Consolitis

Greetings!

The first time I played video games for real was when I played Ice Climbers on NES. For a long time consoles really helped to shape what we have come to know as video games and its genres. So it feels really strange and ironic that today I believe consoles are responsible for dumbing down video games as a whole and sort of restricting what comes out and is available to play.

In the late 90's a really hyped FPS that was coming out for the PC was one named Halo, developed by Bungie, a company at that point mostly known for the FPS Marathon for Mac. One of the selling points of Halo was that you would be able to drive around in vehicles in the game, which sounds silly today but at that time it was the coolest feature imaginable. The incredibly tedious buggy part of Half-Life 2 is there because of this. As the release date for Halo was getting closer however, some things were stirring in the pot that was going to cause a ripple effect resulting in what is today known as consolitis. The Face of Evil, Cthulhu Arisen, also known as Bill Gates and his company Microsoft was not far from releasing their first console X-box. What the console lacked was a good game to sort of flagship its release, and Halo fit that role like a glove. Like the giant amoeba it is, MS absorbed yet another company and the PC gamers (yours truly included) who had been waiting for years for Halo could rest assured that the X-box players were going to be able to play the game first, and iirc about a year before it was released for PC.

Flash forward about a decade, and here we are. Even though there is no debate that FPSs are best played on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, the console versions outsell the PC counterparts by miles. If I've been a bit bitter about stuff in my previous updates, I'm really pissed off about this. I can't believe I'm sitting here typing this stuff like some sort of doomsday prophet. Microsoft, consoles and frat dudes playing Halo can't be held solely responsible for the state of video games today though, of course pirates play a big role as well as PC games are easy to pirate. If you really want to, pirating console games for most of the current generation of consoles is not particularily hard either. It just seems very stupid that PC games lose basic features such as leaning in FPSs, proper surround sound etc just because of them being little more than straight console ports. I guess money talks and rules this world, which is true for video games as much as for everything else. Also I suppose people in general are just too stupid to realize that aiming with an analog stick is not very good and pretty much impossible if you don't have any sort of auto aim. I don't know what the solution is either, I do think games like Mega Man 9-10 and Super Meat Boy is a step in the right direction though. Games are not one hundred percent about graphics and 3D, when push comes to shove it's the gameplay that counts.

Peace out!