man, what the hell. myspace is such an unbelievable piece 'a crap. i know, i know "what do you expect, a million billion people can log on and off at any given moment, it's bound to be a lil' bit unsteady" -- yeah, well, google always gives you results without so much as a hiccup, hell a billion other sites seem to mask their problems at least a little more creatively. Well I am not so whiny (oh look, i've lied again) but for some reason myspace's inability to get it's shit together regularly confounds me. i guess i just get pissed when i want to write/read some email on the thing (or just do a damned blog entry) and it denies denies denies that it gets under my skin. oh "i bitch because i love" yeahhhhh. Well really, it goes along with my general philosophy of life though, in that al the shit i have is somehow kind of busted anyway. Oh okay i don't have a heart murmer or a bum kidney or anything of that kind of magnitude (that i know of.. perhaps someday my sperm count will come up low - well if chronic masturbation truly has anything to do with that, we shall see. Oh hi, my parents who read this!!) Hey, just havin' fun. I'm a fun guy. Really.
but yeah almost everything i own is kinda busted. even my ear seems fucked up lately. i guess it's a little humbling to have a general "ghetto touch" to everything, and makes you not get to terribly attached to anything and worried about maintaining it contiued pristinity. For crying out loud, anytime my girlfriend buys ANYTHING she has to get a custom-fitted screen protector slapped on it ASAP. Oh, I have had my moments too. That was the OLD ron.
I guess I should riff a little on video games right about now. i have actualy thought about starting a second blog just for video gaming, in general, but i am not at that precise level of nerdiness just yet. Actually, I consider it more of a business-related thing than anything, it's not exactly my hobby anymore. I do consider it kind of a responsibility of mine to talk more on t mater though, especially as the years pass and I delve deeper into the industry (in a more business and philosophical sense). One thing I'd not be too concerned with it just being a drooling fanboy yammering about the flavor of the month. That's all well and good, but there's more than enough of it out there and so in my own capacity, it's pretty useless. But then I am not that type of gamer though.
So I guess I will use this opportunity to take an inventory of what I am looking at, lately, game-wise. The last real system I bought was a Playstation 2, probably about... uhmmm.. 2002, summertime? I was working on action sports (oh hell, it was motocross racing) and up to that point I was fretting (to slight degree) "which console should i buy?" The job I had made it an easy choice, and I filled out my library fairly well to represent the theme. I had actually bought a PS2 a couple years earlier at the system's launch, only intending to sell it and make some cash (I think i ended up making about 200 bucks, no big deal). So I still have the thing sitting in my cabinet these days, i have to say it functions really well for watching divx movies streamed off of my PC and the occasional DVD rental I suppose (I probably rent like.. 5 DVDs a year.. maybe, if that!) Yeah, I am not what you would call any kind of a media zombie I guess. Not mainstream anyway...
On a couple trips home I dug up my Sega Genesis (sitting in the closet but "i'll hook it up one of these days") and a Super Nintendo, circa 1991 (woa, that sounds old). it's yellow and gross looking, but if i was gonna sit in front of my TV for an extended period at this point in my life to play a videogame, in all likelihood it'll be to play some game on that thing. 2D was king for me and it peaked right there. My collection of games is somewhat anemic, but already it's more than I'll ever play (I got on a little kick for ebay with SNES gams for 5 minutes, a little over a half year ago - if only to increase my assets - but most of the stuff I bought hasn't been even loaded into the deck yet, for longer than to ensure the damn thing would boot up). Even now, I could still wrangle a night of absolute fun out of the SNES, some booze, and a couple of good friends visiting, I must say.. it's thoughts like that which make me still appreciate the community aspect of those games.
I have somewhat recently acquired an Xbox and, much more recently, a Sega Saturn - but systems relatively antiquated by todays standards (okay Xbox ain't THAT old but old enough to be abandoned by it's developer!!) I was fortunate enough to get both systems for free, and though the Xbox I will say maintains it's presence purely for research purposes, the Saturn is definitely there for a little more "fun," I'll admit it. I have spent next to nothing building up any kind of collection for that thing, but it's one of the.. err... "weirder" systems out there, meaning there's some cool weird games out there I could get my hands on, and I intend to when it's a little bit more appropriate in my life (hard to justify shelling out bucks for video games when yer broke and jobless). I did get a couple hard-won discs off ebay though, I would like ot sit down and mess with them some afternoon "when there's time." I never feel like I have any time for that stuff, really.
I am not a console gamer anyway. I have a Gameboy micro, that's pretty much the smallest handheld system of any serious merit one can acquire. Granted, I DID used to have a Tetris Keychain, and it dd make a pretty compelling argument - hell I got more than my money's worth out of it, I wish I could find it now!! But it was "just Tetris." No small feat, but gameboy micro trounces it about 800 times over. I could lose all my video game systems, paraphernalia, etc, ALL OF IT, as long as I had my micro still I'd likely not bat an eyelash. There is one holdout exception to that rule, I have this nice little korean toy called a GP32, which is a bit bigger than the ol' micro (it can still squeeze into one's pocket, but juuuust barely!) and it's power is significantly beefier (though already dwarfed by it's own successor). But while the micro will play all my old 8bit NES/Sega games, and of course gameboy advance games (who cares), the GP32 will cover a ton more territory. It'll play tons of old actual arcade machines, and a fairly decent handful of the 16-bit-shit I grew up in my gaming heyday. yeah, as long as I have those two to mess with, I am pretty set - if I can't play it on the toilet, and there's a color-depth > 256, then you'll be hard pressed to get me to care, fellas...
