Friday, May 31, 2013

Inconsolable

It was just past 9 on a Friday night. The baby was asleep. My wife was turning in early. Finally, I had a chance to pop in the copy of Tomb Raider that a friend had lent to me. Not to go all sitcom-dad on you, but I was practically giddy to have a couple of hours to myself. I poured a drink and fired up the PS3.

"The latest update data has been found."

Okay. Fair enough. We're six and a half years into this thing. I'm used to it by now. And, as PlayStation 3 patches go, this wasn't a bad one.

At the title screen, the display glitched in an ominous way I've seen before. But I thought it might have been intentional. Maybe Tomb Raider attempts some Kojima-style breaking of the fourth wall.

Nope. I made it as far as inverting the Y-axis -- inverted being the one true Y-axis -- and then the PlayStation beeped and the screen went black. I tried to restart it, but it wouldn't power on. I couldn't even eject the disc, which, remember, I had borrowed from a friend.

Kaput.

The gaming situation is less than optimal in the Krpata household right now. The Xbox 360 has been out of commission since last fall thanks to, let's say, an incident involving the collision of a gamepad with a wall. With the PS3 out of the picture, that leaves a mid-range PC that is starting to show its age.

In the past, when I was reviewing games on the regular, I replaced hardware as needed. It paid for itself, and was a tax write-off. These days, circumstances are different. To replace a console is a big investment. And with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One right around the corner, it seems counterproductive to replace a current-gen system, especially since they're still charging three hundred goddamn dollars are you kidding me for a new PlayStation 3. Better to grab a Blu-ray player with wi-fi for under a hundo, and get 90% of what I was using the PS3 for anyway.

All this has gotten me thinking about game consoles in the big picture: what they're for, how we use them, and whether we even need them anymore.

Obviously, the console manufacturers have been wondering the same things. They're trying to make themselves indispensable with carrots (new features, more powerful hardware) and with sticks (no used games). They're trying to become all-in-one entertainment solutions, which not coincidentally allow you to make all your entertainment purchases directly through them. But the tighter they try to keep consumers in their grasp, the more we want to escape.

Let me make an observation: I've already had to repair or replace each console from the current generation, but my 15-year-old Super Nintendo works just fine. (And my saved games are still intact on my Super Metroid cartridge!) Of course today's consoles can do a lot more than my SNES ever could. But what is reliability worth?

Even when modern systems work, they don't work. The PlayStation 3's system updates and pre-installs are the stuff of legend at this point (and I thought it was interesting that Sony reps made a point of assuring us that the PS4 will handle these things in the background). The Wii's vaunted motion controls were so bad that even a game like Skyward Sword, which required an additional peripheral to function at all, included a manual override for all the times it got messed up. I guess the Xbox 360 pretty much did what it was supposed to, provided your console didn't RRoD or you didn't get a Kinect.

You can't just own a console anymore; now, you have to manage it. It takes three separate subscriptions to watch the new season of Arrested Development on your Xbox. On the PS3 you can subscribe to a monthly service, the PlayStation Network, in order to sometimes be able to pay less for other things you can buy. I don't even know what the hell you need to do with Nintendo's online service, but in fairness, I don't think Nintendo does either. The PC used to be better about this, but I was just trying to figure out how I could take advantage of an Amazon sale on BioShock 2 to install it on Steam so I could buy "Minerva's Den" from Games for Windows Live, and ultimately decided that five bucks was still too much to spend to deal with that. Sorry, Steve.

I haven't been a foot soldier for one console maker or another since the 16-bit days. I learned my lesson when I finally got a SNES after years of proselytizing for the Genesis and discovered, to my shame, that it ruled. Since then, I've been omnivorous. So, when I say that I'm going to have to think long and hard about which next-gen console to buy, it's not about brand loyalty. It's about whether I need to buy any of them at all. It's about whether I want the effort of owning them.

Based on what I know right now, I don't want what Sony and Microsoft are selling to me. I don't want to buy a game system and then have to pay a fee to use it. I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on a piece of hardware that can do everything but stay up and running for more than three years. I want something that runs video games. If it can do other things as well, fine -- I'm happy to stream Netflix through wherever. But if it isn't fucking great for playing games, then I am not interested.

So far, I'm not convinced that I must have either the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One. Not with cheaper alternatives for their non-gaming functions, and especially not with a backlog of great games I've missed that I can still play today. I haven't played much new recently, but in the past couple of months I've made my way through Metro 2033 and Super Metroid, and right now I'm waist-deep in System Shock 2. None of this has made me feel as though I need a new console, that's for sure.

I recognize that I'm an old man having his get-off-my-lawn moment. But I'm not trying to argue that games today are crap and that everything was ideal back in my day. My concern is that the barriers are getting ever higher. If you can't borrow a game from a friend, if you can't play a single-player game without an internet connection, if you can't trust your expensive hardware to last its intended lifespan, then where does all this lead?

Maybe it leads to the end of consoles.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree. The upcoming consoles are doing a horrible job of selling me on the fact that they're supposedly gaming consoles. Another thing that this next console generation is doing is convincing me that my video gaming hobby is a disposable one. We've already dealt with hardware failures that guarantee we will eventually be tossing our old systems, but the new systems are not backwards compatible with the games that we have been accumulating. I'm sure we will be offered the option of downloading older software...but there's a price attached to that.

While I will always be interested in the hobby as a whole, I think that I'm finished with trying to keep up.

R.S. Hunter said...

I feel the same way. My SNES and PS2 still work just fine but I'm on my 2nd 360 and PS3 (the first PS3 had to be twice-repaired at home).

I just don't feel any sort of excitement at the thought of buying another new console. Especially when these consoles are shaping up to be even more restrictive with some of their policies.

Etelmik said...

People always say PC gaming is more expensive, but if you get a nice one for 700-1,200 dollars it can last over three years and still play current and high-demand games.

If you buy two consoles and a Live subscription every year, and pay the higher prices for games (because let's face it, Amazon digital and Steam sales), it ends up being even. Except you can do other things with a computer, which you probably need for work and practical purposes anyway.

If consoles become a childish thing, I'm okay with that. Especially when support and the ability to patch for developers is much worse on consoles anyway.

Mark Cook said...

I have PlayStation Plus because I really like that they give me free stuff every month. It's the closest thing there is to a Netflix for gaming, and fifty bucks a year so I get Spec Ops: The Line and Deus Ex and Little Big Planet 2 and Gravity Rush and more every month is a good darn deal.

Unknown said...

As far as wanting consoles to remain gaming devices, it seems like PS4 is shooting for that much moreso than Xbox. I guess we'll know more about that tonight, though. Wii is pretty reliable in my experience, and my understanding of the Wii U is that it's pretty similar, albeit without a lot of games at this point.

The death of consoles? I doubt it. I've never used a PC for gaming, and I don't know if I ever will. I grew up with consoles and went most of my childhood without a computer in my house. Gaming is important to me, and as long as it's an option, I'm going to buy consoles to keep up with the games.

I probably won't be buying a PS4 for a good year or so. By waiting for another version, I'll save some money, avoid the technical problems that have hit the last generation throughout its early days, and tehre will be a good catalog of games waiting for me. I just got my PS3 6 months ago (had been using a roommate's for a while before that) and there are plenty of games for me to play in the meantime.