Why the Next Generation of Gaming Will Suck Massive Ass

Get ready folks, there's another console-war a comin'.

Last time I was here I talked about the Wii-U and the sad state that Nintendo appears to be in. Since I wrote that post, Microsoft has revealed their upcoming XBox One console, which has pretty much all the bells and whistles that Sony's PS4 appears to have, plus more besides.

Yeah, things aren't looking so good for Nintendo these days. But that's a different story for another time (again).

Anyway, the XBox One managed to wow XBox fanboys across the globe with it's seamless Kinect features and voice-controlled app-switching on the fly, etc. etc. etc. What it didn't show though: games. Now, let it be said that Microsoft has pretty much ruled this current-gen console war, which is in itself kind of surprising. They cornered the multiplayer online component of video games and managed to make a shitload of money with XBox Live: a service that by all rights and purposes should be free to use right off the bat. Sony's is free on the PS3, but goddamnit, do those XBox fanboys ever love their "Halo" and "Gears of War" multiplayer action.

What's most alarming about the XBox One is what it appears to offer and not offer. It looks like an old VCR and appears to be able to function as the all-in-one media console that Microsoft has tried to pimp the 360 as since 2005. Hell, you may be able to even watch cable TV on the damn thing. Regardless of that though, there's some alarming things about this console that need to be addressed. It may not have to be an "always on" machine that requires a constant internet connection (maybe), but it may be charging you an extra fee to play a used game. Now Microsoft and a majority of game publishers are being fairly mum on this thing, but it wouldn't be a surprise. Most games from EA and even recent hits like "God of War: Ascension" and the rebooted "Mortal Kombat" require a purchased online pass if you buy the game used, so this new used fee isn't too much of a surprise. Microsoft, like Sony, EA, Activision, etc., is a mega-conglomorate that wants to make as much money as they can from you, and goddamnit, they are gonna do it no matter what.

So ya know what? Fuck 'em.

Is this really the future of video gaming? Nickel and diming the gamer every chance they get? It's been happening for a decent amount of time now, and it's only going to keep getting worse. Microsoft is suffering a lot of flack since the XBox One reveal, and rightly so. Still, people will flock to the new console for "Halo" and "Gears of War" alone (two franchises which in all honesty I've never ever understood all the hype surrounding them) no matter what they have to pay upfront and in the future, and as long as that keeps happening, we'll all still keep getting fucked in the ass and wallet by these companies like EA and Microshaft.

For me personally, I've often felt like I've been playing the same games for nearly the past 20 years. That's one reason why after this generation of consoles and gaming is over, I'm out. That's no bullshit either, that's all she wrote. I really hope that more people follow suit so that when Microsoft an the rest of the money-grabbers look at their profit margins, they see a steep enough decrease to actually consider to themselves "maybe we're being too greedy here".

Of course that will never happen because the fanboys will flock to these new consoles (except the Wii-U apparently) in droves to play prettier versions of old games, and when you've got a money making scheme like that going well and strong, only an idiot would pull the plug on that operation.

Nintendo Needs to Stop Sucking

Oh Nintendo, what have you gotten yourselves into now?

The beloved video game giant seems to have fallen on hard times. After 2009/2010, it looked like no one gave a shit about the Wii anymore, only a few years after it set sales records and had everyone going apeshit over it. Truth be told, other than "Wii Sports", the "Super Mario Galaxy" games, Mario Kart, "Madworld", "House of the Dead Overkill", and a couple others, I didn't really enjoy much of what the Wii offered outside of the novelty of the Wii-mote. Last year for holiday time, Nintendo unleashed the Wii-U, their first HD console, which promised to introduce new gameplay elements including a touch-screen based controller and a library of intuitive games as well.

Well, it sucks...and so does Nintendo these days too.

Now let's get one thing straight here before you all start calling for my head. Even though I grew up primarily a Sega kid, the first home console I ever owned as a kid was the original NES. I also ended up owning every iteration of the GameBoy since its original launch, and I grew to love the Super NES on a journey of discovery after its prime. After that though, that was pretty much it for me and Nintendo. Although I loved the original DS, their home consoles on the other hand never did much to rock my world. The Nintendo 64, Gamecube, and Wii all just looked like shit to me, but then again around those times when they came out, I was too busy with my Dreamcast and Playstation's 1, 2, & 3 to ever really give them a deserved shot.

Now here we are in 2013, and Nintendo's profits are falling fast. They even made the curious decision not to have a featured presentation at this year's upcoming E3.

Let that sink in.

While Sony and Microsoft will be pimping out their new, upcoming next-gen consoles, the granddaddy of all video game companies will be absent.

