G-pinions

Aside from his occasional crazy rants, Nick has clearly demonstrated himself as the more rational, enthusiastic gamer on this site. He loves most anything, regardless of the quality. He buys bagfuls of $5 games and actually plays all of them; even the lame ones that involve running around a barren fields cutting down trees. Nick is that hardcore. He loves all that is gaming. I, on the other hand, do not.

This leads me to my newest, or should I say revised, complaint about the industry. There seems to always be some huge, new craze taking over my games. A few years back you might remember stealth games bursting onto the scene. From Metal Gear to Tenchu, and even Zelda, every single game had stealth in it. Unfortunately, that trend has stuck around somehow… Anyway, just when I thought I survived that, a new, even worse disease has mutated into a deadly threat. I fear that, just like stealth gaming, this new presence will be along for a very, very long time. I call this plague online gaming.

I know you’re all shocked that I’m not embracing the newest gaming toy. Nick just dropped his pipe and a baby is probably crying somewhere. How could I not like online gaming? It hasn’t even been two days since Nick and I fired up Crimson Skies and took on 14 other players in classic dog fighting action. It hasn’t even been 48 hours since I leapt from Nick’s confining sofa and moved closer to the television so I could fully experience the online revolution. What could have possibly happened in the last two days to make me go from loving all that online gaming entails to realizing it is actually quite boring?

For the first time today, I was able to go online with my very own Xbox. From the confines of my suburban home, I changed from Tom to Noble Penguin as I fired up my own copy of Crimson Skies. Yesterday, I gasped at the beauty of the game. The play mechanics – the pure, arcade delight of streaking towards the ground only to pull up at the last second – that made me giggle with the glee that hadn’t escaped my mouth since youth.

But as I sat there, alone in my chair trying to outmaneuver a guy named Mauve762, I realized how terribly boring it is to try shooting down a person I don’t even know. It was fun insulting Nick during the entire match, only to see at the conclusion that he had doubled my pathetic score. Alone, the game loses any semblance of fun. The voice technology that Microsoft claims creates a gaming community unlike any seen before was shaky at best. I don’t think I went through one complete match without someone’s voice shorting out a few times.

I’ve said this before and now that I’ve actually gone online I’ll say it again: multiplayer gaming is something that should be done with 3 friends sitting together in the same room. I’ll deal with split screens and stinky feet as long as I can shout extremely personal tiny penis jokes whenever someone kills me. Half of multiplayer gaming is the competitiveness in throwing a group of people in a room together. Online gaming is no better than destroying mindless bots.