Op-Ed: Why I Don't Own a "Current-Gen" Video Game Console.

Why I Don't Own a "Current-Gen" Video Game Console.

OK folks, I'm going nerdy today.  And I do realize that most of my current small audience doesn't care about my interest - or supposed lack thereof - in video games.  So if you are reading this far and are wondering whether this will be a silly "gamer" rant, let me assure you  that the answer is: yes.  Yes it will.

Still there?  Ah, come on.  You can find better things to read, or watch, or do, I'm sure.  But in my opinion, the chances of that better thing you'll be doing being a modern video game...  not too great, in my opinion. 

This whole rant of mine actually has its genesis back in 2012.  Perhaps you've noticed that my blog has languished in obscurity for awhile.  Well to be fair, greater obscurity than when I actually post to it, I mean.  I've been otherwise occupied with life for awhile.  But this doesn't mean I haven't been reading, writing, or most especially - thinking.

The article that first spurred me to write this Op-Ed about video games was found on Wired.com.  The article's title: "Video Games Can't Afford to Cost This Much."  The graphic above comes from that article, and shows the average video game budget since the business took off in the early '70s. / Source: Wired.com/Elisabeth Caren 

Now I haven't played much in years, to be honest.  In college, I didn't have the time.  And since I've been out of college, I am still pretty busy.  But this doesn't mean I don't play at all.  I'd like to think I've found a happy level of gaming that allows for entertainment, while spurning obsession.  Because folks, I'm here to tell you, I was once a video game addict.  Yes, it is true.  Before I went into self-imposed video game rehab, I would often play day and night if I could.  It was like this: I went to school/work, I came home, I played games.  When I got old enough to not have a parent mandated bedtime, sometimes I even played instead of sleeping.  The whole night even.  Late night sessions of gaming were my first introduction to staying up way past any reasonable hour of night.

And to clarify, when I say I went to school and then came home to play, I mean elementary school.  And junior high.  And even high school, to a lesser extent.  I played less in high school, if I look at it as a three year spectrum.  But after high school, I took up gaming again with a vengeance.  And throughout most of my young adult life, I spent more time on video games than on most anything else, sadly. 

Thankfully that part of my life is behind me.  I play a couple of games on my tablet on a daily basis, albeit as short a period as I can stand.  The Simpsons: Tapped Out, and The Sims: Freeplay (The Sims has since been dropped off my list... got too annoying).  To be honest, by the time I post this piece, I may have quit one or both.  The endless grind of building up in increments, combined with the constant huckerstering to buy perk content, annoys me. 

The main reason I play less?  Well for one, I think video games have in many ways lost their hook.  For a recovering addict, that is a good thing.  But beyond that, the loss of soul in video games is hurting the hobby's future, I believe.

How can I say that games have lost their appeal?  Well I wouldn't dare call myself the end-all/be-all expert on the pastime, but I will say that I have owned an Atari 2600 and Atari 7800, a Super Nintendo, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, XBox (the classic one, I mean), as well as a Nintendo Entertainment System and a Sega Genesis (the former worked off and on while the latter never did, but both of those were purchased from a thrift store when I was an adult, and both were... shall we say "too well loved?").  And that's just consoles I can recall off the top of my head. Oh yes, I forgot my Nintendo 64 that I got on eBay after the system was past its prime, and later sold on eBay as well. 

eBay giveth, and eBay taketh away...  Actually, when I put in "ebay video games," this image came up from PCMag.com.  Apparently this collection of video games sold on eBay for $1.2 million.  See.  Who says you can't make a little money on eBay? / Source: PCMag.com

And then there was the first Nintendo product I owned, a Game Boy.  Mid junior high was when I received that for Christmas.  I talked my mom into buying it because I said the screen was small and grainy and I'd get eye-strain and so not play it constantly.  She had been opposed to having a Nintendo Entertainment System in our home because she recognized that I was very video game-focused, and she was trying to keep me from devolving into a pair of hands, a pair of eyes, and a few rudimentary glands.  Kudos to the woman for trying.

I also owned an Atari Lynx, though also as an adult, and purchased off of eBay in used condition.  I so wanted to love the Lynx, as I had drooled over it in video game magazines as a teenager, but it just wasn't that cool in real life.  And I've also owned several Game Boy Advances.  My daughter owns a DS, though I'd never get one myself.  Too gimmicky, I thought, when first I read up on it.  Seeing her use it, I haven't been dissuaded.

