We covered Macbeth at school when I was 14. I don't think I was particularly disadvantaged by covering it the old fashioned way; with a decent teacher who helped us over some of the linguistic bumps, covered key themes and character arcs and had us do rough-and-ready re-enactments of a few of the scenes to understand both the "flow" of Shakespeare's language and the pace and tone of the play. I struggle to understand how technology would have helped much above and beyond that.
We've had a flood of articles on the issue of "does learning to code make you better at learning other stuff" recently. I can't help but feel that the question itself isn't quite the right one (and that the wrong question might be getting a deliberate push by commercial interests).
If there is evidence to suggest that learning to code produces wider educational benefits, then I suspect that it is because coding is something that needs to be taught in a structured manner, with strong logical underpinnings. This is something that is missing from many subjects on the modern curriculum. Even mathematics is usually taught by rote these days, with students simply learning how to plug numbers into a formula in a mechanical manner.
Having recruited and managed a number of school and college leavers over the years, I've noticed that those whose education has included subjects with strong structural and logical underpinnings often tend to be more adaptable and faster to learn in the workplace. That can mean computer science and it can mean mathematics, but it's not limited to them. Ancient and non-Indo-European languages can be particularly good, as learning these requires engagement with the logical underpinnings of "how a language works". French/Spanish/German etc, unfortunately often tend to be taught using a "phrasebook" approach that might result in a faster route to a passable fluency (provided the conversation remains within comfortable bounds), but doesn't bring the same wider benefits.
Most modern MMOs don't have a real economy. EVE Online is a rare exception (and very much a niche proposition). Of the "normal" MMOs, then depending on who you talk to, Final Fantasy XI (released 2002 in Japan, 2003 in the West) or Star Wars Galaxies (2004) was the last to allow any significant degree of player freedom to shape the economy. Everything since World of Warcraft has locked in-game financial transactions down so hard that actual trading between players is knocked right out to the margins.
What do I mean? Basically, that the items of highest value in most MMOs cannot be obtained through player-production and in-game trading. In a subscription MMO (eg. WoW, Final Fantasy XIV), the most powerful gear will normally be obtained by players through skill-based team challenges (high-end raiding or PvP). Once obtained by a player, it is almost always locked so as to be untradeable to other players. A second tier of good-but-not-best gear is usually available via a pseudo-currency (tokens, honour, whatever) that is rewarded in fixed proportions from performing repetitive activities (daily quests, dungeons etc), often with a cap on how much can be earned in a week, and which can't be traded to other players. Consumable items are still crafted and traded, but the trend in MMOs has been to downplay these over the last few years.
This has largely come about due to the prevalence of real-money trading; people using real-world money to buy in-game currency. When the companies running MMOs realised that trying to crack down on this trade was like trying to wrestle with fog, some of them shifted their strategy to downplaying the importance of the in-game economy.
The others, of course, went into the "freemium" pay-to-win model, whereby he who spends the most real-world money has the best stuff.
What's interesting in the subscription MMOs is how the free market has acted to route-around the ever-tighter economic controls. You might not be able to buy the best gear, but in both WoW and Final Fantasy XIV, you can hire teams of players as "mercenaries" who will run you through the high-end content and guarantee you the items that drop. Blizzard don't like this, Square-Enix turn a blind eye. Various other types of grey-market activity have also sprung up around the margins to allow players to turn either in-game or real-world wealth into an advantage.
I went back and played the original X-Com again (for the first time in a decade or so) after I finished the remake. And what I found was a game whose graphics hadn't held up quite so badly as others of a similar vintage, but whose gameplay was showing serious signs of age.
On the tactical side, squads felt overly large, micromanagement was excessive by any reasonable estimation and the random number generator was allowed to become far too dominant in determining the outcome of combat. The need to play "hunt the last alien" before you could successfully complete a mission made certain missions, particularly some of the terror missions with complex cityscapes, an absolute grind.
By contrast, the remake is slicker and smarter. I felt like it was doing more than the old X-Com to make me use all of my assets in the field and was striking a more appropriate balance between luck and skill. Moreover, with the troopers being a little less vulnerable and having more defined traits to carry over between missions, I felt a sense of connection with my squad that was missing in the old game.
Now, the remake isn't perfect; I think allowing an extra 2 soldiers in the tactical squads (so 8 rather than 6) would have struck a better balance. The strategic game is undeniably less sophisticated than in the original (though also less repetitive in the late-game stages).
But on balance, I would rank the remake as being the better game, in objective terms - and in terms of both gameplay and graphics. Admittedly, the original was a far more striking game when it was first released and had a genre-defining impact that the remake didn't. But put them side by side and I'd take the remake.
Graphics matter. Anybody who doesn't think so is a luddite and should maybe consider that the whole "technology" world might not be for them.
Advances in graphics and advances in the quality of games have frequently gone hand in hand over the years. Wing Commander wasn't massively more advanced than the space-combat bits of Elite, but it felt like a whole new experience thanks to the graphics and presentation. At the other end of the timeline, if you have the horsepower to run the PC version of The Witcher 3 on full settings, you'll get probably the most immersive experiences ever made - which complements the gameplay nicely.
Admittedly, you can have a good game without good graphics; I can think of a handful of fairly recent titles that have managed it (Super Meat Boy, Thomas Was Alone), but those tend to be the exceptions. By and large, the "graphics doesn't matter" indie scene has given us a bunch of shoddy, derivative "retro-sprite-art pseudo-8-bit roguelikes" to clog up the Steam storefront. As I get older and more cynical, I increasingly find that a lazy approach towards graphics on the part of a developer usually translates into a lazy attitude towards the broader design.
In the specific case of the Resident Evil 4 remaster, I can sort-of see the point. RE4 was a seminal game that brought in a lot of wider changes to the survival horror genre. In the long run, I think you can argue that most of those changes (the greater action focus, the upgrade systems) were detrimental to the genre; but that doesn't diminish how important (and how good) RE4 was. The problem with going back to older games, however, is that graphics can turn into an immersion-breaker. Visuals which seemed fine a decade ago frequently look horrible to eyes used to modern games (and resolution upscaling can be particularly unforgiving in exposing flaws). I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories. So making some improvements to enable people to go back to the game without that sense of disconnect is no bad thing.
But it is, I would argue, something Capcom should have done for the re-release. Not something that should be left to the community.
True, but it matters more for some genres than others. A lot of the past game-streaming ideas have foundered because they were pitched at the streaming of action-heavy games.
Trying to play a shooter, a racing game, a fighting game or a precision platformer via streaming? No thanks. Even small amounts of input latency can render games in those genres deeply unpleasant. But streaming something like X-Com or Pillars of Eternity? Sure...
