Archive for the ‘Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (19 June 2016)

Sunday, June 19th, 2016

I’ve come down with a very annoying and distracting cough. So please bear that in mind as you read through this week’s WNR, and if things don’t seem to make much sense, you’ll know why (it’s either the fever, or the fact that I can’t see properly through my phlegm covered screen).

*cough cough cough cough cough*

On with this week’s news …

Copyright

The Walking Dead - Lucille

Who’s on the other end of this screenie from The Walking Dead is the subject of a copyright dispute

Can you file a copyright lawsuit against someone for posting spoilers? Especially if those so called spoilers are really just guesses based on deduction? Apparently you can, with The Walking Dead’s AMC suing a spoiler Facebook group for just that.

The Facebook group, The Spoiling Dead Fans (TSDF), uses aerial photography, cast sightings and other means to guess at key plot points in coming episodes of the hit zombie series. And with the latest season of The Walking Dead ending on a huge cliffhanger, in which an unrevealed key character was killed. With fans eager to find out just who got it at the end of a barb wire coated baseball bat (called Lucille), TSDF did its usual thing and promised to post information that could prove who the unfortunate victim was.

This, however, was a step too far for AMC, and they promptly issued a cease and desist letter to TSDF. TSDF backed down with hesitation (and some anger from its fans), because they simply couldn’t afford to fight a lawsuit against AMC, even if AMC doesn’t really have a case (based on common sense, and also based on expert advice). It’s legal bullying at its most obvious!

Adding to all of this is the fact that comic book readers already knows who most likely ended up having their head bashed in (and eyeball bashed out), and also the fact that most TWD TV show fans were incensed at the decision by producers not to reveal Lucille’s victim (having spent a whole season building up to the confrontation).

So are spoilers, especially ones based on nothing more than conjecture, copyright protected? So if I post here that Heath is the one most likely to get it, am I committing copyright infringement? (note, it’s most likely not Heath).

Gaming

E3 was interesting to say the least. Nintendo finally got solid information out about its long overdue Zelda game, Sony had a very exciting game line-up, but it was Microsoft that had the most up its sleeves. Microsoft unveiled not one but two new Xbox One consoles, and while one is 18 months away from seeing the light of day, the other was almost as exciting.

Xbox One S

The Xbox One S – best value Ultra HD Blu-ray player on the market?

The console 18 month away from release is the Xbox ‘Scorpio’, a souped up version of the Xbox One that Microsoft says will be the most powerful game consoles when it is released most likely in time for Christmas 2017. The rumours have mostly proven true, with the Scorpio being 4K capable for games, VR, and all sorts of other things.

But the console I most want to talk about is the other one, the one available as soon as August – the Xbox One S. The ‘S’ moniker does stand for Slim, but the S is more than just about a small factor (40% smaller to be precise). There’s no more power brick, for one, and there will be more storage (up to 2TB).

And most exciting of all, the new S will include a new Ultra HD Blu-ray drive that allows for 4K Blu-ray playback (as well as 4K Netflix and the like, but no 4K gaming until the Scorpio). There’s also HDR support, for both video and gaming. With the expected price of the Xbox One S to be $299, this would make the Xbox One S potentially $100 heaper than Samsung’s Ultra HD Blu-ray player!

But there’s even more. The new Xbox One will be more powerful than the original Xbox One, not quite Scorpio levels of upgrade, but enough to make the Gears of War 4 developers to add code to take advantage of the increase in GPU and CPU power.

Not bad for a minor upgrade!

The 2TB “special” edition of the S launches in August for a slightly inflated price of $399, but the cheapest 500GB edition won’t be here until the end of the year (a third 1TB edition, for $349, will also be available in the US at least).

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That’s it for the week. I’m off to cough up what’s left of my lungs. See you next week.

Weekly News Roundup (17 April 2016)

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

Having watched The Force Awakens on Blu-ray (having already seen it twice at the cinemas), I can honestly say that it is one fun movie (at least for Star Wars fans). Sure, it may be derivative, but it’s proper Star Wars in the sense that the prequels weren’t, and one that even casual fans will enjoy. And add to it JJ Abrams’s latest slip of the tongue (or deliberate use of the good old mystery box) about Rey’s parentage, the anticipation for the next instalment is going to be insane.