And I do currently own a Nintendo Wii.  This is the last and only video game console to reside in my home, if I conveniently forget about that last surviving Game Boy Advance that languishes in the dark confines of my sock drawer, gathering sock drawer dust.  Why do I have a Wii, you ask?  I bought one off eBay (starting to see a trend?) after the newer Wii U came out and the original Wii prices eventually went down as a result.  I got it so that my family could play and enjoy games together.  Guess what we use the Wii for?  Netflix.  And that's about it.  I might pony up a few bucks for better games than Wii Sports, but it just isn't a high priority to me, I suppose.  My kid is gaga over enough electronic junk.  No sense in adding to it, I reason.  Sadly, she gets that from her parents to a certain extent.  Especially her old man.

So as the title of this blog indicates, I do not own a true current current-gen video game console.  No PS4, no Xbox One, no Wii U.  Nor do I have any intent to.  If you've survived this far, I'll be glad to tell you why.  I'm going to start with some personal history that will become more relevant when I turn back on the why's and what for's.  So bear with me.

My first video game console was an Atari 2600 Junior.  It cost $50 brand new.  I know this because it was a birthday gift from my dad when I turned twelve, and he left it on the porch at my house with the price tag still affixed.  And most of the games for that Atari 2600 cost me under $20 bucks brand new.  Granted, this was the late '80s and the 2600 was on its way out, despite Atari's half-hearted attempt to stay in the market after the 1983 game market crash and then Nintendo's taking up of the torch.  But still, 2600 games were fairly economical when compared to Nintendo's offerings.

You know, speaking of my dad, I think that is really the best place to start telling you why I am so well acquainted with video games.  It's like this: I didn't see my dad much growing up.  Divorced since I was two years old.  He was my primary supply of video games as a kid.  On Sunday evenings Dad would pick me up and we'd go to Chuck-E-Cheese.  Not every week, mind you, but more and more as I neared the pre-teen years.  Coincidentally, my mom sometimes referred to Dad as being a "Disneyland Dad."  He spoiled me and then brought me home, and she had to deal with me in the real world, where budgets were tight and problems had to be faced and overcome.

Back to Chuck-E-Cheese.  We'd eat some pizza, then Dad would work on paperwork he brought with him, or chat with my step-mom, or something else non-parental, while I went and hit the arcade.  I never played the ticket generating games like Ski-Ball or Free-Throw Challenge.  No, my eye was firmly set on the rows of cabinets that forever washed the grimy floor of that place with pixilated color from their over-taxed monitors.  I'd play almost any game at least once, but I still recall my favorites there.  These included Xenophobe, Shinobi, Return of the Jedi (which to this day I loathe, as it seemed to love to steal my quarters by running me into the first tree obstacle I could possibly hit over and over again - so damn hard!), Time Soldiers, and then there was my absolute favorite machine there, Sky Shark.  Just typing that name sends a shiver up my spine.  I can smell the scent of quarters and grade 'D' pizza, just thinking of it. 

Ahh, now I feel like greasy pizza, poorly maintained animatronics and dim lights.  You'll have to forgive my nostalgia for the moment.  I'm tripping heavy on the siren song of the Pac Man theme right now. / Source: showbizpizza.com

Forgive my indulgence, but this is a photo of the actual Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theatre I mentioned in this post. / Source: showbizpizza.com

But of course you can't live in any practical sense in an arcade, no matter how you might wish.  So as I said, my first home machine was an Atari 2600.  Not the classic machine with the faux wood panels, nor even the so-called "Darth Vader" with its similar shape but all black plastic design.  Nope, we're talking the sleek and slim-lined beauty that was the 2600 Junior.  I took to it immediately.  My first home game cartridge was Dig Dug, though many more would follow it.  I owned upwards of fifty or sixty games by the time I eventually sold that system and almost all the cartridges to my cousins, in my high school years.  I regret doing so to this day.  I had a kick-butt collection in near mint condition.

