Five reasons you'll hate 3D gaming...
1. You'll need new hardware
A new TV for your PlayStation, a new 120Mhz monitor for your PC and, depending on what 3D tech you go for, a set of active, rechargeable 3D glasses. Going 3D isn't going to be cheap – why not spend all that cash on an impossibly large TV, a clutch of ace games, a nice new hat and some gourmet sausages instead?
At present, the incoming PS3 3D means this is all a bit of a Sony thing too – they're bullying us into 3D by saturating the tech industry with their expensive new tellies and Blu-ray players.
2. Loss of colour
Pass a game or movie through a pair of polarised stereoscopic glasses, separated into left and right images, and you lose light. In turn, you can lose colour and vibrancy (depending on the effectiveness of any colour correction tech employed).
Given most big-budget videogames already seem to think brown and grey are the only colours worth bothering with, where's the fun in 3D if these muddy worlds end up looking even more dreary?
3. Yeah, the glasses thing
You look like an extra from Back to the Future 2, the fleshy bit where your ear attaches to your skull will ache after a while, and whenever you look around and see anyone else wearing 'em the fantasy of the game world falls apart. And don't get us started on how preposterous it feels to wear 3D glasses over existing glasses – you look like a mad professor.
UNCOOL: It's OK, you definitely won't look like a total idiot whilst wearing 3D glasses, because it says Sony on the side! Problem solved
4. You stop noticing
Can you honestly say you were still cooing at all the visual frippery in Avatar in the last hour or so? Course you weren't. You were just hoping that the blue hippies would beat up the nasty racists, and that they'd stop saying 'I see you' over and over again.
And were you still noticing that the balloons in Up looked a bit poppy-out after the first couple of shots? Nope, you were just laughing at the funny dog.
We acclimatise to visual phenomena quickly; in fact, you'd adapt just as easily to playing games on a 14" black and white telly. When you adapt to what's there, what's the point in going to all this effort for 3D?
5. Patchy support and backwards compatibility
For all Nvidia's ballyhooing, try 3D gaming on PC now and it's a muddled mess of pleasing depth effects and crosshairs and HUDs that look like someone tattooed a hologram directly onto your retina. The stuff that works is undone by the stuff that doesn't.
Unless game developers are consciously thinking about how their interfaces, menu screens and cutscenes are going to look in glasses-o-vision, you're going to have a headache-inducing barrage of screen elements that don't know how to behave.
You can fix some of it with driver profiles on PC, but you'll have more fun just instantly playing the game with none of that 3D fuss. Once Sony's 3D-specific games such as Gran Turismo 5 arrive we'll have a neater experience, but running older games, on PC or PS3, in 3D just means a whole lot of bloody-minded compromise.
IN THE GAME: Nvidia's 3DVision dongle/active glasses, which go for around £100. You'll need to pickup a 120Mhz monitor as well, or they're absolutely no bloody use whatsoever
Also, if you're a crazy person:
It will make violent games too lifelike, worry 51% of general consumers. It's true – being able to see a little more depth is the tipping point that will cause millions of gamers to instantly turn into murderers.
