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Spanky the Dolphin aside, what do you think about it? Insightful? Shitty? Or shittily insightful?


Insightfully shitty?

I have to agree, i've noticed some of this before myself. Video Games are becoming far too expensive and so are the machines, eventually this will cause a collapse as people cant afford to sell their kidney to buy a PlayCube 260 or whatever.

Blah blah blah blah fucking blah.

David Wong's insipid rantings aside, maybe it'll do the gaming world some good for consoles to be so expensive. Why people are so fucking attached to them over PCs elude me, with the exception of the fact that good games are often exclusive to said consoles, which is just a symptom of that underlying problem anyway.


Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

I agree with some of it- but I don't see why anyone should care about the exodus of the "original gamers". There are other generations out there. I won't fault Nintendo for making games aimed at kids predominantly- I just note that I'm not one of the people who'll be playing their childish, inane Mario/Wario shit. That shit's for kids and I'm not a kid.

Frankly, this is all so much console stuff. And consoles have always been of secondary interest to me. PC games are in general a much more involving and rewarding experience than console games, though there's danger on the horizon there as well (as costs of development increase, publishers are less and less willing to front the money for a game that isn't an RTS/FPS/MMORPG we've all seen a billion times before etc).

David Wong reveals towards the end the true inspiration for his article: he doesn't just think the industry will collapse, he wants it to collapse because he subscribes to the bullshit conception that there's an infinite diversity of gametypes out there and all we have to do is crash the game industry to force developers to be more creative and innovative and presto the New Golden Age of (Indie!) Video Gaming will be upon us!

What I want to know is how he's so sure that there isn't a finite number of gametypes that are waiting to be discovered, a la the couple hundred or so individual plots that exist from which all stories derive?

18-Till-I-Die wrote:Video Games are becoming far too expensive and so are the machines, eventually this will cause a collapse as people cant afford to sell their kidney to buy a PlayCube 260 or whatever.

Video games are becoming far too expensive? There was a time when there were Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games sold for upwards of $70 or more. Adjust for inflation and many video games today are still very reasonably priced.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

He'd probably respond with "but it's such a tiny market it doesn't matter", to which the counter-response would be "So? It still makes money and it will continue to make money... see the legions of kids who still play Starcraft and Counter-Strike 1.6? They'll happily gobble up re-treads and re-hashes."

To which Davey-boy would probably sniff and counter with something like "well they're just pasty losers."

Vympel wrote:PC games are in general a much more involving and rewarding experience than console games, though there's danger on the horizon there as well (as costs of development increase, publishers are less and less willing to front the money for a game that isn't an RTS/FPS/MMORPG we've all seen a billion times before etc).

At the very least, the PC market is a helluva lot easier to step into as an independent developer; not only is the hardware and software relatively open and accessible, there are even whole game engines which have been open-sourced (Quake 3, for example) and now Steam is available as a means of distributing content without the pesky retailers to get in your way.

This is the same guy who argued that the XBox 360 was going to go the way of the dreamcast, being crushed hideously by the PS3 about 9 months ago.

Excuse me while I don't give a damn. Nevermind that the game industry in all forms grosses massively, far in excess of what it did during the original crash.

The guy is a fucking retard who's writing reeks of impotent self-importance...

Yes he makes some points, but the only points he makes are the ones he's lifted verbatim from other people.

I'm confused. Why are people taking something in PWoT seriously?

Adrian Laguna wrote:I'm confused. Why are people taking something in PWoT seriously?

Because it isn't funny - ergo, it can't be a joke, because jokes are funny.

He says that at 30, he's one of the original gamers. That's bullshit; the original gamers are over 40. He also says that many people of his generation have gotten bored of the gaming experience and will never buy another new console because they're getting too expensive and the experience is getting old. Even if that last part were true, the first part wouldn't be, for the simple reason that most people around his age start to reproduce. And that means kids, who will want new game consoles to play with.

I have a Gamecube and an XBox. Do you think I ever play on either of those fucking things, with their mindless kiddie-oriented or teen twitch-oriented games? No, I don't touch 'em. I have them for my boys, not for me.

His argument is very much like saying that the music industry will crash and die because most people stop really picking up new music once they hit 30, and instead prefer to continue listening to the old stuff. He honestly doesn't seem to understand that the human race continues after his generation.

I do kinda agree with him in the "single player modes for games meant mostly for multi-player" thing. That really does annoy me. Mostly because it seems 95% of the people you come across online are a bunch of idiots, so I actually prefer to play single player. Fuck all that l33t shit; I play games to have fun, not to dick wave on the Internet.

I do find myself agreeing with him on quite a few of his points, but I don't think we're looking at some gaming industry crash or anything (at least not for the reasons he's saying). But here at the tender age of 21 I do find myself becoming less and less interested in gaming in general. Maybe that's just because my competitive nature doesn't give a rat's ass about online play (and who wants to die a billion times while trying to entertain oneself?) and I'm too cheap to shell out the monthly fees for MMOGs (though if I do get the cash, I'll probably sell my soul to Blizzard and go on WoW).

