Gadgetory

good Thursday morning it's april six in time for episode 206 of the 359 podcast and we got Alfred hang and Bridget Carey in the studio today good morning everybody how will be doing wait oh no you go for high we're doing great we got some big Scorpio news today hank scorpio nice to meet you God if finally packets if only it was the same Scorpio but no this is about Microsoft's us project Scorpio where it's gonna be there next gaming console they're calling the best console ever where ever heard of that one before um but and then to lead up with that I've we've also got my story about disabled gamers what they're doing to you know just just be able to work around their their their limits and I actually talked with a gamer named brawley legs who plays street fighter four and five with his face and he's he'll kick my ass he's very good at it i I've seen him play super smash brothers and which I play competitively and he can't defend him because you need the left and right buttons to block and he can't do that with his like just playing on us and he's still like I've seen him play he's incredible at it so yeah yeah and then we've got you got your ass handed to you I didn't play him but like I'm saying like if I did like I probably would uh and then we our last story that we're talking about today is um the selfie drone because we all need new ways to take photos of ourselves you know we don't ya know we don't I want a new filter there's no new filter I can't wait for the filter drone alright hang out everybody we're gonna go ahead and get into the recording of the podcast for about four minutes and then we'll be back and we'll join you in the chat and have a lovely old time to end our podcasting work week I me here we go in three two welcome to the 359 where we talk about the top tech news of the day and all the other crap we feel like I'm Alfred Inge and I'm Bridget Carey so microsoft revealed the specs for project scorpio its latest project which is supposed to be pretty much an xbox one on steroids just listing off some of its stats it's supposed to have a one terabyte hard drive of the 12 gigabyte RAM Microsoft is bragging about as the the most powerful game console ever made which most gaming companies will brag about it and it should be very capable of playing a 4k games so Bridget I know you've looked into this what do you think and what potential does does this have for the next generation of games well they kind of spat out a bunch of specs that just kind of make it glaze over unless you really care about specs ever heard of a teraflop before because I got six of them you know and you go okay thanks that that's good but when you really compared to how it looks with the xbox one and the ps4 pro it's definitely more powerful and faster than the xbox one and X the ps4 pro is just a close second behind and what you're looking at is something that in the grand scheme of things if you didn't already know it's not gonna play a new set of games it's not a new library here this is the same games that work on the Xbox one but if these game makers are already are making games that work on high-end pcs what Microsoft is doing is kind of making it so that those same games can look their best also on an xbox just whatever they're gonna call Scorpio um and and so is it gonna do much for a gaming except that if you really want to see something in its amazing 4k quality and and it has enough processing speed to be able to render that in a way that you'll notice well it depends if you got a lot of great accessories at home to go with it like a great TV and what not well speaking of games i wrote a story today about disabled gamers and how they're finding solutions to play by working around their disabilities i spoke specifically might begin who he's better known as Broly legs and he plays with his face using his tongue inside his cheeks to press buttons on an xbox 360 controller very similar is the one that you and I would use it this me there's no extra like add on to the controller knowing he's using his his mouth nope it's the same controller you and I would use first came he actually ever beat with Super Mario Brothers 3 and that's actually how we figured out how how he's gonna like to start using these controllers Wow and I mean I'm thinking to myself like it's already hard enough for me to figure out kames but like I was looking at the picture that you had on your story about about how he's doing it and and and I'm just impressed but yeah he's doing this with kind of the help of a charity organization called AbleGamers they kind of create controller solutions for people that aren't able to play that many games I spoke with a someone who visited who had cerebral palsy and her right arm so she needed to be able to play only for the left hand and it was really hard for her to play on keyboards because you know she had to stretch like over her thumb and she works on a keyboard all day so like it's very strained by the end of the day and when I was there today shoulder all these like different controller options like there instead of using a mouse to like look around in a first person shooter she kind of had like a foot board where you can I put your foot on it and you rotate it around like to look around in the game I think inventing their own accessories to make it work or companies really like now actually helping people by by making add-ons well sometimes they're inventing them but they're working with these companies they worked with a group called evil controllers to make a like an accessport kind of thing and then but sometimes they're also buying them like the foot pedal was shown off at CES and our last story our own Josh Goldman wrote a story on a guide on how to step up your selfie game which is pretty much using selfie drones instead of selfie sticks these go start at like three hundred fifty dollars and can go up to a thousand dollars now for that once i could buy like a hundred selfie sticks i really don't know like 106 you never know yeah run out of them alright thanks for listening and check us out and see net for more all right welcome back uh I want to hear more about the you're able gaming experience it's a you know we only ever have enough time for the podcast it just kind of glazed over mm-hmm a lot of the details and elements but I want to hear more about this experience you had last weekend you travel too deep where'd you go to sledge Enya Virginia oh yeah it was really cool that so they have that an accessibility lab-based out of Virginia it's about West Virginia sorry it's about an hour and 30 minutes outside of DC but they're you know they have like all these shelves of like different kinds of controllers that like people can come and test out they have like a desk that like automatically lifts up and down so if you're in a wheelchair can like come down or like you're a little kid or um and then they have all these like different kinds of