The way we play games has dramatically changed over the past few years to incorporate many more features. But are they really necessary or just a gimmick to make us buy there consoles?
An example would be the virtual boy, a console made to fill in the gap between the N64 being released. It was a virtual reality headset with a controller. It used two screens each for one eye to simulate a 3d effect. For the time it was new and innovative yet it was poorly designed with it being very difficult to place the virtual boy in a comfortable position and it would cause eye strain and headaches. Due to its bad design and lack of good games for it caused it to be one of Nintendo's worse consoles. Yet today there is new hope for virtual reality in the Oculus Rift. So far its received a reasonably good response and its still under development, though there are still complaints of nausea and headaches which may be unavoidable. It uses a similar interface to the virtual boy with a headset and then it can be attached to controllers to move but they are also developing a walking system where players are placed in a harness and can walk in their virtual reality.
Though a story that captivated me recently about it was of a terminal bedridden cancer sufferer using it to experience visiting places she had always wanted to with the Oculus Rift. It is a great new way of using gaming technology and just shows that this technology could have lots of uses for many different people.
In recent years motion controllers and detectors were used in most consoles after the success of the wii. Motion controls allowed players to feel more immersed as there actions were directly affecting the game in a sense so players felt like they were wielding swords or guns instead of just the controller.
An example would be the virtual boy, a console made to fill in the gap between the N64 being released. It was a virtual reality headset with a controller. It used two screens each for one eye to simulate a 3d effect. For the time it was new and innovative yet it was poorly designed with it being very difficult to place the virtual boy in a comfortable position and it would cause eye strain and headaches. Due to its bad design and lack of good games for it caused it to be one of Nintendo's worse consoles. Yet today there is new hope for virtual reality in the Oculus Rift. So far its received a reasonably good response and its still under development, though there are still complaints of nausea and headaches which may be unavoidable. It uses a similar interface to the virtual boy with a headset and then it can be attached to controllers to move but they are also developing a walking system where players are placed in a harness and can walk in their virtual reality.
Though a story that captivated me recently about it was of a terminal bedridden cancer sufferer using it to experience visiting places she had always wanted to with the Oculus Rift. It is a great new way of using gaming technology and just shows that this technology could have lots of uses for many different people.
As for handheld consoles a feature I found quite interactive was the voice recognition on the Nintendo DS. My first game for this console was nintendogs where voice commands are quite important and it made the experience much more fun because of it, though infuriating at times with how picky the voice recognition is. In other games you could also blow into the microphone and it would blow objects in the game which was also a fun feature. Today both the PS4 and Xbox One make use of voice commands for many of the games menus, simply turning the console on and off is a simple voice command... and so is being transported to the search engine Bing.
With mobile and tablet gaming becoming increasingly popular the use of touch screen capabilities has allowed for a diverse variety of games, from fruit ninja to angry birds. The mobile market has also allowed for many more smaller companies to make games as they don't need to be as complex and are smaller as the technology they run on is relatively limiting. For these games its almost a step back graphically but there games need to be more innovative to stand out in the mobile market.
Or not in some cases, just being featured on a certain you tubers channel can make a hit.
Another feature that is also quite popular at the moment is the "share" button function on the PS4 controller, allowing players to quickly share their gaming experiences onto the internet. Other systems have similar features like the Wii U allowing you to leave comments in game and they will pop up on other peoples games when they play through them. The main components of most gaming devices haven't changed much however with the same use of analog sticks, buttons and triggers but with the future of possible virtual reality this might change back to more motion controllers.
No comments:
Post a Comment