The year is 1999 and the Nintendo 64 is my life. Gaminging is still a relatively small thing;the generalpublic doesn’t care much for it. The ‘90s were the golden years of gaming and I loved every minute of it. As the year 2000 approached, I could only imagine what would be next. I was ready for anything, and thought video games would have my back no matter what. I was wrong.
It’s now the year 2010, and I’ve become a much more cynical gamer, burned by the industry that I had loved as a child. The video game industry has forgotten about the things that made it so great in the past, and is more focused on what’s popular with the general public.
Gaming is also no longer the cheap hobby it once was, with games costing a whopping $60. Publishers are determined to squeeze every last penny out of their consumers.
For instance, Electronic Arts is charging people who bought a used copy of Madden NFL ‘11 an extra $10 to play the game online.
Consoles have gone up in price, costing up to $300. Controllers are almost the same price as a new game. It costs money to play online too. You must buy a $90 wireless adapter in order to connect online, and then pay a yearly charge of $60 to use the online services. In total, it’s about $450 to get the best gaming experience.
Developers seem to be caring less and less about their games single-player aspect and focusing more on making a fun, multi-player experience. The best example of this is last year’s blockbuster, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game’s single-player campaign is shorter than a Lindsay Lohan jail stint. It can be beaten in less than five hours. It also traded in the well-told story the previous installment had, for a Michael Bay-like narrative. Big explosions, little plot.
Multi-player has changed as well, becoming more online-based. While this can be fun when playing with a respectable and nice group of people, most will often end up playing with some foul-mouthed, eight-year-old kid who sounds like Justin Bieber on helium. It’s much better just to find a group of friends and play with them instead of trying to meet new people online.
Perhaps the worst thing that has happened to gaming is the lack of originality in modern games. Games all follow the same cookie cutter stories and game play, simply ripping off what other successful games are doing. The characters in video games are almost all stereotypical, steroid filled tough guys, whose personalities are about as interesting as a box of Corn Flakes.
As video games change so do the controllers that we play them with. Motion control is popular now, with millions of gamers waggling there wrists around frantically like there’s a spider on their hand. Motion control, while sometimes useful, falls flat the majority of the time, ending up feeling like an expensive fisher price toy.
Though much of gaming has changed for the worse, some games still uphold the standards that I, and many other gamers, once held dear. Games like last year’s Uncharted 2, and this year’s Heavy Rain and Red Dead Redemption dared to be different. If gaming returns to what it once was, it will still have a chance.
