Most of the time, when it comes to the current generation of video games, I feel really old. There’s a lot of things about the current gaming scene that piss me off, and I really wish I could figure out why they did. I think it has something to do with the fondness for the games I played as a youth. As a fan of side-scrolling beat-’em-ups, vertical and horizontal shoot-’em-ups, 2D fighting games, and puzzle games, I really feel like I’m left out of the current generation. Sure, there are a few games that I enjoy, but I often find myself going back to the old staples of my childhood, and I think I’ve found out why…

- The rise of the first person shooter. I don’t really have a hatred for the FPS. One of my favorite N64 games was an FPS (obviously, it was Goldeneye 007). I just can’t get into them. To me, they are pretty much all the same; you run around shooting at things, and the story is irrelevant. Just don’t shoot your teammates and you’re okay. The story is secondary. Not only that, but there is a serious overtone to a lot of these games. The main reason Goldeneye was so fun was because Axel and I would turn on paintball mode and giggle at shooting the walls, or turn on one-hit kills but not give any weapons out. There hasn’t really been a fun FPS unless I missed something. That, and the first person perspective usually makes me dizzy.

- Online gaming. Oh, sure, this is great when you live in a city where you don’t know anybody, but I’m not a big fan of not being able to see who’s beating the snot out of me. That, and it seems a lot of people throw hissyfits over really simple things in online gaming, such as people getting upset whenever they get beat and throwing racial/sexual slurs around, or accusing the other people of cheating, or whatnot. The only real game I’ve felt comfortable playing online so far has been Smash Brothers Brawl, just because I don’t need to hear a discussion about how drunk you are or how hard a certain part is, I just want to play a game and thankfully, Nintendo doesn’t have voice chat on the game. And yes, I know I can mute mics, but I shouldn’t have to.

- Downloadable add-on content that you have to pay for. This just pisses me off. A new game can cost anywhere between $50-$60, and that’s a lot of coin to drop on anything entertainment-wise. Then, after buying the game, you find that they’ve added more stuff to it. Well, that’s a patch, right? PC gamers have been familiar with that for years. My problem is that they expect you to pay for this extra content to help add replay value to the game. I have a problem with that. I paid a pretty decent chunk of cash for a game, and now I’m told that my game is incomplete and, in order to have the complete game, I have to pay another five bucks. You know what that says to me? "We rushed this out to market because we couldn’t wait to make money off of you, and now we want to complete the game, but you have to give us more money or you can feel left out." Pathetic.

- Emphasis on graphics over gameplay. A lot of the games today look pretty, there’s no doubt. However, a lot of the games with awesome visuals play like your character runs in mud, or features unresponsive controls. I was excited when Street Fighter EX was coming out, because hey, it’s Street Fighter in 3D! That’s got to be awesome, right? Well, the game moved at a snail’s pace, the controls acted as if your input was merely a suggestion, and the game just seemed too dark in the visuals for some reason. And yet, people bought it because it was Street Fighter in 3D. A lot of people buy games today because of the graphics, yet ignore games with great gameplay because the graphics aren’t "next-gen" enough for them. There’s only a certain cap that technology is going to be able to hit when it comes to graphics, and what happens when we reach it?

I guess maybe I’m just too simplistic, but I have more fun with the downloaded games on the Xbox 360 (huge recommendation for N+, by the way, and you should go pick that up ASAP) than I do with about 98% of the library. Why’s that? Because they are simple to pick up, hard to master, and fun. I just wish other game companies would remember why people play video games to start with… to have fun.

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