This is a concept I've had brewing for awhile, and if you dislike it, rest secure in the
knowledge that, as it's a one-off special, it will be the first and only of its kind.
It's early 2013.
And with swirling rumors permeating every square inch of the professional gaming media,
the trafficking of unsubstantiated and often fallacious rumors, after all, being their
primary purview...
I figured that regardless of what the coming year bears for gaming, one simple fact is
true... the seventh and most recent console generation... is at last drawing to a close.
But before slapping a toetag on this croaker and relegating it to an urn on the mantlepiece
of gaming history, it's time to sharpen the scalpels and discern the cause of death.
With most generations, it's natural causes, but with recent events, and the industry's
dramatic crash over the past four years, I'll not rule out homicide.
Labored analogies aside, it's time for The Rageaholic's comprehensive Post-Mortum...
of the 7th Console Generation!
If you're going to start, you may as well do so at the top... and no console stood more
proudly atop the monetary mountain this generation than the Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' of video
game consoles: The Nintendo Wii.
And while it's a petty and trifling complaint, I'll itemize it all the same: Given the fact
that it was arguably the first console in history to properly tap the power of motion
control and capitalize on the burgeoning casual market, Nintendo should have gone with their
first instinct, and called this system the 'Revolution'.
Because for all its latter-day failings, and they are legion, the Nintendo Wii for a very
brief moment in time... was a motherfucking revolution.
It had the buzz, it had the audience, and for awhile, it definitely had the games.
And at a relatively humble $250 pricepoint, the Nintendo Wii was never once not worth
owning!
So prodigious was Nintendo's lead, that even after four straight years of miserably diminished
returns, The Big N's rivals are still effectively fighting for a distant second place.
It seems like a strange thing to say, for a console that was effectively the 'Tickle
Me Elmo' of 2007... but in many ways, this is a system that's deeply underrated.
In terms of motion control and user interface alone, if nothing else.
Prior to the Wii, gamers' only experience with motion controlled gaming were third-party
bargain-basement peripherals like the Sega Interactor.
Which, as anyone who's ever used the fuckin' thing will attest, is touchier than a titty-bar
for the blind.
Nintendo actually managed to make motion control... a viable interface for contemporary gaming...
an aspiration the industry has made repeated, embarrassingly-poorly executed attempts at...
since the late fuckin' '80s... but Nintendo finally cracked the fuckin' code.
You can say all you want about Nintendo's hype, marketing and mainstream buzz, but at
the end of the day, for innovating in that singular regard...
Nintendo deserved every red penny they made off the system... and then subsequently wasted
on the Wii U. I wax decidedly negative on modern gaming,
and with good reason, given the developments of the last four years.
But mark my fucking words when I say that history will remember the Nintendo Wii...
as the Nintendo Revolution.
Godspeed, Nintendo Wii.
For the 'proper' gamers.
then, the big winner this go-around was undoubtedly the Xbox 360.
They soundly trounced both Sony and Nintendo for over a year, the first feat of its kind
for a North American video game console, and to this day, they continue to 0enjoy an insurmountable
lead in software sales over 0the Playstation 3, even without the benefit of virtually ANY
Japanese sales whatsoever.
You need to pause and process that for just a moment:
Because the Xbox 360... outselling the Playstation 3... even though, for the past three years,
the console is no longer sold in the largest video game consumer market in the world?
It's like watching Glass Joe beat Mike Tyson's ass like a narc at a crackhouse with one hand
tied behind his back!
Look, for all the negativity I've hurled Microsoft's way, and in recent years it's become positively
copious, that is a feather that can and should never be removed from Microsoft's cap!
Simply put, Microsoft found their wings this generation.
After a promising, but ultimately disappointing launch of the original Xbox, they rallied
the troops, hit the skids early and walked out of this generation with possibly the most
impressive launch of any company this generation, which may seem quizzical, given the fact that
I just creamed my long johns over the Nintendo Wii's success, but rageaholics, let's make
one thing perfectly clear: In commerce, there are two kinds of success.
There's 'success'.
And then there's 'Oprah success'.
The defining qualifier for which is simple: When Oprah devotes an episode to discussing
your product...
you are officially Oprah-successful.
