A Week In Comments

The bus driver comes out and asks me for direction on how to get to a restaurant, and I gladly helped him out.

Once I helped him out and he was saying his good byes, the windows of the bus came down and all these hot 17-18 year olds start telling me thank you and how hot I was, not to mention ask if I had a girlfriend and that I should go with them to the restaurant.

I felt so harassed and covered my man nipples screaming

“NO MEANS NO! NO MEANS NO!”

And then I left the scene with tears in my eyes. I had never felt so sexually harassed before. It was horrible, I had to take a cold shower to forget about it.

Some would call it nostalgia, but to me it’s quite obviously something different: the end of the technological arms race.

The Wii was offered as proof of this, but it wasn’t. It was simply a home console Game Boy, a generation behind but the provider of an advantage other systems did not have. It was portability for the GB, motion controls for the Wii.

What proves that the tech arms race is perhaps not over but definitely now a behind the scenes thing about middleware and production costs, rather than a consumer concern, is that GT gave its best graphics in E3 award to Kirby’s Epic Yarn. Every other award they gave to Rage, name-dropping the “megatexture” tech every single time. But best graphics? The string game.

Now, that by itself is impressive, but there is a frame of reference for it that puts it in perspective, and that is Odin Sphere. Arguably it came out in a year without huge visual leaps. Early on the HD cycle, devs were starting to slowly make incremental upgrades in their visuals Odin Sphere came out and, like it or not, every single reviewer agreed that the graphics were gorgeous. Some people gave it a nomination in GOTY awards for best graphics, but it didn’t really win any of them.

That turn, from the artistry in Odin Sphere being considered a curiosity to the Rage megatexture being the curiosity and the artistry in Kirby being the highlight, is a massive landmark moment for gaming. It’s the tipping point when shooting something in colour or black and white became an artistic choice, not a technological choice made to add a bullet point to the poster.

And it’s why 2D gaming is back. Because 3D gameplay was shoehorned into games up until now due to technological reasons. The advent of the indie market, and its sold-out corporate bitch cousin, the console downloadable game, have helped deliver the point that 2D and simpler gameplay mechanics are an artistic choice, rather than the result of a lack of technology to do something else.

So I don’t think the survival of 2D is due to the inherent control and camera limitations of 3D (2D has its own challenges), it’s due to the maturity of an industry that is not nearly as technology driven as it used to be. How else to explain the fact that Microsoft put out a camera that recognizes your body movement and voice, effectively turning the world into Star Trek and this was widely seen as the worst offering of E3 this year because the games for it weren’t up to expectations?

An injustice is rape. Murder. Emotional abuse from a loved one. The destruction of livelihoods. The violation of someone’s fundamental rights as a person. Someone being banned from a website is trivial, and doesn’t deserve the strength of language or emotional intensity that’s being used by people. There’s just so many more important things to care about in life.

I mean seriously, what does this prove? There are 6 really great games here (most, if not all of which are as good, if not better than Halo 3) that have been marginalized, stripped of all of their merits, to be simply used as fodder to exemplify brand loyalty.

All artistry, production values, story telling, etc. gets thrown by the wayside.

All this proves is that Microsoft is the master shepherd, able to command the most sheep. There is really no other way to look at this because no one could honestly tell me that Halo 3’s merits outweigh all 6 of these games combined.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Halo 3 has sold as well as it has. I don’t have numbers to back me up but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft spent more money hyping/advertising Halo 3 than Sony did on marketing all of these games combined.

It is just a different way of spending money (putting it towards more new content vs using it to market/support specific content). So really, the blame does not lie on Microsoft. It lies on the consumer. If comments like Mr. Greenberg’s get you pumped up, then they were probably written for you.

It is just sad that so many of us are so lazy, that we just buy what we are told, rather than taking a little bit of time to research something slightly off-radar. Unfortunately this is an issue that is persistent in all mediums of entertainment (music, film, etc).

So, as a gamer, you just have to make sure you do what is right for you. If you get more enjoyment playing fewer games while taking pride knowing that you everyone around you is playing what you are playing, then the more power to you. However, if you would like to spread your enjoyment across more, varied experiences, then you can go your route as well.

And before I get attacked, if the shoe were on the other foot, my stance wouldn’t change. If it were Killzone or Resistance that outsold all of Microsoft’s properties, I wouldn’t bat an eye. However, if a game like LittleBigPlanet or Heavy Rain, or the upcoming Last Guardian (games that support creativity, artistry, intelligence, and the furthering of games as a legitimate form of art) were to pull in numbers like Halo’s, I would be jumping through the roof. However you all know as well as I do, that this day will never come.

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