As I was browsing the daily news content around the world of video game journalism, I came upon a certain article written by Brian Langlois on the Kombo website about “Simpler Times in Gaming” and how the effects of making consoles, games and all of the components that make up the industry have had a profound effect on the complexity of the hobby. Well I simply believe that what this writer is arguing about is complete bullshit. Not only have the generations provided much more entertainment, they’ve provided better hardware, more immerse games, more control and, above all, better entertainment for the users.

His first argument is of the user interface that is in all consoles [handheld and home] that he finds to be distracting and does not contribute at all to the gaming world. This, I find, to be complete nonsense as, with the Xbox 360 and PS3 have shown, these always running interfaces keep gamers in contact with all their friends at all times when the system is on. No more having to hop on AIM or call your compadres to see if they want to play games only to wait for them to call you back and find them in a lobby. You can just invite them to the party you’re in and invite them to play the same game you are. Granted this is just on the Xbox 360 as the PS3’s interface still needs some tweaking till it gets it down but compared to the archaic methods that the Wii uses, it is a godsend to have these features at your fingertips. His other dilemma about this is that it takes time to boot up the OS and then hop into a game which is false. The only systems that do this are the Nintendo ones whereas the others allow the option to start the game upon turning on the console, granted the game is IN the console in the first place.

Next he goes on to complain about the abundance of buttons on modern day controllers and how games were much easier to control way back when. There’s a simple answer to why this is so: games have become sophisticated now. Games have graduated from the times when two plays were acceptable for football and when all you needed was a jump and shoot button. With the advent of 3-D gaming, you needed to be able to control the camera [or rely on AI to position it for you :(], you needed buttons assigned to all your new moves and, above all, you needed the ability to just handle the complexity of the newer generations. Games like Pac-man work fine with no buttons and a directional control scheme, but that’s because it was from a developer standpoint and not a hardware standpoint. Console back then had NUMEROUS buttons which were mostly in the form of number pads and were usually tethered to the system, not to mention an abundance of consoles made a uniformed control scheme idea commit suicide. More than likely the use of just directions was met from an economic standpoint on the developer’s end of not having to program for multiple consoles. Games back then didn’t always just use those two buttons though. You always had maps of holding left then pressing B to activate some feature the could have been made easier if two more buttons were added. Limiting buttons is just limiting the possibilities of designers to be more frugal. When that happens, you get the monstrosity that was Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snake’s control scheme.

In regards to the older consoles being able to run forever, I will point to the NES as your bastion of absurdity. This console is the very epitome of all that can go wrong with older systems. For starters the choice of going to a front loading drive meant that when a user inserted a game they ALWAYS bent the pins that read the data and, after time, caused these pins to wear out extremely fast. This, coupled with cheap parts, made the NES unplayable. I remember having a trick of piggybacking two carts, blowing into the system and pressing Reset some odd times to finally get the game to work, only for it to fuck up in the middle of it. My family took really good care of their new investment but when it comes to cost effective measures and piracy control methods that shit on the consumers there’s little you can do. Cartridges being built like tanks is completely true but they do have a cyanide capsule embedded within them called “Battery Backup.” The games still worked great, as long as they were clean, but over time the batteries would just wear out causing years of game data to be erased. Nothing you can do about keeping them somewhere else off of the system as memory cards/paks/HDDs were some long ways off.

I will concede defeat about load times and their effect on the industry. Things are being done to decrease these times such as installing to hard drives, network distribution and others. Over the span of a console generation they usually dissipate as developers become streamline the data process of the console.

Firmware updates to the console sector of gaming is a welcomed edition, in my eyes, and is the next logical step for network gaming. He argues that they should have gotten it right in the first place and how they’re time consuming and frequent. I have news for you buddy, these updates happening regular are keeping your investment running and getting rid of those load times you bitch about. Getting hardware right the first time, no matter how many engineers you have on your payroll, just isn’t going to happen. In the old days you had hardware revisions that, if you were stuck with your first gen hardware, meant you were left in the snow and not cared about. Microsoft has shown that everyone is part of their plan regardless if you bought a console the first day as you have constant support from them with new interfaces, hardware tweaks [through software] and all around bug fixes that would, otherwise, cause you to hang yourself. They’re frequency is good because it shows that they’re still finding things that can better optimize the system and help keep it from becoming a homebrew playground like the now defunct Dreamcast or how the original Xbox was.

I feel the same about patching games as I do patching hardware. It enhances the experience for us more so than it does them. When a company is able to patch their games you have examples such as Burnout Paradise or Call of Duty: World at War. When they don’t, you get Guitar Hero 3 [for Wii] having mono sound and gamers having to ship in their game to get one with stereo. I’m really adamant about patching in games because I know plenty of games that could have been improved with a patch but didn’t because of the policy from the company that they do not patch [SMASH BROS. BRAWL!!! >:(] These patches allow the developer/publisher to provide more content either free or as DLC which has had it’s share of ups and downs. People seem to forget that these are businesses and want our money all the time to survive. Even if it’s shit that should have been included on the disc, like alt. costumes for Street Fighter 4, no one is putting a gun to my head and forcing me to buy them. We do the same thing with movies in buying the same movie twice because one has updated features and commentary. Would you rather buy a $60 game once and MAYBE purchase some DLC for it…or buy it twice to get those things you want on the disc. Choose wisely.

To settle the score, the writer states that he’s not all that into the “bells and whistles” of the new consoles. This is just the exact opposite of how I feel since I’m glad that when I plop $300 on a system I’m getting more out of it than playing games on it sometimes, I get to watch movies, talk to friends, listen to music, stream though my files,…watch porn…, and play games. Consoles in the early times weren’t over complex not because they were trying to keep things simple or they wanted to get grandma to play, it’s because they just weren’t able to. When you have the ability to do something and don’t, is that a smart move? It’d be like walking from GLOBAL WARMING instead of running.

Ignorance to what the new machines have to offer isn’t something that should be applauded when one decides to keep things simple, but should be seen as hindering the evolution of the industry. In the end it is up to the developers to deliver us rich and engrossing games [and from evil?] but when they can’t deliver us because of limitations in hardware from a back end standpoint, the only ones to blame are the same fuckers who are still stuck in the “simpler times in gaming.”