The Gaming Landscape 2000 to 2009 Part 1: The PC

PCs have always been a staple of gaming going back to the 1970's.  Text-based adventure games, MUDs, and ASCII games like Rogue were some of the first immersive games.  Commodore games still get a lot of play, and the 1980's and 1990's were extremely kind to the platform.  By the year 2000, the PC's fortunes were skyrocketing.  The experience you could get on a PC was unmatched by any system.  Comparatively, the N64 was four years old and extremely long in the tooth and the PS1 was starting to show its age graphically as well.  The Dreamcast had just launched and had great graphics, and included online play on select few games, but EVERY GAME on the PC had online play.

That's to say nothing of the quality of the games.  Diablo II launched in 2000 and proceeded to break countless mice.  Everquest started to hit its stride and become EverCrack way before World of Warcrack.  Deus Ex created a believable world with countless solutions that still resonates today.  No One Lives Forever was the first shooter that was "better than Half-Life."  Sure, there were some lazy PC ports, but the vast majority of groundbreaking games came out on the PC first and foremost.

The PS2 launched in 2001, and didn't really dent the PC's strong customer base.  I mean, they promised a game like SOCOM that allowed for online play, but once again, the PC had it in virtually every game without any major hurdles.  Sure, the PC was more expensive, but the quality of the experience was unequaled, with games like Rise of Nations and Jedi Knight II providing an experience that rivaled or beat most consoles.

As a matter of fact, up until this point there was a pretty clear demarcation building.  The PC was home to shooters, strategy games, and Western-style RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment.  Consoles were the home of action/adventure games like Zelda and JRPGs like Final Fantasy.  Obviously, we're oversimplifying the matter and of course there were exceptions, but this was the way of things.  The PC had the graphics to keep up with shooters where consoles couldn't, and console controls were better suited to handle adventure games.

By the year 2000, things were going along swimmingly for the PC.  When did the PC's fortunes turn?  It can be traced to three things:  The growing ease of piracy, XBox Live, and Half-Life 2.

Piracy is usually the scapegoat for most people when discussing the downfall of the PC.  It's easy to blame, and it indeed had a real impact.  I mean, why pay for a game when you can get it for free?  It seems like a rather obvious problem.  In 2000, piracy was becoming an issue, but hard drives were small and discs held a lot of data.  CD burners were starting to become more prevalent, but they were still kind of expensive.  Broadband was starting to become common, but most people had dialup.  You could maybe get games on Limewire or Kazaa (remember Kazaa?) but you had to contend with viruses and slow internet speeds.  In other words, there were enough roadblocks in place to make piracy more of a headache than a boon.

What's changed?  With hard drives getting bigger and bigger, you can store more ISOs and cracks than you could in days gone by.  In the past, you may have had a 10-15 GB hard drive, and a game disc would take up 700 MB of that space.  That was valuable real estate that you couldn't afford to occupy.  Installing a CD burner to get that ISO off your computer would run you at least $200, and half of the time that burner would make coasters (Buffer Underrun Error!)  Now, you can get cheap hard drives that hold 250 GB or more.  Sure, an ISO may be 4-7 GB, but you're still in great shape, space-wise.  A top-flight, error-free DVD burner can be purchased online for $20, and DVDs are a dime a dozen.  On top of that, internet connections in 2000 were topping out at 1.5MB/second and most people were still on dialup.  Now, chances are that if you're reading this entry, you have a high-speed connection that's at least 1.5/MB if not far more.  That means that a full ISO, instead of taking you a full month to download, now takes you only a day or sometimes even an hour to get.  There are far fewer roadblocks to piracy than before, and it's become far more difficult to stop.

In and of itself, piracy isn't the lone cause of the decline of PC gaming.  A large chunk of that can be traced to XBox Live and similar services.  Up until then, the PC's major benefit, online and LAN multiplayer, was just a mere pipe dream for console makers.  It was the one area of gaming that couldn't be touched by consoles, and it was beautiful.  Even when the PS2 launched with an Ethernet jack, it was still more of a headache to connect online than anything else.  Then the XBox came along, and Halo over Live became de rigeur.  It didn't take long for companies to latch onto the idea of a closed system that was easily manageable to keep cheaters out AND that wouldn't have the same piracy risks as the PC.

