The Future of Gaming
 The
Future of Gaming
by
The Bearer
PART UNO: The
Build Up and The Early Adopters
We stand on the
threshold, fellow gamers. The threshold of greatness, the threshold of a brave,
new world, the threshold of gaming nirvana. Can you feel it? Can you smell
it? Dare I ask, can you taste it? Of course you can. It’s all around us, in
the air, in the food we drink; it’s in our very DNA. We, fellow gamers, are on
the threshold of a new generation of consoles. Bigger, faster, cooler, and
awesomer (okay I made that last one up, but you know what I mean) than anything
we’ve ever even thought of hooking up to our television sets. Cue the trumpets,
the singing angels, and the heavenly light shining down upon us. New consoles.
Say it with me, it just feels good, “New Consoles!” Sony, Microsoft, and
Nintendo all have announced development of brand spanking, new uber-consoles.
For those of you
new to the world of gaming, the late adopters to the current technology, you may
as well go ahead and buckle in, because you’ve never experienced anything like
what you are about to endure. In all of gaming there is nothing greater and
more exciting than the launch of a new console. Never mind the newest Madden,
Metal Gear, Zelda, Final Fantasy or that unexpected little gem that explodes
from out of now where that makes our hearts go pitter-patter, none of it even
comes close to the excitement and wanton lust for a new console.
We save money for
months to ensure that we have enough not only for the console itself, but also
for every smoking hot launch title, extra controllers, memory cards, etc. We
read every last little snippet that we can find concerning the new console. We
drool over the specs; crunching numbers to determine just how many polygons that
bad boy will push. We wade through message board after message board searching
for every little piece of rumor and innuendo from those that have supposedly
been blessed enough to see the hardware in action. Then we spend countless
hours arguing as to the validity of the reports and countless more hours
wondering what it must have been like. (And of course we wonder whose butt we
gotta kiss to be in the same room with such top-secret electronics.) And then
finally the moment arrives; we wait for hours, if not days, on end in line, in
order to be assured that we’re one of the very first kids on the block to get
the Holy Grail in our grubby little hands. We schedule our entire lives around
the launch of new consoles. Really, the only negative in all of this is being
forced to listen to the fanboys cry and argue over what system is going to
“rule” all the others and why your chosen system sucks. On a side note, is
there anything more annoying and irritating than fanboys?
Once home, you’re
like a five year old kid on Christmas morning. Tearing away cardboard,
cellophane, plastic, and of course the bane of all mankind, those stinking twist
ties that are twisted around everything. What is the deal with those things
anyhow? I mean c’mon, when my son was born I checked him over just to make sure
that his parts weren’t being held securely together by the damn things. Our
pulse quickens, our pupils dilate, and our hands shake uncontrollably as we
lovingly run the wires from the back of our console to the television.
Finally, we
somehow manage to gain control of our wildly quivering body long enough to feed
a disc into the console’s hungry craw. We forget to breathe for the next
several minutes as we ooh and aah over the brand spanking new boot-up screen and
drool over what is no doubt the single greatest intro to any game ever. We
might press a few buttons or we might go running to drag the nearest person to
the television to share in our excitement, but no matter what we do, it doesn’t
last for long before we punch the eject button and feed the next disc in,
starting the process all over again.
I know in my
situation for the first week with the PS2 I couldn’t play anything for longer
than fifteen minutes at a time. Between SSX, Madden, Smuggler’s Run, and Tekken
Tag, I couldn’t sit still long enough to enjoy any of them for any amount of
time before being overcome with the need to feed another one in to bask in their
glory.
Inevitably,
however, things begin to slow down and we are able to concentrate on a single
game for extended periods. We no longer tiptoe around our new box for fear of
upsetting it, we no longer blow kisses to it, and whisper sweet nothings into
its exhaust port. The newness begins to wear off and reality begins to set in.
Ninety-five percent of launch titles are either 1) rehashes of what we’ve been
playing for the past forty-seven generations of consoles 2) absolutely beautiful
to look at, but buggier than all get out 3) absolute crap or finally number 4)
all of the above. However, this is not even the most grievous of the hard
truths of new consoles. The worst has got to be that most publishers blew their
entire wad trying desperately to get titles ready for launch and in some
instances, it will be months before they release anything substantial. A close
second to this is the nagging notion that you won’t see anything truly
revolutionary and or fitting of the new technology until the second or third
generation of software. And just behind that is the fact that first and
sometimes subsequent early runs of new consoles invariably have design flaws
ranging from the annoying to the devastating.
Are these issues
and problems enough to warrant holding off on being new adopters? What!? Have
you lost your mind!? There’s new consoles and new technology to be had.
Hiccups be damned!!! Truthfully, it’s entirely up to you and how much you get
wrapped up in hype machine. There are both positives and negatives to waiting.
The positives are that the prices on the last generation of software tends to
bottom out soon after the launch of a new console giving you a perfect
opportunity to catch up on titles you might have passed on before. You won’t be
paying a premium price for likely unstable hardware that will eventually drop in
price and become more stable. You can skip the ridiculously long lines that
plague console launches. You just might miss out on wasting money on a console
that suddenly and inexplicably dies. Some of the negatives are…Do I
really need to go over these? There’s a new console out for crying out loud!
In a nutshell
we’ve covered the present up until the launch of the next round of new
consoles. What have we learned? New consoles rule, new software rules for
about a week, the library tends to stall after the initial batch of launch
titles, fanboys suck, and the whole atmosphere of a new console launch is pure
electricity. Did I mention the fanboys yet? But this isn’t the meat and
potatoes of “The Future of Gaming” or FOG, as I like to call it. What will the
new consoles mean? What can we expect? What will be their triumphs and their
failures? What’s good and what’s bad? Tune in next week when I explore
what we can expect in the next generation of consoles.
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