I think I've done this before...

You know, I like to consider myself a gamer. A person that plays games. Video games for those of you who actually went along with that duchebag commercial in which they promoted a gamer as a beer battered cheese head football fan who spends his entire paycheck on pay-per-view sessions of every sporting event known to man kind and corn nuts. That is not a gamer. That is a complete waste of flesh. There's a difference. But that's not entirely what my rant is about today though I would like to take a few moments before I start to mention that just because you play video poker online and are able to keep yourself entertained for 30 minutes playing the newest incarnation of Bejeweled does not make you a gamer either.

Also, if you actually own and play any game with Madden in the title, you are also not a gamer. You're a pretentious fratboy who thinks that being good at a game that plays by itself if you leave it alone is actually something to be proud of. You also apparently don't know the difference between a sequel and an expansion pack...

But I digress on the subject of who is and isnt a gamer. The point of today's rant is the fact that a gamer requires something important in order to satisfy their needs as a gamer. And that would be games. Good games, preferably. Unfortunately the gaming industry has hit a rut and there's hardly anything on the market that's worth playing at the moment. There are a select few, but opening a new year with about three playable games does not bode well for the industry. In fact the gaming industry and Hollywood seem to be cheating off of each others tests because they're both doing the same thing in digging up old franchises that should have stayed dead. This is almost as bad as when they try to make games based on movies or movies based on games. When was this ever a good idea and why do they keep doing it? I can understand the movie based on game aspect but the only good game based on a movie was 007 GoldenEye for the N64. Well, there was also one other one for the PS2 but I forgot which bond movie it was from. Most games based on movies are designed to increase the overall revenue of the movie, not actually make a playable game.

If you're going to base a movie on a game, here are some ground rules you need to follow:
1. Don't change the main character to someone no one knows. If the main character is male and GOOD, don't make it a female character just because you think following around a pair of tits is a way to make money at the ticket booth. (Yes, I'm talking about Silent Hill. And while you're at it, Resident Evil)
2. Don't get artsy with character design. People like the way characters look for a reason. Suddenly deciding that your costume designer who thinks the pinnacle of gaming is Snake on her blinged out cellphone has a better idea of how a main character should look than the original creators is fucking STUPID.
3. Follow the fucking story. Video games are not religious texts. There is no interpretation required. The game was good enough to be overheard by the artsy douchebags in Hollywood because it's sales records stated that people liked it. Why would you decide to write your own god damn story and just slap something else's name on it? You know who does that? Yaoi fanfic writing fangirls who come up with ideas like Sonic banging Tails in the woods behind Knothole Village. Sonic is not gay, and even though Tails acts like it at times, I'm pretty sure he's not either. DON'T CHANGE THINGS THAT WORK.

Sadly the only movie that was almost exactly like the game it was meant to portray was Tomb Raider. And that's simply because the game only consisted of a thin plot revolving around putting a female lead in awkward positions while the camera was designed to show her ass and/or tits as much as possible. And guns. No surprise the film-makers got this one right...

Okay, so going back to the original topic, there hasn't been a good game to come out for a while. Not like there used to be. Everything is basically a 'like this game but' game at this point, all of them copying off of each other trying to do something the other hasn't but in reality just fucking up something that worked properly the first time. And then you have all the sequels that are losing steam. Even the GOOD games are falling prey to the sequels falling apart at the seams. Devil May Cry has all but become a game of 'let's see how ridiculous of a combat system we can come up with'. I mean in 4 you basically get a chainsaw with no chain that requires you to hold the button down to charge it up for an attack. The whole point of Devil May Cry is to string attacks together so rapidly that you keep your combo counter going so you get that coveted S rank as often as possible. So how is giving you a weapon you have to charge add anything useful to this system? I have no idea. Then there's Resident Evil. I'm a fan of Resident Evil. I've played if not owned nearly every game with the title that has been released, (Except the shooter and the 'cronicles' games on the wii). That includes both of the Outbreak games. Now, they have Resident Evil 5.... a game that offers me so little that I hardly even care it was released. WTF is this?! I bought a gamecube... a fucking GAMECUBE just to play Resident Evil 4. What the fuck happened? I mean sure I was a little bummed they took out the zombies in 4. But the mechanics made up for it. Now, they decided to throw away the whole zombie thing all together completely, put you in control of the most pointless and bland character in the entire series - Chris Redfield - and pair him up with a set of walking tits that you have to BABYSIT half the time. The whole thing that made Resident Evil scary was being alone in a city, and running into someone who was still alive was a godsend. Now they pair you up with a military trained chick in a skintight catsuit that follows you through the entire game. You know, they could have just added a few more slots to your inventory and got rid of her all together. That would have worked better. And speaking of the dead.... the thing that made Resident Evil good was not knowing when and where the dead would rise. They came out of windows, out of the ground, and woke up after you passed them a few times. Now they're all wandering around, and you can see them coming a mile away. The only thing scary about it now is that they move faster and can dodge your already limited bullets. Frustration isn't an acceptable substitution for Fear. Feh.

The only decent games released recently were Little Big Planet (Which I barely got to play since it came out on the PS3 which is a pointless waste of money unless you happen to like watching movies in slightly higher definition than DVD. Yay.), Blazblue, and surprisingly, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The last one surprised me because they added a feature that was sorely lacking in every other CoD game. That being when you point at something and shoot, you actually HIT what you're aiming at. It's like the developers finally figured out that in a first person shooter the point is to SHOOT things and not to see how much ammo you can spray before randomly hitting the enemy standing 2 feet away out of pure chance.

Nothing else of note has even been mentioned except Starcraft 2. But that was only announced TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO. There's no rush Blizzard, really. I'm sure you have your hands full with your new expansion pack for WoW. Because your level 80 players are getting bored buttfucking demons in the ninth level of hell. But hey, now they can start a new character at level 1 and mindlessly do it all over again. But this time they can be a goblin. Or a werewolf. (Which is actually kinda cool, if I still played the fucking game. There's more farming in WoW than that stupid Farmville game on Facebook I keep hearing people rant about. You want to play a good farming game? Play Harvest Moon.)

Ghaah.... well, I guess I can try finishing Bayonetta. It's not exactly a great game, but for a game who's main focus is on making the character naked, it's not really that bad.