles rather than a real place. Yes they're detailed but they don't feel like there's a real world beyond them. By stripping away the enemies and time limits and just giving you a world to explore at your leisure Fez creates a sense of place far stronger and more memorable than most virtual worlds.

It's not that I need every shooter or even adventure game to be about traversal and sense of place, but there are plenty of RPGs and platformers that could take a few notes from the way Fez offers you an awesome world and lets you explore it at your own pace.

I read a lot about Bastion before its release, and it seemed like a game I would appreciate but never love. The rebuilding land gimmick seemed a little silly and the combat looked simplistic. So I waited until it was on sale before buying it, while it racked up awards, and waited until now to actually play it. And for the first chunk of the game I'd say my expectations were about right. I liked the narrator, really liked the gorgeous graphics, which are phenomenal and demonstrate once again that 2D can do things that 3D cannot (The reverse is definitely true as well.) The combat was okay and the story was a little inscrutable but fine, nothing to write home about.

I'm not sure when my opinion began to change exactly because there was no one big turning moment. Just lots of little ones as the world began to fill in and the game began to build on itself in every way. Bastion's gameplay might be a modification of many games that came before but I can't remember a game that was so unified in every way between its themes, gameplay, graphics, and narrative. It's all about construction and moving forward to the point where when the last choice came it didn't feel like a choice at all.

But man did it hit home on an emotional level. The last level of Bastion affected me as much as any game I can think of. It has such a haunting beauty, and even as you are by that point kind of unstoppable, scything through enemies in relentless pursuit of your goal, there was just this gorgeous melancholy and feeling of weightiness. In some ways Bastion reminds me of a Cormac McCarthy novel, maybe not quite as dark (though it is plenty dark) but lyrically beautiful and caught between the real world and the world of dreams. I think it doesn't get counted as an art game because it's fun to play, but it makes an unassailable case for games as art and it stands as a singular experience. To think that this is the first game from this studio...

I know everybody has lavished praise on this game, and I'm super late to the party, but as someone who was a little turned off by the praise and went in thinking of the game as a palate cleanser between big AAA releases, and came out with the feeling you get from experiencing something that's just about perfect, I just wanted to join my voice to the praise chorus. This is a game made by adults for adults, and while I'm still processing it, I know it will find its way to my all-time top ten list by the time I'm done mulling it over.

The evolution of Xbox Live Arcade from hosting old arcade games and new stuff like Screwjumper and Shrek 'N Roll to having some of my favorite games ever has been nothing short of astonishing.

One thing that I think has not been talked about in the discussion of possible disc-free consoles is the loss of an important distinction, that between the disc-based game and the downloadable title.

XBLA and PSN downloadable titles have been a revelation this generation of consoles. They have rescued entire genres of gaming from seeming extinction and brought some of the best games of the generation altogether. They have also put some pressure on bad disc based games released at full price. I remember when that shameful G.I. Joe game came out a few weeks before Shadow Complex was released and redefined what console downloadable games could be in terms of polish.

Both PSN and XBLA have libraries that compare favorably to the libraries of entire consoles. 'Splosion Man, Super Meat Boy, Bastion, Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed, the Geometry Wars games, Limbo, Renegade Ops, Outland, etc... can stand up pretty well against all but the top tier consoles and that's not even getting into many of the amazing HD ports and second tier awesome games like Toy Soldiers and Shank.

Downloadable games have preserved entire genres that might otherwise be lost or marginalized and have provided some of the most experimental and original gaming experiences of a generation that often plays it safe.

My concern is that if the new consoles launch without disc drives, or with downloads of games available day and date with the new releases, these games will be pushed to the side to make room for the big boys. Already the Indie Games channel on XBLA is ignored and you pretty much have to know what you're looking for in order to find the worthwhile stuff there. I don't want that to happen to XBLA or PSN, but once the latest Call of Duty is releasing digitally there will be pressure from Activision and Microsoft itself to heavily promote that stuff and make XBLA an afterthought. This may be especially true with games that are not so great. Is the publisher of the next G.I. Joe game going to want it going to toe to toe in the same marketplace with the next Shadow Complex, which offers 10 times the fun at one quarter the cost? It's not a big deal now, when digital distribution of retail games is an afterthought and the prices aren't even in the same currency, but I predict it will be one, and that indie and smaller games will lose what little promotion they have so that big titles can have a clearer space in the digital market.

I know that Steam will continue to exist, and people make great stuff for Steam, and team meat keeps reminding us that Steam is where they made their money, but there are lots of games that wouldn't exist but for XBLA or PSN and while whether discs still exist is important and whether used game sales are going to change is too, I care more about preserving the good stuff we already have. I don't want the next Bastion to be tucked away in some hard to find place. We've gone from a world where old games were hard to find legally to one where you can get The Simpsons Arcade Game alongside Radiant Silvergun, Guardian Heroes, and the Banjo Kazooie games. We've seen great new takes on older genres like 2D platformers, isometric RPGs, and bullet hell shooters even as games like Rayman Origins have shown us that these genres may not have a life at full retail anymore, outside of megafranchises like Mario. Digital content has made this generation much more creative and diverse than it otherwise would have been. I hope that by the time we are ready to move on from the PS4 and Xbox Omega we can say the same.