 Oh, right. So yeah, so that all makes sense on the rundown then Chris. Yes, looks great to me. Awesome. Good. Scott, do you have any questions? Well, I've got no questions. Not one. Not one question. Not nary a question. A question. Not do I have. Could you allow me that so I can make sure that I could. But did you pick up aloe at Chris? I did once when I had a really bad sunburn. What are we talking about? Google messaging app, which will do nothing for your sunburn. No. All right. Well, let's get this show on the road then. Here we go. Quality content thrives through the support of those who benefit from its creation. If you gain value from the Daily Tech News show, consider joining others like me who provide support. Learn how to help at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today as he does most Wednesdays. Mr. Scott Johnson is back in the house. How are you doing, Scott? I'm good. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to be. I'm thrilled to be Thomas. Is that what you said? Yeah, I don't want to listen. I don't want to be like your mom and be the only person that refers to you as Thomas. But it just came out. I don't know why. Even she doesn't really. But that's fine. I don't mind. We have a guest. I'm very excited to have along Chris Kohler from Wired, author of Power Up, how Japanese video games gave the world an extra life. Here, particularly to talk about what happened at the Tokyo Game Show over the past several days. Chris, welcome back or welcome to the show, I guess. This is the first time we've had you on. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to talk about Tokyo Game Show. Me too, actually. And I missed the Tokyo Game Show, but I went to Japan and Korea like it's been two weeks ago now. So I was in Akihabara kind of wandering around. That was just there. My timing was off. Maybe your timing was really good. Or about the Akihabara shopping before everybody else came in and took all the video games. Yeah, exactly. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Also, Scott Blizzard announced it's phasing out the name BattleNet in favor of just calling things Blizzard right after Chris Metson retires. Yeah, the coincidence? I don't know. Actually, I got an email on the Instance email account today saying a big conspiracy about how they think that the reason Chris left is because they were changing the name of BattleNet. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's why I quit my job. Absolutely. Why? I refuse to change BattleNet. You've seen the last of me. Yeah. Can't possibly because he has more money than God. Right. It can't possibly just any of us would do in that situation. Absolutely. It couldn't possibly be the reasons he gave us. But yeah, it is kind of interesting in the sense that it is a name that we're all used to saying. It was pretty historic in terms of what it was when it was launched. And kind of with them, though, that it doesn't really matter what you call it now. So make it what you want to make it. All right. Here are some more top stories. Google released its new messaging app, Al-O-A-L-L-O for iOS and Android. It includes the Google Assistant, which can help you, you know, do things like find restaurants, get information about your trips, the kind of smart assistant stuff that Siri and Alexa and all of those do. End to end encryption is available in the app, but it's not on by default. You have to use the incognito mode for each of your conversations. Every time you start a conversation, you've got to start it in incognito if you want it to be end to end encrypted. Also, Google changed one of its privacy features. When they announced Al-O back at I-O, they said that Al-O conversations would be not logged or stored, that they wouldn't be end to end encrypted so they can analyze them for data to help Google Assistant, but they would not store your messages. They have changed that. They had decided that they will, in fact, store your messages by default unless you go in and delete them from your history. That still doesn't apply to incognito. That's still end to end encrypted. The Verge reports Google made the change to improve Google Assistant's smart replies feature. That's the one that generates suggested responses for you, like, thank you. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, Tom and I had a little experience earlier with this. We went a little back and forth. As you can see there at home, if you're watching the video, I've got precisely two contacts. I have Tom Merritt and I have Google Assistant. Those are my two friends. They're both working out just great. I actually am pretty impressed with some of what I saw. I'd like the idea that I could just type to you the word pizza. It was smart enough to know that maybe I want to order some. I hit that and boom, I was given locations, directions, order online, that sort of stuff. Very sort of Google results, but also very chat interface-y. You're able to see those two. You did the same thing with Movie Times and LA. I could see how this could be helpful in-line conversations when you're trying to get something done like, where are we going to meet up or do we need to make reservations or some other substantive work that usually takes you out of the app to do something else. Outside of that, as the chat app itself, like the actual interaction between you and I or anyone else, I don't know, man. I'm not blown away. It's okay. I hate to say this because I usually think Apple stock stuff is never really that great, but the new iMessage stuff kind of blows this one away in terms of those features. It of course doesn't feature any of these smart abilities outside of maybe a date or a time and then letting you calendar that sort of thing. But it's not the funnest app. Let's put it that way. But the AI and the machine learning has some potential there. Yeah. So all you have to do if you want to set up a movie is make sure that both you and all the people who you want to set up the movie with are on Google Allo. And it will integrate with text messaging, not as seamlessly as iMessage or even Hangouts used to. It sends a note to the person you're SMSing with saying, this is being sent from a Google Allo message account. You can get your Google Allo by downloading it from here, which is a little bit pluggy. And Chris, not everybody has it. Doesn't sound like you have gotten on the Allo train yet. I have not yet gotten onto the Allo train. This is almost the first time hearing about the actual details. If I type in, where do I hide a body? Will it bring up like a map to the nearest desert or something like that? Because ultimately that would be really relevant to my mind. That is an important question that I will ask right now. Where do I hide a body? Doing real journalism here. Yeah. You got to make sure you started as a make sure it's an incognito message just in case. Yeah. And then make sure it's