Games sure were fun back in those days.  Yes, they were simple, and you couldn't always immediately tell the difference between yourself and what passed as the "bad-guy" of the game.  Blocky graphics demanded a good imagination.  And these games were often unforgiving.  As an example, there is Yar's Revenge.  Never heard of it?  I pity you, and I pity me at the same time. 

By way of explanation, there was this thing in Yar's Revenge that you could only destroy if you hit it with a shot from your super cannon.  And incidentally you could only make that super cannon appear if you touched the thing you were supposed to destroy with your on-screen character.  Said character just happened to be a giant mutant house fly, by the way.  But the object you were supposed to destroy, called a "Qotile" if memory serves, had a habit of morphing into a swirling disc of death every now and then, and then shooting across the screen at you at high speed.  Come in contact with it after it makes its transformation into the spinning disc of death and it was the equivalent of being squashed by a fly swatter from hell. 

To make things worse, you had to chew or shoot your way through this shield barrier thing to actually get to the Qotile on its side of the screen.  And in higher levels, the damn thing moved up and down on the right side of the screen, so you had to touch it in its non-spinner of death form, then fire your super cannon at just the right time so that the single blocky shot fired from your super cannon would intersect with the target and... well you'd be rewarded with a cool explosion if you did.  And did I mention that contact with the block thing that was your super weapon's discharge was as lethal to you as it was to the Qotile? 

Yar's Revenge?  Funny how E.T. the Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 also had a Yar in it, as an Easter egg.
 

Oh how often I was killed while attempting the mighty feat of putting my super cannon's shot into the same spot as the Qotile.  Death came either by Qotile's spinning death disc or by the constantly homing missile which slowly pursued your character anywhere on screen at all times, or even sometimes by mis-judging the distance and accidentally straying in front of my own super cannon shot.  Lethal to Qotiles, and just as lethal to mutant house flies, was the super cannon. 

Thank heaven for the easy levels where you had a disruptive field in mid-screen that you could hide in, and thus at least avoid that homing missile.  But it was still maddeningly tough at times, since the spinning disc of death could kill your housefly avatar anywhere on screen, even amidst the disruptive field.  And maybe you thought only modern games or titles for home computers were complicated.

Whoever came up with Yar's Revenge was a sadistic son-of-a-video game programmer for sure.  And yet I loved it.  The ultra-satisfying sound of the Quotile blowing up was music to my young ears.  Of course, this was back in the day when games rarely had an ending, per-se.  You played until the difficulty level ramped too far up for you to survive, or if you were especially good, until boredom overtook you.  If you truly became good at a game, usually it was boredom that would eventually drive you from playing. 

Atari 2600 games were all about the challenge.  This was an unsympathetic console system.  Yes, they gave you varying difficulty levels, via the select switch.  And there were the difficulty toggle switches on the console body which sometimes made things easier.  In the home version of Space Invaders, for example, it would make your Christmas tree-shaped player either wider or narrower, and the narrower the better for ease of play, since in higher waves of the game there were so many descending enemy laser bolts as to make you feel like you were in a really killer rainstorm.  2600 games were often not easy to play well, and some were down-right sadistically hard.

I loved that first Atari, and it whetted my appetite for more.  Later I conned my Dad into buying me an Atari 7800 for another birthday.  I think I was fourteen.  I treasured my 7800 as much as my 2600, because not only were the graphics on that system nicer, but it was backward compatible with my old 2600 games too.  In fact, I still miss my 7800 sometimes, as it was a lot of fun to play, despite the fact that it was under-marketed by Atari and almost completely overshadowed by the Nintendo Entertainment System.

You know, I played those Atari games (2600 and 7800) for all their were worth.  And I eventually took this love of games with me when I started making closer friends, rather than just in-school acquaintances.  As you can no doubt tell, I was a very shy and somewhat socially awkward kid.  But I'd play Atari games with my cousins, and then later with my friends.  I especially looked forward to my birthdays, when I'd have a sleep-over with three of my favorite cousins and play games almost the entire time.  They'd bring their games, I'd have mine... we'd all play.  It was fun, and as close at that time as I got to "normal" kid-to-kid interacting.  School doesn't count.  School was, when I was younger, often just an exercise in discomfort for the most part.

