Console Generation VII - All the Good It's Done

Now, I disliked basically everything that Acefondu did about this current generation. In fact, I probably disliked it even more. However, I try to be a positive person, and so I can't help but want to find the good in this. I've been floundering on where exactly to start this for several days, and mostly what I've come up with is separable into two simple categories: Hardware and Software.

Hardware:

There are certain things about this generation of consoles that, simple though they may be, are truly excellent and often glossed over- wireless controllers. On this front, the clear winner is Sony. Not only wireless, but rechargeable! Everyone else still requires AA batteries.

Another good feature is that the hardware basically guarantees good graphics. Even the very worst games on the market look decent. Honestly, this is the best I could come up with. Based solely on hardware, this was a disappointing generation to say the least.

Software:

Here's where it truly shined. Some of the best games I've ever played have been released in this generation among the deep sludge of FPShooters and grizzled space marines. We're talking whole franchises I have come to love, like Bioshock, Dead Space, InFamous, Assassin's Creed, and let's not forget the cream of the crop- Batman: Arkham Asylum. These games are all truly excellent, and great starts to a whole new world of gaming. So much so that they deserve their own article, and I'll elaborate on them all later.

Instead, I choose now to post something of a rebuttal to a part of Ace's article: his complaint about sequels.

Firstly, I find his statement about game series rarely reaching so many sequels before now to be a bit silly. After all, our two favorite franchises of all time, Mario (his) and The Legend of Zelda (mine) have such high numbers of sequels that it's actually difficult to nail down just how many there are. (Mario has 115 titles to his name if you count side games and sports and whatnot, and Zelda has over twenty.) The reason that there haven't been so many sequels to series until this point is that they simply hadn't been around long enough. Of course the longer a game franchise is around, the higher its number of sequels go. That's just logical. Secondly, the more sequels quality companies make to quality games, the better. Every new sequel is an opportunity for a good game. Some of the many many Megaman sequels were excellent, as Ace himself pointed out in his most recent article. Thirdly, sequels aren't harming the new in the industry. All the new franchises I mentioned weren't hindered by the fact that there's now eight Silent Hills. In many cases, not only have the sequels NOT hit critical mass, but they've reached a finite ending. As of now, at four games, Snake's saga in Metal Gear Solid is over and done with. There may be more games on the horizon, but we've effectively wrapped up the character in style.

Another truly excellent addition is DLC, and online download networks, when utilized properly. I love replacing old PSX games with PSN titles, and I especially love the reasonably priced DLC you can get for many new games. Mission packs and new content are always welcome.

Basically, what it comes down to, in my thought process, is that as long as the games themselves don't suffer, the generation was a success. This generation has brought with it many, many evils. the FPS plague, the obsession with repeating successes of other companies instead of finding their own, the casual gaming market. However, buried amongst the filth are several new games and new standards that make it all worthwhile. At the end of the day, this generation has delivered a lot of fun, and isn't that what truly matters?

The Death of Mega Man

Keiji Inafune left Capcom some many months ago, and it seems as though that has pissed Capcom off more than I had hoped. I pondered what would happen to our favorite blue bomber once its creator left. I assumed Capcom would continue making great Mega Man games and little would be lost. If anything I thought maybe a new director would breathe a little life into the series. I of course, couldn't have been more wrong.

Capcom as far as I can tell has all but decided that Mega Man is no longer a viable mascot character. Admittedly, his games haven't sold well the past few years apart from the DLC games of Mega Man 9 and 10, and in Japan Battle Network is a really strong series. As a whole though, the Mega Man property is not nearly as lucrative as it once was.

Despite that, I believe there is something more to this story that fans will never really know. Just how badly did Keiji piss Capcom off? I mean, he really must have upset them greatly. After he initially left, Mega Man Universe was immediately cancelled which was supposed to be a sort of Little Big Planet meets Mega Man. It was pretty far in development too, they had trailers for it, and even a pseudo release date planned. Now that didn't really register with me too much at the time as far as just how badly Capcom is trying to keep Mega Man titles off the shelves.

Just this past week Capcom cancelled Mega Man Legends 3 on the 3DS. They were going to release a demo to see how viable the game would be before actually finishing it. However, they never even let the demo get released to see how well it would do. That strikes me as very fishy. Initially they said to the fans that if the Mega Man Legends 3 demo got enough attention and downloads that they would make the full game. Why suddenly deviate from that plan and pan the game? It makes NO sense. But ok, whatever, the Legends series was probably the least lucrative of all the Mega Man spinoffs, I get the decision.

