Le Mans 2011

Posted by Chris Till on July 5, 2011 in Racing
Audi R18 #1, 2011 24 Hours of Le Mans

Image by Audi USA via Flickr

Le Mans 2011

This year wasn’t the first time I’ve been into the Le Mans 24 Hours, but it’s the first time I’ve obsessively watched the entire race from start to finish. I just felt that because I love it so much, and because I want to experience the entirety of Le Mans to its fullest at least once in my life, I might as well do it now while the opportunity is there. Plus, it’s only one weekend a year of complete sleep deprivation after all. I’d also like to visit the race at some point in time but there’s plenty of time for that.

I thought it was a fantastic race. Although Audi lost two of their cars to very scary accidents, they still somehow managed to win with their third car, probably the car with the least amount of stars in when the average person looks at the line-up and doesn’t see a Kristensen or a McNish.

Peugeot had a great car and it was a close battle, but in the end, Audi just barely had the edge on pure pace despite Peugeot having better economy on fuel and tyres. Despite not having to pit as often, the raw speed of the Audi R18 was able to keep the lone German car out in front of the three Peugeots.

It would have been great to see a 6 way fight to the flag, but there’s always next year, and the most important thing is that everyone was safe after those two horrific crashes. I really hope Peugeot and Anthony Davidson can get the Le Mans win finally next year as he’s definitely got the talent to do so. He’s been unlucky this time around with Alex Wurz crashing their no. 7 car out of a podium place which must have been desperately disappointing for everyone in the team.

Overall I think it’s fair to say that as much as I would have liked to see Peugeot avenge 2010′s emotional defeat, Audi had the slightly better car on the day and especially after the two crashes, it seemed appropriate that they would win the race. As bad as I felt the following day, I would do it all again next year without question. There’s just something about Le Mans that makes it the most special event in racing to me.

The 6 hours of Imola round of the ILMC was this past weekend and it’s the main reason I finally wrote this post. A post about that event will be next after this.

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Can Google+ Compete with Facebook?

Posted by Chris Till on June 30, 2011 in Technology

Google have a poor track record when it comes to social media. Just look at Buzz and how that didn’t give Twitter any competition whatsoever. This from the one of the first, and probably still biggest internet companies.

Google+ is another typical Google product from what I can tell. It looks good, has the best of intentions but will most likely end up being too geeky and not mainstream enough for the general public to get behind. Not only this, but Facebook is so deeply engrained in world culture by this point that I don’t see how anyone can compete with them, even someone as big and as powerful as Google. Even if Plus ends up being better than Facebook, which is unlikely to start with, they will struggle hugely to make a dent in Facebook’s humongous user base.

I’m also a bit concerned that the ‘+’ is going to become Google’s favourite thing and be overused throughout all of their products, in a similar way to Microsoft and ‘Live’ and Apple’s ‘i’.

Speaking of Google’s new found love of the plus, I should also mention the +1 sharing feature which is now visible on many websites. I like it so much more than the buttons to share things on Twitter and Facebook. This is simply useful and understated. If you like an article for example, simply +1 it and if and when that search result pops up in Google for your friends, they’ll see that you recommend it. The best part is that it doesn’t clog your friends news feed or twitter homepage. They’ll only see it at a time when it could actually be of use to them.

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Marvel vs Capcom 3 Mini-Review

Posted by Chris Till on June 30, 2011 in Game Reviews
Thor battling the goddess Amaterasu in front o...

Image via Wikipedia

I recently rented Marvel vs Capcom 3. Fighting games normally don’t keep my interest for more than an hour or two usually, but this one separates itself from the pack in a number of ways for me.

I love the fact that they include a simple control mode. It meant that novice fighting fans like myself are able to execute all of the cool looking combo moves that otherwise would have been beyond my skill level to execute.

Obviously, you should also know if you’ve read my last post that I’m an on and off comic book fan, and so any fighting game with Marvel characters in it is more likely to peak my interest than any others. The gameplay is the same as previous entries in the series but it’s still a lot of fun tagging in and out team-mates and causing chaos by sending them in to interrupt proceedings.

Once someone more casual completes the single player experience and had a few fun battles with family and friends in the same room, there’s really not much else to do with the game. This is why it’s such a great rental title. I’m definitely glad I took the chance on a fighting game I would ordinarily have given a wide berth. I enjoyed my couple of hours with it a lot. I hope the developer gets a fairly decent share of the rental profit as they deserve it. I just can’t justify rewarding them with a full price game purchase.

