Community Blog

So you've got yourself a beast of a machine, all ready for the latest and greatest games. Or you've got the PS3 or XBox 360 and you're going to play the latest and greatest games. Pity then you're a dupe suckered in by a superficial industry who thinks that games are all about the graphics all the while forgetting the one thing that gaming is all about... playing games.

While the graphics are being pushed the actual game itself is being left behind. Gone are the days where the story was the game, or the emphasis was on playability. With all the computing power we havetoday, why are we still confined to limited playing fields and limited interaction with the environment.

How come we can't have a game where you can climb into any vehicle, enter any building, talk to any person? Why in a first person shooter can we blow a hole in a door but not a pane of flimsy glass? What if in all these games the story was made up as you went? What if everything could be destroyed?

Is all this non-linear, expansive, destructible game environments impossible to make? Well, no. There's a game called World War II Online which is something just like that. It's so huge in fact that you can fly a plane literally for one day and not see the same terrain twice. It's a virtual representation of the Europe and England and you can enter planes, boats, jeeps, trucks, tanks, or just run around as a person. Why can some independents perform this task with today's hardware and the major game labels can't?

It basically boils down to pushing titles out quickly instead of spending the time to actually make a high class game. Most FPS games today are just rehashed Doom games using the Doom or Quake engines. Yawwwn. Nothing new just yesterday's lunch with tomatoe sauce on it.

Many of the games coming out now are claimed to be the next big thing. The thing that's going to push the limits of your hardware, and so like a shill you purchase said new game and within a short time you complete said new game and you wonder why the hell it was you just forked over $110. The problem is that people fork over the $110 to play the latest games instead of save their money for something that actually does push the limits of the hardware. It's all those idiots that go out and buy Tiger Woods golf or Rugby Whateverthehellyearitis thinking they're getting a new version but in reality getting the same version you paid for last year only with different player names or shirts. The same can be said for MotoGP, WorldSBK, Formula One... Why buy a new version, why not just download an update that includes this stuff because you're certainly not getting anything new. If you stopped buying these titles then they wouldn't make them, they would be forced to come up with something new and breathtaking to... well take your breath away, as well as your hard earned dosh.

But then the machines today aren't really anything that flash anyway. They're still the old gamepads implemented by Nintendo and Sega back in the days of the NES and MasterSystems respectively. But what's funny is that while Microsoft and Sony are playing a techwar with each other, Nintendo is pulling off one of the most major paradigm shifts in gaming since the original PlayStation. What's interesting about this shift is something I'll discuss in my next entry.