Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Blah Tuesday?

Well, there certainly is a lot of technology out there this past shopping weekend, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anything.. evolutionary yet to caused mass buying. Let’s look at some of the things released:1. PS 4 Pro: An upgraded PS4, the problem here is that there aren’t really many games out there that will take advantage of the new system’s upgraded capacities and that most games really won’t be able to do THAT much, since games will have to work on a base Ps4 as well.

2. PS VR. Right now, other than the EVE: Valkyrie, which is getting rave reviews, there’s no.. real drivers out there to spur buying.  There are things like Batman VR that could be considered solid proof of concept, but, I think it will be working with the Pro together down the road where it will be most useful

3. Xbox One S: Yes, yet another upgraded system, and this is really just a X1 slimmer with incremental upgrades, to pave the way for Scorpio next year. Again, proof of concept.

4. First Generation VR: We’re starting to see a lot of commercials for the Google branded VR systems, as well as the Occulus and other systems, but again, after the first generation of games that was VR ready (Project CARS, for example), you don’t really hear a lot about games that make it a selling point. There’s a few shovelware-ish games on Steam, and the NBA2K series has a VR experience with likely more VR features coming.. but again, it doesn’t have that must buy urge.. at least not yet.

Just following up on my Digital Revolution post, I was speaking with Josh Allen, who posts sometimes over here, and he thought that the digital revolution post was based on way too little data, that each game had some notable flaws in past versions (Watch Dogs 1 was not warmly received, Titanfall was Xbox/Windows only, and MP only really, Call of Duty has hit the point of saturation). He did say that the Final Fantasy 15 release, if it comes out as horribly as the other games did, COULD be a canary in the coal mine.

Speaking of FF15, oh dear, I just saw the Kotaku review of it. The reviewer spent 55 hours on it and praised the characters, and the combat system, but said the story was told poorly and many of the mechanics were “half-baked”. This is almost exactly the words that people were using to describe Mafia III. That game landed on our Golden Turkey list.