Android (and PC?) gaming just got a lot more interesting: http://kotaku.com/5973641/nvidia-out-of-nowhere-announces-a-new-gaming-handheld http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-project-shield
For me this also brings up an interesting question: With two of PC gaming's biggest movers and shakers (Valve and Nvidia) putting significant money and effort developing for open platforms, is Windows gaming fucked long-term? In 5-10 years will I be logging into Ubuntu to play the best PC games?
I'm betting this thing will be 3x the price of the OUYA, at least, so I wouldn't really consider it a direct competitor.
I'm thinking that the most convenient way for them to ship OUYAs would be directly to your trash can, so I wouldn't consider much of anything a direct competitor.
This sounds fantastic. I've been wanting to play PC games on my TV, but have been reluctant to either purchase a dedicated PC for the TV or move my current PC out of my home office. I love the idea of the PC "beaming" the game output to the controller when I can then hookup to my TV via HDMI.
Why is everyone's default to copy the Sony way of doing thumbsticks and not copying the way the 360 does sticks? The 360 way is so much better.
How is the asymmetrical Xbox controller better? Does your left thumb grow out of a different place relative to the rest of the hand than your right thumb? Do you never move the camera to look around?
Tested.com's article has some additional interesting details: Depending on when this thing comes out, and if it works, I'd be willing to switch to an nVidia card from the AMD card I currently have. It's a bummer that nVidia is limiting the Shield to working with only PCs that have nVidia cards, but of course I understand why that would be from a business perspective. Not sure if there is an actual tech reason for it or not.
I'm not an ergonomics expert but I suspect that the asymmetrical design is probably related to the positive answer to your last question - it's probably more comfortable and/or less conducive to RSI to reach forward with your thumb than it is to reach back. Your right thumb tends to move between the ABXY buttons and the right stick a hell of a lot more than your left thumb moves back and forth between the left stick and the d-pad.
On the other hand (ahem), perhaps Microsoft just thought it was a striking design compared to what the other manufacturers were doing.
Finally I can realize my dream of streaming games over WiFi. I guess it'd be all right for turn-based stuff. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure I'd rather go with the long-ass HDMI cable plus wireless mouse/kb/360 pad option.
In most 3D games these days, you will always want your left thumb on the thumbstick. However your right thumb will be alternating between pressing buttons and using the right thumbstick. So the 360 method of making the left thumbstick more prominent than the d-pad makes a lot of sense. As for which is more prominent, right thumbsticks or buttons, it's a tossup. So the 360's way is at least half right (and all right for many games), whereas the PS way is all wrong.
Here's footage of a demo: It looks like the guy has his left thumb up in the buttons in the middle (?) or I'm reading it wrong. I like the idea, just not sure about the controller setup, much like everyone else.
This is a great idea. Ever since I started seeing workable realtime wireless HD video/sound streaming start becoming consumer-grade last year I've been waiting for the convergence of that tech into something with actual support. You could kinda do something like this right now with a piecemeal collage of different devices but it'd be very DIY and you'd be working around a lot of rough edges. I'm excited because I know the tech exists to make something like this work with very little latency. It's basically OnLive but local and thus without that whole physics problem with propagation delay that OnLive liked to pretend didn't exist.
Two things stick out in my mind. One, it's weird (on the face of it) that an operating system designed for touchscreen devices is largely abandoning the touchscreen interface with this and OUYA. Two, I've always felt that cell/smartphone gaming was never a good platform for gaming, even though it made a couple people rich. It's great for very casual games, but nothing "serious" like a console game. With that in mind, it make sense that certain businesses are trying to capitalize on the console market using android software, so that it gives mobile devices some legitimacy as a gaming platform. By providing both smartphone games and dedicated console games on basically the same software, it makes both platforms more accessible to eachother. The only major downside I see is this could change the way console games are made. We've seen how some developers treat pc ports of console games and console ports of pc games. It's usually not pretty. I would not expect android to ps3/360 ports and vice versa to go over well.
They already make shitty android ports of popular games, I don't expect them to even bother adding joystick controls for the 3 people who will buy this monstrosity.
I wouldn't worry too much about this, to be honest. Worst case scenario is that Android hardware advances to the point where it's able to run the same Linux versions of games as a normal desktop running Steam for Linux. Possibly. Maybe.
So is the primary usage scenario for this intended to be streaming games from my PC? Or is it intended to be a standalone platform that I just happen to be able to use for gaming on the can?
Don't you already have an iPad or a nexus 7? Your gaming on the can needs are already well covered in either case.
My guess is that this is really a demo unit thrown at developers and technophiles, to provide a little push for Tegra 4 and possibly Android gaming (because no OS fees -> cheaper products -> more sales -> better for Nvidia). I don't think Nvidia is delusional enough to think that consumers will buy this thing in significant numbers.
But what if it came with 100 pre-loaded F2P games at no extra cost? That much value is bound to turn few heads.
If anyone's planning on paying hundreds for this awkward paperweight instead of ten to twenty bucks on a monoprice HDMI cable of appropriate length, I happen to have a bridge for sale that's right up your alley.
More than likely patents and legal considerations come before ergonomics when designing a controller in this happy modern age. I don't doubt that the positioning of thumbsticks on a control pad is part of a series of different patents concerning controllers held by various corporations.
That's not exactly fair. My home theater (gaming) setup is in the basement, about as far from my home office PC setup as possible. To play PC games on my nice TV I'd just have to move the PC downstairs, which I'm not going to do. Even if I was going to use my PC on the TV in the living room, it's not exactly ideal to run a 25 foot HDMI cable down the hall from the office to the living room, ya know? I think you're severely discounting the utility of the streaming capability for a lot of folks.
This also is discounting the need for responsive controls that operate from 25+ feet away. A wireless 360 controller with the dongle doesn't have that kind of range, and a wired controller would be clunky and would require repeaters to extend to such a distance.
The stuff up top is easier to reach, which is why the buttons are there on every controller. The stuff below is harder to reach, which is why the less-often-used camera stick is down there on every controller. The joystick being down below on the left is a holdover from it being added on after the fact to the original PSX controller, when the d-pad was still the primary way of controlling almost every game. Now that the opposite is true, the Microsoft/Sega placement makes way more sense.
No there are tons of knockoff controllers with the 360 configuration. Hell I use a PS3 one that mimics it.
Also Sega's and Nintendo's controllers. Of the four major console manufacturers from the 3d era, Sony is actually the only one to have favored the d-pad up top/analog stick down below configuration.
Gizmodo has some hands on impressions and a video. http://gizmodo.com/5974239/nvidia-project-shield-hands-on-a-little-less-weird-than-it-looks
It sure looks like a gaming handheld designed by Homer Simpson, but the possibility of streaming your PC games as well as running Android's great emulators is sure attractive.
I'm excited if I can use this thing to play Pinball Arcade on the go with physical triggers. People with Vitas seem to really enjoy that, but I've not been interested in buying one just for that.
