The 7th Guest
Casey:
So I have a wildly unrelated question for Mr. Syracuse.
Casey:
What the hell happened with this PlayStation 4 thing?
Casey:
Because I don't really follow video games at all, but oh my god, the internets went crazy over the... I guess it was like a... They didn't go that crazy.
Casey:
They went fairly crazy.
Marco:
I don't understand why everyone was all cranky.
Marco:
I think everyone's mind was blown about how little their mind was blown over the course of two hours.
Casey:
I think that is exactly right.
John:
That is exactly right.
John:
I don't get it at all because...
John:
Like, they do this with every new console, and many people are getting more and more worked up about it, but they always do something like this.
John:
Like, they always dole out the information.
John:
Like, Nintendo is the king of this.
John:
I remember with the Wii, they were like, we have a new console coming, and it's called The Revolution.
John:
And, like, they had a press conference about that, but they told you nothing.
John:
And then another time they said, it's called The Revolution, and it's the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of each other.
John:
And the control scheme is very interesting.
John:
And they didn't tell you anything else.
John:
The next press conference is like, okay, now it's like so long before they finally showed you, okay, here's the little box, but the control scheme is really neat.
John:
And it's like, all right, well, what the hell is the control scheme?
John:
And then finally, here's the new console, here's the box, here's what the name is, and here's the controller.
John:
And it was like seven press conferences over the course of a year, slowly doling out information about the Wii.
John:
That's how they do it.
John:
This is the first press conference.
John:
I'm surprised they even showed a picture of the controller.
John:
I'm surprised they showed anything.
John:
The specs, we already knew what those all were from all the rumors and everything, and they more or less confirmed those, plus or minus a few details.
John:
In this internet age, we already know.
John:
See those articles, I think I tweeted one of them, Durango versus Orbis.
John:
Those are the two code names of Microsoft's and Sony's consoles.
John:
It's like we have them down to the individual components that are going to be on motherboards.
John:
You're never going to they're never going to announce price until it's practically for sale.
John:
So anyone expecting price is crazy.
John:
Oh, you got to show me the box.
John:
Who cares?
John:
I mean, like they they showed the box of the PlayStation 3 and then that wasn't the box that they shipped.
John:
They showed the controller of the PlayStation 3 and that wasn't the controller they shipped.
John:
I don't know why anyone is upset about any of this.
John:
As far as I'm concerned, this was like the first press release, the first press conference.
John:
They showed a bunch of stuff, probably about the same amount of stuff I expected them to show.
John:
Anyone who expected to see a price and a date, unless that date was like March, you were crazy.
Casey:
So kidding aside, you were not disappointed by this.
John:
No, it's exactly what I expected.
John:
Like, you know, I was disappointed by the controller, but, you know, I can't say that it was unexpected.
John:
And I was pleasantly surprised about the RAM, which was double the rumored amount, assuming that assuming they actually stick with that.
John:
I mean, because Sony says a lot of things like until the product ships, you know, who knows?
John:
So I'm I'm still giving it a thumbs up.
John:
I'll buy one despite the controller.
Marco:
What's interesting, too, is that the architecture they picked, they basically said it's x86 CPUs from AMD and 8 gigs of shared RAM with video and main RAM with some beefy AMD video card.
Marco:
That's basically the modern version of the Xbox One.
Marco:
And the Xbox One, when it came out, because it had like a 733 megahertz Celeron-ish thing.
John:
You and your Xbox One.
Marco:
No, but...
John:
No, I'm saying like... That thing was such a piece of crap.
Marco:
No, honestly, the Xbox One was a fantastic system.
John:
It was not a fantastic system.
John:
It was a cobbled-together, terrible PC.
Marco:
That's what it was.
Marco:
I really beg to differ.
Marco:
I would say, because it was... Effectively, it was like a 700 MHz Pentium something with a GeForce 3.
Marco:
That's basically what it was.
Marco:
Like, you know, they were both custom parts, but that was... I know, and if you open it up, it looked like it.
John:
It looked like someone had taken a piece of A and put it in the Will It Blend machine and then jams it into an ugly black box and said, here you go.
Marco:
But one thing that helped them a lot was that making games was just DirectX.
Marco:
And it was easy to program for, which many consoles are very hard to program for, or at least to extract a lot of good performance out of.
Marco:
And it had so many advantages.
Marco:
It's interesting now that, and the Xbox went away from that architecture for the 360, and the PlayStation, the PS2 and the PS3 were both ridiculously hyped for whatever weird CPUs they had, which were always very hard to program for.
Marco:
Especially, is it the PS3 with the Emotion Engine, or is that the PS2?
Marco:
Two.
Marco:
Three is Cell.
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
Even I knew that, and I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, everyone complains about both of those, especially the Cell as being very hard to program for, efficiently at least.
John:
The thing about the PS2, though, is it costs about as much as the GPU in the original Xbox, like the entire machine.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
The thing is, I can't see this, whatever this PS4 is, I can't see that being inexpensive at launch.
Marco:
I mean, the PS3 launched at, was it 500?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, they're going to be expensive.
Marco:
It's going to be probably in that ballpark.
John:
The reason everyone's going x86 this generation is because x86 has finally got the power usage under control.
John:
Because the Xbox One was before Intel had gotten their chips down in power.
John:
It was before the core architecture, before Apple adopted it.
Marco:
But it was also before the stupid Pentium 4 netburst architecture that was so wasteful.
John:
I know, but it was still – it was nothing compared to the power-sipping little, you know, washing machine CPU that's in the PlayStation 1 and 2.
John:
Like, consoles used incredibly cheap, wimpy things.
John:
So that's why the Xbox was so huge.
John:
That's why it was so hot, you know.
John:
And so everyone was PowerPC in the next generation because X86 still hadn't caught up, and that was the sweet spot.
John:
It was PowerPC and ATI.
John:
And then this – finally now, in the modern age, the X86 stacks isn't that bad.
John:
You can get a reasonably low-powered x86 CPU.
John:
But really, the reason everyone went with a commodity PC parts this time around is because neither player, Microsoft or Sony, have the kind of money to invest in all custom stuff.
John:
Like, Sony can't afford to do the sell again.
John:
Whether you like the sell or don't like it, it costs them a tremendous amount of money to develop this crazy-ass new thing.
John:
all on their own they could not put that kind of investment they didn't want to and microsoft also didn't want to pay for ibm to make them their own crazy cpu gpu thing like they did with the xbox and everything they said we we are both not in a position to do that this time we have to go with commodity parts there's not enough of an upside for us to do custom so they both go with commodity parts
Marco:
Now wait, forgive my ignorance on this.
Marco:
I don't know anything about what the next Xbox is rumored or planned to have.
John:
AMD CPU and NVIDIA.
John:
Who's doing the GPU?
John:
Whoever's doing the GPU is the same for both of them.
John:
Both AMD then.
Marco:
Formerly ATI.
John:
Yeah, it's the same company now.
John:
But yeah, they're the same.
John:
I mean, they were close to the same.