anti encrypted. It responds with a San Francisco Chronicle article called one thing not to ask Siri where to hide a body. Whoops. We're in it deep now. Not terribly helpful. And also showing shade at Siri. If you were using Google Allo to find out more about Siri, I suppose that was helpful. Yeah. You know, it's funny is this is one of the few times where an app came out and I was more optimistic about it before I started using it. Usually I'm fairly skeptical based on things I hear. And then I start using it and I find things I'm like, well, actually this works better. This I was very like, okay, yeah, it can integrate with SMS. It integrates a lot clunkier than I expected. It has little AI. The AI in there is okay. I'm not going to slag on it, but it's not any better than what I'm used to experiencing from Amazon or Apple. So it's not blowing me out of the water. I'm not sure that whereas before I thought, well, this is a really good way to get people to use a messaging app. I'm not sure that's true anymore. Yeah. And if you're using it, if you're using it just for, hey, I need to find some stuff or do some stuff, I would argue Google already has better apps out there that are with voice, for example, I've got to type all this in. And I got to make sure those words are right. And if I don't give it all the proper rights, I'm not going to get the data I want anyway. And some of the rights are asking for, for access to various pieces of data are pretty deep. So I don't know, man. I feel like they would have been a little bit better off adding these kinds of features to an existing product rather than launching a whole new one. Let's give it some days and let's see how it goes. But yeah. No. Gouchin in our chat room says you must say the obligatory it will get better with use because it's an AI. Yeah. Or they'll drop it one way or the other. Right. Also on the news, Facebook will live stream the US presidential debates in cooperation with ABC and Twitter. We'll do the same in partnership with Bloomberg and, of course, YouTube. Tom's wife works for YouTube. They'll have coverage from Bloomberg, PBS, the Washington Post, and Telomundo as well as streams from YouTube, live users. But NBC is partnering with Alt Space R to stream the debates in virtual reality. That's like, that's right. VR is going to be hosted by Al Roker's avatar from the virtual democracy Plaza. NBC will also stream Q&A's analysis and comedy shows and more leading up to the election night coverage. By the way, that's Alt Space VR, not Alt Space R. Watching. Can I ask a question? Yeah. When you're watching the presidential debate in VR, how can you tell if you're getting motion sickness or just regular sickness? Just political sickness? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a fair question. It is going to muddy the waters on that scientific endeavor. Yeah. Very well might. If you have an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive, or even a Samsung Gear VR, you'll be able to get the Alt Space VR app, which I've seen on at least my HTC I've seen. 2D versions of the stream are going to be at altvr.com slash NBC news covered starts Wednesday night. I can tell you this as a regular web comic artist, which is one of the things I do. This story gave me a really great idea today and you'll see that come to life later. But Tom, I don't know if I'm ready for being able to write up close to these people that have driven me nuts for so long over the last year and a half. But at the same time, I'm very curious how it's going to feel and I wonder how much of that they're going to let me get close up to. In other words, are they going to let me teleport around to different spots the way you do with typical 360 video? Is it just one camera or two cameras? I guess they're multi lens cameras, but are these just in set spots and I'm only going to have one unchangeable view? And then I can just kind of turn around and see the other because they're building it as a viewing party. So I imagine you'll be in a room with other avatars and how does that room integrate with the 360 video? Is it like you say? Is it multiple perspectives, et cetera? I think really the underlying story to this is less about the VR that's kind of, that's a good headline grabber for NBC. And it is interesting to see people starting to push this, this technology out there a little now that there's folks willing to consume it and see what works and what doesn't. But you can watch the presidential debates on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You don't need to have any kind of television service to do this. And it's part of Twitter's, with the NFL last week premiering on Twitter, it's part of Twitter's move to becoming a real live event destination. And of course, Facebook Live wants to be seen as that as well. Yeah. I'm mostly interested in just VR as a streaming platform and its infancy is a little scary in that we still have issues like bandwidth and latency and things that are going to affect this. So if something goes wrong at some point in this feed, what happens to me as a user wearing the headset? Will I get motion sick because we're going to be stuttering all over the place? Or are we going to have a pretty good buffer into that thing? Are we going to be delayed more than other streams are? Like I have a lot of just kind of technical questions about that and it'll be fun to see how they do that. But if this ends up just being a room and it's me and a bunch of, you know, low poly count people standing around in a room watching a scene of this thing, I will probably take the headset off and watch it on YouTube. It'll be a bunch of me's from me. Al Roker, me telling me what to do. All right. Chris, do you, do you, I mean, will you, if you were to watch, let's, let's phrase it this way. If you were to watch the presidential debate, would you watch it just on regular TV like always or would you be willing to try one of these ways? No, I feel like I would watch it on regular television if only because it's something that I would probably drift in and out of. You know what I mean? Like in VR at this point, you can't really like have something on in the background while you're doing other things and decide to pay attention to it or stop. It's really like, it's really, you're signing up for three hours of, of, of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump yelling at each other. And, and like that's what you're exclusively doing. So I don't actually think that I would do it in, in VR. But maybe Twitter in the background tab, that now that you put it that way, it makes me actually want to use Facebook or Twitter more rather than have it up on the TV. Cause then I could just have it off in the background and pop over if I need to. Right. Right. Or let me play a VR game where this can be just a little PNP down in the corners. I'm playing, you know, I'm saving the universe