Tunnels of Doom

[Update, August 26th: Two days after posting this, I happened to re-visit GW's website and found that they had updated the Blood Bowl listings and now include boosters for some teams that actually make some sense in terms of how the teams are constructed for LRB5, including Undead. The main point stands, but I thought I'd be accurate in saying that at least they seem to be doing something, even if I feel it falls well short of the mark.]

All I want is a single model to round out my Undead Blood Bowl team. It’s not a tall order, nor an unreasonable one. However, my primary logical provider of this product, Games Workshop, is a sloppily run niche market company that can’t be bothered to cater to its customers and so I’m left with vitriol and empty hands.

At least I have a blog.

Look, I get it. Gaming has got to be a frustrating market for businesses that want to operate as legitimate enterprises and not labor-of-love charity organizations. Gamers are notoriously fickle, generally cheapstakes and loathe to part with their disposable income unless the purchase meets some ill-defined criteria whose formula cannot be deduced using modern mathematical principles. So yeah, game companies have a steep road to climb to financial success.

Big, important game companies like Palladium and TSR have struggled or failed because they attempt to either exert market muscle on a difficult to demograph clientele or they prostrate themselves on a core fanbase to keep them alive with guilt trips and puppy dog eyes. Small companies have risen meteorically based on fluke and fad, like Wizards of the Coast. Even sister industry video games have struggled to work within a customer base that is neither loyal and predictable nor malleable and excitable. Gamers tend to be skeptical, critical and yet habitual. So yeah, I understand to a degree why game companies might treat their customers with a bit of disdain.

What I don’t understand is a company acting like it’s allergic to certain types of paying customers. Games Workshop, publishers and rights-owners to several of my all-time favorite tabletop games, has squandered much of the good will it earned by associating itself with these products. I’ve already mentioned my general apathy toward their flagship products principally due to their hamfisted efforts to milk the few customers they can draw in dry. And now I’m losing the last ounces of respect I had for them because they can’t even manage the few games they’ve retained even a modicum of support for in a way that makes any sense.

This is strictly opinion, but I feel that GW’s Specialist Games line is their biggest asset. The squad-level games like Necromunda and Mordheim offer a brilliant intro to tabletop miniatures games without heavy investment and provide, due to their scale, a more manageable gameplay experience. The battallion- or fleet-level games of Warmaster, Battlefleet Gothic and Epic 40K provide a more robust strategic experience due to the wargame-style abstractions and the comparative simplicity of the hobby elements. Their more restrictive environment games, closer to traditional board games, like DungeonQuest and Space Hulk are some of their best overall products because they allow for a less fiddly experience that appeals to a wider audience while still giving ample opportunity in the hobbyist realm.

They even have stepped down the right path with their Living Rule Book concepts. If they don’t want to actively support these products with their company time and effort, that’s okay, as long as they allow the game to flourish naturally with a community-driven model. And in part they have with community-driving games like Blood Bowl (which is what this is really about). Yet in a time where Intellectual Property notions and theories are being challenged regularly with variations on the idea of idea ownership I can’t begin to fathom why GW thinks they have to tightly reign the product that they’ve essentially handed off to the community to run. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

Basically Blood Bowl in the present tense is managed by the Blood Bowl Rules Committee, a group who works on revising the LRB. They are selected from the community and they democratically collate the results of playtests and rules discussions into something that works like actual rules modifications to improve the game as a whole. Which is great except that the community en masse is stifled by GW’s draconian demand for ultimate IP control. Like I said before, I get why GW ended up in this position what I don’t understand is why they don’t open their minds enough to see the value of trying something new.

Let’s take an example: The BBRC has voted unanimously to add three new teams to the next edition of the rules. Most of the teams are revised legacy teams from older, way outdated versions of the game. Most of them add great new dimensions to the existing game dynamic and yet there is a roadblock: GW won’t approve the addition of new teams without official models to support them and they won’t order new models to be created unless their market research can predict a minimum sales that Blood Bowl figures don’t meet. So there exists this set of limbo teams that everyone who plays the game and cares about it wants, but can’t be added because the rights holders have deemed it unprofitable.

