I hate this generation!

(inserted by Justin, to lighten the mood in here!)

I remember being a kid in the early 80’s when the NES was at its peak. There was hundreds of game that came out every year. If you liked sports games you would buy Bases Loaded, Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Ice Hockey, etc. If it was racing, action, role-play games you had plenty to choose from. You would talk you parents into buying it for you or renting it. So you would open the box on the way home and salivate over the instruction book. Most games gave you a instruction book with a storyline that would set up the action that you would face for the rest of that afternoon, and into the night till you went to sleep.

Fifteen percent of the games made you feel like it was well spent time when you were done with it. The majority left you thinking, “Well it wasn’t great, but I was having fun playing a video game. And that makes it worthwhile”. Then you’re left with roughly ten percent that were just dreadful. You would rather be stuck at home sick watching your moms’ soaps than play that junk. (And let’s face it we have all played hooky to stay home and play games. Hell, I still do it now!)

You didn’t critique these games. You either liked them and they went to the front of your game drawer, or you didn’t and they collected dust in they back. At least until trading games became popular. Then Nintendo Power came out and it would let you know what was slated to come out soon. They didn’t do reviews, (of course because it was an in house project) you would get tips and codes.

I hate people the think their professional video game reviewers.

Now everywhere you turn around everyone has written a review. Everyone nit picks a game and forgets why we play games to start with. Is it fun? No, people worry if the lighting was a little too dark, the shadows are bad, the AI was lazy, and god forbid, the game was short.

Let me give you some examples of where the fun factor is more imortant the HD'ability. Madden looks better than it ever has, plays great but, it is the NFL (No Fun League). There is no real sense of impact with tackles. No subtle celebrations. Where did the injuries go? Ace Combat 4 is a beautiful presentation. We don’t need the storyline. We need a fun dog fighting experience, not monotonous bombing runs and drawn out, looping dog fights. Far Cry might have the best environment in a FPS. But there are only so many times you can enjoy the same mission they give you. GTA4 is a great idea, but there is the repetitive thing again. The Forza series looks and feels great. How many laps do you want to take on that same track, woo hoo! Assasins Creed, great story but the game could have been half as long and it would have been a better experience. All of them looked pretty, but missed the fun factor throughout the game.

On the other hand CoD4 has a short single player story but the online multiplayer is great. They got it right with the audio/visual to make you feel the experience. GOW 1&2 has an awesome single player game, but the online is glitchy. Crackdown may not be the most beautiful game but the entire game is on point. Mercenaries 2 is fun, glitchy and a little ugly but fun.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Now that you have that in your skull here is my other issue.

I was playing a nice quiet game of Hardcore Team Deathmatch on CoD4 when I was rudely interrupted.

My phone rings and it’s one of my best friends. “Hey man, can you do me a favor? If your not to deep in a game. Can you pop in Mercenaries 2?” Now I stopped what I was doing for what I was doing, and for what? He wanted the viral achievement that I had so he could have 50 gamer points.

I hate Microsoft, I hate Sony. I hate Achievement Points and Multiplayer Challenges. It has made them money, because the dumb monkeys have been sucked in to this gimmick.

People play games just to get those achievements and do not return to enjoy the fun in it. For example my friends and I played Horde on GOW 2. We completed the 50th wave and had a blast doing so. But now I can’t anyone to do it again. Now that the achievement was accomplished they are done with that game.

You know where I think Cod4 got it right. The Achievements where all single player, and the Challenges for multiplayer are not attached to the achievements at all. The Multiplayer Challenges that open items in multiplayer are related to kills and headshots, not some outrageous happenstance situation. The happenstance situation were just extras for fun to see if you could it it. (they don't give you anything)

Other than trying to find the orbs in Crackdown I have never tried to complete any Achievements just for the sake of getting them all done. I just have fun, play the game, and get my Achievements along the way.

I’m not an Achievement Whore, just a Gamer!

