Let’s face it – the future sucks. Being so obese that you can’t lift your fat ass off your seat will be so commonly accepted. Robots will be left to do the dirty work, and that isn’t cool because, unlike the sweatshop workers of today, they don’t look sad and you can’t laugh at them. Robots are programmed to be happy while they do menial tasks, which sucks.
The future of gaming is even more bleak. Ever since Nintendo attempted to touch the more unfortunate side of the gaming society (aka old people), with their devices of doom called the Nintendo Wii, everyone, even non-gaming companies, have tried to follow suit to make digital life better for people over 40. Apple, for instance, created the iPhone and the iPad because they knew old people would go all sorts of crazy with keypad buttons, and that they would love a device that resembles their fantasies of the future during the 60’s.
Sony and Microsoft have tried to appeal to the much older community too, because apparently Nintendo has made a lot of money selling gaming consoles with remotes that were accidentally thrown into flat screen TVs, smashing them in the process, because they thought you have to throw the controller forwards when you’re playing Wii Bowling. They wanted to produce the same effect of making you look stupid while you’re playing (which has been the standard for the whole gaming era), sans the weird looking controllers we have been with since the beginning.
Enter the Kinect and the Move. Created by Microsoft and Sony respectively, these accessories will be available shortly to the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Both have been featured in the recent E3 2010, where nerds and gaming enthusiasts have gathered to watch the impending horror of the death of the gaming industry before their very eyes, in a fancy and exciting convention.
Both of these motion controllers, which feature state of the art sensors (I won’t go into any details here, go Google for it yourself) that somehow intelligently perceives your motion in front of it. This allows games like dancing to be more “dance-like” without the use of a heavy metal pad with four direction buttons on it. Boxing and fighting games wouldn’t need a badly designed glove-like accessory or a platform with infrared sensors that does the contrary to feel realistic. Driving is probably the worse – instead of using an already awkward-to-use steering wheel and pedals, you now just have to raise your hands in the air, grip and imaginary steering wheel, and you’re good to go. It’s like reliving what you were doing in your childhood again.
There’s also new ways of manipulating this new technology, like using it for simulation games like having a pet tiger in a jungle. With these new toys you can actually own a virtual pet tiger that you can feed, pet, and punch in the face by just letting your hands do the action in front of the motion sensors. Of course, all this does is just doom children when they realize that tigers don’t like being fed, pet, or punched in the face when they grow up as adults.
If there’s such thing as too much technology, it’s very apparent for the coming years of the gaming industry. This makes me want to throw away all my new games away and just start playing games that were made prior to 2008. Those were all better than most, if not all the new games we have now.