Of course, by high school, I had that Game Boy as well, which was nice because I could play the grainy pea soup games for it anywhere I dared take them.  I recall beating one of my all-time favorites, Castlevania: The Adventure (a game still despised by many players for its obnoxious design) while on university campus with my mom while she was taking an exam.  And so, having a Game Boy, I could be mobile and game as well.  This was good since mom didn't like that I spent so much time by myself at home.

That's the box art that takes me back.  I can almost remember the first time I fired up Pole Position II.  I recall thinking it seemed so much more like an arcade game than Pole Position for the Atari 2600, with its clunky block graphics and harsh bleeting sound effects. / Source:  atariage.com

 

I obtained my Super Nintendo for Christmas of my sophomore year of high school.  I'd really come to love this system later that year for its two-player abilities, as I'd race my best friend on the challenging tracks of the very first Mario Kart game.  We'd also occasionally play Street Fighter II, though Super Mario Kart was always a better competition.  I recall one instance specifically during my senior year where me and two of my buddies cut class and came home to play.  We told my mom that there was an assembly and we were skipping it.  She was wise to us, but to her credit, she gave me some slack.  Anyway, we were upstairs playing, and my best friend and I were racing.  He always pushed me full-tilt at Mario Kart.  No easy push-over, for sure.  He was in the lead and I was gaining on him, though he didn't realize it.  During the last lap, I got close and then slipped past him right before the finish line, stealing away first place.  He was so surprised that he yelled at the top of his lungs, "F**k!"  My mom, who was downstairs, hollered up: "I heard that!"  We were all in stitches and chagrined at the same time.

That Super Nintendo had longevity.  After high school, I was still playing it.  That same best friend introduced me to the Super Nintendo port of Civilization, and I was hooked.  Yes, the graphics were a bit clunky, and the music was... well I'd mute it, because who can play the Super Nintendo version of Civilization for hours on end and stand that monotonous melody (I think the designers made it that way so that the music would eventually drive you to take a break from playing, much like the Wii now-a-days asks you if you don't think you might take a break and get some fresh air... hahaha).  But it was my first real experience with one of these types of games, and I was one rampant Civilization builder for at least six months or more.

This was where I first started staying up all night long and into the next day, playing video games.  Sadly, this sort of behavior, while I look back on it and reminisce, was to lead me thoroughly toward my state of video game addiction I have previously spoken of.  I was already a devoted gamer and played more than was healthy, but at least during high school I would set aside gaming in favor of friends.  Sure, I still loved the rush of shooting down an enemy plane via Falcon 3.0 on my old PC, or exploring the depths of some really novel level design in Super Metroid, as I had when not hanging out with friends in high school.  But after graduation, I sort of fell off the world, so to speak.  Heck, that first summer after high school, I used an early generation game-making program to design and build my very own game on that old PC!  By the way, my game was called Underworld.  I still have a copy somewhere.  It's not very good, mind you, but I still claim it.  Warts and all.

Now I'm gonna fast-forward a bit, glossing over my days of PlayStation 1 gaming (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Ace Combat 2 and Vigilante 8 were my favorite games on that system), which was what I bought right after breaking up with my first serious girlfriend.  I did still play while dating the girl in question, and I recall her really being mad at me after I practically ditched her for a week straight so I could power through System Shock (a classic if ever there was one).  But I was also enamored with having an actual girlfriend (!), so such gaming was less all-consuming than it had been for awhile and later would be again.

I had money of my own to spend by the time that girlfriend and I broke up, since I was working full time but still living at home.  So I could afford to buy my own games now.  And without a girlfriend, what else did I have to spend money on, besides a rather cantankerous Dodge Aries that served as my first car?  Gaming became my life.

I'm also going to bypass too many details of the late-night sessions of Goldeneye on one of my friend's boyfriend's Nintendo 64.  That was nice though, as I got a chance to relive what multiplayer gaming was all about.  Too bad I spent most of my time hanging out with that friend's boyfriend, as I wish now I'd done more to really rekindle the friendship I'd had in high school with this particular girl.  But it was a weird time, after me and that girlfriend I've mentioned broke up.

I'm going to skip right ahead to the first years of wedded "bliss," and Unreal Tournament.  I became interested in video games again in a big way after getting married.  Before getting married, I'd been able to curtail my gaming somewhat.  Dating is a contact sport if done right, you know (not that sort of contact, ya dirty mind!).  What I mean is that, like a pro athlete, I had to be on my toes to keep the lady on the court/field.  Too bad I didn't realize that applied just as much after "I Do."  But more on that in a second.