Slowly but surely, the XBox started becoming home to shooters, which were once solely the purview of the PC.  Now we're seeing games like Modern Warfare and Fallout 3 landing on consoles far before the PC, if they ever even get there.  Gamers decided that they would overlook the deficiencies of the two-analog-stick control system in exchange for ease of use and managed friend lists, and the XBox (and later the PS3) ended taking the runoff from the PC market.  In effect, they aren't growing their own separate markets, but rather taking away the PC's market, cannibalizing it in order to grow their own.

Lastly, Half-Life 2 is to blame.  It seems like lunacy to blame Half-Life 2, one of the greatest games of the decade, for the issues plaguing the PC.  Hear me out.

Before Half-Life 2, game activation was simple.  Put in your CD Key during the install, and you can play.  There was a booming used market at Gamestop, Electronics Boutique, GameCrazy, Fry's, and others because you could very easily transfer game ownership from one person to another.  Then Half-Life 2 came along and demanded that you activate the game online.  Once it was activated online via Steam, you really couldn't transfer ownership without a lengthy process.  Trade-ins on Half-Life 2 became nonexistent.  How could you trade in a game where ownership couldn't be transferred?  Since it was a very high-profile game, the issue really couldn't be pushed aside or ignored.

All of a sudden, EB Games and Gamestop saw their opportunity to downsize their PC gaming racks.  PC gaming had long been a thorn in the side of retailers, what with their big boxes that weren't easily stacked and their byzantine system requirements that led to more returns and customer service headaches than other games.  From the retailers' perspective, why waste the valuable shelf space on a platform that caused so many problems AND wouldn't give them their huge markup that they were accustomed to on used console games?

This led to the Great PC Game Selloff of 2005 and 2006, as gaming boutiques slashed their used inventory at unheard of prices.  It wasn't uncommon to find great, AAA used titles for $5 with manuals and cases.  It was beautiful and a little sad.  You knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, and the longer you held off buying the games the longer used PC games remained stocked at the stores, but how could you pass up those prices?

Once PC gaming left the boutiques, it lost its visibility.  A new AAA PC game no longer carried the same prestige as before.  Sure, MMOs have picked up the slack, but there's something wrong about paying someone a continual sum of money for the privilege of continuing to play their game that you've already bought and paid for.  Now, the only games that come out for the PC are MMOs, indie games, and console ports.  It's been a precipitous drop for the PC.

However, that's not to say that the PC didn't deserve to die.  For all of their merits, PCs are expensive.  A good gaming rig will cost you $1000 or more while a 360 or PS3 is $250.  Plus, trying to figure out the system requirements of their home PC is an exercise in frustration for most gamers.  It's a little sad seeing a once-proud, monolithic platform being reduced to a shadow of its former self.  However, it's still the system with the highest install base, higher than any console, higher than any handheld.  The glory days may never return for the PC, but it'll still be around for a long, long time.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2*6-12+86 Days

If I was Disney, I would be livid at Square right now. What started as a relatively straightforward Square/Disney mashup has now gone completely off the rails.

I played the first 20 minutes of Kingdom Hearts e=mc squared last night, and while it's neat, it's certainly not what Disney must have wanted at this point. You wouldn't even know that Disney characters were in here unless you look at the box art. There, in the very corner, is Mickey. The rest of the art? White space and spiky-haired anime characters. More and more, Kingdom Hearts is turning towards Square's increasingly convoluted storytelling and fleshing out a world that didn't really need fleshing out instead of focusing on what Disney probably wanted. It's no wonder that Disney is commissioning the "Epic Mickey" project.

Do you want to see something absolutely hilarious? I can't find it now, but Games Radar has an absolutely ridiculous recap of the events from Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and Chain of Memories that will make your head spin. The series is not at all conducive to allowing new people to join up and enjoy, and that has to drive Disney crazy.

End of the Decade

I'm pretty excited.  We're coming up on the end of the 00's, and that means we're going to see a lot of "end-of-the-decade" lists.  There's no exception here.  I'm going to be busting out the best music of the decade, the best games of the decade, and talking about how much has changed and how much is the same.

One thing that I want to emphasize is how much the gaming landscape has changed.  The difference between 1980 and 1989 was just a matter of graphics.  The same basic types of games were in their primitive forms in 1980, and 1989 just say those forms perfected.  1990 to 1999 saw the beginnings of 3-D, and that was a seismic shift in gaming, but the revolution wasn't totally perfected yet.