Mass Market Gaming Getting Stale

bcullers brought over DarkSector last night for the 360. As he started talking about it, he immediately brought up gameplay references like Gears of War and Army of TWO (which is a Gears of War wannabe in it's own right). We shared a sad laugh about yet another Gears clone and then we both said, "Well, if it works..."

It was something I hadn't thought about playing Army of TWO. Instead of the whole time playing the game with an angry cloud over my head because the gameplay in it wasn't original, should I have been more focused on what new things the game brought to the table instead of what it didn't? I'm not sure what other things like that exist in the world like this. When I buy a new game, unless it's a sequel, prequel or derivative IP, I want it to be genuine and different. Music is a possible comparison if you really like music and not a genre. Books too. But I think with games I always want the next game of that genre to fix the things that were broken in the last game.

I think, overall, I find it really hard to not reference other games when playing a new one. Unless it's a game like Katamari Damacy for the PS2 or Brain Training for the DS, your getting a game that is specifically set in a genre (football, driving, FPS) and there is little you can do to differentiate it from it's members.

But most of the games I own (and keep) I like very much. So getting a new game with elements of my old ones should be comforting. But I want new experiences from gaming constantly. I don't want another Gears of War game with a different set of characters, voices, and graphics. I don't want another Forza Motorsport that touts more cars and tracks. I want new experiences and games that make me think in a different perspective. Having sold on eBay Mass Effect (a mediocre space RPG) and Army of TWO (a clone of another game), I can tell my purchases are going to start getting far and few between and overly scrutinized.

A new hope in gaming recently is Penny-Arcade's The Greenhouse. This is a game related comic-drawing duo that has it's hands also in charity work, game expos, and now with Greenhouse, independent game developers. Not much has been said about Greenhouse other than right now it's a platform to release their new game (another hand) "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness". But I wouldn't mind starting to play games on a PC or Mac if meant getting really good content.

3D Gaming Just Around The Corner!

This is serious. Awesome even. To think that the Nintendo Wii has this much potential embedded in it's little, white box of cuteness is borderline Jekyll and Hyde. Imagine buying a game with a pair of cheap glasses and a Wii-mote stand and getting this kind of gameplay out of it.



I know I haven't written much in awhile, but really, I've been so content with Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 that I just really haven't paid much mind to buying any other games. I've posted a ton of stuff in the news on the right side of the page, but I've been too busy playing the stuff I have to worry about writing anything new for awhile.

And by the way, this whole SEXbox scandal going on with Mass Effect is utter bull. 10 seconds of ass crack and side boob in a 30 hour game is hardly controversial. Especially since you can't control any of it or change what you see. It's static. It's PG-13 at worst.

Judge for yourself. This is "worse". Mind you that this is an M-rated game and that parents ultimately are to blame for their kids playing this, not the creators for making it.

Video Gaming: The New Golfing

When most people think of sports, they think of grown men getting paid ridiculously high salaries to play a game. We laugh at their mansions and cars and money. But we know they are the best at what they do and we know that most of will never reach their level.

It's the same in the world of video games. Except without the money. But that's changing.

To get a glimpse into this world of Joystick Juggernauts (I'm coining that phrase, btw), Spike TV's Game Head show is touching on the World Cyber Games 2007. It's a global video game "olympics" that consists of about 700 players from 70 countries all playing for a piece of the $450,000 pot. There are quite a few other major league tournaments like this one, but this gets the most publicity as far as I'm concerned.

A lot of gamers think it's boring to watch this stuff on tv, but that's only because they do a poor job of it. We don't get to sit and watch the matches as they go down, just clips of them and knee jerk reactions of the teams as they win games. It would be like watching highlight clips of a football game. That's fun and all, but we want to see the WHOLE thing.

