According to GameSpot’s Doom 3 Xbox review:

Extremely impressive from a technical standpoint yet behind the times from a first-person-shooter design standpoint: This is the dichotomy that is Doom 3, the long-awaited sequel from well-known Texas-based developer id Software.

Why does a technically impressive but outdated shooter deserve 8.6 exactly? This isn’t aimed just at GameSpot since the high scores have been fairly unanimous, but they’re known for being pretty strict and time has shown just how average Doom 3 was. Sites are always telling us that five on their scale means a game is average but unless they’ve made some radical changes Doom 3 on the Xbox will be just that. In fact it will be an average PC game with inferior graphics and controls. OK, if I reviewed it I’d rate it slightly above average (three stars on my scale), but I still don’t know how it can get 8.6 and higher on the same console that gave us Halo.

From what I understand, the Xbox version is essentially the same, but with Xbox Live, co-op, and some tweaks to criticisms of the PC game such as the excessive use of the colour black. This might give it a couple of points above the other version, but when you take what is essentially a massive tech demo and force it to run at a lower resolution and taking an FPS and forcing it to run with a controller (first-person shooters designed for a controller work fine, but others aren’t) you’re taking two of the games’ fundamentals away from it. Some relativelly minor additions are really outweighed by things like that.

I suppose I’m going to have to try it out to see if there are any improvements that I haven’t heard of, but as it stands all this is doing is giving ammunition to the pretentious pricks who insist that it’s because console games have lower standards and that an average PC game is considered good on a console.

New consoles are always expensive, but I don’t remember even seeing an uproar on the scale that the PSP is getting for its $250 price tag in the US. For some reason people seem completely averse to paying that amount of money for a portable, no matter how much technology it’s carrying inside that little plastic shell. Admittedly your average $300 home console is more powerful than the PSP at launch, but it also doesn’t have size and weight as a real issue (miniaturisation doesn’t come cheap), usually can’t use an existing storage format, and doesn’t have to pack its own display. When people stick their new console into their $2,000 HDTV they tend not to factor that into the price.

From what I’ve seen of it the PSP is comparable to the PS2 with regard to power, and you can get one of the new PStwos for $99. If you’ve seen one of those you’ll probably agree that it’s pretty amazing how small they managed to make the hardware, but for the PSP they got something similar into around a quarter of the size. It’s also the only machine to use the UMD as storage which had to be developed from scratch, and so it needs to cover the cost of R&D on that. The mechanisms on it are probably only modified MiniDisc hardware (another proprietary Sony format), but adapting a high-speed optical drive for a new format is more complicated than Nintendo’s steady-state cartridges that all their handhelds have used.

Of course, there’s “that” screen. Seriously, the PSP display is one of the nicest ones I’ve ever seen. It puts any other portable console that I’ve seen to shame and it’s better than many portable DVD players that cost a similar price. The colour and clarity is better than I’ve seen on a lot of expensive laptops, and for something of the PSP’s size it’s absolutely massive. If nothing else, Sony has set the standard there.

Why is it that people will think nothing of spending $300 on an iPod and yet $250 for something which does a lot more is too much? Admittedly it doesn’t play MP3s as well as the iPod or with as much storage, but it plays high quality videos very well (the PSP and the Revenge of the Sith trailer were made for each other) and from what I’ve heard, UMD movies look even better, pan-and-scan aside. You can view your photos on it at a size and quality far preferable to that of the iPod Photo, and of course you can play PSP games. It suffers somewhat from “jack of all trades” syndrome in that it does everything adequately and nothing spectacularly, but it’s incredibly impressive what they’ve crammed into it. Bear in mind that the firmware can be upgraded to give features beyond the initial capabilities (web browsing via wi-fi is supposedly on the way) and it gives the PSP the potential to give even more for what I feel is a very reasonable price.

Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m used to paying the equivalent of $500+ for a console depending on the exchange rates, but I can’t help but laugh at people calling it too expensive in the same way that I want to punch them when I hear Americans complaining about the “ridiculous” $2/gallon fuel prices (we pay over $6/gallon) as they trundle along in their 9mpg SUV. But that’s another story.

Will Wright is undeniably creative, and one of the few people behind the scenes of game development in danger of being recognised on the street, even if I thought The Sims was one of the most inane things I’ve ever played. My personal preferences aside, he’s perhaps even better than Nintendo at taking the idea of an open-ended and unique game idea and running with it to create something really extraordinary.