Not me playing "Facing Worlds," one of the most popular Capture the Flag maps for Unreal Tournament.  I was never very good at this game, though I sure liked to play it.  I quickly discovered how bad I was when faced with online competition.  Real people are much more tenacious and accurate than the computer-provided "bot" players (surprisingly enough I'd think it'd be the opposite).

Once marriage replaced dating, things changed in ways that weren't so great for either of us.  In reflection, I think I was feeling out of sorts from how life was going.  And some primitive part of me thought happiness was playing games and having the woman of the house take care of everything else.  Ashamed to say it, but yes, after some years of reflection, I suppose that about sums up what I perceived at the time.  I was very much used to being by myself as well, as I think I have illustrated pretty well so far.

Where was I?  Ah, Unreal Tournament.  As with most of the games I have mentioned thus far, I still enjoy this one, though it and its closest direct sequel, Unreal Tournament 2004, also make me feel edgy.  The game is a visceral first-person shooter where you, as I usually refer to it now, "run around in a maze and shoot people."  The thing that made Unreal Tournament and its sequel so addictive was that there were life-like "bots," or computer-controlled opponents that acted like human players, albeit with pretty bad coordination.  And better still, Unreal Tournament allowed you to go online and play against real players, via the internet.  The pice-de-resistance was that Unreal Tournament had an in-system editor that allowed you to build your own maps, weapons, and other forms of game content.  I never actually did this myself, but I took advantage of other people's creativity and spent exceedingly long hours using our apartment's one phone line to slog through huge lists of add-on files to download.  I certainly got our money's worth for that dial-up connection, let me tell you.

I eventually began playing Unreal Tournament less and less.  For one thing, I knew gaming had become a problem in my life, and especially in my marriage.  I'd like to think I'm fully in recovery today, though if I had time and didn't feel any worry about succumbing to the siren's song of game addiction once more, I might play more than I do. 

Now that I've laid out where I come from on games, let me put forward why I think they have lost their touch in the present day.  Granted, what I have mentioned is a small sample of the sheer vastness of games I've played in my life.  And no, I won't be entertaining any arguments as to whether Unreal Tournament or Quake III Arena was better (because that's pointless to debate - UT rules and that's all there is to say) or why the Sega Genesis was better than the Super Nintendo System (pointless as well, as the Genesis was getting long-in-the-tooth when the Super Nintendo was still coming up, so you could enjoy one and then the other and not consider yourself a traitor in either sense, in my opinion).

First, video games these days are so expensive!  I point to the cost of my Atari 2600 games when I first got into gaming.  Now I realize that had I gotten my system when it was first on the market in the 1970s, it'd cost me similar to what you'd pay these days for a modern machine.  And the games were probably similarly priced too.  But that's the thing.  When you bought a game, up until the turn of the century, you were buying the WHOLE game.  Yes, PC games have featured add-on packs for years, but these were still stand-alone programs for the most part.  You might not know what the game was about if it was an add-on, but often you could still play it.  No, I am talking here about Downloadable Content, otherwise known as "DLC."

What classic games may have been like if DLC had been invented at the time.
 

DLC is a good idea.  In theory.  So might I add is Communism.  In theory.  In DLC's corner, the argument goes that you can pay real world money to get extra game content.  In theory then, games can be cheaper and then the designer can incentivize you to pay for non-essential content, right? 

Nah, that's not quite how it goes. 

Console games are, according to my sources, making the player pay for entire chunks of a game that by rights, they should be getting for their initial investment.  So-called "triple-A" games cost upwards of sixty big ones these days.  No, that wasn't a typo.  Sixty.  Dollars.  Three Andrew Jacksons, not including sales tax!  Ouch.  I could go to an amusement park for that.  Sure, a video game provides more long-term entertainment than most modern amusement parks.  So we'll say that kind of lay-out of capital is the price you pay for your entertainment.  But when games don't deliver the goods all up front, and then expect you to pay more for content that is sometimes actually pre-packed into the program itself, and not patched on afterward as legitimately downloadable content?  You download an unlock code and then get to play parts of the game that were off-limits before...  and they wonder why people go to such lengths to hack their games and then pirate them on the 'net.  It seems backhanded to me, honestly.

