Sorry that I've been away. I rarely get a ton of time to do bloggy writing these days now that I've taken up the Senior Editor gig at Twin Galaxies. Life, as it happens, tends to keep me pretty busy, too. So here's a quick rundown of what you missed in the last 9 or 10 months:
- I write a lot for TGI, but you knew that already. I've been keeping busy with writing reviews and news. The Straight Dope is my baby (as well as the ones from my Lothario travels throughout the world. One day I'll unite them and appoint them code names and THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY), so go read it.
- I think I've put some weight on, but am assured that much of it is muscle. Now my biceps are nearly as big as my ego!
- The above sentence aside, I still hate exclamation points. Just sayin'.
- I got hitched in September. Boom.
- I bought an Xbox 360 two weeks ago. Refer to number 4 and know that it was her idea.
- I've played a lot of video games over the past year. Many of them have sucked.
- I turned 30. And into a werewolf. So I'm no longer a teen wolf.
For the purposes of this video game blog (which is what I think this has just finally become), let's concern ourselves with numbers five and six. While it isn't exactly unheard of for me to buy video game consoles, a couple of questions come to mind in regard to the 360: why did I buy it, and maybe more interestingly, why did I buy it now?
Well the answer to that first question is just as easy as you think it is. I play a lot of video games, and I kinda wanted one. There. Other than that, I do write about video games on the regular, so having one of everything (I already own a PS3 and a Wii) kind of helps in that regard. Sure, I have access to a 360 for game reviews and other journalistic ventures when absolutely necessary, but I've never had one laying around for personal amusement, so I finally get to catch up on stuff that I've been missing over the last few years.
But what took so long? The machine's been out for five years now, so what gives?
For some reason I feel ashamed to admit this, but part of it was do to brand loyalty. I've never been the kind of person to hold to particular console manufacturer for very long. When I was a young'n and had my NES, the prospect of a newer, swankier machine appealed to me very early on, so I didn't wait for the SNES and went right ahead to the Genesis (a decision that I do not, under any circumstance, regret). After that my options were pretty wide open. Being an early adopter at an early age, I wasn't about to sit on my hands and watch until a one machine came out on top the other, and at the time, the choices were the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn with the Nintendo 64 still a ways off. I mowed a shit load of lawns that year and shoveled a metric fuck ton of snow, but the deciding factor finally boiled down to the fact that my brother worked at a Camelot Music (remember those?) in a mall and that he got a discount, and they just happened to have a Playstation and not a Saturn. From here on, we can call this game/set/match for Sony.
It had a slow start, but I was very happy with my PSOne until I basically ran the thing into the ground. Like many of my nerd peers, I had to play with the console upside down due to heating issues in its waning years. I call that a badge of honor. But it wasn't to last; there will always be evolutions to video game consoles and I couldn't just sit by and watch my beloved Playstation die of old age and over abundance of Tekken 3. But the choice was clear for me: I would be buying a Playstation 2, and this was without question. Sure, I got starry-eyed like Davey Jones on The Monkees when I first played Soulcalibur on the Saturn, but I knew that all of those pretty graphics and steering wheel- like controllers won't hold my interest as much as whatever Sony's got cooking in their mad laboratory. History has shown that I was correct, but if not for one small, though significant, factor I would probably be writing either requiem for the Dreamcast right now, or perhaps nothing at all (the PS2 had quite an effect on me).
I speak, of course, of backward compatibility. Amen, I say to you, the prospect of building a video game library only to sell it off has always been the catch-22 of video game collecting at a young age: you may want to play these older games again, but you need the capital to buy stuff for that new console. I'll remind the world that emulation was still in something of an infancy, so the idea of playing all of those old PSOne games that scrimped and saved for in high school was almost kablammo if not for a new machine that played old games, and it was practically a god send.
Fast forward to the current console generation. While I had a bit more disposable income than I did in my poverty-stricken college and immediate post-college days, I tried to be a bit more discerning about my future purchases. Having gotten over a previous prejudice against Microsoft (you can thank Fable and Ninja Gaiden for that), I was more than willing to give them a chance very early in the 360s life cycle, but once word came down from the Sony mountain that the Playstation 3 would not only be backward compatible with PS2 and PSOne games my fate was sealed. Plus they it was going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII as exclusives, so it wasn't that hard of a call to make.