and then look, hearing about how my own is crashing down. I think we're going to want a little bit more of that out of our VR. In fact, I mean, we could even talk about this later on because, you know, Sony did show off something for PlayStation VR where it would create a virtualized version of your smartphone within VR. So you can come home and if you just want to sit and look at your phone and read social media, you can do that, but you can put on the VR helmet and suddenly be on the beach. But then you still have your, your smartphone there. Which is, which is kind of weird and, and struck me as like something out of Wally. But at the same time it was like, oh, okay, that's, that's convenient because you're, you're closing off this sort of like crappy apartment around you and transporting yourself to a, a calmer place, but you're not cutting yourself off from essentially the real world while you're doing that. Which could be a big selling point in places like New York and Tokyo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well if NBC is smart, they will have avatars for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson sitting in the front row of the virtual. I wondered how they were going to sneak them in and now I think we know. The Financial Times reports Apple approached automaker McLaren to discuss an acquisition or strategic investment. McLaren is best known for Formula One racing, of course. Also makes road cars. They made the P1 hybrid, so they've made electric cars. Also supplies parts to car makers and racing teams. Now McLaren emailed a statement to the Verge that said, we can confirm that McLaren is not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment. So at least McLaren PR flatly denying this, which made me say, okay, not a story anymore, but the Verge pointed out in an interesting article that the acquisition might still make sense. McLaren has expertise in building drive trains and vehicle control systems. They have experience with that supply chain, those supplier OEM relationships that are very difficult for someone to break into. Also works with carbon composite, aluminum carbon fiber, and McLaren applied technologies, works with companies to provide R&D and technology. And they talk about the general design gestalt of McLaren with the white floors in their factories just fitting in with Apple culture. So yes, McLaren saying there's no conversations, but let's lean back and say she. Yeah, well they say that there's no, they're not in discussion with Apple in respect of any potential investment. That doesn't necessarily rule out acquisition. Yeah, they're going to talk tomorrow, but there's no talks. We can parse it, that's for sure. Sure, but outside of that, it makes sense to me, they're kind of the series of car makers for them and that's, you know, Apple looked at the whole voice controlled sort of assistant world and said, what do we do? We're going to make our own? Well, why don't we buy the thing that works so far? And they did. And then they built on it and they've made it better in some minds. This could be the same thing. It's like saying, well, look, we don't, why go through all the trouble of building this groundwork when somebody's already there, they don't have more cash than anyone. Let's just buy them, go from there. It already sort of fits within, like you said, their culture, their way of thinking what they might do with cars. What would be interesting to see is if they, if they did this, would they stay in the business of formula one racing? Or would that go away? And would like if Apple acquired McLaren, yeah, I mean, how do you not, how do you get rid of the main thing that a company like that is known for? And Beats kept headphones, right? That's what leads to doubts on this story is that, is that is such a great Chris? What's your confidence level, Chris, about Apple even getting into the car space? Oh, I feel like it's going to at some point. I feel like it's going to on a long enough timeline, simply because I am convinced at the idea that self-driving cars are a thing that we're going to look back. When I'm 80 years old, I'm going to be telling stories about, they used to let humans drive cars. Can you believe it? That's crazy, grandpa. And if that's a space that's going to happen, then it would appear to me that maybe Apple would want to be in that as well. But then again, everybody thought Apple was going to release a television. But now it almost seems like that Apple is going to cause the television to simply become obsolete, right? Yeah, to skip right past it, exactly. Right, right. I mean, the same thing with video games. Oh, when is Apple going to release Apple TV that plays games? And it did. And it had no impact, probably because instead of getting into the console business and destroying it, Apple actually is sort of obviating the need for that console business via the smartphones and the tablet game ecosystems that it already has. But then again, we need to find a different way of moving human bodies from place to place. If Apple leapfrogs the car, then it will simply introduce the teleporter. Yeah, no, I like that. Just like, forget it. No, we're going to disrupt teleportation. We've moved on. First, we're not buying McLaren. And you're really, in that case, you're really going to want to wait for the teleporter 7 plus versus the teleporter 7, because that's going to have some bad bugs. But they removed the headphone jack on that one. It's a key port. It's going to be bad when Apple is finally like, you know, we now have the courage. We're going to teleport your entire body, except for your appendix. Because you don't need it anymore. Because you don't need it anymore. You don't need to design it out. Actually, that sounds like not a bad idea. Along with the limited release of community section on the channel, YouTube has started a program called YouTube Heroes. I won't confuse anyone looking for Heroes of the Storm players on YouTube. Anyway, people who help moderate comments and videos will earn points. They're kind of gamifying things. Like one point for accurately identifying a video that doesn't comply with your standards or 10 points for the best answer to a help question. As you earn points, you rise through five levels where you receive additional moderation tools. And at level five, the ability to test new YouTube features before they roll out to the general public. So round the horns. Who thinks that this will have a discernible effect on the cesspool of YouTube comments? Not really. No. Well, we should get 100 points for leaving a racist YouTube comment, which I think is just a terrible idea. Here's the thing, what will happen, Tom. And I think we all maybe know this in our hearts. But when these sorts of things happen, they come from a good place. They come from all the best intentions. But the side that we're trying to combat just ramps it up and we'll