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DC Comics Make Huge Changes

Posted by Chris Till on June 29, 2011 in Features
DC Comics

Image via Wikipedia

I would say I’m a big comic book fan. That’s probably going overboard. I enjoy reading every now and again when I feel motivated to sit and pick up a book. I have a pretty big collection of trades, most of which I haven’t actually read yet, and I know that’s pretty silly but I will get around to it at some point.

When I do read, it generally ends up being the Invincible series in trade form. I love that book. The story is interesting and engaging and the art is just spectacular.

Rather than go into my on and off love of comics in further detail, I want to talk about the big changes that DC announced a month or so ago. Digital is clearly the future in practically everything, and the comics industry isn’t exempt from that.

Digital comics have been steadily growing for a while now, mainly thanks to apps like Comixology, Playstation Comics and the support of the publishers themselves. The problem up until now has been that the publishers, while they did show significant support, weren’t willing to take a risk on day-and-date print and digital comics. Instead, they’ve been releasing digital versions of library comics which are now out of print, and therefore not a risk at all. It simply gave them a chance to test the market and make more money off books which they generally wouldn’t have otherwise.

However, it was clear that the next step had to be made soon and DC have given fans what they have been clamouring for. Starting later in the year, they will be releasing comics on the same day in print and online. This is a watershed decision that will determine the future of the industry. Now we just need to get all publishers (especially Marvel) on board and we need to develop a standard format for comic publishing that will allow comics to be read on any device in the same vein as digital music and video, and to some extent, eBooks.

This is some way off, and is not going to be easy considering that most digital devices you can read comics on are often very different, and therefore standardising everything will be tough, but hopefully we see something along those lines in the near future. We don’t want to stay in a situation now where you’ll forget where one particular book is. I have some on my PSP, some on my iPod and it’s definitely going to get worse before it gets better.

The other news from DC is that they are re-launching all of their main series at the same time in a gigantic event which must be taking a gargantuan amount of time and coordination to achieve.

Practically everyone knows the basic origin stories of the famous superheroes thanks to the films, TV series and so on, but over the years, those stories in the books themselves just get so complex and confusing, that eventually it gets to a point where it’s hard to follow what has happened. DC have realised this and are resetting everything back to how it was in the beginning. They want to make the characters younger and more relatable to today’s audience. Whether or not they just end up having to do the same thing a number of years down the line is anyone’s guess, but I like the fact that they’re taking this chance now regardless.

They’re probably also hoping that all of the number 1 issues will entice collectors to buy a fair few copies up. Maybe some people will buy both the print and digital versions so they have one to read and one to keep pristine. As I’m not really a collector I’m not too worried but who knows.

I don’t know if Marvel will follow suit in both of these initiatives, but if they do only one then I hope they take the digital route for all of their comics. It’s the next logical step and they can’t afford to get left behind by their great rival and all of the independent guys like Image who are doing some great stuff at the moment.

I’m definitely excited to see how the digital transition pans out, and reading the amended origin stories for some of the most well loved characters in all of entertainment can’t be a bad thing either. It’s definitely going to be a great time to be a comic fan and a great time for kids and adults alike to get into it for the first time.

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Firefox 5

Posted by Chris Till on June 29, 2011 in Technology
Mozilla Firefox word mark. Guestimated clear s...

Image via Wikipedia

I was planning to do a review of Firefox 4 when that came out a while back, but I just never got around to it. Thankfully, Mozilla have a new, far shorter release cycle for their browser so I can just skip 4 and move straight to 5.

Also thankfully, not much has changed from the previous version to this one, which is a bit of a shame really as we’ve become accustomed to long waits for big feature changes from the organisation.

Firefox 4 was quite a radical departure from the long standing version 3.5. They added their own version of Chrome‘s pioneering tabs-on-top feature, and changed the menus to make it far more sleek and minimal. It took a little adjusting to but it was definitely an improvement.

Along with the cosmetic change was the addition of HTML 5 support which in the future will prove essential as we move away from reliance on the proprietary flash format more and more. Another nice move was the addition of Firefox sync as an integral part of the application as opposed to an extension which in the past made it a fairly niche product. Now, everyone will be able to set up sync and enjoy having all of their bookmarks and other data on their mobile devices and other computers, which is a great thing.