However, it's this last bit of news that strikes me as odd. Capcom just earlier today announced a follow up to Marvel vs Capcom 3, called Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. They also released the names of the new combatants the game will have. Before I mention who is in and who isn't let me tell you that Capcom had polls on their website of characters people wanted to see, and more often than not Mega Man or Mega Man X would appear in the top 5 for the Capcom side of the game. He is, however, nowhere to be found on the new version of MvC3.

What strikes me as REALLY fishy about the choice to leave him out though, is who they put in. They put in Virgil from Devil May Cry. WHY? They are rebooting the Devil May Cry series, GOD knows if Virgil will even BE in that reboot. So we have Zero in MvC3 who was put in before the Keiji fiasco and Dante, but no Mega Man who is the star of his series but they add Virgil? At this point, it's a blatant snub.

Clearly there is no question to me now that Capcom has lost faith in the Mega Man brand as it stands now. Whether we ever see Mega Man again is something I doubt heavily, but it IS Capcom after all and rarely do they ever let a series die off. But this is a rather strange series's of occurrences against Mega Man. If I had to make bets, I would say one of two things will happen.

1. Capcom is going to revamp Mega Man into something brand new yet familiar like they did with Street Fighter 4.
2. We never see Mega Man again.

What I'm 99% sure of is we'll never see Mega Man 11, or a new Mega Man X. The Zero series on handhelds died several years ago so we won't see that again either. Hopefully, I'm wrong and we see Mega Man soon. He's my second favorite video game character of all time. I enjoy every Mega Man game made apart from the Battle Network games, and I could play Mega Man games through a Mega Man 100 if that ever happened.

It saddens me to think he may be gone. Honestly, it kills me inside as a gamer to think it. The way of gaming as I knew it is dying off making way for FPS after FPS. If they make a Mega Man FPS I'll probably assassinate myself. I know there's a fan game of a Mega Man FPS, that doesn't count. Like music though, what you grow up with ends up being what you like most and all the new stuff is crap. I feel video games will have the same stigma among people. Despite my bias, I think gaming fans can agree that watching Mega Man get sent to his unceremonious death is very sad.

*21 Charge Shot salute*

Crysis 2: Everything that's Wrong with Gaming Today

If you have rummaged through earlier posts of mine you'll note that I have become somewhat of a PC gamer. I enjoy PC games more these days with their mod communities and customization, mouse control especially for games like this, and the online communities are generally older and easier to get along with.

Crytek made an amazing game some years back called Crysis. It was the Mount Olympus of graphical benchmarks for PC's. To this day it's used as a benchmark to see just how good your PC is. Though it is being slowly replaced by Metro 2033 and Witcher 2, it had a really good long run. Graphical benchmarks aside, it was an amazing adventure. Beyond its lush landscapes lay a great foundation of gameplay, utilizing suit powers and allowing the player to plan how to attack every situation. I played through it 3 or 4 times and always doing things differently each time. The story was simple, but compelling and succinct. It made sense and didn't leave you scratching your head. The ending was a cliffhanger and left us really wanting Crysis 2. Let me just say that not only wasn't this cliffhanger resolved, it was left entirely ignored as if it never happened.

So Crysis 2 finally comes and Crytek brings the game to consoles. This of course is an immediate detriment to PC gamers. Crysis 2 by comparison to Crysis looks awful. The textures are not nearly as crisp, the environments are unimpressive, and the scope of the game in all has shrunk significantly. They all but abandoned the first game's story for console gamers who had no history with the first game. You could play Crysis 2 without ever playing Crysis 1 and not be lost. What doesn't make ANY sense though, is if you HAVE played Crysis 1 you will be SO lost playing Crysis 2. If I went back in time and didn't play Crisis 1, maybe Crysis 2 would make sense....maybe.

