Microsoft came out today and announced that starting November 1st Xbox Live would now cost 60 dollars for the full year subscription. 3 months will cost 25 dollars and one month will now be 10. I understand that as inflation and the general cost of doing business goes up the price we pay for Live would need to go up but in this case I believe it's kind of crap that MS is raising the price.
When the live service debuted back in 2002 it was like dropping an atom bomb on the console gaming community. It was a way for the first time for console gamers to meet up online and play with each other and it took off.
As the years went on Xbox Live set the standard for console online games, when Sony would launch the PSN with the PS3 it even followed in Live's footsteps.
When the 360 launched Live was upgraded to match the 360 with a new dashboard and new features that the new hardware allowed the service to use. But this is when the problems started.
With every new dashboard update it became more laggy. It became a sluggish mess and just trying to get to your games and videos became a test in patience.
Facebook, twitter, Netflix, all the other add on crap they've added to the dashboard is doing nothing besides bogging it down and making it run like garbage. The streaming ads they don't help either. All this crap all these unneeded features that could be avoided if MS would allow a web browser to run on the 360 and then you wouldn't need all these apps you could just use the browser to tweet and facebook.
On the first Xbox I remember Live being down maybe 3 times over the years and it may of all been maintenance. After the 360 came out Live was down all the time and I'm sure we all remember the December it was down for almost 3 weeks because of what MS claimed were to many new users. They knew how their machines were selling around the holidays that year they should of been ready. Lately it's been nothing but service outages and lame excuses from MS. Then they go and raise the price of their broken service.
It's come to my attention lately the Xbox Live Enforcement service is a busted mess of contradictions and nonsense. Hope you never get falsely banned from the service as you're boned and you will probably not get back on. It's like this, if someone and I mean anyone calls Xbox Live and says that the gamer tag you own and use has been stolen the enforcement department lock the gamertag for 10 days to investigate the claim. You can call with all your personal info stuff only you and Xbox Live would know and you're still locked out. It's crap and I've heard they've revised it somewhat but it's still not perfect.
In the end I think MS needs to fix the issues with Live before they go raising the price. How about a cheaper price for people that just want their machine to play games and go ahead and charge extra for the people that need it to be their one stop shop for all things online.
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Standing the Test of Time
The Second Look I just posted about Mario 64 had me thinking about something that's been on my mind for awhile now. I strongly believe that newer games just do not stand the test of time. With 3D graphics and polygons being introduced into gaming we've become jaded by what makes a game fun. One of the first things anyone notices about a game is the way it looks and this can skew people's opinions of a game. If it isn't all nice and shiny people will ignore it in favor of the new hotness with all the graphical bells and whistles. I'm guilty of this as well one of the first thing that hit me when I played Halo 3 for the first time was it didn't look that great and I thought that the big flagship title for the 360 should of been the best looking game on the system but it was still a fun game to play even though it looked like a first Xbox game. It's rare lately to play a game that just seems like a classic something you'll remember 20 years from now fondly and could still pick up and play all the way through.
With that being said I think gaming peaked in the 16-bit era. The Super Nintendo was dominating with the Genesis in a very close second and you had the underdog Turbo Graphx 16 trying to keep up and the PC leading it's own followers down a different path that would lead most of the innovation we see in console games today. All the different systems had different games with exclusives that stayed exclusives and actually gave you a reason to own all the gaming machines that were out then. While a lot of these games had good graphics for the time they had to have interesting art styles to separate them from the other. You can look at a Mario game and tell it's not Sonic. Final Fantasy did not look like Dragon Quest and so on. Today the endless streams of military shooters all look the same or you're in space shooting the same guys with the same laser and while these games can be fun they just don't stand apart except in name.
I strongly believe that when you discuss truly "classic" games you need to stick to the 16 bit or earlier era. Mention Gears of War 2 me and yeah I loved playing that game it was a ton of fun but is it a classic? No it's not something will come along and do Gears of War better then the Gears franchise will be forgotten not just by me but everyone. Even my beloved God of War I don't think is a classic. Another game by the same group of people that does the fighting and camera better with some slight tweaks to the game play can make God of War seem unplayable and broken. But a game like Super Mario World? It's just classic almost platforming perfection. The controls are responsive the game is beautiful even by today's standards it still holds up. The first two Sonic games do too, they're just fun to play with very very interesting zones, remember the first time you played the Casino Zone? Yeah I do and I'll never forget it but ask me about a part in Halo 3 and I may not be sure and need to go look online to refresh my memory.
Another thing from the past that I miss is that games were just different. Even though Mario and Sonic were both platformers they were completely different games. Today with the saturation of FPS games they all look the same shooting miscellaneous middle eastern guys with you're m-16 with a holographic site on it. With not a whole lot if anything at all different with them in a brown and grey world why use these advanced graphics engines to make bright bold colors when they do brown so well? I know these wars are in the desert but even the games that are in space are all grey and metal looking. Even as fantastic as Killzone 2 looked it was all brown and grey. DOOM took place in space and then Hell but it had some color to it bright colors we need to bring this back.
Most modern games you play them and forget I do have a few that have stood out to me and could very well be considered a classic, Demon's Souls is one and you can read why a few articles back. Another one that came out that I really really and I mean really enjoyed was Borderlands it did something different with the current FPS model and even though it took place in a desert waste land it was still colorful and looked amazing. Lately I've been more into the indie 2D games that are around, Cave Story, La-Mulana and all that kind of stuff. I remember more about Cave Story than I do most of the games I played last year.
I'm not saying I don't like new games because I do. A lot of them are fantastic but the overall "me too" system of copying is getting old and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Games need to be like the old school and not try to imitate but innovate and really do we need so many sequels so fast? Make us wait from a bit before we get the next game, but that's for another time.
