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By: Ian Essling
Years ago, computer and video games took skill. On the Sega Genesis, if you didn't throw the ball at your receiver at the right time in College Football 97, you didn't complete the pass. In Goldeneye 64 , if you didn't aim your gun at the enemy and pull the trigger, you didn't kill them (believe me, I learned the latter the hard way many, many times).
Those were the days; those with skills won, and those without went home licking their wounds, swallowing their pride, and hoping to improve before the next gaming session.
Being good at a game took some effort; not a monumental/obsessive 15 hours a day practicing kind of effort, but at least someone couldn't pick up a brand new game and be "owning" in an hour.
Those days are sadly gone. With the advent of auto-aim, auto-pass catch, and auto-everything else, games just aren't what they used to be.
I probably sound a crotchety old guy yelling at the whippersnappers running around in front of his house with this article, but in my ripe old age of 21, that's almost what I feel like sometimes when I see how absurdly easy new games have become, and how punk kids think they are "all that" because they can master multiplayer Halo in an hour.
Newsflash: that game is not difficult, it has no plot, and Master Chief is no match for a crowbar (inside PC vs console joke).
I will admit that I expect the easiness, to an extent, from console games. Consoles are already operating at such a handicap comparing to PC games (with regards to graphics and controls, mostly) that you have to dumb down the game a bit to make it work.
After all, when you have an X-Box controller that has, what, two-dozen buttons, and you face that against a keyboard and a mouse that has over a hundred keys and the most dynamic controller in existence, there are going to be allowances.
However, even PC gaming, the most hallowed and uncorrupted form of gaming in my book, has seen some disturbing cross pollination from the console gaming wave of luxury. The first time I played Counter Strike , I died so fast and so many times, I had no clue what was going on.
From my vantage point, enemies appeared from nowhere, my weapon never fired correctly and I spent a lot of time studying the floor and the ceiling.
I ended the game with one kill to match 25 deaths, and knew then and there that if I wanted to play the game against the type of people that just gave me a thrashing, I had to put in a bit of time to learn the ropes.
This is no the case anymore. Now, you can pick up a game and "learn" it in an hour or two. What happened to destroy gaming as we know it?
Well, the problem is something that, in my opinion, can be described in two words: "The Mainstream." You've heard the term before, I'm sure. "The Mainstream" is what "everyone" is doing, don't you know?
The "Mainstream" likes results, and they like those results quickly, with a bottle of Dasani on the side, thank you.
Counter Strike for PC was one of the most popular PC games of all time, but it never received a following from "The Mainstream" until a butchered and stripped version of the game appeared on consoles, complete with auto-aim, practice bots and simplistic weapon controls. Soon after, the butchery extended to the newest version of the PC version of the game.
It seems that now, no one wants to own a game for months before being able to be competitive; they want to sit down and immediately be a master at the game.
No one wants to put hard work into anything any more, least of all a game, and that's just a sad development in my eyes.
I always loved the challenge of learning a new game, and I relished the ass-beatings that you have to endure on the way up the ladder.
Now, an afternoon in front of a screen and you've learned all you can learn from the game.
Our society's pathetic "instant gratification" attitude is bad enough in the context of the Iraq War or other things, but now it's even polluting our games. |