For the real power users, they added app tabs, which in my view don’t really work out well in the end. I just kept having my gmail fail to update and cause issues. The same could be said about the new tab organising feature called panorama. This allows you to group your tabs into named sets which you can switch between. Most people will never need this and as someone who usually tries out everything new, I really think it’s going to be overkill for almost everyone. I just don’t see how it’s worth the effort for 95% of people.

Firefox 5 doesn’t do a lot of new stuff, at least not that you can see, which is in some ways a good thing. Security, standards compliance and performance are at the heart of this release’s improvements.

At the end of the day though, despite everything they’re doing, I just prefer Chrome. Every now and again I like to open Firefox just for a change of scenery so to speak, but I always go back to Chrome as my browser of choice. Everything that browser does just suits me perfectly. The new tab page just works, the way I can use the main search box to look things up on wikipedia just works and the clutter free design wastes no space.

As much as I appreciate what Mozilla do with open standards, supporting multiple devices including android among other things, I just like Google’s browser more.

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WWDC 2011 – Part 3: iOS5

Posted by Chris Till on June 28, 2011 in Technology

The main new features of iOS5 are the new notification centre, wi-fi syncing and the ability to be PC free and iMessage among others.

Notification centre is definitely the biggest and most significant update. I got my first smartphone a while back, a Sony Ericsson Android phone. It doesn’t run the most up to date version of Android but you can immediately see the difference in notifications between it and the iPhone. You swipe down from the top of the screen and see all of your notifications. Apple have clearly neglected this important area of the device for some time now but thankfully they look to have done a great job in updating it.

Now, instead of being greeted by one notification at a time, each in a big blue bubble, now you see a sleek list of individual notifications. Each of which you can swipe to go straight to the corresponding app. It’s so much more functional now especially if you get a lot of notifications that you don’t want to miss. Like android, you can access the list when the device is awake by sliding your finger down from the top of the screen. It’s far from revolutionary, but to be fair, they do implement it well even if they did copy from Google.

PC free and wi-fi syncing is also a great addition. It, combined with all of the iCloud features will finally stop the critics who say that the iPad is not a true tablet computer but an oversized iPod Touch. It can now plainly go head to head with any traditional tablet in terms of functionality. This also is available on iPhone and iPod Touch, where it’s welcome but not as necessary as it is for iPad.

The wi-fi syncing is also welcome. If you can plug it in to charge using any device or better yet unplugged, then this could be very useful for me, but regardless, it’s nice to see something people have been requesting for a long time now being added.

iMessage is an interesting one. On one hand, surely we already have enough methods of communcation. Texting, email, twitter, facebook etc. You would be forgiven for thinking “why do we need another one?” I’m struggling with this question myself. It would be nice to have a method of communication between iDevices, but how confusing will it be for iPhone users who already have an identical looking texting app? It takes away the simplicity and speed of texting, as you’re relying on 3G or wi-fi, both battery draining. The jury is out on this app I think. We’ll just have to see how it pans out when we get to use it.

News Stand is an interesting idea, and looks to be the fourth separate store Apple are starting, this time dedicated to all newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I like the idea of integrating it directly into the home screen. It makes you wonder why they didn’t do that with iBooks but are here. It’s a bit inconsistent. If it is built into the OS by default as opposed to a download like iBooks then it would be further adding to that inconsistency.

Other improvements of note include Safari, which now has an instapaper clone built in that syncs with iCloud, the reader feature that the desktop version has had for a while and tabbed browsing on iPad, all nice improvements but not earth shattering.

Reminders is pretty self explanatory and looks nice, although I’m so used to Google tasks by this point. You can now use the volume up key to take photos and it’s quicker to jump into the camera app which is a nice touch. The photos app allows simple editing such as cropping, red-eye removal and auto-enhance. Again, all welcome additions.

There are other new features, but most are not really worth talking about, especially Twitter, which seems a bit pointless from where I’m sitting, since you can do all of the things they advertise, albeit slightly less well integrated, by using the official Twitter app which many have already.

Overall though, I think iOS5 is a pretty impressive update and a step forward in many ways. WWDC in general was a triumph. I love iCloud and iOS5 especially and I don’t think they could have done much better with anything they showed on that day.

I’m keenly looking forward to the next Apple event to hear about new iPods, that new iPhone everyone’s speculating about and of course some new computers.