With that being said I think gaming peaked in the 16-bit era. The Super Nintendo was dominating with the Genesis in a very close second and you had the underdog Turbo Graphx 16 trying to keep up and the PC leading it's own followers down a different path that would lead most of the innovation we see in console games today. All the different systems had different games with exclusives that stayed exclusives and actually gave you a reason to own all the gaming machines that were out then. While a lot of these games had good graphics for the time they had to have interesting art styles to separate them from the other. You can look at a Mario game and tell it's not Sonic. Final Fantasy did not look like Dragon Quest and so on. Today the endless streams of military shooters all look the same or you're in space shooting the same guys with the same laser and while these games can be fun they just don't stand apart except in name.
I strongly believe that when you discuss truly "classic" games you need to stick to the 16 bit or earlier era. Mention Gears of War 2 me and yeah I loved playing that game it was a ton of fun but is it a classic? No it's not something will come along and do Gears of War better then the Gears franchise will be forgotten not just by me but everyone. Even my beloved God of War I don't think is a classic. Another game by the same group of people that does the fighting and camera better with some slight tweaks to the game play can make God of War seem unplayable and broken. But a game like Super Mario World? It's just classic almost platforming perfection. The controls are responsive the game is beautiful even by today's standards it still holds up. The first two Sonic games do too, they're just fun to play with very very interesting zones, remember the first time you played the Casino Zone? Yeah I do and I'll never forget it but ask me about a part in Halo 3 and I may not be sure and need to go look online to refresh my memory.
Another thing from the past that I miss is that games were just different. Even though Mario and Sonic were both platformers they were completely different games. Today with the saturation of FPS games they all look the same shooting miscellaneous middle eastern guys with you're m-16 with a holographic site on it. With not a whole lot if anything at all different with them in a brown and grey world why use these advanced graphics engines to make bright bold colors when they do brown so well? I know these wars are in the desert but even the games that are in space are all grey and metal looking. Even as fantastic as Killzone 2 looked it was all brown and grey. DOOM took place in space and then Hell but it had some color to it bright colors we need to bring this back.
Most modern games you play them and forget I do have a few that have stood out to me and could very well be considered a classic, Demon's Souls is one and you can read why a few articles back. Another one that came out that I really really and I mean really enjoyed was Borderlands it did something different with the current FPS model and even though it took place in a desert waste land it was still colorful and looked amazing. Lately I've been more into the indie 2D games that are around, Cave Story, La-Mulana and all that kind of stuff. I remember more about Cave Story than I do most of the games I played last year.
I'm not saying I don't like new games because I do. A lot of them are fantastic but the overall "me too" system of copying is getting old and I don't see it going away anytime soon. Games need to be like the old school and not try to imitate but innovate and really do we need so many sequels so fast? Make us wait from a bit before we get the next game, but that's for another time.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Falling out of love with a game!
This is something we all as gamers are probably guilty of at one time or another. You get the hot new release, a sleeper hit, or just a straight up bad game. You get home pop it in and you just freaking love it. You call a friend or two, send out messages on Xbox Live/PSN, post on a message board, "Hey you all need to check this out it's fantastic!" Well then some time goes by, it can be hours or days any time frame, you start to see the flaws, or you're just not that into the game anymore. Someone will ask you, "Why aren't you playing such and such anymore?" You tell them you don't really care for it and you gave up on said game. It's not a bad thing lots of times you try anything new and you're all about it but as that euphoria wears off you're not that into it anymore.
I've done this a good number of times. I play a lot of games, I mean a lot. I always have something waiting for me when I finish whatever I'm currently on. The last one I did this with was Red Faction Guerrilla. I was blown away by the demo and went and managed to talk the guy at the Best Buy into selling it to me a say early. I went home fired it up and I was in gaming heaven. Capping dudes and blowing the hell out of buildings it was so good. Then I started to notice some of the small things that would keep me from loving this game forever. The overall combat was one thing. Mason is a fragile man, a few bullets and he's down. I've read online that I wasn't playing it right that I needed to be more like a Guerrilla soldier and that I can understand. I just couldn't get behind that concept sneaking around in what didn't really seem to be set up like a stealth game. The driving really bothered me too, it never seems consistant. When I was just driving around it was tight and responsive but then I would take on of those timed race side missions and it seemed like the controls just fell apart and the vehicles would slide all over the roads. But this is a just an example of this happening to me, I have another game to write about and that is Halo 2.
Halo 2 is I think the best example of this happening on a very large scale. When it first came out everyone loved Halo 2, if they were playing online or plowing through the campaign everyone was hooked, me included. Then as a little time went on the campaign didn't really hold up, why would they make a game where you don't play as the main protagonist through half of it? People want to play as the main dude not his sidekick (Metal Gear Solid 2) why leave the Master Chief out? It didn't really help the story, what little of it there was and I think hurt the series as a whole. The weak way they handled the cliff hanger ending didn't help either, kind of like we know you'll buy the next one no matter what and we don't really feeling like finishing this story so guess what we'll get you next time. While I'm at this duel wielding in Halo 2 isn't an innovation plenty of games before it had it just like items in Halo 3 it had been done before quit patting yourselves on the back for it Bungee didn't come up with the idea. Now a little on Multiplayer, the backbone of the Halo 2 hype! You can play on Xbox Live! Yay for us! Well from the beginning people were complaining that the maps from Halo 1 were not included, well guess what? I think if a company puts out a new game and all the people playng can talk about is how they want the old maps you made a crap multiplayer experience. I had fun playing Halo 2 online but Bungee should of just updated Halo 1 with all it's superior multiplayer maps added some new ones and called it Halo 2 multiplayer. Even with Halo 3 people still want the Halo 1 maps. "Oh! But we're giving you this map that's kind of like this map from the first one!" No one wants that give us the maps we want not your idea of what we want. I'm not really trying to review Halo 2 but just share some thoughts on the few examples I gave. It was called the best original Xbox game by a few gaming sites and publications and I've seen it on some lists of the biggest dissapointments of all time, so which is it? See one's feelings at the beginning won't always be the same down the road. Before you think I'm just bashing the Halo series because I'm aware that's how this could come across, I like the Halo games. Halo 3 is probably my favorite I played through it 5 times I liked it so much.
