Half-Life

Dare I review this? Dare I sit there and look at this piece of work and do what nearly everyone else has done since the day it was released? Of course I do. It's not that I have the bollocks to do it, it's quite simply because it's a game that everyone should play at some point or another (if they haven't already, or even if they HAVE already) just to re-familiarise themselves with what a high standard of gaming should look like and should feel like to play.

Half-Life was very unlike most other games of the First Person Genre. The majority of games were (some still ARE) the simple affair of getting from point a to point b and kill anything that rises up in the way. Doing that in Half-Life will get you... barely out of the first room as your plot based exposition/conversation has to take place with an NPC for them to get the door to open. It's an odd situation when you're used to seeing ANYTHING move and trying to kill it.

For the controls, you have your now standard setup of forwards, back, left, right, use, jump mouse looking, shooting, alternate shooting and crouching. Nothing particularly fancy compared to games with going prone or using parkour to navigate levels like some hopped up prick on coke with springs up his arsehole. Yet the engine works well and the movement/control system is practically faultless, though it can take a little time to realise that sometimes you need to jump THEN crouch to get into some awkward spaces.

The game starts off with the player riding the monorail in a huge underground complex and in an odd twist, can do NOTHING for the first few minutes while you're being conveyed around a place that is showing off the engine's capabilities. Yet nothing is held in such a way to force you to look at the events taking place, in fact you could be watching one thing and miss something else just equally as awesome. Rather than some games that control a player’s vision and forces them to watch something they might necessarily NOT be looking at immediately, just for the designers to show off a complex special effect. It's jarring to the players to see and to watch what's going on while interrupting the flow of play. Not here, not in this game. You CAN miss the special effects and likely will.

While riding a fixed box for around 5 minutes, you'd think it'd be boring, but with so much eye candy to be shown, especially for the time, large areas showing off the detail with little slowdown, it makes for a rather grand opening and gives way to people being treated to a story without exposition, seeing into the world laid out at Black Mesa, the experiments being conducted, the machines being used, the size and scale laid out in multiple maps as well as the oddly hidden, and decidedly NOT ominous involvement of the military with a helicopter.

The action doesn't kick off until nearly 20minutes into the game (or 5 hours if you're that much of a prick acting slowly) and you shove a shopping trolley with a big gem into a bright light. Tits go up, shit goes down and you're suddenly teleporting back and forth between one reality and another before it all goes dark and some aliens are staring at you. Back to this world and all that glittered and was pure is now smashed, blown up (or blowing up) misfiring, malfunctioning and generally hazardous to your health.

Once outside it, you start to realise that you're going to need some of these survivors to help unlock doors and such to let you progress. In the meantime, you'll grab some guns and work your way through air vents and complexes in your journey back to the surface. Before long the military start killing anyone they find so your job gets harder while fighting back the gung-ho cover up attempt while at the top and running across the desert fighting tanks and helicopters.

Eventually you meet the group that could fix the problem and start to delve down into firing up the processes to begin hunting through the alien world and killing the problem at one of the sources (which we know is not the case thanks to the event that was Half-Life 2).

The whole time you're being attacked by aliens left and right, ninja assassins, marines, psychic dog beats, huge shark monsters, armour-plated aliens with bee guns, giant tumour carrying crab beasts, walking tanks with flame throwers, lightning blasting monsters and the almost cute, head crab creatures. The selection and variety of enemies and situations is vast and almost different in every situation, sometimes being shown things, sometimes alluding to future meetings.

The game tells a very rich and developing storyline told through varying guises of over hearing conversations, direct conversations, listening in on radio broadcasts, watching scenes of combat unfold around one's self whilst trying to sneak around the combat or plough through it with some big tanks firepower etc. Nearly every situation has multiple ways of defeating the enemy/traps until you get to the alien world where the game becomes intergalactic leapfrog time. Which is a shame, as the lack of cohesive plot seems to drop by this point and it almost seems like the alien levels were tacked on when the game should have jumped to the end point with the spooky G-Man, a character who has been following you around during the whole game and now finally presents himself to the player in the grand finale with the ultimatum of "join up or get fucked", in much more eloquent fashion than I've stated.

