Which is Worse? This?

Or This?

Fads, with a D

The interesting thing about PR departments is that they sometimes get caught up in their own hype, and the technology tends to perpetuate the untruths and misdirections until the whole thing just fades away, quietly into the distance.

The greatest example of this, of course, is "Blast Processing." This was SEGA's answer to how quickly Sonic the Hedgehog could run across the screen and how fast Ecco the Dolphin could sprint-swim. The Sega Genesis had no special hardware dedicated to "Blast Processing," it was just a bit of not-so-tricky programming. Sega knew it, gamers knew it, and Nintendo knew it. Who didn't know? Nintendo PR. They decided to release the game F-Zero touting its gamey awesomeness because it was Mode 7. Mode 7. Mode 7. Do you know what Mode 7 is? It's the 7th functionality mode of the Super Nintendo CPU - - Scaling and Rotation. Again, programming. F-Zero wasn't doing anything fancy. It was just the first SNES game to use Mode 7 . . . which had been there from the beginning.

What are the current PR nightmares?

Well, actually, the current crop ARE technological bridges. But they've just become buzz-words that people read in EGM or see in a review online and have no idea what they actually mean. Here are the most current three . . . at least until the next generation is half-way gone, and then the PR flamethrower will start spewing again.

Ragdoll Physics: Probably the most self-explanatory of the three. Throw a ragdoll against the wall and see how it reacts. Now create that ragdoll with an accurate bone structure, muscle-mass, and correct weight distribution and you can see how a real person would move when thrown, or falling, or tossed backwards by explosion. Here's a quick demo. Midway may not have been the first, or the only company to use this term in press releases, but their game "Psi-Ops" has the most realistic ragdoll reactions that I've ever seen.

Radiosity: In real life, if you have a perfectly white carpet and place a red couch upon it, look at the base. The red bleeds over onto the white . . . even though the white carpet is not a reflective surface. It just happens. It's called the principle of radiosity - - the fact that lines of color are blurred between objects. Or, simply, color radiates outward. Recently, programmers have been able to mimick this effect in games (just like the programming of individual fingers, and the programming of an object being able to cast a shadow upon itself - - still not possible with the Dreamcast).

Normal Mapping: This is one of those oddly-titled gaming techniques. Programmers basically write a high resolution version of a wall, full of textures, pockmarks, shadows, or any other thing they can think of. They take a 'picture' of this wall, and turn the high-res image into a simple low-res texture map. They then map the texture onto the standard wire-frame of the wall in the game. What happens is this: the gamer gets to see what looks like a high-resolution image, with the load time and speed of a low-resolution image.

It should be interesting to see what happens next winter for the 2006 holiday season. By that time, the battle between the Microsoft 360 and the PS3 should be heating up. The Nintendo Revolution may or may not be out, and may or may not have a great deal of momentum. By then, the PR departments of the big three will have to kick it into high gear and try to come up with more and more reasons to buy their respective systems.

It should be fun.