A New Generation of Games

Now that CD-ROM drives have become commonplace, it is much easier to add digitized sound, graphics, and video to games. Unfortunately, just because one can doesn't mean one should. Many games nowadays are as much motion picture as interactive game. (The rest, of course, are Doom clones.) It seems that modern games exist either to prove you've got a system powerful enough to run them (such as The Eleventh Hour, which even on my high-end PC doesn't always run smoothly) or to make a quick buck by thinly disguising a series of video clips as a game (the most extreme case I've enountered being Silent Steel, a submarine "game" that is little more than a choose-your-own-adventure of video clips.).