John:
The Xbox 360 doesn't have a cell processor, but they both had GPUs from ATI, and they both had PowerPC cores inside their CPUs, and the cell did all sorts of other crazy stuff and had an NVIDIA processor.
John:
GPU and everything like that.
John:
But yeah, the architectures are different.
John:
I'll send you that article that I tweeted a couple days ago.
John:
It's short enough you can read through the differences and what they decided to do.
John:
It looked like the difference was going to be that Microsoft was going to have double the RAM of the Sony box.
Marco:
Right, but now Sony's matched that.
John:
But it was slower RAM, and everyone looked at the Microsoft box and said, okay, well, why would you put that much RAM in a game console?
John:
It's too much and too slow for you to use.
John:
And to make up for the slowness of the RAM, the next Xbox has a dedicated embedded SRAM, like 32 megabytes of it.
John:
Wow.
John:
Kind of like how the GameCube did.
John:
Wow.
John:
to have one really super fast region that you can use for cache or enough for, like, frame buffers and other data that you need close by, and then an enormous pool of much slower RAM.
John:
And the theory behind that is that the Microsoft box was going to be, like, a DVR and a media center, and games wouldn't even have access to all that RAM, so it would be, like, 8 gigs, but games would get, like, 5 gigs of that or something, and the rest of it would be dedicated to, like, just doing, like, you know, media center type activities.
Yeah.
John:
which would run at the same time as your games.
John:
Whereas the Sony one was supposedly coming with four gigs of super duper, you know, four gigs of GDDR5, which is stuff that's on video cards that would be unified pool.
John:
All of it's really fast.
John:
You don't need a special cache close to it, but there's not enough leftover for you to be doing dedicated, you know, media center DVR, whatever functionality.
John:
But now...
John:
that sony has come out with eight uh i don't know if they just changed their mind and went with eight but that's that's kind of eight gigs of gddr5 assuming that's what's in there i still haven't seen the beginning of the presentation but i just saw the number on it uh and by the way the the playstation one supposedly has more gpu cores as well so it was a more it was a more interesting fight with the rumored specs now that the real specs are out assuming that the rumored xbox specs are correct the sony one is just more powerful and
John:
in all ways has faster ram the same amount uh more gpu cores and then the xbox one is i guess it'll have it's crazy has connect stuff on it too but i don't know uh but they are looking very similar uh this generation
Marco:
And then you also throw in, is this Valve box thing going to happen?
Marco:
That is just a PC.
Marco:
The funny thing is, now we're going to have two, possibly three consoles that are extremely similar to PC hardware, all with games that won't run on each other.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
The PS4 is not like PC hardware.
John:
PCs don't have 8 gigabytes of GDDR5 RAM.
John:
They have memory for the computer and a CPU for the computer, and then they have a GPU, and then there's RAM on the video card.
John:
Two separate pools of very wildly different memory.
John:
One of it's really close to the dedicated GPU.
John:
And this is a very different arrangement than having a unified, super-fast RAM for the entire thing.
John:
There's dedicated...
John:
video decode hardwares on the thing so they can do real-time screen capture video of your playing.
John:
The PS4 is not going to look like it's Steamboxing.
John:
Steamboxing is literally going to be a PC.
John:
There's going to be RAM, there's going to be VRAM, there's going to be a GPU, there's going to be a CPU.
John:
That is very different architecturally from the PS4.
John:
And that's even before you start getting into all the little dedicated chips for all the dedicated functionality.
John:
And even before you get into how...
John:
much closer you can get to the metal on the PlayStation when writing games for it.
John:
So I expect PS4 games to look as good as the Steam Box games out of the gate, assuming anyone ever makes, I mean, who is that company?
John:
Like that Piston something company is making that Steam Box thing?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know what Valve's plan is, but they should just either make their own hardware or pick one hardware vendor and make one single thing and not be like, oh, it's a free-for-all.
John:
Anyone can make a gaming PC that hooks up to your TV?
John:
Yeah, they can, but they all stink.
Casey:
Now, Marco, to go back quite a while, actually, what is it that you like so much about the Xbox One?
Casey:
And I ask because the friends of mine that I have that adored the Xbox One, it seemed to me they adored it more for the hacky, moddy things you could do with it than they did for the actual stock Xbox.
Casey:
Does that question make sense?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And I bought mine actually pre-hacked because I didn't want to mess with it, but
Marco:
I bought a modded Xbox in 2004.
Marco:
I think it came out in 2001 or something.
Marco:
It was well into the console's lifespan.
Marco:
It was very nice.
Marco:
I bought it mainly as a 16-bit emulator for my TV and some media center functions.
Marco:
Originally, XBMC, running all that.
Marco:
It was fantastic for that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
As a gaming console, what I liked about the Xbox One was that they really went all out on the hardware, and they really had a few very good innovations.
Marco:
One of the biggest ones were those breakaway controller cords.
Marco:
You remember those?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
You know what was better than breakaway controller cords, Marco?
Marco:
No cords.
Marco:
Well, yeah, eventually.
Yeah.
John:
That's called innovation.
John:
Well, yeah, but... You and your breakaway controller cords.
Marco:
At the time, everything still had wires, and so if you're going to have a bunch of wires...
Marco:
If you're going to have a bunch of wires, that's a very good way to do it.
Marco:
And they also had an auto-switching Ethernet port on the back.
Marco:
It was the first console, as far as I know, ever to have Ethernet at all.
Marco:
And to have it built in on every console was awesome.
Marco:
And it was auto-switching so that you could use a straight-through or a crossover cable between two Xboxes, and it would just make it work.
Marco:
Which, on gigabit, I think all gigabit ports have that, but that was only 100 megabit, and so it was optional at that time.
Marco:
And they put that in as a little trick.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And they had all sorts of neat little things with the software, the management interface, stuff like that that was very ahead of its time.
Marco:
And in addition to being a pretty powerful system graphics-wise.
Marco:
So overall, I really enjoyed the Xbox.
Marco:
Even though I didn't own one until relatively late in its lifespan, I thought it was a fantastic system.
Casey:
You know what's weird is, and this is totally dating me, well, except maybe to John, who probably was well ahead of me on this.
Casey:
And Marco, I bet you've done this too.
Casey:
When you talk about an Ethernet connection on a console, I don't know why, but the first thing that jumps to mind is me when I'm like 10, playing Descent 1 and Duke Nukem 3D and Doom on serial no-modem cables playing
Casey:
strung together in like my dad's office or whatever so my friends would bring their freaking tower computers and their 800 pound 15 inch monitors over and we would have like a predecessor to a LAN party and that was how I spent my Friday or Saturday evenings when I was like 10
Casey:
uh playing these games against my friends locally and then we thought we were really hot shit when when we would figure out how to do it over dial-up which by the way was so unreliable and so slow that it never friggin worked anyway but i mean i did you guys also do that sort of ridiculously nerdy crap when you were oh yeah i mean almost every weekend in high school and even like like the summer summers in college my friends and i would do this when we were all home
Marco:
Almost every weekend in high school, though, we would haul our computers and our CRT monitors to whoever's house had the hub at the time.
