I am a living oxymoron.
I am, by nature, a calm, caring, simple person who wants nothing more than good times, calm waters, and no problems. I am quick to crack a joke, and my humor can be rather dark, but I am mellow and easy going. You wanna unwind and forget about life’s bullshit? Stop by Casa Uncle Willy. The only thing allowed here is chill. And booze.
But I am a hot-blooded gamer on the inside. I have a hair trigger on my emotions when I play. My TVs have feared me over the years, dreading the day I throw my controller into them. When I game, I am the polar opposite of my IRL persona. I wanna play, I wanna win, and I wanna tear your esophagus out of your right nostril if you impede me!
But I do not like to hate.
Hate is a word that I strive to remove from my real-world vocabulary. I don’t want to be a hateful person. I strongly dislike a great many things (vegetables, doctor visits, public transportation, politics), but I never hate things in real life.
But gaming is not real life.
I have been gaming for as long as I can remember. I still get shit from my mom because I lost sight of my brother at a mall and he got lost. In my defense, I was in an arcade playing Space Invaders and Atari’s Football. Did she really expect I could do that AND look after my stupid sibling? Oh, and I was 8. Maybe she should have thought of that BEFORE she gave me $5 (approximately $1,000,000,000, adjusted for child gamer inflation) and left me at the damn arcade in the first place! Where was Wendy Williams back then?
When I am in my gamer mentality, I throw the word ‘hate’ around like Tom Brady throws footballs, except my words are not deflated. Anyone who hears me play games, or anyone who catches me on the Digital Crack podcast, would swear that I am anti-social enough to be the emo bastard in Hatred. My hate can be quite palpable when gaming is involved.
But I hate to hate.
Gaming makes me hate. Not hating the games, not always hating the gamers. But I sometimes loathe the entities that FUCK UP GAMING for all of us who love to game.
Every gamer has his own personal game hit list, the list of game developers, game publishers, and gaming entities that send them over the edge. If you have heard me on the podcast or read my previous articles, you would know my personal hit list. For those that don’t know, here they are:
Square Enix – Some of the fondest memories on my NES or SNES involved either Enix or Squaresoft, two separate companies back in the day. Dragon Warrior. Final Fantasy. Secret of Mana. Chrono Trigger. Illusion of Gaia. Parasite Eve. The games that I enjoyed from them are numerous, and they were all loved. Then they joined forces on April 1, 2003, and I was ecstatic.
Then they started to fuck up. Repeatedly. Often. And, like clockwork, predictably.
I want to love Square Enix. They have many IPs that I love, Including Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Hitman, Just Cause, and Tomb Raider. But they keep fucking things up! Hitman is episodic. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a timed exclusive for the Xbox One, the weaker of the two mainstream eighth generation consoles, and released the SAME DAY as Fallout 4. A remake of the much-anticipated Final Fantasy VII was announced during E3 2015, only to be announced later that it will also be episodic. Because, you know, a game that came out in NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN can’t possibly fit on one fucking 50GB Blu-Ray disc! And the single most reviled game in their history: a mobile game, Final Fantasy: All the Bravest. A game where SquEnix tried to pimp the caché of Final Fantasy and turn it into an abomination of a “game”, laden with bullshit microtransactions – ON A GAME THAT YOU HAVE TO BUY!!!
Every time I think of them, the hatred bubbles forth from within me. I hate to hate, but I HATE Square Enix!
Konami – The venom that spews from mortal mouths when the once-mighty Konami is mentioned is amazing. The company known for Contra, Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Silent Hill is now a shell of the shell of what it once was. It has relegated itself to mobile games and pachinko machines, claiming to still support consoles and Metal Gear but only committing to yearly Pro Evolution Soccer titles. Worse still has been their behavior. I’m not going to go into the whole Kojima debacle and its wholesale attempts at censorship on YouTube. Suffice to say that they are not very nice people.
Whenever I think of Konami, I think of all the times I enjoyed playing Gradius, Parodius, Jackal, et al. Then I see how they are now and my blood starts to boil. I don’t like to hate, but I HATE what Konami has become.