But then that's just me. I'll stick with my GTA style games for now (and the occasional strategy game). At least there when I get to one of those insanely annoying missions that I keep failing over and over, I can take it out on the rest of the game world before trying again.

And for the record, I found his little narrative about Luke's Death Star trench run to be pretty funny.

EDIT: Damn typo.

(the other) Mr. Wong wrote:The current generation was novel because it introduced the world to adult games. The Grand Theft Auto series carried the PS2, with the ability to abuse prostitutes in ways that Mario only did off-camera. You had cursing in the cutscenes, you had games a 28 year-old man felt cool playing for the very first time.

But each event in that game is still carefully scripted. Run up to the busted-out brick wall. Truck pulls up. Six enemy troops spill out. Shoot them. Run down the hallway... get killed. Start over. Run up to the busted-out brick wall again. Again wait for the truck to pull out. Kill the six enemy troops. Run down the hallway. Pick up the First Aid Kit...

Rinse. Repeat. Memorize.

Again, it's okay for a film to be scripted because you're in the hands of the director and charismatic actors who make you care about their situation. But other than the thrill of seeing what special effects a shiny new console can show off, what's the reward for playing a scripted game?

Really? I thought the whole popularity of GTA (and its innumerable clones), was the fact that it was open ended and let you do things your way, not having to rely on memorization and "twitch" gaming. That seems to be far more the way that games are heading, not just

slightly better reflection effects and slightly better animated water ripples and - oh, look! This game has the most realistic fog yet!

...Although that's always nice.

To make a long story short, this guy's full of it, and himself, and don't know which end is which.

Why people are so fucking attached to them over PCs elude me

Unlike a PC, they're cheap, idiotproof and standardised - no messing around with drivers and upgrades, no worrying if your peripheral is going to work, no system requirements to keep in mind.

For gaming, I *vastly* prefer a console simply because I know the game'll work exactly as the developer intended.

I read that whole article before realising it was just that damn David Wong again

The video game crash of 1983 was because the games were shit. And not just the same-old same-old kind of shit Wong makes it out to be, but actually pure unadulterated shit, and every single person who played the games thought so (not literally. I'm sure there's someone somewhere who enjoyed E.T.). That lead to people returning the games, and when they noticed that there were very few playable games, they stopped buying them. And when people don't buy something, the stores have to return it, which means that the game companies had to give them their money back. The alternative would have been to give them another game, but since no-one was buying them anymore, the stores didn't want that. So the video game producing companies all lost a lot of money and many of them went bankrupt or dropped out. People also realised that they could buy personal computers, such as the C64 instead and they were both better in all ways and cheaper than the consoles.

The reason for why there were so many shitty games was partly that Atari themselves thought they could sell games just by brand-recognition alone, and partly that they lost control over who developed games for their system. Anyone with money started throwing out craptacular titles in the hopes of cashing in on the video game market. Even freaking Quaker Oats had a games division at one point!

Then Nintendo came up with the idea that they wouldn't let just any idiot develop for their new system, but you had to guarantee that it would be a good game (and they had some good and some silly demands that the companies had to follow. Max three games per year, no blood, and such things which eventually game them the reputation of being a bully but that's another story). This eventually made people buy consoles again.

However, people didn't stop playing games during the video game crash; that's not what crashed. They still had their old good games, the arcades and not the least the personal computers (which were quite different from today's PCs in that you didn't upgrade them all the time). David Wong is again full of shit.


Are we then seeing a similar crash coming? Not likely. Perhaps a crash is coming, but it's not going to be for the same reasons that caused the 1983 one. And David Wong's idea that the "original gamers" are going to stop buying consoles and play games is irrelevant even if it was true. By that reasoning the entire video game industry would be completely gone when that generation is gone.

However, I somewhat agree that it should be easier for indie game developers to distribute their games, but only if they can produce good games. Does anyone have any idea how many people there are out there who are gamers that just want to create clones with absolutely nothing original, just because they liked the original games so much themselves? It's depressing, because there are so many non-indies that do that already... (creating clones are, however, very good for learning purposes, and to do find out what it is that makes those particular games fun)

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Blah blah blah blah fucking blah.

David Wong's insipid rantings aside, maybe it'll do the gaming world some good for consoles to be so expensive. Why people are so fucking attached to them over PCs elude me, with the exception of the fact that good games are often exclusive to said consoles, which is just a symptom of that underlying problem anyway.


Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

Thus far it has simply been a question of money. Our home PCs are never up to the games I want to play, nor is my school lap-top. Up until now it's simply been more cost effective to buy a $150-$200 console which has plenty of games that I want to play instead of spending $1000 or more on a PC that can run a couple of games I'm interested in.

