About every 5 years something very special takes place, at least for us tech-savvy people. If the annual E3 expo is the gamers’ Mecca, then this must be the return of the (insert word of choice) mothership. For a couple of months the whole game industry goes completely off the hook. Game journalists lose all sense of journalism and fanboys once again rear their ugly heads, the arrival of the newborns is nearing.
Needless to say, we are the moment in the middle of this circus and everybody are now waiting for Nintendo to also reveal their next-gen console. With all the big words from both Sony and Microsoft about how their new consoles will bring video games to the next level I can’t help to think back when the first Playstation hit the market over 10 years ago. Though some got a taste of 32/64 bit gaming with the Panasonic 3DO and the Atari Jaguar (not that it tasted very good) as early as 1993, most people first experienced next-gen gaming on the Playstation or Sega Saturn a few years later. What still strikes me is how incredible huge that leap was, from playing F-Zero on the SNES to Wipeout on the Playstation, or from Street Fighter to Tekken. Not that I have anything bad to say about F-Zero or Street Fighter but the arrival of the Sony Playstation also was the arrival of a new era in gaming. Some of you were probably a bit too young back then to remember, but for the ones of us who had been playing games for a while it was almost a bit too much. I have been asking myself many times if we will ever experience a similar leap again with the arrival of a new generation of consoles. If you look at the PS2 compared to the PS1, it really doesn’t offer anything new. Sure it can produce much nicer and cleaner graphics but all the games basically plays and offer the exact same gaming experience as you can get on the PS1. GT3 really is just GT2 with cleaner graphics and same goes for Tekken 4, you’d be surprised how well Tekken 3 plays. If you still have your copy you should treat yourself to a few rounds and see what I mean. On the other hand you also be surprised how incredible bad the first Resident Evil game looks if you place it next to the GameCube remake. I could swear the Resident Evil I played back in 1996 looked a lot better, but I guess it only shows that our memory is not a very reliable source of information. If you are amongst those who’d choose the blue pill if Morpheus ever offered you one, do not do this experiment. But to avoid drifting too far into the rabbit hole I better return to the point of this article which is that no matter how much better the 128 bit games looked over the 32 bit pioneers, they basically play very much the same.
Now that we have got a glimpse of what the PS3 has to offer, do we have any reason to believe that games will take its next big step? Personally I think so, and not because of the improved graphics but rather because of the things we don’t see, but which will enhance the gaming experience. In today’s games the gaming worlds looks pretty but they are not very believable. To make a gaming environment believable it’s not enough to make it look real but it must also react realistically to the players actions. To pull off great graphics and advanced game physics at the same time takes an enormous amount of computing power which today’s generation of game consoles clearly lacks. Instead of calculating reactions by characters or the environment in real-time, a series of pre-animated sequences are often used to fake the feeling of a true dynamic environment. Creating a game with a truly believable gaming world is an enormous task, so don’t expect every PS3 game to pull this off. Many PS3 games will just be prettier looking PS2 games, but the developers now finally have the computing power available to them to create believable game worlds if they want to, assuming they have the financial resources needed. It’s important to understand that not every game studio will be able to produce games on the same technical level as say Killzone 2, and maybe more importantly a game doesn’t have to be technically advanced to be a great game.
We all have good reason to be excited about the PS3 and the games that are in development for it, I just hope the future of gaming also has room for games that focuses mainly on fun factor rather than being the next technological wonder. This matter is not in the hands of the developers or Ken Kutaragi, this one is really up to us who play games. Each time we buy a PS2 game we also place a vote for what type of games we would like to see on the PS3. So in 2012 when the only games available for the PS4 are Grand Theft Auto 8 and Gran Turismo 7 you might just wish you had picked up that copy of Mr. Mosquito.
