The Different Forms of Realism
There is no question that the ultra-realistic graphics appealed to me. I just prefer a sharp picture. But oddly enough in video gaming, I find all of the graphics, SD, HD, uber-PC disappointing. They are just different levels of disappointing. The problem is where my serious gaming began. My first big game was Zork ( I still have a copy if anyone wants to try it). Then I played just about every Infocom game ever written. For our younger friends, these are text only games from a time when computers had trouble producing six colors at one time. You would enter a room and read the description. After a while it became second nature to provide your own graphics. My graphics were GOOD! My Leather Goddess of Phoebus was a lot hotter that anything that ever came off a silicon chip. When games first went graphic, it was a gigantic step backward and for me we still haven't made up the ground.
So, for me personally, until the graphics get as good as I can make in my head they can't , in of themselves make a game real to me.
The other side of the coin is I love immersion and involvement. I did a lot of amateur theater and spent many years as a Revolutionary War and Civil War re-enactor. That side of me doesn't care that much for pretty pictures, I just want to take up my trusty firearm and plunge in. If the game is good and this one is, within a few minutes I'm sweating, ducking behind living room furniture, lifting my trusty Zapper/Thompson submachine gun to my hip and unleash the hounds of hell, the battles is on. I tend to play mostly when I'm home alone because it rattles my wife. Whether she fears for the antiques, my sanity or both I'm not sure.
I thought it was going to be a much tougher decision but it wasn't really. In the end, no matter how sharp the picture on the screen, I still felt like a puppet master working my pixilated doppelganger on invisible electronic strings. It was realistic, but it wasn't quite real.
With the Wii, I was in there, not a puppet, I was in there grunting, ducking, shooting. It was very visceral, I felt fear, anger, elation. It may not have been as realistic but it was a lot more real.
Would you experience the same thing and have the same experience? Probably not and I don't think you should try if you're really happy with what you got. You might want to be open at least. Or at least understand that for some of us, motion control is at least as important as graphics.
I was a little sad however as I packed up all my old COD games and the Belkin pad and sent them to a grateful friend. We spent a lot of good hours together but as Thomas Wolfe said, "you can't go home again."