figure out ways around it, on top of it, and under it. And so I suspect that we will end up with a little bit of a worse problem, maybe at least at the beginning. There's no way this magically cleans up the cesspool. Yeah, I agree. T2-T2 in our chat room says dead in three months. Maybe more abundant at best in three months. It just doesn't offer enough interest to really have the critical mass that it would need to have an effect. I don't think. We rolled out a security update to its Model S sedan after security researchers at 10 cent in China demonstrated remote access to the car. The hack could access the brakes on a moving Model S, open the trunk, and activate the windshield wipers. It did require the car to have a browser active and be connected to a compromised Wi-Fi hotspot. Tesla sent out over-the-air security patch within 10 days of the exploit being disclosed to them, so you shouldn't be vulnerable to it now. Tesla also released version 8 of Autopilot Tuesday night, which includes a major change to how object detection works. Radar will help camera sensors detect objects rather than just relying on the camera sensors, and this new system might have avoided the crash that killed Josh Brown on May 7th. If you had read this article to me 10 years ago and said that this will be for a car company, despite the fact that you're speaking about it as if it's a version of Word or something, I would have laughed at you, but I just want to point out where we're at in 2016. Yeah, that we've got over-the-air updates happening to software versions of a car somebody's driving. It's actually really cool and kind of insane, so I'm glad to see them responding quickly. 10 days is pretty quick to have a fix for, I think. I don't know what the standard for that should be, but it feels... Yeah, from somebody alerting you zero day, right? It's not too bad. Yeah, it's not bad. Chris, what do you think about the idea of your car getting updated over-the-air? I just try to be excited about these things and not consider the potential disaster of the car version of waking up in the morning in a conference in your computer is like, hey, we're upgrading you to Windows 8, so just wait around for another five hours or so. Yeah, always dismissing the patch update when you get in the car and then realizing your windshield wipers aren't under your control anymore? Right, right, exactly. Probably should have updated at some point, yeah. In the world's continuing pursuit to catch reality up to the movie Back to the Future 2, the least good one of the three. The Cubs will win the World Series this year and Nike will come out. Nike rather will come out with self-lacing shoes. That's right. Sure to be the first of those that Tom may attempt as a Cardinals fan to jinx the Cubs. But anyway, the self-lacing shoes thing is 100% real. Nike Hyper Adapt 1.0 will be available at select U.S. retail locations by appointment beginning in November. That's on the 28th. More details on price and how to get an appointment will arrive in the next few weeks. Battery life is claimed to be two weeks. It comes with magnetic chargers and charges fully in three hours. I feel like I need to explain that, yes, I did write that for Scott because the best way for a Cardinals fan to approach the end of the season is to declare the Cubs have no chance of not winning the World Series. Of course they will. I keep seeing you put it on Twitter and I keep thinking, how many people know what he's talking about? But, Nike self-lacing shoes. Now, here's the thing. I'm a little upset at these, Scott, because they don't lace like they did back to the future, too. They're just kind of straps that sense where your foot is and tighten the shoe around it. Which is cool. You don't really need laces. They're doing laces just as a kind of a giving. I agree. And this is how this stuff usually goes. So Captain Kirk wants us to have a communicator with a little flip-up plastic protector lid. And that idea didn't last very long and now we all have these super-exposed phones. Some of us have them in cases with flaps. But for the most part, the good idea is in fiction end up being tailored down to something else that makes more practical sense. And it absolutely is more practical to have these straps tightened than it does to have these autonomous tendril-like shoe laces reanimate themselves and tie them in a knot in the way that they would if it was a human hand doing it. And they also adjust as you run. I mean, they are meant for athletes. They did a lot of design work to make sure that they didn't get in the way of somebody who wants to use these in running, in jogging, and they can loosen up as well as tighten. Chris, would you buy a pair of these? I own a pair of Nike shoes that I got at Payless the other day. It's probably about as close as I'm going to get at this point. They are on the cover of, I believe on the cover of the latest issue of Wired where I work. Oh, with your Payless shoes? Somehow I... Yes. No, my Payless shoes, obviously. I am a fashion icon. Congratulations on that. I was just going to say, this sounds like the kind of thing that would show up on the cover of Wired, and I can't believe you just... Oh, it is. Wired have the inside story about this. Yeah. Yep. Well, thanks to all those who participate in our subreddits. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right. Let's get to talking about the Tokyo Game Show. Picking up right where you were mentioning earlier, VR was center stage and sounded like. Yeah, for sure. Yep. I mean, PlayStation VR, of course, is coming out very, very soon. It's coming out in early October, worldwide. So, of course, Sony... I mean, not all of Sony's booth, but a great proportion of Sony's booth and an adjunct booth that they had in a different hall were just filled with PlayStation VR kiosks, lots and lots of games that are getting very close to finish. But, of course, Vive was there. HTC was there showing stuff off. And there were just any number of other companies showing off new and crazy things with VR. And there were over... I mean, Tokyo Game Show is not really a huge show in terms of number of titles, but there were over 100 VR games on the show floor. And did you feel like it was primarily a Sony pushed sort of thing? Like, they were the front and center on VR, or did you feel like it was sort of an industry-wide excitement, or is it mainly Sony with all the energy right now by getting their product up? Well, I mean, certainly for the major Japanese companies, it is Sony that's really on the bleeding edge of the whole thing. I mean, they are really going to be releasing what could be with PlayStation VR like the most mass-market VR system yet. And, of course, they've lined it up with all kinds of well-known video game franchises versus sort of like no-name tech demos and things like that. But again, like, you know, HTC was there, other companies