Now granted, Nintendo has made strides with selling their products and making big announcements through social media outlets instead, but to option to not be included in the industry's biggest jack-off fest is disheartening, and kind of frightening, to say the least. Even though I said Nintendo sucks these days, the idea that there is a legitimate possibility that they could possibly end up bowing out of the video game hardware business if the Wii-U falters any farther is scary. That means that only Sony and Microsoft, two mega-conglomorate corporations, would be the only horses running in the video game race. That is scarier to me than anything else.

If Nintendo did bow out of making consoles and switched to being a third-party software developer/publisher like Sega did after the discontinuation of the Dreamcast a decade plus ago, that would mean we'd be seeing Nintendo's classic characters hitting XBox and Playstation. Could you imagine that? Seeing Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, and the rest on the same consoles that offer up "Halo", "Killzone", and the thousands of "Call of Duty" knock offs and wank-fests? Would anybody even care? Probably not...and that's sad.

So yeah, Nintendo...you fucking suck. You fucking suck for possibly having to say R.I.P. to making consoles, and waving the white-flag as being the only true video game company left. Do I really want Sony and Microsoft being the only two console developers left only because they have an endless amount of money and resources that could absorb any kind of loss that companies like Nintendo and Sega could only hope to dream of? Fuck no.

Stop sucking Nintendo, for the love of the video game gods, stop fucking sucking.

The clusterfuck that is PSN

It’s been a rough past couple weeks for Playstation 3 owners. First Playstation Network goes down mysteriously, with Sony eventually coming clean and admitting that they had fallen victims to a hacking group. A little while later, Sony would go on to admit that PSN account information had been “compromised”; meaning that everything from personal info (address, phone number, e-mail address, etc.) to possible credit card numbers had now fallen into the hands of the hackers.

Fuck.

That word was pretty much my knee-jerk reaction at this whole thing, which besides cancelling my debit card, I found myself pretty powerless in terms of this whole PSN outage. Not that I play video games online a lot, it’s just the other things I tend to use my PS3 for. More often than not, I use PSN for renting movies and streaming stuff from Netflix (which thank the technological gods still functions even with PSN out), but I’d be hard pressed to not admit that playing a game without PSN functioning just isn’t the same.

While Sony was slowly admitting what exactly happened (i.e., how much they fucked up in the first place with designing the whole PSN infrastructure), the conspiracy theorist in me started acting up a bit. Namely, what if the whole thing was a crock of shit? What if this was the means to an end with Sony starting to charge PS3 owners monthly fees for using PSN? Oh shit, now I’ve done it…strap yourselves in folks.

One of the things that attracted me to the PS3 over the Xbox 360 is the fact that its online functions are free. Playing multiplayer games and all the other things it does can be done without a monthly or yearly charge (and let’s be honest 360 owners, it’s a service that should be free in the first fucking place) are what really set me on purchasing it (as well as the built-in Blu-ray player, but I digress). However, it was only a few months ago that Sony introduced a feature called “Playstation Plus”, which charges a similar fee that Xbox Live does per year.

What Playstation Plus offers are early demos, occasionally free content (games, movie rentals, add-ons, etc.) and some other goodies, but it really isn’t anything special, and it’s completely optional to have…for the time being that is. And that right there is the problem for Sony: no one is a Playstation Plus subscriber. There aren’t that many subscribers, which has been admitted by Sony in surveys done among PS3 owners, which in the end, finds them not making as much of a profit as Microsoft makes with Xbox Live. So what’s the solution to not having nearly as many Playstation Plus subscribers as there are PS3 owners? Make it look like PSN got hacked, and then eventually tell PS3 owners that if they want true security from hack attempts, they have to subscribe to Playstation Plus?

Am I jumping to conclusions? Maybe and in all honesty, probably. However, this isn’t the first time something shady has happened with the PS3. A little over a year ago, there was a mysterious bug going around that was only affecting old PS3 consoles, wiping away the system’s HDD and profile information with it. During this time, Sony ended up selling more PS3 Slims than they had when that console model had first been released. It’s no secret that the PS3 hasn’t enjoyed the same kind of success that the Xbox 360 has had, but in essence, that crisis ended up selling more PS3’s than Sony had done before.

Coincidence? I don’t know, maybe I should put the video game conspiracy theories to rest, and just hope that PSN gets up and running again. I’m not holding my breath however (even though Sony keeps promising “soon”), and I’m hoping that Sony will give me and my fellow PS3 gamers some kind of severance for all the mishaps and security breaches. After all, I think that we deserve some free shit from the mega-conglomerate instead of consistently getting Sony’s dick put to us on a regular basis.

Still, no matter what, I’d take my PS3 over the 360 and Wii any day of the fucking week.