The Xbox 360... has closed the wide sales gap between itself and the Wii... without
the benefit of ever being Oprah-successful, and that is a herculean feat all its own.
Perhaps more importantly, and rarely touched upon, is that the Xbox 360 served as the centrepiece
for a rapid, industry-wide developmental paradigm shift.
In short, we went from a nihongocentric model that placed the wants and needs of the lucrative
Japanese gaming industry above all else...
to a more diverse, European and American-dominated industry that now even has titans of Japanese
industry, people with surnames like Kojima, Yamaoka and Mikami that everyday gamers recognize,
outright admitting that Japan has been left in the dust.
Call me a nationalist, but I take some pride in knowing that North American RPG developers
have gone from a quaint novelty with games like Wizardry, Daggerfall and Ultima... to
full-on running the fuckin' show with titles like Deus Ex, Fallout and Skyrim!
And while we often dwell on the homogenized progeny that recent development has born,
let's pause for a moment and contemplate the positive side of the more westernized video
game development culture.
Remember in the late-'90s, toward the end of the PS1's life cycle, when it often felt
like you were a hapless bystander, subjected to a ceaseless barrage of melodramatic cutscenes,
turn-based grinding and linear gameplay?
Well now, most of that shit is real time and rendered in fuckin' engine.
Most of those games are open-ended.
Sometimes sandboxes, sometimes featuring a simple narrative fork.
But it's a very strong step in the right direction, and a welcome change from the same old vapid
shit Japan was cranking out for the better part of a decade!
Remember how if you played a game from a company like Konami or Capcom back in the day, and
felt dissatisfied or wanted to make suggestions to the developers, you were effectively S.O.L.
not just due to the absence of a viable audience feedback structure but, quite frankly due
to Japanese developmental arrogance?
Simply put, those companies didn't give one iota of a fuck what you thought about their
games, because, by god, they're Squaresoft and they know better than you?
Well, that's at least partially mollified.
The Stanley Woos of the world are a negative byproduct of a very positive, primarily western
development... and that is that video game developers actually now open forums, incite
their audiences to disseminate their opinion, and occasionally actually give a shit what
gamers think!
NONE of that would have ever happened... if Japanese developers were still cock of the
walk.
And the success of the Xbox 360 is seated squarely in the eye of that hurricane.
If Sony had remained dominant this generation, gaming would have continued to be the feudal
dictatorship it was during the PS2 era.
And for that alone, I consider the 360 a resounding success, and a very welcome alternative to
the other two, far more japanese-centric console manufacturers!
Failure rates that rival Bob Dole's crank notwithstanding.
A hearty Godspeed to the Xbox 360!
Sony, on the other hand, took one squarely on the chin, this go-around.
And in the cock, and in the throat, and in the temple... and in the brain.
After a tepid, somewhat debatable victory with the original Playstation and then flat
out running away with the the entire goddamn console generation with the PS2...
Sony, quite simply, indulged their corporate, engineering arrogance to a repulsive degree
and pissed away every cent of their PS2 profit pile.
Launching out of the gate at a much-maligned $4-and-599 u.s.
dollars... $599 u.s.
dollars... $5-- *ahem* at a price-point that made purchasing a gold-plated, space-age NASA
supercomputer a more cost-effective alternative, they'd already blown their entire fucking
foot off.
But the truth didn't truly show in the muck until they imbibed in one last indulgence...
they allowed Sony's engineering and R&D division to run roughshod over Sony's corporate leadership.
They slapped a prohibitively expensive Blu-Ray drive onto the machine in order to win a format
war that - seven fucking years later - consumers still aren't interested in buying, went ahead
and crammed a laughably inefficient cell processor that ultimately underperformed when compared
to the competition into their waffle-iron-lookin' chassis, and myriad other masturbatory tech
that gamers were ultimately far less interested in than whether or not they had some fuckin'
games to play... which, for the first three years of the console's life cycle, they most
decidedly fuckin' didn't.
To make matters worse, when R&D unsurprisingly went over-budget while designing the console...
they concealed this fact from the company's CEO until it was too late.
Meaning every solitary Playstation 3 had to be sold at a massive loss until four years
into its death cycle.
