The Problem With Modern Day Consoles

[Stage-It]

What I don't think companies understand is that what makes games "exciting" and "new" is hardware that is a huge step above in terms of gameplay, not graphics.

The thing is, graphics are no longer capable of creating new gameplay environments.  At this point, it has to switch to Virtual Reality via user input.

Yes, I know.  A 1990's buzzword.  You'll see my point in a second.

Let's take a look at the Atari 2600.  In 1978, this thing was bleeding edge.  It could do more than twice what it's competitors could at half the cost.

Atari could have objects on screen than their competitors.  More detail, more color, and better sound as well.  Less gameplay slowdown to boot.

Even when Intellivision came out, it's main processor was too slow to support action titles.  Only the ColocoVision finally bested Atari's gameplay.

Now, fast forward to the NES.  For the first time in human history, players got arcade quality graphics.

Higher resolution graphics meant for cartoon-quality characters, which lead to immense plots, and innovation everywhere.  Later chips in the cartidges such and MMC5 and battery backups expanded the machine to the point where if you wanted to create a game where you beat up thugs in a school, you could draw the school instead of making a yellow background.

It was video gaming's first taste of cinema.

If you're wondering why I'm leaving the Master System out, well, here's why: It's nothing but an NES with twice the processing and audivisual power.  Sure it had 3D glasses...with four games that used them.

Now, fast forward to 1989.  The Sega Genesis has a rather lame launch, but over the next few years it becomes evident as to what it could do.

The Genesis could handle DOZENS of onscreen enemies, store more data on it's carts than the NES, all while offering audiovisual effects that were four times as good.

Games became larger.  Games became faster.  Games had less slowdown.  There was less technical limitation.  More freedom of artistry, more control over the mood, theme, and tone of the game thanks to more processing and audiovisual power.

The SNES offered most of this as well as new playfield innovations, namely Mode 7.  It's CPU however, was dogshit and made action titles nearly impossible.

Now, in 1995, America gets 3D gaming...Namely the Saturn and PlayStation, and then the Nintendo 64 a year later.

The jump to 2D to 3D was like humping your family to stay warm in a cave but switching over to fire.

This is the only time new graphics allowed for totally new gameplay.  SNES and Genesis couldn't create a whole new art medium like the NES did, these bastards could.

Gameplay concepts could now be free-roaming, real life style.  Fuck the main processor - The 16-bit days were over.  You needed 3D horsepower.

You could now walk in fields naked, not walk non a 2D plane naked, although both are equally funny.

For the next generation of machines, only the Dreamcast and the XBox stood out.

Dreamcast was the Revolution in 1999.  The console was years ahead of it's time.  Free online play if you didn't use AOL.  Extreme graphical and CPU horsepower.  A new style of controller that was designed around ergonomics, not button count.

The VMU inside the controller also allowed developers to create a "HUDless Environment," as showcased in the horror survival game Carrier.

The new disc format, GD-ROM, allowed for larger games than previous generation machines.  It also had better load times that all other optical consoles besides the Saturn, which is still unmatched in 2006.

The best part was development.  Cheap.  Free.  Sega threw the fucking devkits at you, they'd give you a certain amount cheap, the rest were like $800 a pop and can be found on eBay for $300 quite often.

This resulted in quite possibly, the most balanced software library ever.  Every genre, even MMORPG, was covered superbly.  In it's 18 months on the market, it had achieved more records from everything to online gaming to pace of development than any console made in the past 30 years.

I'm actually shedding tears thinking this in depth about it.  How much it did, how short it lived.

The XBox was very much like Dreamcast initially but this faded quick.  What was great about the XBox was how it promised to bring PC gaming home, so for $300 you could get a high-end gaming PC with a GeForce3.  It eventually fufilled it's promise - but with far fewer titles than expected, and longer spacing than expected.

Initially I thought the XBox was an amazing concept.  Now everyone could fall in love with Unreal Tournament 2003!  Sadly, that never happened...

So aside from Dreamcast, did the games differ at all with newer consoles?

No.  Why?

There were no changes to how development would work, or how the user interfaced with the machine.

Which of the new machines is doing that?

The Nintendo Wii.