Microsoft's Xbox Live system had something similar a few years ago. In that case, the "bug" was actually a flaw in their online and phone support protocols and is pretty well documented here.
This was used to compromise a large number of accounts in 2011 and 2012, with the compromised accounts generally being used to make tradeable FIFA DLC purchases, allowing Xbox Live purchases to be laundered back into real cash.
I got stung by it myself, which utterly shocked me as my XBL password was a strong password that had only ever been entered into my 360 console - so even if my PC were compromised (and I was pretty sure it wasn't), the password certainly hadn't been extracted via a keylogger. MS were very prompt in responding and gave the impression that they were dealing with a lot of these cases. They refunded the £50 that the scumbag had spent and gave me 3 months free XBL Gold subscription as well, which seemed odd given I was still convinced the slip-up must have been on my end.
Wasn't until I saw that Kotaku article a few months later that I realised what had happened. The irony is that this was going on at the same time as the Sony PSN breach and, unlike the PSN breach, it resulted in accounts actually being compromised and fraudulent purchases being made. But as it was a steady drip-drip-drip of compromised accounts rather than an eye-catching big-bang "hack", the mainstream media never picked up on it.
Always going to the most recent Nvidia drivers has been a risky proposition for years, on Win 7, Vista, XP etc.
Nvidia put out a lot of driver updates tied specifically to newly released high-profile games. In some cases, performance in those games will be pretty shocking if you don't move straight to the latest drivers. The PC release of GTA5 (in most respects a solid release) is one example. Sometimes, the drivers are fine. More often, they cause issues with a range of older applications and games. One recent driver update caused massive issues with.mkv playback, for instance (though a workaround was discovered fairly quickly).
The sensible thing to do is to upgrade your drivers only every few months and only move to versions that are generally recognized as stable and whose known issues have well-tested workarounds. Automatically moving to the latest version is a mug's game.
Sometimes the whole thing goes amusingly wrong. When id Software released Rage, it had horrible texture pop-in issues on most PCs with Nvidia cards. Why? Because id had expected Nvidia to put out a particular driver update in time for launch and Nvidia had gone with a different one instead.
I pre-ordered this on Steam a couple of days before launch. As of right now, it is sat on 1h50m playtime and I'm not touching it again until either we have news on when a major patch is expected or we start to get close to two weeks after release.
Why?
Because of Steam's new refund policy. If you have less than 2 hours playtime on a game and it is less than 2 weeks since release (or less than 2 weeks since your purchase, if you purchased it post-release), you are eligible for a refund. The game in its current state is a very sorry sight indeed.
My personal experiences with it haven't been as bad as some. I have an i7 3820 @ 3.66ghz, an Nvidia 980 and 16gb of nice fast RAM. I also, crucially, have a 500gb SSD that I use for my OS and for drive speed sensitive games (as well as some big old traditional drives for everything else). Running from the SSD and with an.ini tweak to remove the 30fps cap (yes, a 30fps cap in a PC game in this day and age), I can manage a not-terrible level of performance. Framerates with all settings maxed in 1080p flicker between 35 fps and 70 fps, depending on what's happening on screen, though the wide variations do produce some ugly artefacts.
When I first installed the game to one of my traditional drives, performance was appalling. While framerates when stood still doing nothing were the same, taking almost any action in-game, from moving around to entering a vehicle or changing areas, would produce large framerate drops, hideous stuttering, broken textures and texture pop-in. This game has some serious issues with data streaming from storage drives.
The game is also ugly to look at. Ok, ok, I'm being a bit harsh there. As a bare-bones PC port of a late-cycle 360 or PS3 game, it would have looked ok. But compared with PC versions of recent efforts like Shadows of Mordor, Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3, this looks terrible. Bear in mind that all of the above run at higher and steadier framerates with all settings maxed on my PC. In Arkham Knight, NPCs movements are repetitive and robotic, textures are low-resolution (the game will only allow "low" or "medium" detail textures to be selected, implying higher detail textures were removed at the last moment) and basic visual effects from the console versions are missing.
My experiences put me at the better end of the scale. I have a powerful PC with a single-Nvidia-GPU setup. Weaker PCs, or even more powerful PCs with multi-GPU setups or AMD cards seem to have things much worse. I've only experienced one crash to desktop - but that's as many crashes in under 2 hours of play as I've experienced in almost 30 hours of play in The Witcher 3.
A few wider points about this; while this game is particularly brutal in terms of its drive speed requirements, it is part of a broader picture that drive speed is starting to matter as much as CPU and GPU speed for PC gamers in terms of actual in-game performance (rather than just load-times). Watch_Dogs, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition all suffered from in-game stuttering issues when running from a traditional drive - though not to anything like the same extent as Arkham Knight. An SSD large enough for games as well as the OS is becoming non-optional for serious PC gamers.
Second, this is the first real stress-test of Steam's refund system. To their credit, Valve seem to be honouring Arkham Knight refund requests without any qualms. And it's surely no coincidence that the first "broken" PC port to go out after the refund system was introduced has led to such a dramatic reaction by the publisher.
You're right. There was a Survation poll that got fairly close to the final numbers, but the company took a look at it and decided it was a rogue-poll. The Survation CEO wrote a fascinating blog post about why he took the decision, which you can read
The outfit I mentioned in my original post who managed to "predict" the outcome on the basis of published polls were Number Cruncher Politics. Their article, written 2 days before the vote, can be found here - be warned that it is long and has graphs.
The opinion polling industry here in the UK got got last month's General Election badly wrong. Not only did almost all of the pre-election polls (conducted by a wide range of companies, some of whom use telephone surveys while others use an online approach) get the vote-distribution wrong, over-estimating Labour support and under-estimating Conservative support, but they also misread the mapping of those vote-shares into Parliamentary seats (which is, admittedly, not always simple in the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system).
Only the exit-poll conducted on the day of the election itself got relatively close to the actual result (and even that under-estimated the scale of the eventual Conservative victory).
There's a major industry post-mortem in progress at the moment, which is scrutinising various aspects of previous methodological orthodoxy. UKpollingreport has a fairly good write-up of the state of play here.
There's been a fair degree of political acrimony about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polling. In particular, there have been questions raised about whether inaccurate polling caused the parties or the voters to change their behaviours in a way that accurate polling (or no polling) wouldn't have. There are also some calls for the UK to follow the example of some continental European countries and ban the publication of opinion polls in the 2-3 week period before an election.
