Will Wright doesn't spend a lot of his mental resources complaining about hardware capabilities, focusing more on innovating gameplay and conjuring money from thin air. But he has a complaint about next-gen systems...or at least how they're being used.

With the next-generation games systems, unfortunately a lot of that CPU is pretty dedicated to graphics, so it's not like you instantly get 50 times more computing power; you get 50 times more graphic computing power and so I think it's actually more interesting if we had 50 times more general processing that we could then apply to physics, interactivity and AI.

Wright, I'm totally with you on the AI. I'd love to interact with truly intelligent NPCs, even if they look like blocks—hell—even if they are blocks. But the physics could be a waste if I don't want to look at the incredible effects on the screen. Then again, maybe I just can't wrap my head around "next-gen" physics because I've never seen them before.

And in that case...please show us what we've been missing!

The Sims creator Will Wright believes processing power would be better spent on physics, interactivity and AI. [pro-g]