Marco:
Different people got hubs at different times.
Marco:
This was before wireless also.
Marco:
So we would just have very long network cables duct taped to the ceiling and running down the stairs and everything.
Marco:
We would spend like six hours setting.
Marco:
We would start the game at midnight.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
oh yeah it would just be so long just setting it up trying to get all the computers to see each other on the network properly it was a disaster and you know people will have like their their big crt sitting on this rickety coffee table like just everyone cramming in the basement oh my god it was but we had a blast it was tons of fun and i've like now we could all just do that with laptops and
Marco:
Or iPads and have just as much fun.
Marco:
But there really is something about local multiplayer.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
And for certain game types, we would almost always play RTSs.
Marco:
Especially for that game type.
Marco:
It's such a fantastic setup.
Marco:
And it's so much better than playing online.
Marco:
It's so much better than split screen all on one TV from a console.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Yeah.
Marco:
And now the hardware is awesome.
Marco:
We all have enough money to afford laptops now, and laptops are all good enough to play games now, and now we all live in different places and have kids and stuff, and we're all too busy to ever do any of this stuff again.
Casey:
Yeah, it's kind of sad.
Casey:
John, I presume you were an expert in all of these things, but did you get involved in all this?
John:
Only in college, really, because I didn't have networking in my house until I went off to college.
John:
But AppleTalk was awesome for this, because AppleTalk...
John:
the discovery protocol on apple talk like when you're on apple talk network you can see everyone else who's also on the network so that simplified setup greatly you just have to plug all the things together with apple talk cables everyone could see everyone else and like games like marathon and stuff supported apple talk so you just fire it up you'd all see each other you join up and play it was like really easy especially you know like college computer labs where all the macs were there and they're all connected with apple talk you just load marathon and all of them and you've got you know instant land party in the computer lab
Marco:
Yeah, but then the problem there, though, is that you need two things that don't exist.
Marco:
Friends with Macs in the 90s and games for Macs.
John:
In colleges, the labs were always filled with Macs.
John:
And we had a marathon, which is all you really needed.
John:
I did play Doom on the Mac over a modem, I believe, but I think that was after I'd come back from college and played against somebody.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They had old, crappy parts of the game.
John:
Did you ever hear of A-V-A-R-A, Avara, Avara, however the hell you want to pronounce it?
John:
That was a great game with AppleTalk Networking.
John:
It was non-texture mapped, but just like flat-shaded polygons, kind of like a mech game where your direction of travel and the direction that your head carrying the guns were pointing were independent of each other.
John:
Too complicated for modern gamers, certainly too complicated for console, but very...
John:
interesting to play over the network especially at colleges because so with a college you had an apple talk network but you also had uh an ethernet connection to the internet which was just like amazing coming from dial-up right so you could play people in you know far off places over your ethernet connection uh that was like magic i remember doing that on the on the you can only do it on the on the the lab computers because back in your dorm you just had a modem and it was a non-starter you could play online games over ethernet over the internet um
Marco:
Once we got to college, it was way easier because you were on a network of computers or you had labs.
Marco:
In high school, when you were just hauling your computer around, and of course before LCD monitors and good laptops and wireless, it was so much more involved.
John:
I never would have taken my computer to any place.
John:
My precious, beautiful computer, is I going to carry them in a car and in a box?
John:
No, I would never have.
Marco:
For me, though, you always had Macs, right?
Marco:
So by definition, you were never building your own computer.
Marco:
For me, I had this...
Marco:
This weird half hacked together tower that I had assembled myself.
Marco:
Oh, hell yeah.
Marco:
No part of it really felt particularly nice or fragile.
Marco:
It always was just kind of like this.
Marco:
That's why you like the Xbox because it looked like it was built like a Frankenstein monster.
Marco:
i know the xbox is huge lol no i it really like it and i i even had a full tower case not a mid tower a full tower because i wanted and i had friends with those cases too i went over to their houses and played their pc games with them it's no no good i still miss rts's with local multiplayer
Casey:
And you know what I miss?
Casey:
I actually did play some.
Casey:
I played StarCraft and Command & Conquer, Red Alert, some.
Casey:
But you know what I miss is the days back in the day, Marco, when you and I would play Transport Tycoon together.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
On your OS2 laptop.
Marco:
uh wasn't it was it really os2 i know i definitely ran os2 i think we would have to boot to dos to play transport tycoon but the great thing is transport tycoon which is a game that nobody had ever heard of as far as i knew it apparently has enough of a cult following that now there there's this huge open source thing called open ttd for open transport transport tycoon deluxe um you can get
Marco:
a modern engine for Transport Tycoon that uses all the old assets, all the old art and everything.
Marco:
It's open source.
Marco:
It's for Mac and Linux and Windows.
Marco:
Somebody, I think, once tried to port it to the App Store, and it got pulled out of the store for probably a GPL violation or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But you can get this now.
Marco:
So I was playing Transport Tycoon again a few years ago on my MacBook on the train, building up a whole new... It was awesome.
Marco:
And that game has lived on.
Casey:
Did you know, I believe it was Transport Tycoon.
Casey:
If it wasn't Transport Tycoon, it was Roller Coaster Tycoon.
Casey:
99% of that was Assembly.
John:
Wow, I do not know that.
John:
That's how you made games back in the DOS era.
Casey:
Yeah, you kind of had to.
Casey:
But that just melts my head.
John:
Half of the Mac operating system was assembled for most of its early life.
John:
It's the only way that you could do it to get any good performance out of it.
Casey:
That stuns me.
Casey:
Because when I was in school, I, like John, was a computer engineer, not a computer scientist.
Casey:
And so because of that, we had to take a bunch of EE courses.
Casey:
And one of the ones that I believe was classified as EE was microprocessor technology.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly what it was called, but basically it was writing assembly for a Motorola HC-11.
Casey:
And I was one of the like six people I talked to that actually really, really loved that course.
Casey:
And I really did enjoy writing in assembly, but holy crap, I would not want to do that at that level.
Casey:
That just sounds painful.
John:
I could enjoy it.
John:
I really liked my assembly courses and I really got into it and I could see how I would be perfectly happy doing that.
John:
But by the time I was taking that course, I knew it wasn't, you know,
John:
If that was the mainstream way to program, I'd be perfectly happy.
John:
But with the way it is now, no one is writing entire large programs in assembly anymore.
Casey:
Yeah, but Perl makes about as much sense.
John:
It's about as readable.
Casey:
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.
Marco:
Going back a second to Transport Tycoon, I have lots of ideas for little games I would make if I knew how to make games and had time to do so and chose to do that with that time.
Marco:
None of which are true.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
one of the things that I've always wanted to do is take... What I love so much about Transport Tycoon is building the train networks.
Marco:
I don't really care about the other parts of the game.
Marco:
I like building these complicated train networks with tracks laid out in such a way that the maximum throughput of trains can go through and not get all gummed up and everything.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
I bet you could extract that, just that element of it, into a simpler game for iOS that's modern and just simpler and fun.