One other point worth noting is that there was one particular data-analytics organisation (sorry, can't find the link right now) which looked at the raw data from the opinion polls and made a call a few days before the election which predicted the outcome fairly accurately.
Nate Silver called it badly wrong, in this instance.
The banning of video-games has never really taken off in the UK, though not for want of trying. The BBFC had a good go at it with Carmageddon, but the subsequent backlash and (successful) appeal scared that organisation away from heavy involvement with games for quite a long time afterwards.
Manhunt 2 was originally banned in its uncut form, I think, though it was granted certification after a few seconds of footage were cut. And I think there was some other PS2-era shooter (The Punisher?) which was also refused certification without minor cuts.
Actually, the most notable "banned game" in the UK was never actually banned at all. It was Rule of Rose, a generally inoffensive (though not, to be honest, very good) Japanese PS2 survival horror game. Some fuckwit Brussels politician decided he was going to launch a moral crusade against games and picked this as his target. He made allegations about the game's content with were so egregiously untrue that they'd have made even Jack Thompson blush. However, as releases like that are generally have a marginal business case as well and as the game was being (incorrectly) accused of promoting paedophilia and child-murder, the publisher canned the release in the UK and a handful of other European countries.
I ended up importing a US copy just to see what the fuss was about. It was all pretty tame stuff (and the game itself was crippled by terrible controls and a lot of backtracking - common problems in survival horror games of that era). Most video-game controversies, like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto and Hatred, are at least partly courted by the game's developer. I always felt sorry for Rule of Rose, despite the fact it wasn't very good, because the controversy came out of the blue.
Sorry - I should have explained this more than I did. The Zones are technically a part of the public transport charging system (for underground, buses and some rail services) and are arranged in a series of concentric circles. Most of the bits of London that tourists see are in Zone 1. As you get further out, you get more residential areas, as well as (in the outer zones), formerly free-standing towns like Bromley and Croydon which the London sprawl has swallowed over the years.
But while technically a means for working out how much a public transport journey costs, the Zones are more regularly used in London parlance, particularly when talking about house-prices and so on. There's a perception that the more successful you are, the more central the Zone you can afford to live in. But one of the points of my original post was that this has turned into a bit of a false expectation over time; status conscious people are paying exorbitant prices to live in Zones 1 and 2, when they could have a much better quality of life (often with equally good access to the important bits of the centre) living in the outer zones.
As people working in the media tend, as a broad generalisation, to be acutely status conscious and to assume that their own experiences are more representative than they are, the stereotype that all of London is over-priced and over-crowded gets more of a public airing than it deserves.
If I've seen a waterfall once, I don't really need to see it again. To be honest, a single waterfall sighting every few years is more than enough for me. I'm not really into nature; it gets dull fast and most of it smells of cow poo.
I'd rather live somewhere that gives me access to one of the largest and most varied employment markets in the world, as well as a first-rate range of cultural and social amenities.
And London Underground can indeed be a bit grim... which is why I don't use it. The great thing about being south of the river in London is that you are more likely to use surface rail than underground. Faster (since you can get trains to the outer stations that don't stop at every point along the way), generally less crowded (though peak trains can still be busy) and you get a decent view crossing the Thames into Victoria.
Like trying to stay in Zones 1 and 2 and insisting on being north of the river, clinging to proximity to tube stations is another big mistake that a lot of London residents make. The tube is a convenient way to make short journeys around central London, but surface rail will generally make for a faster and more pleasant commute from home if you have the option. Personally, I never go more than a few stops on the Tube (with the exception of the occasional hike out to Heathrow, which is a pain to reach by other means until we get Crossrail).
That's another reasonable option and I have friends who do it. Hell, I spent 18 months commuting from Cambridge (close to 15 years ago now) and it wasn't too bad. Wouldn't be possible these days, though - Cambridge living costs are almost as nuts as central London now.
The only thing you have to watch for with the longer distance commuting is that you really can find yourself at the mercy of rail fair increases; some of the season ticket prices can get very steep indeed once you go beyond the London boundary.
A lot of the negative preconceptions around London are based on tales from people who are determined to cling to the city centre. I used to be one of them; living in a tiny, poxy flat in Zone 2 and paying through the nose for it.
I then took stock, realised that I was spending so much on being close to the centre and was so stressed out by the downsides (noise, antisocial behaviour, general crowding) that I wasn't actually enjoying the supposed benefits. So I bought a place - at a fairly reasonable price - in Zone 5 (and south of the river to boot). From stations within a few minutes walk of where I live, I can be at Victoria station in less than 20 minutes and London Bridge in less than 25. I also get a pleasant, leafy environment, a rock-bottom local crime rate and decent - albeit very mainstream - local shops and amenities. And I'm not exactly mega-rich... "reasonable middle-income" is probably the best description.
If you want to do the full on hipster thing of living in the middle of town so that you can cycle to work and walk to your local pop-up organic smoothie yurt before going window-shopping for hemp underwear, then unless you are rich, you will have no money, will live in squalor and your impressions of London will sour pretty fast.
If you want good access to the city's big employment centres and cultural highlights, then just conquer your snobbery about the outer Zones (a point-to-point ticket from Zone 5 doesn't cost much more than a Zone 1-2 travelcard) and going properly south of the river.
Unfortunately, when I phoned them up, they told me no such thing was possible. This was in late 2013, though, so it's quite possible they no longer had the parts. Plus mine had gone down completely to the YLOD, which has a reputation for being unrecoverable.
I see a lot of cynicism in this thread - much of it entirely deserved. However, from a broader perspective, this is undoubtedly a good thing - and not just in terms of "yay, I can play more things on my new console".
Why? Because it goes some way towards mitigating what was looking like a real risk of a "lost generation" of console games.
As older platforms have gone out of circulation, PC emulation has generally been there to keep titles playable. Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model, I was able to carry on playing my PS2 games from the original discs via PC emulation.
But there is currently nothing like working emulation of the 360 and PS3 and, given those platforms DRM measures and general hardware eccentricity, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are years, if not decades, from actually seeing it (if we ever do).
Neither 360 nor PS3 hardware was of the highest quality. The early builds of both consoles had high failure rates - legendarily so in the case of the 360 - and while later iterations improved matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that they both remained essentially disposable and short-lived devices built as cheaply as possible.
So at some point in the not-too-distant future (within5 years maybe? Certainly within 10) working 360s and PS3s are going to get harder and harder to find. And with no emulation for them, there is a good chance that a good chunk of the (huge) catalogue of games for those platforms is going to end up inaccessible to everybody bar specialist collectors.