controllers there's one that like they used to use a 3d printer to like make the stick for it so like they can make any kind of any shape that would like fit like your needs there's one where you can play like entirely just so I like use it like breathing in a tube and like pressing your tongue down or your chin down we saw a little bit of that video yeah yeah it was really cool and then when Christie Moyer the girl who was getting uh you know trying out all these different controllers showed up she she came with her boyfriend not boyfriend sorry her husband Benjamin moyer who they talked about their relationship and how that but it do we like playing video games a lot but she like was really upset that she couldn't play video games anymore with him which was like a thing that's like really important part of their relationship yeah do you think they're gonna start actually actively developing forward I mean have they started working on things for Scorpio well I guess accessibility yes well Microsoft is actually one of the best companies when it comes to like creating accessibilities for in their games at GDC they were they hosted a panel about game accessibility there and how they added these new features in where you could basically allow gamers to remap their buttons on pretty much any game that they wanted as long as the developers like implemented that feature and but it wasn't like basically the developers didn't have to like create that feature themselves like Microsoft is saying here you go developers we're giving you this tool for all Xbox games and you can just put it in if you want and remapping is like really important that's the only way that Mike become can play you know because he has to remap like several keys to the front faces because you can use the side and that was actually something that was originally made for arcade sticks that's why I like fighting games like allowed you to remap steps because sure yeah I want to play with a controller and you had an arcade stick you could plug that in and as like I want punch to be here that it was made for a cage six most its ergonomics yeah well I mean are we at a point where like I mean the whole issue I see obviously is that a company's not going to make this definitely see its profitable and you want to see companies do more do to make where are we at maybe and that realm or is it right now still a charity design kind of situation well the thing is is that they actually found that these games making these changes actually ends up making it better for everybody in general some of them like it's not even that much so there's a in overwatch that you only need like eight keys for that and people like that was that wasn't like a that's like really helpful for accessibility features where like you don't need to have like a controller of like a bunch of buttons where you could just have it all on like the face buns on most people play on keyboard anyway but it's easier like remap it based off that but in uncharted 4 with the multiplayer on that originally what they had for like multiplayer was like oh okay you're on Team Red and you're on Team Green right but then there were complaints from colorblind players we're basically like that can't tell the difference between my teammates so all they did was change it like Team Red Team Blue and that just like made it better for everybody and then um so these are changes that like you don't think about these things yes don't like these are just changes that just make it a better game in general um there was another one and uncharted 4 we're in uncharted like two or three one of the gamers complained that like there was a part around like the ending where like yet button mash something but then there was a player who had like cerebral palsy who like couldn't do that because he couldn't move his hands that quickly so they just made a feature where it's like if you hold down the button like it'll count as the same as I and you can just turn that feature on if you'd like and personally like yeah because there's a lot of rapid response type of moments in games yeah and then in uncharted 4 they introduced a feature where it's like you can play the whole game like all the controllers just on one like one hand like single controller mode and like a third of Uncharted forest players actually use that feature even though like only one percent of the population like actually needs to only use one so if you get become a power player you you essentially kind of can use these two yeah also pretty much like Madden 17 they introduced a whole bunch of new features for different camera angles and stuff just like if somebody can't like see the full swing or anything like that it just ends up making a bit a much better game somebody referred to it as a electronic curb cut in the same way that like curb cuts on the sidewalk we're like originally made for people in wheelchairs when it goes down yeah but then like you know everyone who has a skateboard a bicycle a stroller started using it so that's that's the way people look at it another example would be like closed captioning on TV that was originally made for you know people that like can't hear like that are deaf but then you know I just ended up being in every bar or any public place that had television yes one interesting perspective yeah yeah you don't and never would've thought of that be totally right yeah so doing so like all these accessibility features for games are just making better games and things that you know people actually want the controller's think that's a different aspect of it though because if it's just what that is like not a very profitable market where it's a sense of you know sometimes it's kind of tragic where like these companies like end up going out of business or something because it's not exactly profitable and then they're also very expensive because if you're making a custom controller specifically for one person there's like really high cost but the issue I mean that's where you know organizations like AbleGamers and special effects in the UK come in where they you know they come up with these solutions to help disabled gamers like find new ways to play hmm all right well let's go ahead and backtrack into more gaming because talking about selfie drones is a waste of time you may have any questions about the selfie dry no but we do have a lot of kind of surprising ho-hum attitude about the project Scorpio I would thought that there'd be at least more balance between excitement but everyone seems to be kind of cautiously optimistic maybe at best at least until East I'm ho-hum about it too it's just specks like that doesn't tell me anything about the games that I'm gonna play and that's another thing that's kind of consistent across a chads a lot of people share that sentiment you never talking about before the show started where it's like who cares about how much power is under the hood make a better game