So it's an interesting time ot be me, somewhat, and ironically so - well in this respect at least - the console generation has upgraded and we've got VASTLY more powerful hardware on the market for the first time in several years, and yet the retro-scene is enjoying quite a resurgence of popularity these days. Definitely interesting, if a bit surreal - not overwhelmingly important, but it makes me realize that the types of games which people used to like might not be quite as easily forgotten as history'd otherwise convince us. Yeah, a bunch of nerdy talk, but rather than just enjoying this in a nostalgic light, I am trying to consider it in more of a business mentality - are the days of "simpler design" attractive in a way as the style of gaming today is not satisfying? Games today look pretty well phenomenal, all things considered. A long way to go yet, stylistically ad technically, but it's growing by leaps and bounds, no one could argue, evolving. But for guys like me, something is definitely missing. novelty, fun, simplicity. The sense of accomplishment just isn't there, man. Pass checkpoints, collect widgets, gone is the visceral thrill. There's too much which has got your back - I used to always sweat "seeing what could be around the next corner." Now it's just a mismatch of good and bad all over the place. Rushed projects of half-realized ideas. The development times have not always increased proportionately with the budgets.
Ah, but I speak as a jaded person who's worked too long on one particular side of the screen, it could be argued. Maybe there's a reason I have lost my love for the scene. Still I will say it, i can pick up a puzzle game where the screen never moves and play for hours and hours. that shit is just FUN. It's simple, maybe I am simple.. but there's a thrill in there, a thrill of risk. the graphics aren't anything spectacular, but at least they are tidy. the controls are tight enough. I am a little surprised that puzzle games have never burst to a further level than the occasional blip on the radar after Tetris, and it takes so-called Genius to discover this stuff. That's bunk i have met several designers who i consider to be extremely smart, the industry and the dollar are what force them to remain bound to a specific path rather than cutting loose and developing more along the lines of innovation and experimentation.
There has been a semblance of hope with the new "budget games" and the different distribution methods that we'd see some resurgence in this style of "lower-budget" or casual gaming, likewise with the modification of the cell phone as ubiquitous hand-held console. The depe game nerds rejoiced, but as is their nature, they quickly enough fell under the spell of the much higher-tech offerings popping up around the corner. Duh, didn't see that happening, the new damned videogame systems just came out....
The Nintendo DS touches me, pun intended, as it's ancient-tech by modern standards but it's sweeping the world with it's popularity. The games look fine for what they are, mostly, and it's already overflowing with a beyond-solid-lineup of offerings. I haven't picked one up (might never) which is kind of a shame, at least not for lack of interest (I haven't the time, energy, or money) but again it's very interesting to see such a style and mindset of gaming proliferating so profoundly. It's really what guys like me would have always dreamed of, and I hope it continues in the next level.. I am amazed to see Nintendo's Console offering (the Wii) following suit and selling out like hotcakes everygoddamnedwhere, but I can't help but think that people are being a little too optimistic regarding the thing, and the industry analysts know it. It's novel, it's fun, but it needs some serious maintainence to get to any kind of success as it's "little brother" the DS is enjoying. I don't care if one in four homes has one in 6 months, that's useless if people aren't buying system-specific offerings for it. And I am not sure that the wobbly flying remote is truly the answer to the console problems those guys have had. I admit it, i sort of WANT those guys to get their asses whupped a little bit - Nintendo's long had this posture that's been a little too proud, and though they've been getting spanked for years now in this particular arena, they really need to follow up with some dedication, some art.. some love for the past besides re-releasing old NES games. That's nice to see, but as support, not a star feature.
Yeah, I suppose I have a lot to say on the business end of this whole argument, and it's hard for me not to consider that I've had a bit of personal attachment to all of this in a few (strange) ways - but this industry has been special to me, growing beside me since I was a kid, and now it's a whole different world. It's still not degraded completely into money yet, though it's made some huge thrusts in that direction, but mostly the heart of it is still just being FUN, enjoyment of life though a new and fascinating abstract, and that's something new and weird that people are still trying to comprehend on all sorts of levels. That's not geeky, that's not novelty, that's just part of trying to be happy. You can say whatever you like "oh yeah but at it's heart it's just about businesses trying to make money," and yeah that's a huge contingent of it - but the vultures will circle anything under the sun, it's almost (almost!) irrelevant in a way. The point is, it's all ben one way, it's changed hands a few times over, it warps a little more and differently through each phase, and it's got a hell of a long way to go yet, which no on has a real clue about. That's frightening in one way and fascinating in another.
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