Now, a good chunk of the library for both consoles is basically disposable junk anyway. Does it matter massively if a few iterations of Madden and FIFA end up lost to posterity? Not really. In other cases, games are being "rescued" via "HD remasters" for current generation platforms (which can, admittedly, feel like a rip-off), as has happened with The Last of Us and and as will soon happen with Gears of War and Uncharted. In other cases, developers looking to make money from their back-catalogue may put out PC ports. We've seen this rescue a few absolute classics like Valkyria Chronicles, as well as some more... shall we say... eccentric choices like the Hyperdimension Neptunia games.
But that still leaves a lot of games - including those which were subject to exclusivity agreements but didn't sell well enough to merit an HD-remaster - stranded. There are some good and noteworthy games here; Lost Odyssey, Vanquish, Eternal Sonata and so on.
Now, if the Xbox One has back compatibility all of a sudden, that means that we have at least a temporary stay-of-execution on all three of those games I just mentioned. Plus the fact that they're running on PC-like hardware keeps alive the prospect that we might see them running on "proper" PC hardware at some point further down the line. And if you care about preserving an unbroken history of gaming's development, then this matters. If you don't think that keeping that chain intact matters, then just ask the BBC how they feel about all of those Doctor Who episodes they threw into the trash.
Of course, we still have some PS3 exclusives that are essentially marooned; and that Cell architecture is going to render any kind of emulation, whether on general PCs or on current or future Sony console hardware, a bitch. That leaves some excellent games (the PS3-era Ratchet & Clank games were superb and a lot of Japan's output for the latter half of the last console cycle was PS3-exclusive) still stranded. But maybe this step from MS will put some pressure on Sony.
Hopefully, the PC-like architecture of the current generation will make back-compatibility less of an issue going forward, though there are still issues about the extent to which many games are essentially dependent on PSN or XBL network architecture.
Which could well be the salvation of the Xbox One. Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, cross-platform development was a PITA because the three platforms were so different from each other.
However, the PS2 had an installed base way that was way larger than either of its rivals. So for a lot of small and mid-sized developers, the obvious solution was to develop only for the PS2; it would give you 90% or more of your sales anyway.
I had a friend who worked at a mid-tier developer during that time who worked on a multi-platform game. The irony was that the technical limitations of the PS2 forced compromises all over their game design; features that had to be cut or scaled down and maps whose size had to be reduced. But even though they could have made a better game for the other two platforms, the PS2 version was king, because it was going to rack up most of the sales. Meanwhile, the Gamecube version was way more trouble than it was worth; several game-functions had to be redesigned because of the lack of buttons on the Gamecube controller and that version ended up with a simpler, less flexible and less well balanced combat system as a result. Often forgotten - controller configuration matters as much for ease of porting as what's inside the console itself.
The game did just about well enough to get a sequel. They binned the Cube version and just about decided to keep the Xbox version, though it was a close-run thing. Only the PS2 version made a profit.
Last generation, the PS3 and 360 had broadly similar installed bases. Ok, there were geographic differences; the 360 was ahead in the US while the PS3 was way ahead in Japan. But by and large, both consoles had a roughly similar sized market. So unless you were being paid for exclusivity, you really needed to target both.
This time around, the PS4 is ahead in all markets and sat on at least twice the Xbox One's global installed base. If cross-platform development wasn't easy, then I could see a lot of developers deciding to cut Xbox One versions of their games, even without financial inducement from Sony.
I don't work for easyJet. However, I do work in the aviation sector. EasyJet have a phenomenal safety culture and are among the safest airlines in the world. I see this article as evidence that they are investing money in improving their safety practices.
Almost every first-world airline knows that safety is an area where you don't cut corners. If you're not a state-owned flag-carrier, then a single crash can (and probably will) wipe out your whole business. This goes for the low cost carriers as much as for the legacy airlines.
It's true that the consoles have a good backlog. This is why I still have my PS3 (well, that and it's a better media player than either of the new consoles). And it's true that if you haven't owned a console before and want one you can get lots of cheap games for, the PS3 and 360 are still worth considering.
But that's different to making them viable platforms to target for new games. People who buy new games tend to want to experience that game with the best experience possible (or in some cases, the best experience possible without the cost of a high-end PC). So sales of new games are already proven to be much higher on the current-gen rather than legacy platforms and most major publishers have now dropped PS3/360 support for all but casual and kids' titles.
There's been solid data for over a year now showing that the majority of games sales have shifted away from the PS3/360 and towards the PS4/Xbox One/PC. We've seen plenty of current-gen-only releases do just fine (Witcher 3 just had the most successful launch so far in 2015) and plenty of games which spanned both generations have sold a lot more copies on the newer platforms. Meanwhile, developers/publishers who stuck with the older platforms have paid a commercial price for it - the initial release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which was limited to PC, 360 and PS3) bombed commercially and shifted only a fraction of the copies at launch that Borderlands 2 managed.
The last console generation was the longest we've ever seen and there was a clear appetite among both developers and consumers to move on from it quickly. A lot of the money-men preferred to hedge their bets, not least because the installed bases for the PS3 and 360 were so huge. But what happened in practice was fairly predictable. Core gamers - the people who buy a lot of games - moved to the new platforms quickly and shifted their spending to those platforms. While the installed base of the older consoles remained larger, most of that base was made up of occasional and casual gamers, who don't spend a significant portion of their disposable income on gaming.
The caution in betting on the new generation wasn't entirely irrational. The new platform launches in the years leading up to it had not gone well. EA got burned hard by the Vita's launch flop. Ubisoft got burned even harder when they spent a lot of money supporting the Wii-U launch only for the platform to bomb. But with the PS4 and Xbox One, the developers who could get titles to market fairly soon after launch were generally rewarded (even when those games stunk, as with Watch_Dogs).
The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot. The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched. But for major launches, there's no longer any point in targeting anything but PS4, Xbox One and PC.
My worry is that this will be another lever for Germany to try to push its insane levels of censorship on the rest of Europe. They've tried before - they had a good push at making German games censorship (in some respects as bad as and in some respects worse than the Australian version) mandatory using the bully-pulpit of their last EU presidency, though thankfully the clock ran out on that particular attempt.
Juncker holds his position thanks to German influence... he has debts to pay.
In theory, I'm in favour of this measure and would like to see geoblocking ended full-stop, not just within the EU. But experience of the EU suggests that defaulting to suspicion of any new initiative is the best approach.
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We covered Macbeth at school when I was 14. I don't think I was particularly disadvantaged by covering it the old fashioned way; with a decent teacher who helped us over some of the linguistic bumps, covered key themes and character arcs and had us do rough-and-ready re-enactments of a few of the scenes to understand both the "flow" of Shakespeare's language and the pace and tone of the play. I struggle to understand how technology would have helped much above and beyond that.
