This week, the subject of video games has come up repeatedly, especially with the European release of the Nintendo Wii on the horizon.
I have to say, I'm impressed with the Wii. The console is cheap, and looks like fun. The games for the box seem to be great for bringing people together rather than encouraging solitude, and the interface looks wonderful. Why didn't someone think to synchronise accelerometer with spatial triangulation of a Bluetooth controller resembling a nunchuk? Err, maybe you shouldn't answer that.
What does this mean? You hold the controller in both hands and can use it logically to control the game. A perfect example of this much more natural interface can be found in the sports package - check out some videos on YouTube for good examples of this. It's quite impressive. Plus the console itself is tiny, and very reasonably priced! Beyond that, though, I'm not interested. I would be if I had a family, thought, I probably would be.
So then there's the Microsoft Xbox 360, which is again a fancy PC, with lots of games involving blowing things up. At least, the games heavily advertised for it are all about running around shooting things or blowing things up. Boring. I'm sure they have some decent games, but it's not worth it. I'm not interested.
Moving right along, there's also the Sony PlayStation 3, which despite being a huge, excessively black shiny box (silver and so-on is coming later). It's an very impressive piece of technology. It's pricey, but considering the cell processor, I wouldn't be surprised if an up-coming university project includes linking a hundred of these things together running Linux in a beowulf cluster in the near future!
The PS3 is amazing, and its interface is visually sublime. The games released are somewhere between the Xbox and the Wii, so there's a lot of titles I think I'd really enjoy. I get the feeling Sony are using it to primarily promote Blu-ray at the moment, with their secondary concern being their PlayStation product chain. This disappoints me, and so does the price. I realise console manufacturers always sell the hardware for cheaper than it actually costs to make, but this is still too much to keep me interested. Maybe later.
I'm still attracted to old school games. Arcade games are great - simple and addictive. It's like two-minute noodles. Nothing's impressive about them, and yet they're still great and addictive. Okay, bad analogy, since I don't know many games containing MSG, but you see my point.
To be honest, I miss the days of these simple arcade games. More-so, though, I miss the days of the old adventure games. Sierra Online (since defunct, as far as I'm concerned) used to make fantastic games such as Space Quest and Police Quest. Once upon a time LucasArts made some hilarious and amazing games that have since become classics, such as Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and even the old Monkey Island franchise.
What happened to those days? Has the market really dried up for this genre? I need to relegate myself to take-offs of original Sierra games (such as Peasant's Quest, based on a Strongbad email and a crappy game).
Maybe I have such a soft spot for these more simplistic games because of my childhood. I remember back in the 1980's my family would often head to the Queen Victoria Market, where my sister and I would normally wind up with another cheap LCD game (the kind that was so generic, you could find them with many different brands printed on them - one of these models can be seen in the movie The Fifth Element as the remote control for Zorg's fancy guns). Those things were ace! My sister had a few non-cheapo ones too, such as Cat & Mice. A great flash version of one of these games with a good dose of humour is Pig on Head.
Ahh, memories.
