We're glad you're reading this blog,we also likes what you've been doing with your hair,
and hey... thanks for readin.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Shoot, reload, Shoot, reload

Rapid Fire Time!

I have a lot of blog ideas that have been on my mind, so I’m just going to hit you with several at once, since none of them are especially important long enough to be full blogs.

1. A large amount of tech journalists are claiming that the 3DS will be a failure because the older PSP is currently outselling it and some people hate the concept of a 3D screen. Here, literally Game Design 101 (as in, this was a topic in my first Game Design class): Consoles don’t win console wars, games do. The 3DO, though powerful as can be, failed because of a lack of games and developer support. The Dreamcast was years ahead of it’s time with features we take for granted today: Online play, DLC, freaking’ voice chat in game! But, alas, Sega fu**ed over their third party developers by almost secretly releasing the Dreamcast only two years after the Sega Saturn, making third party developers sick of Sega’s constantly changing console BS and moving on to other places, like Sony and their PS2. As I said a couple months ago, the regular DS has been outselling the PSP year after year by almost double because it has a good library. This is taking into account that the PSP is twice as powerful as the DS.

Point made simple, the 3DS is a good console, but it was rushed to market (for what reason, I still don’t know) and it is a half-baked system. As of me writing this, the 3DS is still missing the following: An internet browser, Virtual Console support, and DSiWare support. Also, the launch line-up was, umm, lackluster. Street Fighter IV and Ghost Recon may be the only games right now worth playing on it. Nintendo should have released this console on the same day the Ocarina of Time remake was done, or packaged in Pilot Wings Resort as a free game, like Wii Sports, and then this console would have sold like gangbusters. Give it until this fall, and the 3DS will be in a lot more hands once decent games for it come out.

2. Speaking of consoles, the Kinect seems to me as a waste of time and money, right now. This thing was released on November 4th, and as of May only 25 games exist for this add-on, and 17 of them are sports, dance/fitness related. So far, it seems like that is all we have to look forward to from this item, Dance games and workout simulators. At my local Gamestop, I counted 10 used Kinects just hanging from the sales wall, waiting to be bought. My only guess why there wasn’t more is because the wall didn’t have any more space on it, but I am sure there was more in the back. Listen, I am all for game innovation, but motion control gaming is becoming a slight fad, like 3D TVs. The best games I have played in the last 4 months (Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 2, Dissidia 2) have all used standard controllers. The worst thing is the Microsoft has yet to announce any new games for this system. It’s like they are personally giving up on it. I realize it was the fastest selling console ever, but I wonder how many people kept the damn thing or were still using it after two months. Dear Microsoft: support games, not peripherals.

3. The Playstation Move is a failure in my view. First off, the cost of entry is expensive as hell.It costs $210 for a two-player set with one game, barring that one already has a $300 PS3 in their home. You know what you can get for $210? A New Wii, two-players worth of controls, and an extra game. Hey, and the Wii has a MUCH larger library of games with motion-control specific games, where as most of the Move games are Motion control OPTIONAL. This means their perfectly fine games without motion controls (MAG, Killzone 3, Sly Cooper Collection), but Sony wants you to feel justified for spending an inordinate amount of money on this add-on. Fair enough, since the entire collection of Move-specific games are Wii copies anyways. Dear Sony: Support games, not over-priced peripherals. Hell, just get the PSN system to NOT FAIL at every step of he way.

4. I love American Football (been a Steeler’s fan since I was 8), but nothing pisses me off more than a sports strike. I used to love the NHL, but when they struck for what seemed like years, I lost ALL interest. I haven’t watched an NHL game in going on a decade and I have no regrets. I may just do the same if the NFL teams don’t play this year. You know what the league minimum of the NFL is? $300,000! Since a football season is up to, and including the start of training day, about 7 months, that means that even a rookie player makes about $42,000 A MONTH for one season. The average American makes that a YEAR, according to the 2006 GDP. Here’s something else to boggle the calculator, the average NFL player makes 1.2-1.5 million dollars a season. Michael Vick, before he became an animal abusing douchebag, made 25 million a season, making him one of the highest paid athletes in the world. So, I think we can all agree, that when the players want to strike because they “aren’t getting paid enough to play two more games”, it screams ludicrous greed to me.

Don’t get me wrong; I think players deserve to be compensated for their time, but a strike? Gimme a break! At what pay ratio is it no longer the “love of the game” and it becomes “I am already making money hand-over-fist for throwing and catching a ball or blocking/tackling pretty well, I deserve thousands more!” It’s ridiculous to me. Sports athletes are overpaid, they know it, I know it, the whole damn world knows it, and yet we allow these strikes to happen.

SPOILERS OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES

5. My wife forced me to watch every Harry Potter movie made thus far so I can take her to the premiere of Deathly Hallows, Part Two and appreciate it. After watching every single one in secession, I have only one thought: I still don’t care. What the hell is the big deal with these movies/books? Yes, I am all for character development and I can appreciate it, but why is it every one of these 2 ½ hour movies dedicates 2 of those hours JUST TOWARDS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. All of the “good” parts of Harry Potter can be described in five words: first and last fifteen minutes. The rest in-between is tween middle-high school drama about “who likes who” and how unfair is this teacher!” and “even though he has killed people,is Voldermort real?” Am I the only one that saw Dumbledore being killed from, like, the first book on? These books follow the bare-bones basic archetypal models established years ago be Carl Jung almost to a fault. As a matter of fact, almost every archetype and every step of Jung’s “The Hero’s journey” is followed here, and maybe that’s why the books did so well, because they are formulaic and in plain enough English even kids can understand them. It’s not that I don’t think the movies are terrible, I just think they are woefully predictable. Heck, I enjoyed the first Deathly Hallows, for whatever that is worth. I actually want to see the second. As for reading the books, no thank you, sir.


SPOILERS END HERE

And so does my ammo count.

No comments:

Post a Comment