Three Things That Turn Me Off Modern Gaming
Sept 13, 2006 21:14:14 GMT -5
Post by jameseightbitstar on Sept 13, 2006 21:14:14 GMT -5
Looking back now, I can recall three things that helped destroy my interest in gaming.
1. The rising costs and risks
Gaming has been getting more expensive since the Nintendo. The Nintendo itself was a system that came packaged with a game, two controllers, a lightgun, and all the necessary hookup equipment. The only peripherals sold seperately were the Power Pad and the Power Glove, and both the games made for the Glove could be played with regular controllers.
The Sega Genesis originally included all the same things a Nintendo would include, minus the light gun... but when light gun games finally came about, Sega's Menacer was just as effective as Konami's Justifier, and vice versa. For the Super Nintendo, mostly the same story, though it must be noted that all three systems were eventually released in budget releases that included only one controller and a game or, sometimes, no game.
Then the Playstation and Nintendo 64 came along. What's in the box? For the Playstation, the console, a controller, the hookup equipment, and a demo disc. Well, that's better than the Nintendo 64, which didn't include a game at all at first. In fact, when it finally DID come with a game, it was always in a "limited" promotional release.
And now they've found they can't lower the costs any further, so the systems themselves are becoming more expensive.
I mentioned risks, too. What do I mean? Well, I'll have to tell you my story: When I got my Playstation, I enjoyed it... for about two months. Then my sister and her friend, desperate to transport information between memory cards, pulled my memory card out of the system and put theirs in. I don't know what happened, but from that day foreward the Playstation would not recognize any memory cards I put into it. Now, I know you're all saying "Yea, but that's your fault, not the system's," but there's more.
So, my parents got the system replaced. Now, on the old Playstation, I had a favorite controller, a turbo controller my parents had bought for me. I tried this new Playstation for awhile, verified it was working (they got me a new memory card for it), and once I was satisfied, I was back to blasting away... and I plugged in my favorite turbo controller. IMMEDIATELY the old problems came up again. Once more, no memory card, no saving my game (which, in today's gaming, makes any game virtually unbeatable unless you're willing to leave the console running forever).
So we had to replace the system AGAIN. Just because I used a certain controller! Fortunately the third Playstation still works, but I've never taken any risks with it.
My Nintendo 64 also developed a problem... it got to a point where it would lock up after only a few minutes of gameplay. Me and my dad cleaned it, thinking that was the problem, and for awhile that seemed to work... but it didn't. Among other things, this made it near-impossible for me to get anywhere in Zelda: Majora's Mask. I couldn't even get to the first town before the game locked up! (And no, it wasn't just the game or the memory expansion pak--those both worked fine in a different N64).
The final straw was my Playstation 2. At one point I had bought a joystick for fighting games. I loved that joystick--it was so Arcade- perfect! So I bought another one and challenged a friend of mine to Street Fighter II (via the Anniversary Collection).
Then for some reason the sticks stopped working.
I later did a web search on these controllers, and had found other people who had similar experiences. Turned out, the controller had shorted out the rumble feature on my PS2. This may seem like such a small thing, but the fact is, the part that powers the rumble feature is also used as a power source for other peripherals (to this day, the current owner of that particular PS2 hasn't gotten his four-player adapter to work on it, and we both suspect this may be the reason why).
Not only that, but I also found out that the same controller--which also worked on X-Box and Gamecube--was rather limited. There were games it wouldn't work with because it didn't have "analogue buttons."
Okay, that's just rediculous. If I buy a joystick for fighting games, that joystick better as hell work with every fighting game I try to play with it! I don't want to play systems which might burn out or, I dunno, nuke the moon just because I tried some special device on them! But after all these incidents, all I learned was that you have to be hyper-paranoid when it comes to today's game machines. Screw that. I don't want a machine that I know could go bad at any time for any reason, where there's all sorts of uncertainties with even the most simple purchase!
Look at my Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis: The youngest among these has been with me for at least ten years, and neither it nor any of the others have ever needed to be fixed or replace or developed any difficulties that couldn't be fixed with mere cleaning. And when I plug a strange peripheral device into them, I know that the worst that could happen is that it simply won't work. In fact the worst worry I have is that my saved games might be accidentally erased... and it's not like that would be the end of the world.
2. Games became "mature"
You know, the truth is I too was caught up in the whole "Mortal Kombat has blood, it's so cool!" craze, only I got out of it fairly early. Mostly because when my dad saw how much I liked the game, he bought it for me... for the Gameboy. The Gameboy version, of course, doesn't have any blood, but I was addicted to it anyway.