Now?  All bets are off.  We'll talk it about it coming up soon.

LOLOLOLOL (PSPGo)

No UMD conversion for PSPGo users!  Man, oh man, this just keeps getting better and better.

Basically, here's their sales pitch:  "Hey kids!  Buy this system where you won't own the games, won't be able to play the games you already bought, AND will cost you a lot more!  It's AWESOME!"

Game Changing News

Microsoft is looking to pick up EA!  Of course, this is all rumor and speculation at this point, but think of what that would mean.  Imagine a world where EA holds the only NFL license, and Microsoft owns EA.  MADDEN COULD POSSIBLY ONLY COME OUT FOR MICROSOFT SYSTEMS.  Rock Band, Dead Space, Bioware games (The Old Republic!), Spore, The SIMS!

If that happens, I guess the balance of power in the gaming industry will shift totally over to Microsoft.  What would Sony do?  Sony has it's own exclusives, but without EA, what's their endgame?  Nintendo would still be fine, since their system sells on the power of their own games, but Sony could be taken completely out of the picture.

This is a game changer, folks.  I'm keeping my eyes on this one.

The Evolution of DLC

DLC is getting tossed around left and right lately.  In fact, Borderlands hasn't even shipped yet and Gearbox has already announced that they're working on the first DLC pack.  We don't even know if we're going to like the game yet, and they're already making more of it.  Some people are complaining furiously about this DLC explosion, and with good reason.

There are two different kinds of DLC:  There's the DLC that adds substantially to the game, like Fallout 3's different DLC packs that add 4-5 hours of gameplay or, I don't know, SPACESHIPS.  Then there's DLC like Madden's DLC: Adding in features that always used to be in the game by default, like cheat codes and the like.  What kind of DLC should be acceptable and what kind shouldn't?

First of all, DLC has always been around.  We called it "expansion packs."  Any game worth its salt got an expansion pack, and they were usually optional.  You didn't have to get the expansion pack in order to enjoy the full game.  You could play the entire story of Jedi Knight without caring whether or not you played Mysteries of the Sith.  You could play through Half-Life without needing or caring about Opposing Force, and so on.  It was a good arrangement:  If you needed more gameplay, it was there for the taking.  If you didn't, you didn't.  Case closed.

Expansion packs were usually outsourced to a different company.  For instance, Diablo's expansion pack, Hellfire, was made by Synergistic Software and Half-Life's expansions were made by Gearbox.  These expansions were usually not up to the same quality standards as the originals.  In fact, Hellfire made Blizzard so mad that they handled the expansion for Diablo II themselves.  Other companies followed suit, and the tide started to change.  When the original company handled the expansion, the quality went through the roof.  With the quality much improved, the expansions quickly changed from being optional to essential.

For instance, can you imagine trying to play Diablo II without Lord of Destruction?  Or what about playing Age of Empires II without The Conquerors, or Starcraft without Brood War?  The expansions deepened and improved on many of the concepts of the originals so much that you could no longer live without them.  There were other expansions that were just superfluous.  I love Alpha Centauri, but Alien Crossfire is unnecessary to enjoy the game, but it sold a few copies anyway.

Now, if you're a company and you have the opportunity to use the same assets you used to build a game in order to make just a tweak or two to your old game AND make more money off of it, you would have to, right?  Not so fast.  The issue with expansion packs is that you still have to box them and ship them out, one of the largest costs of game development.  What's a company to do?  There's a chance you might make more money, but there's also a chance that those expansions are going to sit on store shelves and eventually sell for $5.  Plus, your game has to have a big enough install base in order to justify an expansion, so you have to make sure your game is selling or at least going to sell before you make expansions for it.

The first shot across the bow of DLC was Elder Scrolls IV's infamous Horse Armor debacle.  Instead of making an expansion worth $20, for the low, low price of $2 you could give your horse some armor!  At the time, almost everyone was in agreement that we were going down a bad path.  "Soon," said the naysayers, "we'll be paying $1 for the ability to level up, $2 per potion, $5 for a sword not made out of cardboard!"

So far, those naysayers have been proven somewhat right and somewhat wrong.  For every game that uses DLC right (Fallout 3's excellent expansions) there are some that don't (Madden).  What the Horse Armor thing taught us is that people will willingly buy something additional if it's worth it.  If I have to pay $2 for something stupid there's no way I'm going to do it, in the same way that those who made expansion packs learned that people won't buy crap expansions.  In other words, DLC is good when it's substantial and priced right, bad when it's not.  Glad we cleared that up.