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WWDC 2011 – Part 2: iCloud

Posted by Chris Till on June 28, 2011 in Technology

I think iCloud is fantastic. When it was first announced, we assumed generally that it would be the name for a new iTunes streaming service but it ended up being so much more, and all of it great.

I’ve been saying for such a long time now that I thought Apple should compete with Google in cloud services. Mobile me simply did not make sense when compared to Google’s free services like Gmail, Google calendar and documents among others. Sure, they were good but they cost money they probably weren’t worth.

iCloud takes everything good that Mobile Me did, makes it free and adds more besides. Whether me.com email addresses can challenge the traditional heavyweights in email like hotmail, yahoo, aol and gmail is another question, but I suppose just the fact that the domain is only two characters should help its cause somewhat. Whether they actually gain substantial market share in all of these cloud services is beside the point, just the fact that it’s free is great and it makes them competitive at least.

iCloud also expands on Mobile Me’s original syncing concept and takes things a lot further and really puts them far ahead of anyone else in terms of mainstream cloud syncing services. Not only does in sync the usual things, contacts, calendars and mail, but also practically everything else you could think of. Your photos, videos, iWork documents, a complete backup of all of your device settings and data from your apps.

These things are all fantastic, but the real star of the show here is the automatic syncing and backup of your purchases from all three of Apple’s stores. All of your music, apps and books will automatically download to all of your devices. No more syncing and homesharing across numerous devices and computers, and no worrying about backing up your precious music. If in future you somehow lose your music on all of your devices, you can just download it again for no extra charge. Apple say that there’s no limit to how many times you can re-download purchases but I assume they’ll be fairly lenient as long as you don’t abuse the function.

For me, this will completely change my purchasing of music in the future. Recently, I’ve been going exclusively to Amazon MP3 for my music, as it’s generally quite a bit cheaper than iTunes for almost everything, and sometimes by a very significant amount. However, the extra value you get from not having to worry about syncing anything and keeping a library in perfect order, as well as the peace of mind of not having to back up purchases make it worth the extra money in my opinion.

At first, I was a bit surprised that Apple didn’t do something more elaborate with iTunes in the cloud in the same vein as Spotify or possibly a locker type arrangement like Amazon cloud player or Google Music. When I thought about it more, I understood why they went in the direction they did.

The reason why they didn’t go with a locker type arrangement is because it’s complex, involves uploading an entire library to the cloud which is far from ideal and wastes storage space with potentially a huge number of copies of the same song being uploaded. I think the Spotify streaming model would make more sense but Ap[ple have traditionally stayed away from the renting model for music as they like people to feel that they own the music they download. The iTunes Match service is essentially the happy medium between these two options. It scans your library for music that wasn’t downloaded on iTunes. AKA: from another online service, ripped from CDs or obtained in less than legal ways and looks for matches in Apple’s catalogue. You pay a flat fee and any music you have that is available in iTunes match is either upgraded to 256kbps if it’s lower quality, or if the music is not on iTunes, those select songs will be uploaded. Everything will then be treated as if you bought it from iTunes originally, and will be synced to all of your devices automatically. This is a nice idea and I’m sure Apple will make it as easy to understand as possible, but it remains to be seen what will happen if you don’t renew your subscription. Hopefully you’ll get to keep any music that was upgraded in the new form, and perhaps even still be able to keep uploaded music synced, but that’s a long shot.

Either way, I can’t wait to check out iCloud when it launches in the autumn. Just the small taster we’ve been given in the UK of being able to sync Apps and books but not not music has got me excited to check out the whole package.

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WWDC 2011 – Part 1: Lion

Posted by Chris Till on June 17, 2011 in Technology
WWDC 1

Image via Wikipedia

Apple did something uncharacteristic this year in the lead up to WWDC, they announced what they were going to show at the conference. We knew they would be covering Mac OS Lion, iOS5 and iCloud at the event. Normally they have kept quiet even when the cover had all but been blown on an upcoming product.

Everything they announced was exciting in some way. I want to just go through each of them in turn now.

Mac OS Lion

In this era we’re in that people increasingly call the “post PC world”, you would think it would be tough to excite people with an update to a traditional desktop operating system.

If anyone could do it though, it’s Apple and they didn’t disappoint. The main new features in Lion which interest me are Launchpad, resume (includes auto save and versions) and full screen apps. All of these three new features are great additions for obvious reasons. Auto save is always going to be useful, and launchpad takes the best of iOS and brings it to the desktop.

