Welcome to 2006! With the New Year, hope springs eternal within the gaming community for new and wondrous offerings. Here is my 2006 wish list, in no particular order:
(1) Out of the Park Baseball Manager – this is the game that I’ve wished for ever since I purchased my first Tandy PC with dual 5 ¼ inch drives. It will be the Football Manager of baseball games. I’ll have no reason to complain about sports games because in 2006, all of my moaning and groaning will finally achieve the results I wanted. Triple Play is dead. And we will have a complete baseball universe in a career game.
(2) All gaming print and pay online media services go away – OK, this is a wish list, remember. I stopped reading print gaming magazines years ago. I stopped paying for Gamespot last year. I would be much more in favor of online pay services if they just provided fast FTP to download demos, etc. Otherwise, there’s nothing of value on these sites. I don’t visit or read them for reviews since there are many forums that do a much better job. Those of us that are into the hobby will continue to write about games for free. In most cases, these folks’ opinions are the ones I want to read anyhow.
(3) All of the Christmas World of Warcraft noobs will grow tired of the game quickly – I’ve had to endure waiting lines of 350+ every evening this weekend to get onto the Bronzebeard server. The only explanation can be that many folks got WoW for Christmas and are playing in droves. Either Blizzard needs to add more servers or the new players need to lose interest.
(4) I finally get a WoW character to level 60 – Speaking of WoW, I’ve gotten a character to 56 and one to 48. This year I will get one to level 60. Or die trying.
(5) Something on the Xbox 360 will actually make the console worth purchasing – I was in Walmart buying an old Xbox with my brother and took a look at the new Xbox 360 games. All five or six of them. Call of Duty 2 looks like the only thing that would remotely interest me, but I’m not going to buy an Xbox 360 for one game. Especially not at $60 a pop for a console game.
(6) The PlayStation 3 will have more then five or six games at launch – One of the reasons I’m waiting on my console purchase is that I want to see what Sony has up its sleeve. They seem to know what they’re doing when it comes to launching consoles and I can’t imagine that they will screw things up like Microsoft has up to this point. Only time will tell.
(7) More blogs will roam the earth – I’m not talking about blogs written by developers and “insiders” here. I’d like to see more gaming fans create blogs that are updated on a regular basis and discuss gaming. Particularly sports text-gaming (again, this is a wish list).
That’s it for 2006. If these simple things happen, we’ll have loads to look forward to in 2007!
The PS2 launch didn’t exactly blow anyone away… I’m not convinced Sony does it any better. That said, I’m not sure the time was right for MS to launch a new console! We’ll see…