#FucKonami!
EA – EA ruined SimCity, my favorite city builder franchise. EA ruined Need for Speed, my favorite auto racing franchise. They ruined Dungeon Keeper, Dead Space, and Ultima. They abandoned Burnout and ignored Star Wars: The Old Republic. They were about to kill Battlefield, but look to be back on track with the recently announced Battlefield 1. You know, unless they stick to their track record and fuck that up, too.
I don’t want to hate. But EA brings out the hate in me without fail.
Atari – The great granddaddy of video games, the pioneer of console gaming, has become a shell of the shell of its former self. The trendsetter in the 70s and 80s, they are nothing but a peddler of half-assed shit games. Haunted House, Alone in the Dark, Asteroids, and Roller Coaster Tycoon are just some of the franchises Atari has resurrected only to screw up. You think E.T. was bad? Well…yea, it was a kinda shit game, but it is a MASTERPIECE compared to the cancerous bile they’re slinging now.
Atari got me to love games when I was young. Now, Atari is making me want to hate. And I hate to hate.
Nintendo – This one hurts me more than I could ever express.
Nintendo got me back into gaming and reminded me how awesome it is to play video games. Nintendo shaped my late-teen gaming and introduced my children to gaming. I spent tons of hours playing Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid…and those franchises were only the first-party titles on the NES! Nintendo was a huge part of my gaming life.
Even with their missteps, like the GameCube, or their odd directions, like the Wii, I still extracted tons of enjoyment from Big N. I still remember playing Eternal Darkness with my son, and my daughter STILL beats my ass at Wii Sports Bowling. Nintendo was taking odd directions, but there games were undeniably fun.
Then the Wii U happened. The console has its good points; the touch pad, while useless in most games as a peripheral, at least makes it convenient to play a game or watch YouTube videos while the TV is otherwise occupied. And games like Super Smash Bros., Bayonetta 2, and Super Mario Maker showed that they could still make great games. Granted, they were the only ones making games for the Wii U, but at least there were good titles. But the Wii U began to show me that Nintendo was no longer interested in making a world-class system like they used to. They have become a company that wants to be “innovative” for the sake of innovation, introducing motion controls and touch pads and bullshit game mechanics just to be different and edgy, at the expense of the games themselves.
No game exemplifies this more than Star Fox Zero, a game that only had to do one thing: be a better version of Star Fox 64 for the 85 people who really wanted an HD Star Fox game. What did Nintendo give us? A poorly-controlling mess that requires the touch pad screen to aim. You know, because using the analog stick was too cumbersome! No, Nintendo needs to be innovative! Regular analog controls can’t be enough. Players need to use unnecessary gadgets to play our games, because we think our unnecessary gadgets are fun. So what if they don’t get it? So what if they just want to play the games their way? WE NEED TO INNOVATE!!!
They will be unveiling the next console, codename NX, sometime in the next few months. Will the NX be the competition-smashing console Nintendo has always been capable of but stopped caring about? If it is, then all is forgiven between us, Nintendo. I won’t forget, but I’m willing to forgive.
But the latest rumor is that the NX, whatever it is ultimately called, will be cartridge-based. And yea, I know most rumors are crap, and they often contradict themselves, but would you say Nintendo is incapable of some backwards-thinking bullshit like that? They saddled the Nintendo 64, a console more powerful than the original Playstation, with the cartridge format because of their greed. They initially refused to adopt the DVD standard fully, choosing to press GameCube games on the Mini-DVD format because of piracy fears. They jumped on HD a generation late, thinking the general public would prefer waggling a Wiimote on a golf course to higher fidelity gaming experiences. They STILL don’t have a viable online presence on the level of Xbox Live or PSN. What makes anyone think that Nintendo suddenly got its act together and decided to focus on the core gamer?
I want to love Nintendo. Deep in my heart, I will always have a soft spot for the Nintendo of yesteryear. I definitely don’t want to hate Nintendo. But they sure act like they want me, and every gamer who ever supported them and revered them, to hate them. I may hate to hate, but Big N seems to hate me more than I can ever hate them. And I hate that!