Gameplay:

Crysis 2 is flat out a downgrade in every conceivable way from Crysis 1 and the gameplay is no exception. In Crysis 1 you got FULL suit control. You could switch from Power, Speed, Armor, and Stealth whenever you wanted, and use them strategically as you want. In Crysis 2 there is no Speed or Power anymore. Speed is the WORST offender in my opinion because it's permanently on. Every time you run your suit power drains. What sickens me is you aren't even running in what Crysis 1 would consider "speed" mode. In Crysis 1 you ran like a rocket. It was brief sure, but it was a great way to bum rush a guy or escape a heavy firefight. In Crysis 2...you just run, like ANY normal human being yet your suit energy gets drained. This is supposed to be the SAME suit from the first game right? How then did it suddenly get shittier? Well it did and we're stuck with it.

Losing Power annoys me too. With Power on in Crysis 1 it was a gamble, you did more damage but were highly susceptible to dying really fast. I loved this gamble myself. Often I would use it against tough foes that took too long to kill, and I'd quickly use Power mode to dispatch them. It felt great, like a strategic move in combat. It was risky and fulfilling. Do we get ANY of that in Crysis 2? Nope, there is no Power mode.

What Crysis 2 does add are suit upgrades with RPG experience points and it added stealth killing. The stealth kills are fun admittedly but it wasn't anything you couldn't also do in Crysis 1. Instead of sneaking up on guys in Crysis 1 and unloading a silencer in them, in Crysis 2 you get to just press a button for a cinematic stab to the neck. The suit upgrades is the bigger addition however it's utterly stupid. The upgrades you get are mostly pointless. The only ones that make a big impact are the stealth ones, such as longer stealth power and silent steps. With those two equipped you are basically invisible to enemies. All the other upgrades are super shitty and don't matter. Like enemy sensor. I never actually got that one because your mini map displays your enemies, what the hell is the point?

Other minor additions to gameplay is being able to run and slide or jump and use a foot stomp move. I barely used either feature as they were pointless and more than not left you open for attack rather than safely shooting behind walls.

The enemies in this game were shitty too. Also, no final boss fight really pissed me off. Just like Bioshock 2, it made no sense. Crysis 1 and Bioshock 1 BOTH had final boss fights. Their sequels did not. WHY? But anyway in Crysis 2 you fight normal humans for a few hours then it's all aliens, of which there are only 3 types and 1 giant robot walker thing and you only fight 2 of those so I don't really count it.

The aliens are admittedly more fun to fight in this game than Crysis 1....but they don't make ANY friggin sense story wise. They look COMPLETELY different from the first game. They are literally a completely different species in my opinion. What's really dumb though is they're basically de-evolved from the first game. In Crysis 1 all the aliens flew around, in this one they are biped...WHY? Why did the aliens get worse all of the sudden? They JUST started their assault on earth after being awoken and suddenly they opt to NOT use their airborne comrades? Where are they? Did I really kill all of them in the first game?

Really I can't get over how completely different they are from the first game. As far as I can tell it was never explained why they look so different. In the first game they were basically robots, in this game they are full on aliens. It just doesn't make any sense, and you'll hear this complaint A LOT in my review of the story.

Story:

It didn't make ANY god damn sense!!!

SPOILER ALERT

In the first Crysis, at the end of the game we see our hero going back to the Island from whence the aliens came to stop them, then the credits rolled. Ok, are we caught up now?

END SPOILER

In Crysis 2 we open to...New York with a band of half-wits trying to defend it. They immediately get pwned and Prophet is inexplicably right there to fish what will become the main character of this game out of the water. Prophet kills himself and gives the new guy the suit.

Right there I had to stop the game. I had SOOOOO many issues with this after playing Crysis 1. First off, why aren't they on the island again? Where is Nomad from the first game? He's never spoken of, he's the main god damn character! It's as if he never existed at all! What the hell! My second issue is how in the holy fuck does Prophet give the new guy the suit? It's explained in the first game how these suits are symbiotic to the host and if you die, the suit literally burns you to ashes leaving no trace of your existence.

My question is how the FUCK did he get the suit off? He shouldn't be able to! Crysis 2, later in the game even points this very fact out all by itself. At one point the evil dude of the game goes to GREAT LENGTHS to take the suit off of you to use if for himself. He has a SHIT ASS TON of equipment lined up to get the damn thing off of you. He doesn't succeed by the way. So here we have Prophet in the opening of the game taking the suit off bare handed and later in the game they revert back to the first game's claim which is you shouldn't be able to take it off through normal means.

