I'll Put $20 on Red and Black
Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del mentioned on his current post that he is planning to buy a PS3 for one game in particular (my link is better than his, despite the flash ad), and “just in case [BluRay] wins the HD format war.”
I know I’m kind of in a post-exam tailspin here, but the profit diagram on that little investment strategy looks a lot like a prison shower scene. Putting down serious wampum on both sides of a format war with Sony involved is just asking for it in a couple of years, when the peace treaty involves a third format, or affordable dual-format players, or simply a crushing Sony defeat at the hands of market feasibility and reasonable compromise on technical merits.
My perspective on consoles is as follows: if you’re not giving me a novel reason to sit in front of a television screen, I’m already wondering why I don’t have WASD and an optical mouse. As a brief former student of models for precise instrumental control, a keyboard and mouse is a near-ideal compromise for a translational (WASD) and rotational (mouse) control. You have 4 degrees of freedom, from what I can tell: left/right and forward/backward on the keyboard, plus yaw and pitch from the mouse. Trying to do that with two analog sticks always feels like playing darts to me.
“Hitman,” for example, while being a great challenge to play, increases its difficulty by forcing the player to monkey with the pitch (up/down tilt) of the view all the time. Casting to reality, this would be like having trouble with your head rolling backwards when you walk, especially when climbing stairs. Adding in a non-targeting gun aspect just makes things more complicated.
The Bond game I’m playing with my roommate kind of does the neck work for you, leaving you to yaw-steer with the right thumb and do the ambulating on the left thumb. This works, but you have this weird zeroeth-order thing on the pitch and first-order thing on the yaw and translation. To the nonintrospective player, this is probably optimally easy, but it’s bothersome to me in terms of the science of the motion. It also does a GTA-style L1 autotarget. It’s Bond, for goodness sakes. The man doesn’t miss.
All this is why I’m looking for Wiimotes, plastic guitars, and touch-sensitive floor mats for the consoles, in addition to good RPGs, which at this point I think I’m conditioned to like better on consoles.