Christmas Special 2014

This Christmas is brought with a little extra. An animated GIF aren't you all lucky!

Full of festive cheer as always.

Merry Xmas all and keep up the good gaming!

Peggle

Unicorns, dragons and owls coming up.

It's hard to describe this game in a simple manner without it sounding like a pile of pants. Take a vertical drop board, add in a lot of brightly coloured pins and bricks, most of them blue, some of them orange and give the player several ball bearings they can drop in from the top of the play area. Watch it bounce around the area like some Two-Penny Shove It arcade until it hits the bottom and any of the pins and bricks it hits are removed from play. Rinse and repeat until all orange pins and bricks are gone or the player runs out of balls.

Doesn't sound like much does it. Thankfully, Peggle is a lot more than that.

Lots of levels on offer

Peggle, fundamentally, is similar to Pachinko where in balls are dropped down a table of sorts and depending upon where they end up and how they get there, players are rewarded with more balls and such. In Peggle, players are rewarded with points based upon various combos and qualifiers such as attaining a long shot to reach a target orange, or hitting several oranges consecutively. There's also other bonuses coming from hitting the randomly chosen pink peg which will boost your score for the remainder of that shot.

Annoyingly, the most prickish looking ones are the most useful.

Each usual level has a limit of orange blocks (not including special challenge levels), the more blocks that are removed from play, the higher the multiplier within the game for that round, boost this with the pink peg and you can really start stacking up with extra balls to help you clear the level of all oranges. On top of all this, there's the "bucket" that steadily sways back and forth along the bottom of the arena, land your ball in that and you instantly get another ball to play with.

Take aim, fire, wish for the best.

That's not all though, you've a selection of colourful characters that also have a special ability. Be it having a longer projection distance, explosive impacts, temporary flippers like a pinball table, flaming destruction that passes through blocks, a touch of the random selection, an instant return ball, multiball, improving shots and more. Though you need to play through the adventure mode first to unlock the characters, a second play through will give you the ability to choose whomever you wish for every level.

Ooh look, themes!

It's a simple game, almost too simple in some regards but there's a lot of charm and appeal here for people to enjoy time and time again. Whether it's trying to play through and beat all of the levels or taking on the task of beating high scores, or going one step further and attempting the challenge modes where players take on a multitude of tasks from beating levels with fewer balls, beating a series of levels with one set of balls, beating a level with a minimum requisite score and in some cases, a combination of all of the aforementioned criteria. 

The alien gets to blow things up, no fair!

Thanks to the easy 'pick up and play' learning curve, even the first few levels slowly introduce the bonuses and specials, allowing players to get to grips with the physics of the game before we start hitting them with a gradual trickle of new features but the crowning glory likely goes to the music and audio of the game, in particular the rendition of "Beethoven's 9th" every time that you succeed in beating the level which plays with enough frequency to always feel like you've earned the win that you've achieved.

Harder to see here, but parts of some levels also move.

It's a game for many. For those who want to master every possible trick shot and every single special ability to maximise their gaming potential and scores or for those that want a quick pick up and play session with little need to commit a huge amount of time to the game. Peggle is a peg that fits many a hole.

Tetris

Nearly everyone has played this one. If you yourself are too young to have played it, I can almost 100% promise that your parents have. Originally made in 1985 and world popularised in 1989 by being released with the "new at the time" Original Gameboy, Tetris was THE addictive puzzler in computer gaming and by god was it.

The premise is fairly simply, as should be with all puzzle games that want to welcome in anyone and keep them a long time playing the game. You have a blank area that's about 9 blocks wide and about 30 blocks high (depending upon versions, some go to STUPID lengths of having thousands of blocks wide). Within this area, Tetriminoes (Check the official company for the spelling, they don't like "Tetrominoes"), descend from the top of the area and fall steadily towards the bottom. These are shapes made up of arrangements of 4 blocks to form 7 unique shapes. Once they hit the bottom, they stick and become immobile, where upon a new shape will fall from the top again.

The game is about making entire full rows of blocks line up by fitting, slotting and shifting the shapes into an appropriate position so that a whole, horizontal line can be completed from one side to another. Once this is achieved, that line disappears and everything above that line drops down to fill the now-empty space. Giving the player more space to keep playing. The score goes up depending upon the number of lines cleared (a maximum of 4 lines from using a 4x1 shaped piece) and while the score goes up, the speed of the game goes up too.

Different game modes allow for playing either to get to 200 lines and by extension, level 20 in speed which leaves you virtually NO time to shift falling blocks into place or rotate them. Or the other mode where you have to beat the game by getting 25 lines but starting with arenas that have randomly filled walls-with-gaps already in place. Other variations of the game include things like having special blocks within the shapes that act as bombs, or using the ability to store a piece for later use, or getting specific back-to-back combinations of line removals for further bonuses. Or even a vs. mode where getting rid of sets of lines will bump up your opponents lines but in such a way that they could quickly reverse the lines being sent to them and send them back with interest.

Other games and variations have Wordtris where the blocks are made up of scrabble shapes and you have to make words rather than making lines, or you have the ill-conceived Sextris where you're dropping in naked people in various positions and have to remove them by getting them into hump-able positions (I had a very odd childhood didn't I...) before they vanish and allow for more naked people to fall into the fray. Or it could be that you're playing the game in 3D and have multiple layers in the Z-Axis to fill too, or you're playing it in First Person Mode or it's about using shapes to create platforms for a platform jumping character (Mario usually...) to progress across the level in some fashion or another.

Later iterations of the game would play online and allow people to compete around the world in 8way games and having team modes and such. Basically as the technology increases and new elements of gaming are found, someone somewhere is going to add in a Tetris effect along the lines from porn to faces, hats, 3D shapes, rotating the arena rather than the pieces, gravity/physics effects and so on.

The base game however, is still just dropping blocks into an area and filling up a space neatly. It appeals on a LOT of levels and in particular, the OCD group, as this is the ultimate cleaning up game.

It's because the game is so simple and accessible that virtually everyone and their parents have played this at one time or another in some fashion or another. Even adventure games have variations of sorting and arranging spaces, such as Resident Evil 4 where in the inventory, you had to make sure everything was neatly packed away or you'd have difficulties buying new items and such. A bit of a weak example, I know, but the influence is still there and can be found in a great many other games through the ages, even parody examples in games like I Wanna Be The Guy (Press R now, just do it)

As such it's hard to just review Tetris given that it's the phenomenon that it has become, but perhaps that should be the focus rather than the game itself. This is a game that started as a puzzle game and ended up transcending time space and the 4th dimension in some versions of the game where a 2D plane has 4D shapes represented by 3D displays in the 2D plane and changes through versions of itself bending inside and outside to form tesseracts (Hyper cubes) and then fitting THOSE into the area to clear out lines.

How the hell someone is going to get their head around that one ... Actually it's quite a fun game once your mind starts to see things in 4 dimensions.

But this just shows how adaptable a player can become from such humble beginnings within a game. There's no save function it's just you and the area. While there have been a GREAT many contenders to the throne, from columns to bean games, to puzzle fighter and so on, Tetris remains such a firm staple of video game history that very rarely can a falling block puzzle game be made that doesn't owe something to Tetris. It's quick, easily playable (especially the original versions, new versions sometimes over complicate things) and of such a pick-up-and-play focus that you can sit down for a session or two and be done within 5 minutes or find that you're looking outside and the 4 Horsemen are looking over your shoulder and waiting for you to catch up with the rest of the apocalypse because you were too busy to join the rapture.

And I bet they'll want to play it before claiming your sorry soul, and they'll likely be better at than you.

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.