I realize that games cost a lot of money to make these days.  And that if inflation is accounted for, it means gamers are probably paying a pretty fair price for all the work that goes in.  But that's just my point.  How long can a market continue to demand that you pay higher and higher amounts for luxury goods, and run in a bloated and self-serving manner while taking in that revenue, and expect to stay afloat?  I say that the rise of so-called "indie gaming" is a good thing.  Big companies, such as the oft-maligned EA (and maligned for good reason, I think), should take a look at their business plans and do some serious thinking about the future, instead of shoveling the same schlock year after year.

Another gripe?  How many copies of the same basic game do I need?  They all look the same to me.  And they say "we extend play life by DLC," and perhaps in some instances that is warranted, but is it really good content I'm downloading?  Everybody sticks as close to what is "popular" as possible, which seems to me to induce a case of déjà-vu.  Haven't I shot that same alien/terrorist/zombie before in that other game last week?  Know what I mean?

I loved Unreal Tournament because I could play a variety of levels with it, based on the fact that users were given the ability to add in their own maps, music, and even game types.  For free.  People made some of these add-ons into true labors of love, and it showed.  Heck, clever designers even modified the original game so that you could play variations never imagined by the original game developer.  The game's engine was that flexible, and the would-be designers were that creative.

In fact, the original Unreal Tournament had a lifespan that makes most modern games look positively still-born by comparison.  Maybe game developers think that by making two dozen sequels to one good title that they are extending that properties lifespan, but in my opinion, endless sequels are shoddy business.  I'll get to that in a second though.

Now I realize consoles are not as user-made-content friendly due to proprietary control restrictions and lack of as much common user interface (the gamepad was not made for designing, nor are motion control systems that newer systems employ).  But just the same, why would I want to play the same first-person shooting game over and over and pay for it over and over?  So many Call of Duty and Call of Duty-clones, and so little time.  No thank you.  Innovate already!  I point to Yar's Revenge.  Yes, it is a little derivative too, due to the design limits of the time, but the game play itself was truly unique enough to make it memorable. 

Now I've seen that there are in fact modern games that are different enough, especially in the way they tell a story, to really draw the player in.  And I am not simply an old man who thinks things were only good when they were simple.  I play some of my old favorites from my youth these days via emulation and wonder to myself: "How did I ever think this was good?"

However, so many games these days, from my observations and experience, are working off the same principle that Hollywood does when it green-lights a film project.  It's the whole: "Do we have enough commonality with what is already popular out there and has worked before so as to justify spending all that money on development and production?"-thing.  If designers in the old days had worked off that paradigm every time they made a new game, video games wouldn't have survived the crisis in '83, after Atari's attempt to cash-in on E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial failed so miserably.  And for that game's sake, despite its many flaws, it did have the courage to be different than what was expected (i.e.: a Pac-Man clone, based on what I have read).  Yes, E.T. crashed and burned in its difference, but at least it took the risk.  The guy who had the unenviable task of taking the game from rushed concept to completion and shipment for the holiday season deserves more credit than he gets, I think. 

And yes, as a kid, I owned the game E.T.  And I beat it too.  And it beat me as well, with that fidgety control system.  It's not a forgiving game, even for a piece of crap.  So there.

What else?  Oh yes, let's talk about System Shock.  Now there was a game that made you feel something more than just adrenaline and tired from button pumping.  Even if most of that feeling was nervous, jittery, coppery-tasting fear.  You never knew what sort of demented robot or mutated horror waited around the next turn, and always you felt the oppressive omnipresent eye of SHODAN.  Ah SHODAN... one of the all-time great villainesses.  The first time you, as the player, really attract this maniacal artificial intelligence's attention, it's one of those moments that rings with anticipation and menace.  Her words, at first curious and then chilling, let you know that you're really in it now.

 

System Shock was among the first pseudo-3D games that really involved the player in what they were doing beyond "shoot bad guy, repeat."  You were constantly working to out-wit SHODAN, while trying to escape from Citadel space station and her clutches.  It was a game that actually had a story that you cared about, as opposed to say Doom, upon which much of System Shock's technology was based from.  Though nowhere near as involved as System Shock, Doom's plot was still basically compelling.  For those who don't know, Doom's plot goes like this: a science experiment gone wrong has let loose the minions of hell, and you gotta shoot your way out.  And that was pretty much the extent of the story.  Sounds like a "B" movie plot to me. 

