The Gaming Industry Wants To Drive You Mad!

If you are like me, you are an old gamer that hasn't had the sense to grow up and do something good with their life. If not, then damn you and your youthful good looks! But even though you have beauty and youth and wonderful days on the beach with beautiful girls in bikinis serving you drinks out of a coconut that has the little straw and umbrella in it and....
Who am I kidding. If you are reading this you are a game geek just like I am. Except I am old and I know the entire history of the video game because I have lived it from the moment of conception. Which makes me ask the question: what in Jebus' name is going on with video games these days?
When I was a kid, we had Atari and Colecovision. Sure, the games were crap and our controller was just a box with one button and a stick that if you held it in your lap would make you look like you were very much enjoying your personal time, but we gamed our little hearts out. And we wept tears of delight if we made it to the 20th level of Pac Man with at least one life left.
But now game consoles have taken a sad and insane new route that makes me wonder if the days of true video gaming are coming to an end. Why do I feel this way? Well, lets take a look...

VIDEO GAMES USE TO HAVE AN END TO THEM

I've played every console game that has come out. Each new wave gave something better. Atari trumped Pong with a variety of games to play. Nintendo beat Atari with better graphics and less monotonous game play. Sega upped that with characters that actually had eyeballs and a spinning, blue hedgehog that didn't think bald men with huge mustaches should enslave bunnies. Then came Playstation, Xbox and the Wii. And life was pretty good for us gamers. You played the game, usually hundreds of times, and got so good that you could win most games in under an hour. But then the gaming consoles got online and terrible things happened.
Games no longer have an end to them. Sure, the credits roll and you THINK you have beaten the game. So you shelve it and grab your new game. And in the middle of playing the new game your console leaps out and says the most frightening thing it possibly could...other than your parents being siblings. It says "NEW DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT!" Dear gods noooooooooo!!!
So now that you have learned to adjust to the button layout of your new game, your old game has just become a new game you have failed to complete. To make matters worse, the thanks you get for beating the game is having to buy this new portion that reminds you of how badly you were fooled into thinking you were awesome. So you dash like a superhero to your local Walmart to buy enough points cards to finally be able to beat the game. And when you are finally able to put the game down for a second time and get back to the new game you purchased, it too has downloadable content available. Gaaaaaaahhhhh! Why?!?!?!
Again you rush to Walmart, you bank account dwindling and your console going from a cute little mogwai into a cash eating gremlin. And it never stops. Ever.

YOU LOSE YOUR SENSE OF PERSONALITY

In the old days your gaming prowess was known to the world by the three letters you could use after you owned the high score that others could only dream of reaching. Gamers known as "ASS" "DIK" and "WOW" dominated the high score, and they were truly the gods of the game.
But now the gaming consoles have decided that everyone should get a chance to be something on their system, rather than just those who would eventually go on to be in the military Special Forces division. And they did this with something called Avatars. Avatars, if you didn't already know, are bobbleheaded cartoon figures that come from a fixed set of various looks and colors that you must try as hard as possible to work so they bear a slight resemblance to yourself. However, unless you look like Charlie Brown, your chances of getting it close aren't very good. Luckily for you there is, again, downloadable content. Unfortunately most of it is stuff that you see in the games you play that you wouldn't wear normally, so wanting to represent yourself by this method tends to fail.
Well, unless you really do hunt down dragons with a machete and rocket launcher. In which case your avatar should be wearing a tight fitting strait jacket.
There are a few gems in the rough though, and you may get lucky to find that cool hoodie you got back in college. If your college had any worth. If not, you are stuck having to go out and buy the hoodie you put on your avatar so it matches you. As well as the sunglasses you had to buy in game to cover up the fact that your eyes don't match the sinister Japanese ones that were as close to you as you could get.
Over time you find that you are not making your avatar to look like you, but rather you are trying to look like your avatar. And when you realize this, you can finally go and get the professional help you've been needing all along.

