A Few Miscellaneous Things and Video Games
Blogger is owned by Google, and in exchange for giving this space away, they put a banner ad at the top of my blog. I don't mind banner ads, especially Google's ads because they only use text, so, visually, it's less intrusive.
However, I noticed something the other day about this banner. At the time of this writing, it has two ads relating to the U.S. Constitution. One of my more recent posts is about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his views on the Constitution, wherein the word 'constitution' appears so often that I actually copy/pasted it to save time on typing.
I don't know if it's neat or scary that they troll my page for keywords in order to place the most relevant ads in the banner.
On a related note, if you search Google for 'Naznarreb,' you get some forum posts I've made, but not this site.
Finally, Video Games!
I have a theory about the next generation of games: I feel we are about to enter the third... phase, for lack of a better term, of video games. First, some history, as I call it.
The first phase, in my estimation, was from the beginning of home consoles through the end of SNES/Sega Genesis Era. In this era, game developers were limited, graphically speaking, in designing games; there's only so much you can do with eight or sixteen or 32 bits. to overcome the graphical shortcomings of games, they had to focus on gameplay and story. This is why games like Super Mario Bros. and the early Castlevainia's, Sonic The Hedgehog and other of the age still stand up after all these years. If you don't believe me, then you probably haven't played the games I'm talking about. My favorite games of all time are the Original R-Type from the Sega Master System and Contra: The Alien Wars from the SNES. Super Metroid is widely believed to be the best game ever.
Second Phase, the one we're in now, began around the time of the N64 and Playstation. During this time, the graphical capabilities of consoles exploded, and the talk was all about how many polygons could a given system push, particle effects, ambient lighting effect and anti-aliasing. Game designers shifted their focus from gameplay and story to whiz-bang graphics. This is not to say that gameplay was totally discarded, just put on the back burner.
Now that we are at the end of the second phase, I feel that graphics have 'plateaued' to a point. Things will continue to improve, but I think the improvements will be more subtle than mind blowing. At any rate, game designers now have the graphical freedom to do pretty much whatever they wish in a game.
The third phase, which I predict will be in full swing by the time the next generation of home consoles, will bring the focus back to story and gameplay. I've seen several things that I think point to this happening.
First, any game that is even moderately successful, or even suck out loud as in the case of the recent Tomb Raiders or any Army Men games or most anything put out by 989 Sports, will get at least one sequel, probably many. A coherent story is needed to sustain a series over many games, otherwise you're just changing the setting and the trinket that the hero or heroine is questing after.
Second, the recent success of games that are very story-dependant: Halo, Morrowind, Splinter Cell, (though this one does run the risk palette swaping the setting) the first Jak and Daxter and others that don't come immediately to mind.
Third, the fact that
R. A. Salvatore and
Orson Scott Card have been tapped by developers to write plots for video games.
All this point to a trend of the focus moving back to story and gameplay.
Hopefully.
We'll still have to deal with crappy games, cheap knockoffs and second-string imitators, but then again we've always had that trouble.
