Tunnels of Doom

I’ve been half-following the news coming out of GDC this year and among all the chatter I found a little slice of news that really bummed me out: The DSi may very well have exclusive titles. The reason this is frustrating is because I buy game hardware to facilitate use, not out of some sense of brand loyalty or for some nebulous potential. I bought an XBox after KotOR was released, I bought a 360 for Dead Rising, I bought a DS for Advance Wars and New SMB, etc. My intial thought when they announced the DSi was that it was interesting but ultimately irrelevant because my DS Lite works just fine and the additional features seemed more like nice-to-haves rather than pivotal upgrades. Cameras? No thanks, I have enough questionable quality personal-electronics-based photography equipment. SD card slot? Nice, but hardly necessary. Bigger screens? Again, nifty but not mandatory. And the exclusion of the GBA slot makes it significantly less attractive than the Lite to me because I still play GBA games.

But the fact that Nintendo seems willing to release games that won’t work on the Lite means that the potential exists for me to want both a DSi and an DS Lite (the latter being my defacto GBA player). I suppose the same effect could be achieved with a DSi and a Game Boy Micro but either way I’m looking at two systems. I was willing to step away from the Game Boy backwards compatibility but introducing a schism in the user base on the same basic hardware is just mean.

It occurs to me that if someone ever wanted to get me the best present ever they could get me something like a GP2X and load it up with emulators for NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBA, Sega Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo and MAME so I can move on past my infatuation with old school games knowing I have access to them without having to take the bitter medicine of “official channels.” If wanting that makes me a bad citizen in the gaming world, then brand me a traitor. I’ve easily dropped over $100,000 on games in my lifetime so maybe the consumer overlords will forgive me this one little lapse if I promise to keep doing my part to drive the industry on the front end of the cycle. Wanting to play Battletoads from time to time doesn’t stop me from buying the new Call of Duty games so cut me some slack here.

What with the new HD rig and all, plus the new-trinket fun of being a new PS3 owner, I’ve been thinking about the Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3. Now, obviously experience isn’t something I can rely on here since I’ve had the PS3 for significantly less time than the 360 and direct comparison is by no means going to be a sure thing either since I have mostly avoided playing the same game on both systems.

But what I can do is provide some non-fanboy comparison of the PS3 to the 360 that doesn’t focus on the number or quality of titles for any respective system. I think we all realize by now that the Xbox has a richer and more robust library than the PS3, so that’s hardly the point here. My comparison points are below, but please note this is merely a trivial exercise. I’m certainly not making purchase recommendations here, as far as I’m concerned the only reason to choose one console over another is the available games.

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In Part I I detailed the games I played this year. It’s not strictly necessary to read that list to understand what I’m doing here, but it may be useful if you see something omitted because I only pulled games for these awards from that list. After all, how can I comment or recognize a game I never played? So before you get upset, check the list and make sure I played it. If I missed a game you thought was fantastic this year, feel free to send me suggestions.

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You can’t say it was a bad year for games. This year, for me especially, was a banner gaming year and even though my best tabletop/role-playing gamer friend up and bailed on me early in the year I managed to play a ton of games.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s time to evaluate some of the games and look back on what transpired and single out some titles that were exceptional in some way or another. Since there was so much gaming (especially video gaming) I’m splitting the posts into two parts: Part I is where I break down what I played this year and Part II will be the actual awards. You might think of this as an uber-Gaming Weekend.

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In the July 2007 issue of Official XBox Magazine, there is an opinion piece by Tim Schafer where he waxes thoughtful about his 360:

…The single greatest achievement of the XBox is not its performance or any of the fancy graphics features, but in how I interact with the machine. The relationship you have with your XBox is the most next-gen thing about it.

He goes on to describe what he means by this primarily in terms of how the Live features dictate his gaming or the progression he goes through between powering on the system and actually firing up a game and summarizes the whole thought with this:

I’m turning on the machine before I know what I’m going to play. Instead of thinking, “I’m going to play Gears of War,” I’m thinking, “I’m going to play some XBox.”

I think he’s on to something here but he stops way short of describing what it really means for a console to be next-gen.

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