In the past I’ve used several ways to launch my apps that weren’t in my dock. I’ve used quicksilver to type the first letter of an app to launch that way, by using a special launcher app I found, as well as what I do currently. This is to use the stacks feature of leopard to have an apps folder on the far right of my dock next to the downloads stack. Even though this works well, launchpad takes this further and really delivers the optimum app launching experience. It utilities the entire desktop and folders are a great way to organize desktop apps, just like I swear by them on my iPod Touch to keep me on top of my ridiculous number of apps.

If Launchpad becomes as successful as I think it could do, then we may see Apple make a change to the dock itself in future. They may make it restricted in how many icons can fit in it, just like on the iPhone, and then just give you a launchpad icon on the left to get to the rest of your apps. It would definitely tidy up the desktop and give it a more simplistic look, but I’m not sure if they would commit to this as it could upset some users who like their desktops to be a certain way.

Despite all of the great little changes that Apple have made in Lion, there are a few which I think may be overkill for most people. Most notably, mission control and the increased number of multi-touch gestures.

I’ve always loved the double finger scroll on my MacBook and I can certainly appreciate why gestures are useful for pinching, zooming and rotating for image manipulation. These are natural gestures and the work well. Where it gets to be overkill is with complex gestures involving up to three fingers. This isn’t really intuitive and I doubt many people will use these. I first realized this when Craig Federighi was demoing gestures at the back to the mac conference last year. He was struggling a bit with getting the gestures to work correctly. It may be true that he was doing it with a magic mouse, which isn’t so easy to manipulate as a track pad on a macbook, but I still don’t see it as a feature most people will make use of.

This brings me on to Mission Control. This feature seeks to combine expose, spaces, dashboard and full screen apps into one overview of your system. Personally, I really like expose so I hope they keep that as an option as well, as I don’t use spaces at all. With that said, it is still similar to that feature except that it groups windows of the same app together rather than spreading everything apart. You can spread open these groups but it’s not as easy as it used to be. I’ll have to reserve judgement until I can get to use it myself, but it definitely has potential for mainly power users I would assume.

It looks like Apple have done a good job here with Lion. It still looks a lot like Snow Leopard but looks can be deceiving. There’s definitely been a lot of good changes made. In the past, these upgrades have been on discs and cost around £80. This time, there are no discs, the price has been slashed by three quarters to just £20 and also gone are the family packs to enable the OS on all of your computers. Now, you just download it from the Mac App Store on every personal Mac you own.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to install it on my current MacBook as it’s 5 years old and isn’t fast enough to run it, which is a disappointment, but maybe sometime soon I’ll be able to upgrade to one of those new MacBook Airs that look great.

Come back for parts 2 and 3 where I’ll talk about iOS5 and iCloud.

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The PSN Hack: what could have been done differently?

Posted by Chris Till on June 16, 2011 in Features
Logo of the PlayStation Network

Image via Wikipedia

Sony took a lot of heat during the PSN outage caused by a hack and the theft of potentially all of our PSN account and more importantly payment card details. I think Sony were unlucky to a large degree. They were right to defend themselves against the hacker George Hotz who published details on how to hack the system which could lead to pirating games.

Sony perhaps didn’t have the most robust security measures in place and as such they were apparently pretty easy pray for angry hackers with a lot of misguided talent. It’s a shame that these people can’t do something more constructive with their technical abilities and instead choose to attack a company that is only doing what it is completely entitled to do, protect it’s intellectual property. I don’t buy the hacker’s claims that they should be able to do whatever they want to the PS3′s that they own. Sony have a fair use policy and they have a right to enforce that to protect their business.

I think the main anger from fans towards Sony was because they appeared to not rush to warn people about data possibly being stolen. Many believe that they should have warned people straight away even if they weren’t sure anything had been taken, just to be on the safe side. I agree with this and I think Sony did make an error here, but as I’m not really one to hold long term grudges on brands I wouldn’t threaten to switch to Xbox or boycott Sony products for example like some people did.

All you can really do is just hope that they really have beefed up their security to an extent where we won’t have a repeat of this scenario again in the future. I’m not going to switch to using PSN cards to pay for PSN content because of this, but I can understand why a lot of people may choose to do so.

This whole fiasco becoming mainstream news has got to be damaging to Sony. All a lot of people will see is that Sony have been hacked and lost people’s private data. A lot of these people may not have ever owned a Playstation, but they may still be put off from buying a Sony TV down the line. You’ve got to hope that this isn’t the popular opinion, because Sony certainly don’t deserve that.