I can’t explicitly fault GW’s reasoning here: Running a business is running a business and like I said, I can sympathize with their positions. But there seems to be a simple answer which will solve most if not all of the principal problems facing the game today: Develop a simple and extremely cheap if not free licensing system to allow alternative modelers to create and sell official Blood Bowl support products. Instead of making sites like Shadowforge and Impact! Miniatures circumvent the rules, give them an affordable way to step in and take the reigns. I’m no businessman but I can smell opportunity and there are companies that are already doing what GW doesn’t want (cannibalizing figure sales with unlicensed alternatives) so why not get a small cut of the action, earn some goodwill with the fans and perhaps give the game a chance to build an audience with a greater range of support than you yourself are willing to give?

As it stands you can’t order single models for any Blood Bowl team from Games Workshop and since the team designations in the licensed boxed sets are woefully outdated for two or more editions back (and arguably unsuitable even then) you have no option other than resort to alternative model providers, the secondary market or overpurchasing. They’ve completely gutted their support so that booster packs are disastrously rare and don’t even get me started on the miserable range of Star Player models that represent perhaps a quarter of the complete list. What this means is that the only way to create a full 16-player Blood Bowl team from official Games Workshop models is to either buy two boxed sets (leaving you with 22 players which in most cases still isn’t the correct combination of positionals as dictated by the team list and at best is eight models more than you’ll ever need) or hope that, again, a secondary site like BBFigs.com can fill in the blanks by reselling GW models.

Your IP is either something you stand behind or it’s a wasted opportunity: Right now GW is treating Blood Bowl and the whole Specialist line with indifference that I can only translate as a wasted opportunity. So what’s it going to be, Games Workshop? More customer ill will and more head scratching about why your company hemorrhages customers? Or out of the box thinking that can actually improve the profit margins that seem to be the only language you speak these days?

Simon Parkin on Gamasutra writes a compelling dissection of modern game criticism and reviews in his piece PR’s Dirty Little Game With 11th Hour Reviews. He posits that the crowded online space of video game-oriented sites, also packed in by offline publications like EGM and the like which focus on reviews as pre-release buying guides is being played by publishers who rely on these information repositories to provide feedback on their accomplishments.

The discussion is nothing new—you can revisit the Jeff Gerstmann fiasco from last year if you wish to see it chronicled even more sharply—but Parkin suggests a new angle by framing the problem in the light of the persistent deadline rather than focusing on the industry’s unhealthy relationship with its own critics. He says:

…[T]here are simply too many websites about video games. The competition to be first to ‘print’ with a review, while always a consideration in magazine publishing, is exacerbated through the global competitive nature of the net. In this environment many gaming website publishers are willing to publish a final review even if it’s only based on very tentative impressions of a small portion of the game.

The hypothesis here of time-based competition that erodes the credibility of any and all reviews is as, if not more, intriguing than the one presented by Level Up’s N’Gai Croal saying the loosely defined problem is in the relationship between game sites and the publishers. What I think both writers are talking about is two sides of a broader concern over the general level of integrity in gaming-related media. There is an overwhelming glut of sources for video gaming news and most of them at least dabble in reviews (I see the mirror, I’m not ignoring it). But the majority operate under the assumption that the me-first mentality that was incubated in the pre-Internet era where magazines reigned supreme and scooping the competition meant, potentially, a significant newsstand sales boost.

With the proliferation of online news and review sites, the prevailing wisdom was transferred wholesale and the only thing that was adjusted at all was the timetable. Instead of a lead time of a month your carefully negotiated exclusivity deal earned you at best a day or two. When rapid updating came into vogue with blog-style enthusiast sites, that lead shrank to maybe hours as most blog posts, at least originally, were direct links to other sources. You start to factor in blogs that link to other blogs and the rise of syndication via RSS and Atom and eventually lead times are almost worthless yet still fought over as if they somehow mattered.