There’s no Star Wars related news this week though, but there are stories about zombies, conspiracy theories and popular video game characters.

Copyright

The Walking Dead

This photo shows anti DMCA abuse protesters at a protest event

The latest season of The Walking Dead has just ended, and a new season of Fear the Walking Dead has started in its place. So while there’s still plenty of zombie action on TV, there’s also apparently lots of zombie action online as well, at least according to the head of a copyright group. The head of the pro copyright group Copyright Alliance says recent online protesters, demanding an end to DMCA abuse, are just like walkers, biters and roamers, that their protest lacks both “effort or brainpower”.

The online protests centered around the issue of DMCA abuse, or when rights-holders abuse the DMCA submission process to submit invalid requests, sometimes due to negligence, and also for more sinister reasons (such as to cripple a competitor). However, according to the head of the Copyright Alliance, Keith Kupferschmid, these protests are meaningless because they were submitted via an automated online form, where a pre-written message was provided for protesters. Despite the fact that users can and many did choose to submit additional comments in addition to the pre-written messages, and despite the fact that the Copyright Alliance runs similar automated campaigns (sometimes without even an option to submit additional commentsa), Kupferschmid still likens these protesters to “zombies in The Walking Dead” due to the “lack of effort”.

Those still wanting to join the horde can still do so on the offiical TakedownAbuse campaign website. And despite what Kupferschmid says, zombies, especially those in The Walking Dead, can be quite effective when trying to achieve their goals (eat humans), so underestimate them at your own peril!

Those that want to legally watch The Walking Dead, however, may find things a little more difficult after the MPAA’s WhereToWatch website removed the ability to search Netflix. WhereToWatch was set up by the MPAA to promote legal content, trying to silence critics who say the piracy problem is partly due to how difficult it is to find legal content online. Conspiracy theories sprung forth from the well that is the Internet, some suggesting that maybe the MPAA no longer considers Netflix as a legal source.

But the actual explanation was much more simpler – Netflix no longer allows third parties to search its library. The abundance of Netflix search sites seems to suggest otherwise, but these crawl Netflix’s site to retrieve a listing of content, and this is very much against Netflix’s terms of service, something the MPAA owned WhereToWatch wasn’t prepared to do.

Still, the critics’ original point stands – it’s can still be exceedingly hard at times to find legal content, and with content being more and more fragmented across a variety of SVOD platforms (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and FOX, CBS and others own SVOD platforms, each offering a subset of content), it really is hard at times to determine just which one of your many subscriptions has that show, episode or movie you want to watch (sure, you can buy it all on iTunes, but I’ve left my American Express Black Card in my other pants).

Gaming

Wii U

Nintendo will hope the NX sells better than the Wii U

Onto gaming news now, with E3 just around the corner, the rumour mill is now working over time on everything from the PS4.5, to the Xbox Next, and the most mysterious of them all, the Nintendo NX. Theoretically coming out next year, we still don’t really have an official name (I doubt it will be called the NX, which sounds more like project codename). The latest rumours suggest the NX will be “noticeable” more powerful than the PS4, and that some of the most popular Wii U games will be ported over to the NX at/near launch.

Assuming Nintendo has learned the lessons from the relative failure that is the Wii U, launching a console mid-generation that’s barely better than what’s already on the market, with games from some of the biggest Nintendo franchises missing, is not something the company will want to see a repeat of with the NX, even if the price is low enough. So I hope the NX will be powerful, maybe more powerful than the much touted PS4.5, and there will be a nice collection of Mario, Pokemon, Zelda and Super Smash Bros. games available at launch, even if some are just ported/enhanced editions of previous games. If they can do this, and introduce a bit of Nintendo magic in again changing the way we play games, then the NX looks to have a bright start and an even brighter future.


So that’s another week done and dusted. Have a great one and see you in seven.

Weekly News Roundup (27 March 2016)

Sunday, March 27th, 2016

Can’t believe it’s Easter already, and here I am, absentmindedly thinking it’s still 2015 from time to time.

Quite a bit of news to go through before we probably encounter the Easter/post Easter lull, so let’s get on with it, shall we?