We've had a flood of articles on the issue of "does learning to code make you better at learning other stuff" recently. I can't help but feel that the question itself isn't quite the right one (and that the wrong question might be getting a deliberate push by commercial interests).
If there is evidence to suggest that learning to code produces wider educational benefits, then I suspect that it is because coding is something that needs to be taught in a structured manner, with strong logical underpinnings. This is something that is missing from many subjects on the modern curriculum. Even mathematics is usually taught by rote these days, with students simply learning how to plug numbers into a formula in a mechanical manner.
Having recruited and managed a number of school and college leavers over the years, I've noticed that those whose education has included subjects with strong structural and logical underpinnings often tend to be more adaptable and faster to learn in the workplace. That can mean computer science and it can mean mathematics, but it's not limited to them. Ancient and non-Indo-European languages can be particularly good, as learning these requires engagement with the logical underpinnings of "how a language works". French/Spanish/German etc, unfortunately often tend to be taught using a "phrasebook" approach that might result in a faster route to a passable fluency (provided the conversation remains within comfortable bounds), but doesn't bring the same wider benefits.
Most modern MMOs don't have a real economy. EVE Online is a rare exception (and very much a niche proposition). Of the "normal" MMOs, then depending on who you talk to, Final Fantasy XI (released 2002 in Japan, 2003 in the West) or Star Wars Galaxies (2004) was the last to allow any significant degree of player freedom to shape the economy. Everything since World of Warcraft has locked in-game financial transactions down so hard that actual trading between players is knocked right out to the margins.
What do I mean? Basically, that the items of highest value in most MMOs cannot be obtained through player-production and in-game trading. In a subscription MMO (eg. WoW, Final Fantasy XIV), the most powerful gear will normally be obtained by players through skill-based team challenges (high-end raiding or PvP). Once obtained by a player, it is almost always locked so as to be untradeable to other players. A second tier of good-but-not-best gear is usually available via a pseudo-currency (tokens, honour, whatever) that is rewarded in fixed proportions from performing repetitive activities (daily quests, dungeons etc), often with a cap on how much can be earned in a week, and which can't be traded to other players. Consumable items are still crafted and traded, but the trend in MMOs has been to downplay these over the last few years.
This has largely come about due to the prevalence of real-money trading; people using real-world money to buy in-game currency. When the companies running MMOs realised that trying to crack down on this trade was like trying to wrestle with fog, some of them shifted their strategy to downplaying the importance of the in-game economy.
The others, of course, went into the "freemium" pay-to-win model, whereby he who spends the most real-world money has the best stuff.
What's interesting in the subscription MMOs is how the free market has acted to route-around the ever-tighter economic controls. You might not be able to buy the best gear, but in both WoW and Final Fantasy XIV, you can hire teams of players as "mercenaries" who will run you through the high-end content and guarantee you the items that drop. Blizzard don't like this, Square-Enix turn a blind eye. Various other types of grey-market activity have also sprung up around the margins to allow players to turn either in-game or real-world wealth into an advantage.
Really?
I went back and played the original X-Com again (for the first time in a decade or so) after I finished the remake. And what I found was a game whose graphics hadn't held up quite so badly as others of a similar vintage, but whose gameplay was showing serious signs of age.
On the tactical side, squads felt overly large, micromanagement was excessive by any reasonable estimation and the random number generator was allowed to become far too dominant in determining the outcome of combat. The need to play "hunt the last alien" before you could successfully complete a mission made certain missions, particularly some of the terror missions with complex cityscapes, an absolute grind.
By contrast, the remake is slicker and smarter. I felt like it was doing more than the old X-Com to make me use all of my assets in the field and was striking a more appropriate balance between luck and skill. Moreover, with the troopers being a little less vulnerable and having more defined traits to carry over between missions, I felt a sense of connection with my squad that was missing in the old game.
Now, the remake isn't perfect; I think allowing an extra 2 soldiers in the tactical squads (so 8 rather than 6) would have struck a better balance. The strategic game is undeniably less sophisticated than in the original (though also less repetitive in the late-game stages).
But on balance, I would rank the remake as being the better game, in objective terms - and in terms of both gameplay and graphics. Admittedly, the original was a far more striking game when it was first released and had a genre-defining impact that the remake didn't. But put them side by side and I'd take the remake.
Graphics matter. Anybody who doesn't think so is a luddite and should maybe consider that the whole "technology" world might not be for them.
Advances in graphics and advances in the quality of games have frequently gone hand in hand over the years. Wing Commander wasn't massively more advanced than the space-combat bits of Elite, but it felt like a whole new experience thanks to the graphics and presentation. At the other end of the timeline, if you have the horsepower to run the PC version of The Witcher 3 on full settings, you'll get probably the most immersive experiences ever made - which complements the gameplay nicely.
Admittedly, you can have a good game without good graphics; I can think of a handful of fairly recent titles that have managed it (Super Meat Boy, Thomas Was Alone), but those tend to be the exceptions. By and large, the "graphics doesn't matter" indie scene has given us a bunch of shoddy, derivative "retro-sprite-art pseudo-8-bit roguelikes" to clog up the Steam storefront. As I get older and more cynical, I increasingly find that a lazy approach towards graphics on the part of a developer usually translates into a lazy attitude towards the broader design.
In the specific case of the Resident Evil 4 remaster, I can sort-of see the point. RE4 was a seminal game that brought in a lot of wider changes to the survival horror genre. In the long run, I think you can argue that most of those changes (the greater action focus, the upgrade systems) were detrimental to the genre; but that doesn't diminish how important (and how good) RE4 was. The problem with going back to older games, however, is that graphics can turn into an immersion-breaker. Visuals which seemed fine a decade ago frequently look horrible to eyes used to modern games (and resolution upscaling can be particularly unforgiving in exposing flaws). I've lost count of the number of times I've gone back to an old game and been shocked at how much worse it looks compared to the game from my memories. So making some improvements to enable people to go back to the game without that sense of disconnect is no bad thing.
But it is, I would argue, something Capcom should have done for the re-release. Not something that should be left to the community.
True, but it matters more for some genres than others. A lot of the past game-streaming ideas have foundered because they were pitched at the streaming of action-heavy games.
Trying to play a shooter, a racing game, a fighting game or a precision platformer via streaming? No thanks. Even small amounts of input latency can render games in those genres deeply unpleasant. But streaming something like X-Com or Pillars of Eternity? Sure...
Ugh, lost the link - here.