As to the article itself I find myself in agreement. I felt that a great deal of the preparation for this console generation was mistakenly centered around making the games look better. I don't care as much for how they look as for how they play. I want expanisve games that live up to a game's premise. I want a FPS that takes place in a fully realized physics enabled city. So that if I go and set up blasting cord and barrels of gasoline around the support columns of a building and set it off, the building comes down. And not because it was a scripted event but because the game is reacting to what I do. A game that allows expansion and lateral thinking is going to impress me a hell of a lot more than a prettier effect set.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Blah blah blah blah fucking blah.

David Wong's insipid rantings aside, maybe it'll do the gaming world some good for consoles to be so expensive. Why people are so fucking attached to them over PCs elude me, with the exception of the fact that good games are often exclusive to said consoles, which is just a symptom of that underlying problem anyway.


Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

How many people are going to shell out $1,000+ for a PC that's capable of playing the latest games, when they can pay less than half that for a console and a handful of good, A class titles that will work straight out of the box, no fucking around required, though?

David Idiot Wong wrote:After all, we still watch TV sitcoms, and they've looked the same since color TV was invented.

Minor note about that...I caught an episode of All in the Family on TVland the other day, and it freaked the hell out of me. People thought that stuff was FUNNY? (And Rob Reiner was that skinny??)

I don't know about American sitcoms (other than they're unfunny), but I've seen plenty of revolutionary stuff over here as time moves on. The majority of sitcoms made in this country from the '60s or '70s are utter shit, but my folks tend to stick with the older stuff while I'm more open to the newer kinds of comedy. It's the exact same thing with consoles, as the good Wong of this board noted. People may keep to their own tastes, but new people are arriving all the time and don't need to fit a niche already extant.

General Zod wrote:

Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

How many people are going to shell out $1,000+ for a PC that's capable of playing the latest games, when they can pay less than half that for a console and a handful of good, A class titles that will work straight out of the box, no fucking around required, though?

I don't think his statement is dependent on the number of people engaged in gaming; if he wanted, he could be a dick and say "real gamers" only means those who are willing to pay big bucks for their hobby.

The thing about a PC is that you can save a hell of a lot of money by building it yourself, upgrading piecemeal every so often, and by not demanding the very latest and greatest in parts, as the latest and greatest games rarely require the very best parts.

That said, I won't try to deny that a gaming PC is a more expensive hobby, but it's one I and quite a few others are willing to put the money into.

(I also would never try to suggest that people should abandon console hardware in favor of the PC.)

UCBooties wrote:I felt that a great deal of the preparation for this console generation was mistakenly centered around making the games look better. I don't care as much for how they look as for how they play. I want expanisve games that live up to a game's premise. I want a FPS that takes place in a fully realized physics enabled city. So that if I go and set up blasting cord and barrels of gasoline around the support columns of a building and set it off, the building comes down. And not because it was a scripted event but because the game is reacting to what I do

You can masturbate to physics all you want, but in the end most of it is just another form of eyecandy, and the example you give is way beyond the capabilities of any hardware, let alone hardware cheap enough to sell at $350 a pop. What else can they do with new hardware but make things look prettier?

A game that allows expansion and lateral thinking is going to impress me a hell of a lot more than a prettier effect set.

Software design is a whole different ballpark than hardware design. How are the guys that sit down and plan out the electronics of the PS3 supposed to satisfy your need for constant innovation and novelty?

(I have to admit that David Wong got something right; some people really do play video games for nothing but sheer novelty, it seems. And it drives me up the wall when those people bitch and moan about how nothing is original and everything is derivative.)

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Solution: Real gamers use a PC.

Assuming that all they want to play ever is FPS, flight sims, and wargames, many of which are derivative clones of each other.

Some people, however, like to have a bit more variety. Real gamers use whatever platform has more games that suit their taste.

It is a stupid reductionist argument to say "Real gamers use PC/insert console game here", since myself and many others play both PC and console based games, because, amazingly enough, not one system holds all the cards. If I want a lightgun game, I'm shit out of luck for PC (I know they exist, but they truly are shit). If I want an RTS, then the PC is the way to go. Anything that's massively complex like a sim or MMORPG is better on PC, while the innovative experiences of Singstar or multiplayer Worms with some friends around is better with consoles.

Really break dit down and he's right about it being a pointless waste of time...it'll be a chunk I won't have back, but to his yabberings.

Now, I don't want to be the type to say "I told you so." Let me instead just say that a couple of years back I made a prediction about the gaming industry and that my prediction is on the verge of coming true and that I now wish to emphasize the fact that I told you about it beforehand.

Who am I? I am the creator of a certain video game console. I don't want to toot my own horn, but let's just say that profits from this machine were four billion dollars higher than the Microsoft XBox.

Yes, and I made $40 just sitting here reading this, while organizing an audit. I guess I should be crowing how I've trumped Microsoft.

While it engages the audience, it's just a poor beginning since it has little to any bearing with what happens in said industry, and tries to paint that MS is the only one ever losing money by specifically targeting them.

