There's a video on the net for anything. Pretty sad seeing how little the game has advanced from four incarnations in 10 years.

Coincidentally, I just saw this video, which suggests another direction gaming might go:

Isn't that just like those things that are on the floor of some malls? That let you pop bubbles or whatever

Yeah -- I pulled it from an article on itneractive advertising. They were talking about how it's starting to show up in airports, and I guess in malls too. I've never seen these, though, but they look pretty cool. And you could do some cool gaming stuff with something like this.

I think technology will improve more in the controller side of things. That's why it's so great to see things like the Wiimote and the balance board, but that is only the beginning

We can't be too far from having suits with thousands of sensors that the gamer can wear to do real life actions. E.g. in a boxing game, your character punches exactly how you punch, same power, trajectory etc.

Yeah true. Although by doing the time trial as opposed to grandprix or 4 player split screen they avoided some of the wicked slow down on the N64 version. Either way, Mariokart isn't really a game that benefits much from enhanced graphics. I doubt there's many hanging out for a HD Mariokart for example.

Maybe but it could definitely be fleshed out some more. Just look at the grass, a flat texture since the first game. They could definitely do something better than that. Trees that look like they came out of Paper Mario? The environments could definitely use an overhaul without going full HD.

Hah, they have one or two of those in the Mall near me. It's right in the middle of the walkway and kids love it.

I would say 95% of Nintendo fans really don't care about stuff like that. So it feeds itself really.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect environments on par with Mario Galaxy.

There's plenty left to do. Processing power and physics cards are where you'll see the most benefit. Down the road memristors will enable games to load instantly once they're installed onto the system.

A couple things you didn't mention:

- Draw distance
- On-the-fly model creation (entire cities, for example)
- Frame rate and resolution
- Physics (OK, you mentioned this, but there are huge strides that could be made here)
- Model detail
- etc.

Of course, the industry as a whole continues to specialize in terms of graphics. GTA X will be a completely realistic environment, probably some sort of VR—but Mario Kart 9 isn't going to look dramatically different (in terms of realism) from where it is now.

Yep, I agree for the most part. Mario is a cartoon character who is not going to get realistic hair for his moustache or finely textured clothing. The best he's going to look is how he looks on the boxcovers, where they show the models used for the game but with higher resolution and better lighting.

However, I'm not sure if GTA will ever look totally realistic. It's always had kind of a cartoony style to its characters, though it's much more subtle than what Nintendo does. Then again, I wonder if that's just due to the hardware limitations. In any case, the Gran Turismos and the sports sims are the games that will go for as much realism as possible.

Draw distance is one aspect that really improved from Mario 64 to Sunshine. In Mario 64, coins would just pop up out of nowhere when you got close enough, but in Sunshine you could look from far away and see them.

I haven't but thank you for the compliment.

All good points, as well as increased AI performance, number of enemies things on screen etc., but none of those bullet points sell systems. Graphics do, plain and simple. I doubt anyone would drop $400 on the Xbox 720 or PS4 if those were the checkpoints on the box instead of a pretty rendering that blows away current systems.

I'm not a graphics whore by any means but if next-gen equated to roughly the same graphics with those bullet points as features, I would be hard-pressed to drop the dough on it. I did buy the GCN 2.0 though so anything is possible. Price was a huge factor in that though.

Draw distance is a good one but we've gotten pretty damn good so far. Games like Crackdown and Oblivion have very good draw distances. Oblivion is limited by hardware, but they had some pretty crazy outdoor scenes where you could see for the equivalent of in-game miles and everything actually looked far away. I'd have to say that, frame-rate / pop-in / bug issues aside, something like Oblivion running at a high frame-rate is good enough for me, just in the way the 2D graphics of Super Mario World or Last Blade 2 are good enough and both are over a decade old.

The big breakthrough is not going to come from better graphics. If you compare graphics from 2009 to 1999 to 1989, I would argue there's a bigger difference from 1989 to 1999 than from 1999 to 2009.

I think more advances will come from physics and having some way to make the worlds much more interactive. Imagine if in GTA5 you could go into every single room within the city, rather than having an inviting facade for a building and a texture for a door for a place you can't enter. That to me, is more of a breakthrough than having better character models, although both will be improved. But this goes back to me talking about AAA games. Something like Elder Scrolls 5 or GTA 5 will use this. But it won't be necessary in every game.

I would love to see a system where you could control a little robot and have him pick stuff up and put stuff down -- gyroscopes, for example. I think that would be the wave of the future.

That sounds cool, until you realize someone has to design all those rooms, so you will essentially have 50,000 rooms that look the same because no one is going to spend the time to do that.

Also, you're never going to get 100% in that GTA when they plant 30,000 roaches you have to shoot in those buildings.

That's where procedural generation comes in. You wouldn't need to design every room.

The cost of that future? 1200 points:



Then there's always this:
http://www.nikkoamerica.com/nhe/dvd_...tor_video.html

While I agree that from here out the big breakthroughs are going to come from things other then graphics, the big change between those years is the evolution from 2D to 3D which is awfully hard to compare. Personally, I think the leap in 3D from Playstation 1 era to today is huge.

Or this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJAIk2nAwG0

Wow. jdodd got me. I totally missed that connection. Kudos.

I completely agree. We'll see more increases in graphics, but the real advances will be on the back-end processing. Better AIs, better physics, more immersive (i.e. interactable, if that's a word) environments, and so on. Stuff that's not necessarily obvious to the player through comapring screenshots, but that quickly becomes apparent as you play the game.

Has everyone seen the promotional video for Force Unleashed where the developers talk about how they combined three different physics engines so that when you use the force to throw an object at an enemy, the enemy will react differently every time, the object will behave differently depending on what it's made out of and its shape, etc. We'll see more and more of that kind of stuff.

I'll always remember overhearing the owner of the local mall-based videogame store, circa 1982, after returning from some trade show, 'Why would the Japanese enter the market? It can't get any better than this'.

In his defense, by 1982 Gorf had been released. Who could have forseen that there would ever be a video game better than Gorf?