GAMES ARE JUST REMAKES OF THE LAST GAME

Ok, some of you out there are shaking your head at me. Yes, I know it was MY generation that came out with the 50,000 Final Fantasy games that were the trademark of the 90s and early 2000s. But at least those games had all new characters and plot lines, and generally had new styles of play, making them nothing like the one before them. But then the economy took a nose dive into the septic tank. And that is where things start to get dismal.
It started with Doom, and every first person shooter has followed in it's wake. It's a generic "shoot, kill, blow up this that and that other thing to make it from this glowing spot on the radar to the next glowing spot on the radar." If there is a story in there, chances are not much time was spent on it. It was as if we were being introduced to the Rambo movies all over again, except now we are paying over $50.00 for the experience. "Same stuff! New Backgrounds!"
But it doesn't end there. The gaming industry has found even more inventive ways of not doing much to make good games but suck a good profit from you. They just jump back to the game that was sort of original and remaster it. Crowning this is 343 Industries Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. So eager were they to do nothing much now that they have taken over the franchise from Bungie that the only thing they changed was the graphics. Everything else is exactly the same. And they have even added the special feature of being able to turn off the new graphics so you can play the very same game that is still stuck in the disk drive of your original XBox.
And shooter games aren't the only ones that have suffered from this laziness.
Guitar Hero was a great game. You got to sing and play as if you were really in a band, just without all the talent that goes into it. But then came Rock Band. The same exact thing with a little change to the graphics. Then came Band Hero that was so unoriginal that it just spliced one word from both games and threw itself into the mix.
Then someone came along and said "what if I don't have any friends, but want to look cool like the guys on these games do?" And so they invented Karaoke Nation and Lips and DJ Hero. But this wasn't enough! They were on a roll of insanity that wasn't going to stop just by merely putting out the exact same thing over and over. No! More must be done that has been done before, and after that, and after that after that!
So then came the celebrity endorsed versions of the above games that held some of the same songs and a few new ones such as Guitar Hero Metallica and The Michael Jackson Experience and The Black Eyed Peas Experience. And if you couldn't sing or push buttons fast, you could flop around like Michael J. Fox on meth to games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Masters and Just Dance and Dance Paradise! *gasp gasp*
And eventually you realize that after spending hundreds on games that are just like other games and spending even more on additional content that is the same additional content you just got for one of the other clones, you start to realize that the game designers lack of creativity has made them billionaires, and your inability to stay off the bandwagon has given you a slew of games that would have been just as good if you only bought the first one that came out.

GAME CONSOLES AREN'T EVEN FOR GAMES ANYMORE

I love to game. That doesn't mean I don't love to watch TV or get my chuckles from those silly little kittens doing goofy and off balanced things on YouTube. This is why I have a TV and a computer as well as a game console. But somewhere in the murky depths of the gaming industry the most horrible of plots arose. "Instead..." they thought, though it was more than a one word thought, "Instead of having people play their game and then move to other parts of the house so they could momentarily realize they have a family and a life, we should take every aspect of entertainment and cram it into our little game console of life sucking so these pawns never leave the room at all! Mwahahahahahaha!"
And this devious thought became reality as Netflix, ESPN, YouTube, Discovery Channel and many others were pushed into the glowing box that once was your game console. As America grows fatter and more complacent, even our video games are being sabotaged into giving us media we already have elsewhere. And the general media isn't the only thing being drawn into this black hole of lethargy. Your IPhones and Droids and Blackberries, all of which tried to do to you what your gaming masters have done are falling into line. Now you can synch your phone with your game so you can know where the gun and grenade locations are while you are playing your game. You can locate team members you otherwise couldn't see by dialing in to your game.
Soon your friends can play Colon Surgeon and know where all the butt problems you have are by calling up your game console which has you and your friends delving into your rectal region to remove the tumors growing there via the new XBox Cancer Zapper game download they got from hearing your blog on the MSNBC app they downloaded. And things are just going to get so manically mish-mashed that eventually your heads are going to explode into that blubbery, upright corpse of yours that has been stuck for years to your favorite chair.

And then maybe, just maybe, you will begin to realize there is a comforting joy in watching a tiny white ball on a black background bounce between two white lines. For in there lies sanity.