Guitar Hero goes to Hell

Earlier this week, video game mega-publisher Activision announced that they would be discontinuing their once-ultra popular “Guitar Hero” franchise, as well as its rhythm game brethren “DJ Hero”. That wasn’t all though, as Activision also announced that the long-running “Tony Hawk” series is on an indefinite hiatus, and the latest installment in the “True Crime” series has been cancelled. What does all this shit mean exactly? Well, so far, it means pretty fucking good news actually.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the “Guitar Hero” franchise was the toast of the video game world. The first game hit the PS2 and was pretty much an instant hit, mostly because at the time, it was something different in the party game genre. Then, something happened. Activision scooped the franchise up from developer Harmonix and subsequent sequels soon followed throughout the years. Harmonix would get the boot from Activision though, and the reins of the “Guitar Hero” franchise would be handed over to developer Neversoft, famous for the years of producing duplicate and boring “Tony Hawk” games. It wouldn’t be much surprise that the “Guitar Hero” games became boring exercises in yearly release tedium, with a rare exception (“Guitar Hero: Metallica” is spectacular, the Aerosmith and Van Halen-flavored editions, not so much), just like EA’s “Madden” game is pretty much the same thing year after year. The only differences between EA’s “Madden” franchise and “Guitar Hero” though, is that gamers were wise enough at this point to find better things to spend their cash on instead of the same rhythm game year after year. Not to mention the fact that the whole rhythm genre became so oversaturated, what with the now discontinued “DJ Hero”, “Band Hero”, “Rock Band”, “Lego Rock Band”, and “Heroin Hero”. Okay, that last one was from an episode of South Park, but you catch my drift.

What this all essentially means is that Activision knows that some of their cash cows are done being milked…for now that is. We’ve been getting shitty “Tony Hawk” games for years now. Remember “Tony Hawk Shred”? That game that came with the skateboard to stand on that barely functioned? Exactly. Truth be told, I haven’t played a good “Tony Hawk” game since “Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2” on the Dreamcast, and I think that was in 2001. “True Crime” always came off to me a relatively lame “Grand Theft Auto” rip-off, and do we really need any more of those?

Honestly, if it’s one franchise I wish Activision would permanently fold, it’s “Call of Duty”. For so long we had practically the same World War II shooter year after year, until “Modern Warfare” actually came along and did some creative changes. Now they have the massive hit that is “Call of Duty: Black Ops”, which isn’t much of a surprise considering that first person shooters are practically mother’s milk to gamers who are two steps away from having A.D.D. It’s not that I hate FPS games, considering I grew up with “Wolfenstein 3-D”, “Doom”, “Duke Nukem 3-D”, and “Quake”; which have always been like the Four Horsemen of FPS games to me. “Call of Duty”, “Halo” and even “Killzone” just all seem almost interchangeable to me that it gets hard for me to tell one from the other.

Maybe I’ve just gotten a bit more bitter as time has gone on. Maybe I’m just not “with it” with all the new video game tech toys like I used to be. Maybe I’m just a prick for loving the fact that Activision just put the kibosh on a handful of their franchises. No matter what though, let’s all take the time to salute “Guitar Hero” for the fun that it was…and just let the mother burn like a Viking funeral.



R.I.P. Guitar Hero, I miss you like Magic Johnson misses having AIDS.

Nick's Mea Culpa's

For my 50th blog edition, I've decided to take the time to admit some of my many faults. Over the years, I've done some screwy and just plain wrong things, and I would like to take the time to apologize to anyone and everyone involved for any shit I've done, and will more than likely do in the future, as well as apologize and admit to things I have been completely wrong about as well. In other words, here's a list of things that I can honestly take the time to say "my bad", I'm sorry, and things I was wrong about...or something along those lines anyway.



My mea culpa's for certain people and other various times:



That time I got drunk and pissed in your sink (this may apply to many)

When I said that Blake Griffin would never amount to being more than a benchwarmer in the NBA

When I thought the XBox 360 was cool

When I thought that Buckcherry would be just what the hard rock genre needed...oh how wrong I was

When I thought Rob Zombie re-making "Halloween" was a great idea

That time I was playing hockey and hit a kid between the legs with my stick and I told him I was just testing how secure his cup was

When I traded my non-functioning Playstation in towards a PS2 at EB Games and told them it worked fine

When I had beer farts and let one rip in a full subway car

When I put a cigarette out in a friend's beer and didn't tell him that I did, nor did he realize it until it was too late (was pretty hilarious though)

That time I said I'd pull out and totally didn't (for all it may concern)



That's all for now, more than likely there will be more to follow eventually...



...maybe :)