I've done this a good number of times. I play a lot of games, I mean a lot. I always have something waiting for me when I finish whatever I'm currently on. The last one I did this with was Red Faction Guerrilla. I was blown away by the demo and went and managed to talk the guy at the Best Buy into selling it to me a say early. I went home fired it up and I was in gaming heaven. Capping dudes and blowing the hell out of buildings it was so good. Then I started to notice some of the small things that would keep me from loving this game forever. The overall combat was one thing. Mason is a fragile man, a few bullets and he's down. I've read online that I wasn't playing it right that I needed to be more like a Guerrilla soldier and that I can understand. I just couldn't get behind that concept sneaking around in what didn't really seem to be set up like a stealth game. The driving really bothered me too, it never seems consistant. When I was just driving around it was tight and responsive but then I would take on of those timed race side missions and it seemed like the controls just fell apart and the vehicles would slide all over the roads. But this is a just an example of this happening to me, I have another game to write about and that is Halo 2.
Halo 2 is I think the best example of this happening on a very large scale. When it first came out everyone loved Halo 2, if they were playing online or plowing through the campaign everyone was hooked, me included. Then as a little time went on the campaign didn't really hold up, why would they make a game where you don't play as the main protagonist through half of it? People want to play as the main dude not his sidekick (Metal Gear Solid 2) why leave the Master Chief out? It didn't really help the story, what little of it there was and I think hurt the series as a whole. The weak way they handled the cliff hanger ending didn't help either, kind of like we know you'll buy the next one no matter what and we don't really feeling like finishing this story so guess what we'll get you next time. While I'm at this duel wielding in Halo 2 isn't an innovation plenty of games before it had it just like items in Halo 3 it had been done before quit patting yourselves on the back for it Bungee didn't come up with the idea. Now a little on Multiplayer, the backbone of the Halo 2 hype! You can play on Xbox Live! Yay for us! Well from the beginning people were complaining that the maps from Halo 1 were not included, well guess what? I think if a company puts out a new game and all the people playng can talk about is how they want the old maps you made a crap multiplayer experience. I had fun playing Halo 2 online but Bungee should of just updated Halo 1 with all it's superior multiplayer maps added some new ones and called it Halo 2 multiplayer. Even with Halo 3 people still want the Halo 1 maps. "Oh! But we're giving you this map that's kind of like this map from the first one!" No one wants that give us the maps we want not your idea of what we want. I'm not really trying to review Halo 2 but just share some thoughts on the few examples I gave. It was called the best original Xbox game by a few gaming sites and publications and I've seen it on some lists of the biggest dissapointments of all time, so which is it? See one's feelings at the beginning won't always be the same down the road. Before you think I'm just bashing the Halo series because I'm aware that's how this could come across, I like the Halo games. Halo 3 is probably my favorite I played through it 5 times I liked it so much.
My gaming History. Parts 1 and 2!
I've been playing video games along time, most of my life. I was probably about 3 or 4 when I played my first video game. It was either Robotron or Defender, a 7-11 down the street from the family home had both of those machines in it. I had to be held up by my dad so I could reach the machine to play it and I was hooked. I did a good amount of my playing at the 7-11 for awhile until we got the Atari 2600. We got one of those I believe right after it came out I can't remember exactly. I played the living hell out of that thing. My dad and I would play Combat for hours it was probably the most played game on that system. But then tragedy struck, the 2600's insides fried and it stopped working but to my extreme dissapointment it would not be replaced. Sometime passed and I had no actual system in the house. Arcades would be hit on occasion but I was hungry for more. Eventually I was given a Colecovision which I was quite fond of. It had one of my favorite games ever on it, Frenzy. Frenzy was a sequel to Bezerk and followed the basic same formula of that game. I kind of gloss over this section because I was really young and I don't remember a lot of the games I had for these systems, Combat and Frenzy for me were the stand outs on the respective machines. This is probably how I handle each section, talk about the systems I got in order and you can assume I had the big games for each. Then I'll mention one or two games that I think not a lot of people played or are just special to me.
Then came the NES, one of the greatest things ever made. I had played Super Mario Bros. in the arcade in one of those Nintendo arcade cabinets. It was SMB and I think Hogan's Alley again in a 7-11. I got the NES with ROB the Robot and the Zapper. That came with Gyromite and Duck Hunt. I also was given SMB and The Legend of Zelda. SMB I was familiar with having played it in the arcades and at a firend's house. But Zelda, holy crap I was floored by it. You could save, a game that was so big you had to quit and come back to it later. I didn't have any experience with PC games at this time so the whole idea of saving was strange and wonderful to me. Basicly I had all the big NES games. All the Mario games, both Zeldas, Mega Man, and Metroid plus tons of others. Metroid was another game that just completely blew me away. It was so impressive to me I would probably have to say it's my all time favorite NES game. Another game on the NES that I don't think a whole lot of people have heard of is The Guardian Legend. It was a top shooter combined with a Zelda type exploring sections. You would play as a spaceship and blast your way into a base then as you explored as a female robot you'd unlock ways to bosses and those were fought in the top down space shooter stages. Just a fantastic game. The NES kept me happy for a long time. I was still working well into the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era until it gave up the ghost and stopped working while I was playing Castlevania 3.
