ZarkSeven

I guess I don’t get it.  I’m a relatively HAPPY gamer.  I have more games than I can get around to playing.  I’m still only halfway through Grand Theft Auto IV.  I haven’t even started Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.  I’m still collecting stars in Super Mario Galaxy.  I’m only a few chapters into both The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII on the PSP.  I have a pile of untouchedgames waiting for my attention, such as Okami, Boom Blox, Zack & Wiki, No More Heroes, Call of Duty 4, Super Stardust HD, Penny Arcade Adventures, The World Ends With You, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and so on.  Yet all I seem to read about in the gaming press is bitching and moaning.  Cases in point:

1.  The Disappointment of E3 – Part 1

The gist of the post-E3 news is this…  What a huge letdown!  First, did you see what a dead zone the LA Convention center was?!  OMG look at these pictures compared to how it was two years ago!  E3 is dead, what’s the point, hardly any announcements, blah blah blah.

Forget the fact that E3 changed because the big gaming companies said that they would not participate under the old, beloved free-for-all any longer, because it cost them way too much money and they didn’t get much return on their investment.  Is the new format ideal?  Most people would say it is not.  But no matter what might be done to change it, it’s never going to return to the mass frenzy that it was 2 years ago.  Get over it.  It’s not intended anymore to cater to the fanboy, which, let’s face it, is what all the gaming blogs are made of.  The booth babes are gone.  So are the five mile long lines to see a game.  Hell, Nintendo even had the balls to come out and say as much.  Miyamoto said “I think that there’s probably one other element to it, and that’s that our view of how we use E3 has changed. For a very long time, E3 was an event where – and certainly Nintendo included – catered specifically to the core gamer. Now we look at more … an opportunity for us to introduce new concepts and new types of play that we intend to bring to the broader audience, particularly because of the media that gathers at E3 now.”

Awwwww, the Big 3 and the gaming companies figured out that they don’t make money hiring booth babes for me to ogle at.  They aren’t focusing on me, blogger extraordinaire for [Insert random gaming website here].  Whine, cry, bitch, moan.

2.  The Disappointment of E3 – Part 2

Where were the games?  All the press conferences sucked.  Nintendo’s press briefing didn’t even have food!  ZOMG!!!!!

I’ve seen at least a couple of posts on what what we “wish we had seen” or “could have seen” at the Big 3 press conferences, but didn’t, such as…

Kotaku:  Things We Wish We’d Seen At E3, But Didn’t

Wired:  Imagination Theater: The Nintendo Conference That Coulda Been

I’ve never seen such a load of backseat driving bullshit in all my life.  Maybe we didn’t see Pikmin 3, F-Zero Wii, God of War 3, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Zelda, Mario, a new Halo title, a new game from Team Ico, and so on because THEY AREN’T READY TO BE SHOWN YET!  Is the concept that hard???  Let’s look at history.

Remember when the Gamecube was announced back in 2000?  Along with that announcement were several software technical demos to showcase the power of the new system.  One of which was a realistically styled duel between Link and Gannon.  Many gamers ran with that, presuming that the next Zelda would be styled that way, despite no concrete word of this from Nintendo.  When the actual cell shaded Zelda was shown a year later, the gaming press went nuts!  Look how kiddie it was!  Where is our mature Zelda?  A year after that, it was finally released, and despite the bitching and moaning about the new look, it somehow managed to get a metacritic score of 96.  When people actually saw and played the game, they found out it was actually good. 

How about Fable?  One of the biggest complaints against Fable, by the gaming press mind you, not the public at large, is that Peter Molyneux had mentioned several game features while the game was in development that never made it into the final game.  Regular Joe Blow gamer probably didn’t know that, and enjoyed a very good game.  But the gaming press made a huge fuss about it, to the extent that Molyneux actually issued a public apology for the things that didn’t make it into the game.  Most likely, in my opinion, to get the gaming press to shut up about it so they didn’t kill a good game with negative press.

But now we have gaming press bitching about what they didn’t see at E3 but thought they were entitled to.  They wanted to see … “God Of War III is debuted. And not with some bullshit pre-rendered trailer. It’s actually debuted.”  A “5-minute demo” of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.  A “minute of gameplay from the new Mario and Zelda titles.”  Based on past history, why the hell would any company show any of you gaming press jackasses a single frame of footage before it’s ready?  So you can get all warm and fuzzy about it, or more likely bash the crap out of it?  Is it maybe possible that Nintendo just inked a deal the week before with Take-Two, and there isn’t a single line of code written for that Grand Theft Auto game yet?  Hmmmm??  Possibly the graphics on God of War 3 aren’t polished enough to show off yet?

The folks at Nintendo essentially summed that up in some statements they had to make to defend themselves from the gaming press onslaught regarding the lack of “hardcore games.”  Reggie said ”We’re not going to tease you over 18 months or 24 month.  We’re going to show you something that’ll make your jaw drop and make it available shortly thereafter.”  Iwata said “The so-called big titles need a long, long development period…we really didn’t think this year’s E3 media briefing was the time to do so.”

Get over yourselves, you pompous twenty-something, “I write for a blog so I must be important” whiners.  I think you burnt some companies enough in the past that the days of sharing something with you for the love of gaming just isn’t going to happen.  There’s too much financial risk in doing so.  Hence, there’s a shift away from gaming media towards traditional media.  For Nintendo for sure, and I think Microsoft and Sony are trying their best to follow.

The Disappointment of E3 - Part 3

Nintendo not only surprised the media with the Wii MotionPlus… they also surprised developers!  *Gasp*  Developers are feeling “annoyed and betrayed” by the fact that they didn’t know about the Wii MotionPlus beforehand, and haven’t already started developing games using it.  It might take them at least 6-9 months to now develop something that uses it.  If only they had know sooner.  O Nintendo, you are so stupid….

Hmm, wait… Wii Sports Resort, which will have the Wii MotionPlus packed in, isn’t coming out until Spring 2009.  Nine months from now??  Well, but, that might mean, huh, maybe the technology in the Wii MotionPlus wasn’t ready to show to developers before E3?  Could that be it???  Maybe that’s why it’ll take first-party Nintendo just as long to develop for it as third-party developers?  You mean, Nintendo didn’t have this sitting on the shelf for the last year, in a secret vault hidden away from those nasty little third-party developers?

How hard is it to do some SIMPLE ANALYSIS before writing some assinine article, which all the gaming sites immediately pick up on and run with like lap dogs!

*Sigh*  I think I need to quit reading gaming sites.  They’ve long since forgotten what the FUN of gaming is all about.