Marco:
And I know there's Train Yard, which is not really the same thing, although it's very good.
Marco:
But as far as I know, that doesn't exist yet.
Marco:
And I don't really know even what the details of that would be, like what exactly the gameplay would be, how that would work.
Marco:
I would imagine it would be some kind of puzzle-like game where you're trying to design these tracks and put the signals in the right places where they would do the right thing and everything, but all to maximize throughput and minimize traffic.
John:
Once you envision that program in your head, don't you immediately envision the program that you would write to solve that game?
John:
You just make an algorithm and stick it on the game and have it maximize throughput?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think it might be NP complete to solve what I'm imagining.
John:
Oh, it's one of those... You ever see them where they do the automator things for Mario games and stuff where you try to make an algorithm that will successfully get you through the level, but there are limitations...
John:
to how you're doing it like it has to be real time you can only do it in like the scanning interval so you can't really be smart so you have to come up with like the the dumbest algorithm right uh that can execute on on this this limited cpu during the interval between the frames that successfully gets you through the level that's really nerdy my goodness
Marco:
that's impressive now did you ever play transport tycoon john do you even know what we're talking about no but i know those i know those tycoon games but you don't that's the thing but you don't it's not like the others john most people think the transport tycoon is like railroad tycoon or roller coaster tycoon and it's not and it was i think it was made by totally different people it's much more like sim city it's closer i also don't like okay well you probably wouldn't like this
John:
Yeah, I mean, I understand why people are into them.
John:
I see the appeal, but I played them.
John:
It's not my cup of tea.
Marco:
I mean, the gist of the game is it looks a lot like SimCity, and there are a bunch of cities on the map, but you don't build the cities.
Marco:
You are a transportation network, and you build the trains and the planes and the roads that connect the cities, and you get business from that.
Marco:
And so you spend most of your time laying out track.
John:
I like Pipe Dream.
John:
Does that count?
Yeah.
John:
i don't know i don't i don't know do you remember pipe dream i don't think so it's uh you have a bunch of pieces that are all square and a piece can have a straight line from top to bottom a straight line from left to right those are the pipes it could be an elbow uh and you had to lay out the pieces as they came you didn't get to pick and choose it was like here's your next piece find someplace good for it uh and then eventually water would start flowing and the goal was like to get your pipe set up for a really long run of water that's right you meet some limit
John:
The best thing about Pipe Dream is that I think at least one, possibly multiple games, have added basically Pipe Dream as their version of, like, hacking.
John:
Like when you're in some game and you go up to your door lock and they put you into the hacking minigame.
John:
And the hacking minigame is basically Pipe Dream, you know, with, like, wires and special effects and stuff like that.
John:
But you're like, wait a second, this hacking game is Pipe Dream.
John:
Which, you know, has nothing to do with actual hacking.
John:
And it's not even, like, they just have to have some sort of...
John:
that regular people who don't know anything about computers will accept as okay i guess this is hacking and they use pipe dream which i i like pipe dream i thought the game was fun i think they even had a version of that in the seventh guest yeah it's very it's a very popular like they disguise it as much as possible and eventually you realize wait a second this is this is just like pipe dream cleverly disguised
Marco:
so a i'm definitely going to release this as another accidental tech podcast episode b i wonder if anybody is going to know what i just said about the seventh guest like if anybody even remembers what that is i remember what it was i actually loved 11th hour do you know what that is i do that's the sequel but i never played it indeed see i never played seventh guest coincidentally but i really enjoyed 11th hour
Marco:
The Seventh Guest is one of those CD-ROM games.
Marco:
Wasn't it one of the first?
Marco:
It was one of the first CD-ROM games, I think.
Marco:
It was one of the first I'd ever seen.
Marco:
And it was like you were in this haunted mansion and you had to solve puzzles.
Marco:
It was just like a big puzzle-solving game.
Marco:
And so it was tons of these little mini-games and trying to figure out some murder mystery.
Marco:
I forget the exact story, but...
Marco:
it was one of those games where because it was on a CD-ROM, most of the time in the game was spent watching these little FMV sequences, these little videos, because games couldn't have videos up until that point.
Marco:
There was not enough storage space on cartridges.
Marco:
So they would waste the whole CD with videos and CD audio raw.
Marco:
And so you just spend the whole time watching video clips and clicking between them.
Marco:
And that was the game.
Marco:
But it did have some pretty hard puzzles in it.
Casey:
I remember that.
Casey:
Because it was right, to my memory, which is terrible, it was right around the time that, like, Myst had come out as well.
Marco:
I think it was before Myst.
Marco:
But Myst was way more popular.
Marco:
But The Seventh Guest, I think, predated it.
Marco:
And I remember, like, Myst was, like, Myst seems so primitive after seeing The Seventh Guest because it wasn't full motion.
Marco:
It was like a slideshow that you were clicking between in Myst.
Yeah.
Casey:
What was HyperCard?
John:
Myst, rather.
Marco:
Was it just a lot less of it?
John:
It was QuickTime, so it was tiny video.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Well, see, like, the seventh guest, every move you made would be animated the whole way.
Marco:
And I think with Myst, like, if you clicked to move, you know, to go into a room, like, it would just clip and you'd be there, right?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, well, they did a crossfade, but yeah, the full motion video was... I love that you remember that there was a crossfade.
John:
There was a plague on CD, on optical media games, because there was so many... Remember, there was a vampire game with Shannon Doherty, and I think that was the low point.
Marco:
And there were a whole lot of, like, make-your-own-music-video games.
Marco:
There was, like, a criss-cross one for the Sega CD.
Oh!
Marco:
really god that's all those were those seven guests was a good game but in general full motion video on cd-rom those were all terrible games especially because like when cd-roms first came out yes they could hold video but they couldn't hold or play back very good quality video so you were seeing like you were sitting there sitting through really low quality really grainy tiny if you're lucky exactly
Casey:
So one of the other CD-ROM games that I really loved at the time, although I think it was a couple years later, was Wing Commander 3.
Casey:
Did you guys ever play that?
Casey:
It had Mark Hamill in it.
Casey:
John, you must have played this.
John:
I know what you're talking about.
John:
I was not a Wing Commander fan.
Casey:
This is the only one of the series I ever played, but I really loved it.
Casey:
And that had a lot of full motion video, and it was split across like four CD-ROMs, which was unheard of at the time.
Casey:
But a couple things about Seventh Quest and Myst.
Casey:
Firstly, John, I'm surprised that you aren't in love with Myst strictly because it was originally done in HyperCard.
John:
I liked it.
John:
I liked that you could cheat by holding down Command and Option.
Casey:
I did not know that.
Casey:
What would that let you do?
John:
So when you make a HyperCard stack, you can make little regions that are clickable or whatever.
John:
And when you're developing a HyperCard, you want to know what those regions are.
John:
So you could hold down Command and Option, and it would put dotted lines around the clickable regions.
John:
And in early versions of Myst, they had not, I guess, found a way to disable that or whatever.
John:
So it really took the mystery out of the game if you could hold down Command and Option and see what the clickable regions were on any of the Myst screens.