It brings about a rather disappointing end with too jarring a change not only pace and atmosphere, but also in style and game play, bringing in the long-jump mechanics into the fray when there's very little of the game left to play. But at this point, I'm nit-picking; it's a mild annoyance but a very memorable one while the rest of the game is a steady, solid progression from start to near-finish, then to go to pot very quickly unfortunately.

It doesn't take much to remember some of the more impressive moments, be it running from a Goliath, navigating train tracks to get from one depot to another, avoiding drowning by using barrels to raise a lift to jump across, going toe-to-toe with tanks, APCs and helicopters, avoiding collapsing buildings, utilising alien and experimental weaponry, and all in a way that is a lot more rewarding than just going from a to b.

Admittedly it looks a little dated given today’s standards of gaming, but as a blindingly powerful example of how to do a FPS shooter right with a rich with storyline, progression, scaling difficulty and not making the player feel like a rat in a maze, THIS is one of the longest running examples of how to do it that you would have hoped many others would have taken the time and consideration to sit down, make notes and study this gem.

It's not a perfect game however, not by a long shot and the flaws and bugs become more evident the longer that you play it. The AI can be fairly easily tricked and duped once you recognise the patterns of play they utilise and set pieces can be completely over looked/bypassed once you realise the tricks of the engines to make jumps that the designers never really accounted for. The Strafe Jump technique can be rather a large boost once momentum is on your side.

Aside from the game itself, it should be mentioned that the modding community took to Half Life like a duck to water, spawning some of the biggest and most profitable mods, eventually turned full games in their own right on the same engine (counter strike being a prime example and Team Fortress after their stint on Quake engine), while these have little impact on the review of the game itself, they still deserve a level of recognition from the starting point that Half Life gave them.

Dated, certainly. Flawed, in places. Fun, definitely and all the more reason I want to keep playing it.

RANT: Old school shooters vs New Age Shooters

With the recent review and recap upon DooM, I’ve decided I’m going to look a little more in-depth at the differences between the new age shooters and the “old school” shooters labelled by supposed ‘hipster wankers’ that like to differentiate themselves from the supposed ‘norm’ of society and then with wonderful comedic tragedy (tragic for them, comic for the rest of the world) become the very thing they’re trying to avoid.

And no, wearing glasses doesn’t make you a hipster if you don’t need them; it just makes you a twat.

HEALTH – Pickups vs. Regeneration

Bit of a mixed bag here. Old school shooters generally have a value for the health of the playable character as a set value of 100 where the player is hurt or wounded; the health drops and STAYS there. The only way to get the health back is to either collect health packs that can be found littered around the levels of the game or in some cases at the end of the level. Health might be gradually regained in smaller units of 1, 5, 15, 25 etc, or could be full re-heals back to 100 or boosted to 200 etc. Having low health that doesn’t regenerate is wonderful for creating unintentionally tense moments where someone has very low health; the next thing could hit the player and kill them. So they have to push on with low health and strive to avoid enemies and death. It can however leave players trapped just to die if they’re faced with a situation where they have to be injured to continue.

Regenerating health has the player usually recover all of their health in a short amount of time of either hiding, standing still or just not being shot up and injured. There’s rarely an indication of the value of the health save for either a bar in the case of Halo, or the screen becoming more and more red and covered in blood/jam opaque annoyances. In some situations it can be preferential and is noted to be prevalent in more modern games where wars are fought rather than taking a bullet, seeing a medic then getting shipped home for months. But we’re not talking realism here. It can be useful if there’s a timed mission and getting shot up too badly causes you to lose pace, but the same can be said for non-regen health.  With regen health there’s no suspense unless you’re fighting something that instantly kills you, but then why not have that instead anyway with non-regen health. If it hits you hard enough anyway... it wouldn’t make a damn difference.  It does have an advantage in online gaming where players can’t camp out the health pickups for easy kills, you just have to hide for moment, get health back and go back in for the other to kill you properly. It also stops players from turning health pickups into a King of the Hill situation and removing the focus of the game.

