Video games have come a long way. From the dedictated arcade machines that cost so much, consumed so much energy, and required so much maintenance that there was no way you could put it in a home, to the little firecrackers that idiots wait in line for days before launch day to buy.
But I foresee something bad coming down the pipe. I won't tell you yet, I'll explain how it went to get there. History first.
The video game crash of the early 80's paved the way for Nintendo to pretty much dominate the home circuit. Part of it was genius, part of it was trickery, part of it was luck. Take a very well documented, common, inexpensive, and easy to program microprocessor (Motorolla's 6502) along with a simple memory-mapped system architecture and you have something easy to make. The way it broke into the US market is not at all a result of chance.
And there were many that sought to dethrone it. NEC, Sega, Atari, to name a few. But their hardware wasn't as easy. They may have been technically superior but without the game backing they were doomed to fail.
The Sega Genesis certainly was a major force. It was in many ways just a Nintendo+. It took the a newer generation Motorolla chip (a 16-bit one) and plugged it into one-step-up hardware. Better and cleaner wave synthesis for sound and music provided by Yamaha, bigger pallettes and higher resolutions in the graphical engine, more memory. I think the Genesis just got lucky, mostly, with excellent games. Most of the Genesis hits were in-house 1st party games. The ratio of stinkers to hits though was higher than the NES in America, thanks in part to 3rd party titles that didn't suck.
I say "America." NOA was very careful about what it let hit our shelves. They kept 3rd parties on a short leash. They weren't allowed to release more than a certain quota of games in the states, so, naturally, they released the ones that would sell the best. To sidestep these, some labels made new ones for more titles, like the "Ultra" name releasing surplus Konami titles. That kind of shit would fly in Japan, but it didn't in the states. That's why Japanese dominance in hardware AND software happened... because the video game companies here were reluctant to enter such things. They had to pay a licensing fee per cartridge? They all had to be manufactured by Nintendo? They have to cover all the risks of publishing? They can't sell on contingency?
So Sega upped the ante in the hardware and Nintendo kept up fairly well but eventually had to spit out the Super Famicom to call the bet and raise it another. Another 16-bit Motorolla chip, but etched out of custom glass which restricted it in speed, a lovely sound processor from Sony, a BIGGER pallette and more memory.
Line drawn in the sand.
To keep my fingers from hurting any more than they already do (my index finger on my primary hand ACHES and ACHES and ACHES for some reason), I'll spare you the rest.
So here we are today. The line has been drawn and jumped over so many times that we've got new systems on the horizon. A decked out Xbox 360 is $400 (yes, they sell a stripped down version, but when stuff is stripped down and is not clothes nothing good can come of it). PS3 is expected to come through the gates at that price or $50 less, depending on how well Sony is doing financially to take such a loss per console sale. Yes, I have the balls to say it. Remember 360 will take a price reduction on release of the PS3.
Add a few games and an extra controller and you've surpassed $500. Why so expensive? We've come to a point where the line is being drawn and jumped so often that it's trying to exceed the natural progression of technology. If it was done at the same pace we would get more for the same price as yesterday. I think a lot of this is due to the loss of cartridges and a general loss of a design fundamental. In the NES days? A new mapping chips in the cartridge, co-processors, all sorts of goodies that supplanted the original hardware made it an amazingly successful run. You can't put new hardware on a CD. None of the pinouts of the DS slot give direct hardware access. Same for the GBA pinouts. Any additional hardware is used explicitly by code executing on the GBA processor, whereas the NES mappings were just inherant in the simpler design.
Then again, implementing those "loopholes" available in simple design in modern systems would be very difficult to keep them next-generation. Even the Passme hack for the DS still ends up being run on DS hardware. There would be no way, for instance, to add a hardware mapping chip to let the hardware all of a sudden access 32 gigabits of flash memory space (the 4 gigs, in, say, an iPod nano). It's capped at I think 4 gigabits through the addressing space allotted by the engineering spec.
It seems that the push for the latest and greatest technology is going too fast, in pursuit of the biggest WOW and OOOH and AAAH in the crowd.
Nintendo's going to try to buck the trend with Revolution. It won't cost $300. It won't have cutting edge hardware. It will have a unique input edge, sure. But, see, video games have gone mainstream. They've been that way for a while. The average gamer doesn't really care about playability or novelty or, arguably, fun. They want to crush opponents online, basically bullying rebuilt in a virtual sense because these days real life bullying gets you a shotgun blast to the face by a kid donned in black trenchcoat garb. I mean, how else can you explain Madden? Final Fantasy IX sold fewer copies than Dead or Alive 4? WHAT?!
I don't care if gaming is popular or not. I just want to play good games and not have to pay too much for garbage. Slowly gaming systems are approaching PC specs, and this is a BAD thing. Look at PC gaming. To get a perfect out-of-the-box experience, you need 2 Gigabytes of memory ($200), an AMD FX-60 ($1000), an SLI rig of two GeForce 7800 GTX's ($1000), plus hard drive, optical drive, case, motherboard, decent sound, super power supply, other incidentals (another $700). Don't forget the HD output ($1200+) And then you've got a near $4000 machine. And all that will be second string in 6 months. AND it isn't even enough to run Everquest 2 at full detail levels. It's customary for PC games to be written at levels of performance that exceed what is available to the customer because by the time they get released the hardware would have caught up.
$4000? Might as well get a CPS-3 arcade machine. They have interchangeable game cartridges too. I fear a bubble popping in the home gaming world.
When geeks ruled, things were good. Oh well.