What does have me amazed, if indeed it’s more than a tech demo for dynamic asset creation, is his latest project: Spore. It starts of as basic as Pac-Man, but through evolution you can take yourself from amoeba to complex organism, right through basic tribes and civilisations into interstellar travel. Not only does the scale of the game change but so does the style of gameplay, going from Pac-Man to Populous to Civilisation right up to the ultimate in macrocosmic god games. If The Sims was a sandbox game, this could be a Sahara game.

The Sims and the GTA games, amongst others, prove that giving players a pretty sandbox is a very successful formula, both commercially and critically, and is probably one of the best ways to capture those who perhaps won’t play the usual goal-orientated title (the EyeToy style of game being the other). It’s not a new idea and isn’t what I’m looking at here. What I’m more interested in is the idea of dynamic content creation by the game itself. Past experiments with it have been moderately successful at best, with RPGs using random dungeons turning into monotonous crawls as a computer program that is infallible at crunching numbers just can’t have an intuitive idea of what is going to keep interest alive. Of course even a flesh-and-blood level designer can’t always account for taste, but it’s just not something that a computer can do.

What I don’t remember ever seeing before is dynamic creation of game assets such as textures and animations. Obviously it’s never going to work for a story-driven adventure which needs the assets created by its army of designers, but for more open-ended games it could mean an end, or at least a curb, to huge game sizes as they would house nothing but mathematical equations instead of huge bitmap images. Have you ever played a game like Resident Evil and wondered why the virus that causes random mutation creates absolutely identical mutants and zombies, even down to bloodstains? Or how RE4 contains only a handful of villagers who you’ve apparently killed hundreds of times each? This technique could change that.

No more cloned, homogenous mercenaries to blow away in your favourite FPS – each one has a unique face, body structure, voice, and even animations. No more guessing what your enemy is going to do by looking at which animation cycle they’re in the middle of because each one with throw a grenade or reload their gun differently. That’s a good application of new technology to solve a flaw of modern games, and coupled with the advancements in combat AI that we’ve seen in the likes of Halo it could prove to be a major step on the road to more lifelike characters.

I’m slightly amazed that even with the announcement of the possible Xenon specs, people still seem inexorable over the possibility that it will launch in the $300 price window that most recent consoles have occupied at launch. It almost seems like any other price for a console launch is completely unthinkable and would be commercial suicide for Microsoft and, I’d assume, Sony.

Would it, though? People seem to be willing to spend £1,500 or more on a gaming PC, £2,000 or more on a nice HDTV, a couple of grand on a sound system, a couple of hundred on a decent DVD player, and I’m sure that the initial HD DVD/Blu-ray players will sell well at their $300-500 (US) price points. Why is a console costing more than £300 one of gaming’s last taboos, then? People are only too happy to (sometimes validly) complain about the cost of a new game but it’s the huge losses on hardware that force these prices. Personally I spend a lot more over the lifespan of a console on games than the actual machine, so I’d prefer to pay £500 for the console and then have games available at DVD prices. That would benefit the manufacturer as well, since piracy isn’t going to cause such huge losses for them.

To me the fact that the PSP is launching in the US for $250, only $50 shy of the usual price for a new home console, should be the first indication that we’re not going to see the new machines launching in the same old price bracket. When people are willing to pay £2,000 for a gaming PC don’t you think that a console would sell for £500? If what Microsoft and Sony are saying isn’t all marketing rhetoric both of their consoles will be more powerful than any PC on the market, so that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. It’s not uncommon for a sought-after console to reach $800 on eBay at launch, so people are willing to pay when they have to.

It’s true that consoles are almost always sold at a loss initially and that the money is made back on the games, but no matter how big the company is they simply cannot afford to sell (ballpark figure) £1,500 worth of electronics for £350. If they take a cut of £10 from every game sold every person would have to buy 115 games for it to be profitable, and that’s never going to happen. They’d be very lucky to persuade people to buy twenty at £40 per game, and even if the costs were £1,000 per unit, each person would need to buy 65 game to make it profitable. I know people who pirate every single one of their games and most of them don’t even have that many when they’re free.

So what if parents won’t buy a $500 machine for their kids? They buy relatively very few games, maybe one for birthdays and one for Christmas plus a couple more, but the bigger 20-30 market with a high disposable income can afford it and tend to buy a lot more games. Games, not hardware, are where the money is made, after all. It all depends on whether market share (what Sony and Microsoft fight over) or profitability (what Nintendo has) is more important. Just remember that a company can’t exist on market share alone.

The revelation of the Xenon specs will no doubt herald the beginning of the new console wars, just as the flames of the current one are beginning to fade. Sony have been brash about what we can expect about the capabilities of PlayStation 3, although some have been cautious of their “Cell” and “Blu-Ray” buzzwords after the failed promises of the PS2. Wasn’t it supposed to be your home media hub, capable of rendering Toy Story in real time? Unsurprisingly some were let down when it turned out to be more like an overclocked Dreamcast.

