People seem undecided on which of PS3 and Xbox 360 are more powerful. What do you think? Will they be very different machines to design games for?
Dave Perry: The PS3 is ultimately more powerful if you are willing to wait for programmers to master it. It's a bit like Path of Neo... Here we are at the end of the PS2 hardware cycle and suddenly we are the first game with Normal Mapping and we also demonstrated 1,500 Agent Smiths on screen at once. Meaning there's always some more juice to get squeezed out. The Xbox 360 on the other hand is much more comfortable to develop on and I expect to see programmers pushing it harder earlier. So I expect (like in a horse race) to see Xbox take off out the gate, but after a while, the PS3 overtakes. The good news is that there's no loser here, both machines rock.
What game are you most looking forward to now in the world of gaming?
Dave Perry: I'm super fickle so I always want to play the future stuff. So I'm looking at the next generation Metal Gear Solid, or Gears of War, or Ghost Recon, or Call of Duty and am drooling.
Finally, what major challenges do game designers face in the next gen?
Dave Perry: The challenge for designers is simple, they need to focus on what's gonna make games much more immersive without just thinking "graphics". They will also be able to start making those old game designs they might have made in the passed, but then marked "impossible". With improved AI, physics, voice recognition, locomotion etc. There will be a lot of surprising new experiences coming down the pipe.