Copyright

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Blu-ray

People will still buy this disc even though a pirated copy is already available, almost two weeks before the official release date

Well, it was unfortunate and probably predictable, as the Blu-ray edition of Star Wars: The Force Awaken, not due on store shelves until another week and a bit, has been ripped and uploaded online illegally. I say it’s predictable because, as one of the biggest movie releases ever (and possibly a record breaker for Blu-ray too), there was just no way this wasn’t going to get leaked early, especially considering how many people will have had access to the retail discs before the embargo date. While the official release date isn’t until April 5th, stores that plan on selling the disc will most likely already have received stock, stock that has been made and packaged long before – all the steps on this production and distribution line will be vulnerable to leaks, and for a release this big, it would have been amazing if there wasn’t a pre-release leak.

With that said, will it really affect sales? Probably not. This is one of the biggest movies ever, and true fans will not be sated until they get their (my) hands on the retail Blu-ray package, the existence of an illegal pirated download is not relevant (we might still download it though) – they (I) would have pre-ordered their copy months in advance anyway, and they won’t be cancelling it for the rip. There might be a few lost sales here and there, but these people were never really that serious about buying the disc anyway, and it’s not going to make a huge dent on the predicted huge sales numbers.

High Definition

The Peanuts Movie Ultra HD Blu-ray

As UHD Blu-ray releases go, The Peanuts Movie wasn’t a popular one

Speaking of Blu-ray sales, the Blu-ray sales stats I published this week contains the first set of numbers for Ultra HD Blu-ray, and there are both good and bad news for the new 4K format.

The Peanuts Movie is one of the first new releases that happens to be released simultaneously on Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray, and long story short (actually, story isn’t that long anyway), not many UHD copies were sold at all. UHD discs for this movie were only 0.27% of total disc sales (which includes standard Blu-ray and DVD), or just under 0.5% of total Blu-ray sales (in other words, only one UHD copy was sold for every 203 standard Blu-ray copies, or 166 DVD copies).

Okay, perhaps this wasn’t the best movie to show off the UHD format, and according to disc buyers, it was ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ that was the UHD demo disc of choice. It had a much more respectable UHD sales share of 6.19% (so one UHD copy for every 6 Blu-ray copies sold, or every 8 DVDs).

It’s still early days, but it looks like its going to take some time before UHD Blu-ray becomes a major factor in disc sales.

Gaming

What might help accelerate UHD Blu-ray’s adoption would be if the PS4 was upgraded to support it – and this might actually happen, if you believe the rumours. Apparently, game developers are already being briefed on a new mode of the PS4 that will support 4K gaming (the current PS4 only supports 4K for images and video files), which necessitates the use of a new GPU. If such a major hardware change is to occur, then chances are, Sony might use the opportunity to also upgrade the optical drive in the PS4 to support Ultra HD Blu-ray. It will make the new PS4, dubbed PS4.5 (or PS4K, as I’ve read about it in some quarters), more expensive, but this “premium” PS4 would not be aimed at the budget conscious anyway.

I think it makes good sense for Sony to make this move, and if they do, it would also fill the rather obvious looking gap in Sony’s Blu-ray player line-up – the company does not even have any current plans to release a Ultra HD Blu-ray player at all!

Wii U Boxes

Wii U sales have been bad enough to maybe force Nintendo to bring the NX’s release date forward to 2016

So while Sony (and Microsoft) are all thinking about making their flagship consoles better, Nintendo might be trying to abandon it altogether in 2016. Reports, which was later somewhat weakly refuted by Nintendo, suggests the Japanese company is going to cut their losses and stop production of the Wii U in 2016. The PS4 has sold three times many units globally than the Wii U despite being released a whole year later, and the situation is not going to get any better. But with Nintendo’s next console not coming out until 2017, it’s extremely unlikely the company will end Wii U production before then – not unless they bring up the release date of the NX to 2016.

It’s actually not too difficult to see what went wrong with the Wii U. It wasn’t powerful enough compared to the other current generation consoles, it wasn’t cheap enough either thanks to the price war between Microsoft and Sony. And while it had a good stable of first party games, there were some obvious absentees (Zelda!), and third party support was lacking. It was probably lacking because the Wii U failed to bring anything really innovative to gaming unlike the Wii – the tablet controller is good, but is often underutilised, even by first party games – and third party developers just weren’t excited about what the Wii U brought to gaming (that’s not to say that the PS4 and Xbox One were innovative, they weren’t, but they didn’t have to be because they were superior in almost every other way).

