What's left for me?

It's been a week since the first E3 2009 conferences started. These idiots bombard us with hour after hour of prepackaged sound and fury, somehow entertaining the mouth-breathing mongoloids that comprise the vast majority of video game fans. I sit and watch all off this with incredulity, not at the games themselves but at the fact that this is what video gaming has come to. Rarely, if ever, do I see anything that reminds me of why i enjoy video games or what got me into gaming in the first place. Quite frankly, the only joy I derive from these things is making snarky comments about it on Internets Relay Chat.

Now, despite being jaded and cynical and pretty much a misanthrope, I often find myself taken aback by the tastes(or lack thereof) of the producers and the consumers that drive this industry. What really got my dander up this year was a certain post on a certain forum by a certain moron declaring a certain trade show as a certain success for everyone. Yeah, he's a liar. Or just dumb. Or a dumb liar. But something along those lines. Here's the truth: It's only a good time to be a gamer if you are a testosterone-addled, pepetually-teenaged boy whose only interests in life are guns, sex,and cars.(i really should bold and colour and underline this thing up to make it look like a late-90s geocities propaganda site) That's not me. This is NOT a good time for me to be a gamer.

People tout diversity in games these days, but from everyting I see, it's all being levelled at the same group of 13-25 year old, machismo-driven mantards. Every single game seems to be patterned off the scripts of rejected 1980s action movies. Things blow up, you shoot things, you fight things, more things blow up, you drive fast, things blow up, you shoot some more, you probably blow up a time or two; it's mind-numbingly predictable. And wehy do people keep buying this over and over and over again and why do they get hyped up for it every time. Maybe I just wasn't born with an enjoys-shooting-at-things-in-browns-and-grays gene. or maybe i was born with good taste. And nothing had me lolling like the Splinter Cell trailer. All dramatic and earnest and the big twist is something happened to his wife?(son? daughter? puppy dog?) and now he no longer plays by the rules. Rawr. I don't believe it could have been more hackneyed if they had tried. And if we needed any more arguments against the prominence of story in games, Splinter Cell: Conviction provides them in spades by combining boring gameplay with hackneyed storylines resulting in a platter more shameful to own than a faux poreclain Dale Earnhardt commemorative plate.

Look! Another arm-holding-a-gun-in-the-corner-of-the-screen game for the 360!

- DenisDuckFat, from IRC 06/01/09

If you know me(and i feel sorry for you if you don't), you know there are certain genres of video games that I hate. Not "don't like," hate. Hate. HATE. HATE. These include car diving games, sports sims, eye-view gun-using games, music games, sneakin' around games, three dimensional platformers, horror movie games. That list may not be exhaustive. Keeping this in mind, what did this year's E3 have for me? New Super mario Bros. Wii. That pretty much wraps it up for E3 2009 as far as I'm concerned.

"Bu-But, Denis -- Metroid! It's no longer in 1st person! What about that?" Shut up. Do you see who's helping make it? Team Ninja. Let's take a look at what they're for: violence games and boob physics. Yeah, I'm gonna pass on this one 'cause I'm not one of those perpetual teenaged mongoloids we discussed earlier. Pretty sad that after being raped for nearly a decade by Retro, Metroid has again been turned over to be ravaged by Team Ninja. And I shudder to think about the things they'd do to poor Metroid.





YES. Game #2 of E3 for me. I've sifted through the hundreds upon hundreds of stupid violent, sneakin, car drivin, shooting, boring, shooting, samey, brown and gray, shooting, 3d, shooting games to find the 2 that appeal to me; that remind my why i play. That's not a good ratio, and that's why this industry and you suck. You make this happen.

This is what's left for me. That's it. Gone forever are the days of going to the video store and browsing the games for rent for nearly an hour trying to decide which to choose. Now I have to research for hours just to find one thing that that suits my tastes. Once before I felt this pessimistic about video games. It was shortly after playing Ocarina of Time forthe first time. My faith had already been shaken by the repugnant reimagining of Matio games in 3D(Mario 64). Ocarina of TIme came by and destroyed it entirely. My 2 favourite franchises were ruined by the added dimension. I figured(and correctly so) that if those 2 series were ruined, there was little hope for the rest of games. So I gave up for several years. Strangely enough, it was trade shows that lured me back in(and Harvest Moons). First with Pikmin at E3 2001, and then with the amazing reveal of Zelda at Spaceworld 2001. Will E3 '11 restore my faith in games? Not at this rate.

Modojo: Take the DDF Challenge

Some time ago the losers over at Modojo(Google it yourself, chumps) issued a challenge regarding internets perception of cellular telephone games.

Mobile games don't suck, and we can prove it.

And that's where I stopped reading. There are many things wrong with the article, and I will systematically point them out and humiliate its author.


First, and this is probably the most obvious problem with their position, is that Cellular Telephone games do indeed suck. They're basically Tiger games in colour. You remember those, right? They were as much fun as my doctor visit after I met your mom. "B-b-b-but DDF wot about Metul Guers Salad and Sod of Whore and and and..." No. The games suck on consoles and they suck more on telephones. You know what else sucks? All the other games on telephones which are basically just blatent ripoffs of games that already exist. What is it about owning one of these devices where you feel good about forking over cash to people who have just copied someone else's hard work and development? Perhaps we'll answer that next.


