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I believe that it is safe to say that video games have advanced considerably over the past 60-years (well, 60-years next year) in all respects. From humble beginnings such as Noughts & Crosses to next-gen games like Rainbow Six: Vegas, video games have continuously set the bar higher each year in respect to what gamers should expect. However, one factor that has accelerated more than any other has been the graphical fidelity of titles. From single screen monochrome sprites to 16-bit parallax scrolling to 32-bit 3D with assorted “bells and whistles”, the level of detail that we have come to expect has increased dramatically as the power of our gaming systems ever increase. And it is in this regard that I write this article and propose that maybe they shouldn’t.
Hot on the heels of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006 is the annual Mac gathering that is MacWorld (Jan 9-13 2006). MacWorld is, frankly, just another tradeshow, albeit one for a single computing platform, but is well attended by Apple themselves and typically used to make some big announcements/product releases. The 2006 event was no different with Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, taking the stage on Tuesday morning and this article takes a look at what was announced and attempts to take a view of the address after having taken a step back. Some of the stuff announced was expected, some stuff was missing, and one announcement came out of left-field and isn’t pleasing some new Mac owners…
The field of entertainment has seen many meldings of its various fields but with a trend towards films/movies. Books often are used as the basis of film plots or are even turning into movies, usually with dubious results. The same is sometimes true of music, such as with The Beetles’ “Yellow Submarine”, although it can move in other directions as well as can be seen with various on-stage musicals. Video games have also been the subject of such transitions with assorted attempts to bring movies into games (the dreaded “interactive movie”, such as Night Trap on the old Sega CD) and movie versions of games. Initially we may have hoped for great versions of the game that we loved to play but following Street Fighter - The Movie I think we all recognised that the concept was Doomed to failure. Let’s face it, which muppet decided to cast Kylie Minogue as Cammy?
I’m pretty much always in awe of many of the blogs where authors manage to come up with new content on a daily basis. Personally, I’m not a big writer of articles (a couple recently, which is pretty rare) and have pretty much exhausted the topics that I could think of. So, when it came to wanting to add some new content to the site and keep it from getting a little stale, I was a little stuck. Still, what’s the best idea in these situations? From the blogs that I read it seems to be to write about your experiences, so here goes…
As is probably well know around these parts by now, I’m someone who has had enough of Windows XP and decided (about 2-years ago) to try Apple, mostly because the OS (10.2 Jaguar, at the time) was meant to be very stable and, er, it looked pretty. In the time since Apple has released versions 10.3 (Panther, a wonderful OS) and 10.4 Tiger and it is Tiger that I wanted to review for this article. Originally I had been drafting a review for the new OS after I installed it as soon as it arrived but decided to give it a few months so that I can really express what I think. To be honest, I’m glad that I did because it’s not all Good News and some of the drawbacks I would not have noticed after the initial install.