Weapons: Multiple vs. limited

In what has been a slowly moving trend to forcing people to select only a few guns, shooters tending to be players could pick up and use any number of weapons. Doom2 had 9, Duke Nukem 3D had 9 entirely different ones (and a switch from shrink to microwave and later versions with alt ammos), Blood had 12 before considering alt fires and the lists go on up to even Serious Sam using roughly 11 from a knife up to a depleted uranium cannonball launcher. The old school style of shooter technically has multiple guns with usually different ammo types for each gun, sometimes they’re shared between a few guns. When done badly, only a few guns are used and the weaker guns are fallen back upon when ammo runs out of the bigger and more fun ones. When done well, each weapon has a use and a purpose and the game encourages (but not forces) the player to do use the weapons. In online gaming, unless there is a serious balance between all guns, there will be a key gun that will win virtually all games. In doom it was the rocket launcher and double shotgun, duke3d was the pistol and its perfect accuracy (balanced as everyone started with it), Serious Sam used no auto aiming at all and cannonballs were powerful but could be dodged with sufficient distance.

Modern shooters and in particular games like Halo, the more supposedly realistic shooters and class based shooters tend to go for a setup that is either 1-2 main guns, a pistol and some other ordinance such as grenades or an item that helps out teammates. Either the player will be given the option to switch out guns at specific points such as a sniping section, or they’ll be permitted to select their own weapons (probably after earning them) and being able to use the guns of their choice and upgrading them in various guises if the game permits. It allows everyone to start with the key weapons and nobody to take a huge advantage over anyone else. More often than not, the best gun in a game online will be one almost everyone can access straight away. Limited guns are certainly useful for balance but you’re never going to get something on par with the BFG9000, even the Spartan Laser was just a rail gun and quake 2 onwards was doing them FAR better.

Cut scene control

Old school shooters tended to have very little in the way of cut scenes, if anything at all. Wolfenstein had your main char running to escape for a few seconds after the first boss was killed. There were none what so ever in doom or doom 2, all you had were splash screens of text telling you things. Blood had FMVs after boss fights and Duke Nukem 3D had the same. Everything in game had to be done by the player or triggered by the player to instigate something they player had to control. Quake might have had the occasional boss monster blowing up for you to see and Quake 2 had animations you could miss by turning around at the wrong time. Serious Sam had scenes where key items were picked up and the only real interruption was the arrival of the final boss. If you weren’t looking in the right direction when the other bosses arrived, or indeed, when something scripted happened, tough shit. You missed out and you’re a prick. Not watching when the Cyber demon walked around the corner and slammed a rocket into your unobservant ass? Too bad!

Modern shooters seem to rely more upon cut scenes to tell stories than for the setting to be purely action. Sometimes it’s done well and adds to the game if the scene is at the start/end of levels or you’re given an audio feed/sample to tell you of on-goings around the place and it adds to the atmosphere without breaking from the game play. But a game that has you forced into a foxhole, demands you go to specific places and stops your control while something happens JUST so you can see it, is not a game, it’s an interactive animation and is utter bollocks. I don’t care if the missile outside hit a building and blew up the most amazing physics based demolition I’ve ever seen, I want to stare at the fucking wall and that’s MY CHOICE TO. Alternatively it’s when the game shifts play method into something you’ve never seen before, never will again and you end up playing as someone you’ve not played as before or will again and the entire emersion of the game is killed there and then (Modern Warfare 3....I’m watching you and I’m not happy...).

A.I. Involvement:

Old School shooters rarely ever had AI involved within a game, the general consensus of the games was to have the player character as often the SOLE protagonist in the game or if there were other characters, they took a sideline to the fighting. In rare cases where there were AI involved such as Marathon with the Bobs and depending upon which timeline of an exploding universe, aliens and monsters on your side but they never beat the level for you. Often they’re cannon fodder or just pointless distractions, even while games like Strife had a whole army help you teleport in and attack a base, only you had the gun that could kill the boss and that was hidden away from the army so the fight was just one on one. Marathon had a small army of virtually invincible teammates towards the end of the game but even then, the plot leading up to explained everything and hitting those enemies meant a thick fast plasma death, they only lasted a level or two anyway. Even games like Quake, Half Life etc, didn’t have heavy involvements of AI as allies and in cases where you needed them, it was brief, it was quick and it didn’t involve them doing much fighting, if any.