Backing up again. The next system to join my NES was a Turbo Graphx 16. I chose between this and a Genesis. Some may say I made a mistake but I quite enjoyed my TG16. One of the features I really liked were the controllers having built in turbo buttons. The TG16 had a lot of really good games and I miss having it because I'd love to rock some of these games again. Blazing Lazers was one of these. A very good verticle shooter. One thing I really dig about schmups are the ones that have crazy rediculous weapons and this had them in spades. You be a screen clearing power house just destroying everything in your path. It wasn't a bullet hell type shooter but it could be kind of crazy. Another favorite of mine was Neutopia, which was a complete Zelda ripoff but it was a fantastic Zelda ripoff. So good to me that I think if they had just called it Zelda something it would of been a classic game spoken in the same sentence as Zelda 1 and 3. I also had the CD add on for the TG16. There was a game on the CD format call JB Harold Murder Club. It was basicly a slide show that had a detective story along with it. You were trying to solve a murder but it was done like this. You'd go to a location a picture of a person would pop up and you'd ask them questions and show them evidence. If you did things right you'd eventually find the killer. If you screwed up you could know yourself who the killer was but not be able to prove it because you asked a qrong question somewhere and you would need to start over. It took me forever to beat that game, I would site there yelling at the TV, "I know who did it!" to no avail because I screwed up somewhere. The game that made me so glad to have a TG16CD was Y's Book 1&2. At the time I was big on RPG's so this was right up my alley. It also had talking instead of just text screens. I was floored by this, you could hear the characters, amazing. It was an overhead view run around kill stuff kind of like Hydlide but really good. It's on the Wii Virtual Console if you've never played or you can check out a few Lets Plays on Youtube.
Next up is what I consider the all time greatest console of al time. I still play games today but really it's kind of like just going through the motions because there will never be a machine that had the range and amazing number of good quality games on it. What could I be talking about? The freaking Super Nintendo. Damn, it was amazing. Super Mario World, Zelda 3, Final Fantasy 2 (4) and 3 (6), Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Home verions of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2, Star Fox, Contra 3. The list goes on and on. Out of all the games on the SNES Final Fantasy 3 (6) was probably played the most except for Street Fighter 2. When I got Street Fighter 2 at home it was a wrap I mastered every character knew all the ends and outs it was crazy. I'm sure I'm leaving some games out but that's only because there was so many excellent games theyre just rushing through my head right now and I can't just seem to single out titles. But if you had a SNES you know what I mean, you may not agree with my statement about it being the best but I just think it's where games peaked and we're probably going downhill now. Very, very slowly but I think there may be a decline.
I had a 3DO sometime after the SNES but the games I had were crap and that system was a waste of money. One game on the machine was called D&D Slayer. It was a first person action RPG. I've heard it was on the PC and called Dungeon Hack but I haven't looked into it. It was a fun game and I spent some time playing it but in the end the 3DO was crap and I'm sorry I ever had one. It's really the only "failed" console I ever owned. I saw a Jaguar in a Kaybee toys for 20 bucks one time and I was going to grab it but I didn't have 20 on me and I never went back. I never had a CDI, a 32x, Virtual Boy or any other I may be leaving out.
After this I had a Genesis that I picked up for cheap. Not a lot to say about it. I know it was great but I got it late in it's life cycle and I didn't own a lot of games for it. I had played a bunch at friends which Phantasy Star 2 was the stand out. Of the games I owned I really liked Rocket Knight Adventures and Strider. My favorite game on the system was Gunstar Heroes, a Contra clone that was so much more fun. I don't think I need to say anything more about it. I'm not dogging the Genesis by not going into more detail but it wasn't that important of a system to me. I grew up a Nintendo kid and didn't own any Sega Consoles for a long length of time. I had a Saturn for a bit but it was awhile after it came out. I still have my Dreamcast but I'll get into that later. But I am listening to Genesis the band as I type this so I think that's cool.
I'm going to call this part one right now. I'm getting tired and I don't know if I can just save this as a draft or not. I'll either do a part 2 tomorrow or edit this and finish.
Part 2
With part two of this I'm going to talk about the later stages of gaming. Pretty much all the machines that have come out since the game format has gone disc based. I'm not going to go into as much detail about these systems because I didn't spend a lot of time with each one. The main reason was a got my first real PC Between my SNES and my PS1. After I got my hands on a real PC I pretty much forgot about console games. I had many years of PC gaming to catch up on so I spent my days playing through dirt cheap old PC games. Old Sierra games, Some of the early FPS games, whatever I could get. The PC in question was a Packard Bell, 75hz Pentium with a whopping 4 MEGS of RAM and at the time a massive 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. I ended up upgrading the ram to 8 MEGS (OMG!) so I could run Quake a little better. I had played lots of PC games at friends houses but never owned one myself. I would say at that time Quake was the most important game I'd played because it introduced me to online play. I would sit up at nights and play Quake over my super fast 56k modem, it ran like mud but I had a blast. That turned into an obsession with Red Alert online later in the year. But eventually the hard drive in that PC died and I was unable to afford to replace it so my PC gaming went into hibernation.
I got the PS1 the year it came out but it only got a little love as I was playing the PC. Resident Evil 1 and 2 were the stand out titles for me. My absolute favorite game on the PS1 was Castlevania Symphony of the Night, definately in my top ten of all time it was so good. Taking the best parts about Castlevania and adding what I loved about Metroid but anyone reading this already knows that. I played Final Fantasy which I'm sure anyone with a PS1 at the time played that one. Speaking of Square at that time this was when they started to release more than FInal Fantasy games in the US. Einhander was one of those games. With my love of Shmups be it verticle scrolling or sidescrolling this game was near perfection for that genre. Everything about it melded together in a way that was just borderline perfection. With all the PS1 classics being released on the PS3 I'm sad this has not been put on the PSN yet. Freaking Final Fantasy 8 is on there and it wasn't that good a game. But I digress, basicly I played all the big name games on it but some of the lesser known titles slipped by due to my PC gaming.