Unlike the Dreamcast, the Wii has very little power compared to it's competitors. 3D Hardware is far more expensive in 2006 than it was in 1998.

But if you look at the sheets, everything the Wii is doing the Dreamcast did in it's own way.  Even online retro gaming was available to Japanese customers, they could play Master System games.

The Dreamcast was destined for success, but it was snuffed by Sony.  Scared of their inferior PlayStation 2 graphics hardware, they freaked and overhyped and flat out lied about it's specs, and what it could do.

The Dreamcast had 8MB of texture memory and supported excellent texture compression algorithms that made the textures look more like those on a 16MB graphics card.  It could also use AGP Texturing to use the 16MB of system RAM as well, although that is significantly slower.

On top of that, you could program it in DirectX or OpenGL.

The PlayStation 2 had 4MB of texture memory, and very poor algorithms.  It was also slower at dynamic lighting than Dreamcast and was a fucking pain in the ass to program.

It could however, push 75 million wireframe polygons - the very spec that killed Dreamcast.  They never said it was wireframe.

The Wii has none of this.  It is virtually guaranteed to succeed.

This basically ends my long rant.

[Zn]

Graphics ARE capable of "creating new gaming environments". You simply need good ideas for a gaming environment. You need to draw, and code. And the hardware doesn't matter, most consoles are general purpose computers with video graphics controllers, you just need to program them. Get a good idea, implement, voila you've got a nice game. Of course companies tried to offer more in terms of hardware, it's innovation, they could have made the programmer's life easier or harder, but you still pretty much get a von Neumann computer with a graphics chip. Of course a lot of developers have pig shit between their ears and put out bad games, but that's not related to the hardware.

[Rizimar]

It's not always because developers don't know how to make a good game. Remember that they're pressed for time when the publishers expect something done by a certain date.

[Boone]

I've never really had an issue with the hardware that a game is run on, but what does annoy me is that the quest to implement 3D in games has turned into a dominating arms race.

When HL2( not picking on it but as an example only ) was released I was told that it was "a revolutionary game that was the next-step".  But the only thing about this game was simply its impressive texturing and polygon count. Theres little else about this game( maybe the scripted cutscenes ) that made it any more revolutionary than older games such Jedi Knight. And it can't really boast about its multiplayer/team modes as they have already been done years before...

And as for DOOM3 and Quake4 - they're just Quake II with higher polycounts and better texturing. Oh, and they have shadows...which we were promised that would give the player an advantage of not being spotted by enemies....which is complete bollocks as the bastards still find you the same way as in lit areas.

I truely believe that the next generation of consoles has arrived slightly too early. It feels like only yesterday that the first XBox was released...though maybe the PS2 is starting to show quite a bit of slow down now - XenoSaga II's intro battle is a good example.

For me, revolutionary means the leap from a NES to a SNES when sprite flicker was irratating or lack of effects such as scaling etc were not possible. Nintendo by giving it two 8-bit chips really did make a console that made quite an impression.  Today, though, Revolutionary appears to mean taking away a harddrive which was one of the great selling points in the first place! And don't even start me on BS such as "oh, but you can still buy an add-on harddrive for it..." as those where famous last words from our pals at Sega!  

But then again, I'm saying all this, and I am only going for a PS3 for the same reason I bought a PS2 - backwards compatibility. I don't really care if the PS3 is capable of hyper-triliner-bizier-mega-curve-textal-humping filtering, as I only care about being able to play my old games and new ones that have improved graphics, sound and zero-loading times.

Actually, that would be a huge leap in gaming - zero-loading times! When will they ever learn that these are what gamers hate the most...building a chip to handle loading would be the best thing ever.

[Boone]

If my post makes any sense - then I sure hope someone can explain it to me sometime...

[Cheapy]

yeah like excessive amounts of bloom and hdr really add shit to gameplay. REALITY CHECK PEOPLE, YOU'RE MAKING GAMES NOT GLITZ DEMOS

[Zn]

Haha. Building a chip to handle loading. Why not build a robot programmer that can handle the loading code? Oh wait I think the live ones aren't extinct yet. They need to know what they're doing as long as they're on the job.

[Rizimar]

Why not build a robot programmer that can handle the loading code?

Then who would make the code to load the robot programmer's software?