So it’s a bit early to eulogise the Wii U, but let’s just hope Nintendo has learned their lessons and give us something that will either be revolutionarily different and/or powerful enough to make Sony and Microsoft look over their shoulders with nervousness. Plus better launch games (Zelda!)

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Okay folks, that’s it for this week. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of the WNR, Happy Easter, and see you next week.

Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2015)

Sunday, September 13th, 2015

Not a lot of news this week, which might be related to the Labor Day holiday in the US. Or the fact that the quota for news stories might have all been used up (during the the very busy) last week.

So this won’t take long at all, I suppose …

Copyright

The Norwegian Pirate Party is ready to counter the country's new censorship regime

The Norwegian Pirate Party is ready to counter the country’s new censorship regime

Norway has started blocking The Pirate Bay, but they’ve chosen to do it on the DNS level, which makes bypassing the filter as easy as changing from your ISP’s DNS servers to a public one (like the ones from Google – this is probably recommended even if you’re not subject to draconian censorship regimes, from performance, reliability and security points of view). And to make users aware of how easy it is to ignore this latest misguided censorship effort, the Norwegian Pirate Party has launched their own public DNS server.

Okay, I admit, this isn’t the most enticing of news stories. But I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and this story about rights-holders pursuing an utterly futile course of action that sets a dangerous precedent at the same time as having no positive consequences for anybody involved, was the best I could do this week.

That was until yesterday, when I glanced upon this story about a new app called Aurous that’s set to make music piracy as easy as Spotify. Not that Spotify is hard to use, and of course, you can use it without paying – but it’s also not as perfect as it could be, with not all songs being available and no offline/download mode unless you pay. This is what Aurous promises to make up, that and to also be pain in the ass for the music industry.

Aurous

Aurous wants to make music piracy easier than using Spotify

The early alpha versions of Aurous, available on pretty much all the major platforms including mobile ones, is still lacking many of the features that makes Spotify really cool – like discovery and radios, so from a usability perspective, Spotify does still have a few cards up its sleeve, even for the free version.

And there’s the “good enough” factor to consider. While Spotify may not be perfect, it might be “good enough” for most people to not have to bother going down the piracy route, even with something as easy to use as Aurous. The same cannot be said for movies and TV shows – as good as Netflix is, it just doesn’t have most of things you want to watch. This is why Popcorn Time, a similar concept except for video content, is such a hit and such a disruptive force for the industry, whereas Aurous may never achieve the same effect (and notoriety).

High Definition

Speaking of offline/download mode, and following last week story about Amazon Prime adding this feature to its streaming service, Netflix has responded this week by confirming that they’re not considering adding the same feature.

New Netflix UI

No offline mode coming, says Netflix

But I’m not sure I buy their reason for not adding this feature, which is that while users want the feature, most won’t use it because it’s too complex (since users will have to manage local storage, queue downloads, you lose the instant play ability, and since not all titles will support downloads, it adds to further user confusion). Users can always choose to not use the download feature if they find it too complex, so I don’t see what Netflix has to lose by adding the feature.

Actually, I do see what Netflix has to lose – money. Rights-holders will want more for the licensing rights to downloads, and licensing costs is something Netflix has been trying to reduce, either through producing their own original content and by ending content deals with the likes of Epix.

But users also have plenty of gain if they had access to an offline playback mode, even if it’s just for selected titles. Being able to queue up a few offline titles to watch could be a godsend for vacations to places with poor to non-existent Internet connections, for example. So perhaps Netflix should reconsider, and give users what they want (even if most might not actually use it, all the time).

Gaming

The August NPD results are in and the PS4 has won yet again. As usual, all the companies spun the results into something super positive for themselves (Sony didn’t have to do as much spinning, to be fair). Microsoft bigged up the Xbox One’s sales increase and its big release slate for the rest of the year, while Nintendo talked about the 3DS, Amiibo and Splatoon, but failed to mention the Wii U at all, which is probably for the best.

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So that was the week that was. A nice and quiet week, hopefully leading up to a nice and not so quiet week next week. See you soon.

Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2015)

Sunday, August 23rd, 2015

So a week and a bit more back from vacay, and what happens? I get the flu, or some hideous mutated version of it. Eurgh. So this week’s WNR is going to be a bit more abbreviated than usual, since it’s very hard to type legible words when you’re coughing and sneezing at the screen all the time.

Copyright

BitTorrent Logo

The RIAA has a new target in its sights …

While this humble webmaster has difficulty writing coherent sentences, the RIAA apparently doesn’t have the same problem, as the copyright lobbyists for the music industry have written yet another letter (after writing one to CBS/CNET last week), this time to BitTorrent Inc, the makers of uTorrent.

The RIAA wants the company that developed the BitTorrent protocol to do more to fight piracy, which may includes building in a filter system for its popular uTorrent client in order to filter out pirated downloads. The RIAA’s letter cited all sorts of stats, all of which basically points to there being lots of piracy going on via BitTorrent. But in classic RIAA style blame shifting, they claim that BitTorrent Inc is somehow responsible for this.

BitTorrent Inc did invent the BitTorrent protocol, and they do publish one of the most popular BitTorrent clients out there, but at the end of the day, it’s just a file transfer protocol. HTTP is also just another file transfer protocol, and there’s a lot of pirated files being transferred via HTTP too, and downloaded via the most popular browser on the market, Google’s Chrome. This does not, however, mean that Tim Berners-Lee/CERN and Google should be made responsible for this, even if the ratio of legal/pirated content may be less of an issue on HTTP than on BitTorrent.

None of this finger pointing, whether at BitTorrent or CNET, actually addresses the question of why people pirate. And the answer to this question is a lot more complicated than “because they’re thieves” (especially when some the same “thieves” are also their best customers).

Windows 10

Microsoft’s ominous user policy changes may be a storm in a teacup, or something more sinister

Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to make it less easy to “steal” games with an updated user agreement that apparently gives the Redmond firm the power to scan and disable “counterfeit games”. After our article on this was published, Microsoft issued a clarification that the newly added clause was mainly for security reasons, to allow Microsoft to remove “apps or content” whenever the company “deems your security is at risk”. I don’t know about you, but this statement seems even more ominous to me, especially the part about Microsoft affecting my “content”. Not to mention the fact hat security was not mentioned anywhere in the updated clause either.

One company that wish it had the legal authority and technical ability to disable content right now is Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison. The site’s data was hacked, posted online and exposed many who used the service to cheat on their partners. ALM is now using copyright law to try and remove the leaked data from online postings (sponge, a flood, trying to stop, etc…) – good luck with that!

What do I make of this whole situation? I guess it’s easy to sit here and laugh (plus cough and sneeze uncontrollably) at cheaters getting what they deserve, but the bigger issue for me is about the right to privacy. Those who cheat on their spouses may deserve the worst, but they may also have an expectation of privacy that we have to respect. Or do they give up this right because online data is well known for not being secure, and that users need to re-adjust their expectations as a result? This is something that I think deserves further debate.

Gaming

Another month, another NPD, and the PS4 once again beat the Xbox One, both in hardware and game sales. I think it’s safe to say that this will be the ongoing trend, and it’s probably not even worth mentioning NPD results unless something changes from this norm.

OUYE

It looks like the real deal, but don’t expect to play Call of Duty on this console

You might think all these monthly wins for the PS4 would be seriously depressing for the Microsoft camp, but it’s worth noting that the Xbox One is still selling better than the Xbox 360 at the same stage of their life-cycles. So it may be the case of the Xbox One being an excellent console, but up against an even better one in the PS4. The real losers in this generation, if the Wii U can even be considered to be in the same generation as the XBO/PS4, is Nintendo.

But what if you could combine the Xbox One and PS4 into the same console? Meet China’s OUYE, which rips off the outer casing of the PS4, rips off the Xbox One’s controller, and rips off the name and concept of Android microconsole OUYA. Note that Chinese company responsible for this monstrosity didn’t even bother to try and rip off the Wii U. Ouch.

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67 coughs, 32 sneezes later, we come to the end of this WNR. Oh I’m sure there will be more news next week, but whether I’ll be healthy enough to write them up is another matter. Eurgh.