M3: My Morning Musings – Apple Watch, NVIDIA Shield, Hotline Miami 2, & More

Yesterday, I spoke in length about Apple’s upcoming Apple Watch. Today, we learned a bit more information. The device will only have 8 GB of storage. 2 GB max of music and 75 MB max of photos will be allowed on the device. For music, that should give users around 200-300 songs and photos around 100. The device just screams First Generation iPhone to me. While it was a great device at the time, it quickly was overtaken by future models of the iPhone and became a hit once more functionality was given to it. I still give the Apple Watch a pass for at least now.

One cool thing Apple Watch will do, but you can also do it on your phone too, is Apple Pay. I spoke yesterday about Apple Pay coming to Coke Machines in the near future. Today, Gamestop announced that they are going to start accepting Apple Pay in their stores, across the US, this month. That means you can quickly and easily check out with your phone or with your Apple Watch.

In real gaming news, Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital are releasing Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number today on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PS Vita, MC, Mac, and Linux. The game releases in Europe tomorrow. Originally designed as an expansion for the original Hotline Miami, the game quickly grew into a bigger title than the original and the decision was made to make it into a full sequel. Looking forward to reviewing this one.

The Evil Within: The Assignment is also available today. This is the first DLC for The Evil Within and is a two-part, story driven experience. The second half of the new story will be in The Consequence that will release later this spring.

Players take on the role of detective Juli Kidman, Sebastian Castellanos’ mysterious partner, in a concurrent story that looks to answer some of the questions surrounding her whereabouts during The Evil Within. Sadly, this is one of the games I missed playing last year. I keep hearing it is one of the best Survival Horror games but I was just too much of a baby to play it. Looks like I need to check it out so I can see what they are doing with the new DLC. The DLC is available in a Season Pass for $19.99 or separately for $9.99.

In sad news, the planned console version of Gone Home has been canceled. This was coming from us via Majesco and their indie Development studio Midnight City. Sadly, the money problems at Majesco didn’t help things here. Not sure why or how Majesco got involved in the project but it is a real shame that this great PC title won’t see the light of day on a console.

Cliffy B showed off his new Project Bluestreak and I couldn’t be any less interested. This is a Free to Play title coming to PC. Yes, Cliffy B, the one who complained about PC users being nothing but pirates while he was at Epic, is releasing a PC title. True, Free to Play games are hard to pirate but why would anyone on the platform support a person who had this attitude towards the PC platform?

Regardless of this, the game is very early and doesn’t look like it is very interesting right now. See for yourself in this video captured from PAX East below:

NVIDIA was on hand at GDC to talk about their future platform: NVIDIA Shield Console. With this device, they hope to sell a streaming package they are calling GRID to offer gamers a way to play games on their TV. Think of it as Netflix for games. The problem with this is there are two services: GRID and GRID+. GRID offers 720p and 30fps quality while GRID+ offers the world’s first 1080p 60fps streaming service. Okay, you say. That doesn’t sound so bad. On the surface, it seems great. But when you look at the details, GRID will require a 5 Mbps–but 15 Mbps is recommended. GRID+ will require 15 Mbps–but 50 Mbps is recommended. I don’t know about you, but there are too many places in North America where you can’t get speeds like that. How can they hope to market this when speeds like this aren’t even possible?