a.) This blog IS called Media Masochists Anonymous

and...

b.) I like to vent about things and this would give me a chance to do so in a way that might get some people thinking.

Now as for the topic of my vent this time around, the first topic that came to mind as I sat down to write was remakes/revamps of old franchises. The main reason this is probably because of the new G.I. Joe movie which I have not yet seen, but mainly it stems from a long running dislike of rehashing ideas by the terminally unimaginative because they know they can make a quick buck on nostalgia factor. Now, I've done a short vent on this before back before "Speed Racer" came out on "Brain Traumatizing Media", my little Livejournal movie critiquing blog that's been rather ignored since this one started. It was mainly to express my frustration with the movie industry's lack of creativity as well as my reservations about the Wachowski Brothers' foray into live-action animeville. Well, that's long come and past; Speed Racer was awesome, I saw it in theatres somewhere around three times (seriously, if you haven't seen it, go fucking watch it. Right now. I'm not kidding, go do it. you'll thank me later.) and my ire for remakes has dampened only slightly, but the point I'm rather laboriously trying to make is that I've said my piece on this topic before and while I most certainly will revisit it again at some point, I'm not going to in this blog.

No, instead, I'm going to talk about one of the biggest things aside from movies, cartoons and comics that helped make me the nerd that I am today: Video Games. More specifically one of the many, many things that piss me off about the industry, and this one has dogged it since practically day one of the home console: The console wars.

Firstly, I need to get something out of the way: I was born in 1988 so I missed the first round of the console wars between Intellvision, Colecovision and Atari (though I got to catch the great 80s cartoons and stuff), I'm a Zelda/Star Fox/ Metroid fan, I was a NES/SNES kid, not a Genesis kid. If any of those somehow make you think that I don't have a right to talk about the crusader like fervor surrounding consoles because any of those things go read another blog and come back next week.

As stated, I was a Nintendo kid growing up. My grandparents had an SNES at their place to distract us grandkids, and I can still remember buying my first Gameboy. That doesn't mean I didn't play any Sega, I did play a little, but only because a cabin we rented for the infamous family vacation had one. so, yes I was familiar with Sega, but stuck with Nintendo because that was what was available to me. The Sega-Nintendo wars were off my radar and it really wasn't until the Playstation hit the market that I truly realized how utterly and insanely dedicated people were to their consoles.

It's honestly something I don't really understand. I mean, I get the argument that the reason people get so up in arms about something this trivial is that consoles cost a lot so generally your mom is only going to buy you one, leading you to get very defensive about your choice. However, that argument stopped working about the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era because, let's be honest, at that point most of us playing games were in our teens to early twenties and paying for our own consoles.

I think my lack of understanding comes from the fact that the last two "wars" (The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era and the Wii/Xbox 360/ PS3 era we're in now) have had three very balanced consoles. The PS2 had amazing third party support and they had fucking Clover making games for them. Okami was god damn amazing and one of the best games I'd played in a while. the Xbox had Psychonauts, the singularly most underrated game of that generation (if you thought I was going to bring up Halo, I'm not because I think Bungie hasn't made a good game since Oni. There, I said it, and you can flame away, I really don't care) and it was probably the first console to make good (if abused) use of extensive online support. The Gamecube was admittedly the under the radar console of that generation, but gems like "Killer Seven", "Viewtiful Joe", "Metroid Prime", "Tales of Symphonia", "Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door" and "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princesss" (which was originally GC exclusive and still plays better on that system) all made it at least compete at the same level.

This just illustrates what the console wars is about; narrow-minded mud flinging without an objective look at the consoles and judging them based on actual faults rather than perceived ones based around the fact that they are not your preferred console. It's stupid, petty and really guys, we should be beyond this by this point. This narrow-minded stupidity inhibits the growth of the community because we're too busy tearing each other down about graphics and control schemes instead of worrying about bigger issues like government censorship of games and the media scare mongering about the effects of violence in video games.

In the end it doesn't matter if your console has better graphics or better online supports, what matters is the enjoyment you take away from the time spent with it. Maybe if more console fanboys looked at it in that light things would be different. So to you console fanboys reading; maybe next time you're ragging on someone's console, sit down and play some co-op with them. You might find you have more in common than you think

I'm just saying, think about it.

Probably Needs to Get Out of The House More,

Jenna Darknight