I have a PS3, and it gets a fair bit of use. Let’s put it this way: if it got stolen from my basement tomorrow, I’d buy another one. I’ve had the system for a year now (almost to the day) and I’ve noticed that in the last 6-8 months I’ve played downloadable games almost exclusively. A friend of mine lent me Uncharted 2 months and months ago, I played about 90% of the way through it, and decided that I just couldn’t wait for it to end. When that happened, I said “this is silly… if I want it to end, I’ll make it end by not playing it anymore”. Then he lent me God of War 3. I plan to give that game a fair shake, but I’ve had it for 3 months and the disc has not once gone in my machine. Yet, a few nights a week, I still manage to find time for Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, Super Stardust HD, and various other $5-$10 PSN games.
Growing up through the Atari years, there were two things I didn’t care much for: Pac-Man and the concept of chasing high scores in games. I don’t know why I didn’t care about scores, but I just didn’t. Sounds strange, because without scores, what good is Atari? I don’t know, I guess I just liked short bursts of distraction. On a whim I downloaded Pac-Man CE-DX in December or so, and that game single-handedly made me do a 180 on both Pac-Man and chasing high scores. Through the excitement of the competition aspect of trying to get a score on the leaderboard and spending hours just trying to best my previous high by a few thousand, I realized what should have been obvious to me almost 30 years ago: when you’ve got something to shoot for, videogames are so much more fun. It was kind of like a gaming epiphany for me (if such a thing is possible). So now, I’ve dug out some of my Atari faves (Frostbite, Pressure Cooker, Kaboom! and many others) and have actually started tracking my scores and trying to improve them. My 95% complete MAME cabinet will have its ribbon cutting ceremony at an ideal time, because now I can start trying my skill and chasing scores on some great arcade classics (the usual suspects: DK, Q*bert, Frogger) as well as some others that I never even played until the advent of MAME (Pengo, Amidar, Popeye, and Qix immediately come to mind). I was out in my garage until 4am on the weekend bundled up in a few sweaters and sitting in front of a small space heater “testing” my machine… now let’s hope I ever actually get around to finishing it.
So, here I am a 33 year-old gamer that cut his teeth playing Combat and Space Invaders on Atari 2600 at the age of 5 in the early 80’s, and it took a PS3 game in the year 2011 to finally stoke my appreciation for Pac-Man and turn me into a competitive chaser of scores. Funny how things work.
Regarding the whole iOS game craze, my position is one of cautious support. Clearly, I’m the type of gamer who seeks out quick bursts of pick up and play action (as opposed to long, boring audio-visual wank-offs that require no skill at all—Uncharted 2, I’m looking at you), so many of the iOS games would seem to be right up my alley. I’ve got a handful on my iPod Touch and some of them really are quite cool. But there is definitely a hype machine behind games like Angry Birds, and it makes me feel uneasy. I can’t even remember the last time a single game—console, arcade, or otherwise—generated that much buzz. Hell, Conan O’Brien staged a live action game of Angry Birds on his show. Stuffy co-workers that fancy themselves way too sophisticated for videogames have it on their iPhones. I’m not anti-success, but whenever something gets THAT big, it seems like it is always followed by a million copycats and derivatives that want their piece of the pie, until finally, you’re left with piles and piles of sterile, lifeless trash with no personality or soul. It happens in music, too. Angry Birds seems to have garnered the elusive “hip” status as a “killer app” on what happens to be the trendiest and most “stylish” electronic gadget possibly ever. It’s a perfect storm of marketing brute force, with great power to influence the path forward in the game industry. As they say, with great power and influence comes great responsibility—let’s hope Angry Birds doesn’t go down in history as the beginning of the end.