Alex Glancy
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 04/04) - Picture it: It's winter, it's cold, you're bored. You could go out but wait, it's freezing and dark and you run the risk of getting lost in the gloom and dying of hypothermia.

Video games? Now that sounds better. You can sit inside, stay warm and grease up your controllers with potato-chip fingers.

Aside from computer games, your standby platforms are still Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox, and Nintendo's GameCube but a vast variety of games are available to keep you busy all winter -- and in the North, that's a long time.

To talk to him, it sounds like CD Plus employee Carlos Johnson has been gaming since sometime around the creation of the earth. He started on an Atari 2600, the godfather of video game consoles that debuted in 1977 and came in such stylish colours as "wood grain."

Johnson says the big sellers at CD Plus include sports games -- particularly those made by EA Sports covering basketball, baseball, football, golf and more.

Also popular are the military simulation games, like the Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six series.

Asked about trends in gaming, Johnson pointed to the advent of online play through the various online services of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Gamers pay a subscription fee for the privilege of challenging each other over a network.

Another new trend is the plethora of games based on movies and TV shows. In CD Plus alone there were video games for Spiderman, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Cat in the Hat, Finding Nemo, Van Helsing and TV's Alias.

"Usually the day a movie comes out a game for it lands in the stores," said Johnson.

He figures the attraction of gamers to movie and TV-based games is that they allow people to be the characters they liked in movies, and to take part in the stories they enjoyed in the theatres -- an extension of the always popular role-playing games.

But the game that Johnson and his friends are most excited about is the new entry in the Star Wars series: Star Wars Battlefront.

The game allows players to battle in scenarios from the six Star Wars movies, using weapons and planes and characters from the films. "You can be an Ewok, for Pete's sake," Johnson said.

Hand-helds on the horizon

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last May, new hand-held video game systems from Nintendo and Sony caused quite a stir.

Nintendo unveiled its new hand-held under the project name DS.

The portable system features two screens arranged vertically. The bottom screen is touch-sensitive and can be operated with a stylus or a finger, similar to a Personal Digital Assistant.

The DS is rumoured to feature Internet connectivity and voice recognition, so users can actually speak while they play against each other. No release date has been set.

Sony's new, as yet unreleased, PSP hand-held is rumoured -- as reported by gaming web site IGN.com -- to have even better graphics processing than the full-sized PS2 platform.

Users will also be able to watch movies on it.

One last development worth mentioning is the huge number of women now involved in video games.

The Entertainment Software Association reports that 40 per cent of gamers in the United States are female -- contrary to the accepted idea that all gamers are, well, geeks.

So geeks and studs and girls and gamers of the world unite this winter. Stock up and stay inside. It's warmer, safer and you can't fight aliens or find Nemo anywhere else.