Have gamers become spoiled?

 

    Lets go back in time for a moment, remember as a child growing up having to go over to your friends house bring the cartridge, the system, the bottle of alcohol and a cotton swab just in case the plastic grey peice of technology decided to just not really work that day. Ah the memories, those days were you would read text and all of the characters in games all made sounds that were like Tuscan Raiders after a bad night at the local Cantina Bar, having to pass the remote to your anxious friend awaiting his moment to try and rescue princess peach from the final castle, good times.

     Now lets flash foreword too today were we have online multiplayer, HD graphics, intriguing story lines, and production costs that rival some of the most expensive Hollywood blockbuster around. While this certainly isn’t a bad thing, I do wonder at times if we have become a bit to demanding? If a game does not have some form of competitive multiplayer it seems that it is bound to end up lining the shelves of ones video game store under the used section. What this has done is forced the developers and publishers to slap together a half hearted and mediocre deathmatch system to meet that demand. It seems amazing that with so many expectations and request that an AAA title is even released at all.  However this spoiled mindset is simply not just limited to the consumer basis but also to the ones that are developing.

    Perhaps its is the ever-growing rise of technology but it seems that some developers have also become spoiled and lazy. Why polish a product to the best of ones abilities when you can simply rush it out and slap a patch on it. Take the recent release of Skyrim for example, while I personally have not experienced some of the problems that have been plaguing other player on the ps3, one only needs to look at Bethesda’s forums to see that for allot of people the game is broken. Back in the super Nintendo era if a game was released and it was broken, that was that, the publisher released a broken product and thus would suffer the consequences in sale.

     At this point I probably sound like that old guy on the neighborhood block, on the contrary I am glad that video games have blossomed into amazing experiences, but at times I do long for the simpler days when an 8 bit Italian plumber running across my screen on the back of a dinosaur was enough.