We're going back.. Back to the future! the year 2000 where we all fly around on hover boards and drive our giant roboto man to work.. well.. not quite.In my opinion not much drastically changed in the Ps2/Xbox generation apart from souped up graphics. Sega was the first to go down the "next gen" road with the dreamcast and at least tried to change the way we play games by having those crazy VMU memory cards and having a wide array of strange types of games. I enjoyed the small amount of time i had with the dreamcast as every other day a new fantastic game seemed to be released.
The Ps2 didnt have this innovation and just had literally thousands of crap games, (bar a few wich i dislike anyway like final fantasy or whatever) i also hated the low resolution it had and its blurry graphics although it had a nice DVD player addition.. and GTA.
The Xbox had really nice graphics and a few good games, i never played much of this console but i heard good things. The gamecube was another console that had a lot of great games, the graphics were'nt to shabby either but it wasn't very popular and game stores never seemed to have any games for it.
The generation to me seemed less of a "good games and innovation" battle than a "how good can we market these things" fight where the developer with the most shelf space wins. The ps2 won hands down even though it was poorly made and had terrible games (i know some sony fanboy is going to argue against this) seemed to appeal to older and younger players because it was "cool" it was also cheap wich is a bonus too. (i have no idea how their going to shift the ps3 mind.)
Another factor of this generation is the seemingly increasing amount developers are spending on video games, even games without film licenses are becoming very serious investments. This was first apparant to me when shenmue was released and topped 20 million wich was pretty unheard of during that time. This seemed to benifit the market(although the first time this happened it killed the market .cough. ET) as developers spend more and more in making the next blockbuster game despite of possible flops.
Im also supposed to write about the future of where video games will go and wich road they will take, but i fear i'll start writing about how i want them to go not how they actually will or something.. My idea is that game consoles will keep getting better graphics and hardware but will open up to the internet phenomina a bit more and become more "PC-like" i think Mod teams breathe new life into older games and continue their life way past its generation (half-life and mods are played more than most brand new games) mods for console games seems a bit crazy now but who knows what will happen.
Steam seems like the way to go.. (not steam engines you silly) as it is allowing third party games made by individuals to sell their games over the internet. Usually crazy gameplay ideas are too much of a risk for big developers and steam offers these potentially good games to be played.. (Garry's mod is one of them DEFCON is another..) They have also bought the call of duty franchise (*cough lab with HL2 COD and HL1 in easy to use browser thing cough*)
Anyway the Truth is that however the games industry will go its us that has to get used to whatever is given to us and theres not an awful lot we can do, if a company feels like it's in risk it won't try and break the mould too much and it won't go down that road... Business sucks.
On the bright side companies do seem to be opening theirselves up to innovation, Nintendo seems to be doing interesting things with the Wii and a few of the Dx10 PC games look quite good too, i do think that the steam client will get big or another company will use the idea and improve upon it.
Games are taken a lot more seriously now than they used to, these days games are an important part of the entertainment industry and can only really get better.. where we're going we don't need roads
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