The Next Generation Console Wars By Steven Merritt The Christmas holiday season is currently getting very close. At the present there is allot of talk about the next generation of console gaming systems and most gamers have very strong opinions on the topic. Some base their opinion on loyalty to a gaming company. I don't do this, for I have no obligations to any gaming company. Some base it off of nostalgia. Although I have played games for as long as I can remember I don't do this, for I don't believe in living in the past. I am always looking for something better. Still there are others that base their opinions on first impressions. That is some people only looking at one system and only one system and then feel completely certain that it is the best system out there and therefore do not bother with researching about the other systems that are looming over the horizon. I do not do this. I have thoroughly researched all of the systems that are supposed to be coming out in the near future (that is if you consider in one year "In the near future,"). I base my predictions off of the wealth of knowledge that I have gained from reading and playing as well as past experiences with the gaming industry. I don't claim to know for certain what is going to happen in the future. With that said I will now talk about my predictions of the future. First there is Sega. Sega's worst problem is their management. At one point in time they managed to heir a man by the name of Bernie Stolar. He was one of the most influential men behind the success of the Playstation. However, later they fired him. To illustrate what I mean when I talk about management problems I will give one example although there are many of them that I have to choose from. Due to managerial problems there was a problem in the production of the Dreamcast. They made two different systems with different graphics chips in them and then compared them. After doing so they decided that the one with a 3D FX chip set in it was the best of the two and made a deal with them to get the chips that they would need to produce the Dreamcast (it wasn't called this at the time.) Latter their development team refused to use this hardware and this lead to large legal problems, that were ultimately settled out of court. After this they gave the system a new name. A name that would not be associated with this whole legal dilemma, they called it the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast can render 3.5 to 4 million polygons per second and it has a 56 k. modem in it. However this is not the advantages that it has that matters most. It runs off of a modified version of Windows CE. This means that it will be easy to port games from the computer to the Dreamcast. The hardware is almost the same as their Naomi arcade systems, so it will be easy to port arcade games to the Dreamcast. Further more development is quick compared to the PS2. At one point in time I thought that they would make a come back with their Dreamcast. But due to their managerial problems and PS2 advances, I now feel differently on the matter. The Dreamcast will do well for about a year and then will quickly decline due to the release of the PS2 with all it's games and graphics. The PS2 can do 6.4 billion floating point calculations per second. Further more it can to fractal distillation render-on-the-fly. Once again this is not what makes the system likely to succeed. The advances that I referred to earlier was the advances in middleware. Now Smaller companies are flocking to the PS2 just like they used to be flocking to the Dreamcast. The PS2 has many developers. I predict that the playstaion2 will be the dominant system shortly after it's release, what do you think?