Since the dawn of home console video games, there has always been war. Bitter rivals competing head to head for your living room space. There were minor skirmishes early on, with Atari vs Commodore, and the NES stomped the Sega Master System into the ground. The first real war erupted when the Super Nintendo went head-to-head with the Sega Genesis, and it was bloody. Lines were drawn. Friendships destroyed. Controllers broken. Blast processing overhyped. In the end, the Genesis held on and fought the good fight, but the SNES eventually won. Since then, every generation has had its console wars. The past few years have mostly seen Sony and Microsoft in an embittered Cold War, with Nintendo ineffectually waggling its sticks around at them, menacingly.
The problem is that we as gamers and consumers never really had options. A console is a long term investment, a heavy chunk of change that would last you 5-7 years. You could pick a side and become a raving fanboy (or girl), you could save up your money and buy multiple consoles, or you could just opt out, build a gaming rig, and become a PC gamer. Either way, there was nothing in between. There were very few alternatives to the mainstream, and those we had either flopped pathetically, or just became short-lived beloved oddities (We love you and miss you, Sega Dreamcast). Even these oddities were an expensive investment. We never had anything cheaper, smaller, or more convenient.
Until now.
The problem is that we as gamers and consumers never really had options. A console is a long term investment, a heavy chunk of change that would last you 5-7 years. You could pick a side and become a raving fanboy (or girl), you could save up your money and buy multiple consoles, or you could just opt out, build a gaming rig, and become a PC gamer. Either way, there was nothing in between. There were very few alternatives to the mainstream, and those we had either flopped pathetically, or just became short-lived beloved oddities (We love you and miss you, Sega Dreamcast). Even these oddities were an expensive investment. We never had anything cheaper, smaller, or more convenient.
Until now.
The face of gaming has been changing, slowly, steadily and drastically over the past few years. We are blowing past the era where a gaming console is just an upgraded version of the last one. They are becoming integrated into our home lives, with music, streaming video, even channel packages. They are growing more and more powerful, finally managing to compete with PC gaming. But with this power and functionality comes a high price tag.
Now we've entered a world where the people demanding options can connect with those offering options. Smaller independent companies can come up with their own ideas and concepts, and they can spread their ideas through Twitter and Youtube, and fund them with crowdsourcing and Kickstarter. Yes, this stuff has been around for a few years at this point, and the indie gaming movement has been thriving for five or six years now, but this is the first time that it's had an impact on the actual consoles themselves. Smaller, independent home game consoles are popping up everywhere, and they're not just making ripples, they're making huge waves.
Let's take a look at some of the upcoming options:
Okay, ignore the horribly designed website. This is actually a pretty neat mini-console. The entire console fits on a tiny 2" stick that plugs into your TV's HDMI slot, or slips into the bottom of the small bluetooth controller for ease of portability. The best thing about the Gamestick is its miniscule price tag, $79.99. That's only a little bit more expensive than a AAA title game right now.
The Gamestick is going to be an open sourced Android-based console, crammed with power in a tiny package. It's going to run off of the PlayJam Games Network, which will provide gamers with hundreds of games from smaller indie devs. They plan to encourage small publishers to get their Android games onto their market, and have already signed plenty of developers to make titles for them. The games will be cheaper and more affordable than bigger console titles, and a lot of them will be free to play.
If you have any doubts about the impact that consoles like this will have on the industry, Gamestick's Kickstarter should remove all of them. They asked for $100K on their page. In 30 hours, they had topped that, and went on to collect almost $650K in crowd donated funding.
All right. This one is actually a handheld device, not exactly a home game console, but it's still pretty goddamn amazing, and I wanted to include it as an example of where we can go with gaming today.
Running off of an Nvidia Tegra 4, Project Shield is basically just a heavy duty controller that bears a slight resemblance to the XBox 360 controller, with a flip-up 5-inch screen offering a crisp, amazing 1280x720 resolution. It will run off of (surprise, surprise) an Android engine, and have internal storage for hundreds of Android based games. It's a mini powerhouse in and of itself, and can handle some of the biggest games Android has to offer.
What sets Project Shield apart from the others? Provided that you have a 600-series or greater Nvidia card in your PC at home, Project Shield can stream all of your PC games over a wifi signal. If you look at the picture I posted above the link? It's running Borderlands 2. Project Shield connects seamlessly with your Steam account, and through Steam's new Big Picture mode, will stream any of your PC games over the handheld system. Your PC will be doing the heavy lifting of running the game itself, while the handheld unit lets you play anywhere you want. Anything your super-powerful high-end gaming rig PC can run? Your Project Shield can run.
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