Rose for Lawson

Chicago gets: Ty Lawson, Danilo Gallinari
Denver gets: Derrick Rose, Doug McDermott, 2015 first round draft pick (best available between Sacramento top 10 protected or pick swap rights with Cleveland, both acquired from Luol Deng trade)

Valid in trade ESPN machine:
http://espn.go.com/nba/tradeMachine?tradeId=ky3pbmk


Why Chicago would do it:

They get a near All-Star caliber starting point guard and makes them clear favorites in the Eastern Conference. This ends the multi-year drama of Rose's health problems and gets them a proven player to help them make a championship run.

Why Denver would do it:

Getting one lottery pick (McDermott) and a second pick likely in the top 20 is a pretty good haul for Lawson. Rose gives them an outside shot at having a super-star on the roster, and even if it is a very small chance Rose's contract is onerous, but it isn't much different than Lawson and Gallo combined.

Destiny first impressions

So I've played some Destiny on PS4 and here's what I think:

GOOD:

• It's like Halo in that the minute-to-minute action is fantastic and absolutely the main draw.
• It's like Rogue Legacy in that it is very difficult but not punishing. Enemies are really tough and hit surprisingly hard. Each encounter, even on normal difficulty, can get you killed. It's edge-of-your-seat gaming at its best. However, in most cases dying has very little effect. At most you have to replay about 5 minutes of content.
• It is one of the best looking video game I've ever played. The graphical improvement compared to the Beta is staggering, maybe that was a PS3 build?
• It's like Mass Effect in that the music is subtle but improves the game tremendously. Whaaaa-whuh-whaaaaaaaaa
• It's like Age of Empires in that managing your resources is actually a fun game: ammo limits are balanced almost perfectly.

BAD:

• It's like Diablo III in that the story is laughably bad, but it doesn't really matter.
• It's like Killzone Shadowfall in that it plays fast an loose with physics (gravity on the moon = gravity on Earth because... it just is).
• It's like Battlefield in that playing more will unlock tweaks to your character, but calling it an RPG is a bit of a stretch.
• It's like original World of Warcraft, in that sometimes the best strategy is to sit and wait for a minute or so while your long cooldowns reset instead of fast-resetting when out of combat

INTERESTING:

• It's like Civilization V or the Sims in that the game as it is originally released is clearly not the final game as it was envisioned/intended; expansions will radically change this game over time, which means that it's designed to rope you back in every six months over a long period of time, rather than grabbing 40 hours right away. The level cap (20), the number of maps (3 planets plus the moon), and the number of classes and class options are obviously blunted numbers. All of those will go up over time to increase content. How good that content is and how much they charge for it will be very interesting to see. I'm hopeful!
• Like the original (loot 1.0) Diablo III, the loot stream isn't well balanced yet. At level 8 out of 20, most of my armor and my primary weapon are all vanilla items with no special perks or powers. I'd say by level 5 or 6, everything should be fancy. Why not?

Note: I haven't played any PvP, this is all based on PvE through level 8.

Building the Melo-drama

The Chicago Bulls would like to get Carmelo Anthony, and they should. Every team should try to get Carmelo. He's one of the best players in the league by any measure, especially as a scorer and rebounder. Because he's been on lousy teams for the past few years, it's easy for many fans to ignore just what a consistently dominant player he has been.

The Bulls also, apparently, have targeted Aaron Afflalo of the Orlando Magic. I'm a bit wary of this. His 18ppg last season looks impressive at first blush, but he was a pure volume scorer and minus defender last year. In fact, last season was the first time in his 7 year career that his PER was above league average, barely making that mark at 16.09. Even more scary, his Real Plus Minus was an atrocious -3.19, good for 75th in the league. For shooting guards.... His one undeniable asset is three point shooting, which he's kept above 40% for most of his career. At 28 years old and on a manageable salary of ~$7.5M per year, I guess you could argue that Thibodeau could turn things around. I'm not at all convinced he's better than Jimmy Butler. In fact, I think they can get a better shooting guard at pick #19 in this draft. Rodney Hood for example.

So here's what I'd like to see, using salary data from HoopsHype.

Truly Next Gen Ideas

As video game consoles shift into yet another gear (and PC hardware revs higher and higher), consumers are right to ask what "next gen" really means this time. It's hard to remember now, but the the previous console era was truly revolutionary: serious online gaming, HD graphics, motion control interaction, and downloadable content/games were all new in the PS3/Xbox360/Wii era. What do we have in store this time? The truth is that nobody knows quite yet, but I'm happy to offer my guesses.

