Wowser! Rather a lot's been happening in the X0 months since I've posted anything! Of course, one thing hasn't changed! I'm still using way too many exclamation points!!!
Okay, where were we? Ah, yes... different stuff. Well, let's see.
I said once that I would post a new entry everyday. This is my first entry in almost five months.
I swore that I would only listen to classical music and soundtracks because "radio music" was a commoner's pastime. Now I listen to Devo, Green Day, and Jimi Hendrix, among others (I think we can blame that one on college, yeah?).
I declared my support for Internet Explorer when I started my website. I'm using Google Chrome to make this entry.
I shunned people who used chat abbreviations and emoticons as being lazy and grammatically-challenged. OMG! i use em now :P nm but i do lmao! ^_^ (we can blame that one on college, too... plus the fact I got to text finally! Welcome to the 21st century, Spiny!)
Er... what else...? Oh, yes. There existed a time in the not too distant past when I preferred the employment of unnecessarily verbose phrasings and grotesquely sesquipedalian selections of words. Yeah. I used to like long sentences and big words.
And finally, I used to keep up with
The Sims series. Either my computer is too old or EA is a corporate sellout, but
The Sims 3 royally sucks. If you read my previous blog on Tripod, you'll already know my thoughts about that.
Videogaming is what I've finally come back here to talk about. More and more games are being optimised for control by motion. That is, the Wii Remote, Kinect, and... er... that PlayStation one whose name I don't recall at the moment. Anyway, it's turning the gamepad into a fossil! That plastic rectangle that came with the Famikon is turning into an interesting archaic museum-piece, but not being used so much for actual gaming anymore. I'll admit, there was a certain amount of novelty involved in pantomiming drawing your sword to actually have Link draw his sword in
Twilight Princess, but after a while, I think most of the old-school gamers (the Fifth Generation, as I call us) would agree that the novelty has worn off. There is nothing Nintendo can possibly do to improve motion-activated control. Crikey, Microsoft's completely
done away with the gamepad. All you have to do with Kinect is point to stuff and things happen. Wii MotionPlus lets the Wii console know what the player is doing in three dimensions! What do you need gamepads for anymore? Apart from operating your legacy equipment,
nothing! (Oh, btw -- gamepad = controller)
I was thinking about this earlier and I decided that the last
Zelda game I had any real interest in was
Wind Waker. I was kind of interested in
Twilight Princess, but my interest wore off quicker that it did with any other game. I also decided that the last
Mario game I really enjoyed was
Super Mario Sunshine.
Mario Galaxy was okay, but it didn't really have anything to keep my interest, either. What do
Mario Galaxy and
Zelda: Twilight Princess have in common? You play both of them with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. What do
Mario Sunshine and
Zelda: The Wind Waker have in common? You play both of them with gamepads. Now, I'm sorry, but the Seventh Generation has taken a major hit with the elderly, in that that traditional gamepad controllers are now obsolete. I
like to sit down and hold a controller in the prone position for six or seven hours.
That is gaming. Getting up and essentially playing "Twister" in front of a motion-activated control sensor -- that is not gaming. That is ridiculous. If you gave a Seventh Generation gamer a Super NES controller, he wouldn't know what the crap to do with it.
"Dude, like, how am I supposed to, like, hit the control pad? And, like, this cord is totally messin' me up. How am I supposed to, like, take a swing at that baseball if I keep gettin' tied up in the cords, dude?"
Four words. Epic, um, like, fail. Call it historical relativism if you want, but no game console can surpass the awesomeness of the Nintendo 64. Motion-activated control is part of the reason why. Sure, there was the GameCube in between the N64 and Wii, but they changed the controller around. Have you ever just looked at an N64 controller? Like, really
looked at it in detail? Here's what I mean: the N64 controller is three generations of gamepads all rolled into one! Ignore the control stick and the C buttons. You have an NES controller. Ignore the control stick and the A and B buttons. You have a Super NES controller. Essentially, it's a fusion of Nintendo's past controllers with a stick and a trigger. FTW! Now, all you do is stand up and point at stuff. FML!
Why am I writing this, then? I don't know. I just wanted to waste my time, I suppose.
Sorry kids, but grandpa's staying with his GameCube and his N64. None of this "get up and play" crap.
Sit down and play!
That's how you play videogames!
