A little less conversation

Yahoo! and MSN are two different entities when it comes to the entertainment world. As much as you'd love to be the first to bash MSN for mainstream stories, at least they don't employ relative idiots into their company like the former. There has never been a Yahoo! entertainment highlight that I have felt intrigued about. I generally get the sense that they let high school yearbook clubs do the work for them, and the Playback series specifically reeks of...well, hackery. It's extremly bad stuff, and I even get the sense every other "feature" that they are targeting parents who don't know anything about gaming. That may be true, but it's sort of insulting to...well...me. I know games, and they don't.

MSN, however, generally keeps in touch with multiple levels of the industry, usually citing a good combination of gamers, the industry, and the hard numbers to back up anything they write. A little slacked, of course, but nothing I would ever slam them on. Recently, they did a bit on motion controls and a decent list of remakes that could be done with them. I appreciated the scope of their idea, especially when it came to Pilotwings. Sadly, it just makes me wish for a VR helmet.

I'll be the first to say that going forward with an advanced idea too early is suicidally stupid from a business and reputation standpoint. Look at the overpowered Jaguar and Saturn. Both had complex ideas in a very absurdly confusing box that developers didn't want to touch. The VR idea worked rarely, and it's scope was limited to game shows, technology features, and amusement parks. No practical gaming use was made from that tech, and no one has dared touch it since in any serious fashion. Yet, here I am, about to say what I firmly believe should not happen.

Bring back VR.

Look, I know that you have every right to lynch me for saying that, but there are facts that can vindicate me. No one is going to get VR right, and we're at least 5 years from doing it the slightest bit of justice, but we can take a step backwards. You heard me. Rewind our tech five years to match a new tech. It's like a maturity match. You'd hate for your 16 year old daughter to scrog a 35 year old, but 18 wouldn't be as bad. So why not bring Goldeneye back with the VR helmet?

The trouble is that all the tech points to this being the final destination. We first arrived at VR only to scrub it in an effort to get everything else right first. Now we have photo-realism and nothing to evolve with in a gameplay sense. Nintendo made the "rumble" feature standard, Sony joined with them on the motion control front, and Natal is promising that we don't even need a controller to enjoy games. Even nVidia, Sony, and HD set makers are offering up future versions of 3-D gaming with or without a set of glasses. Everything is pointing right back at VR.

The good: we've learned from our mistakes. You simply cannot force an advanced idea into the mainstream. We are fully capable of getting VR chambers with terrific graphics on several processors combined with wind, temperature, force feedback, etc...but we don't. It costs too much. No one will back it. Developers for these things are too clumsy and careless. We have baby stepped our way towards even uttering the phrase "virtual reality" for at least a decade, and no one has said it since in a serious light.

The bad: We're dodging it at this point. 3-D glasses restrict you more than anything. The player is still confined to the POV allowed by a television set. Project Natal is great, but how is a player going to turn around in an FPS? How is a player going to aim? There will obviously be sidesteps like the Wii's bounding box, but that's only a sidestep. The Wii has proven, if anything, that the great idea of free-motion is nothing without focus. IGN once had an idea back in the day of what the Revolution's control scheme was actually going to be, and their ideas blew the Wiimote out of the water, mainly because they understood that anything free-motion was going to demand a focus. The focus a gamer has right now is the TV set, and while HD has broadened the focus, it's only been expanded in width...nothing else.

VR is a concept that should happen again, but I'm not entirely sure when it should happen. The later it happens, the more consumers will pay for technology that is only adaquate. As a community, we will literally be taken for granted. The sooner it happens, the less games we can actually expect and the less support it will bring. There's also a far greater chance of a second failure and another decade long delay.

All of the signs point towards VR, but I'm interested in when the industry will admit this. 3-D television sets or goggles don't impress me. VR would...and I'm willing to take the graphical hit to attain it.

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