Material Worlds

In the vast majority of games made so far, a wall is just a solid impassable object. It is a fixed barrier with no properties other than its placement, size, shape, and texture. This is already beginning to change. In early PS4 and Xbox One games like Battlefield 4 and Infamous Second Son, some special structures are designed to be destroyed. While this is a step in the right direction, the majority of the structures and objects remain indestructible, from the strongest reinforced concrete to the lowliest shrub.

There is only way to resolve this long-accepted trope: to have true destructible environments. That means that every object in a game needs to be "built" out of simulated materials. By the end of this generation, I expect that video game walls will have studs and drywall and pipes beneath their skin, just like walls IRL. Plant leaves will shred to pieces when shot at and no car will completely shield you from incoming rockets.

Interestingly, there is actually one game built this way already on PS4: Resogun. Every enemy, object, and player character in this 2D revolving shooter is made out of voxels (volumetric/3D pixels). That means when you shoot an enemy ship, it blasts into the hundreds of pieces of which it is constructed. There can be dozens of enemies on screen at once, and the game rarely dips in frame rate; an impressive bit of tech for a seemingly simple game. Of course, each object in this game is made out voxels with similar basic properties, so there's still a long way to go.

A 3D materials-based game engine suitable for an FPS or an open world game would be tremendously difficult and time-consuming to develop, but could pay huge dividends in immersion and graphical fidelity. Most crucially, it would allow for the creation of a physical world which could react properly to being battered by crowbars, shot at with small weapons fire, and blasted away with heavy weapons. It would also eliminate some of gaming's oldest design conventions in interesting ways. I can't wait to see how it plays out.

Procedure

Games have played around with procedural level design for years, particularly in the "dungeon-crawler" genre where the dungeons are often randomly assembled (e.g. the Diablo series). The sacrifice here is that the quality of the level design is highly variable, and usually the levels end up feeling bland or "same-y". The computational power now available to developers, either on-system or in the cloud,  opens up the possibility for much greater variability and success in spontaneous level design. Now a game could be designed to procedurally generate 500 levels using dozens of variables, "playtest" them virtually and select the ones with desired characteristics (most difficult, least amount of available cover, greatest vertical variability, etc.) in a matter of moments.

This will greatly enhance the variety and enjoyability of games using random generation, and most importantly open up this type of design to the types of games which have historically relied upon tedious and costly development. Imagine if an Elder Scrolls game could see that you need one more Daedra heart to smith that badass longsword and spawned a new dungeon, tailored to challenge your avatar's skillset, ending in a boss fight with a demon who drops the heart. Or imagine if every planet in the Mass Effect galaxy map had multiple bases and colonies who could really use the help of a Specter. High level procedural generation can make these things possible, and best of all give each player (and playthrough) unique experiences and stories of their own.

New Voices 

One of the grand promises of gaming is to craft your own unique story within a game world. Almost every game now has "RPG elements" like character customization, classes, leveling up with experience, and item acquisition/unlocking. Generally, games have gotten very good at providing different ways to play, but in therms of storytelling they all constantly fight a losing battle between personalization and quality.

Games like Mass Effect and the Elder Scrolls series are absolute favorites, but are also prime examples of this problem. In Elder Scrolls you have a huge (sometimes petrifying) amount of options in designing your avatar. There are multiple races to choose from, different sizes and shapes and skin colors and hairstyles and scars and ok I should probably just click DONE and start the game already. In my first playthrough of Skyrim, I was a lizardman (Argonian, for the initiated) named Seldon who looked legit OG dragon-born. That level of personalization is awesome, and the game does a pretty good job of reacting to your race and gender. The trade-off? You never speak. Bethesda isn't going to hire the twenty voice actors needed to read all that dialogue for all 10 playable races and both genders. And they shouldn't, because that money is better spent on creating the world environment and writing the script.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Mass Effect games tell an amazing story and give the lead character, Commander Shepherd a strong voice. The trade-off here is that you have exactly one meaningful character customization option: gender. I appreciate that Bioware took the challenge to hire two voice actors to read all that dialogue when most players will only hear the male Commander Shepherd (not my sexism, just a fact; and most Mass Effect aficionados will agree that "FemShep" gives a stronger, more nuanced performance). Also, all the NPC's are forced to call every player "Commander" or "Shepherd" for three straight games, which is much better than "The Champion" of Dragon Age 2, but still not ideal. The game offers story-altering choices, but they don't branch too far from the tree. It's definitely a great "role-playing" game, but the role you play is fairly similar to those played by everyone else.