My console consisted of a plastic milk crate with a kitten placed inside. The controller was a wooden rod that could be used to poke the kitten. I sold zero of these consoles, which cost me zero to manufacture. Therefore my profits were zero. The XBox, however, LOST four billion dollars. Click the red words if you don't believe me. I'll wait.

Now imagine four thousand of those stacks, and then imagine someone setting them on fire. That's what the XBox has done for Microsoft. If, after I tired of playing the only game available for my console (Cat Poker Tournament) I sat down and mailed a $20 bill to every single gamer in America, I would still be $2 billion ahead of the XBox.

Continuation of the shit above, move along...move along.

Think about that, and think about how Sony plans to take a $400 to $500 loss on every single damned PS3 they sell for the first few years. Oh, I know they can make that money back on the games... if the consoles sell like hotcakes in a colony for hotcake addicts during a hotcake shortage. But only if.

Finally he reaches something of a point...at the end. Let's see if he does anything with it.

I hereby predict that this will not happen. Luckily for me, it doesn't take a genius.

No shit, now will he finally reveal his opening beyond his yabbering doomsaying?

I'll now answer some of the most common objections about the Video Game Crash:

1. Why does the industry have to crash at all? The movie industry is still around over a century later, dumbass.

Let's say Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft came out tomorrow and announced they were cancelling their next-gen systems. I don't know why, maybe there's a plague or something. How long would you keep playing your current game machine? Forever? As long as good games were coming out for it?

History says otherwise. History says that you'd eventually get bored with the machine even if there wasn't a better one to replace it.

No shit, still doesn't actually go into why the crash came about, but it takes you a while to even reach here.

It sounds crazy, and it took everybody quite by surprise the first time the game industry crashed in the early 80's. Back then the Atari 2600 was king, it being the first really popular game console. They sold 25 million machines when suddenly, inexplicably, most people stopped playing games.

Nice to see you gloss over real facts in favor of your bullshit. Atari failed not because of only the 2600, but the direct confusion over the market...first stone was that abomination called the 5200.

Nobody was more surprised than Atari, who in 1983 spent millions bringing their biggest title to market, a game based on the movie ET (at the time it the highest-grossing film in history). So they had the most popular film, in a game for the most popular system. What could go wrong? They stamped out seven million copies of the game, and then were shocked to find that about six million of them sat untouched on store shelves. Legend has it that the unsold games wound up buried in a landfill and that to this day, no plants will grow over that spot.

Still seeing yabbering over actual facts.

What Atari didn't realize was that by 1983 the vast majority of 2600's were sitting in closets, and in basements and in moldy cardboard boxes in the back of the garage. No other console became popular in its place, not for years.

Dumbshit...the 5200 hurt atari, the proposed 7800 did worse...huge amount of mismanagement at Atari to compete with Apple and Commodore ring any bells?

Of course not.

Why? After all, we still watch TV sitcoms, and they've looked the same since color TV was invented. Kids still play basketball, more than a century after that sport was accidentally invented by a rural turkey farmer looking for a quick way to get dead birds into the round hole of the carcass chute. So what's different about video games?

Another deviation.

The difference, is that most people are only playing games for the novelty of it.

Remember the first Roy-Orbison-wrapped-in-shrinkwrap erotic fiction story you read? Of course. Do you remember the 207th one? Only vaguely. Well, it's the same reason. Those stories really aren't that great. It was only interesting for the novelty, and the novelty wears off.

Yep, intelligent analogy. I might as well claim my cat licking her pussy as my interest in sex.

With the 2600, players realized that Hot Dog Maze was just Pac-Man with different colors. Soon the cool thing among video game fans was to sit around not playing video games. The industry collapsed.

Y'know what Kirk said about Khan and missing the target?

Then the Next Big Thing came along, the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. It was a radical departure from the blocky 2600, to the point that the experience was novel once again. Games had actual worlds to travel in, and you could save your games from one day to the next. Playing these games didn't just look different; they felt different. Space Invaders was a series of symbols on a screen you manipulated for a score, Legend of Zelda was an actual universe you could escape to.

Kirk's statement even more true. To put it this way, it wasn't because the NES was vast new technology, or somehow they had stories. These help...but the truth is the game were not something you could see yourself doing. They were engaging and were for lack of a better term...not shit. Oh they were out there, and many still died, but the good ones that sold the system were not.

And yet, even with the enormous number of games (Metroid delayed my discovering girls for a for a good 18 months), the gaming experience itself still couldn't keep our interest for more than a few years. Attention waned again, but this time new, fancier systems arrived just in time, offering a new and novel experience thanks to prettier graphics and character animation. And yet those systems (the Sega Genesis and later the SNES), as great as they were, eventually were retired to closets and attics and the sandy carpets of the Pakistani black market.

Here's where I really wonder about super dork(Nintendo delayed nothing of women when I discovered them...that I call building self confidence).

Nintendo lasted about a good 7-8 years. Sega Genesis and Super NES lasted around the same mark before any true dissolve of their target market.