yeah I mean where do you start with that though that's the that's the way that I look at it like imagine you're like describing a basketball player and all you can do is like tell me like his height he's tall he's like he's really toys to tallest player ever doesn't tell me anything like do not like what is like free throw percentage or anything like that but like hand eye coordination yeah that's the thing it's like tell me about the games like to throw in the counterpoint um Eurogamer you know who the site that had had this exclusive look at it you know we still have no pictures but they said that they saw it perform really well in 4k and had enough you know processing power to kind of render all this great and you're okay it's like saying I saw a player play good you know so you still want to see that demo this was a weird tease to bring someone out and you know someone who is very you know spec oriented eyes who they brought out but it worked because we're here talking about it we are hungry for just some information about it you know so yeah the biggest thing I want to know is is that is this a development name or is that gonna be the final and that's the code name I hope so because that is so pretentious and do she's won't be yo and you scoop you the only good Scorpio there ever was with hank scorpio me before I gotta I gotta break for me here for a second because I just can't ignore that there there is a joke competition going on in our chat room right now and I just want to shout out to a spire link what do you get when you put a vest on an alligator an investigator that was surprisingly easy cuz I didn't get it when I was reading in the chat well you guys are doing the stories in the beginning I'm sitting there reading joke my god no I don't know no I'm not backing idiot I've heard so many of these like jokes uh yeah a lot of people are just kind of generally I just want to play games as elite brian gaming go figure with a name like that Brian are you leaving these comments on your own no I'm not if only I had that much time I mean like yeah you look at you know the Nintendo switch which you know it actually doesn't have better graphics or specs than the ps4 or the xbox one s but at the same time like they're trying they're delivering on like very excellent games you mean differently too yeah which is you know what people are also looking for something what makes you think differently who are the game developers I didn't take advantage of said specs you know a king dave points out that the xbox one currently isn't a 4k gaming console it's upscaling because no games are made in 4k our people actually going to start doing that with Scorpio because it's going to be allegedly easy well the pc games are able to handle that so you see master it easy man but but but you know what i mean you know like take those same games and maybe they'll start to look good on ya but yeah somewhere early on in the comments i am i'm forgetting the name of who contributed this but they said digital foundry pointed out that would the xbox project Scorpio would be the equivalent of like a one-thousand-dollar pc gaming that we owe the equivalent of it yeah well isn't it supposed to be around five hundred dollars though like at least from the first teased I remember reading things that it could be around five hundred dollars again there was no price set but that's some of the early reports so maybe there's different I don't know if it's if I mean anybody who ventures farther outside of that $500 window on a launch console is just asking for trouble yes Sony yeah we just just got a PC for gaming it's so much better it always will be it really is I mean you can get a controller for your pc to play on and you can always upgrade it and that's the problem with consoles to do you know you're like stuck so oh yeah it's the best now and then who's that great later we're almost out of time but I like bills sentiment in the chase as these two point O consoles will kill the market why bother with the consoles if we need to upgrade halfway through their lifespan that's the other thing to the upgraded by multiple versions of all of these consoles yes places you for pro xbox one s it's gimme the good one first or make it upgradeable yeah the upgrade cycle has like modular game consoles I mean if you're really into it but then I mean that's what a PC yeah um but yeah the upgrade cycle has gotten so much shorter it feels like phones now we're like you get a new one every year but no but there's no need to do that yeah I know when people stop waiting in line outside the apple store for three weeks and we'll stop you know finally moving beyond that as a society it's just like think about the difference between like the like the weight between like the n64 unlike the Gamecube unlike the game few min the wii and then that's when things you know went downhill whereas i oh now we've got the wii u but like the difference between like well I think when Tendo really faulted on their side they had appropriate windows in between each launch just because the wii u wasn't a great console and they it was an appropriate amount of time you forget how much time really passed between the wii and wii u granted the idea to rename itself kind of was weird but that's another ship refaire they went from xbox 360 xbox one and now yeah xbox one s yeah and I guess the next is xbox Scorpio or something I don't know everybody's a reboot it's like movies just like everything game consoles are just a big series of reboots people talking about possible exclusives what do you think the exclusive games anything Xbox is gonna step up they weren't gonna do it they weren't that's the last i read that like nope it's not gonna be something not even something made just for Scorpio Holy Light Nicholas yeah it is suicide man I think it always change their mind or maybe say hey this version of the game might might have an extra type of thing but I think it's gonna all be the same yep same I mean I mean when plays agents scooping up stuff like a um shoot what did I just see the other day sorry I total breach alert you know what they got the Parappa remaster alright that game is incredible um I mean that that's where it started it has to stay there yeah um but yeah I mean you can probably expect like another halo um maybe in other gears of war I just meant like nothing on Scorpio isn't gonna be on xbox one oh okay that's what i meant like like you're not gonna get something special just for scorpio that you wouldn't get if you didn't have an xbox one yeah alright fair enough it's probably good place to wrap it up for the day anything yeah I'd say so if you liked what you heard check us out on cnet com the 359 podcast is also available on itunes tune in stitcher SoundCloud feedburner google play music exactly dinner made that awful list thanks everybody that's the end of the week we'll see on monday have a good one see you do i need to rework