Monday, November 19, 2012

Consoles And PCs

While this post is mostly inspired by what I am hearing about the launch of the WiiU, it really extends to all consoles these days so anyways.

The game.

I was born in 1982, I will be 30 in December.  I have owned many, many Nintendo systems.  I will likely own a WiiU at some point because I just think it is all sorts of cool but I am reading online about how the system has to receive a patch as soon as you get it home.  Wut?  What happened that made it so our consoles leave the factory imperfect?  My Super Nintendo never needed a patch.  But I figured out the problem pretty darn fast.  It's that our consoles want to be computers.

This doesn't work for me.  For me, consoles are consoles and PCs are PCs.  They don't compete, they don't interact.  They shouldn't do either of those things either.  When a console tries to be a PC, it does it poorly and you wish it was a computer (see The Sims).  When a PC tries to be a console, it does it poorly and you wish it was a console (see EVERY FUCKING RACING GAME).  But then there's this thing called the Internet that console makers really wanted to take advantage of, so they started building their consoles like computers.
Here's the problem, the Internet is the realm of the PC.  It always has been, it always will be.  Consoles just suck when they get on the Internet.  It makes game publishers sloppy and makes them force shitty ways for consoles to make use of the stupid Internet.  Not only that, when you're a user like me that doesn't take their consoles on the Internet, you end up alienating those users.  Online functionality for me seems like this magical realm until I actually get on it and realize that consoles just don't belong on the Internet and those that have their consoles on the Internet are quite depraved.  Jokes about 12 year olds telling people on the Internet to fuck their mothers exist for a reason.  We have people levelling up for killing people with machine guns so they can buy hats.  We have games that get released with few changes from their predicessor just to add more multiplayer functionality.  Fucking Minecraft.
I know this isn't anything new, but when I heard that the WiiU is basically hinging everything on online use I threw up.  I am one of those people that when I buy something, I don't really expect it to change unless I continue to pay for it.  When I buy a game, I expect the game will stay that way unless I buy a different game.  That isn't the way it is anymore.  But even further, I've gone so far to not purchase games because I knew that I would have to get "DLC" in order to make use of it.  NO!  NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO!  It still pisses me off that I don't have all of the stuff I paid for on my Forza 4 disk because I haven't connected to the Internet.  How fucking fair is that?!  You included a second disk with the damn game, why do I have to download even more shit!?
So call me old, but I think that building games with full intent of patching them or only to add DLC later is a huge cop out.  The greatest games in history didn't need patches, why do today's?  Because they can.  Enough.  Those of us that don't have broadband Internet coming out of our ass would really like to have our consoles back.

Thank you.

1 comment:

Topheezy said...

Epic. I tried to make a post about this but couldn't quite put it the way I wanted. You said it right, brother.

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