John:
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Casey:
And then also a real-time follow-up because I don't want to have an episode without it.
Casey:
From Wikipedia, Myst was commercially successful on release.
Casey:
Along with the seventh guest, it was widely regarded as a killer application that accelerated the sales of CD-ROM drives.
Marco:
Which was first?
Marco:
I'm curious.
Casey:
Seventh guest by a few months.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And this is, of course, just whatever my friends had.
Marco:
But I saw The Seventh Guest a few years before I ever saw Myst.
Marco:
But again, that's just because my friend had it, and I guess nobody bought Myst for a while.
Casey:
Well, the best part was I remember vividly for these games loading them into, what do you call it?
Casey:
Not a carousel, but it was like a cartridge that you...
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So you put the CD into a caddy and the caddy into the external CD-ROM drive, and that's how I played it.
Casey:
And, oh, my God, that was so terrible.
John:
And it was probably scuzzy.
Casey:
It was.
Casey:
It was indeed.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
John:
So what your PC weenies missed out on was that before Myst were two games called The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, which were— The Manhole?
John:
The Manhole, yep.
Casey:
Is that not for children?
John:
Which were absolutely 100% precursors to Myst, but they were black and white—
John:
They did not come on CD-ROM.
John:
Cosmic also came on, like, six floppy disks or something, six 800K floppy disks.
John:
But it was the same exact thing, a hyper-card stack with static screens that you could click on to make things happen, to solve puzzles, much more casual puzzles, much more kid-oriented, lighter-weight-type things, all black-and-white graphics, but it was the same type deal.
John:
Click, go from one place to the other.
John:
Myst was simply 640x483D rendered color version of that, plus full-motion video.
John:
But if you had played those first two games, it was a natural progression.
John:
well also apparently it was by the same guys who did mist which i've never heard of cyan uh those guys cosmo is a very important a very important piece of work along with like fool's errand uh in the world in the pantheon of gaming and mac gaming do you think you could still make a game like mist today or do you think everybody would just want it to be a free 3d world where you can move wherever you want it
John:
Well, that's what the Myst games are like now.
John:
Oh, they still make them?
John:
Well, they did Myst, and then Riven was just like Myst, but much nicer and better.
John:
Then they did the one, Myst 3 Exile, where you could, like QuickTime VR, you could change your viewpoint and look around in real time.
John:
So it was like you were in a series of...
John:
of, you know, bubbles, the QuickTime VR things that you could look around in.
Marco:
Like those real estate walkthroughs?
John:
Yeah, but only much nicer and motion sickness inducing in me.
John:
Then they did Real Mist, which was like, take Mist 1, now we can do that in real time.
John:
And then they did Uru, which was the online thing where you could walk around and complete 3D.
John:
But yeah, we're far past the point of static screens.
John:
Although I believe Riven is coming out for the iPad, and I think that will actually be a good application.
John:
For people wondering, Riven is the best game if you can only play one of them.
Marco:
play Riven even with the static screens I think on the iPad it'll it'll still work well yeah actually that kind of game probably like there's so many game ports that that people are dumping onto iOS now because if they think they can make a quick buck off their old catalog and such as the seventh guest
Marco:
That's for iPad now?
Marco:
I didn't realize that.
Marco:
Yes, sir.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
I actually might try that just to see.
Marco:
I'm sure the game is not nearly as good as I remember.
Marco:
$4.99.
Marco:
It never is.
Marco:
Sega's dumping so much crap on there.
Marco:
There's so many old console and old PC games that are just being dumped on iOS.
Marco:
Most of them are just terrible because controlling things is so different in iOS.
Marco:
But I imagine a game like Myst and Riven would probably be really easily portable.
John:
It's a perfect fit because you just tap.
John:
It's random access.
John:
It's even better than doing it with a mouse because you don't have the mouse cursor mucking things up and you have random access.
John:
But what they really need to bring is Myth, M-Y-T-H.
Marco:
Wasn't that like an RTS with fantasy people or renaissance?
John:
Yep, but it was no resources.
John:
At the beginning of the round, you have a certain number of points that you distribute to whatever units you want to select, and that's it.
John:
No mining, no producing new troops, no nothing.
John:
So it was a tactics game, really.
John:
But it's perfect for the iPad because it was all about...
John:
swiping around the battlefield rotating skewing selecting multiple people you can imagine like tracing your hands around them maybe they'd have a little bit difficulty because there were formation keys like all the number keys were which formation you wanted and then you would click and drag to align your formation but i feel like with a series of gestures you could pull it off uh and it would be awesome i played myth like crazy and that would
John:
be awesome on the ipad i definitely feel like the the rts type games or games that have rts like controls um are really so far underexplored on on the ipad because i think they're terrible on the on the console because you don't have random access you don't have a random access you don't have a mouse pointer so it's just like it's a nightmare right so it's they're good on on the mac or pc terrible on the console but the ipad should be great because you know you have random access and you know 10 fingers you really need you really need the ipad pro for that the
John:
The big one.
John:
20-inch iPad Pro.
John:
You can use two hands to play Myth 3000 that Bungie will come out with when they're done with Destiny.
Marco:
But if we at least had all iPads, I wouldn't have to carry my full tower PC to my friend's house to play RTSs.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
On a random note, you know what else that just jumped into my head that I used to love playing back in the day was Battle Chess.
Casey:
Did you guys ever play that?
John:
I saw it, yeah.
John:
I remember Battle Chess, yep.
Casey:
Oh, God, I love that.
Casey:
It was just a stupid animation.
John:
Yeah, that was exactly aimed for 10-year-olds.
John:
They cut the guy's head off.
John:
Oh, my God, that's so awesome.
Marco:
This is so much better than regular chess.
John:
And it wasn't even, was it 320 by 200?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
I don't even remember.
John:
Because that was the dividing line between disgusting PC games with pixels the size of bricks and real software that had reasonable size.
Marco:
Very few games of that era were 640 by 480.
John:
Syndicate is the first one I remember seeing.
John:
I'm like, finally, PC gaming has arrived.
Casey:
Well, according to the screenshot in Wikipedia for Battle Chess, it was 320 by 200.
Casey:
But I get the feeling this has got to be shrunk or something.
Marco:
I remember one of my favorite classic games is Scorched Earth to the extent that when I was in college, I tried making a Scorched Earth clone about five different ways and starting over five different times.
Marco:
That's how I learned DirectX.
Marco:
That's how I learned OpenGL.
Marco:
I started even trying that on iOS because I love Scorched Earth so much.
Marco:
In fact, my wife, who was then just my girlfriend, even made me a Scorched Earth pillow for one of the various anniversary or Valentine's something or other where she stitched a Scorched Earth screenshot that she found.
Marco:
She reproduced it with stitching on a pillow.
Marco:
It looks awesome.
Marco:
I still have it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Yeah, that was a fantastic game, and I was happy to see some games similar to it, like that tank game, whatever.
