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*