This type of hacking is in vogue at the moment you could say. We’ve seen numerous hacks on almost a daily basis on all kinds of websites. From game developers to news sites and more, it appears that no one is safe. In a way, this just validates Sony and just shows that no matter how much time you spend defending yourselves against data theft, it seems that no company can avoid being breached. If a hacker group wants to do something, then it seems like not much can stop them. This is probably why Microsoft didn’t make fun of Sony at the conference, because they know that it would be like showing a red cape to a bull and making themselves the next prime target.

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E3 2011

Posted by Chris Till on June 15, 2011 in Features
Wii U Controller

Image by ze_bear via Flickr

I think this year’s E3 has been a strong one from all three companies. Certainly a lot better than in past years, especially Nintendo who have not always brought their best in the last several years. This is a quick overview of how I think each of the three big companies conferences went.

Microsoft

Microsoft seemed to be a bit ordinary and predictable in their approach this year, and it does make me wonder who’s running things over there when you see casual games taking the centre stage at a show where hardly anyone is interested in the majority of those titles. Yes, Dance Central 2 should be a great dance game just like the first one was, but I just think they could have mentioned the game with a quick trailer and then moved on to the next game. It just didn’t seem necessary to demo it to the audience they have in attendance.

In terms of the rest of the show, no real surprises. I suppose 2 Halo games are better than one for fans of the series, but anyone could have predicted Halo 4 and that Microsoft would want to jump on Sony‘s HD remake bandwagon for some quick cash.

Sony

I don’t think Sony had the strongest of shows but it was certainly similar to last year’s in being very consistent and safe in a way while still exciting fans with great gameplay demos of titles like Uncharted 3.

The Vita name for the NGP is starting to grow on me slowly. If I had written this on the day the name was confirmed, then I would have not been in such a great mood about it, but now I can see how it may work. In terms of Vita games, I think they’re doing well for a launch lineup, with Uncharted leading the charge with many other strong titles such as LBP, Killzone, Call of Duty and more all in the pipeline as well as the traditional Sony launch games like WipEout and Everybody’s Golf. I’m pretty confident that they’ll be something for practically everyone when the system ships, unlike the 3DS on launch.

Nintendo

We knew pretty much everything about the Wii U before it was announced. Practically nothing was a surprise except the name. Which I suppose looking at it now isn’t really surprising. It makes sense for Nintendo to keep such a successful brand name going rather than risking a whole new identity for their new system.

The most exciting aspects for me to come out of the conference were the slew of game announcements. Not counting all of the games we already knew about, Super Mario 3D and Luigi’s Mansion 2 were the big stand-outs on 3DS. There wasn’t really anything on Wii that we didn’t already know about but the Kirby game looks to be the pick of the bunch alongside Zelda Skyward Sword.

Mario Kart 3D got a new trailer and now we know what the gimmick will be in this latest version, flying and underwater aspects. I quite like the idea of turning into a big glider and actually being able to control your flight rather than following an automatic path when you fly off a big jump, so I’m looking forward to this. I’ll be a little disappointed if they don’t feature bikes as they were so much fun in Mario Kart Wii but it’s not something that will ruin the game if it’s not included, likewise stunts.

Star Fox disappointed me a bit because I first thought this was a new version rather than the previously announced remake, but it seems like they just re-announced the same old game which isn’t ideal really.

A quick note on the Wii U controller. I hope they change a couple of aspects of the buttons. An analogue trigger is a must for realistic driving games and currently they’re not showing this so I hope they add those. I also was disappointed to see that they use the same design of analogue circle pads from the 3DS on the Wii U which to me doesn’t make much sense. The whole reason you would use those on the 3DS is because a traditional stick wouldn’t fit with the clamshell design of the system. Here, you’re not bound by height restrictions and as the controller is already so big, I would have expected full size analogue sticks just like the Nunchuk and Classic Controller. Not having those I believe will negatively affect precision control.

Conclusion

Overall, I think you would have to say that Nintendo had the best conference. A new system is practically guaranteed to overshadow anything else that’s shown, and it proved to be the case here.

The Vita price point of $250 was a bit of a relief but it’s still going to be expensive here. Then again, even if it comes out at the ridiculous £225 price tag the 3DS launched at, then I’ll be a lot more accepting of paying that much for this device over Nintendo’s one.

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