Microsoft's Xbox Live system had something similar a few years ago. In that case, the "bug" was actually a flaw in their online and phone support protocols and is pretty well documented here.
This was used to compromise a large number of accounts in 2011 and 2012, with the compromised accounts generally being used to make tradeable FIFA DLC purchases, allowing Xbox Live purchases to be laundered back into real cash.
I got stung by it myself, which utterly shocked me as my XBL password was a strong password that had only ever been entered into my 360 console - so even if my PC were compromised (and I was pretty sure it wasn't), the password certainly hadn't been extracted via a keylogger. MS were very prompt in responding and gave the impression that they were dealing with a lot of these cases. They refunded the £50 that the scumbag had spent and gave me 3 months free XBL Gold subscription as well, which seemed odd given I was still convinced the slip-up must have been on my end.
Wasn't until I saw that Kotaku article a few months later that I realised what had happened. The irony is that this was going on at the same time as the Sony PSN breach and, unlike the PSN breach, it resulted in accounts actually being compromised and fraudulent purchases being made. But as it was a steady drip-drip-drip of compromised accounts rather than an eye-catching big-bang "hack", the mainstream media never picked up on it.
Always going to the most recent Nvidia drivers has been a risky proposition for years, on Win 7, Vista, XP etc.
Nvidia put out a lot of driver updates tied specifically to newly released high-profile games. In some cases, performance in those games will be pretty shocking if you don't move straight to the latest drivers. The PC release of GTA5 (in most respects a solid release) is one example. Sometimes, the drivers are fine. More often, they cause issues with a range of older applications and games. One recent driver update caused massive issues with .mkv playback, for instance (though a workaround was discovered fairly quickly).
The sensible thing to do is to upgrade your drivers only every few months and only move to versions that are generally recognized as stable and whose known issues have well-tested workarounds. Automatically moving to the latest version is a mug's game.
Sometimes the whole thing goes amusingly wrong. When id Software released Rage, it had horrible texture pop-in issues on most PCs with Nvidia cards. Why? Because id had expected Nvidia to put out a particular driver update in time for launch and Nvidia had gone with a different one instead.
Yes, pre-orders are refundable up to 2 weeks after launch day. The clock doesn't start ticking when you place your pre-order.
I pre-ordered this on Steam a couple of days before launch. As of right now, it is sat on 1h50m playtime and I'm not touching it again until either we have news on when a major patch is expected or we start to get close to two weeks after release.
Why?
Because of Steam's new refund policy. If you have less than 2 hours playtime on a game and it is less than 2 weeks since release (or less than 2 weeks since your purchase, if you purchased it post-release), you are eligible for a refund. The game in its current state is a very sorry sight indeed.
My personal experiences with it haven't been as bad as some. I have an i7 3820 @ 3.66ghz, an Nvidia 980 and 16gb of nice fast RAM. I also, crucially, have a 500gb SSD that I use for my OS and for drive speed sensitive games (as well as some big old traditional drives for everything else). Running from the SSD and with an .ini tweak to remove the 30fps cap (yes, a 30fps cap in a PC game in this day and age), I can manage a not-terrible level of performance. Framerates with all settings maxed in 1080p flicker between 35 fps and 70 fps, depending on what's happening on screen, though the wide variations do produce some ugly artefacts.
When I first installed the game to one of my traditional drives, performance was appalling. While framerates when stood still doing nothing were the same, taking almost any action in-game, from moving around to entering a vehicle or changing areas, would produce large framerate drops, hideous stuttering, broken textures and texture pop-in. This game has some serious issues with data streaming from storage drives.
The game is also ugly to look at. Ok, ok, I'm being a bit harsh there. As a bare-bones PC port of a late-cycle 360 or PS3 game, it would have looked ok. But compared with PC versions of recent efforts like Shadows of Mordor, Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3, this looks terrible. Bear in mind that all of the above run at higher and steadier framerates with all settings maxed on my PC. In Arkham Knight, NPCs movements are repetitive and robotic, textures are low-resolution (the game will only allow "low" or "medium" detail textures to be selected, implying higher detail textures were removed at the last moment) and basic visual effects from the console versions are missing.
My experiences put me at the better end of the scale. I have a powerful PC with a single-Nvidia-GPU setup. Weaker PCs, or even more powerful PCs with multi-GPU setups or AMD cards seem to have things much worse. I've only experienced one crash to desktop - but that's as many crashes in under 2 hours of play as I've experienced in almost 30 hours of play in The Witcher 3.
A few wider points about this; while this game is particularly brutal in terms of its drive speed requirements, it is part of a broader picture that drive speed is starting to matter as much as CPU and GPU speed for PC gamers in terms of actual in-game performance (rather than just load-times). Watch_Dogs, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition all suffered from in-game stuttering issues when running from a traditional drive - though not to anything like the same extent as Arkham Knight. An SSD large enough for games as well as the OS is becoming non-optional for serious PC gamers.
Second, this is the first real stress-test of Steam's refund system. To their credit, Valve seem to be honouring Arkham Knight refund requests without any qualms. And it's surely no coincidence that the first "broken" PC port to go out after the refund system was introduced has led to such a dramatic reaction by the publisher.
Oh goddamit, fat fingers. Survation link here.
You're right. There was a Survation poll that got fairly close to the final numbers, but the company took a look at it and decided it was a rogue-poll. The Survation CEO wrote a fascinating blog post about why he took the decision, which you can read
The outfit I mentioned in my original post who managed to "predict" the outcome on the basis of published polls were Number Cruncher Politics. Their article, written 2 days before the vote, can be found here - be warned that it is long and has graphs.
The opinion polling industry here in the UK got got last month's General Election badly wrong. Not only did almost all of the pre-election polls (conducted by a wide range of companies, some of whom use telephone surveys while others use an online approach) get the vote-distribution wrong, over-estimating Labour support and under-estimating Conservative support, but they also misread the mapping of those vote-shares into Parliamentary seats (which is, admittedly, not always simple in the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system).
Only the exit-poll conducted on the day of the election itself got relatively close to the actual result (and even that under-estimated the scale of the eventual Conservative victory).
There's a major industry post-mortem in progress at the moment, which is scrutinising various aspects of previous methodological orthodoxy. UKpollingreport has a fairly good write-up of the state of play here.
There's been a fair degree of political acrimony about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polling. In particular, there have been questions raised about whether inaccurate polling caused the parties or the voters to change their behaviours in a way that accurate polling (or no polling) wouldn't have. There are also some calls for the UK to follow the example of some continental European countries and ban the publication of opinion polls in the 2-3 week period before an election.