Anyway, almost immediately afterward began the boom of "mature" games. I honestly never liked the look of those--the big, sweaty tough guys with machine guns whose very pose gives off this "Hey, I'm a tough guy!" mentality. It was like suddenly Rambo was in every game, and there was blood, of course... lots of it. Violence, which beforehand had just been a means to an end, was suddenly cool in and of itself.
It didn't stop there. We started having gross-out games, like Boogerman (which I avoided like the plague) and more and more what I felt were dopey concepts. It was in the Playstation era that things came to a head, when we entered the Lara Croft era. For years gamers had claimed there weren't enough girls in games, then suddenly they started appearing, only each and every one of them was little more than a digital whore. I remember this magazine advertisement for the Sega Saturn in which there was a naked woman in the background, with screenshots of Saturn games all over the page (don't worry: they covered the sensitive bits), and a message that read "In case you hadn't noticed, there's a big, beautiful, naked woman on this page." And below that: "With Sega Saturn, nothing else matters."
And suddenly the games themselves were all about the violence, the grittiness, and the scantily-clad women (whom I personally didn't think were all that attractive no matter what they didn't wear), in a way that is almost comparable to the movie Heavy Metal 2000. These games repulsed me as much as that movie did. I didn't want that kind of game.
3. The commercialism
Okay, many of you are already saying "games are made, first and foremost, to make money." I won't argue that. But there are times where it just goes too far. What I mean is, when you have to have some peripheral (say, an E-card reader and some E-cards) to unlock secret levels in the re-release of Super Mario Bros. 3, or how there will be two versions of one game (such as the ever-prominent "Red Version/Blue Version" thing many Gameboy games do) that are interdependent on each other. Of course, the companies give the spiel that they're trying to "encourage sharing," but we all know what they REALLY intend is for players to spend their money buying both versions. Nowadays, we're getting more and more games that hinge on some sort of gimmick. For many of them, just owning the game, the console, and a controller is not enough. My house does not have room for this kind of junk, so these things are an automatic turn-off for me.
There were other things I didn't like, but the above were the things I noticed that pretty much established the backbone of my dislike of newer games. If you've ever wondered why I'm such a stickler for old school consoles, there's your answer. It ain't nostalgia, it's just a practical decision enforced by negative (and admittedly subjective) experiences.
1. The rising costs and risks
Gaming has been getting more expensive since the Nintendo. The Nintendo itself was a system that came packaged with a game, two controllers, a lightgun, and all the necessary hookup equipment. The only peripherals sold seperately were the Power Pad and the Power Glove, and both the games made for the Glove could be played with regular controllers.
The Sega Genesis originally included all the same things a Nintendo would include, minus the light gun... but when light gun games finally came about, Sega's Menacer was just as effective as Konami's Justifier, and vice versa. For the Super Nintendo, mostly the same story, though it must be noted that all three systems were eventually released in budget releases that included only one controller and a game or, sometimes, no game.
Then the Playstation and Nintendo 64 came along. What's in the box? For the Playstation, the console, a controller, the hookup equipment, and a demo disc. Well, that's better than the Nintendo 64, which didn't include a game at all at first. In fact, when it finally DID come with a game, it was always in a "limited" promotional release.
And now they've found they can't lower the costs any further, so the systems themselves are becoming more expensive.
I mentioned risks, too. What do I mean? Well, I'll have to tell you my story: When I got my Playstation, I enjoyed it... for about two months. Then my sister and her friend, desperate to transport information between memory cards, pulled my memory card out of the system and put theirs in. I don't know what happened, but from that day foreward the Playstation would not recognize any memory cards I put into it. Now, I know you're all saying "Yea, but that's your fault, not the system's," but there's more.
So, my parents got the system replaced. Now, on the old Playstation, I had a favorite controller, a turbo controller my parents had bought for me. I tried this new Playstation for awhile, verified it was working (they got me a new memory card for it), and once I was satisfied, I was back to blasting away... and I plugged in my favorite turbo controller. IMMEDIATELY the old problems came up again. Once more, no memory card, no saving my game (which, in today's gaming, makes any game virtually unbeatable unless you're willing to leave the console running forever).
So we had to replace the system AGAIN. Just because I used a certain controller! Fortunately the third Playstation still works, but I've never taken any risks with it.