Now just try to imagine my fury when, scant months before finally buying one, Sony decides to cut backward compatibility for their machine. Multiply this rage when I hear, a few months after tracking down a BC PS3, that Final Fantasy XIII was also coming to the 360. The five stages of grief set in hard for me, and the worst of it was acceptance where I found that I was a mope for months after deciding that I probably backed the wrong horse.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with my Playstation 3. Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and the Uncharted games are some of the best I've played in this generation, and most of the stuff I would have played on 360 ended up being multi-platform anyway, so I eventually got over it. But the larger player-base (aside from their negative reputation for being childish assholes), strong exclusives (I'm looking at you, Fable II), and feature-rich online components were something I knew I was going to miss. Though, like the tenth person for caller nine of a radio station contest, I got over it.
Know this: the best and worst shopping decisions you make are while you're inebriated. Those Britney Spears disks of my wife's, that SportsNight boxed set, the wooden sign above my microwave that reads "cooking is love:" all made after beer number 4. I stand by them, even if I have to piece together why I did it in the first place. Then again, these are purchases that are under $250, but whatever. Walking through a Target about week and a half ago after an early dinner and having your wife tell you that I should buy an Xbox? That, friends, is what love is.
But what can we take from the concept of "brand loyalty?" Personally, I felt cheated that Sony would remove a feature of their high-powered super computer that many people see as important. With a tradition and promise of backward compatibility, you send a message to your user base that you thank them for their continued support and welcome them into your plans for the future with open arms; almost transitioning the user from one generation to the next. In the PS3's case, it made the outrageously high price of the machine a bit more palatable: you could sell your old PS2 to help curb the cost and get the same service. To maintain that high price and disarm the machine of that feature was like dropping trou and pissing in my face after punching me in the stomach. It sent a message to me that cutting costs of the system to lower overhead was far more important than keeping your return customers satisfied, and forced me to give my money to the used market instead to the company. At that point I was completely fine with that, though.
The bottom line is that I had exclusives to look forward to and older games that I still wanted to play, and it seemed to me then (and still does now) that Sony did their best to bungle both of the reasons I wanted a PS3. It almost came to the point of sending an irate letter to them explaining my concerns (their continued high price and botched lock downs of exclusives was slowly killing them), but they didn't need me to tell them that they were fucking up; the sales alone were letting them know. But it doesn't mask the fact that I bought a Playstation 3 anyway, and I did it because I was loyal, though with definite feelings of dissent. Does this make me an idiot? Maybe, I guess, but I've definitely learned to love my monstrous, though sleek, black machine. My past few years with it have been far from awful, but like turning down a job or not calling someone back, you sometimes wonder how things could have been. In this case, though, I actually get to find out.
So it's been almost two weeks. I bet you're wondering how that Xbox thing's going, right?
Ok, forget a bunch of that bullshit that I told you up there, because I wanted to get a 360 for Mass Effect and that's pretty much long and short of it. I'll tell you all about my experience with it when I'm finished (I hope), but I'm happy with my decision with less buyer's guilt than I thought I'd have. So far, I'm finding that paying for an Xbox LIVE Gold account a bitter pill to swallow after years of not shelling out for online gaming. And since I've been playing Mass Effect almost exclusively thus far, I'm not even using it so I feel kind of guilty.
But to say that I feel "complete" still seems weirdly inaccurate. That doesn't mean that I'm wishing that there more systems for me to buy or that I now need to go trick out my PC to effectively play Crysis or something. No, I have come across a surprising feeling of emptiness now that almost all of gaminghood is open to me on a personal level. There's no more hoping that a game that looks good on x system will show up on the y system that I own. There's no more feeling of superiority when the exclusive game for one console rakes in the GOTY awards, or that great downloadable content is available only for that one machine. Having all three of the current generation of home machines simply means that when something comes up that sounds good, I go get it, and that's that. I never thought I would lament what I used to think of as a limitation. I feel like I've exhausted my possibilities when all of them have just opened up to me.
You know, just something to ponder.
