(Rant)

Funny how I get so worked up over people predicting the Wii U's failure when I'm about to do the same to the Xbox One. This article is slightly different in that respect, mainly because the bashing of the Wii U is uncalled for. People say the Wii U will fail only because of the Wii's supposed status as a "kiddie console", which occurred because the news sites wouldn't stop drilling that phrase into your skull. That feeling, for some reason, carried over to the Wii U, which isn't fair. However, in this rundown of the Xbox One, I have specific points as to why you need to stay as far away from this massive silver slab as humanly possible.

I treat home game systems like I do with Pokémon games. You can buy one and still get away with it, but if you want the full experience, you're gonna need the second one. I own a Wii for the Nintendo goodies that I can't go one generation without buying, but when new games started coming out that I had no way of playing, I turned to the Xbox 360. I would've gone with a PlayStation 3 if it weren't for the fact that the 360 is what all my friends had at the time and that it had Halo, which I would stay up until 5 AM playing with said friends. Getting a 360 let me experience some of my favorite games of all time, such as Assassin's Creed II, Sonic Generations, and Portal 2, and I don't regret getting it. Here's the catch, though: while Nintendo's massive first-party IP library is exclusive to their consoles, virtually everything else is on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game that is exclusive to one or the other, making it so that if you owned a Wii and a 360 like I do, you wouldn't have a need for a PS3 because all the games out for the PS3 are also on 360. What it comes down to is whether you prefer Persona and Rachet & Clank over Halo and Fable. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Halo, but it's droppable. The obvious flaws in the 360 and the rumors of the "Durango" had me prepared to drop Microsoft entirely in favor of Sony...I just didn't expect that the Xbox One reveal conference would solidify my opinion so quickly.
 
The Xbox One conference opened pretty well at first. 500 GB of hard drive space, a significant imporvement over my 360 S' measly 4 gigs. It holds a whopping 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing it to multitask between movies, games, and internet browsing. The controller, while really uncomfortable-looking, sports a D-pad that isn't somehow worse than the GameCube's, unlike the 360's D-pad. The console sure looks sleak, even if it's the size of my desktop tower. The best part is that the Kinect 2.0, as people are calling it, is pre-packaged with the system so that you don't have to pay half the price of the system to get something that doesn't have have anything worthwhile compatible with it. The disc drive is Blu-Ray and the Kinect camera is now 1080p.

See, it's all fine and dandy, right? It has nice features, and looks cool. What more could you want out of a game console?

Oh, wait, I know! GAMES.

Microsoft is under this moronic impression that they need to cater to "growing technology" and outfit their console with TV integration and sports and movies and music and STOP IT. We're investing in your console for games, not for fantasy basketball league plugins (which they actually teased; this is too stupid to make up). This whole mindset is absolutely ridiculous. As for the cool features they talked about, I realized partway through that the Wii U already does the majority of this stuff and so will the PS4, making owning an Xbox One pointless and a waste of cash if you're getting it for just the features alone, which is the only selling point right now because they barely teased any games whatsoever, but we'll get to that in a minute.

These are things you could get past, though. Some of these complaints are kinda petty. Maybe you want a whole bunch of junk like voice commands and TiVO shoved into what's supossed to be a gaming system. Maybe you want to use voice commands that are probably unresposive to turn on your TV as opposed to the Wii U's GamePad that even lets you take your game away from the TV. Well, does the actual gaming side of the Xbox One hold up enough to make the purchase worthwhile based on what they showed during the conference? I'd answer that with a resounding "Are you insane?!".

The Wii U is backwards compatible with Wii games. You can transfer your Virtual Console games over to it, if for a small fee. The PS4 can kind of do backwards compatibility; I'm still confused on how the whole game streaming thing works. So how come Microsoft completely cuts out backwards compatibility as a whole for both physical and digital games?! For a system advertised to be an everything-in-one system, it's pretty stupid that you'll have to have two huge boxes on the counter to be able to play all of your games. Oh, and if you're an Achievement Hunter, better kiss your hard work goodbye because your precious Gamerscore isn't transferrable to the new system. Low on money? Wanna buy a used game? Well, too bad! Every game purchased is registered to an account, meaning that you can't play any used games. They said you can transfer the license for a fee, but who knows how massive that'll be! They also brought up how many servers they have. Look, the cloud's cool and all, but if they crash, you're in for some trouble, because that's also where you'll be storing your save data for your games and your digital purchases. Not to mention there was no word of making Xbox Live Gold free as opposed to its stupid $60-a-year price tag.