One other point worth noting is that there was one particular data-analytics organisation (sorry, can't find the link right now) which looked at the raw data from the opinion polls and made a call a few days before the election which predicted the outcome fairly accurately.
Nate Silver called it badly wrong, in this instance.
Indeed, still remember buying my copy.
The banning of video-games has never really taken off in the UK, though not for want of trying. The BBFC had a good go at it with Carmageddon, but the subsequent backlash and (successful) appeal scared that organisation away from heavy involvement with games for quite a long time afterwards.
Manhunt 2 was originally banned in its uncut form, I think, though it was granted certification after a few seconds of footage were cut. And I think there was some other PS2-era shooter (The Punisher?) which was also refused certification without minor cuts.
Actually, the most notable "banned game" in the UK was never actually banned at all. It was Rule of Rose, a generally inoffensive (though not, to be honest, very good) Japanese PS2 survival horror game. Some fuckwit Brussels politician decided he was going to launch a moral crusade against games and picked this as his target. He made allegations about the game's content with were so egregiously untrue that they'd have made even Jack Thompson blush. However, as releases like that are generally have a marginal business case as well and as the game was being (incorrectly) accused of promoting paedophilia and child-murder, the publisher canned the release in the UK and a handful of other European countries.
I ended up importing a US copy just to see what the fuss was about. It was all pretty tame stuff (and the game itself was crippled by terrible controls and a lot of backtracking - common problems in survival horror games of that era). Most video-game controversies, like Carmageddon, Postal, Grand Theft Auto and Hatred, are at least partly courted by the game's developer. I always felt sorry for Rule of Rose, despite the fact it wasn't very good, because the controversy came out of the blue.
Sorry - I should have explained this more than I did. The Zones are technically a part of the public transport charging system (for underground, buses and some rail services) and are arranged in a series of concentric circles. Most of the bits of London that tourists see are in Zone 1. As you get further out, you get more residential areas, as well as (in the outer zones), formerly free-standing towns like Bromley and Croydon which the London sprawl has swallowed over the years.
But while technically a means for working out how much a public transport journey costs, the Zones are more regularly used in London parlance, particularly when talking about house-prices and so on. There's a perception that the more successful you are, the more central the Zone you can afford to live in. But one of the points of my original post was that this has turned into a bit of a false expectation over time; status conscious people are paying exorbitant prices to live in Zones 1 and 2, when they could have a much better quality of life (often with equally good access to the important bits of the centre) living in the outer zones.
As people working in the media tend, as a broad generalisation, to be acutely status conscious and to assume that their own experiences are more representative than they are, the stereotype that all of London is over-priced and over-crowded gets more of a public airing than it deserves.
If I've seen a waterfall once, I don't really need to see it again. To be honest, a single waterfall sighting every few years is more than enough for me. I'm not really into nature; it gets dull fast and most of it smells of cow poo.
I'd rather live somewhere that gives me access to one of the largest and most varied employment markets in the world, as well as a first-rate range of cultural and social amenities.
And London Underground can indeed be a bit grim... which is why I don't use it. The great thing about being south of the river in London is that you are more likely to use surface rail than underground. Faster (since you can get trains to the outer stations that don't stop at every point along the way), generally less crowded (though peak trains can still be busy) and you get a decent view crossing the Thames into Victoria.
Like trying to stay in Zones 1 and 2 and insisting on being north of the river, clinging to proximity to tube stations is another big mistake that a lot of London residents make. The tube is a convenient way to make short journeys around central London, but surface rail will generally make for a faster and more pleasant commute from home if you have the option. Personally, I never go more than a few stops on the Tube (with the exception of the occasional hike out to Heathrow, which is a pain to reach by other means until we get Crossrail).
That's another reasonable option and I have friends who do it. Hell, I spent 18 months commuting from Cambridge (close to 15 years ago now) and it wasn't too bad. Wouldn't be possible these days, though - Cambridge living costs are almost as nuts as central London now.
The only thing you have to watch for with the longer distance commuting is that you really can find yourself at the mercy of rail fair increases; some of the season ticket prices can get very steep indeed once you go beyond the London boundary.
Not quite...
A lot of the negative preconceptions around London are based on tales from people who are determined to cling to the city centre. I used to be one of them; living in a tiny, poxy flat in Zone 2 and paying through the nose for it.
I then took stock, realised that I was spending so much on being close to the centre and was so stressed out by the downsides (noise, antisocial behaviour, general crowding) that I wasn't actually enjoying the supposed benefits. So I bought a place - at a fairly reasonable price - in Zone 5 (and south of the river to boot). From stations within a few minutes walk of where I live, I can be at Victoria station in less than 20 minutes and London Bridge in less than 25. I also get a pleasant, leafy environment, a rock-bottom local crime rate and decent - albeit very mainstream - local shops and amenities. And I'm not exactly mega-rich... "reasonable middle-income" is probably the best description.
If you want to do the full on hipster thing of living in the middle of town so that you can cycle to work and walk to your local pop-up organic smoothie yurt before going window-shopping for hemp underwear, then unless you are rich, you will have no money, will live in squalor and your impressions of London will sour pretty fast.
If you want good access to the city's big employment centres and cultural highlights, then just conquer your snobbery about the outer Zones (a point-to-point ticket from Zone 5 doesn't cost much more than a Zone 1-2 travelcard) and going properly south of the river.
Unfortunately, when I phoned them up, they told me no such thing was possible. This was in late 2013, though, so it's quite possible they no longer had the parts. Plus mine had gone down completely to the YLOD, which has a reputation for being unrecoverable.
I see a lot of cynicism in this thread - much of it entirely deserved. However, from a broader perspective, this is undoubtedly a good thing - and not just in terms of "yay, I can play more things on my new console".
Why? Because it goes some way towards mitigating what was looking like a real risk of a "lost generation" of console games.
As older platforms have gone out of circulation, PC emulation has generally been there to keep titles playable. Hell, when my first-gen back-compatible PS3 died on me and I had to replace it with a non-back-compatible slim model, I was able to carry on playing my PS2 games from the original discs via PC emulation.
But there is currently nothing like working emulation of the 360 and PS3 and, given those platforms DRM measures and general hardware eccentricity, it seems reasonable to suppose that we are years, if not decades, from actually seeing it (if we ever do).
Neither 360 nor PS3 hardware was of the highest quality. The early builds of both consoles had high failure rates - legendarily so in the case of the 360 - and while later iterations improved matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that they both remained essentially disposable and short-lived devices built as cheaply as possible.
So at some point in the not-too-distant future (within5 years maybe? Certainly within 10) working 360s and PS3s are going to get harder and harder to find. And with no emulation for them, there is a good chance that a good chunk of the (huge) catalogue of games for those platforms is going to end up inaccessible to everybody bar specialist collectors.