That was JUST the first FUCKING cinema and already I found like 4 plot holes. Not withstanding the incomprehensible nature of our new alien friends, this game may as well not have been called Crysis 2 at all. Just to tie it up, do we ever find out Nomad's exploits on the Island? No. Do we ever figure out just how in the hell Prophet got off the island? No. The island was supposed to be VERY important, and instead we get a defend New York story with none of our Suit wielding combatants like Nomad or Psycho (who by the way was the best character in the series).

Ugh, ok so I accept that I'm some new guy, fine. So immediately you're contacted by some random hippie character who still thinks you are Prophet. And as before you're a silent protagonist so he never opts to tell this hippie dick that you are NOT in fact Prophet. This will present another glorious plot hole later. First I'd like to identify, not exactly a plot hole but something that REALLY pissed me off.

So the hippie guy wants to meet up with you ASAP. You go through many stages trying to get to this dick fuck. Finally, in one level he is surrounded by the enemy on all sides and you have to break in and save him. You break in, shoot up all the dudes, but the hippie guy is nowhere to be found. Ok, so I think he gets captured, big whoop.

THE VERY NEXT CUT-SCENE:

Hippie Guy: "I fucked up"

I don't remember the exact next quote but he basically says he "fucked up" and left the place he was surrounded on all sides by to....get this...try to save his girlfriend..or go to his girlfriends house...something like that. I about shit a brick.

1. How did he escape? If he was in SO much peril HOW did he get out?
2. His girlfriend is never mentioned again.
3. If his ultimate goal is to meet up with Prophet WHY not wait?
4. Again, suit guy is a very good bodyguard. Wouldn't it have been smarter to wait for him and then save the girlfriend? YES!!

Fuck me this is beyond stupid.

So here's that plothole that I mentioned earlier. You FINALLY meet up with hippie guy who when he meets you is immediately thrown that you are NOT in fact Prophet. So much so, he suspects you are there to kill him and then he pulls a gun on you. This is where the idea of having a silent protagonist is utterly retarded. He could have told the hippie guy from the start what happened, and avoided this ugly incident. Furthermore, he doesn't even explain himself when the gun is on him. The suit RANDOMLY projects the game's first cinema which is a recording Prophet made...on the suit...which he wasn't wearing at the time...I have no idea how that worked....Anyway, so Prophet's message plays which gets the hippie guy off your case and he trusts you now. Thank god Prophet had the foresight to know he was recruiting a fucking mute and made that message!

It's at this point I mentally gave up on the story. The game drags on and you meet the old guy who started the suit program and wants the suit for himself to live longer and save everyone from the aliens. Once he fails to get the suit off he suddenly turns good guy and helps you out through the end...it's senseless just like everything else. I mean, your character had no reason NOT help stop the aliens in the first place. Why wouldn't the old man just wait for your character to stop the aliens then take the suit? No he has to fuck you up a bit, realize he's being a dick and then assist in you in the mission you were already fucking on in the first place! FUCK this is dumb!

Oh, and at one point in the story they threaten to nuke the aliens if you don't succeed in your mission in a certain time limit. In the first game it is discovered that nuclear warheads EMPOWER the fucking aliens. It gives them ENERGY! HOW was this forgotten? Did they just not tell anyone?

"You know sir, I think it'd be a good idea to tell the rest of the military that nukes don't work on these aliens."

"Nah, fuck that, let them figure it out."

Now, granted they never launch the Nuke so I didn't get to bitch about yet another plothole where the Nuke fried the aliens (which it shouldn't) so that's good they avoided that. But for them to even suggest a nuke makes me want to punch small baby Panda's for just how fucking dumb it is to suggest.

It actually gets dumber. The very end of the game made zero sense. Maybe I have to watch it again, I don't know. I still can't piece together exactly what happened. But basically you complete a mission destroying some alien power towers, get launched out of the last one and a cinema plays showing you rise up and Prophet's voice plays and he says he's Prophet...So Prophet came back to life? ....Somehow? WTF?

End Credits...

My only thought was what the hell did I just see? And I turned the god damn abomination off and played something good....

Sound:

Great sound as usual. Loved the gun sounds and I really enjoy Crysis's soundtracks. They are all fitting and give an air of futuristic war. It's good shit, can't say much else. Oh, -10 points for your main character causing plotholes because he's a silent protagonist. Yeah, that's in the sound department. Oh, and the voice acting in general was terrible. WHERE THE FUCK IS PSYCHO? He would have made this game a billion times better. "C'mere moppet!" - Psycho says to a Korean.