With a new job at this time I picked up a Japanese Dreamcast with Soul Caliber and Sonic Adventure. I didn't have a lot of import games for the Dreamcast but I did get the US release when it came out. I had Ready 2 Rumble and Blue Stinger which was okay but had some really bad crap about it gameplay wise. Everything in life grinded to a hault when I picked up Phantasy Star Online. That was like crack, I was addicted like you wouldn't believe. I was only getting a couple hours of sleep a night because I stayed up so late just playing that game grinding for the next rare item. After my addiction to PSO came to a close I decided I wanted to try a real MMO. With my new PC which I had played Half Life and other games of that time on I decided to play Everquest. I couldn't get into it. I was looking for something closer to PSO but Everquest was a more complicated game. The first Dungeon Siege was a game on the PC I really enjoyed I blew through it in a three day weekend with very little sleep. I think in those 3 days I only slept about 5 hours.
I eventually got a PS2/Gamecube/Xbox but this was a generation I passed by for the most part. I played GTA 3 on the PS2, KOTOR on the Xbox and Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and not much else. I ended up getting Star Wars Galaxies when it launched and the next year was spent playing that. I love Star Wars and this game while not being really Star Wars-ey was just enough to scratch that Star Wars itch. I really enjoyed the game and I was not a fan of the giant overhaul they did to it over time. The only two breaks I took from playing it were to play KOTOR and Jedi Academy. After I stopped playing SWG I played a couple different games on the consoles I owned but one by one those were sold to upgrade PC parts. Eventually I got into World of Warcraft and that was it, I don't need to go into detail about this but it was more consuming than SWG. It would be the only thing I played for 2-3 years.
So now I sit here typing on my PC, with a PS3, a 360 and a Wii sitting next to my TV. I haven't played the Wii in months, Madworld was the last game I played on that. I've been through some games on the 360 but the RROD crap has burned me on the system, I'm on my fourth 360. The PS3 is my go to console for the moment but if the game is on the PC I play it on that. Because no matter what I own or what I play I will really be a PC gamer for life. It's just what I enjoy the most but I like all the platforms out there for some reason or another and that's really all I have to say about that.
So that's a brief history of my gaming stuff. I glossed over some stuff but I'm pretty sure I hit the important parts. I just wanted to share some things about how I've enjoyed the hobby I've had for almost my entire life.
Then came the NES, one of the greatest things ever made. I had played Super Mario Bros. in the arcade in one of those Nintendo arcade cabinets. It was SMB and I think Hogan's Alley again in a 7-11. I got the NES with ROB the Robot and the Zapper. That came with Gyromite and Duck Hunt. I also was given SMB and The Legend of Zelda. SMB I was familiar with having played it in the arcades and at a firend's house. But Zelda, holy crap I was floored by it. You could save, a game that was so big you had to quit and come back to it later. I didn't have any experience with PC games at this time so the whole idea of saving was strange and wonderful to me. Basicly I had all the big NES games. All the Mario games, both Zeldas, Mega Man, and Metroid plus tons of others. Metroid was another game that just completely blew me away. It was so impressive to me I would probably have to say it's my all time favorite NES game. Another game on the NES that I don't think a whole lot of people have heard of is The Guardian Legend. It was a top shooter combined with a Zelda type exploring sections. You would play as a spaceship and blast your way into a base then as you explored as a female robot you'd unlock ways to bosses and those were fought in the top down space shooter stages. Just a fantastic game. The NES kept me happy for a long time. I was still working well into the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era until it gave up the ghost and stopped working while I was playing Castlevania 3.
Backing up again. The next system to join my NES was a Turbo Graphx 16. I chose between this and a Genesis. Some may say I made a mistake but I quite enjoyed my TG16. One of the features I really liked were the controllers having built in turbo buttons. The TG16 had a lot of really good games and I miss having it because I'd love to rock some of these games again. Blazing Lazers was one of these. A very good verticle shooter. One thing I really dig about schmups are the ones that have crazy rediculous weapons and this had them in spades. You be a screen clearing power house just destroying everything in your path. It wasn't a bullet hell type shooter but it could be kind of crazy. Another favorite of mine was Neutopia, which was a complete Zelda ripoff but it was a fantastic Zelda ripoff. So good to me that I think if they had just called it Zelda something it would of been a classic game spoken in the same sentence as Zelda 1 and 3. I also had the CD add on for the TG16. There was a game on the CD format call JB Harold Murder Club. It was basicly a slide show that had a detective story along with it. You were trying to solve a murder but it was done like this. You'd go to a location a picture of a person would pop up and you'd ask them questions and show them evidence. If you did things right you'd eventually find the killer. If you screwed up you could know yourself who the killer was but not be able to prove it because you asked a qrong question somewhere and you would need to start over. It took me forever to beat that game, I would site there yelling at the TV, "I know who did it!" to no avail because I screwed up somewhere. The game that made me so glad to have a TG16CD was Y's Book 1&2. At the time I was big on RPG's so this was right up my alley. It also had talking instead of just text screens. I was floored by this, you could hear the characters, amazing. It was an overhead view run around kill stuff kind of like Hydlide but really good. It's on the Wii Virtual Console if you've never played or you can check out a few Lets Plays on Youtube.