were there with fairly substantial boots and showing things off. So it's not just Sony. Did you walk away going, oh, man, that's the one VR game slash experience I must have after all this dust settles this fall or whenever it comes out? Did anything jump out at you like that? A few things did. I mean, I think the... I feel like the most compelling PlayStation VR launch title, ironically, because it was not originally a VR game, is going to be Rez Infinite based on the great, you know, classic Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 game, Rez. So that has the original game, but you can also play it in VR, which essentially is just like playing the original game except where you can kind of turn your head around and look everywhere. And typically, things that weren't in VR before being put into VR is a bad idea, but Rez just really works perfectly always. It's an on-rails game. It always accelerates the exact same speed. It just works in VR. Then they've actually, which I played for the first time, brand new level. It's called Area X, which is very much designed for VR and lets you kind of move around. If you know Rez in the games very much on Rails, this one sort of lets you float around and fly around freely in 3D space while still feeling very much like Rez. I think everybody who came away from that was like, oh, this is going to be great. Did that impress you or did it make you feel like, hey, this isn't Rez the way I used to do it. You're supposed to be on Rails. Did that feel like a disconnected thing to you or a good thing? I think that it is a good thing because I think they wanted to try to move beyond... They could have made another Rez level, but I think they wanted to try now that we have VR, let's try doing something that is sort of VR first. The thing is, it's just very easy to move yourself around in Rez in the Area X VR experience because you just go where you're looking. You just look where you want to go and your character starts moving in that direction. It takes away the issue of, if you were trying to do this just with a controller, you'd have to move your character around with the joystick, but then how do you kind of manipulate in 3 different axes would have been a lot more difficult. I do want to stress, by the way, if you don't have PlayStation VR, Rez, Infinite, everything, all the content is playable outside of VR as well. I actually played it also on a big, ridiculous $8,000, I didn't even know 4K television because it's going to support PlayStation Pro and you'll be able to play, if you want to play Rez, this standard definition game, now if you want to play it literally in 4K you can do that and of course it looks more beautiful than ever. Was there a lot of 4K stuff on display yet? Just to touch, when I went to Sony's PlayStation Press Conference they had a couple of 4K TVs outside running hands-off demos, one of which was Final Fantasy 15. So you can get a sense of what that's going to look like in 4K. For me, it's not something that makes me want to run out my life savings on a 4K television, like I'm okay, but it's certainly it's interesting to see what's going to come down the line once you see it get cheaper. And I assume PlayStation 4 Pro rather was on display everywhere as well. Were most of the VR experiences hooked up to PlayStation Pros or do we know? No, they were running on standard PlayStation's. I think they want to give people the experience of well this is what it's going to be like on the PlayStation 4 that you already own. Or in the case of Japan, you don't already own because they really haven't sold very many PlayStation 4. So I think they're hoping that VR is going to kick that up a notch as well. Speaking of games that everybody's owned before, if anyone who has been to or knows about Akihabara and that whole area, the retro gaming collection craze is kind of on fire and has been for a couple of years now. Is that affecting the games business in Japan in other positive ways other than the interest is always exciting and fun, but is it impacting the industry itself or some of the manufacturers getting more interested in uprising some of their old games and bringing classic titles to light and that sort of thing? We are seeing that for sure. I think we're seeing this renewed interest in older games and that is causing people to look at Nintendo has always had virtual console where you could download old games on its game platforms. But now we're seeing even more obscure old games come back as PlayStation 4 titles. There's a Sega Saturn game called Battle Godega which is this really expensive shooter. The only way to play it was to buy the original Sega Saturn disc. It was hundreds of dollars. In part because of the rising prices these classic games are becoming very expensive collector's items when people see that much money getting thrown around it makes publishers go, oh, we own this? We should get some of this money. That's going to come out on PlayStation 4 in a revised edition. We are definitely seeing people look at their back catalogs and saying if our game is selling for $500 maybe we should actually re-release it now. There's something going on. That makes me think are we seeing less new experiences at TGS on consoles and more mobile more clearly the VR space is all about consoles in this case. But are you seeing less of the, oh here's the 20 AAA Japanese titles coming out to consoles this year and here are the two or three weird things. It sounds like you're seeing a lot more small stuff, weird stuff, mobile stuff than you are traditional console titles. I mean Tokyo Game Show always used to be filled with small and weird stuff but it's still full of small and weird stuff but they're attracting even more of that now. They've got a big indie games area and I think it's very inexpensive if you've got a game that they like. It's very inexpensive to be able to go there and show your game off. There are a lot of mobile games so one of the things people don't really know about the mobile game booths at Tokyo Game Show is that often the game is already out. People already have it on their phones. People are going to the booth already play the game but they're giving you some sort of an experience. So like for the romance games that are very popular with women you can go and meet like an actor who like portrays one of the characters in the game or something along those lines it's like this very expensive user acquisition tactic. There's going to be hundreds of thousands but like tens of thousands of people at Tokyo Game Show and they're going to come by and see these booths and maybe they're going to download your mobile game and maybe they're going to pay you and that's what a lot of the booths are going towards. The major publishers are still there but they maybe only have one or two games in their booth. Maybe they have like one game playable in their booth. The number of top