Graphics:

I went over this a bit earlier, but the graphics are worse than Crysis 1 by quite a bit. That's not to say the game looks bad though because it doesn't. I'm not a graphics whore by any means, but it would be embarrassing to me as a game developer to say that a game I made 4 years ago looks better than a game I just made. I mean it will confuse people in the future I bet. Playing Crysis, then Crysis 2 and saying "What the hell is this garbage?" Kind of like watching the old Star Wars movies and then the new ones which look better despite being prequels. It's all kinds of fucked up.

Multiplayer:

I actually tried to get into this, but it's too terrible. Finding a game is really hard, and most of them don't start. Furthermore, this game is bugged to hell and 90% of the time the game does NOT recognize that I'm online. I have to reboot the game 9 out of 10 times before Crysis 2 goes "Oh, yeah I see now, you ARE online! You can play now." I have no idea how to fix this error. From what I understand though it doesn't approve of Wifi connections. Sadly that's the only connection I have so fuck it, can't play online.

Conclusion:

I titled this with "Everything that's Wrong with Gaming Today." Specifically what I mean is Crysis 2 catered to console gamers and abandoned its core audience which is what a LOT of developers are doing these days in different ways. Whether it be to the casual crowd, or selling out making yet another FPS game, developers these days just don't give a shit about their fans. It's like when Epic Games called their fans thieves and refused to continue the Gears of War series on the PC. People pirated Gears of War on the PC and it didn't sell well, so Epic just said fuck you to PC gamers. It doesn't help that Gears of War is one of the shittiest PC ports in existence either. So really it's their own damn fault.

Also, the crappy story. Games these days are so poorly written, far worse than even the bad translated games of yore. I don't think developers hire writers anymore, really I don't. They probably let the clerical staff, or the janitor write some shit down and they use it. That's what this game felt like. It felt like whoever wrote it honestly never played the first game at all nor knew it existed and probably wondered why the executives kept insisting he title the game "Crysis 2."

This game should not have been called Crysis 2. It should have been called "Aliens fuck up New York," it would have made SO much more sense.

*This game sucked*

Console Generation VII

It's been a while since I've posted here, mainly because I lost my job last month. I lost it mostly due to our new governor cutting school funding across the board and also because of incompetent management, but hey what are you gonna do? I just get to join the 10% of jobless Americans at the moment and be in the 60% of Americans living in or below poverty. So I've been job hunting for the last month getting absolutely nowhere as I have been for the last 2 years job hunting as a side project. I'd rant more on it but if potential employers put 2 and 2 together and learn who "acefondu" is and google me they'd probably reconsider hiring me if I rant about how absolutely retarded my previous employer was. Suffice it to say I didn't have a job description for 4 years and they blamed me for not having enough work to do...Just a thought, when you hire someone, you probably should have something in mind for that position...But no, I was in the wrong...It took them 4 years to figure out I didn't have enough work to do, let that settle in on how dumb they are. They probably would have never figured it out had I not given myself projects to do, which when I presented them is when they caught on that I had too much free time. So by trying to help them out, I get fucked over. Take my advice, always look busy and don't do anything extra. It would have been safer for me to post more of these blogs at work, seriously.

So back to what I know best, gaming...and ranting. Today I'm going to rant about the 7th generation of gaming as it is reaching its twilight hours.

The 7th generation of gaming will be known historically as the online generation. But for me, it will be known as quite possibly the worst gaming generation I have ever been through. From shoddy hardware to terrible innovation the 7th generation of gaming is arguably the very bottom of the barrel when looking at previous gens. As usual I shall rant categorically.

Hardware:

The 7th generation, for me and many others, will mark the first time we ever had to send our systems in for repairs...and not just once but multiple times. We are all very aware of the Red Ring of Death fiasco, and I personally avoided the Xbox 360 for that very reason. However, the utter shittyness of the 7th generation would not let me escape hardware failures. Within the very first month of owning the Wii I had to send it in for repair. The first models had faulty graphics cards that would overheat and cause the screen to flicker tiny green dots everywhere. This wasn't an isolated incident either. The very same issue happened to my friend in the exact same week.

Just last week my original 60GB PS3 flubbed out on me in the middle of a Street Fighter match. It had been showing signs of breaking on me the last few months. Mainly when I would start a game it wouldn't boot up the audio properly half the time. It would make stuttering noises in many games. Also, some games would lag on me on boot up. I saw it coming.