Marco:
I shoot on iOS in the early days.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
oh yeah that game that was like one of the very first games i had where i could run it at the full resolution that my video card supported which was 640 by 480 and it just looked so much better than my friend's crappy 320 by 200 version on his little bit older pc um all those all those sharp lines and everything was so crisp on my 640 by 480 screen that's what us uh mac gamers were lording over all you people yeah you may have color
John:
But who wants color?
John:
We have sharp, sharp black and white graphics.
John:
Wow.
John:
It really did make such a difference, though, with the sharpness of the things you could do.
John:
That's why games like Fool's Errand were possible with those tiny, sharp little graphics.
John:
Even things like Dark Castle, where PC gamers, when they saw Dark Castle, were impressed because it was something they couldn't see on their systems.
John:
Even though this was a black and white game, they did not turn their nose up on it.
John:
They were fascinated by it because it was...
John:
You know, didn't exist at all anywhere.
John:
Nothing had, you know, 72 DPI screen with tiny little characters with real sound.
John:
That's the other thing that PC gamers would be impressed by, you know, if you didn't have a fancy sound card, you just had the PC speaker and it would like bleep at you or whatever.
John:
you know the max came out of the box 22 kilohertz audio and you know they'd put like actual clips of sounds i used to impress uh pc folks when they came over i would just play like random clips from like ferris bueller's day off and stuff just play them as like beep sounds they'd be like wow your computer made that sound is there a cd in there is i no it's just that's just sound the computers make they can make sounds
Casey:
You know, it's funny because I don't really give a crap about hardware in terms of the intricacies of this GPU versus that or this processor versus that.
Casey:
But back in those days, man, I remember having arguments about what was it, like the Sound Blaster 16 versus the Sound Blaster Pro and all these stupid, terrible arguments that when you're 10 years old and a complete frickin' nerd, God, you took them so seriously.
Marco:
Well, also, back then...
Marco:
It was a much rougher world with all this stuff.
Marco:
Like, you would have... Some games just wouldn't support your sound card, and that'd be it.
Marco:
And even just, like, the point where you went from PC speaker to sound card... Nobody had Mac, sorry, John.
Marco:
But the point when you went from PC speaker to sound card...
Marco:
that was a major upgrade because it really did change what your computer could do.
Marco:
It, it radically changed what it was like to play games.
Marco:
And, and like, like to me, like, so I got my first computer, it was a 486, um, without, without a sound card.
Marco:
And then like, I got as an add on, like the next Christmas, um,
Marco:
I got a package that was a SoundBlaster that a CD-ROM drive would also plug into because the motherboards didn't have CD controllers.
Marco:
I think it was a TAPI, the interface that they used.
Marco:
And so you had early sound cards would actually come with a TAPI controllers and they would sell the CD-ROM and the sound card as a bundle.
Marco:
so that so like my first christmas after having my first computer i added to it a cd-rom and a sound card and that was such a massive upgrade like i don't think there was an upgrade that significant until getting internet connectivity like in in how much it changed my computer and then getting internet connectivity there wasn't anything really after that until ssds maybe
Casey:
Well, what about Wi-Fi?
Casey:
I mean, maybe not the same.
John:
How are you not finding Macs?
John:
Because you're adding this terrible CD-ROM drive and this Sound Blaster card to the computer and it's such a huge upgrade.
John:
And like every Mac all was already able to do that for years and years when you had your 486 and you were just ignoring them.
John:
Yeah, probably.
John:
They're off on the side there.
John:
I wanted to play games.
John:
They all had stereo sound that worked.
John:
You could connect the CD-ROM drive to all of them.
John:
You didn't have to buy anything weird.
John:
It was just there.
Marco:
I probably wouldn't have been able to afford it.
Marco:
I bought this computer in 1994.
Marco:
Or like late 90s.
Marco:
No, it was early 94.
Marco:
And I remember it cost like $2,000 with monitor and printer.
Marco:
like what what would a decently equipped mac cost in sorry not 2004 1994 right uh what would a decently equipped mac cost in 94 i'd probably double that right and that that was the problem like we couldn't afford it so you know i i had my uh my gateway 2000 pc that came in the cow spot box oh the lcs were out there 1994 the lcs were out you could get a crappy low-cost mac with a cd ramen sound card
John:
yeah well you know there's no sound card they're trying to say there's no sound card on a mac they all came they all came with sound that worked it was like it's built in it's not there's no incompatibility like the very first one 128 kilobytes of ram 22 kilohertz sound it was just like regular sound you know they jumped up to cd quality eventually but it was like you would never there was never a mac that could just bleep and boop at you
Casey:
right yeah do you remember speaking of ram and this is for marco do you remember doing the dance with conventional memory and trying to make sure that you're like auto exec bat and config sys had had the drivers set up in such a way that you would eke out just barely enough conventional memory in order to run whatever game you wanted to run i did that over my friend's house trying to get the games to run they would come with little instructions on what's how to change your config dot sys and it
John:
You need a bat file to try to get the thing to boot up.
John:
You would get one game to work, and then you'd have to be like, okay, are we done with this game now?
John:
Because we have another game, and we have to screw with the settings again.
Casey:
And this one needs the mouse, so we need to screw with it.
John:
You can't do both of them.
Casey:
I had these bitchin' boot disks and these auto-exec scripts that were like full-on menu systems.
Casey:
So you would turn the computer on.
Casey:
It would be like, what game do you want to play?
Casey:
And based on what game you wanted to play, it would either engage or disengage the mouse and turn on or off your Sound Blaster and the CD while I'm driving.
Marco:
oh it was barbaric but god it was like right after that like i i bought my first computer like right when that stuff started not mattering anymore like it had it had eight megs of ram which at the time was pretty good like it wasn't like a workstation level but it was for a
Marco:
and so like and it was like dos 6.1 or 6.2 so it was already like dos was pretty mature at that point the sound blaster was really easy it was a sound blaster 16 i just put it on the default irqs and everything and it just worked and all the games just supported sound blaster 16s already so like i feel like i i entered that like right after it was all those pains in the ass
Casey:
The next time I had such a big pain in the ass, and I'm going to butcher the acronym, but we were living in Austin, Texas at the time, actually, and we were trying to hook up to our first ISP.
Casey:
And not only did we have to write the modem command script, whatever that's called, where it was like AT, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
AT, H something, 2, D2.
Casey:
So we had to write that.
Casey:
But then we had to write the script that you would run, that the modem would run or whatever the computer would run once you connect to the ISP.
Casey:
God, I wish I could remember the name of the script.
Casey:
But we had to write that by hand.
Casey:
And this was when ISPs, like nobody had an ISP.
Casey:
Everyone had frigging AOL.
John:
It was like, wait for this and send that.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I wrote those in college to connect to my college network with my modem.
Casey:
God, I used to remember what it was called.
Casey:
And my dad and I literally spent like two weeks trying to figure this frigging thing out.
Casey:
And finally we did.
Casey:
And it was like a whole new world.
John:
It didn't take me that long because I had internet access in the lab.
John:
It was really easy to look up modem and its scripts.
John:
And yeah, they weren't that complicated.
Casey:
Well, but bear in mind, I was like 12 at the time.
