Dear Future Gamer

Woohoo! About time an' all. About what am I blathering? I'm rather excited now, because at last I've seen something that might make me raid my slender piggy bank and actually buy a Dreamcast. If the preview of Toy Commander is anything to go by then I'm very happy. "But why?" I hear you cry. "You have a PC, it's upgradeable, etc..."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I still rate consoles way above PCs for that casual gaming experience. Note: that's not in terms of technology, etc, so hands off that keyboard. Also, the programmers can't get away with being lazy and just relying on everyone to upgrade all the time, rather than tidying up their code as they go and saving RAM.

A recent analysis of a Microsoft product, whose name I can't bring to mind at the moment, found that over half its code didn't actually do anything but was just leftovers from lazy programmers cutting and pasting their way along and relying on us all having stupendous amounts of RAM. Only a few hundred k out of over a megabyte of program was actually needed to make it run! You just can't get away with this on consoles. As all games are forced to run on the same system on a console, you're reasonably well assured that it will run in the first place and all parts in the system will be optimal for that program, rather than the horrible mishmash that is the PC. This is a much more friendly experience for anyone not at home with the technology who just wants a box that works.

I've probably got more than a few people frothing at the keyboard by now, but this is only my opinion, so let's not get carried away on the PC vs console malarkey again. All I'm trying to say is that the Dreamcast looks like being a surprise hit if this is the sort of stuff it's capable of, and that we shouldn't get caught in the same old 'mine's better than yours' row. Consoles are right for many people for all these reasons and more, and the Dreamcast looks like being at the very least something to look forward to.

Michael Foster

FG: I know Future Gamer reach a lot of the development community and so we'd like to give them the chance to answer this. Are PC programmers lazier or simply less skilful than their console counterparts? Or can't the two be compared? We should be told.