But my take on gaming as a sport is like this: Any activity can be raised to a competitive level. It's what we do as humans. We find something we're good at, brag about it to other people, and hopefully find a way to live off it. Gamers don't need to defend themselves from ridicule and naysayers. The people trying to make a living out of it right now are just having a hard time while the idea gets it's legs. The X-Games started the same way, with skateboarders and BMXers leaving the parking lots and signing sponsors. Gamers, too, will leave the basements, sign sponsors and one day there will be a channel that covers gaming well and lets us all track stats and hang posters of our favorite gamers and collect their trading cards.

In the meantime, I'm still going to play games to waste time, relieve stress and entertain myself with my friends. I'm going to spend money on it that I don't need to, shun my pile of laundry and leave the dirty dishes in the sink, ignore my wife for 5 hours straight and waste an entire day fragging people on the internet and still not get any better than I was the day before.

Sound like a golfer you know? Well, minus the fragging part?

On the Death of the Hero

The invention of 'lives' in gaming wasn't because video games had some morbid sense of accomplishment or denial. It was to make you spend quarters. Arcades being the first invention in electronic gaming had to have some way to keep you in the poor house, so 'lives' were created to give you three chances to resurrect yourself and complete your task.

But as games got older and moved away from spaceships and centipedes, people were introduced as the main characters and gave the meaning of 'life' a whole new purpose in games. They took on a resemblance of a cat's nine lives.

Man jumps. Falls in pit and dies. Tries again.

Before games were created, comics flourished as superheros wildly took over the imagination of children and adults everywhere. Virtually invincible heros that fight crime and save the world. Bullets riccochet. Punches glance. Danger is averted.

As the gaming picked up on the whole hero idea, gamers got to save princesses of imaginary worlds and stop evil from ruling the land. There were normal heroes; humans charged with super hero-like duties to save princesses from evil dinosaurs or returning the land from the creeping darkness of evil pigs. But there were also these superhero characters, still fighting their longtime battles from their comic book worlds, transported into digital form for us to experience with our two, human, mortal thumbs.

So why still have lives for these unbeatable heroes? Why should characters who span generations of our lives live any different in a video game.

To my knowledge, Superman Returns was the first game to address this issue. When it came out last November, Superman was indestructible. The mechanic of 'life' was removed. The paradigm was shifted. No matter what I did, nor what anyone else did, I was an indestructible superhero. Unbeatable. But then I realized what Superman Returns had done. It had gone and made things much more difficult.

Supes' objective was still the same: save the world. But this time, he had to save everyone else too. As destruction and evil rampaged across the map, Superman had to make sure that damage to the city and the lives of the people didn't reach epic proportions. Now, instead of a health meter for Superman, there's a health meter for the world.

As Halo 3 denies people everywhere the right to read books and go outdoors, again we are charged with the duty of controlling a hero. A super-human soldier. Not the virtually indestructible Superman we've come to know and love, but the protagonist of a story that inevitably will finish the fight and save humanity. Does dying as this character create a challenge is the game or does it take away from the experience we are meant to experience as the developers have intended?

Halo 3 is a short game, yet complex in it's story. Only on the easiest difficulty setting do most gamers get to experience the story as it was meant to be. But as gamers, we want a challenge. We want to be tested, yet we do not want to fail. We want to experience the hardships of our beloved Master Chief and still be protected by his armor and super abilities. We don't want to die.

So instead of creating immense levels and filling them with wave after wave of enemies armed to the teeth, is there some other way to test the mettle? To prove that I am capable of being a hero without suffering the mortal's death?

What Superman Returns did was just that. It created other factors to consider when fighting the generic enemy. You were faced with life altering changes that weren't meant for you, but for others. Choices that superheros make every day.

But maybe it's easier to program the destruction of your life than it is to create scenarios of lives to save or puzzles to solve or missions to complete in timely manners. With superhero games already having superhero-sized budgets, it could be too much to ask for every role playing game to have "next generation" ideas in gaming along with those "next generation" graphics and "next generation" prices.