If these specs are to be believed, the Xenon is going to have insane amounts of processing power. A Power Mac G5 with dual 2.5GHz PowerPC processors wipes the floor with pretty much anything on x86 systems, so when the Xenon has three 3GHz ones it could be phenomenally powerful. Toss in a graphics card a whole generation ahead of the current best PC card and 256MB RAM (it doesn’t sound like a lot, but the Xbox could do a lot with 64MB) and we could seriously be approaching the level of raw power needed for photorealism. The difference between the current generation and this could be like comparing games on the PS1 to Xbox.

What I do find strange is the potential for bottlenecks. The power of those processors is immense, but it’s never even going to break into a sweat with what a next-gen X800 and 256MB shared RAM can throw at it. It might hold the advantage of being able to crunch massive numbers for things like realistic physics engines and dynamic lighting while leaving all the graphics to the GPU, but I still just can’t see that much power being utilised. It’s also going to carry the issue with multiple processors becoming exponentially more difficult for developers to take advantage of and that is, therefore, going to take even more power away from independent developers and shift it into the big boys like EA. That’s not good.

The decisions to plump for standard DVD-ROM instead of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and to drop the standard hard drive are fairly baffling, too. DVD is going to struggle to accommodate the textures that they’re going to be pumping out for this stuff, as well as the inevitable HD video content, and loses out on an obvious selling point of being able to play those new hi-def movies. With HD-DVD using Microsoft’s own video codec it seemed like an obvious choice, but maybe not. Of course, with DVD writers being widespread it’s also going to cause piracy issues.

The hard drive was one of the most popular features in the Xbox, allowing saves without memory cards, custom soundtracks, faster load times, and content downloads, so losing it is huge. When it’s not standard it won’t be supported (look at the PS2 hard drive), and when the PS3 will almost certainly contain one they seem to be making an odd concession to Sony by giving them a nice advantage. An HD is so cheap now that it seems idiotic not to throw it in, but we’ll have to see if Microsoft has thought of an angle that is invisible to everyone else.

With the Xenon and PS3 obviously packing such power, it seems impossible for them to be able to pack them into the standard £300/$300 price bracket. Look at those dual-2.5GHz Power Macs – they cost £2,000, and there’s no way that a console can sell for that price. Anecdotal evidence holds that Microsoft lost $700 on the sale of every Xbox at launch and I seriously doubt that they can afford to do that again. I’d prefer to pay more for the console so that they can make a profit on it and sell games cheaper, but that doesn’t mean that I’d buy a £1,000 console.

I guess “wait for E3” is going to be the answer, as usual.

The advent of the Internet as a viable form for the gaming media to exist in has been the biggest shake-up of our section of the industry since Pong, with the main source of information to the consumer changing from being static monthly magazines to the dynamic and interactive (not to mention mostly free) Internet. What I want to know is whether or not this quantum shift is what’s responsible for the metamorphosis of most magazines from fun reading into stoic Edge clones.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bashing Edge. They’re one of the few publications that I trust with where my £40 goes and they do a great job of filling their little niche. In fact, they’re now the only games magazine that I buy on a regular basis (in addition to my subscriptions to IGN Insider and GameSpot Complete). My complaint is that it seems like every magazine is trying to be them.

Rewind ten years or so: I was buying Super Play, Nintendo Magazine System, and Gamesmaster every month and looking forward to what would become N64 Magazine. None of them had any illusions that games were high art and they’d make jokes and interact with the fan base, as well as have features that I still enjoy going back and reading today – pragmatic features on import gaming or creating a fanzine and tongue-in-cheek ones about things like gaming recipies or a gamer’s first visit to Japan. I still have my magazines on my bottom shelf and I can still kill a couple of hours by digging out a favourite issue and having a quick read.

Now the Official PS2 Magazine is a £5.99 advertorial, Official Nintendo Magazine has been shit since it changed from the NMS format, gamesTM is one of the most blatant Edge clones around (they’ve even manipulated scores based on Edge’s), and even the surviving magazines aimed at a younger audience like Gamesmaster have tried to realign themselves with teenagers. Edge are the only ones who consistenly write with conviction and intelligence.

Maybe it’s the fact that as many gamers are adults as are kids today, and it makes sense to cater your magazine to the ones with the disposible income, but something doesn’t have to stop being entertaining to be grown up. We need a well-written magazine for grown-ups that’s less Newsnight, more Have I Got News For You.