The Dord of Darien

Making games is hard

Or, at least, that’s what some crybaby at Bethesda thinks. I guess it requires such a huge amount of work to get every shade of brown properly calibrated for one of Bethesda’s epic, eighty-hours-if-you-don’t-know-the-solution, eleven-minutes-if-you-do brownathons that it’s utterly unfair of us shithead gamers to expect them to brown up multiple hardware platforms. As such, this individual asshole thinks there should be only one hardware platform available. He even has the brilliant, forward-thinking hubris to declare it "good for gaming." Hey, clearly anything that makes my job easier is good for Society as a whole!

So let’s say there was only the Playstation 3. That would be awesome, right? We’d get to play Mario Galaxy and Ratchet & Clank, but we wouldn’t have to buy two consoles! Score! Oh, but, wait. Mario Galaxy uses the Wiimote for non-trivial things, huh. So it would actually have to be substantially rewritten to work on the PS3. And Wii Sports, Skyward Sword, and FlingSmash? Those wouldn’t work at all. So I guess nobody could play those. That would be awesome for gaming!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. "Well, asshole, Sony could release a controller that is a Wiimote, and then they’d work fine." Set aside the fact that now you’re buying a whole bunch of extra hardware that’s rapidly destroying your uni-console dreams — would that really happen? I mean, we’re not talking about a situation where, suddenly, all the Wiis in the world cease to exist but the games are left behind; we’re talking about a situation where the Playstation 3 was the only console in existence. At all. Nobody’d be making a peripheral to support those games because those games never would have existed. Is that good for gaming? Sure, maybe you don’t give a shit about FlingSmash, but I’ll bet somebody does. Is this some sort of collectivist wet dream where he just accepts that he needs to sacrifice for the greater good? Or are we allowed to say that, yeah, the guy who likes FlingSmash is totally fucked by your scheme?

Maybe if you’re Bethesda, and you just make the exact same game over and over again but with higher-resolution brown sewer rats, and you’re so overworked remaking your sewage texture for the new consoles that you barely even have time to sue Notch for hilariously phony reasons, you honestly can’t understand why people might like variety. And if you’re lovably beefwitted Jason Hall, and your schedule only allows for 30 minutes of Call of Duty in between your morning routine of curling a Mazda Miata and your afternoon routine of having sex with fifteen women, you may not realise that people don’t all want to play the exact same games you do. But really, guys, your plan to make your own jobs easier by getting rid of all that goddamn innovation and competition and variety? Not exactly in everybody’s best interests.

Oh, and, Jason? Don’t want to tell you your job or nuthin’, but it’s really, really weird to refer to the market leader as a "weak player."

August 5th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Games | one comment