Modern shooters seem, though not all and I will happily accept that, to have this ethos of putting the player as part of something bigger and not really letting them have the fun of doing the real stuff. This is particularly true of war based games where you’ll spend the level running through and gunning down an forever spawning army of pratts before someone else turns up to win the day at the last second. It becomes heavily anti-climatic, though I can appreciate that “in a real army, everyone does things and everyone wins the day” but this isn’t a real army. It’s a game. There’s a limit to the realism and beyond that it becomes dull and pointless to watch all your hard work supposedly paid off like a weak orgasm, by someone else who was scripted to always have their fun at the end at the cost of all your build up. That’s right, you’ve become a fluffer for a computer game character because they get to star in the porn and you just sit at the side with a dribbly mouth going “I want that... I worked for it”

Anyway...

I’m not solely against the new wave of shooters, I find the multiplayer modes and team modes are usually good fun for those with fast stable internet connections, which I don’t have, so fuck them too. No. Seriously, they can be very enjoyable but a lot of them have become rather generic, in particular I acquired a demo of a game based on being a sniper in the jungle, much like that one level in Modern Warfare 3 for one part of that level, but this is a whole game based on that.

Whoopee.

Now can I have a whole game based on just punching a block for a mushroom to fall out? Forget the platforms and levels, I want 25 hours of HD graphics, bloom lighting effects and bonus stipple alpha (get THAT reference and I’ll be impressed) and just focus on a 12 hour story of how blocks need to be punched, 2 hours for flashbacks, the first boss is brick and moving up to the final showdown, my fist vs. a 17story block of solid steel with over the top orchestral accompaniment while crying about how I lost the love of my life to a Lego brick.

Doesn’t sound too bad now.

Doom

The doors are locked, you’re down to 12 health points, demons are approaching from the rear, the lights have failed, your shotgun is down to its last round and there’s an army to slaughter ahead of you. Make your choice wisely or meet your DooM.

Yes, Doom. A very key and prominent component in the machine of pushing to the forefront the First Person Shooter genre of gaming, while Doom itself is very similar to Doom2, I’ll be focusing on the first game for this particular review as the two have some very large differences that almost make them completely different games from each other. I’ll explain that a little better during this review.

Doom. Bow down and worship it for the Grand Father figure that it is, Wolfenstein 3D could be the Great Granddaddy but Doom is the more widely recognised forerunner on this genre. While other systems might recognise Encounter, Marathon, Dungeons of Doom (no relation), Doom has been the more successful and iconic game for many reasons. (Don’t talk to me about Doom 3... that’s for another day).

Doom, has a very simple premise and get go for a game. You’re a marine. The end.

I joke.

You’re stationed on a moon base while covering for secret lab stuff involving teleportation. They open the teleport, it works, great celebrating. That would make for a royally shitty game but then it all starts going wrong with the teleporters from the moon to mars. Things start to come back through the teleports and a whole lot of skullfuckery happens. The marines go in and you’re sat on your arse while they get ripped, slashed, chewed, munching and generally hurt to death in the way a trained army usually does and you’re left all on your lonesome.

50 rounds in the pistol and that’s it. Go save the day, Hero. To which you’ll do this by running through 3 (or 4 if you have Ultimate Doom which wasn’t the last doom, that’s Final Doom and even then it’s Doom 2 but enough of that complex mindscrew) episodes of 9 levels (8 and a bonus) filled with corridors, darkness, keys, switches, traps, monsters, monsters, monsters and monsters, with some monsters for bonus and then a monster or two.

