VG Theory Productions

An Editorial By Ricky Coulter

It all started out so simply. It always does, of course. For all intents and purposes, what attracted the masses to putting money into a color television set that had a couple of rotary knobs on the front and a coin box glued to the side was a moving square representing a ball and two small lines on each side of the screen representing ping pong paddles. That was Pong, as everyone should know. Curious how so simple a concept could attract so many people, as well as so much money.

Granted, it wasn’t exactly the first. There was Computer Space, based on the ever popular, yet virtually unknown, mainframe game called Space War. And there was the Odyssey, a very basic television game that featured simplistic graphics akin to Pong, as well as board game accessories and color overlays for one’s television set. And before that, the oscilloscope game Tennis for Two, another virtually unknown game.

There are many reason’s for the relative failure of these previous experiments to capture the public’s interest. Odyssey was sold for a high price, and was presented with misleading advertising. Space War ran on a computer that cost several thousand dollars, and was simply not feasible to mass produce. Computer Space was much too complex, not to mention expensive to produce, for the public. One could argue that Pong hit the sweet spot, the balance between simplicity, fun, and price.

Ironically enough, if a game like Pong were released in an arcade today, it would bomb. Badly. Granted, this is merely conjecture, but seeing how people react to graphical enhancements and fads, Pong couldn’t survive in today’s gaming world. If it doesn’t push many millions of polygons or produce a draw distance past the game horizon, it’s probably not worth playing. Go figure.

When I take a gander at the Xbox 360, I see a great device. I mean, it’s got plenty of horsepower under the hood, as it were, with three(!) 3GHZ PowerPC processors. Suffice to say, it’s got some juice. Games like Project Gotham Racing 3 look stunning in motion on the unit. It’s a great, relatively sleek device for gaming. But it is not without flaws. For instance, I feel the unit was a bit rushed. Why? Well, let me give you an example of one of the flaws, at least how I see it. The power supply has a freaking fan inside it. I’ve heard horror stories about the power supplies, even so far as to remedy the heat issues by hanging the damned thing from a piece of string in the air so that it has plenty of air flow surrounding it.

That strikes me as something that could have been fixed, or rectified in some manner, with a bit more time in the shop. Now, believe me, I understand why Microsoft wanted this thing out the door in a hurry, and I don’t blame them for making a conscious decision. Doesn’t mean it was the best one, but they built it, so more power to them. I also think the price tag is a bit exhorbant, to say the least. Then again, a three core 3GHZ box would be superb in a Mac, and would undoubtedly hit a very high mark in any other situation. Rumor has it that Microsoft loses money on each 360 sold, and for good reason. It is costing them, allegedly, almost $700 dollars to make. Do the math.

Microsoft is losing several hundred dollars per unit on this thing. Why? There is no way that the mass market would have began buying it at basically anything higher than it is. History is there to back me up. Now, Microsoft is a very different company than the 3do company, especially financially, but I doubt they could pull off a coup of that significance. I’m talking about the $700 dollar 3do, of course. But I digress.

I guess my point is that while I think the 360 is great for what it is, and something I wouldn’t mind grabbing some time down the line, once it’s a bit cheaper, it doesn’t scream gaming to me. It’s a media center. I don’t exactly need a media center myself, but that’s my own problem. What games there are for this beast aren’t enough to justify the cost, in my mind. I’d rather buy a full price Dreamcast or Gamecube, both of which were cheaper at their respective launches.

Moreso than that, the 360′s games aren’t what I would call simple and addictive. Maybe they’re fun, maybe they are addictive, but they aren’t pick up and play friendly. That’s alright in some cases. I like sitting down to play a few hours of Neverwinter Nights on my iBook every now and then, and it’s cool. But as with everything else in life, there must be balance, or it’s going to fall on it’s face. Not just the console, or even the manufacturer, but the industry as a whole. It’s happened once before.

Before I breeze over that, I do want to mention that there are plenty of simpler and more addictive arcade-style games available on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s strange that most people who buy the 360 end up playing these simpler games more often than the full price games like Call of Duty 2 or Project Gotham Racing. I have no numbers to back this up, of course. It’s still merely conjecture, but I think it’s a very reasonable consensus.

Ah, but the crash. The crash of the Video Game industry, that is. Around 1983-1985, in fact. When so many people seemed to just stop buying new games, stopped playing arcade games, ect. There are many reasons for this, as there always are. The VCS was still arguably the king of the console domain. The problem is that the hardware had been around for nearly ten years at that point and it’s follow-up, the hastily converted 5200(converted, that is, from the Atari 400/800 computer line hardware) did little to take up the sword and continue the fight, as it were. What’s worse, the 2600(another name for the VCS, probably more well known by people) was getting some really bad games. Pac-Man, just about the most popular Arcade game of all time, was hastily(and, regrettably, poorly) recoded for the 2600. Many millions of people bought the game, only to be upset by the poor quality.