In order to provide high quality and highly customized story experiences, multiple technological advances are needed. I think the hardware may now in place to be able to create those solutions, so it will be in the hands of game developers to invent software solutions capable of delivering this promise. I think the answer is two-fold: artificial  voice synthesizers and simulated artificial intelligence.

Voice synthesizers have been around for decades, starting with text-to-speech devices designed by Ray Kurzweil and others to aide the visually impaired. Now everyone now has Siri (or something similar) in their pocket. I'm not going to pretend that these programs are going to replace Morgan Freeman anytime soon, but it is reasonable to assume that they will continue to advance, and within the proposed decade-long span of the current console generation they may be just good enough for video game use. If and when high quality synthetic voices become available, a game like Elder Scrolls could finally give a voice to the playable character and allow NPC's to call you by name.

That's the easy(ish) part. If you really want to have a dynamic game with unexpected turns, endlessly branching stories, and personal character interactions, the non-player characters must come alive via a crude form of artificial intelligence. Open-world games of the current era have blasted well beyond any reasonable expectations for the volume of dialogue writing. I can't imagine how long the script for a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 is, if you include every side quest, pedestrian quip, radio station, etc. It's really getting ridiculous, and ridiculously expensive, to make an open-world game and fill it with so many voices. There are always sacrifices, and in the case of the GTA series, it's pretty clear that the money gets spent on presentation and world design and not on gameplay improvements. As such, I find GTAV to be an impressive achievement but ultimately not very enjoyable to actually play.

Combining artificially generated NPC behavior and dialogue with a believable voice synthesizer could free game developers from writing volumes of banal background chatter for the sake of making an open world feel more real.

Summary

There is an over-arching theme to the ideas I've brought up in this article: my dream for truly next-gen gaming is that game creators will set up elaborate worlds with interesting characters that allow the player's actions and decisions drive a unique narrative each time. That and really, really, really high polygon count assault rifles of course.

The Playstation Vita Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame

The following are games I have completed* and can recommend without reservation to any gamer who owns a Playstation Vita:

• Guacamelee! (2013)

• Dragon's Crown (2013)

• PixelJunk Monsters (2013)

• Rayman Origins (2013)

Hall of Very Good

The following are games I have completed* and can recommend, but are not necessarily for everyone.

• Killzone Mercenaries (2013)

• Uncharted (2013)

• LittleBigPlanet (2013)

* I have zero platinum trophies. By "completed", I mean completing the main story or defeating the final boss, or anything else that triggers the rolling of credits.

The Vita Ladder (March 1 2014)

My how times change. The last Vita ladder I posted at the end of September looks almost nothing like my current list; and that's a good thing. Quite a few new games have come out, and the Playstation Plus freebies and sales have really boosted my library.

Here's how my ladder shakes out today:

1. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker: In anticipation of MGS5 Ground Zeroes, I'm going back to this PSP classic available on Vita. I've never played it, and I picked it up during a PS+ sale for $12. The controls are a bit wonky because the PSP didn't have a second analog stick, but the story presentation is rad and the gameplay works quite well. When I'm finished, I'll go for MGS3HD on Vita.
2. Soul Sacrifice was free on PS+ for a short time in November. It is a very unusual action RPG which goes back and forth between dull and interesting, easy and hard, good and evil, fun and frustrating. I can't say it's totally worth the full price ($36), but it's gone on sale I think at least once since. There is a ton of content, though it can be a grind.
3. Spelunky thrilled me for about a week. It's brutally difficult and completely unforgiving. I was having a great time making slow, painful progress... and then the final tunnel man challenge sank in. I'm sure it's not impossible, but the time it would take me to get it done is not worth the effort so I haven't been playing much since.
4. Persona 4 Golden: People who like this game really like this game. After a few hours, I'm not all that hooked. I enjoy it when I play, but I haven't chosen to do so very much.
5. The Walking Dead Season 1 is another beloved game that isn't grabbing me like I thought it might. I'm beginning to think most gamers don't read books, because if this game is supposed to be an example of amazing storytelling, I'm not all that impressed. I'd rather read "The Stand" or something.
6. Stealth Inc. is a clever 2D platformer with a good mix of puzzle and timing challenge.
7. Unit 13 is a shockingly good third person action game. Instead of having a story mode, it simply has individual levels with specific goals. Beating any level is fairly easy, but getting five stars in it's Angry Birds-esque grading scheme is usually a challenge. I come back to this one regularly to knock out another mission or two. Apparently it's coming to PS+ this month, definitely download it!

