The Gloves Are Coming Off (Games Are Too Violent And They Suck)

You know, yesterday, I was feeling mellow, alright, school wasn't too bad, but today, I'm really pissed off.  Parking at college is horrific--I literally had to park in the lone corner of the campus because the rest of the spots were taken.  Had to walk fifteen minutes to and from class in the swelling heat.  That's gonna screw me out of a good grade in my first class because we have surprise quizzes that I can't take if I'm late.  What a piece of crap.

But I would like to take the rest of the entry to say this to the Video Game Industry:  All your games suck.  Here's why.  I collected a bunch of articles from that garbage Kotaku site and here we go, time for the breakdown:

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http://kotaku.com/5618338/motorstorm-apocalypse-makes-a-3d-believer-of-me

I'm pretty sure that everyone knows about the original Motorstorm for the PS3.  It's a rally game where you drive 4-wheelers, rally cars, bikes, big rigs, whatever.  Someone at Sony had a serious mud fetish cause within seconds of the race, your car goes from squeaky clean to absolutely muddy.  Disregarding this, it was an okay game.  But this time around, they decide to rehash the same game, this time taking in the apocalypic badlands of an abandoned city.

Let's put the whole 3D junk out of the way.  WHY DOES THIS GAME HAVE TO TAKE PLACE IN A WASTELAND???  Why does every game nowadays to seem "good" have to take place in some sort of dark, grimy, depressing, macabre-like setting!?!?  Okay, we have FPSes like Gears of War, action like God of War and Devil May Cry, indie games like Limbo, whatever, keep it to yourself.  But now, it's leaking over to racing games as if racing games nowadays haven't been bastardized enough.  WHY DOES THIS NEED TO HAPPEN!?!?  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GOOD CLEAN FUN!!!??? WHY DOES EVERY GAME NEED TO BE AN EXERCISE OF MY DEPRESSING SIDE!!??!?!

Let me point to UK Resistance's "Blue Sky in Games" campaign cause they're absolutely right.  It's okay to play an emotional little game here and there set in some dreary backdrop, but whatever happened to stuff like "Let the good times roll!"???  I mean, at the end of the day, you can give me this gloom-and-doom BS about how we're all gonna die, but do you think God gave us the emotion of joy never intended for us to use it?

http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2005/11/blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched.html

I don't know about you, but I could just stop there and leave frustrated.  But the mutiny continues.  Check this out:

http://kotaku.com/5621563/are-video-games-just-soap

Are video games soap?  Basically, by soap, they're products that you use and are done with.  They don't have any significance in the long run.  My ideas deviate from the article quite a bit.  Look at it this way, you got all these FPSes and action games every which way.  They keep spitting them out and they're all nearly the same.  You got these gritty FPSes with all this blood, you got all these "kill everything on the screen" games, you got car racing with explosions and gorgeous "car violence," I mean, it never ends!  Whatever happened to making games that last for a lifetime!?  There aren't many games out there that don't copy the same-old formula.  Make a game like Halo, like Call of Duty, add lots of guns, etc.

EDIT: I mean, look at Daytona USA, look at OutRun, these are games we never forget about!  They engage me!  After going through a million FPSes and other junk, there's only maybe three I still care about--Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and Counter-Strike 1.6 (GoldSource).  What ever happened to the substance?  A lot of these games look to sell a bunch of copies, not to leave a lasting impact--that's not to say they all do, but there's not many.

http://kotaku.com/5576332/who-cheers-for-war

This article claims that as video game graphics become more realistic, they become more brutal and mind-numbing than ever before.  Because games like Halo and Call of Duty are so popular, devs are hauling ass more than usual to make dirty, grimy FPSes and spit 'em out on the market.  To be fair, none of these games are THAT bad but these aren't the kind of games I want to go through like Fig Newtons in the sleeve (see previous article).  It's disturbing because if you take a look at the lineup of the most popular games nowdays, at E3, at Stupid Generic Gamecon that comes out, most of them are M-rated.  It's just "kill, kill, kill."  That's not to say all FPSes are dreary and depressing.  I mean, I like FPSes, but games like Perfect Dark are a farcry from the muck that we have now.  I just can't wrap my brain around this crap anymore.  I mean, 2000 was about when FPSes were at their best, then they just went downhill since, especially due to the fact that they're now undisputably the most popular game genre.

EDIT: That is not to say that every game that comes out is bad.  I mean I still like FPSes, but COME ON, turn down the violence and come up with something new.  If you're going to make an FPS, at least make it somewhat colorful--Team Fortress 2 and TimeSplitters come to mind.  Or at least use someone other than the n-teenth "grizzled space marine," or "elite military operative."  Seriously, let me reiterate this--if I see another Master Chief clone, I am going to snap.  Gotta give props to Valve cause they use scientists and regular joe dudes in their games, much more entertaining.  I love those little Garry's Mod videos--Valve always has funny characters.  I talk about Valve a little bit here (they dodge the bullet just a little).

http://kotaku.com/5600550/lay-down-your-guns

One more article and I'm not really going to comment on this one much cause I can't take it anymore and I'm sounding repetitive.  One of the main reasons I like FPSes is because of the tactical and excitement aspect.  Contrary to these people who spit out this behavoristic worldview that all human beings are out to rip each other's heads off and suck their blood (and have rough sex with all the women too), I'd like to think that gore doesn't make the game necessarily better.  I like FPSes for the tactical aspect, kind of like how in Pac-Man you eat the dots and in Mario/Sonic, you get to the end of the level.  It's challenging.  Competing against other people can be fun.

But somehow, in the end, it has to be about violence.  Hey, if I want to get excited about something, I'd rather play a good racing game.  And GTA, I play that mostly to drive around, because TBQH, the shooting action in all those games stink.  Give me CS instead--I'd rather kill terrorists instead of innocent AI civilians walking down the street.  At least the T's in CS are a little more settling IMO, plus it's less violent and borders on hilarity (funny death sounds).

So what can we do about it?  Well, the only game company that seems to be making "friendly" games is Nintendo.  But they're only making them on the Nintendo consoles, which means that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are just this wasteland of games.  Remember the movie "Escape from New York" where Manhattan gets turned into a maximum security prison full of gangsters and Kurt Russell has to go in and save the President?  Well I feel like that we 360/PS3 users are in that prison.  We're just in this mire and we're trying to get out.  So Nintendo is practically useless at this point, screw 'em.

And this brings me to Sega...  When I look at the Dreamcast's lineup of games, they were friendly, they were happy, they made me feel GOOD.  That's why I wholly advocate them and wish that Sega had kept up their quirky goodness because I feel that if things don't change in the next few years, consider Sega dead and all these crap games will rule the world.  I'm dead serious.  Sega needs to step it up here, I'm serious.  Cause I can't take it anymore.  Just gonna end it here since I'm out of things to say.