Forty years ago, the United States put the first human beings on the moon. If you consider all the money, failures, man-hours and material that went into it, you might wonder why we even went through all the trouble. It wasn’t for scientific advancement or because JFK told us to. It was to stick it to the Commies.
Ever since the moon landings, Americans have often used the phrase “If we can put men on the moon, why can’t we …” to complain about something lacking in advancement. It’s not a great argument, I know, but we Americans like to complain; it’s our national pastime.
Speaking of pastimes, video games have always been at the forefront of computer technology. And I’ll wager that more people play video games than watch baseball.
The things you can do within a video game are amazing and endlessly entertaining. Yet, games are still plagued by the same problems after all these years. Every year, graphics and physics become more life-like, game length and size increase, but some niggling little details still manage to sneak into so-called “next-gen” games and piss us off.
As data storage and processing increase, game developers push the limits of what their games can do. If we ran a 4 megabyte Nintendo 64 game on modern hardware, there wouldn’t be any framerate issues or load times. But we always want bigger and better, so games continuously push the limits of what’s possible with hardware to get the most out of it.
We still have games with horrendous load times. A minute or more of loading is an eternity when playing a game. Waiting at a screen for a stupid little bar to fill up is still commonplace in modern games, but no less frustrating. However, some games manage to sneak the loading under gameplay, or do all of it at the start and let the game progress uninterrupted.
Of course, this can’t always be the case. The software architecture is different in almost every game. And there’s the wide range of hardware on which games are run. A PC can be continuously upgraded throughout its lifecycle; consoles are stuck with what the factory gave them.
If load times are inevitable, you’d think that hardware developers could at least handle them gracefully. Unfortunately, the current generation of consoles fails miserably in that regard. Let’s start with the Playstation 3. Every Blu Ray game disc must be partially loaded onto the PS3’s hard drive before it can even be played. The Xbox 360 allows straight up play, but has its own problems.
Depending on the game, the 360 sounds like it’s either making coffee or trying to mow the lawn. When you can hear the machine playing your game over the sounds of the game, you’ve got a problem. It’s not all that surprising when you consider that Microsoft is a software company. But with Sony, you’d expect their system to be the most cutting-edge of all time. Instead, you get a George Foreman grill-looking box that requires hard drive installs, Blu Ray discs and still can’t beat the 360 in terms of graphics.
To be fair, hard drive installs are now possible on the Xbox 360. You need a lot of disk space, but the benefits are tangible. Running games is now whisper quiet and few games actually have reduced load times. The game disc is still needed to verify ownership of the game.
The optional install for the Xbox 360 is a step in the right direction, albeit an expensive one; each game requires three to five GB of storage for complete installation. I had to cough up $150 for a 200 gigabyte hard drive for my Xbox. The fee is exorbitant when you consider how relatively cheap PC hard drives are. On the plus side, I now have more than enough room for videos, demos, pictures and game installs. But why isn’t this standard? Props to Sony for allowing users to upgrade the PS3 with computer hard drives, though. See, I’m not entirely biased.
Nintendo’s primitive hardware is another matter. In an age when all other game systems have High Definition capability (even television broadcast in a few months), the Wii has no HD support and possesses graphics capabilities similar to an original Xbox. If Nintendo sent men to the moon, they’d do it using soda bottles and air pressure. Everyone would want one and it would look cool, but still not the greatest way to fly.
But the Wii sells and it sells big. Consumers who aren’t video game fanatics don’t really care that much about graphics or storage capacity. They want fun. It sounds silly, but waving remotes around in an attempt to out-bowl your friend is a blast. Being able to play with your friends in the same room still has a lot of appeal.
For all their fancy hardware, the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 still face old problems while inventing new ones. Sometimes, I get nostalgic for the days of slapping in a cartridge and not having to worry about the console catching fire. Then I look at gorgeous screenshots of the newest game and forget all about it.
Maybe someday China will put out a successful game console and the U.S. will have to scramble to compete. Maybe then we’ll see some really great hardware and games. Best of all, gaming won’t just be recreation; you’ll be helping Uncle Sam stick it to the Commies.
Brian Diefenbach, a copy editor and columnist for the Western Herald, is a junior majoring in imaging. He can be reached via e-mail at brian.a.diefenbach@wmich.edu. His Xbox Live gamertag is F0RCEFL0W.
About Carman
I was curious to see if you were willing to speak about the Resident Evil 5 demo you alluded to in your last review. I have it and believe it is fairly similar to RE4 with slight graphical improvements. Perhaps the scope of the game is gigantic – that is what teaser screens and demos lead me to hope for. The gameplay is only altered by the addition of a second player to keep alive. In reference to your above article, I believe the PS3 does force you to store small bits of content to your hard drive when you watch a Bluray disc, but you go back and delete it just as you would when you rent a game for a week and beat it. The X-Box 360 would have you purchase additional space and pay for online gaming? No way! I emphatically back up the PS3 in this regard. Graphically, I don’t know if the 360 is still superior, just different. Games such as Killzone 2, Uncharted and other first-party games have it figured out much better than third-party suppliers right now. Hopefully, that will change in the future. Kinda reminds me of the debate over graphical output by the Playstation vs. the N64 – which had more jagged polygons? Ultimately, it didn’t matter if you could afford a Dreamcast. Some want quality games and some want more options on what to purchase. This debate will be axed when smaller producers are squashed by the advertisement needs the likes of EA and others.
When I referred to the RE 5 demo a while back, I didn’t really mention the problems I had with it. Basically, I found the controls frustrating and slow. I realize that every game has a learning curve, but I have this prejudice where if I can’t get a good grasp of the mechanics in a few minutes, I get frustrated and give up. I’m sure RE5 is excellent otherwise.
And like I mentioned in the article, Sony makes great hardware, while Microsoft focuses on software. It’s obvious from their respective consoles. It’s too bad that we can’t get the best of both worlds.