The Importance of Being Idle

Day Of The Dead

Yeah, not really sure where today has gone. I started well, did lots of useful things before 10am, and then totally ran out of steam. I've spent the rest of the day listening to music, watching junk TV (I am becoming oddly attached to the show America's Next Top Model - now that's a title eh? Tells you exactly what the show is gonna be about, without ever trying to be imaginative or eye-catching) and doing laps on Forza. Oh yeah and I went for a run too, that was useful (in the sense that it made me fitter, marginally). I finally succumbed to my last piece of Episode III LEGO (Anakin's Jedi Starfighter) which was super fun and happy, I was glad I'd saved it for a dull moment.
My main pre-occupation today though has been the steady trickle of information about the next generation of video game consoles. So far we've seen the presentations from Microsoft and Sony.
The Microsoft hyperbole machine gave us Xbox 360 (stupid name right there, what happened to Xboxes 2-359? Was I unconcious for 1432 years? How careless of me). What struck me most about that launch was the massive preponderance of idiotic marketing speak (it will apparently offer the Zen of gaming) and the almost total lack of those whaddayacallems that these things are designed for... games, thats it. There were no games, or at least no games that made you go "ooooooooo I gotta get me one of them". No, what we were told about was the multimedia capabilities, how it played DVDs and music, how it connected to the web to offer downloadable content, how it offered voice and video messaging, how it was a next-generation media centre. In short they showed us pretty much everything but the games. Now call me fussy if you will, but I don't want or need any of that non-gaming stuff from my console. My DVD player plays DVDs, my stereo plays CDs, my PC connects to the 'net... what I want my console to do is PLAY GAMES. I doubt that Micro$oft will be offering you the option to pay less and have a 360 that just, y'know, plays games. What little software was shown was so disappointingly bland that it totally failed to inspire. So whilst I was left with the feeling that I really wanted a 360, I couldn't for the life of me tell you why. A bit like the DS and PSP then. ;p
Sony on the other hand, dispensed with all the glitz and glamour (so The Killers didn't play at their launch then), and showed us the PlayStation 3, and (*gasp*) its games! Sure the system offers a lot of the media-centre functionality of the 360, but in this case it seems like a nice bonus feature rather than the whole raison d'etre of the machine. Sony talked to us gamer to gamer, they showed us the stats and talked about the architecture of the machine. Then they showed us what it could do. Now I've seen a lot of talk on the various boards I frequent that what they were showing were just renders of what a game might look like. I don't buy that, I think we can tell the difference between renders and in-engine stuff and with launch less than a year away a lot of software should be starting to come together, at least enough to give us some tech-demos. A lot of what was shown looked like in-engine stuff to me, and damned inpressive it was too. Even if it was just pre-rendered, at least they were trying to get us excited as gamers, which is more than Microsoft could be bothered to do, they just wanted to sell us The Vision (which is great in a marketing meeting, but didn't move me in the slightest). Bloody hell I was impressed by Sony, whom I hold responsible for the death of video-gaming as I once knew it. Sony in the gaming arena don't have a track record of impressing me at all, quite the opposite, so the fact that I didn't treat the whole thing with derision is something of a breakthrough for them.
Now all we have to wait for is Nintendo. They're coming last to the next-generation party, and to be honest they're not there for the same reasons at all (Microsoft and Sony both want to get drunk and make-out with a hot chick, Nintendo just wants to dance and have fun). Both Microsoft and Sony want to make games with a higher graphical fidelity than ever before, and that seems to be the sum total of their ambition. Nintendo however don't really think that graphics are the be all and end all of gaming, and are actually concentrating on new ways of interacting with games (just look at the DS, for all that third-party developers don't have a clue what to do with it, it's giving us some potentially very interesting new ways to play games) and new types of gameplay. I don't know what any of that is gonna mean in practical terms, I guess we'll find out later on today. As usual though, I'm in Nintendo's corner, and I'm excited to see what they come up with.

posted by BadMonkey @ 6:36 PM