Hi, everyone. I’ve brought you many game reviews such as; The Legend of Zelda, The Wind Waker, Chaos World, and Actraiser. I usually bitch about gaming in my reviews, so this time, I’m just going to bitch about gaming—satirically of course—no review.

 

This all began when I first learned about Steam. Reading through what Steam is, and how the platform works, I couldn’t help but feel out of touch. I mean, it’s awesome for game developers, indie or otherwise, who want to release games and get traction, but I don’t get why gamers would buy games through Steam and then play them on Steam, but then I had to consider just what gaming is, or rather, what it is to me.

 

Like most dudes in their 30s, I began my gaming sojourn with an Atari. I think it was the 2600, but it might have been anything. From the Atari, I was upgraded to the NES. My first game was the Mario and Duckhunt twofer. They were games. I played them. They were okay. Then, I got Simon’s Quest, and you can read my Castlevania reviews here.

Simon’s Quest blew my shit. The music, the story, the monsters, the magic, the mayhem! Oh my God, that was some serious shit to me, and I was like 6 years old then. Games went from incomprehensible lines and pixels, to plumbers jumping on mushrooms, to bad ass vampire slayers destroying evil curses, and then I got Life Force. Holy freaking cow, games then turned into a space adventure, fighting mind-boggling aliens through unimaginable alien worlds!

Holy fracking shit, I then got Megaman 2! Robots running and gunning, blowing other robots to shit, and stealing their weapons only to fight more, bigger, badder robots?!?! WHOAA!!!

Of course, I calmed down a little after that. R-Type wasn’t a novelty. Final Fantasy wasn’t a magical journey. I liked those games, but the feelings evoked were never the same. It’s like the first time you get laid; you, like, can’t believe it’s happening, and then it’s over. Sure, you do it again, and you get better, and sometimes things are different, but it’s never the same as your first time no matter how bad your first time was.

So, to me, gaming is like sex? Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, right, Steam, and all that.

Yeah, so gaming, for me, was a way to immerse myself in a foreign world where there were new rules and new adventures, and then there were multiplayer games. This is back when multiplayer games were played by people in the same room, on the same console, looking at the same T.V. screen. Yeah, it was a great way to get socially awkward kids, who were bad at sports, together and do something they liked, socially, together, physically, in the same room.

Now, most multiplayer games are played alone, which is weird to me. It’s cool that people from different countries and cultures can do something together, but no one is hanging out in the same basement, playing games together as a social gathering. I mean, these are games. They just happen to be video games. Would you want to play Monopoly with three other people in three other countries? Games are supposed to being people together, but I digress.

The real question is: Why do we like videogames? Why do we play them? The sights, the sounds, the stimulus? Sure, but they also evoke emotions, memories, and we often enjoy something that someone else imagined; something we could never imagine ourselves.

Now, the same thing can be said for books, T.V., and movies, and maybe this is why some people like watching other people play videogames, but that’s another concept that blows my shit to dust. People watch other people play videogames.

I like books. I read about things I could never do, like, say, fall in love with a vampire. Can’t happen IRL. I like movies because I get to see things I can’t really see, like a dragon setting a village on fire. I like T.V. because I get to see people do things that people don’t really do, and the consequences are often humorous; I like comedy shows like Seinfeld; yeah, those guys would’ve been dead or jailed long before season 9, but, here’s the kicker, with a videogame, I can interact with all those qualities.

I can’t play a movie, book, or T.V. show, but I can play, interact with, a videogame, and suffer consequences like a game over. I can share those interactions with other people in the same room as me when playing multiplayer games. I have no desire to watch someone play Wind Waker unless that someone is in the same room with me, and I can fuck with them. Then, they hand me the controller, and we take turns, but the idea is that it’s a social gathering with gaming as the activity. Otherwise, I’m just gonna’ pop in The Edge of Tomorrow!

This makes me wonder why gaming companies even release games anymore. Why don’t they just make FMV shows? If people wanna’ watch a game, watch an FMV show. I loved Reboot. I love watching MLP and Overwatch, too, but that shit’s on special sites. You know what I mean!!!

On the other hand, I can’t judge or condemn people for what they like. I also support E-sports. I mean, gaming contests have existed since gaming was a thing, and if someone who plays basketball for a living can earn a living, why not someone who plays NBA Live? A game is a game, right? And if we watch people play real games, why not watch them play virtual games or video games?

I could play basketball, but I’d rather watch it on T.V., so who can say what’s what?

I guess, in the end, I just feel out of touch. There are so many games out there, good and bad, that I will never play them all. I’m not going to download every single NES rom from emuparadise. I’m not going to get to play every game on the SNES. Hell, I just learned about Neopets at the beginning of 2019. It took me 14 years to learn that the game existed, so I have so many games to discover and play, for better or worse, that I’m just not willing to exert the effort required to stay on top of the contemporary gaming trends.

I think the newest game I played was Ark, and that shit fell flat on its face after like 6 months.

Fortunately, indie game developers are making more and games for dudes like me. Unfortunately, I don’t know where those games are released or how I can play them. I guess I could sign up for a Steam account and even buy Steam hardware, but then I’d be saving my games and game files to the Steam cloud sever, and if people stop playing on Steam then all that shit vanishes, but my NES still works, and even if it didn’t, I could buy one of those mini-NES’s with the built in games.

For me, the whole point of gaming is to bring people together, but it seems like technology is pushing people apart, and we’re trying to make games like real life, but if real life was so great, we wouldn’t be escaping it to play games, get me?

I mean, consider that before movies, we had books. Now, we have movies…but we still have books! To me, the NES is like a book, and no matter how great it is to own every copy of Harry Potter on your e-reader, it’s so much cooler to own the whole print series, and you read it over and over again, right? You don’t read it once, and then trade it in for A Song of Ice and Fire, right?

I don’t know. Maybe, I’m just getting too old for this shit. Oh, yeah, Harry Potter and A Song of Ice Fire all suck, so eat that!

Anyway, you can find and read all of my game reviews here! Thanks for reading this post about my issues with aging and gaming. Make sure to fuck around this website and check out my original stories.