Next up is what I consider the all time greatest console of al time. I still play games today but really it's kind of like just going through the motions because there will never be a machine that had the range and amazing number of good quality games on it. What could I be talking about? The freaking Super Nintendo. Damn, it was amazing. Super Mario World, Zelda 3, Final Fantasy 2 (4) and 3 (6), Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Home verions of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat 2, Star Fox, Contra 3. The list goes on and on. Out of all the games on the SNES Final Fantasy 3 (6) was probably played the most except for Street Fighter 2. When I got Street Fighter 2 at home it was a wrap I mastered every character knew all the ends and outs it was crazy. I'm sure I'm leaving some games out but that's only because there was so many excellent games theyre just rushing through my head right now and I can't just seem to single out titles. But if you had a SNES you know what I mean, you may not agree with my statement about it being the best but I just think it's where games peaked and we're probably going downhill now. Very, very slowly but I think there may be a decline.
I had a 3DO sometime after the SNES but the games I had were crap and that system was a waste of money. One game on the machine was called D&D Slayer. It was a first person action RPG. I've heard it was on the PC and called Dungeon Hack but I haven't looked into it. It was a fun game and I spent some time playing it but in the end the 3DO was crap and I'm sorry I ever had one. It's really the only "failed" console I ever owned. I saw a Jaguar in a Kaybee toys for 20 bucks one time and I was going to grab it but I didn't have 20 on me and I never went back. I never had a CDI, a 32x, Virtual Boy or any other I may be leaving out.
After this I had a Genesis that I picked up for cheap. Not a lot to say about it. I know it was great but I got it late in it's life cycle and I didn't own a lot of games for it. I had played a bunch at friends which Phantasy Star 2 was the stand out. Of the games I owned I really liked Rocket Knight Adventures and Strider. My favorite game on the system was Gunstar Heroes, a Contra clone that was so much more fun. I don't think I need to say anything more about it. I'm not dogging the Genesis by not going into more detail but it wasn't that important of a system to me. I grew up a Nintendo kid and didn't own any Sega Consoles for a long length of time. I had a Saturn for a bit but it was awhile after it came out. I still have my Dreamcast but I'll get into that later. But I am listening to Genesis the band as I type this so I think that's cool.
I'm going to call this part one right now. I'm getting tired and I don't know if I can just save this as a draft or not. I'll either do a part 2 tomorrow or edit this and finish.
Part 2
With part two of this I'm going to talk about the later stages of gaming. Pretty much all the machines that have come out since the game format has gone disc based. I'm not going to go into as much detail about these systems because I didn't spend a lot of time with each one. The main reason was a got my first real PC Between my SNES and my PS1. After I got my hands on a real PC I pretty much forgot about console games. I had many years of PC gaming to catch up on so I spent my days playing through dirt cheap old PC games. Old Sierra games, Some of the early FPS games, whatever I could get. The PC in question was a Packard Bell, 75hz Pentium with a whopping 4 MEGS of RAM and at the time a massive 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. I ended up upgrading the ram to 8 MEGS (OMG!) so I could run Quake a little better. I had played lots of PC games at friends houses but never owned one myself. I would say at that time Quake was the most important game I'd played because it introduced me to online play. I would sit up at nights and play Quake over my super fast 56k modem, it ran like mud but I had a blast. That turned into an obsession with Red Alert online later in the year. But eventually the hard drive in that PC died and I was unable to afford to replace it so my PC gaming went into hibernation.
I got the PS1 the year it came out but it only got a little love as I was playing the PC. Resident Evil 1 and 2 were the stand out titles for me. My absolute favorite game on the PS1 was Castlevania Symphony of the Night, definately in my top ten of all time it was so good. Taking the best parts about Castlevania and adding what I loved about Metroid but anyone reading this already knows that. I played Final Fantasy which I'm sure anyone with a PS1 at the time played that one. Speaking of Square at that time this was when they started to release more than FInal Fantasy games in the US. Einhander was one of those games. With my love of Shmups be it verticle scrolling or sidescrolling this game was near perfection for that genre. Everything about it melded together in a way that was just borderline perfection. With all the PS1 classics being released on the PS3 I'm sad this has not been put on the PSN yet. Freaking Final Fantasy 8 is on there and it wasn't that good a game. But I digress, basicly I played all the big name games on it but some of the lesser known titles slipped by due to my PC gaming.
With a new job at this time I picked up a Japanese Dreamcast with Soul Caliber and Sonic Adventure. I didn't have a lot of import games for the Dreamcast but I did get the US release when it came out. I had Ready 2 Rumble and Blue Stinger which was okay but had some really bad crap about it gameplay wise. Everything in life grinded to a hault when I picked up Phantasy Star Online. That was like crack, I was addicted like you wouldn't believe. I was only getting a couple hours of sleep a night because I stayed up so late just playing that game grinding for the next rare item. After my addiction to PSO came to a close I decided I wanted to try a real MMO. With my new PC which I had played Half Life and other games of that time on I decided to play Everquest. I couldn't get into it. I was looking for something closer to PSO but Everquest was a more complicated game. The first Dungeon Siege was a game on the PC I really enjoyed I blew through it in a three day weekend with very little sleep. I think in those 3 days I only slept about 5 hours.
I eventually got a PS2/Gamecube/Xbox but this was a generation I passed by for the most part. I played GTA 3 on the PS2, KOTOR on the Xbox and Metroid Prime on the Gamecube and not much else. I ended up getting Star Wars Galaxies when it launched and the next year was spent playing that. I love Star Wars and this game while not being really Star Wars-ey was just enough to scratch that Star Wars itch. I really enjoyed the game and I was not a fan of the giant overhaul they did to it over time. The only two breaks I took from playing it were to play KOTOR and Jedi Academy. After I stopped playing SWG I played a couple different games on the consoles I owned but one by one those were sold to upgrade PC parts. Eventually I got into World of Warcraft and that was it, I don't need to go into detail about this but it was more consuming than SWG. It would be the only thing I played for 2-3 years.
