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Jason Cross's recent foray into Doom 3 benchmarking made me think a bit about games, and what I like.

Blitzkrieg

My gaming history goes back to the time someone bought me a copy of Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg. For those of you who weren't into gaming (or weren't even around then), Blitzkrieg was a board game that was sort of a distilled version of a World War II campaign. The game consisted of several hundred cardboard counters that you'd move around a board with a hexagonal grid. Combat was resolved with dice rolls.

But when I'd play with friends, we never saw paper counters and die rolls. Instead, we'd see columns of tanks and embedded infantry.

Later, when PC and console games arrived on the scene, I found many of them to be relatively uninteresting. That is, until two things happened. First, the legendary SSI Gold Box games, based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons arrived on the PC gaming scene. Secondly, games began supporting sound. (Former Amiga users take note: I know you had sound before the PC did.)

Games started to interest me more at that point because I felt I could blend my imagination into the game and feel like I was taking part in the goings-on. In other words, the experience of "being there" was more important than the actual gameplay. To me, the immersion was as much a factor as the mechanics.

Others feel differently, of course. The current debate on Doom 3 raging inside the gaming community is a good example of this. If you want to read a subset of the dispute, check out the "Game Design Lessons I Learned in Doom 3" on the Quarter to Three Web site. The forum is a place where a lot of reviewers—and occasionally game developers—hang out and debate just about everything.



I've been having a good time with Doom 3, but the "experience" didn't feel quite right. It wasn't the mechanics of the game, which some people seem to dislike intensely. It was the lack of internal consistency. ("Whaddya mean I can't strap the flashlight to my gun?") Luckily, an enterprising game named Glen Murphy came up with the Doom 3 duct tape mod, which allows you to tape a flashlight to your weapons. Now I'm happy.

The same holds true for me in multiplayer gaming—but here, the "experience" is the social milieu. I've rarely played online games. For all the supposed immersive goodness of EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and others, I found them to consist mainly of repetitive mechanics. Their strong suit is social interaction, but that didn't appeal to me. On the other hand, LAN parties are immense fun, because you're in a room full of gamers, all screaming at each other.

Of course, the most immersive environment won't make up for really poor gameplay. But I've never liked "pure" games much, nor really cared if a game that grabbed me wasn't perfect—just so long as I could leave the real world for a spell.

As technology evolves, realism and immersibility will just keep improving. It will be interesting to see how gameplay evolves as the technology makes it easier to lose ourselves in the virtual world.

This Week on ExtremeTech

It's a big week here at ExtremeTech. We're still buzzing about everything we saw at the SIGGRAPH show last week, from holograms to wearable technology. The really big news, though, is that we're finally going to announce the winner of the case mod contest on Wednesday. Whether you entered a case or not, make sure to drop by and check out the winning design.

Meanwhile, we have the Aopen EX915 small form factor review that we promised for last week, as well as a roundup of all the small form factor reviews we've run in the past couple of years. Plus: Dave Salvator hammers on various external audio solutions and Jason Cross tries to answer the question: Does memory latency really matter?

Just another week at ExtremeTech.