tier console titles has shrunk significantly and everybody's kind of just they're banking on like this one hit or that one hit and hoping that it does really well which is dangerous. Unlike E3 Tokyo Game Show is open to the public right? It is open to the public on the last two days. So this is what would, if E3 ever did this I bet you they'd have to add days so that people could get their business done and then also the public could come in. A lot of people in the games industry really complain about Gamescom because Gamescom is like four or five days I want to say like it's a really long show and sometimes people have to work the whole thing you know and but Tokyo Game Show is definitely that way where the first two days are business days and then the second two days are public days so it's a longer show than E3. Well thank you Chris for letting us know your insights on this of course you've written up some great articles over at Wired. I was very happy to see one of your articles that Space Channel 5 is popping its head. Oh man oh my goodness that was so the crazy part is of course Space Channel 5 was originally Dreamcast game that was developed by the same team that did REZ. So weirdly enough here we're at Tokyo Game Show and like two of the biggest VR things everybody wants to do are Space Channel 5 and REZ and Space Channel 5 the demo there wasn't much to the demo it was really just sort of like watching the level one of Space Channel 5 kind of go on all around you but it was beautiful just like being in a Dreamcast game there was a little bit of interactivity but the important thing is the developers very excited about wanting to do more Space Channel 5 in VR and so you know fingers crossed that it does well. Palmer Lucky actually went and played it. It was at the HTC booth and he went down and he played it and he was very happy. He was a very happy man there is video of Palmer doing this embedded on your story too which is great. There certainly is yes I just so happen to be there. He's got a vibe on when he's doing it because that's amazing. He's got a vibe on while he's doing it. I mean he did a whole tour of the whole show and went to Sony's booth and played the games out in public. I don't think he really you know cares. He plays all the VR everything. See what the competition's up to sure. He was very excitedly talking to the developer of Space Channel 5 afterwards and he's got his fingers crossed it all spins up and becomes a real thing and not a sort of a trade demo event but it was very exciting to see that. One last question and I know you've got an article of this up on Wired. Did you get to play Last Guardian and if you did are we ever going to get it and how was it? Oh I did get to play the Last Guardian. I think it's great. I'm very nervous of course because I love eco. I love Shadow of the Colossus and this is this third game in that trilogy that we've had for a really long time and I think coming out of my Tokyo Game Show demo I understand why it was in development hell for such a long time because like I can see the fundamental design problem of having to like there's a giant monster and you have to use that monster to solve puzzles but like we want the monster to feel like a real monster like a real companion for you which means that maybe he's not always going to do the thing exactly like you want him to but it's a puzzle and if you know as a player you kind of expect the game is going to always set you up for success if you're doing the right thing in the puzzle so I kind of came out of that thinking like okay I'm really going to take my time I'm not going to get frustrated I'm going to just enjoy this because who knows who knows like when we're going to get another game like this again so I'm not going to try to rush through it or get mad and just try to take it as it is. Like playing a dog. That's essentially the idea and like I mean imagine like how difficult this must have been to get it right and I think that the most recent delay kind of got pushed back to December is really they are they did fundamentally kind of change the controls because if you play the eco or Shadow of the Colossus you know to hold on to a ledge you've got to be holding a button constantly but with this build they actually it was in the E3 build where you had to hold the R1 button all the time to grip on the things but with this this build they're going to get that out and I think they're trying to make the game more friendly to players at even if it comes at a cost of it doesn't well it doesn't really feel like Shadow of the Colossus anymore I think they're very they really want this to resonate with people and they don't want people to get frustrated and not play it so it's interesting there's some people who came out of that demo feeling worse than I did you know what I mean like feeling like I don't know maybe a little bit concerned but I mean I think it's definitely going to make this December date coming out what I've seen so far is is beautiful there's just been pure moments of joy that I've had while playing it so I don't know fingers crossed we've only seen this little teeny tiny slice of it so far so I really want to see the whole thing real quickly let's get to our pick of the day I want to point you to our own column from professional driver Sikhani Wright weekly column on dailytechnewshow.com discussing ride sharing from the driver's perspective and this week he calls me out and my love of ways arguing and I have to admit fairly persuasively why for a pro driver Google Maps is much better and Google loves this debate because they own both of these apps but I put in my my lame defense of my love of ways in a comment there but go check it out dailytechnewshow.com looking for look for your professional driver by Sikhani Wright and send your picks to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com one quick message Matt wrote into remind us of Google's progressive web apps which let your home on Android users get an app experience in the browser you can even save web apps to your home screen have an offline experience devs can do applications and more Matt says I think this is the future for smartphone app developers and I predict that in a few years smartphone users will be spending most of their time in these kind of web apps bold prediction that will just be treating web apps like regular apps and you won't have app stores anymore yeah remember who told us that before I believe it was his name and yeah you won't need well that was because they didn't launch with the app store I always felt like that was just kind of covering up oh for sure like they were absolutely covering up but I also think there was a spark of yeah that kind of makes sense and you and I have always been proponents of like hey if it works good on the web why you even need it I mean financial times for years has had a web app that is on par with any