Gaming Evolution

I’ve been playing games ever since my father bought a knock off of the old family computer. He followed it with a handheld, and then bought me a PS one 5 years after its release. It became a tradition after that, my next PS was purchased 5 years after its release and the same goes with the PS3 and the PSP.

You could imagine my frustration/excitement waiting for the years to pass by to the point when I can finally afford these game consoles and handhelds. And with all that years of waiting, I had more than enough time to ogle and research.

I became a fan of Sony products, played till mid night and woke up early in the morning to play again. Being a gamer, I was exhilarated by just thinking about the future of gaming, 3D, holograms, voice control, movement capture, virtual reality, maybe even a Matrix like world where we boot ourselves to computers and fly like Superman and dodge bullets like Neo.

But at the present, for gaming, I use a cell phone…

I didn’t know what happened, but in my perspective, Sony, my favorite provider of gaming hardware, is just waiting for new technologies to pop up, copy it, and wait for new innovations again. X-box is somehow impressive for creating the Kinect, but if Nintendo hadn’t come up with the Wii, would Microsoft bother making it?

The real front runners are Apple and Nintendo. Nintendo was already legendary before, but the Wii made it clear that not all gamers are hard core nerds that spend hours completing all levels just to see hidden easter eggs. They revolutionized gaming by strengthening casual gaming with the Wii remote that detects movement.

Apple is currently the king of casual gaming, not because their smart phones look so good, it’s because they perfected touch screen technology and installed gyroscopic sensors.

Sony and Microsoft held onto consoles and handhelds thinking that making their products faster and more powerful ensured success, but that is not the case. Although we as consumers think that we want our old consoles to be better in graphics, Apple and Nintendo thought differently and provided us with gaming hardware that was very enjoyable and also futuristic.

Nintendo is facing difficulties with its 3DS, Sony is releasing the Vita in February (which means I’ll get mine in 2016), Microsoft is gunning for its new X-box in 2013, and Apple? I don’t think Apple cares about gaming that much, or are they?