Post E3 thoughts...and gaming in general

I've created this blog solely to vent and discuss about one of my favorite hobbies in the world, gaming. I've been a gamer since the NES days till today but as of late gaming has left a bad taste in my mouth. I considered the 16 bit and 32 bit ear--late 1980s to the 2000s, or before Xbox360--the golden age of gaming because of the sheer number of creative and innovative games came from developers of that time. Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System set the precedent for platform gaming; Double Dragon II, River City Ransom, and Street of Rage II showed us how to do side scroll beat em ups; Final Fantasy VII showed us that games are just games for kids anymore but novelties hit human emotional chords. FFVII was the first game that made grieved for a digital videogame character. I can go on and on about the many games of that time, and there were many, but with comparison today's gaming, it is just a sad joke.

I won't blame Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare because that was an excellent game, an innovative novelty at its time, the first shooter-based game to have a RPG like leveling up system in online multiplayer, and it was the game that turned me away from Halo 3 and trumped it in terms of sale figures. However, thanks to COD4, game developers saw how profitable shooters were and wanted to recaptured those massive Call of Duty sale numbers. American game developers have corrected what Japanese game developers did wrong and modernized the times while Japanese developers remain stagnant. Sadly, as a result,  Japanese are not  the key developers of this generation as they were of yesteryear.

There are other factors that ruined this generation of gaming for me--corrupted and shady business DLC practices,  buggy games, incomplete games, games that required online passes to play, and other bullshit--but what bothers me the most is lack of quality and creativity in today's games, they are just cheap superficial thrills that will be unplayable decades from now due to the game's architecture.

Despite things said, I heard that Indie games of E3 are amazing but it is unfortunate we didn't get a chance to see them since they are very reminiscent of yesterday's greatest games. It is really disheartening for a gamer, that only cares about games, who spent hundreds of dollars on a gaming platform just to be told that their console is a multimedia hub that connect mobile devices and other other electronic devices. We didn't tune in E3 for that shit, we tune in for games. However, from a business perspective, I understood why they took that route because E3 2012 conference was being broadcast over cable networks and they had to cater to the masses and potential casual games, and especially those non-gamers that plays games casually on their portable devices. Anyway, fuck them, because it is we that has sustained the gaming market during the dark years and sustaining it now.


Editor's note: I had a direction in mind of where I want to take this but I got so sidetracked that I lost the thought I had in mind, so I am going to post this anyway just for content sake on my page. Basically in a nutshell, the big three console holders are trying to adapt because the market has changed in the way of how consumers consumed entertainment. For instance, thanks to smart phones with their wealth of PC-like features, compact cameras are basically obsolete and handheld gaming consoles basically walking the same path but there is still need for them since handset/cellphone gaming haven't truly taken over thanks to inferior software. My hats off for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo for moving in that direction but in the end where are the games? The games are what define this industry in that regard I am little bit wary because nothing worth noting, just rehashes of the typical shooter format and shallow experiences but their are a few gems, literally just a few amongst the millions of rubbish.