Ode to joy
In Las Vegas, CES yields little for watchers of the new generation, but pays plenty of homage to the current one
In Las Vegas, CES pays plenty of homage to the current generation
Attending Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show has always seemed to require a special sort of madness. After all, who in their right mind spends the first week of January – a time, traditionally, of abstinence, or at least a bit of low-key living, after the excesses of Christmas and the New Year – in a city where the party never stops and the dinner buffets stretch off to the horizon? We would, if it’s all the same to you, much prefer to stay in bed.
Nor has it typically yielded much of great significance to the videogame industry. It is the tech sector’s measuring contest, a place where fantasy becomes a passably prototyped sort of reality, where expensively developed and tenuously marketable solutions go in search of the their respective problems. Each year Ed Zitron, a US PR (and, in a past life, disc editor for PC Zone) goes hunting for the very worst CES has to offer. Among his discoveries this year were a stove that monitors air quality; a toothbrush speaker system; an ‘e-gardener’; countless helmets to aid sleep, mindfulness or brainpower; and ‘the world’s first connected pen’. Right you are.
This year, of course, heralds the arrival of a new console generation, but you wouldn’t necessarily have known it if you were at CES. Sony’s livestreamed press conference featured PlayStation boss Jim Ryan touting sales figures and unveiling PS5’s logo, but little else. AMD’s equivalent event sent newsdesks into a brief frenzy when it seemed to reveal a rear view of Xbox Series X, but the company quickly copped to having used a fan-made render it found online; the console’s array of ports must remain a beguiling, eternally fascinating mystery for now. That aside, pickings were slim. Indeed, the closest thing to Series X to be shown at CES was Razer’s mini-PC, the Tomahawk, which boasts a similar form factor and has a tool-less design that simplifies the upgrade process: slide out an internal drawer, pop your new component into place, and away you go.
Razer is the sort of company that flourishes at CES, because it is prolific and weirdly experimental enough to ensure it stands out from the crowd. This year it showed off a custom racing setup with a 128-inch screen offering a 200-degree view, a hydraulic seat that mimics G-force and terrain and a steering wheel with pedals and manual paddle gearshift. Made by Razer using a mix of its own tech and that of other companies (including Fanatec and Vesaro), it’s not intended for the home market, but instead is aimed at cornering (sorry) the apparently rapidly growing e-racing scene.
The Korean firm was also part of a broader trend at CES this year, which
we suspect at least one marketing exec has suggested we all label Switchification. Leading the charge, if you can call it that, is Alienware’s cheerily ludicrous Project UFO, a portable, and dockable, PC with a 1600x900 screen and detachable controllers. Alienware’s shtick is basing its industrial design somewhere in between ‘70s sci-fi and a ‘90s teenager’s bedroom, and it continues the theme with a system that is not only imposingly large, but that looks even bulkier than it is, with more awkward angles than a red-top’s features desk. The appeal of the concept – a Switch that plays your Steam library – is undeniable. The execution is rather less convincing, though it is, in fairness, to use the timeworn CES caveat, only a prototype.
Elsewhere, Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi was showing off its mobile-gaming mouthful the Blackshark Phone 2 Pro, and specifically what it calls the Portable Gaming Kit – though hats off to the thirdparty seller on Amazon who has listed it as the Switch Kit.
Essentially the gamepad equivalent of an drop-leaf table, it can be pulled apart from either side to reveal a cradle for your phone, with Joy-Con-style removable controllers. Razer’s Kishi, meanwhile, is the latest in its line of phone cradles, the USP this time around being compatibility with both iOS and
Android, and a direct connection to your smartphone’s charging port to minimise latency in a sector where Bluetooth is the accepted standard.
All that aside, the only real link to the new generation of consoles comes, predictably enough, from display manufacturers – though if Samsung’s bezel-less 8K display, or the LG model that rolls down from the ceiling, set your pulse racing then we’d perhaps suggest getting out more (once we’ve asked if you could lend us a few quid until payday, anyway). Series X and PS5 will support, if likely only theoretically at first, 8K resolution, but on PC players tend to favour refresh rates. CES ensured that extreme framerate fans were every bit as well catered for as the pixel-counters: Asus unveiled the first 360Hz display, with backing from a Counter-Strike pro. And that, really, is CES in a nutshell: it is a place where nothing is too extreme, where something being theoretically achievable is evidence enough that it should be made. It is a week-long celebration of robots that bring you toilet paper, of shower heads that double up as Bluetooth speakers; of smart litterboxes, pinball tables with LCD screens in place of traditional mechanical innards, and wearable sub-woofers. And it’s in Las Vegas. We stay at home, in the cold and the dark, if anything relieved that the new generation of consoles has only a tenuous link to this desertbound tech hellscape. Maybe next year.
A place where nothing is too extreme; a weeklong celebration of robots that bring you toilet paper