The speech I recall was a bit more involved: "Who are you? The computer nodes can be repaired, but you... Who are you? My cameras and probes scan your body, but you do not match any employee file. When my cyborgs bring you to the electrified interrogation bench, I will have your secret and you will learn more about pain than you ever wanted to know."
 

Doom really didn't have a deeply fleshed out story, but System Shock...  Now that was art.  For those of you too young to have played it, just imagine the subtle nuances and ingenious game-play of Half-Life, but without true 3D graphics.  True, it wasn't exactly Shakespeare in either case.  Wait, do people these days even remember Half-Life?

And before you say it, I know that old games didn't always have plots that made you simply hang upon their every moment.  But that's not the point.  Games like Yar's Revenge had to be creative and do the most they could with what they had on-screen because they didn't have anything else to go with.  These days a game has the ability to put the player into a world that can almost seem at times as though it is as real as the one in which we inhabit. And yet the plot is so often: "kill three million bad guys and get some end-credits for your trouble."  And yes, to those of you who shout that I haven't played enough modern games to know any differently, I realize some modern games do have more plot than that. But the problem is, games as a story-telling medium are evolving very slowly.   

By way of example, take the plot of any average Nintendo Entertainment System game.  How much different is the plot of any current-gen console game from it?  Not by much.  And yet with all the horsepower of the modern gaming system or PC, it seems to me that the reason better interactive experiences aren't being made is that it is: 1) safe to stay with "kill all the bad guys," and 2) developers can't figure out how to tell a story more compelling and not be labeled "more interactive fiction than actual game." 

I'll point to another title that I neglected to mention until now: Knights of the Old Republic.  Talk about a plot twist when you first play through it!  That is, if you didn't have the plot spoiled for you by reading about it ahead of time, as I did.  The first Knights of the Old Republic game, despite some in-game mechanics that occasionally annoyed me (the RPG element of combat, for one), broke my expectations with its game play.  I have heard it said in some quarters that Knights... was in many ways what George Lucas's Star Wars prequel trilogy should have been.  The plot is truly immersive.



The PC game Knights of the Old Republic was converted into a three part movie series, using the game's plot and converting it into a truly compelling story.  Above is the first of the films, via Youtube.

You know, if I am going to pay $60 for a video game, I'd like to know that what I'm getting is going to be playable for some time to come.  The Legend of Zelda comes to mind.  I still like to take a trip through Hyrule now and then.  Even though the game can be predictable, it is still entertaining to replay even today.  But how many modern games can say the same thing? They are designed to be practically thrown away after a certain amount of usage, since a newer game system or PC hardware will make them start looking dated in six months or so, give or take.  If console makers have their way and ban the used game market, eventually we will be throwing away games we don't feel like keeping.  The current crop of systems dodged a bullet when they backed away from that proposition, in order to save face.

And speaking of used games, what about the issue of backwards compatibility?  To my knowledge, the Atari 7800 was the first system to offer this integral to the system (without peripherals, like the Atari 5200 used).  And further, I was happy that the PlayStation 2 played PS1 games natively too. But this should be a no-brainer, since both PS1 and PS2 were optical formats.  How hard is it to make your new system play all the old stuff I have from your company too?  Well apparently hard enough, as some PS1 games were not supported on even the PS2.   

Apparently Sony's latest console, the PlayStation 4, does not feature full backward compatibility at the press of a button.  What Sony, were you saving a couple bucks by leaving what must take up about half a micro-chip's worth of space these days off of the console!?  Are PS1 games such a hurdle that if I happen to have some laying about that I still like to play, I have to fire up my old PS1 console to give them a go again, and then smack the system repeatedly to get the damn laser to move properly ?  Hey Sony, no offense to your supposed cloud-based solution, but what if I want to play my games off the grid?  Must we all be umbilicalled to the cloud to do anything, these days (says the blogger who uploads his rants to the world-wide-web like a man trying to throw rain back into the sky and have it stick).

