Friday, September 11, 2020

Half-Measures

image from The Verge
(and before you ask, no, that's not a speaker)

I'll be honest with you, the current plan for the Xbox Series, er... series of consoles is a little confusing to me. So we've got a five hundred dollar system that plays games in 4K, and a three hundred dollar system that in some ways is actually less powerful than the deluxe model of the previous generation Xbox One. You get less RAM and fewer teraflops in the Xbox Series S than you would in 2017's Xbox One X, which leaves me perplexed... and not just because I'm not entirely clear what a "teraflop" is and how it relates to system performance.

Some folks aren't all that worried, like EGM's Mollie Patterson, who feels that the Xbox Series S will offer more than enough performance for older 1080p television sets. I personally question the wisdom of splintering the user base and potentially leaving cash-strapped customers out in the cold, but maybe this won't be a repeat of the accursed 32X. After all, we're not living in 1995 anymore. Video game hardware has evolved to the point where further advancements provide only modest enhancements to the gaming experience, rather than completely transforming it. We may need a seismic shift on the level of last century's polygonal graphics before the video game industry needs significant hardware upgrades.

Anyway. The Scott Pilgrim game everyone wet themselves over is making a comeback ten years after its Xbox 360 debut. As you may have gathered from the previous sentence, I did not enjoy this game, which heavily leeches from River City Ransom while somehow leaving out the fun. However, if you did like it, here's your chance to play it again without having to dig through the closet for your last generation console first. Bring along some Huggies just in case.

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