Lunchtime Discussion: Power

First thing’s first, I’m actually writing today’s article. Sure you’ve had it good with Lorcan and Watchful for the past two days, but I’m back today. I hope you haven’t left the place a mess. Now onto today’s topic, console power. It seems with every new major title’s release developer’s talk about how they’re ‘pushing the system to it’s limits’ and that kind of chest beating. Sure, it makes a good advert for the game, but do we really buy it?

I talked about God of War II last week, and it makes sense to talk about it again in this context. God of War II is becoming the classic example of just what you can do with a console’s power, even when it’s successor is now on the market. With people at the time talking about the ‘revolutionary’ power of the new generation of consoles, it must have been more than a little embarrassing for other developers to have the guys and gals at Santa Monica put out something that simply blew away what they were doing on the PS3 at the time.

So, as the God of War II example clearly shows it’s not about the power you have, but about how you’re using it. So does it really mean anything when developers say they’re using all of a console’s power? Well in my opinion no, but that’s almost not the point. I guess it’s almost a question of developer’s trying to use technical terms as advertising for their games. For some reason this really gets at me,  maybe it’s to do with being a huge geek.

So what are your thoughts? Does it irritate you when developer’s talk of power? Is it right to use technical terms in advertising, when they don’t really mean very much? Or is all fair in love and advertising?