My Nintendo 64 also developed a problem... it got to a point where it would lock up after only a few minutes of gameplay. Me and my dad cleaned it, thinking that was the problem, and for awhile that seemed to work... but it didn't. Among other things, this made it near-impossible for me to get anywhere in Zelda: Majora's Mask. I couldn't even get to the first town before the game locked up! (And no, it wasn't just the game or the memory expansion pak--those both worked fine in a different N64).
The final straw was my Playstation 2. At one point I had bought a joystick for fighting games. I loved that joystick--it was so Arcade- perfect! So I bought another one and challenged a friend of mine to Street Fighter II (via the Anniversary Collection).
Then for some reason the sticks stopped working.
I later did a web search on these controllers, and had found other people who had similar experiences. Turned out, the controller had shorted out the rumble feature on my PS2. This may seem like such a small thing, but the fact is, the part that powers the rumble feature is also used as a power source for other peripherals (to this day, the current owner of that particular PS2 hasn't gotten his four-player adapter to work on it, and we both suspect this may be the reason why).
Not only that, but I also found out that the same controller--which also worked on X-Box and Gamecube--was rather limited. There were games it wouldn't work with because it didn't have "analogue buttons."
Okay, that's just rediculous. If I buy a joystick for fighting games, that joystick better as hell work with every fighting game I try to play with it! I don't want to play systems which might burn out or, I dunno, nuke the moon just because I tried some special device on them! But after all these incidents, all I learned was that you have to be hyper-paranoid when it comes to today's game machines. Screw that. I don't want a machine that I know could go bad at any time for any reason, where there's all sorts of uncertainties with even the most simple purchase!
Look at my Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis: The youngest among these has been with me for at least ten years, and neither it nor any of the others have ever needed to be fixed or replace or developed any difficulties that couldn't be fixed with mere cleaning. And when I plug a strange peripheral device into them, I know that the worst that could happen is that it simply won't work. In fact the worst worry I have is that my saved games might be accidentally erased... and it's not like that would be the end of the world.
2. Games became "mature"
You know, the truth is I too was caught up in the whole "Mortal Kombat has blood, it's so cool!" craze, only I got out of it fairly early. Mostly because when my dad saw how much I liked the game, he bought it for me... for the Gameboy. The Gameboy version, of course, doesn't have any blood, but I was addicted to it anyway.
Anyway, almost immediately afterward began the boom of "mature" games. I honestly never liked the look of those--the big, sweaty tough guys with machine guns whose very pose gives off this "Hey, I'm a tough guy!" mentality. It was like suddenly Rambo was in every game, and there was blood, of course... lots of it. Violence, which beforehand had just been a means to an end, was suddenly cool in and of itself.
It didn't stop there. We started having gross-out games, like Boogerman (which I avoided like the plague) and more and more what I felt were dopey concepts. It was in the Playstation era that things came to a head, when we entered the Lara Croft era. For years gamers had claimed there weren't enough girls in games, then suddenly they started appearing, only each and every one of them was little more than a digital whore. I remember this magazine advertisement for the Sega Saturn in which there was a naked woman in the background, with screenshots of Saturn games all over the page (don't worry: they covered the sensitive bits), and a message that read "In case you hadn't noticed, there's a big, beautiful, naked woman on this page." And below that: "With Sega Saturn, nothing else matters."
And suddenly the games themselves were all about the violence, the grittiness, and the scantily-clad women (whom I personally didn't think were all that attractive no matter what they didn't wear), in a way that is almost comparable to the movie Heavy Metal 2000. These games repulsed me as much as that movie did. I didn't want that kind of game.
3. The commercialism
Okay, many of you are already saying "games are made, first and foremost, to make money." I won't argue that. But there are times where it just goes too far. What I mean is, when you have to have some peripheral (say, an E-card reader and some E-cards) to unlock secret levels in the re-release of Super Mario Bros. 3, or how there will be two versions of one game (such as the ever-prominent "Red Version/Blue Version" thing many Gameboy games do) that are interdependent on each other. Of course, the companies give the spiel that they're trying to "encourage sharing," but we all know what they REALLY intend is for players to spend their money buying both versions. Nowadays, we're getting more and more games that hinge on some sort of gimmick. For many of them, just owning the game, the console, and a controller is not enough. My house does not have room for this kind of junk, so these things are an automatic turn-off for me.
There were other things I didn't like, but the above were the things I noticed that pretty much established the backbone of my dislike of newer games. If you've ever wondered why I'm such a stickler for old school consoles, there's your answer. It ain't nostalgia, it's just a practical decision enforced by negative (and admittedly subjective) experiences.