Supposedly even the hasty link blogs that do little aside from redirecting readers through their ad-supported feeds to the useful information can increase an original source’s pageviews that I guess make the Web go ’round, but I’ve encountered plenty of link rings that end up being self-referential with little clue where the source material might be found. In my very brief stint as a gaming site contributor I found that often the original material was only spoken of and not directly attributed; the destination content was the commentary on some obscure site that casually referenced without attribution some exclusive preview or trailer. Aside from being an obvious source for the rampant rumor mill that frustrates publishers and PR departments, it renders a lot of exclusivity deals essentially moot. At best you could say they foster community discussion and put the subject into the consciousness of the intended audience but that doesn’t really help the publications that act as delivery mechanisms and sell their souls for those kinds of deals, it only benefits the publishers who have all the power in the first place.

And none of this even addresses Parkin’s suggestion that maybe all this first-to-press coverage isn’t even particularly valuable to begin with. You can ask several game reviewers what their mission statement is in providing readers with reviews. They may have some sort of noble, reader-focused concept of providing a buying guide or acting as a stern warning to save thrifty gamers some cash. But that’s a red herring tossed out by entities that understand their livelihood depends on goodwill that exists between them and their readers. In truth they can’t possibly have anyone’s pocketbooks in the forefront of their mind when they’re getting all the games for free. If you eliminate the actual act of parting with money in exchange for entertainment the value prospect becomes purely hypothetical.

It’s easy to cast judgment from the mountain; Tunnels of Doom has certainly printed reviews and though the mission statement indicates a “different way” of handling them, it’s hardly unique or ground-breaking. Even Play Magazine recently published an issue without review scores to encapsulate the text. The truth is ToD has changed somewhat organically from early efforts away from the official one-post review. If you want to know what I think of a game you can check my weekly Gaming Weekend posts where I talk about the games I played. I found that was a more natural way of discussing games because your opinion can change wildly over time. My initial view of, say, Rock Band was overwhelmingly positive. Somewhere in the middle I got frustrated with some of the game’s missteps but you’ll find that there have been a huge number of weeks where the game shows up in the list of titles I’ve had spinning in the 360 and that speaks volumes to how good the game is, how much staying power it has and how easy it is to overlook the faults.

Could that have been summarized neatly? Sure, but not after a week. It took six months for those two sentences to shake out and there’s no way you can get that honest of a testimony about a game with a race-oriented review schedule. I may have been in the midst of my frustrations (many of which were actually addressed with a patch released about a month ago which highlights another point about games: Many are moving targets) and come across as being down on Rock Band. Meanwhile I may have raved about GTA IV, a game which gives a very strong first impression, but you’ll note I haven’t touched the thing in a few weeks. What does that really say about it? Can I give a definitive opinion on it even now? What if I pick it up again once I put down Overlord and find myself seriously hooked on it?

The biggest thing to take from all this is that gaming isn’t a speed-based pastime. Movies are typically under two hours and very rarely over three. The experience of a movie or a book is finite by nature. Games are less so and therefore you at best get impressions, even of narratively structured games, when you try to formulate opinions about them using techniques that were designed for less time-consuming media. What we need are less reviewers that are purporting to act as buyer’s guides and more critics who are trying to serve as commentators on the state of games as a whole and who can reflect on trends or at best identify gems that may be overlooked.

Some non-reviewers are already doing this and the gaming culture responds: Observe Tycho from Penny Arcade and Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. Whether it’s Tycho’s obsession with complex game mechanics or Yahtzee’s hatred of quick time events, they both critique games more than they actually review them in the traditional sense of the word. But in doing so their opinion becomes even more valuable and as a result they serve the purpose run of the mill reviewers claim to serve. To a certain extent we can expect that some games are going to sell no matter what people say, and suggesting that reviewers are holding any sway is ridiculous to begin with, especially when you consider that the best reviews are reserved for the usual suspects anyway. Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out shortly: Does anyone honestly expect more than an almost imperceptible fraction of reviews to be sharply critical? Does anyone think that even if 100% of the reviews called it the biggest failure since E.T. that it wouldn’t still sell a million copies on the first day?