Casey:
We didn't have an internet to turn to because A, there was barely an internet to begin with, and B, this was us trying to get on the fucking internet in the first place.
Casey:
So, oh man, it was so painful.
Casey:
God, I wish I could remember the name of that script.
John:
I remember tweaking my Moda Minute scripts.
John:
It was like once I got interested enough in it to look up like the AT whatever language made by – who was the one who made that?
John:
Was it Hayes?
John:
Yeah, whoever came up with that originally.
John:
It does make sense once you understand how it works.
John:
And so you could tweak it to try to get like a little bit more performance out of your Z modem transfers.
John:
You know, if you just change, just tweak this parameter a little bit.
John:
See, let's try that.
John:
Hmm, 500 characters per second.
John:
I think I can get more.
Marco:
Bolt on a cold air intake.
Casey:
Oh, and I remember the days of the external US robotics modems.
Casey:
Didn't you talk about that at one point, Mark?
Marco:
Yeah, well, the first modem I had, because I wasn't allowed to really get on the internet for a while, just for money reasons.
Marco:
So the first modem I had was just a hand-me-down from, I don't even know where I got it.
Marco:
Maybe the garbage, a thrift store.
Marco:
It was 2400 baud, and it was a tremendous external serial modem.
Marco:
And this was probably 1996.
Marco:
It was pretty late to have a 2400 baud modem.
Marco:
and the only thing I could connect to was this local BBS that was free.
Marco:
There was no internet service for me back then.
Marco:
So what I eventually got, though, was I eventually somehow negotiated, or I think somebody else felt pity on me and handed me down a 14.4 modem a little while later, which at the time, again, was ridiculously slow, but it was at least a lot better than 2400.
Marco:
So with that, I convinced my richest friend, whose dad had an AOL account,
Marco:
uh, to give me a screen name on his account.
Marco:
So I could log on and I would leave call waiting off.
Marco:
Uh, I mean, I would leave call waiting enabled and leave the speaker on the modem on constantly, which is an AT command that you have to modify to do that.
Marco:
And, uh, and just listen to the, the whole time I'm online, just listen to that and,
Marco:
And I would have to listen for the call waiting beep.
Marco:
Because if the call waiting beep, it was either my friend who wanted to use the account because we couldn't both be logged in.
Marco:
Or it was somebody calling from my mom.
Marco:
And we only had one phone line.
Marco:
So I had to flip the modem off, pick up the phone, and answer the phone.
Marco:
And then lose all the connections I had.
Marco:
Any download that was in progress would be lost, have to start over again.
Marco:
The AOL client would freak out because it wasn't really accustomed to your modem just being turned off all the time in the middle of being used.
Marco:
And it was terrible.
Marco:
And I went straight from that terrible AOL setup to eventually a 33.6 modem.
Marco:
That was a gift for me from my mom.
Marco:
I really appreciated that 33.6 modem.
Marco:
Still no service, though.
Marco:
I still use my friend's account.
Marco:
And then after about another year of that, I went right to cable.
Marco:
I finally convinced my mom to let me buy my own internet service.
Marco:
I was working at a little hippie food co-op grocery store when I was like 15.
Marco:
So I was able to pay the 40 bucks a month for the Roadrunner service from Time Warner.
Marco:
It was one of the very first cable modems.
Marco:
It was awesome.
Marco:
And I went straight from 33.6 AOL, my friend's account, to 10 megabit unmonitored awesome everything.
John:
You never got 56K.
Marco:
No, I skipped 28.8 and 56K, like the two most common ones.
Marco:
I skipped both of them.
John:
I skipped 28.8 and 33.6.
John:
I went 24, 96, 14.4, 56.
Casey:
See, I went 96, 14, 4, 28, 33, 6.
Casey:
And a lot of this, I went through every step.
Casey:
And I remember that we chose the X2 side of the X2 K56 Flex debate.
Casey:
But the reason I was able to get all this stuff was not because we were particularly fluent, but because dad worked for IBM.
Casey:
So he arguably needed all this crap for work.
Casey:
And so because of that, I got to kind of ride on his coattails.
Casey:
And the same way I'm riding on Marco's M5's coattails, if you will.
Marco:
Yeah, I need this car for work.
Marco:
I still have all my modems up in the attic, you know.
Marco:
Well, I think I still have the 33.6.
Marco:
Original boxes and everything.
Marco:
I got the cable modem in like 98 or 99, one of those.
Marco:
But I still had a reason to pull out that old external 33.6 US Robotics modem like once a year until like 2005.
Marco:
I held on to it because I kept needing it for like occasional like, oh crap, something's broken.
Marco:
I can't do something.
Marco:
I need this modem to save me in some way.
Marco:
Like, that kept coming up for almost a decade after I had it.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Memories.
Casey:
We're so old.
Marco:
We really are.
Casey:
That's a good time to end, what do you think?
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
It's getting late anyway.
Casey:
I'm about to turn to a pumpkin.
Casey:
Or whatever you do when you get really tired.
Yeah.
Casey:
Anything else, though?
Marco:
I think I'm just going to let you keep talking.
Marco:
Yeah, right?
Marco:
It's getting better.
Casey:
Let's not do that.
Casey:
And I only had that one glass of Silvertree.
Casey:
Some kind of fruity vodka.
Casey:
It was not fruity, jackass.
Casey:
And that is long since done, so I can't even blame it on the booze.
Casey:
Oh, well.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else?
Marco:
No, I think we're good.
Casey:
Actually, that was a really good Accidental Tech podcast, if I'm allowed to say so.
John:
You guys okay with it?
John:
I thought that wasn't actually going to be a podcast, so I was too loose with my gaming talk.
John:
My fans will be disappointed.
John:
That's the best.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Listen to this guy.
Marco:
The whole point, John, is that if we convince you to do any kind of additional tech podcast, we can't allow you to prepare for it because then you'll get burned out and you'll have to stop doing it.
John:
I still got to find the video.
John:
I only saw the tail end of the video.
John:
I just looked at the reports of the front part.
John:
I joined when they were showing the Killzone demo.
John:
The obligatory pre-rendered BS Killzone demo, which has become part of the Sony press conference experience.
Marco:
I really have doubts with these consoles.
Marco:
Is the console business still growing meaningfully?
John:
Oh, I don't know if they're going to be successful business-wise, but the hardware they're making, I would like to buy and use, and I hope they stay in business long enough to make games for it.
John:
I'm not even going to attempt to handicap their business stuff.
John:
But the hardware, I think it's still very interesting, much more interesting to me than just making a gaming PC.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you look at the optical disc for video business, you know, I think, you know, we had the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format where it sucked.
Marco:
And then now we still have the problem with like a lot of people just don't upgrade to Blu-ray because DVD is good enough for them and they don't really notice.
John:
Because Blu-ray is so terrible.
Marco:
Yeah, and Blu-ray is such a pain in the ass.
Marco:
Like all the weirdo new menu things they do now, the Java.
John:
So terrible.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so I think looking at that landscape, it very well might be that Blu-ray is the last video disc format.