More Beatles Reasons

There were a couple more things I thought of overnight about why the Beatles remain as popular as they do.

1) They let themselves be influenced by others.

The Beatles did not exist in a vacuum.  Their early work was inspired by Elvis and skiffle.  Some songs bear the clear stamp of Bob Dylan, like "You've Got Hide Your Love Away." (Incidentally, my wife actually thought that was a Dylan song until I pointed it out to her.)  Later on, they were influenced by Ravi Shankar and eastern philosophy.  Even an album as seminal as "Sgt. Pepper" has its roots in other albums like "Pet Sounds" and "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa, which they've acknowledged as a clear influence.  You could say that they were copying others, but like any good artist, they understood that inspiration doesn't just happen.  You need...a little help from your friends.

2) The finality.

Consider The Rolling Stones.  From 1963 to 1972, their catalog is a murderer's row.  Think of the fantastic songs they have: "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'," "Gimme Shelter," "Get Off Of My Cloud," we could go on for a while.  But when you think of the Stones, what do you see?  The cool Keith Richards pursing his lips while he plays his guitar?  Mick Jagger swaggering his way through "Brown Sugar?"  Or do you see a couple of old wrinkled guys who haven't made a really top-of-the-line album in a while?

Consider The Who.  Their catalog is also mostly unimpeachable to a point.  They were a band with three frontmen and a fantastic bassist.  But they're still going, long after Keith Moon and The Ox died, still plugging along long after they're relevant.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, and then John Lennon died. They've never, ever gotten back together.  (Yes, they recorded "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love," but those were Lennon compositions.)  They didn't throw Julian Lennon into the mix and hit the road again, and they're not endlessly touring.  When you think of The Beatles, you think of them the way they were, not the way they are.  Paul will always be the guy with the flirty eyes, John will always be the dreamer and tortured artist, George will always be the mysterious guitar savant and Ringo will always be the fun-loving drummer.  If Paul McCartney were arrested tomorrow with his trunk full of dead Chechnyan prostitutes, it wouldn't reflect at all on the Beatles' music.  It exists in a vacuum in our minds since it came, it rocked our faces off, and then it left, leaving us with fond memories ever since.

The Beatles: Legendary Or Not?

This topic occurred to me when reading an article written by Paul Shirley on ESPN.com. In his blog post, he complains about people liking the Beatles, saying they really were primitive and other bands are better. Every once in a while, a contrarian viewpoint like this one will pop up, and as Shirley did, they usually don't have anything to back it up except statements like this one:

I'd much rather listen to Oasis than The Beatles. Oasis, or any band that came after The Beatles, learned from The Beatles, improving on their work by listening to, building on and perfecting the styles pioneered by The Beatles.

*Cough*

There's almost no way that someone from my generation can listen to the primitive hackings of "Eleanor Rigby" finish, and then listen to "November Rain" and say, "Yeah, 'Eleanor Rigby' is the better piece of music."

*Hack*

But I do know that the Dean Koontz books that entertained my 14-year-old mind are infinitely more complex and frightening than "Dracula."

*Sputter*

These are usually the kind of statements you see in this type of article. It's never anything concrete, such as, "Listen to the last third of 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' where they just repeat the same thing over and over again and tell me that the Beatles are a good band." That sort of argument I can understand, but the only songs this guy mentions are "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "Eleanor Rigby." Those are both fine songs, but he doesn't even talk about what he doesn't like about them. He says that he doesn't like the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand," but his trashing of "Eleanor Rigby" has no hard statements as to what's wrong with it. He also brings up "Abbey Road," which he trashes once again without saying why he doesn't like it.

When people trash the Beatles, they usually don't mention things like "I listened to 'Revolver' and I didn't like it." Their point almost always boils down to "They're not as good as everyone says they are." That's essentially what Shirley is saying, along with a healthy dollop of "I wasn't around then so maybe I don't understand the attraction." Paul McCartney will even admit as such. His exact words on the subject as quoted from The Beatles Anthology?

We were just a band that made it very, very big. That's all.