But given the precession...these thoughts are irrelevant to his all knowing truth he wishes to preach.

It was a bitter, dark cloud of Japanese expletives that wafted from the meeting rooms at Nintendo and Sega when they realized their industry effectively lived under a curse. Gaming was not an everlasting, deep well of joy for the audience. No, the only way to keep them playing was to distract them with novelty, to roll out a new machine every five years, spending half a billion dollars in development each time, moving from colored blocks to 2D figures to cartoonish 3D to realistic 3D.

Which brings us to today. We've now advanced from realistic 3D to slightly prettier 3D and... even slightlier prettier 3D with slightly better reflection effects and slightly better animated water ripples and - oh, look! This game has the most realistic fog yet!

Seriously I'm trying to figure what this pile is saying here. So they moved to 3-D....and we have slightly prettier 3-D? So what are you aiming at...other then ranting.

See the problem?

No, because what above was a bad rant.

What does an art form that relies on novelty do when it can no longer offer up anything novel? Think I'm crazy? Would you call Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi crazy?

You of course will be able to point this out logically and effectively correct? No? Didn't think so.

Okay, you would, but in between strapping kleenex boxes to his feet and wearing a giant raw squid as a hat, the 114 year-old console gaming guru speaks wisdom. And he believes gaming has hit the wall as far as graphics go.

You don't have to be a tech geek to get this. Check out the rather startling difference between the Atari 2600 title Jet Goblins Attack from 1980 and The Legend of Zelda just seven years later:

What the hell are you getting at? Hell, I thought you wanted to talk about games as actually play and such not...not whether graphics are shiny. Oh wait, that was and is your main thrust, because it ignores all the other aspects of why the industry crashed.

Some prettier flame effects, but it's hardly enough to be a new experience.

2. Don't you know the new consoles are 1,000 times more powerful than the current ones, you flaming volcano of idiocy?

The walls show rust and shadow better, and maybe blood sprays a little differently... but you don't have anywhere near the leap from the Atari's little blocky shapes to the NES's ability to actually display little human characters, or the jump from flat 2D SNES games to the wide-open 3D landscape of Mario 64. With each successful new generation there was a real difference, not just in how the game looked, but in the gaming experience itself.

Too bad, you actually don't cover any of it until burping it out now.

The current generation was novel because it introduced the world to adult games. The Grand Theft Auto series carried the PS2, with the ability to abuse prostitutes in ways that Mario only did off-camera. You had cursing in the cutscenes, you had games a 28 year-old man felt cool playing for the very first time.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay, equating to fucking hookers and killing to make a 28 year old feel cool, tells you all you need to know.

But now Sony is asking us to pay $600 for the PS3, a machine that really needs a $2,000 television to work, on the promise that it will "...be able to simulate cloth and fluid" like never before.

What little of the PS3 games they showed at E3 did indeed seem to be able to simulate some phat-ass cloth and fluid... but how much difference was there in the actual gaming experience? Gears of War for the 360 is beautiful to look at but nobody is claiming it's a truly different - or novel - experience than similar games we're playing now. And history says gaming can't survive that way.

Back to yabbering about graphics, stating that game experience will suck, but no proof.

The Nintendo Wii maybe has the right idea, introducing a controller that you flip around with your wrists instead of pushing buttons. Their thinking is you can engage gamers by translating their actual body movements into the game world. Right now it looks like a primitive, gimmicky attempt on a cheap, underpowered machine.... but at E3 just that little bit of novelty was enough to draw huge crowds that dwarfed the Sony and Microsoft booths.

Also see this little video clip, depicting E3 crowds walking past the PS3 booth like it was a homeless man asking for change. That, my friends, is the first iceberg sighting from the Titanic.

But crowing that "See Nintendo does this with their cheap ass machine...and it drew huge crowds!!!...The End is near!!!!!!!!"

Still nothing about how graphics spell instant gratification..oh wait, at this point does he have one? No. He's off on another tangent. Fits his analogy with Roy real well, doesn't it?

The problem is the next real leap forward in gaming, the next real difference in how we play games via sensory suits or neural inputs or whatever, is still too far away and too expensive. Back in the 90's they thought it would be VR headsets, but that technology turned out to be a headache-inducing fad, people's desire for tech novelty outweighed by their fear of being caught in an enormous electrical dorkhat.

You have got to be shitting me. He's bring the VR statement?

3. Look, jackass, as long as there are fun games, the industry will be just fine.

Let's look at this supposed "fun" thing for a moment. As far as I can see, there are two kinds of video game enjoyment:

A. Soothing Hand-eye coordination - you get this from fast-twitch jumping games like Mario and puzzlers like Tetris. See the block, tap a button, repeat. These quick repetition tasks provide the same kind of Zen stress relief that you can get from knitting or making pornographic doodles on a scrap of paper.

