G-pinions

First, read this article. Ding!

Did you read the whole thing? It's long, I know, but you can do it. Go back and read the paragraphs you skimmed. Pop quiz: what color was Batman in the Atari screenshot? What was that? Black? No, that's the real Batman. Go back and read it again, I can wait...

So, I've never skied before, but I imagine I'd be real bad at it. I don't know, it just seems like my knees would freeze and I'd fall down or something. Can't that happen? My knees sometimes freeze when I walk down the street. Yeah, I sometimes fall...

Ok, you done now? So what did you think? A video game crash is imminent? Imminent you say? You agree with him? Fuck you, you're both wrong. And I'll tell you why.

First and foremost, we live in a rich nation. Yeah, Bush put his peeper in our outholes pretty good, but money is still plentiful. We have money to spend. How else could Starbucks stay in business? They charge 5 Bones for coffee you know.

And, since we have an excess of money, it has to go somewhere, right? We're not rushing to our Bank One's, throwing our money at them yelling "Please! Take my money before I spend it on more crap I don't need!" Nope, we buy the crap.

Oh, I don't know on what exactly, but many things. We buy the good kind of peanut butter for one, not that store brand. That's an extra dollar every week or two. We see movies we really shouldn't, just because we're bored. Some of us even donate money, just giving it away. Those of us with girlfriends or bum boyfriends have to buy lavish gifts for them to ensure fun time in the sack. And, of course, we buy video games.

There really isn't enough cool stuff to buy if you take video games out of the equation. So, that's my first reason why video games will not have another crash.

Second, there are so many fucking sweet games that come out every year that one can't help loving our industry. There are entire companies who consistently release very good to great games with every single release. Bungie. EAD. Ubi Soft. Rare (Shut up!). Blizzard. Konami. Capcom... The list goes on and on. All of these companies are committed to quality and consistently produce amazing games we, the video game buying public, can't wait to sink our teeth into.

And then there are those licensed games. I talk a lot of shit about them but, guess what, people love them. They love being James Bond or Mary Kate or The Bearenstein Bears. Yeah, it's cool being a random secret agent trying to save the world, but how much cooler is it to be Jack Baurer, saying "No, Chappell, I have to do this to save lives! I get results!" while you go kill terrorists. That's what we want. That's why we play games.

And yeah, maybe Mr. Bitter didn't love Rogue Sqadrdon, but what about Knights of the Old Republic? Remember the part where that guy goes "Nevermind" and you reply "You got it."? That was priceless. You didn't get that kind of entertainment in the last two Star Wars movies combined.

And, despite what this loon thinks, people don't see movies or buy games because they revolutionized the world. The most popular stuff in both mediums is usually something that has been done a million times before but this one has Snoop or Online Play.

And that brings us right to Online Play. This bitter little man would have been the same guy, 10 years ago, saying AOL should just cut its losses, no one except teenaged nerds will want to go online. Now my mom plays people in Switzerland in Scrabble every night. You don't think that will catch on in the console world as well? Right now their are two problems why online isn't successful: 1) People don't want to shell out $50 for Xbox Live and 2) People don't want to shell out $40 for a PS2 network adaptor. If they were free, like games on the PC are, then maybe you'd see more than 28 million people playing.

People like this piss me off. I still play old FPS, Goldeneye is one of my favorite games ever. Doom 2 sold really well for the GBA. People play old games if they are still great. And, sure, there hasn't been a huge leap in football games the last two years, but remember that first year with Dynasty Mode? That was pretty amazing, wasn't it?

All I have to say is that video games are alive and well. Nintendo is right that you can only go so far with graphics before gameplay comes in vogue again, but there is no reason to believe enough companies won't follow Nintendo's lead and make games great.