If I say E.T., it brings to mind, in most people, anyway, the highly popular movie made by Steven Spieldberg back in the ’80s. The other little tidbit that might pop into some people’s minds is the game for the 2600. It was a big deal. Atari spent millions on the license. The catch? It had to be written in roughly 5 weeks, if I am not mistaken. Talk about a rush job. Poor Howard Scott Warshaw. He wasn’t a bad programmer by any means. Just look at Yar’s Revenge for the same system. Great little game. Five weeks. That’s simply not enough time to write a good, much less great, game, unless the programmer can read, write, and speak binary.

Atari made another mistake on top of this. They made around 12 million of the damned things(assuming my memory is correct). As far as I am aware, the installed user base of the 2600 was around 10 million at the time. Heh. Poor Atari. The theory was, of course, that people would buy systems to buy the game. Sounds good in theory, doesn’t it? People didn’t bite this time around, and i’ve read stories of a landfill in the southwest where Atari dumped the many, many excess cartridges, because nobody would buy them. They were rendered absolutely worthless because of the poor execution of the strategy. Shame. It more or less ended the Atari that the world, up to that point, knew and loved.

Again, my point is that the crash did happen once before, and it very well could happen again. Many people in the industry have speculated that it is coming, and soon. My opinion is that IF it is going to happen soon, it will happen during the next console life cycle. That is, PS3 vs. Xbox 360 vs.(to a degree) Revolution. But that’s just my opinion.

My views on the Nintendo Revolution are known well enough just from my conversations about it on Video Game Theory, but in a very brief summarization, I think it’s a great idea, great hardware, and there are some really cool games that are being developed for it. PlayStation 3 is a disaster waiting to happen. I’ve read many rumors, speculations, and industry insights regarding the system, and it just spells disaster. Even the design makes me laugh. In my eyes, it’s like a bar’b'que grill with a batarang controller. Shameful. The word in the industry is that it could be very expensive, $500 dollars or more. I will grant you, Sony is pushing a lot of new technology onboard this beast so that they can ultimately get it produced cheaply(trojan horse for mass production of expensive technologies in order to get costs down quickly and have users adopt the new tech). The same thing happened with the PlayStation 2, with the DVD drive, and it worked. Many people bought the PS2 just because it was a relatively cheap DVD player. Go figure.

The problem with this strategy is, as far as I can see it, that they are pushing too much, too hard. The first Blu-Ray drives(one of the two next-generation DVD players) will cost around $1000 bucks in Japan. Even if we assume this is cost times three, the common pricing formula for manufacturing, that still means the drive actually costs around $330 dollars to produce. Couple that with the very expensive(powerful, sure, but damned expensive) Cell processor, and you’ve got a very high price. That’s just the manufacturing costs. Not to mention the memory, the peripherals, the miscellaneous components, the design of the unit. This beast will be expensive. I don’t doubt that Sony has some trick up it’s sleeve. But personally, I feel like this is going to start the downfall, or at least decline, of the PlayStation legacy.

PlayStation is, of course, the industry leader, as far as game consoles go. Don’t peg me as a Sony hater. I own a slim PS2. In fact, I had some fun with Grand Theft Auto 3 earlier today. It’s a nice little system. My view is that if there are good games(good being on a sliding scale; what I see as good may not be as good to others), I’m there. As it stands, the ONLY game that could get me to purchase a PS3 is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I’m a MGS freak. I would, and perhaps will, buy a PS3 for MGS 4. Hideo Kojima has my respect, guys, and I’m not ashamed to say it. But I digress.

I suppose the point I am trying to summarize in this decidedly longer article(longer than I initially anticipated writing; glancing at my clock, it’s been almost an hour and a half of writing…) is just how much things have changed in thirty years. Pong had the world captivated back in the day. It was arguably the first game of it’s kind(the debacle surrounding Atari and Pong is another article in and of itself), so that is definitely part of the reason it became so popular. Every generation of game console has pushed the limits of graphics farther than the last, and games have become steadily more complex. For once, the next generation isn’t as graphically superior as the last. People are, I feel, beginning to realize that more polygons isn’t going to keep working to grab attention. But then, it is quite obvious in hindsight.

While I love some of the newer games to come out in the last few years, such as Resident Evil 4(saying great game doesn’t do it justice) or Super Smash Bros. Melee, which is actually my favorite game yet, a lot of trends seem to be pushing game design farther and farther away from the stuff I played when I was a kid. I like the older games. I like 2d games, I like pixel-art, I like classics, I like the more traditional 2d sprite-based fighters and shooters. As much of a current gamer as I am, I love the old-skool games of the ’80s and ’90s. The new stuff is, again, great, but it’s taking over and I don’t like seeing tradition just swept out of the way in favor of, well, more polygons.

I have a knack for brief synopsis, no? Suffice to say, you can gather your own point from this article, assuming you were brave enough to read this far. Feel free to discuss the topic on our forums(here, for those interested). I’d be interested to read your thoughts on the matter(ascii text, not telepathy, of course). Seeing as how it’s 1:30 AM here, I guess I should wrap things up. Appropriately enough, Good Night and Good Gaming, folks.

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