Hello there. We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Chris. Oh, you say your name is Cherry Daiquiri? Alright then. I’ve got a few words for you about video games, if you’ll sit down and have a listen. Preferably topless.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Some may argue that I still have a lot of growing to do, but they’re douchebags. Don’t listen to them. I picked up my gaming habit in 1989, at the tender age of four. During my early years, I spent a lot of time playing Superman for the Atari 2600. If you haven’t played it, the game consisted of you walking around as a few colors representing Clark Kent until you found a phone booth so you could turn into the Man of Steel and then…inexplicably fly around metropolis endlessly with no real purpose. I think you were supposed to pick up criminals and drop them off at jail, but I spent most of my time with the game experiencing its unintended purpose. You see, if you flew straight up, you continued to fly straight up forever on a skyscraper background. You couldn’t fly back to the ground. Going up was an eternal struggle to avoid inexplicable chunks of falling kryptonite. That’s all there was to the game. Criminals, Kryptonite, and making out with Lois Lane if the kryptonite touched you.
This brings me to my main points, I suppose. I feel there has been a video game quality bell curve since my initial foray into gaming. We’ve gone from terrible, pointless crap like Superman and everyone’s favorite, ET, to a situation where Nintendo and Sega were battling it out for the title of Console King. I spent so much time playing Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 that my fingers bled and blistered over. Gaming started to progress from there to something brilliant and, in my middle school mind, flawless.
Yes, I have been to the doctor for carpal tunnel treatments after what seemed like thousands of hours of Starcraft. What of it?
From the golden age of gaming, where things seemed to hit their peak, we headed straight to corporate hell. With big budget titles like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, major companies noticed that you can spend a half-year pumping out a mediocre expansion pack using the same engine as your 20 million dollar title and people will buy it like it’s crack and eat it up. Slapping the Halo name on a game will net you millions of dollars, even if the entire game is an hour and a half long and doesn’t add anything new to multiplayer. I get aggravated every time they shit out a new Call of Duty game with the same exact action sequences and decent-but-not-amazing gameplay. Couple that with Farmville, Cityville, Warville, Fuckville, and every other pointless money-grab Facebook game, and things have gone downhill significantly for people who love video games since I was sitting in my bedroom with my Shaq Olympic Dream Team jersey on, testing my might and punching in ABACABB at the menu screen.
But hope is not all lost. For every two cookie cutter FPS games, there are two quality games. Thanks to Steam and the different console stores, there are a plethora of cheap indie games that are representative of what game developers always intended to make from day one. You also have the big named titles like the Mass Effect series keeping hope alive, and games like Battlefield 3 who are not only providing a quality multiplayer experience to FPS gamers, but a comprehensive playtime for people who aren’t into fragging their friends.
In the end, I feel like things are looking up. The balance between quality and quantity is finally reaching an agreement point in the gaming market, and studios of all shapes and sizes are turning the funding dollars into actual quality.
Except, you know, for the MMO market. There’s only a diamond or two in that shitty rough, but that’s a topic for another article.