And more recently my Wii has been making serious grinding noises when I run my games. It's so loud and obnoxious that I have since put it in my nearby closet while I play it. This muddles the sound enough to where it's tolerable to play, and generally not noticeable thankfully. This isn't an isolated issue either. There are many youtubes on this explaining how to fix it. I tried my damnedest to fix it myself but I could NOT for the life of me remove the final screw keeping it together. It's impossible, several of my friends have tried their hand at it and it's just not coming off.

---

Sure, the hardware of the 7th generation is the most complicated it's ever been. But when I can, to this day, still pop on my Atari 2600 after nearly 30 years it just makes me wince that NONE of the 7th generation's consoles are reliable. Absolutely none of them. What's worse is although they are more complex and have more working parts to fail, they can be compared best to desktop PC's. Now, I have owned around 4 or 5 desktop PC's and NONE of those have failed in the slightest. They all still work, and I still have them. If someone told me that a 14 year old PC is more reliable than a 7th generation gaming console I would have laughed in their face. If someone would have told me that a Nintendo console of all things would be shittier than a Panasonic TV I would not have even responded as my sides would have been splitting.

Seriously, up until the 7th generation of gaming consoles I was under the impression that game consoles were damn near invincible apart from the PS2 which has the infamous shoddy disc laser. I am baffled at the lack of quality of this generation of consoles. It's like all 3 companies purposefully made their systems cheap just so they could pull in repair service money and pooled repairs into one large warehouse so they all get a cut of the profits. Only problem is Microsoft went too far and their system was so shoddy they got a class action lawsuit. Good old Microsoft always taking ingenious devious corporate plans one step too far.

But I digress...

Software:

The 7th generation of gaming can be summed up in three words; First Person Shooter. Between the 360 and the PS3 you cannot escape this genre. I have pointed out before that previous consoles were plagued with too many bad side scrolling platformer games, however, in this day and age the over saturation of one genre is FAR FAR worse. Why? Because it takes WAY more time and WAY more resources to churn out shitty games these days, and because of that fact, we get less overall games than we did in previous generations.

Allow me to explain further. A company can spend some 3 to 4 years developing a crap fest like the new Turok game let's say, or god forbid the 14 years it took Duke Nukem Forever but that's clearly an exception. Still, they spend all that time on what is essentially a terrible First Person Shooter in an overcrowded First Person Shooter gaming environment. The console cycle after all this time is nearly passed, and what do they do for their second game? Make a sequel to their shitty FPS game of course, that's normally the case.

So instead of getting something interesting or unique from a developer, we are forced to eat their shitty FPS game. Back in the day a company may have spent a year or less on a really shitty side scrolling platformer. Maybe they would waste their time on a sequel, but generally they would explore a new avenue and create something generally worthwhile if not something of a cult classic title. In this 7th generation of games there are SO few risky titles, or cult classics, that it is simply ridiculous. The worst part about that for the developer is if they're just coming into existence and essentially make a game that will make or break them, they almost always end up failing on that one FPS title. I get why they choose that genre as their moneymaker, it just statistically sells the best right now. Even FPS games that do poorly still have way better margins than a shitty RPG. Take Homefront for instance. It's practically a dead game now, even though it's really young. It did terribly sales-wise, but it still danced circles around games like Nier and Disgaea 3. But in the end, everyone who worked on Homefront joins me and 10 out of every 100 Americans now as being jobless. As a gamer I would have taken my chances hitting it big with a game like Demon's Souls than try to insert another ho-hum FPS game into the 7th generation...but that's just me.

Game sequels are also what tells the story of the 7th generation. Before this one, you'd rarely see a game series go past 2 or 3, in this generation that's all we can expect. Most game series's now are in 4's, 5's and 6's. Others have dropped the number all together because they know just how embarrassing this is. From a business standpoint, I get it, it makes more sense to make something familiar and successful than something that may not resonate well with gamers or sell at all. With development cycles taking 3+ years it makes complete sense. But for gamers, we end up suffering though another Call of Duty, or only getting Madden to choose from rather than the superior Blitz games.

Worst of all the online scene that has defined the 7th generation has made it all the more worse. If you are one of those gamers that seeks a robust online experience you really have to play the popular game of the month, or one that keeps a robust online community. If you are like me, you pretty much hate all of those games. Considering mostly all those popular games are FPS games.