Now, a good chunk of the library for both consoles is basically disposable junk anyway. Does it matter massively if a few iterations of Madden and FIFA end up lost to posterity? Not really. In other cases, games are being "rescued" via "HD remasters" for current generation platforms (which can, admittedly, feel like a rip-off), as has happened with The Last of Us and and as will soon happen with Gears of War and Uncharted. In other cases, developers looking to make money from their back-catalogue may put out PC ports. We've seen this rescue a few absolute classics like Valkyria Chronicles, as well as some more... shall we say... eccentric choices like the Hyperdimension Neptunia games.
But that still leaves a lot of games - including those which were subject to exclusivity agreements but didn't sell well enough to merit an HD-remaster - stranded. There are some good and noteworthy games here; Lost Odyssey, Vanquish, Eternal Sonata and so on.
Now, if the Xbox One has back compatibility all of a sudden, that means that we have at least a temporary stay-of-execution on all three of those games I just mentioned. Plus the fact that they're running on PC-like hardware keeps alive the prospect that we might see them running on "proper" PC hardware at some point further down the line. And if you care about preserving an unbroken history of gaming's development, then this matters. If you don't think that keeping that chain intact matters, then just ask the BBC how they feel about all of those Doctor Who episodes they threw into the trash.
Of course, we still have some PS3 exclusives that are essentially marooned; and that Cell architecture is going to render any kind of emulation, whether on general PCs or on current or future Sony console hardware, a bitch. That leaves some excellent games (the PS3-era Ratchet & Clank games were superb and a lot of Japan's output for the latter half of the last console cycle was PS3-exclusive) still stranded. But maybe this step from MS will put some pressure on Sony.
Hopefully, the PC-like architecture of the current generation will make back-compatibility less of an issue going forward, though there are still issues about the extent to which many games are essentially dependent on PSN or XBL network architecture.
Which could well be the salvation of the Xbox One. Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, cross-platform development was a PITA because the three platforms were so different from each other.
However, the PS2 had an installed base way that was way larger than either of its rivals. So for a lot of small and mid-sized developers, the obvious solution was to develop only for the PS2; it would give you 90% or more of your sales anyway.
I had a friend who worked at a mid-tier developer during that time who worked on a multi-platform game. The irony was that the technical limitations of the PS2 forced compromises all over their game design; features that had to be cut or scaled down and maps whose size had to be reduced. But even though they could have made a better game for the other two platforms, the PS2 version was king, because it was going to rack up most of the sales. Meanwhile, the Gamecube version was way more trouble than it was worth; several game-functions had to be redesigned because of the lack of buttons on the Gamecube controller and that version ended up with a simpler, less flexible and less well balanced combat system as a result. Often forgotten - controller configuration matters as much for ease of porting as what's inside the console itself.
The game did just about well enough to get a sequel. They binned the Cube version and just about decided to keep the Xbox version, though it was a close-run thing. Only the PS2 version made a profit.
Last generation, the PS3 and 360 had broadly similar installed bases. Ok, there were geographic differences; the 360 was ahead in the US while the PS3 was way ahead in Japan. But by and large, both consoles had a roughly similar sized market. So unless you were being paid for exclusivity, you really needed to target both.
This time around, the PS4 is ahead in all markets and sat on at least twice the Xbox One's global installed base. If cross-platform development wasn't easy, then I could see a lot of developers deciding to cut Xbox One versions of their games, even without financial inducement from Sony.
I don't work for easyJet. However, I do work in the aviation sector. EasyJet have a phenomenal safety culture and are among the safest airlines in the world. I see this article as evidence that they are investing money in improving their safety practices.
Almost every first-world airline knows that safety is an area where you don't cut corners. If you're not a state-owned flag-carrier, then a single crash can (and probably will) wipe out your whole business. This goes for the low cost carriers as much as for the legacy airlines.
Your prediction is bollocks, pure and simple.
It's true that the consoles have a good backlog. This is why I still have my PS3 (well, that and it's a better media player than either of the new consoles). And it's true that if you haven't owned a console before and want one you can get lots of cheap games for, the PS3 and 360 are still worth considering.
But that's different to making them viable platforms to target for new games. People who buy new games tend to want to experience that game with the best experience possible (or in some cases, the best experience possible without the cost of a high-end PC). So sales of new games are already proven to be much higher on the current-gen rather than legacy platforms and most major publishers have now dropped PS3/360 support for all but casual and kids' titles.
There's been solid data for over a year now showing that the majority of games sales have shifted away from the PS3/360 and towards the PS4/Xbox One/PC. We've seen plenty of current-gen-only releases do just fine (Witcher 3 just had the most successful launch so far in 2015) and plenty of games which spanned both generations have sold a lot more copies on the newer platforms. Meanwhile, developers/publishers who stuck with the older platforms have paid a commercial price for it - the initial release of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which was limited to PC, 360 and PS3) bombed commercially and shifted only a fraction of the copies at launch that Borderlands 2 managed.
The last console generation was the longest we've ever seen and there was a clear appetite among both developers and consumers to move on from it quickly. A lot of the money-men preferred to hedge their bets, not least because the installed bases for the PS3 and 360 were so huge. But what happened in practice was fairly predictable. Core gamers - the people who buy a lot of games - moved to the new platforms quickly and shifted their spending to those platforms. While the installed base of the older consoles remained larger, most of that base was made up of occasional and casual gamers, who don't spend a significant portion of their disposable income on gaming.
The caution in betting on the new generation wasn't entirely irrational. The new platform launches in the years leading up to it had not gone well. EA got burned hard by the Vita's launch flop. Ubisoft got burned even harder when they spent a lot of money supporting the Wii-U launch only for the platform to bomb. But with the PS4 and Xbox One, the developers who could get titles to market fairly soon after launch were generally rewarded (even when those games stunk, as with Watch_Dogs).
The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot. The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched. But for major launches, there's no longer any point in targeting anything but PS4, Xbox One and PC.
My worry is that this will be another lever for Germany to try to push its insane levels of censorship on the rest of Europe. They've tried before - they had a good push at making German games censorship (in some respects as bad as and in some respects worse than the Australian version) mandatory using the bully-pulpit of their last EU presidency, though thankfully the clock ran out on that particular attempt.
Juncker holds his position thanks to German influence... he has debts to pay.
In theory, I'm in favour of this measure and would like to see geoblocking ended full-stop, not just within the EU. But experience of the EU suggests that defaulting to suspicion of any new initiative is the best approach.