B. Imaginative Immersion - this is from games that let you pretend you are somewhere else and living as someone else, preferably someone who doesn't spend all day in a cubicle. These are your role playing games, adventure games, the same escapist pleasure that we get from movies and page-turner novels and schizophrenia.

Now, you've probably noticed that new versions of Mario and Tetris do not spark midnight riots in Japan these days. That first kind of games, once the entire point of having a console, are a dying breed on the new systems. The reason is obvious; we're now knee-deep in handheld game machines that do those simple button-tapping games better. Among a certain age group GBA's and DS's and PSP's are as common as cell phones.

Now he reaches gameplay. But wait, he wants to add "tetris and Mario do not spark raids on stores!!!!!" True, Mario and Tetris don't. We call them Halo and Madden.

And honestly there are games people buy for the console itself. You just want to pursue your point in exclusion of all else to persuade the reader of your unsupported idea.

Those simpler games now seem like a waste of consoles' power, and why play them tethered to your TV when you can take a GBA with you to be played in your bedroom or on the toilet or the bus or in the waiting room of the nipple-piercing parlor?

So consoles are left to butter their bread with the latter, with the immersion-type games, with the Final Fantasies and Grand Theft Autos and F.E.A.R., games that put you in a movie, basically. The competition here, then, is Hollywood. When teens are in the mood for a mobster story, the game industry hopes you'll be in the mood to play The Godfather game rather than watch the movie. The problem is that people can watch the movie version over and over and over again, there is a human element to the story that lets a person enjoy it all over again, 20 years later. Games really don't give you that.

Wait, huh? So you're saying they are in competition with other entertainment?

When WERE THEY NOT?

4. Well, now that consoles can display movie-quality graphics, video games will just become the new Hollywood. Gaming will be better than ever! Stop wasting my time, you talking red baboon ass.

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.

"Red Five, begin your attack run."

Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back ho-"

Turret laser bolts tear his X-Wing apart.

___________________________

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.

"Red Five, begin your attack run."

Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!"

Turret laser bolts miss by inches. He skims along the trench.

A Tie Fighter drops in behind him and blows his ship to ten thousand flaming pieces.

___________________________

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.

"Red Five, begin your attack run."

Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home!"

Turret laser bolts miss by inches. He skims along the trench.

A Tie Fighter drops in behind him, shoots and misses. Luke approaches the exhaust shaft... fires a photon torpedo...

...and misses. The Death Star destroys the rebel base.

___________________________

Luke's X-Wing approaches the surface of the Death Star.

"Red Five, begin your attack run."

Luke swoops down into the trench. "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon ba-"

Turret laser bolts tear his X-Wing apart.

___________________________

That's the exciting Star Wars finale, as played out on your home video game console. "It's just like living a movie! A plotless ten-hour movie edited by Michael Bay's retarded brother and running on a skipping DVD player!"

It's unfair to compare any movie game to a movie because films are relying on an art form (drama) with a thousand years of popularity under its belt. You put sympathetic humans on screen and tell a well-paced, exciting story and we escape into their adventure. But the director controls how the story unfolds, controls what you see and, if he knows what he's doing, delivers it to an audience based on a centuries-old formula designed to engage the emotions.

Games try to trump that with interactivity, letting you control the outcome. But the more control the gamer has, the more the pacing is ruined by brainless repetition (leaving the task to the gamer presents the possibility the gamer will fail 30 times in a row).

Seriously, he's just trying to hard. The point is you are the main...the movie is someone we can sympathize or relate, the game does not.

If they make the game tasks easier (as not to bring the story to a screeching halt), the gaming experience becomes much too short to justify the $50.00 $60.00 pricetag. And the more interactivity is taken away in favor of pacing and pre-rendered cinemas, the more they stop being video games.

Good to see diphead still not getting what the difference between being the hero and relating...but then again I point to he related novelty with Roy Orbison erotica.

Again, the novelty of getting to be Luke Skywalker has attracted gamers in droves. We were never really able to do that before. The experience of being able to stride down a hallway blowing up monsters with a rail gun was also new to a lot of you. But it comes to the same, doesn't it? The first time you play a level, the monster around the first corner is a surprise. After that, it's homework. It's memorizing, via pure repetition, bad guy placement and ammunition deposits and card keys. "Okay, kill the mutant behind the crate. Duck behind the dual doors. Wait for guard to walk out. Kill him, take his key. There's two Hellgoats in this next hall. Pick up the rockets..."

Every game since the dawn that is played against a set amount is always this moron. Thank you for describing absolutely nothing new. It's strange you got the immersion right, but destroyed it with your completely wrong time frame.

Is it any wonder that once we see the new, glossier FPS games that so few of us go back and play the old ones? What do the old ones have to offer once the experience has been memorized? And what do the new ones have to offer but new arrangements of hallways and glossier monsters and new stiffly-acted cut scenes that we'll watch exactly once before skipping past them?

This has nothing to do with nostalgia, no sir, nothing whatsoever...

