Ad Terras Per Aspera

This month’s issue of Game Developer mentions a PC-like arcade board produced by Taito to bring titles like Half-life 2 and Unreal Tournament to the arcades in Japan in an attempt to revitalize the industry. They have the right idea: decent machines, nation-wide high bandwidth/low ping dedicated network, and a shared high score table.

They only get one thing wrong: the low end video card included with these machines. It is simply a Radeon 9200SE with 128 megs. If they want to bring in more players, they need the highest end hardware they can grab instead of a low end R300-based card. If they want to succeed at their mission, they need to use something in the R400 series (such as the recently released X800/850 cards) that has future titles in mind.

I know I’m not the only one here who would pay to play HL2 or UT at 1920×1440 with the graphics quality up the whole way.. and still getting 60fps. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, the X850 can’t do this, but it does get pretty close.