John:
Oh, certainly, yeah.
Marco:
And if it's not, there's only probably one more.
Marco:
But I think Blu-ray is probably going to be the last one.
Marco:
Looking at these consoles, I would say there's a good chance these might be the last consoles that Microsoft and Sony make.
John:
Well, if they play their cards right, they shouldn't be.
John:
They're the last consoles that are going to have optical discs in them, probably.
John:
You know, there was many questions about whether the PlayStation 4 would have an optical drive where they were just going to go download only.
Marco:
And I think we don't know the answer to that yet, do we?
John:
Yeah, they're going to have optical drives.
John:
They can't go download only because the games are too big.
John:
Yeah, it's a little aggressive now.
John:
The connections are too slow, so...
John:
Yeah, I have faith that certainly Microsoft can stay in business with their other things, funding them.
John:
And Sony, I think they'll both pull it out.
Marco:
I mean, Microsoft will be fine because Microsoft is fine pumping money into a losing division for a long time.
John:
And Xbox is finally making money for them.
John:
Oh, it is.
John:
Yeah, it turned around sometime towards the end.
John:
I don't know if it turned around if you ignore the Red Ring of Death cost or if you don't, but basically it came around.
John:
That's their one little success story.
John:
They just...
Marco:
fighting the wrong battle but yeah i hope they both stay in business because i like game consoles and i don't want them to go away i i do like i it's hard for me to really enjoy them because i haven't really had time to enjoy a game console or rather i haven't haven't even played journey it's shameful i know like i haven't i haven't chosen to spend my time that way i guess it's two hours marco two hours so angry go do it now i think i might have even bought it
John:
It's two hours to play the game, but it takes four hours to get the game.
Marco:
Right, that was the problem.
Marco:
There was a day, and I IM'd you for recommendations.
Marco:
There was a day where Tiff and I decided, you know, this was before the baby was born, and we were bored.
Marco:
And it was like a weekend.
Marco:
I'm like, okay, I can justify not working for one day.
Marco:
And we're like, let's play video games.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And so we go to play video games, and we're like, all right, well, what do we have?
Marco:
We have all three systems.
Marco:
Well, the Wii is, I think, upstate somewhere, and her parents' house, and I don't know where the Wii is anymore, because we have no desire to play the Wii.
Marco:
But we have the 360 and the PS3.
Marco:
They both have internet connections.
Marco:
They both have downloadable game stores.
Marco:
All right, let's go.
Marco:
What do you want to play?
Marco:
And we realized we were totally unqualified to even choose a game to buy and play from their stores.
Marco:
So, you know, so I am Syracuse.
Marco:
So, you know, I asked you, oh, what should we get?
Marco:
You gave me all these recommendations.
Marco:
They were mostly pretty good.
Marco:
So I go and like, oh, I got to add more credit to my account, but I don't want to give Sony my credit card because they keep getting hacked.
Marco:
So I have to find some way around that.
Marco:
And then while the PS3 game was down, I'm like, let's switch over to the Xbox.
Marco:
This is going to take forever and then go through 17 system software updates and all these reboots.
Marco:
go over to the Xbox and do pretty much the exact same thing, going through all the software updates and all the reboots, then going and trying to buy some games, having to add more credit to my account because I haven't added any credit to it since 2005 or whatever, and all these hoops to jump through, these overhead of trying to start playing a game...
Marco:
and, oh, let me download the demo for this one before I buy it, and then the demo sucks, and then you can't multiple download or anything, because if you do, it cancels the first download.
Marco:
It was such a disaster.
Marco:
We ended up spending hours trying to play a game, and then by the time we actually started playing a game, which eventually we started, what's that black and white one?
John:
You played Limbo.
Marco:
Yeah, Limbo.
Marco:
And that's a really good game.
Marco:
We enjoyed it for a while, but I haven't actually gone back and finished it yet.
Marco:
That was like the perfect game for this, for us.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
It took us hours of dicking around with the consoles and their stores.
John:
Think if you didn't turn on your Mac for a couple of years and you wanted to get something.
John:
Oh, well, the thing you want is only in the Mac App Store.
John:
What's the Mac App Store?
John:
Oh, well, you need 10.6.8 to get there.
John:
Oh, well, then I got to upgrade that.
John:
Okay, I wanted to get 10.6.8.
John:
Oh, that only runs online, so I got to upgrade again.
John:
Like, if you didn't use your Mac for years, you'd be in for the same crazy upgrade thing.
John:
If you use your console frequently, the system updates are more frequent than OS X point updates, but they're not that onerous.
John:
they'd be spread out because you'd be using it more frequently but i use it frequently as a media player right so the people who don't actually play games on it except for once in a blue moon just like they have all these updates built up uh for them uh but if you if you use it frequently like that's not stopping any of my kids but they're playing the things at least once a week and so everything is all always updated and really fine and i think there's plenty of wii games that you would actually enjoy
John:
Not that I'm recommending you dig out the Wii because now it's kind of past its prime, but, you know.
Marco:
I mean, honestly, if I was going to get back into the Wii, I'd get the Wii U because one of the things I hated so much about the Wii was the lack of HD output.
John:
Yeah, well, you know, it was past its prime when it was introduced and it's even farther past now.
John:
Yeah, the Wii U is fun.
John:
Talk about multiplayer gaming where one person's got the little screen, one person's got the big one.
John:
No split screen.
John:
It's kind of nice.
Marco:
Yeah, I imagine once my kid is old enough to want to play video games, I imagine my opinion of consoles will change and my usage pattern will change.
John:
But for the next few years until that happens, presumably... So you've got to keep those console makers in business, waiting for Adam to get older.
John:
He's got a couple of years, maybe five years, before he can do something useful, and there better be a console maker still standing.
Yeah.
Marco:
I imagine some geek parents have probably attempted this, where you attempt to make your kid just be happy with a very large quantity of games for an old system that now costs nothing.
Marco:
But I would imagine that plan falls apart when they go to their friends' houses.
John:
I did that with my kids.
John:
No, I did that with my kids.
John:
They do not care.
John:
He played Nintendo 64 games, GameCube games, Wii games.
John:
None of those are HD.
John:
Some of them are just hideous-looking, and he has never made a peep about a game not looking good.
John:
Not once, and he's eight now.
Marco:
That's pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe I'll try that.
Marco:
I still have that modded Xbox somewhere loaded up with my emulator packs of every game ever made for the Genesis, the Super Nintendo, the NES, and I think even a few for the TurboGrafx-16, and a few.
John:
Wow.
John:
And it did emulate the N64.
Marco:
I didn't.
John:
i didn't try 2d games maybe he would have complained if it did 2d they were all like nintendo 64 as far back as i went but nintendo 64 games look awful compared to i mean that was like the first things that were 3d you know it's they they're not good looking uh but maybe he would have balked at 2d i'm not sure so you'll find out try him try him out with uh space invaders now so many ios games are 2d and so many kids end up playing those
John:
Yeah, but their 2D retina is a little bit different than Super Nintendo graphics or whatever.