However, the cascades of adulation heaped upon the Beatles do have some merit. I myself was skeptical of them for a while. The first albums I ever bought (after The Wallflowers' "Bringing Down The Horse") (don't laugh) were "Abbey Road" and "Let It Be." I was very disappointed in both of them, but I kept trying to break through and figure out what I was missing. After a while I bought "Sgt. Pepper" and I liked that even less. It wasn't until I listened to "Revolver" that I got it for good, and I consider "Revolver" to be their finest album and one of the best albums I've ever heard.

To be fair, the Beatles are, first and foremost, just a guitar band that got opportunities for musical expansion that other bands of the time didn't get. You could make the argument that a band like Radiohead is far more experimental than the Beatles ever were. However, the Beatles didn't have the tools to be that wildly experimental. They were using 8-track recorders. Electronica was in its infancy. Plus, Radiohead, while popular, is nowhere near as popular as the Beatles, and that's because the Beatles understood when to be experimental and when to dial it back.

The strange thing is that Radiohead's career arc and the Beatles career arc follow each other pretty well. Both started out as simple guitar bands. Early Beatles songs like "Please Please Me" and "All My Loving," while good, aren't earth-shattering. Likewise with Radiohead's "Creep." I would actually say that "Creep" is an awful, overplayed song. Neither gave any indication about the eventual endpoint for their respective bands. As they grew and changed, they experimented with more sounds until they created their breakthrough "sound of a generation" albums. The Beatles made "Sgt. Pepper" and Radiohead made "Kid A."

We're digressing, but the point is this: Every band starts with humble beginnings and eventually becomes something bigger. Every band is "just a band." However, there are specific reasons why The Beatles became as big as they did and continue to be. Sure, their mythology helps, but there's a lot more in play. Here's a couple of points:

1) The quality of their music.

This is the first and most obvious reasoning. In the space of 8 years they released 13 albums (14 if you count The White Album as two albums) and almost every song is good. There are a few clunkers, like the second half of "Yellow Submarine" and some of their cover songs at the beginning of their career. However, just about every song has something worth hearing. Even a song like like "I Want To Hold Your Hand" has that three-chord introduction that gets repeated throughout the song. It's endlessly sing-along-able (is that a word?) to boot.

On top of that, the depth of their library is fantastic. You can randomize their library, pick out 14 songs and get a pretty good album out of it. It's a rare group that has almost no worthless songs, especially with the volume of songs that they have.

2) Their initial popularity.

There's no denying that Beatlemania plays a large part in their ongoing popularity. That's actually okay. There are galvanizing moments in culture that everyone who was around still remembers: Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, 9/11. "Beatles on Ed Sullivan" is another one of those moments, and we really don't see mass cultural events like "Who Shot J.R." anymore. It's a bit of a relic of the old mass media, and just the same as we still talk about other cultural seismic shifts, the Beatles influence deserves the same recognition.

3) Their experimentalism.

The Beatles were just experimental enough to be dangerous. There was always a little bit of danger underneath the moptop haircuts and suits, even at the beginning. They may have looked clean-cut, but their music was raucous party music in a style that really hadn't been around. Elvis' music was sharp at the beginning, but by the time the Beatles rolled around, he was willing to just make movies and take drugs without taking any real risks.

The Beatles made fun, rollicking guitar songs for quite a while, but they had the clout to do more and they did. "Helter Skelter" is still a harrowing work and wholly shocking from a band that once sang "She Loves You." "Tomorrow Never Knows" is more experimental than a lot of modern bands are. And unlike a lot of bands that have tried to be experimental and failed, The Beatles experimentalism actually works and sounds great without being too far out there ("Revolution 9" aside).

--

Now, the question is, are the Beatles substantially better than any other band in existence ever? Not really. They're really good, and I would classify them as the best band so far, but there are a lot of other bands who have very solid catalogs as well. However, none have had the reach culturally, have grabbed as many people, and are as universally loved as the Beatles. I guarantee you that long after we're gone, a big chunk of their music will continue to live on.

Why do I even bother...

...when stupid articles like this one come out every week or so?

Look, how many more ways can this be worded?  Running an industry, ANY industry, takes a lot more than aiming at enthusiasts.  Imagine if car manufacturers only made expensive, top-of-the line cars.  Imagine if the only food available was caviar, or if the only drink was champagne, and it was all still priced exactly the same.  It's ludicrous.  Nintendo knows this.  That's why...

GAH!  I can't handle this any more.  The idiocy, it astounds me.