The inclusion of this exotic, and ultimately overstated, tech was proven an even more disastrous
decision, as even seasoned third-party developers found themselves laboring to develop games
on the console's needlessly convoluted cell processor architecture.
Some developers, like Valve's Gabe Newell - were even famously quoted as initially refusing
to ever produce a game for the console - presumably while feeding a Twi'Lek dancer to his pet
rancor.
While that rhetoric was ultimately proven more empty than a Kardashian bookshelf, as
appears quite evident in exceedingly glitchy modern PS3 releases like Skyrim and Red Dead
Redemption... clearly...
when it comes to the cell processor, developers - much like a Kobe Bryant dinner date - are
still fucking struggling.
Sony's responded by locking developers into absurdly restrictive first-party contracts
to develop games exclusively for their flagging systems, and in many cases this has come at
the expense of the developers' livelihoods.
While Sony could get away with this underhanded bullshit in the PS2 Era thanks to a raging
case of 'Only Game in Town' Syndrome, when a company signs on to develop for Sony, only
to release one flop and find themselves liquidated by their parent entity... the business practices
of Sony Electronic Entertainment begin to lapse into the downright nefarious.
This generation has seen the death of an unprecedented number of Sony-exclusive developers, most
of whom were shuttered by Sony themselves, or simply severed from the corporate teat
and left to die a slow, withering death in a fiscal wasteland after one failed release.
The message to first-party exclusive developers from Sony HQ was simple: 'We want your games.
But after that, you can take a long walk off a short bridge.'
Zipper Interactive, makers of SOCOM and MAG, SuperBot Games, a studio formed by Sony for
the express purpose of cranking out Playstation All-Smash, was exiled from the kingdom just
last month, Sony Entertainment Liverpool (also known as Psygnosis) makers of WipeOut and
Colony Wars, Sony Entertainment Cambridge, makers of MediEvil and the PSP version of
Little Big Planet, 989 Studios, makers of Syphon Filter and latter-day Twisted Metal,
Lightbox Interactive, Incognito Entertainment, the list is endless.
And yet frothing fanboys will hail Electronic Arts as the Neon Antichrist as they steadily
lead BioWare on their long walk to the gallows to join their compatriots at Pandemic and
Westwood, while ignoring that Sony set the fucking mold for this profligate behavior.
I'd love to focus on the positive with Sony this generation.
But for Sony, this truly is a post-mortum.
The PSVita and the PSP Go were dead on arrival.
Fuck, even the Playstation 3, after 'righting the ship' and supposedly selling more consoles
than the Xbox 360 - a figure that's bloated by the fact that the PS3 is sold in more territories
than the Xbox 360 - is still a resounding failure.
For Sony, there are very few successes, and a fucking hope chest filled with festering
failures, and that's all they have to take away from the 7th Console Generation.
And I'm sorry to say, but promoting Kaz Hirai, the man largely responsible for launching
the torpid tandem of the PSP and PS3 to 'clean corporate house' is like handing a pyromaniac
a zippo and telling him to fight a fuckin' forest fire!
Sony could have co-developed a more profitable technodrome with Krang and the fucking Shredder...
and actually been perceived as less evil in the aftermath.
Given the sheer number of divisions from which Sony is positively haemorrhaging money...
correcting their past transgressions with the PS4 may actually be too little, too late.
But I'm far from hoping from their fall.
As wrestling fans have learned from WWE's last decade of dominance, an absence of viable
competition is a prelude to self-destruction.
So hang in there, if possible, Sony, because nobody wants a two-world order, mlet alone
a Microsoft or Nintendo dictatorship.
Godspeed into the afterlife, Playstation 3!
The seventh console generation was characterized by highs that rivaled Everest... and lows
that outstripped the Mariana Trench.
I firmly believe that history will record this as easily the most polarizing and controversial
generation the industry has ever seen.
In the immortal words of Shakespeare's MacDuff 'Such welcome and unwelcome things at once...
'Tis hard to reconcile.'
Which, of course, he uttered shortly before he chopped the king's fuckin' head off and
paraded it around Scotland like Rowdy Roddy Piper of Peyote buttons.
Bringing home one final point to all three major companies.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft...
Tread fucking lightly.
I'm RazörFist.
God - fuckin' - Speed!