Nuclear Monster

  • Exactly as rumored, the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition has been announced without a disc drive for May 7th.

    At $250, the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition is a $50 discount on the $300 price of the regular Xbox One S.

    The only slight bonus to this version is that you get Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves bundled with the digital-only Xbox One

    When this revision was rumored, I wondered what the pitch would be. It’s not an Xbox One X, so the All-Digital Edition is lacking in performance. The discount is practically speaking, nothing, today.

    That $50-off-the-$300 MSRP of a regular S is not enough of a discount, especially when the Xbox One S is regularly on sale for $250. At the time of writing, you can get an Xbox One S 1TB console with a game and a disc drive for $250 from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Gamestop.

    My only guess to explain this odd strategy is that at E3 Microsoft could announce a price drop for the Xbox One X. Maybe $350, and cease producing the Xbox One S with the Blu-Ray drive. That distinction, a cheaper Xbox One X, and a Xbox One S All-Digital Edition that could be regularly discounted to $200 would be a good wrap-up price on this generation for Microsoft before their next console is released.

    Hats off to Sony for upstaging Microsoft with their PlayStation 5 announcement. With new consoles coming in the next year or two I don’t think I’d buy or recommend a PlayStation 4 Pro at this point, or an Xbox One X, to anyone who owns a base PS4 or Xbox One. I’d expect much more from Microsoft about their commitment to a next generation console at their E3 presentation.

    Also, this video Microsoft’s crack marketing team put together to announce this all-digital edition is supposed to be funny. Yikes.

  • Peter Rubin has the scoop on what might be the PlayStation 5 at Wired with a Mark Cerny interview. It’s mostly about the tech details. The SSD, backwards compatibility, ray tracing, PSVR compatible, not in 2019, not at E3.

    My fear with anything like this as I sit here in April 2019 is that a PlayStation 5 would be noted to the press at length, and then the punchline when final details are announced is that it could be just the server that sits at a data center to host your game stream, but that isn’t the vibe I get from Rubin’s article.

    Rubin also talks about the supported resolution of the new hardware in this parenthetical:

    (While the next-gen console will support 8K graphics, TVs that deliver it are few and far between, so we’re using a 4K TV.)

    I don’t for a second buy that this machine can do anything like real 8K rendering. Especially in combination with any kind of ray tracing.

    I am not super interested in the ray-tracing GPU situation today. My read on it has been that enabling ray tracing features destroys performance on today’s modern, expensive, desktop gaming hardware from Nvidia.  A 2020 (or 2021) release date isn’t going to magically make today’s performance issues and cost go down to the point where true 8K rendering and ray tracing can coexist. Sony isn’t even using Nvidia parts. Cerny doesn’t seem like the type to bullshit, and that quote above isn’t quoting Cerny.

  • Space explor-o-build-emup, Astroneer, exited Steam’s Early Access program and it’s still as cool as ever if you’re interested in mostly calmly exploring unknown worlds, building new things on them, and then occasionally running low on oxygen.

    Mike Williams enjoyed Astroneer for it’s chill nature:

    In terms of the survival genre, Astroneer is definitely on the soft side of things. The leisurely pace of Astroneer puts it closer to a game like Stardew Valley-it feels like the little brother of the current version of No Man’s Sky at times-giving you a series of tasks that push you toward an end goal. The primary focus is exploration, as you push out further from wherever your shelter is located. The planets you find yourself on are randomly-generated; a series of bright, colorful alien landscapes. Mountains, plains of swaying grass, and odd-looking trees stretch out in every direction in neon greens, oranges, and blues. Astroneer looks inviting and fun, and your lone explorer bounding across the landscape never diminishes that.

    I’ve had fun with Astroneer as well, but I found that the text could be a little tiny when displayed on a TV, that’s with the Windows version on Steam (or via a key on Humble). Astroneer is also available on the Xbox One. Both versions are $30.

  • The people behind the Zen Pinball games, Zen Studios, have put out a first-person, turn-based, dungeon crawling, RPG called Operencia: The Stolen Sun that looks a lot like a modern take on the old Wizardry games. Unfortunately there are very few reviews of the game available, the one I found from IGN Spain is worth reading (machine translated version to English) for Javier Artero’s comments on the game as well as its translation.

    Seeing a turn-based first-person role-playing game makes me wish for a modern remake of the Doom RPG and Wolfenstein RPG games from id that have been lost to the sands of time.

    Operencia: The Stolen Sun is out now on the Epic Game Store and the Xbox One for $30. It’ll be on Steam in 2020.

  • That’s the headline to Joanna Stern’s latest column about Apple’s keyboard ongoing nightmare. It’s a hilarious column to read, Stern had her colleagues make some custom tech to remove or add letters from the article to match her brand new MacBook Air’s broken keyboard, and the video has a great conclusion. Don’t worry, there are switches to turn the letters back on.