When I put up some thoughts on E3 last week, something about it seemed a bit... familiar. Turns out I did the same thing on my old 1up blog (which I will not link) back in 2006, albeit with a little more... passion. For fun, let's take a look back and see how well I predicted the future.
Just for clarification sake: Back in 2006, the 360 had launched, but the Wii and PS3 had not. In a lot of ways, it was the latter two's "coming out party", while the former was eager to prove itself.
I definitely felt the Wii really performed the best at the show, and it did a lot to get me very excited about the system... they completely deliever[ed] on content for the system... I have a hard time making notable comments about Wii games; there is literally too much I am excited for."
Jesus, too much content for the Wii? Alright, well, I was justified to be excited about the Wii - back then it was a very exciting product with limitless potential. And I'm not the only one who bought into that - it's the number 1 selling console this generation for a reason. But I think we can all agree my enthusiasm was a bit too... overzealous. Nintendo Kool-aid was in no short supply back in 2006. But how about the 360?
[T]he 360... did an awesome job in it's approach to E3 by plugging up Xbox Live users with tons of E3 content, some of it as it was happening. Really looking forward to Enchanted Arms and Nintey-Nine-Nights which look great, and the Fable 2 trailer was really nifty and got me excited.
That was the first time any console really put up trailers concurrently with E3 and it was exciting for the time mostly because it was new... whereas nowadays I generally watch things on my computer. But it's still a neat feature. That being said Enchanted Arms was okay and I never actually bought Ninety Nine Nights, or N3 as was eventually called. However...
[B]ut what impressed me the most, of any game, was most certainly Bioware's Mass Effect... it just sounds... incredibe... I am uber-psyched.
Mass Effect went on to become one of my favorite games ever, elevators be damned. So that's justified at least. As for Sony...
PS3, on the other hand, depressed the hell out of me. I mean, the 500-600 price thing was something we all saw coming, but that doesn't make it any less lame... Sony has completely failed to prove how superior the PS3 is to the 360 like they did with the PS2 against the Dreamcast... The whole new controller with no vibaration but motion sensitivity comes off... cheap... It's just pretty terrible.
Wow! Ouch! Calm down there bud, you're going to buy one of those overpriced paperweights one year later. Not to say I was really offbase - price has been the constant issue for the PS3, and that whole vibration business was a blunder they've corrected and tried to forget rather than excuse. Back then I basically called out the machine as being deadset for third placedom. To date, I haven't been proven wrong. So what else do we got?
On a similar note, Final Fantasy XIII has got to be the biggest disappointment I have ever seen in the series... We've all done some whining about FF12, but I still believe it will be an enjoyable game, and nothing FF12 has done compares to what FF13 is looking to do. When I first saw it, I declared the series dead to me... and in the coming days, that has not changed.
Man, chill out fanboy. I was actually pretty surprised by that. I remembered not thinking much of it, but man - I guess I was pissed. I think it's mostly because, at the time...
The "real" FF13 really does just look like a Devil-May-Cry-esque Final Fantasy...
Which it's totally not. Ironically it's probably more traditional than FF12 was. So, first impressions aren't always everything. But that's not the only thing I was upset about...
[T]he game is PS3 exclusive, which is really the nail on the coffin. I mean, despite all of the above, if this game was multi-console, I'd probably give it a shot. But, it's PS3-only, and I don't really want a PS3, and I don't really want this game, so I'm not gonna get either.
But of course you'll get both, dear boy, and you should never have fooled yourself into thinking otherwise. Plus, you got your wish - the game is multi-console now, thanks to the PS3 failing with Western markets. Any more predictions before we close?
Quite frankly, with Sakaguchi and Uematsu gone and now working on Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, I consider those two games much more Final Fantasy then FF13 ever will be.
Uh, definitely no on Blue Dragon. Sorry about that. But actually, Lost Odyssey was very reminiscent of a Final Fantasy game from the FF7-FF9 era. Had Sakaguchi had more control back then, it might very well have been Final Fantasy 10.
Okay so it turns out I'm a little 50/50, but cut me some slack - I was a little more passionate back then, still had a few things I had a tendency for fanboyism about. It's all part of the maturing process. For the most part, there's good lessons to learn here - avoid getting sucked into the hype, try to keep an open mind with new products, and rest comfortably knowing that a $600 price tag is always bullshit.
In another news, expect my E3 2009 retrospective sometime in 2015, where I'll comment on our naiveté in believing motion controls to be the future when in fact the Virtual Boy 2 would prove that VR brain simulators were the only games worth playing.... That is, until the discovery of Holodeck technology in 2020, which would ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race. Until then!