The integrity of gaming media is in shambles because in equal parts we’ve accepted what they’ve heaped upon us without question or concern and because that media has married itself to the industry it purports to discuss critically or impartially. Faced with an impossible task and an apathetic audience, it’s hardly a surprise we’re left with this farce of an industry.

The graphics in Grand Theft Auto IV are vastly improved over the previous generation’s iterations. This stands to reason: The Xbox 360 and the PS3 have more powerful graphics capabilities. But GTA is still, subjectively, a pretty ugly game. Compare it to something like Gears of War, Call of Duty 4 or Heavenly Sword and it becomes clear that eye-popping visuals are not Rockstar’s strong suit. Some may say, that’s cool, they’re more interested in the experience than the graphics.

I doubt many people have a problem with that. GTA conveys a sense of place (and time, as evidenced by Vice City and San Andreas) and IV does such a phenomenal job at getting the details right that it’s not difficult to overlook the lack of eye candy in favor of the overall “feel.” It’s also highly likely that the sheer number of things going on in any given scene requires the graphics engine to scale back a bit to handle everything they want to show.

But for Rockstar’s obvious perfectionism, it seems a bit strange that they would consistently make graphical compromises with their flagship game. And what’s even more bizarre to my mind is that they have a very powerful artistic style closely tied to their products that they could draw on to solve the problem, but they fail to do so with each new iteration.

The style I’m referring to is the striking flat-shaded line art that graces the game covers and has done so since the original GTA III. Each successive title uses the same basic premise with minor stylistic adjustments, up to and including IV. And most significantly, each style evokes the mood of the game and looks great.

Since most graphically striking games rely on detailed textures and heavy bump maps to achieve their photorealism, it stands to reason that cel-shaded or heavily stylized games are less taxing on a system and therefore easier to produce. GTA games already have a smooth, attractive style associated with them, so why settle for the half-cocked “realism” of the engine they use?

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Gary Gygax, co-creator of the most popular and well-known tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, passed away yesterday at his home. The outpouring of sympathy and sadness on message boards and blogs was predictable as was the requisite “Can I get a res spell over here?” cracks. The general tone seemed to be one of loss and respect, many people thanking him posthumously for the game that enriched their lives.

One notable exception (to some) was PvP cartoonist Scott Kurtz’ limp “moment of silence” post that some fans found confusingly ignoble. Kurtz then posted an explanation/redaction:

Emails were getting more and more upset as the day went on, so simply to quiet the masses, I forced out a post. Shortly afterwards, I received some email from people who felt that my tribute was less than flattering.

…

It’s just that despite everyone’s obvious connection to Dungeons and Dragons, I never felt a connection to Gary Gygax. For most to the time I played Dungeons and Dragons, I had no idea who Gary Gygax was.

What I don’t understand is why would you post a tribute to someone “just to quiet the masses”? Why would you “force out” a shout-out to someone who you “never felt a connection to?” The lack of sincerity suggests to me that Kurtz was filling a role he feels shoehorned into (nerd statesman) and nothing more. As if he felt pressured to conform to what other nerds were feeling even if he didn’t feel that way himself.

I don’t begrudge him for the lack of connection to Gygax nor do I think he should have felt obligated to say something on the topic if it didn’t resonate with him or he felt uncomfortable paying tribute to someone whom he felt had not played a significant part in his life, regardless of how true or untrue that may be. In fact I would find it significantly easier to appreciate him if he’d simply come out and said:

For me, Dungeons and Dragons was about my Dad and my friends…not about the authors of the modules we were running without any real true understanding of the rules. It was a legitimate excuse to hang on to the game of “let’s pretend” well beyond the appropriate age. It was an entry point for making our own stories with pictures. For me, it was my entry into making my own comic books.

