The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King game makes use of assets from the feature such as the original score and cast voices. A bonus includes high-quality vignettes that mesh the game and movie together. © Electronic Arts.

When Magnavox first introduced the Odyssey Video Game system in 1972, it did little more than allow early game developers to create a moving blip on a blackened screen, but it did catch the eye of a generation of game players that has lead to a nearly $10 billion a year industry that is gaining ground on the movie industry in both entertainment value and choice.

Though not a scientific comparison, looking over the video games released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 (PS2) systems for the years 2001, 2002 and 2003 is a very telling exercise.

And, of course, where they are going is not just about who is buying them, but why. Video games are all about “eye-candy” and game play. To be successful, the game must not only engage the player but it also must look good, and game buyers expectations have grown significantly over the last 20 years.

Mark Long of Zombie Games thinks today’s state-of-the-art vfx feeds players’ desire for ultra-realistic play.

“The new consoles and the state of the art PC have driven the players’ expectations higher as they are looking for more realism in an almost 100% computer-generated world,” said Mark Long, ceo Zombie Games. “And we don’t have to look that far back to remember what it was like when you could see the details, the jagged edges of the pixels, the disappearing walls, that said that’s how they (the game developers) did it. But that is not how it is now, or it will be in the future. The visual effects that we can do now are only a fraction of what we will be able to do in the future.”

Today’s leading consoles, the Xbox and PlayStation 2, both have substantial and fairly equal power.

The PS2 features the 194.912MHz 128-bit Emotion Engine with a 24KB cache, Sony Graphics 147.456MHz Graphics Synthesizer, 32MB total memory and a 3.2GB per second memory band. Polygon performance runs at 66M per second with a 2.4G per second fill rate.

The Xbox, on the other hand, mimics the computers of the day with an Intel Pentium III central processing unit featuring 733MHz with dual 32KB and 128KB cache and a 250MHz custom-designed X-Chip. The system boasts 64MB total memory and 6.4GB per second memory band. This gives the Xbox a bit more polygon performance power at 125M per second with a pixel fill rate of 4.0G per second leading to increased graphics clarity and movement speed.

Which means when it comes to processing power and visual depth of field, the Xbox is clearly the technical winner. However, PlayStation 2 retains superiority due to its market penetration title library, or by virtue that they have been around longer and just have more stuff.

What it has become is a contest of creating games marketable to fans of both consoles.

Taking the Field Are Your Favorite Players
Video games are divided into a series of genres, including action/adventure, arcade, combat, fighting, sports-racing and role-playing, and each has its own visual demands.

While role-playing games are usually set in a total fantasy environment that has no recognizable elements, a good sports title is not only robust enough to allow for realistic game play, it is also as recognizable as the game on Monday Night Football.