Wait, Wait, Pikachu is a -What-?

Pikachu facial capture.  I...I don't...

A Detective. A Fucking Detective.

I just don't even know anymore.

I mean, I say that a lot, and I get dramatic sometimes for comedy's sake, but I am well and truly baffled by this.  Essentially, the Pokemon Company has been working on a "Top Secret" game for a little while and just chose to reveal the details for the first time yesterday.  The game is going to be for the 3DS and won't see release for a while - they've suggested that they're shooting to release two years from now - and will be, as stated, a detective game where you and your intrepid partner Pikachu try to solve mysteries and do all those detective-y things.  You might say "Ohhhh, so it's basically just one of those Pikachu games and he'll just be kind of an annoying sidekick" and no, you are actually incorrect apparently.  Pikachu will be cognizant of his own thoughts and ideas and he'll actually be able to communicate them through speech.  That's right, Pikachu is going to talk to you, and do so using proper language.

That's part of why the Pokemon Company felt the game was so experimental and 'dangerous' because making Pikachu talk is a -big deal- to them.  The little yellow mouse is the mascot still, after all, and likely will never relinquish that role so the branding more or less lives and breathes on his image.  So to put him in this kind of game which honestly won't be pandering to the younger crowd - at least one can surmise as much, given that Pikachu will be saying some 'adult'-ish things (commenting on pretty ladies, suggesting a situation is going to be fairly violent) - is a big risk.  One that Nintendo is clearly hoping will pay off later on and, let's face it, it probably will.  It does, however, leave me just one question about the whole thing as it stands.

Why?

Why is Pikachu in this game?  Why is Pikachu essentially a functioning adult character stand-in?  Why did they announce this game -now- if it won't be ready for two years?  Are they fucking Squeenix now?  Why did they make yet another drastic genre-shattering game with an existing IP?  Why did they not just make a new IP for fuck's sake?

New Nintendo IPs are a rare breed indeed, at least when it comes to something they have any intentions on -making something of-, and with the success of the Professor Layton games, there's absolutely nothing saying Nintendo couldn't have made their own detective series of games that would've been memorable and inspiring enough to jettison the main character into the Nintendo Hall of Fame as it were.  It honestly wouldn't take much at this point - just make the character and give it even the slightest pushes and you're set.  Just give some perceived notion of at least semi-permanency even if you don't intend it - lord knows Star Fox and Captain Falcon know that pain as do their fans.  Yet they're never forgotten, and you can't say that Nintendo put so much effort into that effect, if only for Captain Falcon and not so much Star Fox.  Yet, instead of taking a chance on that new IP, we get a weird game where Pikachu has facial scanning and animations because he's going to say “If this keeps up, we’ll have a bag made from Pikachu…” because that's necessary.  Totally.

really, the whole 'two years' thing is what bugs me the most, you're better than that Nintendo

Read more at http://www.siliconera.com/2013/10/28/top-secret-pokmon-game-revealed-detective-game-featuring-pikachu/#Ms1zGALrLKBRG07u.99

Nvidia Announces 'Shield' Confuses Literally Everybody

So, there is honestly a little bit of an inordinate amount of news going on these days, and a big contributor to that is the International Consumer Electronics Show which has an inherent skew into gaming, though not a whole lot tends to come out of it if memory serves.  However, at least two big pieces of news, in a sense, have come out and the one that came out first was the announcement of Project Shield from Nvidia, you know, the graphic processor guys.  When you make graphics processors for PCs, the clear and obvious next step is Handheld Mobile Gaming and that is exactly what Nvidia has thrown down into.  I mean, it's so obvious.  Nvidia and I are truly of a like mind in this, a matter that makes absolutely every bit of sense as you would expect a big decision like this to have.

Lack of sense aside, this is still a rather big deal, ill-fated from the beginning or not.  This is being billed as a Handheld Gaming Device, meaning it is stepping directly in line with the 3DS, the Vita and the other "wow, why are you even..." handheld devices that have cropped up.  Much like those, this is going to be running Android, which seems to be on everything that doesn't come from Apple, Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, and also much like those, it doesn't seem to realize that the Android market is apparently undersized compared to iOS despite it being on every mobile thing (and the Ouya, remember that?  No?) that isn't an iDevice, Windows Phone, 3DS or Vita.  Still, perhaps devices like this will change that in the whole run of things, since, well, it's apparently an increasingly bright idea out there.

As for what this Shield is exactly, it's basically a big little controller that also happens to have a Five-inch screen that I am guessing is intended to clamshell on the controller bit itself, but I don't see that being a good idea.  The controller itself is styled after a regular controller, a little more 360 controller than anything (which makes sense, since the Microsoft 'official' PC controller is a 360 one) and has all the usual buttons you might expect, two sticks, plus a handful of strange other buttons (and Start/Select) where the clamshell screen is supposed to fold down at.  Again, perhaps not the greatest idea one could hope to have.  Whether this screen is going to be a touch screen or not is surprisingly up-in-the-air from what I can tell, as it certainly doesn't look like one and isn't in a great place to be one, but at the same time, running Android, you would think it -would- be, right?  Aside from that, it has all the other bells and whistles you could assume, and while it seems based on streaming, I assume it also has storage, but numbers aren't mentioned.

Streaming, as I said, seems to be a big deal with this device, tapping into the Remote Play technology that's been around for a while to allow you to play PC games on this, presumably in much the same way as the PSP/Vita allows as well as the Wii U, though hopefully from a further distance than the Wii U allows.  That much is fairly impressive if it works as flawlessly as one could hope - being able to take advantage of a PC's full power in visuals and such for a PC game on a handheld is something that we're not quite at yet, so even though this is sort of a 'mock' version of it, it's close enough to be a little excited about I think.  Though, I'm not sure just how much streaming will actually hamper what you get on the Shield, so it might be a bit early to consider the possibilities.  Still, mobile Far Cry 3, mobile Assassin's Creed (if you're not into Assassin's Creed 3:  Liberation for some stupid reason that is also dumb) and so on and so forth is a tantalizing prospect, provided the streaming works with -all- PC games, ones that are on Steam, Origin or otherwise, and not just some.

The big issues here are pretty simple:  reliability and price.  Make no mistake about it - this is going to be a powerful handheld, but powerful things, especially electronics and especially especially when related to things of a PC nature have a propensity towards unreliability, and this certainly tips the scales more than that I would say.  Still, maybe that's not so much an issue as the actual form factor of the device seems like it might be built to accommodate power at the expense of comfort.  Price is the sticking point, however as I doubt "being able to play your PC games for 5 hours* on a handheld" is going to translate directly into a rather high price point, though from everything you see here, that's precisely what you would expect.  What I expect, at least, as I just can't come up with a figure in my head that makes this cheap.  It's scheduled to release in the latter half of this year, so I imagine we'll get details before then, but by the time we do, I'm also imagining we'll have completely forgotten about this.  I will, most certainly.