As I wander around E3, I'm struck by the sameness of most of the 3D-accelerated games. Sure, there are exceptions, like Talonsoft's Hidden and Dangerous, but for the most part, there seems to be a sameness to the way the games tend to look. Take the use of heavily filtered ground textures, for example. The last time I checked, real ground looked alive with grass, dirt, plants, rocks, and the other detritus of life. But if you look at most of the ground in games, you see terrain that looks as flat as anything out of an Alice-in-Wonderland chessboard and as blurry as my ceiling looks in the morning before I put on my glasses.

The Playstation Effect
Games on the Sony PlayStation, and even the Nintendo 64, have this kind of look to the ground, walls, and other broad surfaces. But PC games don't have to look like this. If you watch some of the technology demos from companies like Matrox, nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft, you can see the possibility of much richer graphics. Matrox's stunning technology demo, complete with rippling, transparent, reflective, running water hints at the possibilities.

Then I bumped into one of the nVidia marketing folks, who clued me in. "The PlayStation 2 will be good for us," he said.

He must have noticed the baffled look on my face, so he elaborated. "The Playstation 2 will up the ante. Right now, when we talk to game developers, we tell them 'more triangles! Higher resolution textures! Bump mapping!' But then they tell us: 'the PlayStation doesn't do that.'"

The reality of the game business is that console games generate far more revenue than PC games, even though PC games can be more profitable. The amount of money that console games can generate is an attractive, and often addictive, revenue stream for many companies. Most developers don't have the resources to maintain two discrete sets of art, so games get developed to the lowest common denominator. The result are games that have a certain sameness in the way they look, due to low res, overfiltered (or pre-filtered) textures and limited color palettes used in the artwork.