Seeing all the message board skirmishing as the E3 corporate chest-beating is about to begin, I’m reminded of The Great Nintendo-Sega Console War, fought in lunchrooms, playgrounds, and classrooms in schools across America. I like to think we handled it a bit more “gracefully” in our time than current day console warriors (i.e. corporate shills), but I make no guarantees. I can tell you that Sonic was dumb and that a bunch of games featuring a fast hedgehog couldn't compete with an veritable army of quality titles, filled with plumbers, an elven warrior, some dude (who turned out to be a chick) in a suit with crazy lasers, and a robot whose powers and adaptability could only be defined as “mega”.
Or so I would claim in the trenches of my elementary school, a time when Nintendo was king and I was one of its many loyal followers. I was in pretty thick too. We’re not just talking games here, I was knee deep in the TV shows, the toys, the lunchbox, the bedsheets, the puzzles, and whatever ever else I could get my Nintendo-loving hands on. I even had the Nintendo Sticker book. Naturally I was also a subscriber of Nintendo Power, our own version of The Daily Worker, which fueled me with the monthly information I needed to claim supremacy of the Nintendo brand above all else. Does what Nintendon’t? Not a chance.
As an adult I can look back on this sort of thing and laugh, knowing that the only reason anyone participated in this playground warfare is because we had to make a choice. It was going to be one or the other, and whatever it was, that's what you stuck with, no matter what. I can't imagine any of my fellow warriors ever turning down a Genesis if one had been offered to them. Hell, even I bought a Game Gear with money I had saved up, and thought it was pretty cool (when it wasn't consuming all of the AA batteries I could find). What it ultimately came down to was I had one, not the other, and there was no way I was going to feel like I had the short end of the stick.
Knowing how that sort of mentality is, you'd think I'd have some sympathy for today's youths and console warriors, but the truth is I don't. First off, I'm not sure that any of these companies really court fervent followers like Nintendo and Sega did back in the day. I can't believe that anyone really loves giant corporations like Sony and Microsoft, who honestly don’t give a damn about them, and yet people defend/revile them like they’re some sort of helpless kitten/Nazi war criminal.
Secondly, none of the big three have anywhere near the propaganda of old days. And even if they did, there’s more information out there than ever before, so you think people would make informed decisions about what works best for them and live with it. But no, instead they twist whatever little pieces of information they can find for slander and ammunition.
Do they still suffer from the “my mom can only buy me one” mentality? I suppose it’s possible, but there's less and less reason to care – compared to the Sega-Nintendo days, exclusivity is a joke. They make portable versions of most big releases nowadays for Christ's sake. And yet people still fight on across the internet about which is the better console, even going so far as to compare screen shots. And none of it matters in the slightest, because the console that looks the worst is outselling the other two in spades.
Maybe I'm getting a little old and curmudgeonly, but allow me, a veteran of the console wars, to say a little something to the younger generation of troops in the battlefield.
Chill out.
And lay off the corporate kool-aid. Because you don't want to end up like this guy.
I have a love of commercials from the 80s. Early 90s had some good stuff too, but any other era... I don't know. I enjoy them from a historical context, the same way I enjoy reading an old newspaper, but it's not the same. I genuinely love commercials from the decade I was born, which means that Youtube has been not only a lifesaver, but a lifedevourer. Thanks to people holding onto their recorded Miami Vice VHS tapes for decades, I have lost hundreds of hours watching commercials for products that are no longer relevant and are often times completely laughable in today's society.
No other commercial... indeed, no other product represents my love of the 80s better than the McDLT.
I am pretty sure this is the greatest moment in commercial advertising.
What we have here is the perfect storm of TV ad genius/absuridty: a pre-George Jason Alexander (talent), with a company of McDonalds Performers in a smörgåsbord of 80s fashion (now unfashionable), singing and dancing (now seriously unfashionable) about the McDLT (just a hamburger with lettuce and tomato), a burger that keeps your cold garnishes separate from your hot hamburger (seriously just a hamburger with lettuce and tomato) by using a very eco-friendly styrofoam box with a brilliantly engineered dual-compartment design.
I have watched it probably close to 100 times within my life and it still makes me giggle like a school girl.
But look at it! All you need to know about the 80s is right there. Should alien anthropologists discover this video, with no other knowledge about our society, they could quickly determine that this was a time when...
- Fashion was at an inbetween stage, with forces of conservativism in very similar, dour suits (yuppies) battling against a more asymetrical fashion with a colorful array of pastels and bad color schemes (general youth)
- People were very loose with the use of song and dance, using to effectively to glorify and sell something as mundane as a cheap meal
- Society had reached a point of decadence where they were happily sold things they had no conceivable need for, such as a food item where the meat was served "hot hot" while maintaining the lettuce at a temperature of "cool cool."