this quikie written for KoreanZ.com

Bill Gates opened the CES show floor on Friday morning with the second keynote of the show. Bill brushed over the evolution of the computer and his vision of "extreme entertainment." During the speech, a pedestal with a mysterious object atop was cloaked in black cloth. At the end of the speech, Bill whipped back the cloth to reveal publicly for the first time the Xbox's actual design..

Those into gaming will know that the style of the box has no importance relative to the quality of the hardware inside. So one of the Microsoft presenters walked the crowd through two games in progress on a prototype development kit. The first, "Munch's Oddysee" was originally scheduled to be part of the Playstation2 launch but was paid off by Microsoft to release the game exclusively on Xbox. The demonstration was truly impressive, showing extremely high quality animated figures in fully textured, antialiased environments. Actions were smooth and believable.

The second demo, whose title and publisher are not recalling themselves to me, showed a little girl a few inches tall that wielded a giant hammer as big as herself in an environment full of giant insects. The gamer has a number of very creative ways to use the hammer to squash, wipe, and mutilate the bugs. This demo was equally impressive for its high quality realtime rendering: the most impressive part of the demo was the ending bit, where a giant robot comes to life that mimics the girl's actions. The demoer made the robot jump too high and consequently the robot's head went crashing through the ceiling with a resounding clang, leaving the robots legs dangling helplessly below.

While I wouldn't say that the graphics are at the point where they are realistic - that is to say where screenshots could be mistaken for real life photos, they are approaching broadcast-quality animation. The phrase Bill used was "Toy Story-like quality" which really is pretty apt. I figure in another five years, we'll have movies with computer / digitized actors that are mistakeable for humans, and another three years after that will see realtime, interactive "reality," at which point the video game industry will be able to reach whole new audiences by creating completely believable simulations and scenarios.

The Xbox will be coming out this Fall, pretty much at the same time as Nintendo's successor to the Nintendo 64, the Game Cube. Nintendo barely had a showing at all at CES and has been keeping the hype meter pretty low on their upcoming box, previously codenamed "Dolphin," whereas Microsoft has been running their press engine full steam. While it looks on paper like the Xbox is far superior to the Game Cube, Microsoft has been posting numbers that are aggressively optimistic theoretical maximums (not really representative of in-game performance) whereas Nintendo has been publishing guaranteed in-game minimums. The real performance figures are rather close, according to sources at IGN and elsewhere.

Both boxes are considerably faster than the Playstation2 and sport more features, but that's to be expected from a platform that will have had over a year extra to develop. The PS2 has gained itself a reputation for being devilishly difficult to program efficiently - this may steer developers towards platforms that are easier to exploit but it also means that the current set of PS2 games are nowhere near using the PS2's full capacity; much more powerful games may be coming out before long. Even if Sony isn't good at making the hardware trivial to code for, it does have a positive reputation in terms of developer support, so we should see PS2 games being cranked out at an increasing rate. One of the aspects of the PS2 that makes it so interesting is its ability to play games designed for the original Playstation as well as DVDs and CDs. Consequently, it can today already engage thousands of games, which is impressive for a newly-released platform.

Christmas 2001 will see an interesting, aggressive console market come to maturation: the Xbox and Dolphin will be newly out, the Playstation2 will have a full repertoire of games to play on, and the Dreamcast may also remain a contender.

All four will offer some form of Internet connectivity with multiplayer gaming, email, and web browsing. The PS2 will have acquired a hard drive peripheral, and the Xbox will ship with one inside. It's hard to say where things will go from there or who will win the wars, but it's certain that Microsoft's Xbox is to be taken very seriously - its widespread support among game developers, Windows-based API, and high-speed graphics architecture (courtesy Nvidia Corporation) will offer a compelling array of games and services. Nintendo's Dolphin, if it is to succeed, must be able to match Microsoft's hype with a fully loaded system shipping with a large array of compelling games. PS2, in the interim, will take the lead as the home entertainment system of choice.