The Maturation of Video Games

1up.com is running a piece examining how video games have matured since the early days. The article explores what the social context of gaming has been, from Hunt the Wumpus to 'Hot Coffee'. From the article: "The maturation of games might be viewed more accurately as a climb into a unified grace. By the time console gamers were wowed by Sonic The Hedgehog's 64-colour world, computer gamers were already familiar with zooming across galaxies, building cities and landing virtual planes. The 486 ran at 66 mHz and had the capability to create 3D texture maps. 16-bit consoles, which ran at 7 mHz, could not replicate a game as impressive-looking, innovative and as huge as Doom."

Comments

Oh, bloody please

[Moraelin]

Well, gee, yet another thread along the lines of "but gaming platform X is better than platform Y, because its hardware is better".

Hello? Aren't we missing something? Like, you know, the _games_? Because it seems to me like that's the only reason to own a gaming rig in the first place: to play the games.

Until you can tell me that you're playing directly with the shader pipelines, instead of with a game that uses those... sorry, I'll concentrate on what games I can play on it, instead of the bogus "mine has more MHz than yours" willy-waving.

Want to know why I bought a console, "my PC has more MHz" willy-waving be damned? Well, for the games. Games such as:

- Gran Turismo, which was a better racing game than any racing game that ran on a PC

- Fighting games, which pretty much _disappeared_ on the PC after Mortal Kombat

- Jade Empire and Fable alone were worth the price of an XBox, and more

- Japanese RPGs, including not just Square ones, but also some very original ones like Valkyrie Profile and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Those two alone would make the price of a Playstation worth every cent I've paid for it

- Lightgun games. Yeah, the PC has keyboard and mouse. Wake me up when I can plug a lighgun in and play a House Of The Dead or Time Crisis game the way it was meant to be played.

Etc.

In a nutshell, it's all about the games. If a platform has games I want to play, I'll go buy that platform and play those games. It's that simple.

I don't care which has the higher MHz or bogus benchmark scores. I don't play 3DMark, I play _games_.

I have a top end Athlon 64 4000+, 2 GB RAM, a 7800 GTX, and a WD Raptor in my current PC, but trust me, looking at 3DMark still gets old after one 10 minute run. I'll play a game instead to keep myself entertained.