I miss simplicitcy

The last few days I've been busting out the retro games.  Thanks to a little bar near my house I've been able to get my game on with some actual hardware rather than emulators or shitty Chinese made multi systems.  I then come home and try to set up the WiiU that my wife bought me months ago and it was so much harder and I ended up not playing anything.

Back in the day it used to be very simple.  I would just buy a game, slam it into the system of choice and start playing.  Even up to the PS2 shit was as easy as buying the game, popping it in the tray and hitting go.  Of course, PC and home computers were a little bit more complex but the levels of bullshit were generally a bit lower.  The worst you'd come across with old PC games are titles that had 8 or 9 discs which is more of a pain in the ass than bullshit.

Nowadays though its a whole different ball game and even consoles don't provide any respite.  You buy any game for any system and you can't just put the fucking thing in and go.  First you have to download system updates and then when that's done you need to download game updates.  While that's bullshit I can still kind of handle that but there are games now that require you to sign into shit like Origin or UPlay or Xbox Live or some such crap and I just can't be fucked with that.  PC is actually a little better since all my shits in Steam but even Steam does this stupid "first time setup" thing that seems to take a million years every time I install a new game.

The other day my friend brought round a copy of Smash Brothers on WiiU and due to the fact he was only around my place for a short time he spent about 70% of his time with my WiiU looking at update bars and loading icons.  Fuck, if I fire up my Wii and put in Brawl or Melee at least I'm playing within less than a minute providing I don't fuck around with the menus.

I just don't care about all these fucking updates, I don't want them, I just want to play the goddamn game that I bought.  The only reason that these updates are required is that sometime after the PS2s generation game developers forgot how to make games that work upon release so patching is required.

There's a lot of games worth playing in the modern day but I find it so much harder to just relax with games now because I know every time I want to play something new I'm going to have to wait for it to update or some such crap.  Still, at least old games fire up instantly so I have something to do while the fucking  thing takes 20 minutes to get itself up to speed.

P.S. Single player games that have required internet connections are the devil, fuck those games.

Rabid Fanboyism is Dumb

With the PS4 and the Nextbox (because 720 is a dumb name) on the horizon, I've started to notice more and more fan boys popping up to defend their favourite system, and this is annoying and it should stop.

Above is an old advert for the Megadrive (Genesis if you're American and WRONG) basically slagging off Nintendo in order to try and drum up sales for the system.  Now I owned a Mega Drive back in the day, I thought that shit was the bees knees, but I never slagged off a Nintendo system.

Sure, I would have arguments with my Super Nintendo owning school yard friends over which shit was better, but that wouldn't deter me from heading to their house after school sometimes and playing some of the old SNES greats.  In the same way, when they would come to my house they would be really hyped to hop on a bit of Sonic 2 or Golden Axe or whatever.

The debates and the sharing of systems continued for years and years, when all of a sudden the debates around which system was better changed.  No longer would people argue the pros and cons of a system, it all just devolved into "MY SYSTEM IS BETTER AND YOU'RE DUMB!", but the language was much harsher.  It's basically been the same since that switch, where trying to debate systems on most forums will just land you a load of personal attacks rather than any decent discussion.  It died down for a while but the whole Microsoft Vs Nintendo Vs Sony thing is starting to rear its ugly head again.

So why did this shit even start? When did people get so defensive about their system of choice?  Well I'm going to make an uneducated guess and say it was when Halo came out.

As fun as Halo was, it was released on a system that basically had nothing else going for it.  There weren't all that many great games on the Xbox, at least not compared to the PS2 or whatever, but it had a few.  This is where I think it all started though.  People would buy an Xbox for Halo, then realise that there were maybe, 2 or 3 other games worth playing and then feel that they had to justify the big money splurge.

In trying so desperately hard to justify their purchase, they brainwashed themselves into having a sense of brand loyalty and that is how the "rabid" fan boy was born.  Then again, I'm probably talking out of my ass but fuck Halo it wrecked FPS (I just want my Doom-esque shooters to be popular again)

Still, it's not like fan boys are going to stop me from buying all 3 systems in the end and enjoying everything the next generation has to offer, but I wish I could have a decent discussion without having my sexuality brought into question just because I think the WiiU looks promising.  Your loss morons