Look, you're an Xbox fanboy and want to support this, whatever. It's your money. I'm just giving you friendly gamer-to-gamer advice by telling you to back away from this thing. It doesn't make any sense as to why you'd spend money on it when all it does so far is do anything but play games, and the few games announced for it aren't even exclusive titles. I used to defend the Xbox, but now, I'm not supporting this idocy anymore. If you complained about how difficult and annoying the 360 in general was to use, you're going to have a hell of a time with the Xbox One and trying to even get your games to work properly. Until I see some games that aren't repeat shooters and inane sports games, I'm not in the slightest impressed. I've made my decision; I'm switching to PlayStation as my secondary third-party system.

(Rant)

At this point, I'm pretty sure everyone's heard of the SimCity scandal. In fact, I'm sure of it, because even my dad, who isn't a gamer in the slightest, has even heard of it. Here's the low-down for anyone who lives under a bigger rock than I do: EA and Maxis released the next installment of SimCity, only to find that nobody was able to play their game because their servers were steaming piles of ass. Players who paid $60 (who were also deined a refund, by the way), couldn't even play a single session of what was supossed to be a singleplayer game, instead being promted to wait a constantly increasing amount of time, which tended to be forever floating around the half-hour mark. Those who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the actual game were promptly booted out a few minutes later. As if to kick 'em while they're down, Amazon.com reacted to the outburst of fans and removed the game from their online store entirely. Here's the kicker: why did this happen and how does it affect us as gamers?

Simple. A little concept known as DRM.

DRM, for those who don't know, is a sort of "tool" implemented into a piece of software that renders the entire thing innoperable unless connected to the internet. So, basically, it's as if the games you downloaded on your iPhone wouldn't even boot up unless you had a strong cell service. The fact that this was put into a game that was primarily made for a singleplayer experience doesn't make any sense, unless looked at from a corporate perspective. ...scratch that; it actually makes less sense. According to EA, SimCity was given DRM coding to "prevent piracy". I'm going to put this bluntly, everyone: you cannot prevent piracy. It's everywhere, and with an output like the internet, it's literally flat-out impossible to completely prevent someone from getting an illegal copy of your game. In this scenario, however, you're just shooting yourself in the foot; by screwing over customers like this and giving them a game that doesn't work, you're making piracy even more prominent than it was before, especially when your little DRM thing can be completely removed with a simple edit to a mere three lines of code. (Yes, that happened with SimCity. Go figure, huh?)

Now, from what I hear, Microsoft is planning on using DRM on the entirety of their next console. Simple response: don't. Bad Microsoft. Bad. Don't make me get the newspaper. Nobody in the gaming world will ever react positively to the concept of DRM, primarily because broadband internet isn't as common as we'd all like it to be. There are still people who don't have internet access whatsoever but still want to play video games, and then you have people like me who have an internet connection, but one that's so unreliable that it kicks you off every 10 minutes. In my case, I'd be in the middle of a game I'm playing by myself in singleplayer mode, about to complete a mission I spent an hour on, when suddenly I get booted out because my internet cut out, and most likely losing my progress up to that point. You can't even begin to implement something like this when internet access isn't worldwide yet.

There's also the concept of servers. Every multiplayer game has to have a server to operate, which is a tower of technology in some building somewhere in the world that hosts your little Deathmatch games every time you hop online. After a period of time, not as many people get online to a certain game anymore, so the company decides to save money by deactivating the servers, rendering said game's multiplayer mode(s) inactive forever. Bungie did this with Halo 2, as more people were playing Halo 3 or Reach at the time. With my GameCube, I can go back and play whatever game I want whenever I want for as long as I want, but if Microsoft puts DRM into their consoles, come 20 years later, you and I won't be able to use the console or its games anymore. Why? Because the moneygrabbers behind Microsoft shut down their servers because they just pushed out the Xbox 6 and want people to play on that instead. Because of that, your $400+ system and whole collection of $60 games becomes utterly useless. The NES my family owns can be passed down through generations, but that bigass paperweight from Microshit is now a hunk of wasted money and time because the system's DRM function no longer has a server to connect to.

To those of you up in the corporate world of the gaming industry: don't fuck us over like this. It's not fair to your consumers, and the bottom line is that if you don't treat us fairly, you're not going to keep getting service and you're going to lose a lot of money. Save yourself (and us) the trouble and scrap the concept of DRM altogether, because it clearly is not the way to go from any viewpoint.

(Rant)

I, along with a large chunk of the Pokémon fanbase, have been waiting for quite a long time for news regarding a remake for Ruby and Sapphire. Judging by the current pattern of a remake being put out two generations after the original game, I assumed we'd get a remake by the end of this generation, and half of me wants to believe we'll still get one.

But, sadly, this is most likely not the case.