A Golden Ducat
After months of waiting, calling and annoying big box electronic store employees, I finally caught wind of a shipment of Xbox 360s headed for Best Buy out on the west side. Finally, the guy who writes about video games for The Daily Cardinal can experience the cutting edge technology. And let me say this: I have been to the top of the mountain, and it is good.
Microsoft took everything good about the Xbox—namely their Xbox Live service—and expanded it, trimmed the fat, polished it to a high gloss shine and then wrapped the thing in a frickin' super computer. I hooked it up, sat down, hit power and kissed the sky—I was blown away.
The console is an experience unto itself. Before I even tossed in a disc, I was checking my friends list (my gamertag is Red Box\ if you want to play), downloading movie trailers and other videos. I was stockpiling the Xbox Live Arcade section with all those mind numbing, high score-attempting games I've read so much about over the last six months, just so I could be better at them than my friends. I was streaming music off my computer and listening to it as I was playing Geometry Wars and getting totally owned by parallelograms.
But the best part was the game demos. If in the future the fates ever trust me with money again, I am definitely picking up some of the games the good people at Microsoft are letting me try for free. I can't tell you how many hours I logged on the ""Battlefield: Modern Combat"" online demo once it finished downloading.
Eventually, I did get around to playing the games I purchased: ""Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter"" and ""The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion."" Wow. Even though I was playing on a regular television the visuals still managed to floor me. The links of the chains in the dungeons were individually rendered and the physics were spot on. Tree bark looked real as I dove behind trees for cover from terrorists. Leaves swayed, rain fell and bullets flew in all their next-gen glory.
But somewhere into my eighth hour of ""Oblivion,"" something occurred to me. Amidst the fun I was having with my new toy, seeing all there is to see and doing all there is to do, I realized I'm just seeing and doing more polished versions of the old stuff. I've eliminated insurgents before. I've escaped dungeons and explored vast country sides on epic quests before. Sure, I've never done it with such good looking graphics and unparalleled sound design, but I've still done it.
There are definitely some elements of the two titles I bought—sound and visuals aside—that probably couldn't have been done on current gen consoles. But the core gameplay, the thing that is the fundamental reason we play and enjoy games so much, hasn't really changed.
The new crop of machines being designed and manufactured for our virtual entertainment need to take all the horsepower they're packing and channel it into new, creative ways to experience games. I perused all the 360 titles and noticed that developers are concentrating on making their games for this new platform ""real"" looking. The graphics whore in me gets excited, but that part of me also has a short attention span.
Next-gen gaming can't just mean realistic hair follicle rendering. The 360, PS3 and Revolution will have to find a way to expand the playing field and offer something beyond graphics. Some of the best games, historically, were never the best looking ones. The masterpieces utilized contemporary technology in other ways, drawing the gamer deeper into a virtual universe. It's still early, but let's hope the game makers remember this before they hand us another prettier ""Sonic the Hedgehog"" game.
Contact Jason at jmducat@gmail.com or he'll kill your firstborn child. Just you wait and see....\