In defense of Warframe

Consider these two games:

• Game A: Sci-fi third-person RPG/action/shooter hybrid aimed at co-op online play where levels are spread across the planets and moons of our own Solar System.
• Game B:  Sci-fi first-person RPG/action/shooter hybrid aimed at co-op online play where levels are spread across the planets and moons of our own Solar System.

Game A is a fair description of Warframe, a free-to-play game out now on PC and PS4. 

Game B is a fair description of Destiny, probably among the top two or three most anticipated AAA releases of 2014.

This is obviously where the comparisons have to stop. The amount of investment into Destiny is on a totally different level. The production value in level design, art assets, and gameplay mechanics will almost certainly blow Warframe out of the water. But for now, Warframe, has a unique and highly entertaining package to offer.

Gameplay

Guns, melee, and powers. These are your tools available from the outset of Warframe with which you dispose of countless enemies. The guns are fairly standard, but highly customizable. The melee combat is exciting, and deeper than it first appears. The tutorial only highlights standard and power attacks, but you also have defensive capabilities like dodging and blocking, and hugely under-rated jump and sliding attacks which can be used to knock enemies down. The action is very fast paced, and the game is engineered to make you feel like a badass space ninja.

The missions take place on procedurally-generated maps and offer some decent variety, ranging from simple "kill all the things" to trickier mobile defense modes. Each planet or moon has a tree of missions: follow straight up the trunk to unlock the next planet or chase all the branches for extra goodies. Each planet has a theme; for example all the missions on Venus are icy and the enemies are robotic. In my first 4-6 hours of play, all the missions have taken place in same-y looking bases, but the backdrops, color pallets, and enemy types keep it from being totally stale.

The game can be played in solo mode, but it's a slog. It works best with one or more friends (up to 4 players only), and pretty well with randomly grouped players.

RPG Elements

The level-up hook is key in this type of game. The different character classes (unsurprisingly called Warframes) have distinct abilities, weapons, and stats. These obviously level up during play. Weapons (primary, secondary, and melee) all level up as well, and do so more as you use them.

Gaining a level opens up one modification point. Modification cards are gained as loot drops and have a variable number of points associated with them depending on how powerful they are. Mods include things like adding elemental damage, increasing crit chance, faster reloads, things like that. The class-specific powers are also a type of mod card.  Mod cards can be upgraded to improve their effects, which often ups their point requirement.

This sounds complicated, and it is. It's actually not very well explained, and it takes some tinkering to figure out which combinations are allowed. But once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fun. You have a lot of control in how you build out your character, and even though each level only opens up one more point, that one extra point often allows you to swap things out and shoehorn in a different combination you couldn't use before.

The downside of this is that it's best to stick with one weapon, and level it up. Mod cards can be moved around at any time, but switching to a new weapon puts you back at square one in terms of mod card slots. There is an in-game crafting system, which allows you to build weapons and Warframes from various materials. Some of the mats are either late-game or pay only, so it's rare to actually get all the stuff you need to make a new item without paying (more on that later).

Free-to-play issues

All free-to-play games are designed to get money out of your pocket through microtransactions (or ads), and Warframe is no different. Playing for free, you get access to one Warframe (your choice of several basic models), and a small number of weapons. It costs real money to unlock other Warframes and weapons (and cosmetic options). Some items, especially Warframes, are laughably expensive. 

The good news is that if you choose your Warframe carefully (I enjoy my Mag!), you can ignore all the paid stuff and just go shoot things. The game is 100% playable without spending a dime. After playing maybe 4-6 hours and having fun with it, I decided to buy $15 of in-game currency (the entry amount). I've spent ~$5 on materials which, along with mats and credits obtained through normal play, allowed me to build a new Warframe and a new primary weapon, which is a much better deal than paying for the suit outright.

Final thoughts

Warframe is a fun game that doesn't cost any money to get into. There are better games out there, but on PS4 I think it's among the most enjoyable multiplayer games, certainly the best co-op. It serves as a great appetizer to Destiny, and has just enough depth both in-game and with RPG elements to keep the experience interesting.

(*)(*)(*)(*)( )    <----- 4 out of 5 stars