Savestate: Giant CES

GiantBomb 2014

It’s been a weird year for GiantBomb. Vinny, one of their talented video producers left for New York City to join Alex Navarro in New York City to form GBEast. The decision was motivated by family reasons but they’re making it work. I’m enjoying every piece of content from that two man crew.

GiantBomb filled the video producer role and Ryan Davis’ vacant spot with ex-Game Informer editors, Jason Oestreicher and Dan Ryckert. They (unsurprisingly) were excellent additions to the lineup.

At year’s end, Patrick Klepek, their news editor and horror game aficionado left at the end of this year for Kotaku.

Nothing lasts forever but despite the massive shuffling of the deck, I feel GiantBomb managed to maintain quality throughout the process.

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Steam In-Home Streaming Now Available

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steam_logoThis Steam in-home streaming feature is finally out of beta. I haven’t tried it myself but all the impressions I’ve read made it sound like a viable solution. The only other Steam compatible computer that I own is my Macbook Air. It’s a nice laptop but what I would ideally like is a tiny set top box like the Roku 3.

I will be extremely happy if it works just as well as the Wii U’s Remote Play but something tells me it will lean closer towards the PlayStation 4’s Remote Play functionality which would be satisfactory but not ideal.

PlayStation Now looks promising but I won’t use it

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Unless it’s included with PlayStation Plus, I won’t be using the PlayStation Now service whenever it arrives in Canada.

A U.S only closed beta will begin at the end of January with public rollouts beginning this summer. There’s still no word on Canadian or international availability. They’re also not mentioning pricing models either.

I would love for it to be a feature of PlayStation Plus but if Sony is pushing this as the “Netflix” of video games, it will likely be a separate subscription. Minor compression artifacts and latency issues are forgivable if you’re only paying $7.99 per month (assuming it’s Netflix pricing) on your gaming budget. But when I already own some of those marquee PlayStation 3 games and already paying Sony $4 per month for PlayStation Plus, it’s a tough sell.

Sony have stated they’re going to start by streaming select PlayStation 3 titles before they go digging into their PlayStation and PlayStation 2 catalog.

I hope for the best but unless this is a dirt cheap option with a vast library of games that I don’t already own, I don’t foresee myself using PlayStation Now.

Valve’s Steam OS Announced

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steam-os-logo

Valve announced their very own Linux distribution today. Steam OS will be geared for living room machines and offer the following:

  • Improved audio and graphics performance
  • Reduced latency
  • Home streaming solution for games not compatible with Linux
  • Media streaming

Of course, as with all Linux distributions, this will be free.

Will this succeed? I hope so but I have many, many doubts which I will keep to myself for now. Valve still has a couple of Steam related announcements to unveil. I suspect one will be hardware related.

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