Cleanse, Tone, Defrag: How Far We’ve Come
You know that warm and fuzzy feeling you sometimes get — no, not baked bean or curry induced wind, the other kind; the word alludes me, but it always reminds me of that awesome early nineties Indie Brit-Pop band, Inspiral Carpets — ah, that’s it, inspiration. Sorry, there’s been a lot of Victoria Wood on TV lately and she’s rubbed off on me. Don’t worry, I won’t end this edition with one of her piano skits.
Back on topic, it’s not often that I get a bout of inspiration for an article from a video-game that isn’t a review of aforementioned video-game. The offender this time around being the upcoming L.A. Noire from Rockstar and Team Bondi. Yes, “upcoming.” I refuse to acknowledge that my American chums got this game four days before me.It’s less the game itself, but more the technology behind it that sparked a rather existential thought process. The game uses a new type of motion capture called MotionScan to perfectly render not only a real-life actor’s face, but each and every facial expression they make, presenting the gamer with a shiny and new, fully realized sense of realism than anything that’s ever been seen on a home console before. It’s so literally breathtaking, especially the first time you see it, that I’m fairly certain that it would have been declared witchcraft and dunked in a river back back in the day. Sure, that’s not the most sound analogy as electricity would have been seen as the power of a god, but hey, I’m going with it.
Seeing the nuances and like-for-like recreation of Aaron Staton as Detective Cole Phelps for some random reason cast my mind back to my youth. It was the time of the original PlayStation and game magazines still had demo-discs. One afternoon, while waiting for my tea, I was sitting, cross-legged, on my living room floor playing a game; I was marveling at the at-the-time groundbreaking visuals and fawning over Lara Croft’s blocky boobs. My Grandpa used to sit in there with me, under duress at times as I commandeered the big ole’ CTR TV — but there was only so much Maury he could watch, so it kind of evened it out. Sometimes our conversation would turn to what I was playing as he’d offer his suggestion of how to get past a certain puzzle, or bark a laugh if Lara “fell” off a ledge. The FMV of the Great Wall of China blowing up played, and after it finished, I’ll always remember him saying “you know, one day games are gonna look like that.”
He was right. Within mere years, graphics had improved two-fold and each time he’d see a game that looked even better than the last, he’d remind me and say “‘ere, see, I was right” before lightly tapping the building ash from the end of his cigarette into the tray. It wasn’t until the Dreamcast came along and Resident Evil: Code Veronica that he said that the graphics had surpassed that one Tomb Raider cut scene he’d seen years ago. After that we didn’t so much do the afternoon gaming sessions, namely owing to my increasing amount of coursework and my guilt for hogging the main TV purely because playing on a big screen is just awesome getting the better of me.
If he could see L.A. Noire now, he’d been astounded. Speechless. But then he’d make a crack and say “told you.” Also, being the man that he was, he’d probably tell me that while he queued up the Enterprise theme to sound in the background.
This correlation can be seen even by recent gamers who started out on the PS2. The leaps and bounds in graphical technologies, lightning, even the other, sometimes overlooked aspects of gaming such as writing and the plot, are truly amazing in comparison; and has made gaming in the last generation more akin and on par with going out to the movies. It gets bounded about a lot, but when you take a step back and look between titles, it is sort of staggering.
In the same vein, just look at our phones. They’re not the grey bricks doubling as paperweights of yore or that cool but ultimately crappy Nokia slide phone that Neo had in The Matrix that everyone wanted in my school – they’re computers in their own right, in some cases for certain users, eliminating the need for a desktop or laptop altogether. Then when you factor in how technology has assisted us, enhanced and made our lives better, easier, menial tasks significantly less menial and the world a lot less smaller compared to maybe ten years ago? It’s incredible. Being able to pull up on-the-fly literally anything you need to know; using images to search the Internet; getting the name of a track and artist just by hearing thirty second blasts; having an app translate in real-time a sign from one language to another; making friends with people the world over — now come on, if all of that isn’t the Star Trek dream then I don’t know what is.
Oh, and yeah, I totally lied, I am going to end on a piano number. Take it away, Ms. Wood!
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