So now I sit here typing on my PC, with a PS3, a 360 and a Wii sitting next to my TV. I haven't played the Wii in months, Madworld was the last game I played on that. I've been through some games on the 360 but the RROD crap has burned me on the system, I'm on my fourth 360. The PS3 is my go to console for the moment but if the game is on the PC I play it on that. Because no matter what I own or what I play I will really be a PC gamer for life. It's just what I enjoy the most but I like all the platforms out there for some reason or another and that's really all I have to say about that.
So that's a brief history of my gaming stuff. I glossed over some stuff but I'm pretty sure I hit the important parts. I just wanted to share some things about how I've enjoyed the hobby I've had for almost my entire life.
PC Gaming in a Console World
Like many people my age I started playing games on an Atari 2600. My dad and I would play the living hell out of Combat until the 2600 eventually died on us. As I got a little older I played in arcades until they just vanished from existence. Eventually the NES came into the house and that was it I was hooked. Well I had the Nintendo consoles of the time, NES to a SNES and so on. When I was around 16 I got my first PC. It was a Pentium 75hz with 4 megs of ram. I’d played various PC games before I owned one, Doom, the Sierra adventure games and some D&D stuff. After I got my hands on my own PC that was it, I still played consoles but my main gaming platform was the PC and I would only touch my console for console specific stuff. PC had these great FPS games and I just fell in love with the RTS games. Overall it was just a more complicated set of games at a time when just getting the game to run was a game in itself. Well that went on for a few years and I eventually let my PC get a little outdated and instead of upgrading I went with a Xbox 360 as my primary console, four of those later and I was with my PS3. One thing though I did own the original Xbox, PS1/2, Gamecube and all that crap but I rarely played them. Once the new console glimmer went away they sat for long times, eventually going on Ebay to sell for PC parts. Well with my choice to go to the console for this current generation of games I was met with frustration. The 360 we all know is just a cluster fuck and I like my PS3 but it can be a pain to deal with too. So about two years ago I made a decision to get back into PC gaming. I ordered the parts and slapped together a rig that could run modern games. I had some catching up to do. Of coarse I played Crysis and got into a series that’s one of my all time favorites, STALKER. I knew my choice was a wise one and I’m never looking back.
One thing I noticed when I came back into the PC fold was the amount of console to PC ports that were out there. I remember it wasn’t like it is now and the PC version was usually a crap port that had trouble running and when it did it ran like ass. But today most of these ports run fine sometimes look way better than the console version and can benefit from the mods people make. It’s great to see when a developer lets the fans make changes to their games, sometimes for the better. STALKER:SOC is a good example of this right now. I’m currently as of this writing trying out the LURK mod for it and it’s interesting playing a game I love with the same setting and story but the game play is a lot different. I just think that is the best thing about PC gaming, well that and the graphics not that graphics make a game but I like to see the best I can.
I know people say the PC market is dying and not worth putting the games out for the platform anymore but look at something like Steam. Valve has found a way to make buying games an addiction. I see a game on Steam for 5 bucks and I don’t usually care what it is or if I own it on disc already, being able to just play without a disc and not keep that stuff around is good enough reason for me.
The consoles are slowly catching up in terms of features and what they can output it’s almost as if you have a little PC sitting next to your TV. I think in the future we will not have a Sony or Microsoft gaming machines but just TV side PC’s that a lot of companies make that all play the same format of game. When digital distribution is the plan of the day and you don’t walk into a Gamestop or Best Buy to get a game is when I think this will take hold and the whole industry will be nothing but “PC” games.
One thing I noticed when I came back into the PC fold was the amount of console to PC ports that were out there. I remember it wasn’t like it is now and the PC version was usually a crap port that had trouble running and when it did it ran like ass. But today most of these ports run fine sometimes look way better than the console version and can benefit from the mods people make. It’s great to see when a developer lets the fans make changes to their games, sometimes for the better. STALKER:SOC is a good example of this right now. I’m currently as of this writing trying out the LURK mod for it and it’s interesting playing a game I love with the same setting and story but the game play is a lot different. I just think that is the best thing about PC gaming, well that and the graphics not that graphics make a game but I like to see the best I can.
I know people say the PC market is dying and not worth putting the games out for the platform anymore but look at something like Steam. Valve has found a way to make buying games an addiction. I see a game on Steam for 5 bucks and I don’t usually care what it is or if I own it on disc already, being able to just play without a disc and not keep that stuff around is good enough reason for me.
The consoles are slowly catching up in terms of features and what they can output it’s almost as if you have a little PC sitting next to your TV. I think in the future we will not have a Sony or Microsoft gaming machines but just TV side PC’s that a lot of companies make that all play the same format of game. When digital distribution is the plan of the day and you don’t walk into a Gamestop or Best Buy to get a game is when I think this will take hold and the whole industry will be nothing but “PC” games.
3D Games!
When I first heard about the new wave of 3D games I couldn’t help but think about the “3D” games of the past. I remember playing an arcade version of Wolfenstein 3D that was the old PC game played on a sit down arcade cabinet with a pair of “3D” goggles. All it was was the 2D game in goggles nothing special. Another time the arcade near me had these two virtual reality pods you stood in and again wore goggles but it was in somewhat 3D view. It was okay but nothing great to play. I know the Virtua Boy was suppose to be some kind of 3D thing but I never played one because 3D or not it looked stupid and I was never interested. So besides a few small experiences with 3D in gaming I never gave it much thought.
I guess it started last year I started to hear about the new wave of 3D. It started in movies and or course it’s flowed into gaming. Sony just gave the PS3 it’s 3D update in Japan along with new 3D updates for a few games. Nintendo has the 3DS coming out sometime in the future, so I figure Microsoft will follow along and all three consoles will be in 3D. 3D is the new hotness in gaming, motion controls didn’t exactly set the world on fire and for some reason Sony and MS are diving into the world of motion control to grab the Wii market and I think it’s a little to late because that ship has sailed.
