G-pinions

There are many, many, many reasons to hate this most heinous of companies. Many. They are the worst, most evil company, by far, in the video game industry. And, yes, I know full well that Microsoft is also in the industry.

What fuels my hatred so? Well, it's all rather simple. EA is more concerned with making a huge profit than making quality games and turning people's frowns upside down. A video game company whose only motivation is to make money is an inherently bad company. They are not concerned with making art; they are concerned with making Benjamins. This is wrong.

4 and a half years ago, a company who I have never been a huge fan of released a system that blew me away. Prior to the release of the Sega Dreamcast, the only Sega product I owned was a used Genesis II. They make great games, always have and always will, but I always found their systems inferior to their competitors. A friend in my youth was raised by two well meaning but very ignorant parents who bought him the Master System instead of the far superior Nintendo Entertainment System. I played many games at his house, none of them all too memorable.

I was given a Genesis and SNES in 1991 for Christmas, forced to decide between one to keep. I chose the Genesis, based on the fact my parents gave me Toejam and Earl with it in addition to the packed in Sonic. 9 months later for my birthday I sold my Genesis to get the far superior SNES.

The Saturn was a joke. I had fun playing Virtua Cop and Fighters Megamix, but it was quite obvious that the PlayStation and N64 had far more innovative games and were way more fun.

Then along came the Dreamcast. It looked beautiful, obviously. But the games also just looked like a lot of fun. I preordered the thing to get Powerstone and Sonic Adventure, and then fell in love with Soul Calibur and NFL2K. I loved the thing like it was my baby. From Crazy Taxi to Jet Grind Radio to Skies of Arcadia. The system was pushing out games better looking than anything on the PSX or N64, and the games were not only a ton of fun but really innovated.

And, shockingly enough, the system was actually flying off the shelves. Fueled in no small part by the media hype surrounding Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi, gamers were actually buying the DC with many games to go with it. Could Sega actually make a successful system again after the ill-fated Saturn?

Not if EA had anything to do with it. When Sony entered the market in 1995, they made games mainstream for the first time ever. They had a wider assortment of games than ever before, and, with clever marketing and budget priced titles, the relatively niche, nerdy hobby of gaming was finally embraced by the masses. The Nintendo 64 helped spurn this new love with the best multiplayer games ever seen on a home console. From Goldeneye and Perfect Dark to the beloved Super Mario Kart, if you wanted to get together with some friends and play games, Nintendo was the place to be. For the first time ever, the mainstream was finally deciding what games were going to make money and, therefore, what games companies were going to make.

As many of you might know, the most popular genre among the general public is sports. Specifically, football. And, to be even more specific, John Madden Football.

There was no Madden Football on the Dreamcast.

EA wrote the obituary for the DC in America. If you don't have EA on your side, you will not succeed. It's as simple as that. As good as NFL2K was on the Dreamcast, it didn't have any name recognition with the general public. Ever after Sega teamed up with ESPN, the public still refused to buy it. "We don't want to change" they yelled, "We want Madden."

The PS2 came out with marginally better graphics, 2 fewer controller ports, no VMU and no built in online support, and blew the DC out of the water. Gamers were flocking to shallow 2D brawlers like The Bouncer and pseudo 3D fighters with 5-year-old gameplay like Tekken Tag Tournament over the far more innovative and fun Dreamcast games. EA teamed up with Sony, though.

And now the Dreamcast is dead. And I cry.

But EA is still going strong. And EA, like a Cougar, is still teamed up with the leader in the market place. The Xbox is a great system with a strong collection of exclusive titles, not to mention the best graphics and the only system with a built in hard drive and Internet support out of the box. They are the only system out right now with an online infrastructure built and maintained by one entity. Yet EA refuses to support XBox Live, instead they continue to suck Sony's teat making inferior online games on the PS2.

Yes, I am very bitter. EA buys companies and churns out rehashes of games every year. No, their games aren't bad, but they aren't that good either. EA is the 2nd largest publisher in the world, 2nd only to Nintendo, yet they have no GREAT games in their library. They have no Metroids or Sonics. No Chrono Triggers or Herzog Zweis. EA is a company that uses licenses created by other companies to sell their games. EA is what is wrong with the industry.

And this is not just talk. The most recent EA game in my collection is Madden '94 for the SNES. I refuse to buy any game they "make" or publish. Fuck EA.