Even in the fighting game genre that I love you pretty much have to play the popular fighting game if you want online play. Thankfully I really enjoy Street Fighter 4 and it is the most popular one. But god help me if I want to play Blazblue online, or Soul Calibur 4. Those games online are a barren wasteland. You spend more time finding games than playing them. With that in mind, I simply stopped bothering with them as most people have.

Now I have mostly focused on my issues with the PS3 and Xbox 360 with their endless sequels and the FPS genre effectively ruining aspiring game companies seeking to make names for themselves, but the Wii is by far the worst offender to the horrid software that came out this generation. Let me just get this out of the way, I am ETERNALLY grateful for Super Mario Galaxy. It is my favorite Mario game ever made, and I've gushed over it in previous blogs. Really though, it is the perfect 3D Mario game.

With that said, the Wii has done way more harm than good. It spurred up a new kind of gamer, the casual gamer. Someone who not only doesn't care about the quality of video games, but one who doesn't even know what makes a game quality in the first place. If they can flail around and get a chuckle out of it then they are happy campers. That is exactly how the Wii games went after a while. Crappy flail-a-thons were made, many shovelware titles sold like champs, and Sony and Microsoft actually developed their own shitty flail hardware only furthering to damage the already terrible software lineups this generation had.

As Nintendo fans we expect Mario, Zelda, Star Fox, Metroid, Donkey Kong, and so forth. That's why we buy Nintendo dammit! They innovate, offer new and fun gameplay to their series's, and always manage to keep things fresh and interesting. With the Wii...we traded in Star Fox and F-Zero for Wii Fit and Wii Sports...We never got a new Pikmin, and we still technically NEVER got a new Zelda. The one we got is a heavily delayed Gamecube Zelda, period. The new Skyward Sword game will alleviate that itch, but I can't help but be super annoyed that all the time spent making shitty "Wii" centric games could have been used to give us Zelda two years ago, a Star Fox game, F-Zero, Pikmin, and maybe something totally new and fun. Oh wait we got Wii Music!

*shoots self*

One more point I would like to make about how terrible the software has been is REMAKES. Never before have we seen so many remakes, or companies who look to cash in. Sony has banwagoned to this trolly like no one else. They are HD remaking nearly everything after God of War 1 and 2 sold so well. Nintendo went so far as to remake Super Mario All Stars and had the gall to sell it for $30! The Wii itself launched with mostly remakes of RE Zero -4, OkamWii, and others. So not only is the software in CONCEPT copied from last gen with sequels up the ass, but just straight up copied with remakes. And to this day you can still hear Square fanboys chanting for a HD Final Fantasy 7...

Conclusion:

I was going to write a final paragraph or two about how this gen hasn't been a complete waste, but really I can't think of too much that was good about it. The good games felt way too much like last generation to really make me go "wow, that could not have been done without this new generation of consoles." I mean really, Mario Galaxy could have been done on the Gamecube and would have been better for it as we wouldn't have the shitty waggle attack. Really the only fantastic game of this gen that could really not have been done on the last gen consoles is Demon's Souls since it needed constant online connectivity to succeed beyond its great gameplay.

Personally, I rarely went online with it as I hated getting interrupted by an aggressor and it also screwed up the careful balance of pure black and pure white world tendencies you need to collect certain items. But the game succeeded on its online play. You could say that with a LOT of 7th generation games, and that's just my issue. A game like Demon's Souls can stand on its own without online, but its concept only works with online developed in mind for it. It's still a great game either way, the problem is that can NOT be said about 90% of the 7th generation's games. Would anyone say ANY FPS game was worth a damn without its online component? Of course not. Rare exceptions would be Bioshock and Metro 2033, and I'm thankful for those exceptions. But as I explained before the game has to be popular for the online component to even be worth a damn, and in MOST cases they aren't. Crysis 2 is the only FPS game I considered dicking around with the online as I loved Crysis 1. Sadly for me the game is not popular in the slightest and finding matches is frustrating, (Crysis 2 sucked anyway).

I know my last few posts all have a similar tune, mainly ranting about how I don't feel online gaming is an improvement for gaming, and how the FPS genre / sequels are stifling innovation, and I think I've driven those points home now. So my next blog will surely be bitching about how terrible Crysis 2 is.

*Crysis 2: Everything that's Wrong with Gaming*