Death of The Video Game Industry

A hhh yes, the video game industry of today. It has trodden a path more heart rending than Disney’s poignant movie “Up” over the years, and at this rate it’s only gonna get worse. Here are a few main points I have that cover all aspects and genres of the industry. If you agree with me, great. If you disagree, go ahead and write me a message in the comments box below. I’d be delighted to hear some feedback, but please, have a sense of maturity and don’t be a dick about it. It only makes sense to start with the most popular and most flawed genre so without further delay, here we go.

1. Why innovate, when you can replicate?

I’m sick of the “Call of Duty” series, not just because of its Hollywoodized portrayal of the U.S. and foreign military branches, but because new “Call of Duty” games have become an annual holiday. Isn’t it annoying when you see giant posters, and pop up ads with the same looking soldier all over your favorite consumer electronics store and the internet every November? He’s got special operations gear on up to his eye balls, the standard M4A1 carbine with more accessories stuck on it than Barbie’s fucking dream house, and the giant clouds of debris floating around his feet? It’s the Webster’s dictionary definition for redundancy.

Games in this series, and other First Person Shooters like this come out every year, and to quote the Classic Rock God, Robert Plant, “the song remains the same”. The same patterns of repetition can be applied to role playing games, real time strategy games, racing games, fuck even puzzle games are starting to feel a bit repetitive. Quite simply, they’re running out of ideas.

2. We’ll fix it later, we have the internet.

Do the names “007: Goldeneye” and “Super Smash Bros” on the Nintendo 64 ring a bell? Do you remember how perfect those games were? How smooth they ran, and the sense of quality you got for hours without a shred of boredom? Well my friends those days are gone with the wind, dinosaurs, and Michael fucking Jackson thanks to what the industry likes to call “online connecting capabilities”.
See, back when the N64 was around, you had no way of connecting your console to the the internet. Every game that came out had to be 100 or close to 100% finished by the time the first sellable copy was made. If a game was good, it succeded immensely and the developers showed a sense of pride and dedication to their fans. If a game was bad, it showed that the company behind it was run by a bunch of lazy fucks.

Today, any game that’s developed can be released with enough glitches and faults that make it run as smoothly as Stephen Hawking doing a sing-along to Metallica. Now thanks to modern technology, any company can say “We’ll patch it up later” or “We cam fix those glitches in an update later” etc. It’s a cop out for a lazy and unthorough editing job. Even with the updates, some hiccups remain painfully obvious and totally kill the immersion factor.

3. E3 is nothing but a hype machine

E3. The Electronic Entertainment Expo. Held annually in California, gamers from far and wide (but mostly Japan and California) come to see what delicious treats the lying and swindling game companies have brought to feed the hungry masses. Yeah I can’t really say much about this one, because I’ll just start repeating myself. But, it’s basically a hype fest featuring two minute to thirty minute teases of games that look great but will ultimately suck when they come out in a year or two or five. Inductive reasoning (thank you, Professor Popovich) leads me to conclude that based on previous E3s and the state of the industry, anything shown there headed by a big name company (better known as everything at the fucking expo) will just be more of the same shit.

4. What’s Realism? Wasn’t that Mark Twain’s religion or sumthin?

I’m an early to mid 20th century firearms enthusiast and collector. Being such, I tend to evaluate video games’ portrayal of firearms down to a ridiculously OCD-like level, even though I expect the worst. Yes, I’ll be slightly irked if the developers make even the smallist mistake because that’s just who I am. Many of the fallacies of weapons in video games go completely unnoticed by the average Joe. Then there’s plainly obvious shit like being able to call in a nuclear strike and automatically win the game after killing 25 enemy soldiers without dying. ‘Cause that’d TOTALLY happen in a real life military situation.
“But this is a video game, a departure from reality,” whine the game’s developers. My response to said “innovative developers” ? There’s a very distinguishable line between creativity and stupidity. It’s been crossed so many times, I bet the line says “ah fuck it” and cartoonishly scuttles its way under your feet to free you of the effort of even trying to avoid being conceptually intelligent.
So why has nobody developed a U.S.M.C. scout sniper simulator with singular missions taking upwards of 24 hours or more in real time? Why has nobody made a racing game that forces you to use a peripheral gear shift, steering wheel, and gas and break pedals plugged into your console? Because it’s not simple or unrealistic enough to capture a big enough market to the higher ups at these companies. Even though I am one-hundred percent sure that tens of thousands of people like me would love to see more realistic and insanely challenging video games on the market. Sadly, gamers casual and competitive alike have been sucked into Poseidon’s whirlpool of mediocrity for years past and years to come.
Is there any hope for the gaming industry? I doubt it. It’s gonna have to take a ressurection of Christ like event for good things to start happening in the industry. But to leave you all with a more positive outlook, the Nintendo Wii is awesome. Some of the most entertaining, interactive, and fun video games released are on the Wii. If innovation in the industry is reborn, it’s gonna take it’s baby steps on the Wii and hopefully stick with it when it’s winning the 100 Meter Dash in the Olympics. Rock on, Nintendo.