I used to play video games a lot when I was in high school. Like, a fucking lot. Some days I'd be putting 8 hours into a video game all the while going to school and having a social life. Thankfully my social life transferred over into gaming. Most of my best friends had Xbox Live and we'd voice chat on there for hours while we played. It was just a part of growing up and being kids. As you may remember, I recently wrote a blog post about my falling out of love with video games and so, after several suggestions from readers, I decided to see if it was just a phase, if I had finally "grown up" or if I just hate having fun.
Someone suggested that I seek out games/genres that I had never really played before -- this meant J-RPG's and post-N64 Nintendo. I tried some out and thought that all was lost because of my growing hatred while the controller was in my hand. In fact, I think that I hated video games a little more after playing some of the newer Zelda and Final Fantasy games. So I wanted to go an entirely different route -- revisit some of the older games that I sunk weeks and weeks, months and months, what felt like years and years into.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and
Halo: Reach. Dear god do I love these games. I really thought that I was just completely done with FPS' and that the genre had lost its appeal to me. Not the case at all, if anything this has made me realize that it's the games themselves, not the type of game which has been turning me off. Halo and COD4 are both FUN games, either epitomizing the series or the starting point for something new. I'm sure I put more hours into Halo 2 and Halo 3 but I can't exactly play 2 online and 3 is in a deep, dark place in Michigan known as under my bed. So Reach it was. Now I'm sure that a lot of it is nostalgia. I'm an extremely nostalgic person, sometimes to a fault, so this hits all the right notes. The maps in both of these games are etched so hard into my memory that I can close my eyes and walk perfectly around them. It's that bad. So the cards were stacked in gamings favor for this and I must say, I think I may have been won back.
The recent announcement of
Halo: The Master Chief Collection and the rumored
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Collection and
Gears of War Collection show that my hobby of gaming just may continue, but not in the way it did before. These are the same games I've played before, just with some updated graphics and, sometimes, a new engine. But that's really the point in my enjoyment of it. I don't want to have to learn an entirely new game and maps. If I did that, I wouldn't be playing a franchise game like either of these. It's kind of sad, I remember my dad using the same reasoning for not wanting to play video games whenever I'd try to prod him into a game of Madden. "It's too much work, I can't invest the time to be good." At the time I just saw it as an old-person-response (my dad was like 35 at the time. That's old to young me) and moved on. Now I get it.
I've actually had several discussions with friends recently about the state of gaming. I seem to be the only one not upset about the fact that all these games are being remade for Next-Gen. They all claim that they want new content, not another remake. Maybe if original content hadn't disappointed me so much for the past few years, then maybe I'd share their sentiment. But unfortunately the state of gaming is sad one. Games are constantly being released broken just because developers are able to release patches for them and so a release date is not the ultimate quality control for them. Except it is to this gamer. I'm sick of broken games being released just to make a deadline. As soon as it trickled into my beloved Mass Effect series, I knew we were in for trouble. Then the debacle known as Battlefield 4 happened and here we are -- hesitant at every release. Will it be broken? Will I even be able to play on Day One (*ahem*Titanfall).
The lying going on in the videogame industry is worse than ever. E3 seems to just be an opportunity to promise original content that never ends up delivering. I quite enjoy the recently released Watchdogs and it's one of my favorite games for Xbox One. However, the graphics are not even a sliver of what we were promised when the game was first announced. Hell, we were treated to "gameplay video" that looked like it was the future of gaming. Cut to release and it looks about on par with Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V. And yeah, in case you weren't aware, that was for LAST generation. It's made it so I don't believe anything going on at E3. The only thing I can trust is an update to my favorite from the past. Kind of sad.
I suppose I'm just retreating into what's familiar due to the fact that I have no faith in original content. I've been disappointed too many times. I'm the type of person that learns from experience and as of this point in my life, I know that if it's not coming from Rockstar, then chances are 50/50 that it's going to suck. These upcoming remakes are not just that. It's not like they're replacing voice actors and changing what we once knew. This is a remastering of what I consider to be some of my favorite games of all time. And they couldn't have come at a more pivotal times. Who knows, given a little more time, I may have been forced to grow up.
As if.
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