Secondly, cellular telephones are for losers. Seriously, if your job doesn't make you have one, then you shouldn't have one. What's so bad about them? Well, it's more or less a socially fashionable collar and leash, for one. There's also that horrible movie Cellular. In fact, movies as a whole have been ruined by the proliferation and near ubiquitousness of the infernal devices. from the films themselves to jerks in the cinema who talk on them or let them ring. When was the last time you were yelled at by strangers in a library/theatre/lecture/museum/concert/meeting/funeral for not talking on/having a ringing telephone? I rest my case. P.S. I also hear they shoot cancer waves into your brain through the ears.


Thirdly, there the problem of a phone as an input device.



You seriously expect me to use this to have any sort of meaningful control over whatever lame program is passing itself off as a game on that tiny screen? That's almost as absurd as using this to eat food.

Yeah, I went there. So even if the games didn't suck, which they do, and even if cellular telephones were not for losers, which they are, there's the basic issue of useablility which is totally glossed over by the mobile apologists. The number pad sucked for the Intellivision, it sucked for the Jaguar, it sucks on the PC and it sucks twice as bad on carcinogenic telephones --because they're twice as small.


So what's with Modojo's zealous pushing of these subpar games? I smell kickbacks.


Here's the DDF challenge. When you get the urge to waste money on some lame bejeweled clone, where the jewels are replaced with crude approximations of the cast of Moesha's faces, here's what you do. Take that money, head down to your local Goodwill, buy an old Tiger game, and realise that somehow, despite having broken buttens and a cracked screen, it's actually more of a game and more fun than anything on your precious mobile. Plus you'll have money left over to buy some John Denver records.


DDF's note: The picture I used of a Nokia phone does not in any way imply my endorsement of their phones. Nokia, like all cellular telephone manufacturers sucks. Thank you.

Genius at work

I hereby come out of my soap opera coma to coin the term "BioSuck" in regards to new lame FPS game Bioshock. Anyone using it from now on owes me royalties.

Xbox - A Commitment to Excrement

From Mercurynews via GameLife

Bachus is a drunk, lol

... and by winning over the developers, we knew we could
win over the hearts and minds of gamers by enabling truly wonderful new games to be conceived...

When I pressed him about this comment in light of the the lack of diversiy in software available on the XDude 360, Bachus had this to say:

On the Xbox 360 any gamer can play games from any genre that he wants so long as that genre is shooter.

Well played.

Oddly enough, the same thing happens when I read about iphone

It's hard for me to judge PS3 games and their graphics, because every time I look at screenshots for games, this is what i see:

HALLO. THIS IS MY VOICE ON THE BLOGOSPHERE

Hello, I am Denis DuckFat, aka DDF. You may remember me from such opinions as "Reggie Fils-Aime is worse for Nintendo than the N64" and "First Person Shooters are the dregs of video games." But today I am not here to share my vast knowledge or entertain you with a thought provoking censure of modern video games with a topic like "Why Rhythm Games are bad for the industry." Today, I am here to introduce my blog.

You see, It all started one day when i was watching CNN and I heard them rambling about the blogosphere. That was about 16 months ago. So I started researching what blogs were and for what reasons they were lent any credence. My conclusion? There are no reasons, which means all I need to do is spew out my points of view and be as condescending and arrogant about them as possible. Easy peasy.. So I start this blog because my opinions are much better than those of the majority of internets users, and therefore should be taken more seriously. My thoughts are credible now that I post on a blog.

Previously, all my proselytization efforts were focused on internets message boards. There I was often met with reisstance and ridicule, because my thoughts are too much for their puny brains to handle. This often resulted in forced absence from said message boards. Like pearls before swine, my wisdom was being trampled and covered in the mud of the pedestrian. No, these message boards wouldn't do at all.

From message boards, I took the good fight to blog comments. Blog comments are easy enough, right? And they were. I posted comments all the time on GameLife, a Wired blog. But I learned something. Blog commenters are not endowed with the same no-questions-asked credibility as blog posters. So simply being a commenter would not do. I had to become a full-fledged blogger.

I did make myself one promise before starting this blog; I won't hotlink every other word in my post like lots of the douchebag bloggers out there do. Seriously, do I need a link to the urban dictionary entry for douchebag in the last sentence? No, no I don't, and I'm not gonna do it. You're at an internet and you have access to Google when reading this. Use it.

I know you have lots of questions like, "DDF, are you going to talk about things other than video games?" The answer is yes. I talk about games and tv and movies and idiots on the internets who don't know common sense things. I would say the internet was the inspiration for that FOX piece of crap reality show "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader," but if it had been the internets, then it would have been titled "R U Smarter Then a 2nd Gradder." Zing! All further questions can be posted as comments and I will answer you if it's not a stupid question. If it is a stupid question, I'll probably just make fun of you.

hugs & kisses,
DDF

P.S. Be sure to view my profile to learn more about me.