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The Hookup on High-Def Gaming
Penny Arcade's semi-frequent column The Hook Up has published a new article, and this time around Stormy talks about the coming high-def revolution in gaming and the acceptance of gaming by the masses. From the article: "I'm definitely troubled about the 'dumbing-down' effect that bringing the casual gamers into our fold may have on the quality of games in the future. Sure, tight pants and big tits appeal to the hardcore elite just the same as the casual gamer, but I'm betting that Half-Life 2 on the Xbox will play a lot different than on its PC predecessor. For example, I really took it as a compliment when Valve simply threw me into the fray when I began the game. The beauty of it was that the storytellers assumed that we've all played a shooter before."
The gameplay still has to be there. It goes without saying that it doesn't matter how sexy a game looks, if it's boring to play it won't be a hit. The comments the article made about high-def giving people an advantage is interesting though - you really could get more accurate shots off with a higher res larger display. I don't think it takes into account the natural 'tunnel' that people's vision has though. On a really big screen, it's easy to miss stuff off to one side (try sitting at the front of a movie theatre and see how much of the action you're missing, to get my drift). Basically, unless someone's playing a sniper on an FPS, I don't see a huge advantage - it'll just be tradeoff of clarity in the small area you're staring at vs the guy without the clarity who can see the whole situation better. Interesting observations, anyway.
This is very true. It's actually quite ironic that the original poster used this as an example, since I thought of this as the perfect game to introduce my boyfriend to a FPS.
If you set the game to "easy" then enemy attacks do almost no damage to your character. Even so, my boyfriend died several times as he stumbed around in 3d space.
It's funny how much we take for granted after playing so many games. Areas that I could scan in a fraction of a second and identify all the exits, he would have to carefully study for minutes to find the way forward. Every once and a while he would give up, but in general there is enough infomation there that even a beginner can get by.
He's gotten to the part where they start throwing a lot of manhacks at him, and I think he's getting frustrated. I think, wow 8 manhacks at a time... this is crazy ****ed up fun! He thinks, 8 manhacks at a time... it's time to rent a video.
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This is so simple. The console knows what it's rendering and can report that to Live. People outputting HD play against HD. SD plays against SD. Problem solved!
What I want to know is will xbox 360 support keyboards, mice and monitors? That will kill PC gaming. I know MS is saying 720p, but what if it can output 1920x1080 progressive on a monitor or very high-end TV? The PC gaming market will crash and burn because plenty of people tired of paying for a new video card every two years, a new CPU/mobo/RAM/HD every three, and a new power supply every four. That's $700-1400 every 5 year console cycle. Yes PC games have better graphics in the last couple years, but to too many people it won't be worth it.
Microsoft wants to own the computing world, but PC gaming is a large part of what sells CPU's. They may not want to harm the market like that. However, Sony and Nintendo have lots of reasons to step in and do this.