At the end of each chapter is a Boss setup where you’ll need to kill the key monster(s) to progress and claim to have beaten the game. But what monsters have we got? Some of the infamous in video gaming history ranging from zombies with pistols and shotguns to imps that throw fireballs, flaming spectral skulls that just ram you repeatedly, huge bloated tomato gasbags that belch plasma at you, large bipedal shaved demonic mouths on legs. Barons of Hell that serve as the first boss(es) and later as a significant obstacle in later chapters, the infamous Cyber demon with its obnoxiously huge health and infinite supply of rockets it’ll pump down your throat faster than a teenager watching the scrambled porn channel before the teaser time is up. A huge spider/brain monstrosity with a Gatling gun on robotic legs as the final boss, all await the player during the course of the game.

And some of the demons are invisible.

Yes it’s all coming from Hell. So the religious right should stop reading or keep reading and then play to kill the demons they will come for them at the day of judgement. To defend yourself you’ve an array of weapons and power ups. Health boosters, radiation suits (some of those areas are flooded with nuked liquid), invisibility, armour, light amplification goggles, berserker packs (for punching things REALLY hard in the face for splatification), for one. Shotguns, chainguns, rocket launchers, plasma guns and the all powerful Big Fraggin’ Gun 9000 series, the staple for Big Gun standards and thankfully, not a weapon your opponents have.

Now this is a game that didn’t use mouse aiming, the guns automatically aim up or down as long as you see the opponent but left/right aiming is done by you. Mods... can change that and I’ll talk in a moment on that one. Most of the game can be defeated by simply standing in a room and firing until everything is dead without moving on the easier levels (with double ammo by the way). It’s not until the first boss and absolutely by the Cyber demon that you will have to learn the key movement principle that almost every FPS has ever had since Doom, strafing. Once you learn how to sidestep, you can get through most of the game entirely unscathed as enemies are 100% accurate save for the zombies, or if you’re invisible. You will eventually know that when you see something shoot at you, it WILL hit unless you move or are partially in cover.

Having said this, I’m making the game sound like a roaring rampage of destruction and vengeance. It is not. Doom is the more atmospheric of the games between itself and Doom 2. On the higher difficulties there is definitely more enemies and the fights get more frantic with tactical use of explosives to help thin out numbers. But you’ll wandering dark corridors, avoiding crushing ceilings, hunting down the noises of demons wandering the levels while they seek you. At times the game feels almost claustrophobic with the dark closeness of the levels while being attacked at close range and short range.

The limitations of the engine do keep snapping the player back at times from the possible emersion of the game. Some levels are very well designed and certainly give the illusion of complex military bases, science labs and warehouses. But the engine has this little restriction of every wall being flat and straight up/down. Each section of any map has a floor and roof and nothing between it. Yet while modern shooters make for more complicated levels with 3D mapping and polygons, Doom‘s style leaves the players experiencing an almost comic like horror experience, some areas are dark and moody but the monsters are cartoony in their own regard.

On its own, Doom is a very solid, very polished and well designed game that while lacking some of the features synonymous with today’s modern games (and in many cases NOT, thankfully...damn cut scenes...), remains as a standard for games being made today of the First Person Shooter genre.

But we’re just scratching the surface. The online scene has made doom one of the most modded games of all time and the creativity behind it has been incredible to behold. From mods that change the appearance of the game i.e. having all of a cartoon series as characters in the game rather than the monsters, to new monsters being made, to new weapons and levels being designed. The online competitions have hosted servers for FAR more players than the usual game allowed, speed increased/decreased, gravity for jumping (not featured in the main game) crouching, melee combos and gory deaths and fatalities. New music, remixed music, single level madness, whole 32 map packs, co-operative bullet hells, 2D platformers, VoIP mods, MP3 Players, remote access viewers, total conversions to other games and engines and I’m barely even touching the surface at this list.

A lot of the doom mods are very quick and easy to install and can add a great longevity to a game that has been around for a long time already and given the violent nature of the game, there’s plenty there to keep fans coming back for a LOT more.

