State Of Play

Its funny but until recently I wouldn't have said that I'm terribly interested in computer games, other than casually, but over the last couple of week I've started to become more compulsive about the whole industry. Generally my day starts by going through my daily list of web comics, of which most of them are game related. Add on to this the hours I spent pouring over Oblivion and now the screen grabs of PS3 games that are coming out, and I've realised that I'm am totally hooked.

Unusually though its not a traditional sense, I'm not a particularly good, or obsessive gamer, but I am totally blown away by the advances that have been made in the last couple of years. The PS2 came out pretty much bang on 6 years ago and the games then looked great, with Gran Turismo leading the pack (and still is to this day). Fast forward those six years and we have the X-Box 360 out and the PS3 expected, and all the games are looking even better, more realistic, with more detail and customisation possibilities, almost to the point that the game play itself is reaching cinematic quality (and not just the pre-rendered FMV sequences). In fact the quality of the game engines have advance so far in half a decade that more and more games are using the Game Engine to display cut scenes, saving masses of space on disk (comparitively) to high quality Full Motion Video.

With the 80s (the hey-day of "classic gaming", who can forget Sonic, Super Mario and the rest) only a mere 2 decades past and the current rate of advancement, I think that the next couple of years are going to blow peoples minds: the budgets for computer game titles are rising at the same as film budgets are falling, computing power is still climbing, and the internet is not far off becoming in the norm instead of the exception (even in a significant number of developing countries). Microsoft have the 360 out and are no doubt looking ahead to their next console revision (a good 6-7 years away again), Sony's PS3 is still tipped to be the hottest development in the industry (either as a winner or a spectacular loser) and with these two players its hard to imagine the industry not getting bigger and better, and the games are going to get more and more realistic, if you can imagine that...