Move over old-skool gamers, it's the final level for you

(created with the South Park Avatar creator)

(With the launch of the Microsoft Kinect, all three major gaming platforms now have a controller that is motion oriented. In other words: the gamer needs to get off the couch and put his or her hind quarters into gear. The success of the Nintendo Wii is well known but it seems that both the Playstation Move and Microsoft's Kinect are overnight successes as well.

I am an old-skool gamer. I don't have much time to game anymore but when I do I like to sit or lie on the couch and immerse myself with near religious passivity into a fantasy world of choice. So this development of control schemes that require more physical activity than moving my thumbs and index fingers is worrying to me. Soon video games will cause loss of weight, lowered blood pressure and development of musculature reminiscent of an Olympic athlete. That's not going to do a geek's image any good.

It's the last days of Rome for the old-skool gamer. The grossly overweight, snacks and soda popping gamer is a dying breed. A cultural exponent of the twentieth century is on its last legs in this first decade of the twenty-first century. All that will be left is a small niche of humanity that perseveres as the stereotype old-skool gamer, mainly found among those that play their games on PC's. Most probably roaming the World of Warcraft.

But as all geeks know: one just can't stop progress. It's only a matter of time before a motion based system is developed  for PC's and then even the last vestiges of old-skool gamers will have fallen. Once the drivers have been downloaded, the patches installed and autoexec.bat's and config.sys's been edited, there will be no stopping the onslaught of health for the PC gamers.

It is sad. I gain some solace from the existence of that one South Park episode that stands as a proud monument to a lost culture. The culture of the old-skool gamer.

15 years of PlayStation

The Sony PlayStation has turned 15 on Thursday it says in an article on PCMAG.com. In the days it was launched, those that played games on consoles played them on Atari's, Nintendo's and SEGA's machines. Some of these had been around since the late seventies and Sony had some catching up to do in a market that was still largely a niche market (have a look at some of these vintage machines here at Benway's collection).

Sony caught up. They sold some 240 million units of the PlayStation, PS one (a re-issue of the original) and PlayStation 2 and went on to launch the PlayStation 3. Although this last console had a little bit of a shaky start. The high price point and lack of tripple A games seemed to dampen sales of this new generation. The Microsoft Xbox 360 already had a huge following and a slew of mainstream games to play on it and Sony had to fight an uphill battle. In Februari 2010 Shacknews arrived at new estimates of PlayStation 3 sales that put it at 33+ million sold. This was close to the Xbox 360's previously published number of 39 million units sold. Although no one could touch the Nintendo Wii, which had become a runaway success and had sold 67+ million units.

In the 15 years the PlayStation has been around PC gaming has had to deal with the rising popularity of console gaming. PC gaming is not dead however as some gaming analysts would have you believe. But it has shifted its focus on online play and online distribution. Games like World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and the online distribution service Steam, keep PC gaming alive and kicking with tens of millions of players every day.

The venerable PlayStation has seen it all. It has travelled the timeline from the 8 bit graphics beeps and squeaks era to the hyper realistic every onscreen muscle moves surround sound era. And it has survived. It begs the question, what's next? What will the PlayStation 4 bring and what will it be up against? I am willing to bet it will probably be a Nintendo.

(Read the latest posts on the front page!)