Anyone that’s used to seeing me around on forums, Xbox Live and occasionally the PSN may have noticed that I’ve been around less, in fact I’ve hardly been around at all and do you know the reason? I’m bored: bored of being treated like dirt by the games companies, bored with the lack of decent compelling games that have been coming out, bored with the useless online gaming services that are available, bored of the unsporting behaviour exhibited by the general FPS community and finally I’m bored of the childish fanboyistic attitude that pervades the gaming space (even among ‘adults’).
Now I’m not saying that I’ve left gaming for good, it’s my number one hobby and probably the one single activity I’ve done most in my life other than sleep, eat and work. I’m waiting for my problems to be solved, one way or another or perhaps like the majority of people in the gaming community I’ll just have to lower my standards and put up with the crap we’re being dealt. Here are but a few of the lowlights…
We’ll start with some history, the RROD saga was a brilliant example of gaming companies treating us like dirt. Microsoft denied the existence of a problem for ages, then finally came out with a half-arsed 3 year RROD warranty program which didn’t help much and still resulted in punters being sans-Console for anywhere between 4 and 10 weeks. On a different tangent there’s the lack of compelling games, last year’s much hyped “Perfect Storm” of games was little more than marketing and over-zealous reviewing. Bioshock was a good game and did the ‘FPS Story’ thing better than any game to date but I just found it underwhelming and almost nobody replays it more than twice (that being just for the achievements anyway). Halo 3 was the probably the biggest disappointment in gaming ever, many a fanboy will wax lyrical about how good it is but the truth is that (direct competitors) Orange Box and Call of Duty 4 outstripped it in almost every way – not just my opinion, check the wider gaming community and sites like Metacritic and you’ll see what I mean. Mass Effect had a lot of promise but I found it to be almost unplayable. Lately I’ve probably enjoyed the few games I’ve played on the Wii more than I have the Xbox games (read on for reasons) and the PS3 is still dead to me. I sold all of my PS3 games, had a fit of optimism and bought more only to find that they’re still only average and not worth the money so I sold them again – it still makes a brilliant upscaling DVD player though.
More recently we’ve had the Xbox Live service issues, whilst also being another example of games companies treating us like crap this meant that after finally finding a game I loved playing I could barely get into a stable game for at least three weeks – made all the more irritating by the fact that it coincided with me having some time off of work. On the occasions that I could get in a stable game I ended up playing with and/or against a bunch of useless camping arseholes who managed to suck almost all of the fun out a fantastic game. Microsoft’s response? To give us an already released game for free, probably meaning that it wasn’t selling well in the first place and anyone who had it already gets bugger-all, nice one Microsoft – you really learned from the RROD saga didn’t you. The next issue on my list (we’ll call it the ‘Camping F***tard’ or ‘CF’ problem) has been building for a while, I really don’t understand what compels people to boot up a fast-paced FPS game only to go and lie at the back of the arena with a sniper rifle, hide in a corner for the whole match with a Saw, sit next to flag points without taking/defending them, or just constantly throw frag grenades at spawn points and gain kills for doing bugger all. These people don’t even win most of the time, Private Custard and I go into these matches and cream everyone most of the time but come out the other end having not enjoyed a single minute of it, it’s just not fun if everyone else on your team is being a wanker.
Finally to address the fanboys out there: it’s OK for people to have a different opinion to you. No, really. If I have one opinion and you have another we can discuss it without having to result to insults and if you like a game and I think it’s rubbish that doesn’t mean I hate you, it doesn’t mean that I think you’re a bad person, it just means that we’re different. At the end of the day neither of us are dissing eachother’s friends, family, race, religion or political affiliation (things I find people tend to get touchy about), next time you feel deeply hurt and wounded that someone doesn’t think that [INSERT GAME HERE] is the OMG-est thing in the world just remember that it’s a game and games are meant to be fun – if you like it and somebody else doesn’t then it’s their loss. The one thing I tend to do when I’m bored of my games collection is chat on forums and frankly, you guys are making bored of doing that too.
Well, that’s my little rant over with. I’ll keep up with the gaming news and eagerly look forward to GTA4, I still trust Rockstar to pull something awesome out of the bag but until then I might see you online or I might not. I’m starting to enjoy my photography a bit more now and work’s getting busier so with my limited time I’ll probably not be gaming so much – unless everything else pisses me off!
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: fanboy, gaming, Rant