Now back to 3D, the other day I was able to try out one of Nvidia’s 3D setups in a Fry’s store. Before seeing this I was 100 percent against 3D in games. While I enjoy a game that really lets you loose yourself in it’s world I still like to feel the disconnect from it. I don’t want to be completely lost in it. But I saw this setup from Nvidia and I admit it looks really cool. It wasn’t anything playable but the field of depth from the 3D just worked. While it looks neat I don’t think I would want to play all my games like that. First off on the PC I saw you had to wear glasses which were tinted and made the whole game seem darker. I don’t know if this was because of the lighting in the store and they did it like that to make the 3D better or not but at the time I didn’t like it. I’ve never been motion sick in real life or while playing a game but I could see this giving me a headache after awhile which would lead to vomit. So for just looking at it for a few minutes it looks cool in the long run probably not for me.
Then you have the 3DS which will not need glasses to give a 3D effect. Right out of the gate Nintendo was saying you don’t have to play the games in 3D which led me to believe it won’t work. Much like how I think Nintendo letting you control their games now with a Wii Mote waggle or with another method usually a classic controller is kind of like them saying okay yeah this motion control stuff didn’t work as planned. Anyway I have not seen a 3DS in person but everything I’ve read from E3 says it’s works and looks awesome. I think it was Warren Spector who said it changed his life to see it in action. I have heard it must be held at a certain angle to get the best picture but that’s expected in the first 3D hand held we see. Maybe when Nintendo puts out the 3DS Lite or something they’ll get it with a wider viewing angle. But if they have this working as advertised without glasses I think it will be pretty freaking awesome. Again I think this could cause headaches so I’m glad the option to play in 2D is there. The gamer should always be given that choice and having that choice makes me interested in the system. I know Nintendo has always been the best at making games on their new “innovation” and I hope they have some killer stuff lined up for this besides all the old game redone in 3D. Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 643D, and I’m sure we’ll see a ton of other games being re-released in 3D on this thing and I do not like that. How about a new Star Fox? I know they have that new Zelda on the Wii coming out but how about a new Zelda on the 3DS?
I wonder how long until we hear about a PSP3D or a MS 3D add on for the 360 or a whole new Xbox? the Xbox 3D! It only uses Natal (Kinect is a stupid name) and comes with Halo 3D not to be confused with Halo 3 3D which would be downloadable.
But 3D isn’t even hear yet and personally while I think it might not be for me I think it has the potential to be really awesome unless some one (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) really screw the pooch on it and make crap games that use it in crap ways.
I guess it started last year I started to hear about the new wave of 3D. It started in movies and or course it’s flowed into gaming. Sony just gave the PS3 it’s 3D update in Japan along with new 3D updates for a few games. Nintendo has the 3DS coming out sometime in the future, so I figure Microsoft will follow along and all three consoles will be in 3D. 3D is the new hotness in gaming, motion controls didn’t exactly set the world on fire and for some reason Sony and MS are diving into the world of motion control to grab the Wii market and I think it’s a little to late because that ship has sailed.
Now back to 3D, the other day I was able to try out one of Nvidia’s 3D setups in a Fry’s store. Before seeing this I was 100 percent against 3D in games. While I enjoy a game that really lets you loose yourself in it’s world I still like to feel the disconnect from it. I don’t want to be completely lost in it. But I saw this setup from Nvidia and I admit it looks really cool. It wasn’t anything playable but the field of depth from the 3D just worked. While it looks neat I don’t think I would want to play all my games like that. First off on the PC I saw you had to wear glasses which were tinted and made the whole game seem darker. I don’t know if this was because of the lighting in the store and they did it like that to make the 3D better or not but at the time I didn’t like it. I’ve never been motion sick in real life or while playing a game but I could see this giving me a headache after awhile which would lead to vomit. So for just looking at it for a few minutes it looks cool in the long run probably not for me.
Then you have the 3DS which will not need glasses to give a 3D effect. Right out of the gate Nintendo was saying you don’t have to play the games in 3D which led me to believe it won’t work. Much like how I think Nintendo letting you control their games now with a Wii Mote waggle or with another method usually a classic controller is kind of like them saying okay yeah this motion control stuff didn’t work as planned. Anyway I have not seen a 3DS in person but everything I’ve read from E3 says it’s works and looks awesome. I think it was Warren Spector who said it changed his life to see it in action. I have heard it must be held at a certain angle to get the best picture but that’s expected in the first 3D hand held we see. Maybe when Nintendo puts out the 3DS Lite or something they’ll get it with a wider viewing angle. But if they have this working as advertised without glasses I think it will be pretty freaking awesome. Again I think this could cause headaches so I’m glad the option to play in 2D is there. The gamer should always be given that choice and having that choice makes me interested in the system. I know Nintendo has always been the best at making games on their new “innovation” and I hope they have some killer stuff lined up for this besides all the old game redone in 3D. Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 643D, and I’m sure we’ll see a ton of other games being re-released in 3D on this thing and I do not like that. How about a new Star Fox? I know they have that new Zelda on the Wii coming out but how about a new Zelda on the 3DS?
I wonder how long until we hear about a PSP3D or a MS 3D add on for the 360 or a whole new Xbox? the Xbox 3D! It only uses Natal (Kinect is a stupid name) and comes with Halo 3D not to be confused with Halo 3 3D which would be downloadable.
But 3D isn’t even hear yet and personally while I think it might not be for me I think it has the potential to be really awesome unless some one (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) really screw the pooch on it and make crap games that use it in crap ways.
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