[Malchik]

Why not build a robot programmer that can handle the loading code?

Then who would make the code to load the robot programmer's software?

Another Robot. Duh!

[jleeto]

The only way to eliminate load times is by streaming,.. and that puts even more strain on the hardware because it's always loading and running the game world all at the same time.

[billg3]

Now, fast forward to the NES.  For the first time in human history, players got arcade quality graphics.

Not true at all. I would say that about the time the NES came out, arcade game graphics were as good as, if not slightly better than, SNES graphics.

A lot of people forget (or were too young to remember) that for many, many years arcades were the only place to go if you wanted to play something new and see something new. The technology and variety of games blew away anything that consoles could do at the time.

Think about all of the innovations arcade games created. Lightguns, steering wheels, etc. In some ways, consoles are still trying to emulate that experience.

Also, think about how many console games are ports of arcade games. In the 1980s... almost all of them!

[jleeto]

Also, think about how many console games are ports of arcade games. In the 1980s... almost all of them!

  Also, in the late 90's  lots and lots of console games were ports of PC games.

  The playstation and N64 had loads of pc game ports that were never as good as the PC versions.  Such as Warcraft 2,.. the ID FPS games, Duke Nukem 3d,... Descent,  Starcraft,  Sim City 2000, Crusader: No Remorse, Command and Conquer, Civilization 3 (or was it 2?) The Tomb Raider series started on PC first and was ported onto PLaystation.  It wasn't untill the sequel that they started developing the PC and console versions together.  GTA started as a PC game that was ported to Playstation.

  Even the Dreamcast and PS2, in their first year,.. had ports of PC games such as ONI and Half-Life and Omikron: The Nomad Soul, and other stuff.

  I think it was when X-Box entered the market that PC game developers started to develop for console first,.. then port to PC or do duel development for PC and console at the same time,.. which hurts the game design and leads to the dumbing down syndrome.    

  (although the pc version of The Sims2 is FAR superior to the console version in complexity.)

Oh,.. and on that note,.. Microsoft just bought the development studio "Lionhead" home of Peter Milonuex (or whatever the hell his last name is.)
  So we can probebly say goodbye to games like "Black&White" and "The Movies" and say hello to a zillion sequels to "Fable".

   Just wait and soon you'll hear about Microsoft buying EA and then they'll practically own 75% of the videogame developers.

[Bad Sector]

even if they own 99% of game developers, if they release crappy games, their games will still be crappy, MS or not.

Quality doesn't come in hand with quantity.

[Stage-It]

Graphics ARE capable of "creating new gaming environments". You simply need good ideas for a gaming environment. You need to draw, and code. And the hardware doesn't matter, most consoles are general purpose computers with video graphics controllers, you just need to program them. Get a good idea, implement, voila you've got a nice game. Of course companies tried to offer more in terms of hardware, it's innovation, they could have made the programmer's life easier or harder, but you still pretty much get a von Neumann computer with a graphics chip. Of course a lot of developers have pig shit between their ears and put out bad games, but that's not related to the hardware.

It reaches a point where graphics reach the point where they cannot create gameplay.

Sure.  You could make FreeSpace 3.  And it could have 60 fighter dogfights.

But aside from that I'm swamped in terms of examples.

The only way to eliminate load times is by streaming,.. and that puts even more strain on the hardware because it's always loading and running the game world all at the same time.

Not true...You can limit them heavily by using a similar approach to what Sega did with the Saturn.

The problem is, that approach is no longer cheap.

The Saturn had a 32-bit Hitachi SH-1 driving the CD-ROM along with a huge 512K (.5MB) buffer.  The machine had 2MB of upgradeable RAM.

So basically, the drive did not need to be accessed much at all.

But in 2006, slapping a 512MB or 1GB buffer on a drive ain't exactly economical, cheap, or failsafe...

[billg3]

Also, think about how many console games are ports of arcade games. In the 1980s... almost all of them!

  Also, in the late 90's  lots and lots of console games were ports of PC games.

I think the PC kind of took over the arcade games in terms of unlimited game creativity and graphics. I think it all started when 3D acceleration went mainstream somewhere in the 90's. At that point, PC graphics were better than most arcade game graphics.

Also, you can have all sorts of crazy game devices hooked up to your PC.