Did I already complain about too many sequels?  Super Mario Kart, I'm looking at you.  Nintendo does this to a "T," you know.  They hit on to something good and then pound it to death with sequel after bloody sequel.  Yes, Super Mario Kart deserved a Nintendo 64 iteration. Many say that game was the panicle of the series, though I am a purist and prefer the Super Nintendo version.  But please Nintendo, try something new and get out of your ruts!  We just might like it.  I know, trust is a narrow catwalk over a molten metal pit.  But you can still give it a try.  Maybe there are more avenues to pursue rather than Italian plumbers, pointy-eared sword-wielding heroes and parasite-killing bounty hunters!



At over $400 when it was released, PlayStation 4 was not natively compatible with all previous PlayStation games for previous generations of Sony consoles, even though all are optically based media.  It was different in the old days, when you had a chip-covered card in a plastic cartridge that wouldn't physically fit the newer system because they had to change the input to accommodate newer technology.  Nowadays, optical disks and the plummeting price of microchips allows developers almost unlimited freedom to let you play all your old games.  Or that's the theory, anyway. / Source: Sony.com

One thing I'll say I think game makers still do fairly right is Civilization-type planning and growth games.  Though the market is a bit dried up from its hayday, I think.  Then again, I haven't played a modern Civilization-type in some times, save for Rebuild, an indie game for my tablet that takes the Walking Dead-type premise of surviving against hordes of zombies while living off what's left of the remnants of modern society.  It's a fun little game, and doesn't need a huge budget.  One of the places I think modern designers got it right. 

But then Civilization-type games are inherently dangerous for me, as I am always planning what I am going to do next, and so I get lost in them.  As noted, Civilization for the Super Nintendo was where video gaming started to truly become all-encompassingly obsessive for me, so much that I would stay up late and ditch friends, family and responsibilities to play it.  In fact, Super Nintendo's version of Civilization was the first game I voluntarily banned myself from playing, since I realized even then that it was taking over my life.  So trust me, nothing like that would entice me into buying a console or a suped-up PC. 

How about multiplayer?  That gives games more longevity, I hear you say.  But here's my complaint: I hate playing people online.  Maybe I am just inherently unlucky, or maybe in all these years of playing video games I never became any good at them, but playing against people online makes me feel like an idiot.  For one thing, I dislike playing a complete stranger who is uncannily good at a game.  It makes me wonder if they are cheating somehow, if I can't see him (or her - let's not be sexist) sitting there, mashing the buttons away.  Since I am not right there to observe them actually playing, I get suspicious that they are not even a real person.  Then I lose much of my good sportsmanship feelings and start turning into... forgive the crude euphemism - a whinny little bitch.  Especially when they are taunting mercilessly in every flavor of bad grammar and obscenity to go with it.  It's one good and fast way to get me to stop playing a game online, let me tell you.

This is why Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 was so awesome.  Nintendo got it right again there, I think.  They made the Nintendo 64 a multiplayer system extraordinaire by giving you four controller ports native on the console.  Playing Goldeneye against three other guys in the same room was...  well it was sublime.  And I'm not saying I was good at it.  I stunk badly, since I didn't own the game and get any practice on it until long after the system had spooled out its normal life span.  But when you sneak up on another guy who is sitting right next to you in the room, and shoot him in the back with a silenced Walther PPK?  That's entertainment.  Almost as good as getting in a rocket launcher slug match in the tight corridors of "The Archives" (one of my all time favorite multiplayer arenas).  Poetry.  Sheer poetry.

"Dum da da dum, da da da dum da da dum, da da da dum da da dum, da da da dum da da dum da da da... wah wah, wa wahwa!" / Source: reddit.com

 

In retrospect, I suppose my not owning a current-gen gaming system, either console or PC, has as much to do with the fact that gaming in the past became too all-encompassing for me.  I'm glad to not be a slave to games these days too.  I read more, and I think more, and I spend more time interacting with people.  Sadly, I was once one of those geeks who couldn't carry on a conversation with the opposite sex because I was afraid they'd look at me like a dork if I told them what I liked to do in my spare time (and too much of it in said spare time, as I have mentioned).  So there is little hope for me, I suppose.  Based on what is out in the market now, and forecasting the future from that, I'll never be a true video game addict again.

I'll just write about it instead.

The parting comment:


So true.