regular app that you can get works great so thank you Chris Kohler for joining us today remind folks where they can find your work and about the revision to your book so just hit up wired.com and go look for the culture section where all my stories about video games appear and yeah so I have this old book that I wrote in 2004 is my first book called power up how Japanese video games gave the world an extra life inside stories the creation of super mario final fantasy eco actually was another one and it's actually going to be back in print finally first time in like a decade via dover publications and it's coming out on October 19th. I am a fan of the dover publications to be honest when I worked in a bookstore those were always I would I would hoard those and try to nice off it as possible so please yeah please hoard these by as many copies as you as you want. We've linked to it in the show notes so go check it out or just look for power up how Japanese video games gave the world an extra life thank you again Chris it was great talking to you today. Yeah thanks for having me. Scott anything to let folks know about before we let you go? Just watch for that my dumb VR joke on the comic later today myextralife.com or I'll be posting it on twitter at Scott Johnson and always good to be here sir. I am looking forward to that I love your comics so I can't wait to see what it is dailytechnewshow.com support will tell you all the ways you can support the show we don't take advertising we're supported entirely by our listeners thank you for making that possible and we're rejiggering our rewards on the patreon so if you are a patron go check that out there's a posting up there today where you can see what we're doing and you can become a patron at patreon.com Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can catch us live if you didn't know Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. eastern time at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv for video and you can visit our website anytime you want dailytechnewshow.com Tomorrow with Justin Robert Young talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network Get More at frogpants.com Diamond Club hope you have enjoyed this program That was a great show Thank you Chris Awesome, thanks Chris Big thanks to your jetlag for making it sound like you don't have any you sound great You know it's funny because now that I have a wife and child it's like I can't really you know like I used to kind of come home hours and hours on end and now it's like oh okay wait we're getting up okay alright yeah okay I'm up I'm up Having just experienced that I can tell you that's no mean trick so I extra appreciate it Thank you so much We'll see the first chance every now and again I think I'm okay and then it's like alright well I'm totally over jet lag now and then I'll just go to sleep I guess I'm not over yeah it took me about five days five six days to feel back to normal I think so we always just hang out on the stream while I publish the show and chat but that's totally informal if you need to go go and thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us Okay I can stick around a little bit Show titles Yeah what should we call this So the viewers over at showbot.tv This is where the people watch the live stream or listen to the live stream put in their suggestions Aloe, Mr. NSA from Beatmaster the Top followed by Google can I see your Aloe there's also motion sickness or regular sickness you say google I say Aloe LosingBattle.net Aloe Fish Aloe Fish intelligence Get it Aloe Fish Political Sickness Presidential Debates in VR you won't believe it's real That's pretty funny Tesla S. Foyt Clever Clever, these are very clever Virtual and Reality, Tokyo Drift Well that's today VR is huge I was going to describe the bottom Okay Self-laced shoot fits Nah that's funny Blame the potabate nausea on the VR Dude where's my car update You know I had a joke That's pretty good Back in the 90s we used to joke When cars got this technology technologically sophisticated There's going to be a time where you're going to complain your car won't boot You won't say it won't start you'll just say it won't boot My car won't boot I called a self-driving car We won't even say self-driving car I called a car and it crashed and that won't mean it hit anything It'll mean the computer inside So where are the title suggestions again Showbot.tv Showbot.tv S-H-O-W-B-O-T There we go You can click on the line you like and it'll count a vote for you Booting your car That's another one, booting your car Like you know people you think put those parking boots that major maids do Or meaning what we would call the trunk The what? The boot No, no, no, when they put the I know but I'm saying also There's also another interpretation But we're in America Tom Fine Rod You're fine I'm just a jerk That used to be a No Doubt song and then they changed the title I'm kind of liking motion sickness or regular sickness It's all sickness really Dude where's my car updates getting some votes now too though Those are both good I still got half of the file to level eight before I have to pick a title You know what they're going to do They'll text Herbie like the love bug but they'll make it a self-driving you know intelligent car That sounds funny Of course they'll remove some of the magic because you know the original Herbie's just a self-driving car now He's not magical anymore Or maybe it's a feud where Herbie meets a self-driving car Oh interesting It has to show why he's better I want to do that, oh what if Herbie Herbie was an Uber driver He just goes around and picks it That's how he makes money Herbie the love bug Suddenly that's not as cute for kids What do they call them Don't worry about it My parents took me to see all those movies I think they liked them more than I did The love bug was the original one right or no Well he was always called that It might not be the title of the first movie Because that was the one where the guy saw him in the showroom window and the car followed him home and it was kind of weird but kind of cool and then they had the kind of weird racial stereotype because they had to run that race at the end through San Francisco and they had to team up with like a local Chinese or Chinese American from Chinatown who ran a business because that's the only one he could get to sponsor him and he stopped by one of his gas stations every time the gallon number spins around you I only have the Herbie rides again Viewmaster disc I don't have the original so I can't check Roger your memory of this is outstanding I'm blown away Oh it's just because of that picture it's like really a gov every time he hits another gallon on the gas pump it's like hey I guess there's worse things like Charlie Chan that wasn't so bad it was just the actor it's just bad acting the one guy is the white dude that's in yellow face but the