Gripe: Console war arguments

Xbox360 vs PS3, Gamecube vs PS2 vs Xbox vs Dreamcast, N64 vs Playstation vs Saturn, Super Nintendo vs Megadrive/Genesis-megacd-32x (actually just a big mess by sega), Nes vs Master System, Gameboy vs Gamegear, iPhone vs Blackberry, shit vs sugar, and the even more ludicrous XboxOne vs PS4 which at the time of writing this are both unreleased and there is only stats, schematics and plans that have changed on BOTH sides.

Now to try to throw my hat into the ring on this one and rather than take an on the fence approach, a middle of the road view, shit or get off the pot view, I’m just going to blow the whole thing apart and say one thing: It’s all bullshit.

Before the internet gave every man, woman, child, berk, idiot and asshole a voice and the supposed sense of self-entitlement to use that voice, most arguments over which console is better was done on school playgrounds. Invariably between those that owned one console, and those that owned another. Few usually could afford to have both so the arguments were based on the simple premise of “This is what I play, it must be good, so therefore I am right” and both sides using that argument with no progression made by either side. The very few kids that had both, tended to stay out and realise they didn’t quite fit into those cliques.

The further back you go, the older the machines being paired up were. However, thanks to the wonderful invention of the internet, coupled with the invention of emails (yes pre-dating it strictly speaking if we’re talking BBS and such but let’s not lose focus of the point), the world wide web because a hotbed of porn, paedophiles chasing kids, police pretending to be kids and people around the world bitching at each other for having a different opinion and HOW DARE THEY before overreacting like ignorant little savages.

I’ll attack the internet’s growth of trolls another day.

Consoles wars have never really progressed from the simple bouts of “Mine is better than yours” until some people with some actual brains started to relive the playground days, online. That was a mistake for a start, they were in the playground days, LEAVE THEM THERE. You go back to a playground nowadays and you’ll be carted off to Mr Big’s personal cell before you can say “Sorry I really was just visiting, I’m not a paedo”, seriously, leave the kids alone now. Digression and tortured metaphor aside, people started to argue on the internet about the old days of consoles and talk turned to playground fights which then spilled into real fights about the old consoles and the new consoles.

And it all got retarded, FAST.

Whether it’s because people couldn’t believe that the arguments and fights they thought they’d won back when they were kids were flaring up again; that people had the sheer audacity to disagree with them when thanks to age they really should know better by now; because of the supposed anonymity the internet provides us with custom names, gamer tags, handles and pseudonyms; people got aggressive and stupid and sadly, in many an argument, downright nasty.

The companies never helped with that back in the 8bit and 16bit eras. Often the marketing slogans of the time would exacerbate the situation with such slogans “Sega does what Nintedon’t” and “With only 6 reasons for something Super and 100 reasons for something Mega, you know what choice to make” the majority being Sega lashing out at Nintendo with rarities like “Not On Sega” being thrown back. Companies going so far as to make up lies on things like “Blast Processing” and of course, kids lapping it up like greedy, mewling babes suckling at the teat of false information, desperate for ammunition in their pointless arguments.

The lack of information being available save for in magazines and adverts that usually were skewed in favour of one product or another was difficult for most people to sift through and find the truly non biased information and just raw facts. Even then, with specifications finally being released and people able to moan and argue that this statistic was higher on this machine than another, few knew what it actually meant and even less understood whether it was worth actually bragging about.

“Blast Processing” anyone?

Roll forwards a while and you’ve gotten the internet as well as more modern consoles kicking around, the large battle by the companies between where the lines blur as to which consoles are actively partaking in battles between popularity contests and hardware matchups. Namely the big companies Sega (before the drop out from home consoles but not software and games), Nintendo (which can always ride the hand-held market and its biggest cash cow, Pokemon), Sony (always a popular choice and seemingly set to take the mature market share) and Microsoft (carrying a lame leg as it’s Microsoft, leaves me wondering if they’d started an offshoot company and called it something like Dennis, would it have fared better...) were shooting it out with N64/Gamecube, PSX/PS2, Xbox, Saturn/Dreamcast. The battleground shifted so much and so often that I do recall one edition of a magazine labelling their paid-for console as being “not the fastest, or most powerful or the only online console, but the best value for money machine on the market”... Once again The best value for money machine on the market, which basically meant: It’s on the way out and cheap as sin but that’s because nobody wants it. Phrased in a way that never appeal to a younger gaming audience.

