Continued from page 1
Somewhat unfortunately
rise of
‘Casual Gamer’ will probably lead to more simplistic games being released. While personally I would love to see depth of story and characters, there are a significant number of players out there who want to pick up a game for twenty minutes or so, have a bit of fun, and then put it down until another time. These gamers are generally less interested in
latest greatest technology and more interested in a ‘fast food’ kind of entertainment that satisfies
moment, despite
lack of quality or
lasting effects. Hopefully
two game types can co-exist peacefully although recently it has been seen that some developers are cutting down on some of
planned depth of a title in order to accommodate
more casual gamer.
As technology pushes forwards boundaries are slowly being broken down between systems. We saw
Bleemcast a few years back enabling
running of Playstation games on
Dreamcast, and
PC is able to run almost anything given
right emulation software. Consoles are able to emulate other consoles and new consoles are being announced that promise
ability to play PC games. The Xbox 2 is reported to have a model in planning that comes in a PC case and with
ability to run both PC software and Xbox software. Macs can emulate Windows software and vice-versa. We’ll probably start seeing less of a distinction between consoles and PCs as
price of technology continues to drop and consoles continue to become more and more powerful and able to compete with
more expensive computers. Ideally we’ll see a single platform come into prominence so that everything can be run without purchasing a copious number of different machines, although that does have a downside in that it can establish a monopoly for one particular company.
The technology price drop and increase in power has also lead to more powerful hand-held machines than before. Real games, not just simple toys are now available for
portable market. The advent of PDAs and mobile phones with
ability to play games raises awareness of portable gaming and new competitors are starting to get in on
field that was once primarily dominated by Nintendo’s GameBoy. There is a new product,
gp32, that can run many different emulators and hence, many different system’s games (including some PC games).
I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen but these are just a few ideas that I’ve had recently. Hopefully
games industry will continue to strive towards new heights with new and interesting game play, stories, characters and ideas. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in
next few years.

Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net