Yes, I had a reflex drool response when I first saw the screens for the 360's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

But each event in that game is still carefully scripted. Run up to the busted-out brick wall. Truck pulls up. Six enemy troops spill out. Shoot them. Run down the hallway... get killed. Start over. Run up to the busted-out brick wall again. Again wait for the truck to pull out. Kill the six enemy troops. Run down the hallway. Pick up the First Aid Kit...

Rinse. Repeat. Memorize.

Again, it's okay for a film to be scripted because you're in the hands of the director and charismatic actors who make you care about their situation. But other than the thrill of seeing what special effects a shiny new console can show off, what's the reward for playing a scripted game?

So wait...every game you play is exact memorization? Shit dude, I guess all my old game s are just a matter of me remembering placement...oh wait, has nothing to do with me...I should just program a bot. Still I don't see how the gaming industry will die again given this wasn't the reason the first, and hardly has bearing on what hurts the industry anyway.

Oh wait, this is akin to your analogy of games versus movies. Which is what every entertainment industry competes with.

5. Who cares about single player? It's multiplayer that makes these games worth playing. The reward is getting good at the game and thrashing your opponents, you foppish wide-brimmed asshat.

That's true... for a small, hard-core minority of gamers.

How many people do you personally know who play console games online? I'm not talking about the people you met online. I'm asking how many of your actual real-life game-having friends actually go online with their little headset thing like in the commercials?

Right now about 10% of current-gen gamers are online. That's all. Analysts say that by the end of the next-gen games lifespan, in 2011, less than 25% of the consoles will be used online..

And now multiplayer...his point being? You got me, aside from another rant.

I'm going to share a secret with you; the average video gamer isn't big on fist-pumping competition with strangers. That's the territory of the jocks and the scholarship-clutching Future Businessmen of America members. Among gamers, the Halo 2 teabaggers and Madden fanatics who insist on playing against a dozen strangers online are a small, hard-core faction.

That you can ignore. They see money there, but given only a bare hand full have struck gold and they only make the COMPETITVE STYLE games in this fashion, I still am wanting to see the point?

You think competition is against a superior computer that has to be dumbed down for you to win?

And yet, whole classes of games (specifically first-person shooters and fighting games) are more and more set up so that the single-player mode is nothing but a tutorial for the multiplayer. And I understand why; the industry sees a future where I pay $60 for a game and then pay another $20 a month to play it for the next two years. Look at the money Blizzard is making off World of Warcraft. Five million subscribers, at $15 a month.

Blizzard

The difference is that you can play WoW for days without ever interacting with another human; that's what the solo quests are for. It's online, but not necessarily multiplayer. You see, lots of us play video games as a way to alleviate the stress of dealing with people. If I have a bad day at the office and then go home and play Halo 2 online, I might run into the same type of asshole I just left at work. Petty feuds and cliques.

Isn't that akin to not wanting to go dancing but going to a dance club anyway?

Or even worse, I may get to where I have to practice a game, working to make my skills sharper and sharper so I can rub victory in the face of annoying teenagers I'll never meet, feeling the pressure to log more and more hours in the game so I don't embarrass myself in matches. I don't want to do that. I want to relax. I want to play.

I'm not alone. The numbers speak for themselves. If online play is what's going to save gaming, it won't save it in time for this generation.

Seriously, you need to get a man to butt fuck you while you complain about you hating it. You don't like something, unless someone is forcing you, don't play.

6. But the gaming industry is still growing, dung-hoarding Turd Baron. You're saying everybody's going to suddenly stop playing?

I'm saying both Sony and Microsoft will wind up losing money on their consoles this time around. Nintendo won't, because they quite frankly don't seem to have that much invested. I think the pool of gamers, for the first time in 20 years, will shrink.

The first problem is HD (high-definition) TV. These televisions with four or five-digit price tags are still in only 25% of homes. It's $1,000 to get a very bad (or very small) HDTV, and $10,000 to get a really nice one.

If we play it on the cheap side and get a $2,000 HDTV, and then buy our $600 PS3 console and two games and an extra controller... we're $3,000 into our next-gen investment.

So wait, how does Sony's problems relate to MS?

I know there are people willing to pay that. Their gleaming SUV's pass me on the highway every day. But think about this. The dominant machine, the Sony PS2, has shipped 103 million units as of the writing of this article. Of those, 70 million were sold after Sony dropped the price to $199 in May of 2002.

Get the picture? They dropped the price because sales were falling. Sales were falling because there were only 30 million customers willing to pay $300 for a game console. And now they're asking us to make ten times the investment most of us wouldn't make the first time?

So, how does this reflect on MS? Wait, is this like your beginning again, where you try to generalize?

Hello? Am I the only one who sees this? This is exactly like the HDTV movement, people a decade ago predicting that by 2005 every home would have a $2,000 HDTV in the living room. Who are these jackasses who think the upper edge of the middle class is 100 million households strong?

Well, if you had a point, you wouldn't be ranting to yourself.