Is it so wrong that I don’t feel a connection to Gary Gygax? That I don’t feel compelled to draw an Elven Ranger with his hand held across his hearts or an Owl bear with a single tear rolling down his left cheek? I just don’t feel compelled to do that. I’m sorry.

That’s completely fair and honest. You don’t have to feel a connection to everyone that your peers does. I appreciate what Alan Moore has done for comics and I love his writing but I find him as a person to be kind of arrogant and insufferable in the way he treats his work as if it were unblemished holy scripture unworthy to be interpreted by mere mortals.

Even Gygax himself, I didn’t feel a need to do more than post a short note on Twitter saying I was sad to hear the news, but I didn’t think it warranted to come on here and write a seven paragraph tearful tribute to the man. And my site is (well, ostensibly at least) more in line with that sort of thing than PvPonline.com is.

Frankly, I’m disappointed by Kurtz’s actions, in his caving to reader pressure and in trying to be sincere when he wasn’t to finally coming clean only to be defensive for something that is really indefensible. Maybe next time Kurtz (and let this be a lesson to all nerd statesmen) will find tranquility in the power of remaining silent when you have nothing constructive to contribute.

I play games.

I play a lot of games, as a matter of fact. I play games all the time, in all aspects of my life. I create games. I purchase games. I turn mundane activities into little Calvinball-style games. I talk about games. I think about games, have conversations about them and debate their relative merits.

As a gamer, things like this forum at the recent Game Developers Conference get under my skin. The general thought process that leads people to think that games can be in some way significant isn’t what irritates me because I think games can be artistic, even capital-A “Art” and I think they can be socially significant and of course I believe they can enrich lives both by their discrete nature and by offering perspectives that may otherwise be difficult to grasp. But the deeper implication being pushed by this kind of self-important wankery—that games which do not aspire to Art or social relevance aside from their base value as “game” are somehow broken or useless—is what chaps my hide.

At its core, a game exists to entertain. Games create a parameterized experience by mechanically defining activity: The ruleset for a game dictates how “play” is conducted. But the function is to facilitate the entertainment. Obviously one could play Monopoly by moving as many squares as you wish each turn and collecting arbitrary or negotiated sums from those who land on your property, the “rules” exists only so far as the players adhere to them. But designers build their games from the perspective that the greatest enjoyment will come from participating within their suggested confines.

To suggest then that a game should aspire to something greater than entertainment first and foremost is to miss the point almost completely. Like a movie that is filmed solely to educate or repudiate, that goal may be achieved but only the masochistic or unwilling are likely to experience it because film’s principal motivation is entertainment. Those films which do offer commentary or open conversational doorways tend to do so effectively by remembering to first entertain and secondarily enlighten. This is particularly true with games, since I can imagine nothing more laborious than a socially relevant or intellectually stimulating game that failed to be enjoyable.

Playing games, for me, serves a number of purposes, because games offer a bevy of ancillary benefits aside from passing the time. For example, I play role-playing, multiplayer video games and party/board games because, again, I enjoy them but also I find that social interaction is much more readily achieved through shared play. I play single-player video games because in addition to being enjoyable I like the narrative aspects that are presented to be (very generally) more engaging than other narratives, certainly because I can incorporate play into a typically one-way experience. I engage in role-playing activities beyond mere play like game mastering and world building because it gives me a chance to use a defined framework for narrative creation and to share that creativity with others through a game context (back to the social element). I design games and formulate game elements within non-game activities to obviate the tedium of a typically unpleasant task or to exercise my capacity to add parameters to a broad and complex system that captures the essence of the subject at hand. I play historical games to provide an enjoyable context to educational pursuits.

And so on. There are strategy games that exercise my mind in ways other activities cannot, there are games with controversial themes that spark debate, there are visionary games that challenge assumptions, games that expand vocabularies… but more significant than all of that, there are games that are simply fun. Games that are pure game, like Yahtzee or Peggle or Tag or Hearts. These are games that require credibility-straining levels of effort to place into any sort socially relevant context and yet exist and thrive because plainly they are fun. To dismiss or chastise these games or even games like Gears of War or Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing or Fluxx which may potentially be cast as failures for their lack of lofty aspirations is missing the point entirely. Games don’t exist to try and “matter,” games matter because they exist.

