Aaron McKenna: Dell Should Get Into The Heating Business

I’m told that it is going to be a bitterly cold and long winter for those of us in the British Isles this year. I don’t know if it’ll actually be any colder than other winters, but with the first snowfall arriving in late November when we usually don’t see it in all but the more northern parts until January I’ll believe them on the longevity point.

Thankfully the rain swooped in to get rid of any pretensions of picturesque scenery, leaving us instead with simply very cold rain and a tendency towards not leaving our homes and offices wherever possible.

Personally I think that I’m sitting pretty, as the amount of heat outputted by the various machines sitting or being tested in the office means that apart from that first stretch when you enter the room and it doesn’t give you much incentive to take off your jacket, our office rarely requires that the heating be turned on even in the depths of winter.

Normally something is required to hit a computer into heating gear, though my personal desktop is one of Dell’s XPS Generation 3’s whose Pentium 4 3.6GHz processor begins to output heat as soon as my finger comes to within ten feet of the power button. That doesn’t stop me from cranking her up into gear for a game of something around the 11 O’clock tea break ("How British" says the Yank in the audience) that really heats up the place.

My satisfaction with the heating properties of my XPS didn’t stop a Dell technician from pointing out to me that I’m a whole three generations behind, mind, and as I sat down to breakfast with him one chilly Monday morning he told me about the ultra-cool BTX case that the newer XPS Gen 6 comes ensconced in. Not the best thing to point out to me whilst I was grasping at a mug of tea in order to ascertain whether or not the tips of my fingers would be joining me when I sat down to type this later in the day, but it was a reminder that we’re entering the Season of Goodwill & Hardware Upgrades.

Be we spending our hard earned cash on ourselves or others, gadgets and upgrades are high on many people’s list of things to buy at Christmas these days. Our own Holiday Buyers Guide 2005 is a testament to this. Personally I’m looking at upgrading my x800 XT to an x1800 and maybe, just maybe, I’ll relent and get an MP3 player - I’ve had one or two cross my desk of late and I’m beginning to soften to the idea of getting one for myself.

All that nice hardware generally gets put to use playing our precious videogames, and I’m afraid to have to say that this year I have, generally speaking, been quite disappointed by the final produce. It’s fair to say that there have been plenty of alright games that’ll do us for a week or so, but there has been nothing neither groundbreaking nor exciting.

At this stage most of the major titles expected have been released, and as expected I’ve enjoyed most of the games I said that I’d enjoy - Civilization IV, Age of Empires III and Call of Duty 2 to name but three in descending order of sequeldom. But I was still disappointed by them for a number of reasons, chief among which is the fact that for the most part I’ve enjoyed the same things before.

Call of Duty 2 is a bunch of new interactive set-piece action shots ripped from World War II and Age of Empires III is more base building, this time with a colonial spin. Civilization IV I wouldn’t call unoriginal, as it’s a formula for a successful franchise that doesn’t need all that much tweaking, and even within these confines the developers managed to do a good job. That is until it came to bug testing, and the game lets itself down as being an unstable statue of grace and beauty.

Pretty much the same applies across the board this year, with Black & White 2 letting itself down by not fixing many of the glaring mistakes in the original, making it more of the same in a bad way, and Brothers in Arms 2 being, well, Brothers in Arms with a new subtitle.

I could go on, but to boil it all down since E3 back in May we’ve had the world promised to us, we’ve seen much good stuff and then when we received the final product all we find ourselves with is the games we played last Christmas with fancier graphics and some new scenarios.

There has been nothing of note that has been groundbreaking or even particularly evolutionary this year, and it would seem that the marketers have won out over the developers when it comes to deciding what should and shouldn’t be put into games. Instead of being allowed to try new things, even in small and measured quantities, the money masters have it would seem decided to go with the old tried and tested methods for success.

So it would seem that I’m going to spend this cold winter playing the same things over. Two days into Call of Duty 2 and I’m not that particularly engaged - apart from the set-pieces I’ve seen and done it all before. Civilization and perhaps even multiplayer games of AoE III will keep me going for a while, but with variety being the spice of life I think I’m going to have to cast my net further back and get into the good old Battlefield 2 again.

Hopefully the New Year will provide better pickings, as games not rushed to release for Christmas will sometimes be the ones to produce the truly interesting highlights. In the meantime however Q4 2005 has not produced many titles that will feature as more than mere footnotes in the shadow of greater titles past and to come in the history of videogaming.