entire rest of his family is like standard Asian actors they seem kind of odd there's so much of that what are we settling on for the title then so the top one is motion sickness or regular sickness TV's Egon I'm good with that any other thoughts let's do it you know I've always wondered I always figured VR would take off like gangbusters in Japan just due to the limited space constraints in their living space that would be the perfect solution to create kind of an expansive very rich world without necessarily filling up your room with like a 80 inch 4K TV it still could don't think people understand the potential there until they try it for themselves plus as much as they've really improved things I don't know that we're there yet for the full fidelity in things that we want right well and it is weird things like the VR that lets you be on the beach while you check your phone that sound goofy and end up catching on I'm not saying it will but it is stuff like that that will often be the killer app for something because people are like oh yeah but that's fine I mean I absolutely assume that if that is available at launch for PSVR when my wife first tries it out that that will be one of the things she loves to do I think there's a business opportunity here to set up a chain of VR stores where like you know people going like they do with what they used to do with PC Bangs and Korea where you just set up like a VR station people can well there's already a few people trying that out with gaming ideas and like interior amusement parks have you heard of those yes it kind of cool I guess and then like have sleeping quarters so they'll never have to leave and supply them with food and stuff it'll be like a monthly gym membership or something monthly VR membership my VR membership's up you laugh now but it's going to happen I laugh because I think you're probably close to being someone's going to come up with the hoity-toity name with the holodeck for their chain of stores and then there's going to be a big kind of trademark suit with paramount or CBS over the term holodeck holodeck yeah oh and I guarantee you someone's going to try to recreate one of those episodes where Patrick Captain Picard goes in as like the private dick you know that one like two episodes I'm going to recreate that in every boring detail yeah what was that character's name uh oh well here's him talking here listen to this don't listen to him Gloria he's lying that's him the worst gangster accent ever uh can't remember I think I just let you intentionally did that to make it kind of ham it up a little bit maybe well I think I mean yeah I mean clearly he was trying to be a mobster guy but oof sir Patrick's the man but not that day um but it was some detective name Tom Dickson Hill thank you Tenzak oh wait Krug got it first actually John Luke Picard fictional character was a 20th century detective I always like how they pick things that are like 20th century for the holodeck it's never like oh let's let's see what things were like in the 21st century sometimes they did like ramen hood and they did um you know all the stuff they had costumes for costumes for it's really that simple like you could totally okay what do we have what do we have wardrobe we can get these guys yeah what do I have yeah what's on the paramount lot that we can use private eye church coat did you go to super potato when you're in Tokyo Chris I did go to super potato yeah there's there's basically like six stores in Akihabara that have most of the retro games so you know you go to each one and Chris the others I only knew super potato and it was impressive I spent a lot of time hanging out there but they my theory is that when super potato opened up at that time um nobody in Akihabara ever let you take pictures uh or take video or or anything in their stores if they saw you trying to take pictures of stuff they'd shut you down immediately which is very typical for Japan super potato from day one was just like yeah you want to you want to film entire episodes of your of your video show in our store you know unannounced yeah go for it it became very famous because everybody outside Japan could see what the what the stores look like yeah all the everything yeah that that's my theory anyway that makes perfect sense they're just so popular well they were so laid back when I was in there like unlike many other stores uh they you know when they were closing up they weren't even telling you like okay it's we're closing up now they just sort of started turning things off and you're like okay yeah yeah but yeah they are very it is very much like they want everybody to come in there and have fun yeah I played a little dig other stores it's like all business yeah there were fewer stores with no pictures uh that than I expected but we definitely especially outside of Tokyo they would be like oh no picture I'm like great well then I won't tell anyone about your I think I think that super potato had yeah well I mean there you know I think with Japanese stores there was always these uh privacy concerns everyone will take pictures of their stores because they they were worried about like the competition coming in and taking pictures of like prices or things like that and and it's sort of been this sort of vestigial thing that's been hanging on this idea that you can't take pictures in stores but I think that super potato may have changed some of that and I think the stores now that are opening up and doing well in Akihabara are very are much more inviting and the reason behind it I mean oh the the logic behind it always seemed kind of specious to me because the original reason was because people were taking pictures on their phone of books and they wouldn't buy the book like you know like it was like a magazine or something but I mean you would have to spend a lot of time framing a shot to get something that's legible especially for phones back in the early 2000s right right right it's like yeah maybe I guess well or it makes sense to me a little bit in souvenir shops where the the only reason you're going to buy a green or sticker is because of how it looks or what it says sure and so you know if you can just take a photo then there's definitely no reason to buy it anymore so I still think it's ridiculous I get the motivation in that case I guess Tom yes sir I need to hop off with Terpster but I'm going to call you are you around after this or do you have other stuff yeah I'm recording let's talk about Star Wars in two and a half hours well I'm almost I'm almost done here too there should be plenty of time so yeah just don't call me around six mountain from six to seven mountain I'll probably be away but otherwise I'll be available okay because I won't this thing will only take about half an hour I'll call you and we'll go over that logo thing alright thanks everybody for watching thanks Chris grab me alright talk to you soon