It’s not that often that I allow my raw desires to dictate my actions. For example, if given half a chance I’d probably eat an entire package of Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies for dinner. But I refrain because my desire to eat 52,000 calories worth of cookies in one sitting is mitigated by my sense of responsibility to my own body.

I guess that’s what being an adult is, to the best of my observation: The impulses of childhood continue to exist and, to a certain degree, drive. But a conscious decision to ignore those impulses separates man from boy.

Still, occasionally, you have to toss the inner child a bone. As such I’m conceding to my id and ignoring the principles of maturity: I’m taking a day off of work tomorrow with the sole intention of playing Halo 3 all day.

What’s a little strange about all this is that I’m not even a super Halo nerd. I was far more enthusiastic about BioShock; I anticipate Orange Box and Mass Effect to a greater degree. But while those games offer experiences I crave, Halo represents a phenomenon I identify with. This isn’t just a game I’m interested in and looking forward to playing, it’s a cultural milestone that I want to be on the forefront as I experience. Halo 3 isn’t the kind of game I can snatch up in the bargain bin two years from now and say, “Oh hey, remember this? I should grab it now that it’s only ten bucks.” As an American gamer, someone who in a certain respect chronicles the progression of this hobby, it’s kind of a requirement that I experience this now.

And I do like Halo. It’s easy to fall into the trap of distancing oneself from the franchise because it’s almost trendy, like Madden. Gamers are a curious bunch, not entirely unlike music fans, feeling possessive of their passion and suspicious about any influx of new enthusiasts who might try to take away their carefully built communities of insular nerd princes. Many who spend days and weeks tucked away in some corner of a Halo multiplayer map will denounce the whole series publicly for fear of being too closely identified as a casual gamer.

I’m not so worried about all that. But Halo isn’t the end-all-be-all of games. What it does well it does very well and part of its strength lies in the way it crafts a very competent SF storyline. If no one cared about Master Chief and Cortana and the Arbiter, the series protagonist would have become just some other faceless (literally in this case) drone in the long line of power-armor wearing first-person avatars. But he does have appeal and his fate does matter because Bungie makes it matter by drawing us into the story.

Above all, this is why I won’t be working tomorrow. I confess that as patently ridiculous as the marketing deluge has been for this game, from my perspective it was hardly necessary. You know when they had me? The end of Halo 2. When Master Chief swore that he was here to finish the fight, I took the oath with him. I aim to see this thing through.

And I can’t let a silly thing like work get in my way.

The original name was “Revolution.” Perhaps it seemed a bit too bold, maybe a little too hyperbolic for their taste. But for the system that eventually became known as the Wii, the idea seems to have been pervasive from the very beginning: Do something new and different. Do something that is innovative; create a new framework for games.

It didn’t start with the Revolution, of course. Nintendo has been thinking about this for some time now. They’ve been talking this kind of new and unique experience thing since before the DS was little more than a gleam in their collective eye. Certainly from a completely functional and feature set perspective, this is exactly what they’ve done: Two screens on a handheld, one of them stylus-driven touch sensitive; included microphone on a handheld; a console with wireless, TV remote-style controllers using motion sensitivity and a separate attachment for a basic analog stick; a controller with a speaker in it. The list goes on. From a hardware design perspective, no one can argue that Nintendo is thinking outside the box.

Clearly Nintendo desires that these products be thought of as wildly creative, paradigm-shifting advancements in the world of video games. The conceptual push behind them is a desire to tap new corners of the market and appeal to people who don’t think of themselves as gamers, to broaden their user base to folks who would never consider playing—much less purchasing—a PSP or an XBox 360. In the meantime their words to the devoted hard core gamer amounts to “Plus, we’re offering you experiences you can’t get anywhere else.” Obviously Nintendo thinks they’re being as inclusive as possible and—oh, while they’re at it—revolutionizing video games.

