Next Gen Apathypolycounts don't excite me anymore

I want you to try something. In your mind's eye, I want you to picture a scene from Dead or Alive 2. Don't focus on it too hard, just call up a memory of the game if you've played it. Now, clear your mental palette and call up an image of Dead or Alive 4. If you feel like it, do the same for the other games in the franchise as well.

Next, try looking at the games side by side. Before you do, though, sit back a few feet from your monitor. Now take a look. Feel free to look at them more closely now.

If you're like me, you probably didn't see much of a difference until at least seeing the images, if not upon closer inspection. While the 360 may be a big jump for us in terms of horsepower, most of that power is still being applied to graphics, and the sorts of graphical improvements we're seeing are fairly 'geeky' shaders and the like - the sorts of things your cousin with the Bitchin' Camaro is not going to notice unless you put the games side-by-side and point them out.

I'm far from the first to cry out that graphics are no longer paramount, but I think the feeling is growing more pervasive. I was once a drooling xbox fanboy, and DoA3 has always been the game I pull out to show the system off to non-gamers. Graphics made all the difference to me; I couldn't fathom why somebody would deign to play any multi-platform game on a lesser system. Perhaps I've gotten cynical in the past four years, but this demonstration made it clear to me how much I've flip-flopped on that - as far I'm aware, King Kong's just as fun and interesting on xbox as on it's big brother 360.

Again; I'm not the first to say this, but we need to improve our games in other ways, besides pure graphics injections. There are a lot of complex, ambient enrichments, like improving physics and AI, that can benefit from hardware advances - though I'm not aware of anything revolutionary happening for those systems in this generation. An animator friend of mine mentioned motion blur as a next-gen feature he's excited about, but that seems like small potatoes to me. Talk to me when we can do in real-time what Endorphin's helping us pre-render, and I'll get excited.

I have a hard time going back to games on Saturn or Playstation, because of the graphics jump we took after that generation, but I can still boot up Crazy Taxi on my dreamcast without feeling like I'm taking a trip down memory lane.

This underscores my personal apathy towards the 360 and PS3 launches. I'm fairly certain that exclusivity is what's going to eventually drive me to purchase both of these systems.

Likewise, this also highlights why I'm so excited about Nintendo's Revolution. Though I can't can't make any predictions I'd be confident in regarding it's success, I think they're going in absolutely the right direction - at least as far as reaching out beyond the audience that they've created and nurtured. I absolutely think there's a place for established genres and control schemes in the future of gaming, and I believe the course the industry has been on will continue, but with a broader approach to a broader audience. Nintendo's helping us do that by defying convention on such a grand scale.

You're seeing a lot of commentary these days that express similar frustration with our industry. We need new control schemes! We need more innovative titles! We need alternate revenue streams! We need new distibution methods! We need more indie support! It certainly seems like we've reached a sort of plateau with our current development and business models.

It's going to be interesting to see in what ways we, as an industry, grow and thrive in the coming generation.