Newsfeed: Sony Lies Again, Borderlands 2 Tidbits

Borderlands, one of the neatest and hardest to put down games of this generation (review eventually) is getting a sequel…sometime before April 2013 probably. Not much has been said or shown of the sequel yet besides a teaser but here are a few tidbits of what’s new. The gun manufacturers from the first game which determined most of each gun’s stats will return. They’ll each be more distinctive stylistically and functionally. An example is now Tediore guns can be used like grenades. After being tossed they explode and a new gun is replicated in your hands. It’s an interesting idea that only scratches the surface of the possibilities seeing as there were many manufacturers in the first game and new ones to be introduced this time around. Other tweaks include cleaned up menu screens, online split-screen co-op, and minimap added to the HUD. Also there’ll be new vehicles, better vehicle controls, and all new classes replacing the original four. Roland, Lilith, Mordecai and Brick will return as NPCs in the sequel’s story. It sounds good so far even though the details are scant but there wasn’t much for the original to improve upon to begin with. Personally, I’d like to see craftable weapons. See, the way loot was determined in Borderlands was each part of a gun had tons of variants who’s stats were randomly generated within a preset range. So, maybe you got a gun with a great barrel but an awful clip, etc. So I’d like to see the ability to dissect weapons into their base parts and then recombine them into your own concoctions along with some form of enchantment process. It’d be sort of reminiscent of the rune words from Diablo 2. Picking the right equipment was just as important as the runes themselves.

How partnerships effect customers

Sony announced that PlayStation and DirecTV are partnering to bring NFL Sunday Ticket to the PS3. The service lets you watch every NFL season game including out-of-market broadcasts. The price is free if you already have DirecTV, NFL Sunday Ticket and NFL Sunday Ticket To-Go. If you don’t then you can just get NFL Sunday Ticket for $339.95. So, let’s get this straight. Either way you’re paying for DirecTV service ($340 would cover DirecTV for 6 months, easy) and either way you can watch all the games on your TV and PC. Exactly what is the benefit of this partnership? With MLB.TV it made sense because for $35 you could watch every MLB game (and there’s 162 games a year instead of 16) on your PC or portable device, however you couldn’t watch it on TV. The free MLB.TV PS3 app, although kinda crappy, was a great way to watch the games on your TV. But this? If you’re a DirecTV subscriber you probably already have this for free and adding a PS3 to the mix doesn’t add any benefit. This is a pointless offer, don’t even consider it. I also hear that you may have to pay $50 on top of the DirecTV subscription to use the PS3 as a receiver for NFL Sunday Ticket. All around this is a bad deal.

My gift to Sony

More Sony news as Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, claimed cross-game chat on the PS3 is impossible due to memory restrictions. The PS3 has 256MB of RAM and 256MB of video RAM which is apparently all being used up to run the games themselves. He said, “once a game gets RAM we never give it back. It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact. The game has to use its own memory to do [in-game voice chat]. There’s always voice chat in the game. But it’s a part of a game feature. It’s not a part of an OS feature. That’s the reason in terms of the ability to have voice chat across different games.” This is why the PSVita is expected to do cross game voice chat due to a RAM pool of 512MB and 128MB of V-RAM. This is complete bullshit. First off, the 360 has had things like cross game voice chat and custom soundtracks from day one with no more RAM than the PS3 uses. Also, most of the games on the market available for PS3 are also on 360. Are you telling us that these games are so using so much more RAM on the PS3, despite the stronger CPU, that you can’t get voice chat running? Finally, remember when they were tossing around potential dangling carrot lists of features to include in PS+? What was on that list and was hinted at for months before and after the PS+ launch? Cross game chat. They claimed they’d add it but only PS+ subscribers could initiate chats, remember that? So apparently all that was bullshit because it never would have worked in the first place, Sony just wanted to see how we’d react to it. Yeah, right. They’re just lazy and they’ve gotten this far without trying so why start now, right? At this point between the PSN leaks, PS+’s lack of features (except the ones that should be universal), the PSN passes and this, I wouldn’t believe anything any of these Sony people have to say. At this point the bullshit has nowhere to go and is just hemorrhaging from their bodies as they just try to survive until the PS Vita and PS4 without destroying everything they’ve built. It seems they’re so afraid of inevitable failure that they’re pushing back the Vita launch until after Christmas for no apparent reason. We’ll see what happens but I’d be a lot more skeptical of Sony’s plans moving forward.

Finally, check this trailer out. I like how it gets you interested in the world but doesn't utilize any gameplay footage whatsoever. This would work well as a movie trailer and the game looks good so far.