Oh really?

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Witness as Todd Holmdahl, VP of Gaming and XBox Products Group—also known as the 360 hardware guy—clumsily dances around even the simplest of questions regarding the 360 hardware, future updates and the oft-reported Red Rings of Death.

This is getting a little ridiculous. Microsoft keeps calling the problem nothing more than the rumblings of a “vocal minority” but aside from the fact that every single forum, site and blog that I read (which is a lot) has at least one RRoD sufferer if not many, of the dozen or so people I personally know who own 360s, one of them has already had the problem.

Here’s why this is something Microsoft needs to address in a more decisive fashion: As much as I like the XBox 360—and I like it very much—I live in constant fear that it will fail on me. I fear the blazing heat in generates to the extent that though I want it to be (and have already begun setting it up as) the hub of my entertainment set-up, I feel compelled to turn it off every couple of hours and let it cool down. I have an extra one-year replacement plan from the store I bought it from (it was free), and I’m convinced that my unit will fail days or short weeks after that is no longer an option for me.

Microsoft has had a reliability problem for a long time now: It’s perhaps not a literal one, but it is one that exists in the buying public’s perception (remember the Blue Screen of Death? Of course you do). When people talk about the Red Rings of Death, whether it is a pervasive issue or not, it’s so easy for people to identify with (”Yeah, that sounds like Microsoft all right”) that it might as well be. The constant denials aren’t helping and interviews like this… I mean, why even grant the interview?

And as for the interviewer, I want to give Dean Takahashi the benefit of the doubt but what does it take for some journalist to start getting “answers” like this to finally snap and just say, “That’s not an answer to the question I just asked. How about you answer the question, jerk?”

Major Nelson’s latest podcast mentions a CNet article that tries to pinpoint the top five controllers of all time. The article itself admits it is completely subjective, but what they don’t explain is what they base their opinions on. Is it responsiveness? Adaptability? Comfort? What’s really odd is that when you look at the list, it’s like they aren’t taking any of those things into consideration. Here’s an overview of their list, with my opinions. Feel free to chime in.

Note, they listed them in chronological order, not via some kind of ranking order. I’m just mimicking their order.

Atari 2600

They must have used nostalgia for this entry because while I was only about six years old I recall this stick as being stiff, uncomfortable and imprecise. Historical, sure, but hardly “best of” worthy.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

I think this one was a little small; it worked for my little hands when I was in Jr. High, but I’d probably find it really uncomfortable now. I think it deserves consideration for adding the now-ubiquitous shoulder buttons and for paving the way for the diamond face buttons configuration, which is still being used three generations later.

Nintendo 64

Major Nelson and e both gripe about this and I couldn’t agree more that it’s a terrible addition. It did have some good innovations such as the analog stick, trigger underneath and the rumble “pak” which of course eventually became standard (until the odd exclusion from the PS3 Sixaxis). But the form factor was beyond awkward and the C buttons instead of a second analog stick was proven to be flawed pretty quickly.

Playstation 2 Dual Shock

e on the Major Nelson podcast gripes that the Dual Shock is a bit too dinky and I can see that, but I think it’s fairly small size helps make it lighter which is very important. Just ask anyone who had to wrestle with the original XBox controller.

XBox 360

This generation actually has some really great controllers no matter what system you choose (well, maybe not so much with the PSP, but it seems like CNet is sticking with the non-portables), but considering the odd lack of rumble on the Sixaxis and the necessary wild manipulations for Wii control, whose viability is filled with promise but we’re too close to be able to make reasonable evaluations, I’m thinking we gotta go with the 360’s. Wireless, alone, warrants strong consideration. The 360 controller—the wireless model at least—suffers from some mighty heft, but as far as general “hand-feel” and the broad level of control, it’s nearly flawless. I say nearly because I like to conveniently ignore the atrocity that is the D-Pad until it actively hampers my gaming experience.