Month: May 2005

Suddenly, I am interested in purchasing a PSP. Sports Interactive announced that FM 2006 will be available as a PSP game. No word on a US release.

April sure was a down month for the blog – only three days of posts. Hopefully May will be a little better, but the last few weeks have been pretty challenging with the usual suspects of work, family life, work, trying to buy and renovate my grandmother’s 102 year-old house. Still, life is good.

Some of Chris’ comments yesterday (see Bah Humbug!) really hit home. I bet if Kevin reads this he will start laughing because we frequently had this same sort of conversation.

The funny thing for me is that in the end, I think my love for videogames is being passed by my love for the good old days. The bigger issue is that I no longer feel inspired to write about games because I have less time to play them these days. When I do have time to play them, I do not want to worry about spending my free time writing, and I certainly do not want to spend my free time looking for issues (i.e. game flaws and bugs) that I have yet to discover.

So much has changed, but as I recently said in a previous post, and as Chris hinted at yesterday, maybe this has a lot to do with finally growing up. Maybe we are at the point where our innocence is long gone. Internet life and the gaming scene in general were so different in the mid to late 90s. It is almost impossible to explain if you were not “into” it back then, but if you were, you almost surely know what I am referring to and you almost certainly are feeling the same jaded frustrations.

The independent gamer of the past has faded away into obscurity; just look at this site’s history for an example, and look at what Chris is saying to understand that something extremely important and significant is going on in the gaming community. Many of us old bastards are becoming mainstream. The CG staff laughed at me a couple of years ago when I said as much about myself, but it is all too true, and Chris’ comments just confirm my belief that many of the stalwarts (if I can be so bold as to lump myself into that category) are passing the baton on to a new generation of gamers. What sort of nitch will they carve out? What will be their legacy? What will happen when the gaming community no longer gives a flying crap? Scary stuff; the torch really is passing … to where, I know not.

I am not saying that the mega sites do not have their place (I use them for video and images and the like), but the days of the individual contributor seem long gone. Who do you turn to when you want to find relevant gaming info? As guys like Chris fade out of gaming world (i.e. no longer covering games) so much is lost. It is really a damn shame, and from a selfish standpoint, I hate to see Chris and others get so jaded that they no longer feel passionate writing about games. I guess it is inevitable. Hopefully as Chris hinted, the world of the blog will open new doors and avenues so that the old bastards will continue to contribute in meaningful ways.

As for me, I will just try to keep on keeping on, but obviously the days of 4000+ word reviews are so far gone that no one seems to remember why we did that sort of stuff in the first place. The glory days of Usenet seem so far away …

To all you old bastards reading this blog, to past and current contributors, thanks for all the memories. You guys made (and hopefully will continue to make) gaming an entertaining endeavor.

I am sure this is old new to many PSP owners, but WipeOut Pure has a little hack that has been exploited to allow PSP users to surf the Internet. I got around to trying this out over the weekend, and the results were mixed. There is a certain novelty factor to surfing the web on my PSP. That is well and good, but the load times sucked (may be a limitation of my personal wireless network) and many pages would not load correctly, including this one.

I also had trouble with many sites that I wanted to try out – everything from ESPN to IGN had various issues, including some browser lockups. On the plus side, Google works well, so I could read various news updates, and I played around with my dear old friend Usenet (via Google).

I will have to play around some more before I decide one way another about the viability of web surfing on my PSP. It would be nice to get sports, stock, and news updates, as well as access to email, but it is somewhat of a pain to type user names and passwords, much less full length emails. Still, this is an interesting hack to try out, but hopefully Sony will realize that they need an update to support simple email, web surfing, instant messaging, etc. I am sure a lot of PSP owners would pay $19.95 or so, to have a decent integrated internet package for their PSP. Unless of course the hacks start rolling in that provide a better experience.

For some reason, I am uninterested in writing about games these days. Maybe I finally reached the age where I �grew� up and gaming doesn�t mean as much to me as it did in the earlier days. But that isn�t true. I play two games almost everyday � World of Warcraft and Out of the Park Baseball. My daily routine still includes visiting various game sites every now and then, but fewer are the commercial sites and more are messageboards.

So what happened?

Five or six years ago I was deep into the scene. I had stacks upon stacks of all sorts of PC and console games. I couldn�t get into enough beta tests, even braved a few alpha tests, wrote reviews, and even helped edit a site. Now that I am earning much more money than I did back then, I spend much less on new games of any kind. I have the same amount of time available. I just spend it on two games instead of ten at a time.

My sudden lack of interest in computer gaming mirrors my experience running track for many years. I ran competitive track (the 400 and below in high school, then the 800 in college) from middle school until my third year in college. I used to love racing, especially the relays, but gradually over time I just began to hate it. It got to the point that while I was in the US Marine Corps, the only time I would run was in formation or during our three-mile physical fitness test. The joy was gone.

So I channeled my energy into racing bicycles and still enjoy a good ride every now and then to this day. But I never run or jog for any reason. I feel this same malaise creeping over me when it comes to gaming. Everything being made seems the same, just on a different platform or with prettier pictures. And the coverage of these games has gone from interesting in the earlier days to downright boring and uninteresting today. The two bright spots in game related writing I�ve seen in the past three years is the �Shoot Club� work done by Tom Chick and the rise of the blog.

Maybe I am being nostalgic, but there was a time when there were many outlets for intelligent gaming discussion. I think my interest in gaming is directly correlated with the death of independent non-commercial gaming sites. And the death of usenet as a relevant discussion forum, particularly about sports games.

And inversely correlated with the invasion of the gaming �journalist�. The more of these folks that emerge from the woodworks claiming this moniker, the less interested I get in this industry. Where were all of these �journalists� when EA was marching through sports gaming and leaving a conquered wasteland in its wake? Sending email interviews to EA PR people? They were up in arms for sure, but the intelligent discussion about these events was found on blogs and in mainstream business publications.

So I�ll just play in my OOTP leagues, fire up WoW and shoot a few things, and sip my glass of Jameson 12-year old Irish whiskey (excellent, smooth whiskey that is very affordable). Every now and then interesting things occur that require comment, but I�ve decided to be a part of the gaming masses and jot down a few thoughts every now and then on this blog. No more reviews, no more beta tests, I�m done.

Although I do find the text gaming genre pretty interesting these days, so I think I�ll stick to that commentary in the future.