The boffins in the StickTwiddlers cellar/lab have been hard at work and they’ve finally perfected the Twiddlin’, Time Travellin’ Thingummybob™. With this miraculous device, parts of which look suspiciously like the office equipment we’ve reported as stolen in the last week, we can travel forwards in time to review games and tech which haven’t even been invented yet!

After a brief, Morlock-related problem and a quick trip to see how Die Hard 5 turned out (probably best to wait for the DVD on that one folks) we landed in a game shop sometime in 2014 and picked up the Xbox 720, the PS4 and the Wii U. Having returned safely to 2012 we hooked up these glorious, future devices and got to testing.

Xbox 720:

With a nice slice of bacon simmering on the built in hotplate (yup, that rumour was true), we settled in for a spot of spectacular 720 gaming glory. The graphics were astounding, unsurprisingly. We did ask in the shop about 3D, but we were told that 3D gaming and TV’s had finally died out (knew it), so instead we simply marvelled at the resplendent SDHD (Super-Duper-High-Def) which looked…much like normal HD, to be honest.

Thanks to our technical genius (hitting stuff with a stick until it works) we were able to connect through time to the next gen of Xbox Live. It’s exactly the same as old Live except you pay with real money instead of points and everything costs more. I don’t like it…

We were highly enjoying our dip into the world of 720, right up until the time when the latest incarnation of the “Red Ring Of Death” reared it’s ugly head. We’re calling this one the “Red Ring Of Third Degree Burns, Plastic Shard Lacerations And Blinding”. Dreadful business.

PS4:

One of the first things we did upon arrival in the future was knock over a couple of off-licenses and rob an old woman. Oh, we didn’t want to do it but if we were going to afford the PS4 from new, we knew we would need a lot more currency than we had brought with us.

A snip at a little under one thousand pounds, our shiny new PS4 was sleek, black and mean looking. Kind of like a ninja shark.
Much was made of the marginal difference in power between PS4 and 720, which had led to the Great Fanboy Purge in 2013 (bloody business, but necessary) but we saw little real difference.

PSN (rebranded back to it’s original after the Great Fanboy Purge) is much as it has ever been. Free, which is good, but broken, which is expected of it. Gamers don’t like too much change, right?

Wii U:

Well, what can we say about this little beauty? Imagine playing the Wii, with an iPad as a controller! No, that’s…look, tablet PC gaming combined with…hmm. OK, you’ve got a tablet in your hands, but you move it, see? Yeah, we’re all confused too.

We must say, the graphical capability of the Wii U is impressive. We’re talking incredible photo-realistic graphics! Which are beautifully shown off in Small Cartoony Character Carnival Games 6. *facepalm*

All in all, the consoles of the future are a lot like the consoles of today. They’re a little more powerful, there’s some impressive features, but it’s still going to be down to which one you prefer or are able to afford (lookin’ at you, Sony).

Now, I’ve got some time machine tinkering to do. We’re trying for a long jaunt of about thirteen years, just in time for the next Duke Nukem game.