The ageless prince and his digital weaponry

During my school days in the late 80s and early 90s, when we were old enough to be fascinated by computers, the IBM desktop PCs were considered a sign of technological arrival. These were super machines that could be used to silently type and save typed content as 'files' in addition to compute fairly complex calculations. Losing your files on a shared computer meant the worst - usually someone's conspiracy or ignorance. Unmonitored availability of the desktop meant playing DOS games - what a rage they were Prince of Persia, Mario Bros, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego!, asteroids, centipede and Roadrash. In all, laying your hands on one these games meant premium screen time those days. The other way to play those games would be on hand-held consoles from Nintendo, Atari, Game Boy, Sega and Sony's Pocket Station. These would be mostly be available to a lucky few in school who had that visiting Uncle or Cousin picking it up for them or the really passionate ones would hunt one down in the gray markets of Madras, Bombay or sometimes in Bangalore. Gaming has never looked dull since then with so many of the kids from my generation onwards taking up video and later computer gaming seriously at the cost of real physical sport. This is so much more rampant in the west- I have seen a Play Station or a Nintendo/Wii or an X Box 360 in most homes of friends and colleagues from work that i have visited in the US. A few of them even insisting that a Wii should be a definite carry-back gift from the states especially the one that promises fitness through movement simulated sports/exercises. Gaming has surely evolved from the arrow key movements to help Mario jump trenches and the familiar key navigation to enable the prince leap over chasms, jump through fires, avoid beds of knives and almost impossibly save the princes before the evil vizier could finish her off. A friend's son recently reviewed the new version of the game much to my ignorant amusement. The new version of Prince of Persia is now completely loaded with 3-D graphics, loaded avatars with the Prince battling the evil with his all powerful digital weaponry. Multiple versions and generation of millions of gamers later, Prince of Persia is now a Disney movie starring Gemma Arterton and Jake Gyllenhaal. Meanwhile, being in the software industry for a decade plus now, one of the challenges of application software remains multiplatform support. Gaming has since become a billion dollar industry with more and more of puzzle solving challenges that require agile manipulation of objects - and, not to mention Kids' reflexes being so much better these days. As in software application development, Gaming too has found its challenge in multiplatform support - if you have heard of XBox 380, Nintendo/Wii and Sony's Playstations...