the wii

so we picked up a wii. there's a few games too, mario kart, mario galaxy, mario smash, zelda, it came with sports, and we recently picked up chocobo's dungeon, a final fantasy-esque game. now ive played little of the wii myself, but my girlfriend has done the lion's share of the gaming. she loves it. she's pretty huge about making mii's, she had me make one, then she had us do the fitness thing on wii sports. apparently it rates your would-be age given your performance in a few given tasks. it seems interesting. i rated 77, and then 80. she did about the same heh. an interesting thing about it is you can only run the wii fitness thing like once a day. the mii thing is semi interesting too. you can give it a name, and can configure its face and the like. not the most customizable character creation ever but its interesting. at the screen where you can watch over all the mii's, you can watch them roaming around and perhaps interacting with each other. that bit of it is neat. my favorite games are smash brothers and mario kart respectively. they were of course my favorites when i was younger, and these versions are basically more or less the same engines, no major overhauls, and same gameplay too.

in some ways im disappointed, because of the fact so little about the wii really is new. now the controller is neat, i havent yet gotten used to it truth be told, but i mean... the games. mario for instance, the mario galaxy game... it seems just like super mario for the n64. i mean yeah it looks cool, just like that 64 mario looked great too... but i never really played that game more than a few minutes. it just wasnt fun. and neither does this seem it either. mario karts great, but its entirely about the multiplayer experience. and with two controllers, and a girlfriend who hates to be against you, or die really, then its a matter of some hardcore team action against an incompetant npc team. so that kills some of the fun there. but beyond that, zelda seems nice. i mean of the games ive seen so far, zelda seems nice... only it seems like the graphics were aged, and when i looked it up i noticed it had the year 2006 stamped on it. i mean... come on now, how advanced is this wii really. i have yet to see something that shocks me in how good it looks. the xbox for instance with halo and the like kinda had me more glued to my seat than what im seeing from this wii. but then im starting to read things like the wii just isnt the best graphic system out there as a known fact. so that might move me to buy an xbox.

but thus far, we have many games, most of which havent been played with much. and i guess thats a good thing, in that basically we're not addicted, we're not glued. i used to play games as a kid, over in england, before and after we moved, so as early as '90 and '91. so, the year being '09, it's been awhile. not only that, i've spent alot of time away from consoles altogether, sticking almost entirely with PC's, and a singular PC game, everquest. sure, i picked up oblivion, only it never stuck, and honestly i'd still be playing everquest if the coders weren't mucking it up. slashing the support crew, slackening the pace of expansions, destroying what greatness the game originally held. its a shame to see something so great as EQ go down the tube, but the coders who made this game great i fear i never had the chance to know, and those that run it now, well, they do a decent job on some visible things, but on others... its just appalling. for instance, zone design. at some point, EQ fell hard. Kunark style zones were exchanged for veritable boxes, zones with raised edges and no notable features save a wall perhaps a hundred feet in front of you. depressing. that and the scaling back of diversity of implimented mobs. the models are recycled in a very obvious way. there just is no focus on looks.

another folly of EQ is that the men behind the scenes tend to shuffle people out of EQ and into EQ2, either that or newer games that are yet to be released. EQ gets such a low priority that it gets the fresh blood, those who have little to no clue, and unfortunately the game suffers because of it. keeping none of the flag bearers on in EQ, those who coined the arena that EQ was during its heyday, noone to enforce the old ways, those that have taken over have changed it, morphed it, into something worse, not quite great, and unfortunately, shit. its something we see often, good things don't always last, and usually they're just a chance happening where things seem to work out, either because nobody plays it, or because its just got all the right people in the top management, with all the right support, a shared vision, and all that, but time has a bad way of weathering these things down. people move on, others are brought in, and inevitably the vision slips and the game becomes a vehicle for the next guys own ambitions. and meanwhile we're left with increasingly worse content. its just a shame because over the years the game has built a following but those who epxect the old way are just left in the dark, meanwhile those who dont mind the new way are shown the way to their tables. bitterly swallowed

but the thing is, EQ was so good, that i dont think there was another game out there quite as good as it. I've tried WoW, and other things, and honestly, they just don't measure up. I'm just not really impressed with what i find there. and honestly, i dont think i will see another game that takes all the things that EQ did right and stick them in a game for a long while. there's too few games being made, its a big effort to make a game, and even if you set out in the beginning to make a game like that, in the end it may not get executed that way. so many things stand in the way, its a battle from start to finish, and each of the people involved influence things deeply. there has to be a deep understand of whats being tried to be accomplished. otherwise without that airtight knowledge of the goals, then things can go to shit. and thats whast happened with EQ. they brought in replacements, didn't bother checking if they really got it, and then left the reigns, and left the building. unsupervised, things got real bad, real quick. entire armies of people who had made legions of friends during their time online just began to leave, because the place just didn't serve their kind any more. its a shame but games have a way of abandoning fans and families. but thats the bitter cycle of things of this nature.

many of these articles i write tend to devolve into a recollection of the former greatness of everquest and its current demise, but honestly its something im still trying to properly master, how exactly did it happen, and where do we go from here. the truth is there is nowhere for us to go, except into the sunset, soldiering on. we can never expect another thing like EQ, because it was a chance happening, and whilst it may happen again, the odds are against it. the original men behind it are scattered, one of them suffering from drug addiction for instance and major unreliability problems. if they had an allstar team that was able to assemble themselves and put something amazing together agani it could work, but then the makers of EQ weren't known for a sustaniably good product, but more a brief blip of goodness. kindof like a one hit wonder band, such as Kings of Leon, they had a great album, then devolved into a clone of another band. they lost their infectiously good sound, and instead put together a contrived version of someone elses, and it just didnt sound half as good. things like this can and do happen, all the time. the key is to enjoy the good bits for what they were, brief flashes of genius, and just shielding yourself from the badness that is the rest of the work from that crew.

but back to thw ii, i would've expected better stuff than basically rehashes of games i played when i was half my age today. but alas thats what it seems to be. i mean this is worse than the sequel epedemic in the film industry today. at least they have comics to mine. games dont even have that. the thing is there is no equivolent for games. the industry and the medium is so new that there just isnt ay prior masterpiece that designers and writers can draw from. and if they do its generally so overplayed that its beaten dead. like say warcraft, starcraft, diablo, EQ, all these games were great, so great that they really couldn't exist reasonably outside their game of origin. the truth is that hardcore players will play those games to death. and then when the developers haul out a new iteration, many of those hardcore folk have gotten their jollies already and dont really want to do it all over again. its like sequels, or serials. let the fucking soaps be on tv alone. gaming doesnt need them. we need highly original, new, and markedly different and unique experiences in each play to make it all worthwhile. otherwise... why bother. why play the same game five times for five prices. its just not worth it. and that kindof gaming has a shelf life.