“Hey, my console is the best value for money” Has NEVER won a single argument in a playground.

These days, it’s mainly the Xbox 360 and PS3 at the time of writing with a healthy, half laughing, but half respectable nod, to the Wii and WiiU. Handhelds are competing now with Smart Phones and tablets as technology blurs the lines further between the definitions. But we still have the same old bullshit on a much more accessible scale. Forums, Social Media, Chat sites are still rife with the same topics, the same fanboy-ism that there always has been.

Oh and saying “I’m not a fanboy” at the start of argument, will excuse nothing at all in the paper thin attempt to mask the underlying bias.

Some people have 2-3 of the main consoles and can claim that they know better because they have them all, it’s still just an opinion and like any opinion, can be slighted, slanted, biased or ill-informed. More importantly, it can be ignored too. The level of anger and abuse stirred up from such arguments is horrifying in several ways. The nature and just the sheer thought that someone can summon up these suggestions, does not make for a good outlook on society. (Though maybe these people SHOULD remain indoors). The abusive, hateful, misogynistic, racist kind of comments that just disgust your core on so many levels that deserve no place in this day and age, being thrown around in discussion (I use the word lightly there, saying “this is shit” is not really a discussion, it’s a statement of a lack of vocabulary and an urgent need of a dictionary and thesaurus)

It often begs the question, why do some people get so angry about such things? Because they’re loyal to the product? Hardly. The companies involved aren’t going to give a damn unless their bottom dollar is going to be affected severely. Until then, customers will be gobbling down that thick turd sandwich. Because they bought an item and aren’t satisfied with their purchase? More likely. That wonderful adage “The grass is always greener...” probably rings more true with people having only the capacity of one console rather than several. Though this is more the sorrow of the Opportunity Cost being emotional rather than monetary.

Perhaps it’s the insecurity of people that are offended by the nature of these arguments because the console they have isn’t the one they wanted, or they aren’t happy with the purchase because all their friends bought something else and now they’re playing alone, that they get so angry about the comments attacking “their” console not because they like the console, but because it reminds them of what they DON’T have. Reminds them of the mistake they supposedly made perhaps?

Which brings me to the current arguments and future arguments... Such wonderful arguments of “XboxOne is shit” or “PS4 is bollocks”, these are the most shameful. Whether it’s a one line argument or in some, ridiculously trumped up cases, actually bringing in statistical information related to the specifications of 2 unreleased machines, or going on the companies histories as their basis of the argument. Let’s see an example “Xbox4 is shit because microsony released a console some years back that didn’t quite do as well as I wanted it to and didn’t play the games I wanted to but all my mates bought it and I did too because I’m too much of a sheep to go against the flow and my parents never loved me enough wah wah wahh...” Sound too damn familiar? I know it is.

None of it matters. Not a single thing.

I could try and put it in some context for people. There are children dying on streets in foreign countries, living homeless in every country including yours dear Reader. In particular, 3.1million children died of starvation and malnutrition across the planet in 2011, this works out to be just over 8493 children per day, which is over 353 an hour, which breaks down to around 6 children per minute.  People starving across the planet, not just in 3^rd world countries and the most annoying, anger-inducing thing is that someone bad talked an inanimate object?

Before anyone tries, I’m not suggesting that playing the wrong console kills kids.

There’s no point arguing over which console is better; it’s just the trumped up hurt egos of idiots attempting to assert their mistakes over others for a greater attempt at accepting their own short comings. Pick a console, or consoles, play the games you want to play and remember it’s a product from an entertainment industry. If you’re not entertained, take it back and get another one.

And for those arguing on hypothetical products that are either not released or just in the paperwork. Get a life and discuss something meaningful in video gaming, like how big Lara Crofts next bra size might be, it’s just as worthwhile a conversation.

Future attacks coming soon on Backwards Compatibility whiners and letting kids play underage games.