7. But all they have to do is find new markets. You already said they're making games for older gamers, and new gamers are being born every day.

There are two sides to that coin, though. Yes, there's a new generation of gaming kids out there. But the thing is, the original video game generation is growing old. I know, because I'm one of them, an Original Gamer. I owned Pong as a toddler, an Atari 2600 in grade school and an NES in 1987. I've logged hours on the Sega Genesis, the Atari Jaguar, the NEC Turbographx 16, the SNES, a Sega Saturn, a 3D0, a Sony Playstation, a Casio Fungiver 5000, a 4-bit Toyota Gamemobile... you get the idea.

But I'm 30 now, worried with mortgages and job stress and coffin shopping. My peers all have their own children, the household toy budget spent on the offspring, not the adults.

Did you even have a point. Oh wait, games being spent on kids...possibly your first real point.

I know some of us still play games at 30, studies say about 25% of gamers are now over 35. But can you play games at 40 or 50 without looking like an intellectually-stunted manchild, there in your sweater vest, the control pad tangled in your long, gray, drool-soaked beard as the creeping hand of death stalks your every thought?

We Original Gamers, the hard core, bought every machine that came on the market for two decades. But for a whole lot of us OG's, the game consoles we own now will be the last we'll ever buy. There are millions of us, and it's just a matter of time.

And I mean it's literally a matter of time. I'll pop in a DVD because a movie only requires two hours from my busy schedule of work and home repairs and chasing kids off my lawn. Getting to the end of a video game, however, requires hours upon hours of play. Not because the story is hours long, mind you, but because getting through each scene requires practice and repetition and repetition and repetition, all in the hopes of seeing that exploding Death Star cutscene at the end.

Which is drowned by drivel.

A 10 year-old can come home from school in the afternoon and devote the rest of the day to the task of memorizing the exact sequence of finger twitches that will get him past the dark forces of the Empire. A college kid can do the same, often while high. Most employed and married adults cannot. If I'm right about this, the gaming industry is about to face its first real exodus of existing customers, a hard-core group they've relied upon for decades to snap up every new box on the shelf. We're leaving, because while we have grown up, gaming, in many ways, has not.

I know some of you Nintendo fans were screaming at your monitor in the last section, saying the $199 (or $249) Nintendo Wii is the low-cost answer to the affordability problem. The problem is Nintendo is still so neglectful of older gamers that it borders on hostility. Everything they showed at E3 starred a cartoon character, and the games that didn't (Madden and Red Steel) appear to be very bad games. Plus, I say the older you are, the less inclined you'll be to flail around the room with their new controller.

So the industry will die why again?

In Conclusion...

There's going to be a lot of money lost the next few years, a lot of articles written, a lot of panic, a lot of changes. And when gaming comes back, it will hopefully be different and innovative and based on something other than eye candy and the shock value of blood and guts and hookers. Hopefully it will allow for creativity from the players, and room for small, independent game makers to create content. Hopefully it will be something every working person can afford.

What will it look like? I for one am on record predicting that a massive expansion of the MMORPG market is on the horizon at some point, a new form of online play that relies less on competition and more on MySpace-style human interaction. But that's just me. As for what will fill the void in the mean time, well, no one thing has to fill it. Do you honeslty think there are fewer entertainment options now than the last time gaming went out of style in 1983?

We'll go Indie?

BWAHAHAHAHAHA...fucking A, this was a waste of time. And I agree with Spanky. this man is an annoying retard who's trying to be Maddox. I don't really know which is worse honestly, the stupid yabbering part or him trying to ape Maddox; which is not a goal worth pursuing.

I understand that the example I used is still out of reach, and it was only an example of what I would like to see gaming acomplish sometime in the future. I am also aware that hardware and software design and implementation are two different realms. I was simply trying to express my concern that the hardware seems to be designed first and formost with graphics in mind, rather than implementing systems that allow for more expansive gameplay.

About TV sitcoms, they have been evolving to keep pace with society. Remember the old sitcoms like Happy Days, Family Ties, Growing Pains, or the Cosby Show (which existed in a world where every black person had a high-paying job)? They were all highly idealized depictions of what people thought family life should be like. We then moved to blue-collar chic, with Home Improvements, Roseanne, Grace Under Pressure, and of course, Married with Children. Instead of portraying well-educated liberal upper middle-class parents, these new sitcoms in the 90s reveled in the ignorance and low class of their protagonists, even going so far as to deliberately exaggerate it over time. The prototypical sitcom hero changed from a doctor or psychiatrist to a factory worker, welfare mother, or shoe salesman. From Doctor Huxtable to Homer Simpson.

Similarly, society has changed from viewing "progressive" or "liberal" as positive attributes to viewing them as insults. We have changed from revering doctors and scientists to despising them, and sitcoms have changed in lock step with that sea change.

Sitcoms may not really incorporate new techniques or novel ideas, but they do change to stay current, and that seems to be enough to keep viewers watching.