Are Consoles Really Relevant For Gaming Anymore? Oh And Some Other Random Stuff About How Everything Sucks

I'm starting to get the feeling that I would like to have been born a long time ago. I don't mean this as a technophobe, like I hate the modern world or anything. Well, slightly I do and we'll get to that, although my only real fear for the future is that I am still terrified of ever showing my kids the internet. The first porn I ever watched was a double anal and that was just from typing porn into Alta Vista search engine (only cause they had a videos section and I didn't know how to use the internet to find videos myself). Whatever they type in within the next few decades is surely going to bring up horrors that I couldn't ever even begin to comprehend in my small double anal world. They'll be the quadruple anal generation. Generation XXX.

They're better than me, and for the first time future parents have to concede that maybe when they finally have to put on the gloves of authority, it won't matter because there is nothing you can teach your child. They'll have seen the shit. They'll know truths that you could never teach because to know what they know, would drive your mind into an inescapable and endless insanity. We're the last generation that needs guidance.

The last children.

But anyway got off to a bad start there. I never really know how to start these things. Writing articles is a lot like getting laid. It starts off all pointless because in the title you've already stated what you're going to talk about, I.E The Sex – for the sake of the analogy. But you've got to do a pointless intro sidewinding it to that subject by talking about bullshit, drinking, and being overly friendly with a person or people that you don't know but treating it like it's a casual dialogue. Then you get down to the meat, and it's fine, goes well for abit. Your skill is competent enough that you seem like you know where you're going (this would be the foreplay aspect of the analogy). Then it gets down to the pulp. The writing about all your views and compressing them down in a format with paragraphs (speed variation) and pictures (Cock Slapping) that are used to not bore the audience (throat). The article from this point will end one of two ways. Either it'll go on for too long (like this one is) and end with no climax (doesn't need brackets, cleverly works as an innuendo, this is getting good) but instead, just you hopelessly rounding it off to some point to satisfy the audience (the vagina/ass) before going about your business. Either that or you just end it quickly with a nonsensical joke that you had in the first place and only wrote the article just to dump that one in the end (a selfish cum dump).

But now I feel like I've splurged enough to get going. I could just write this and then edit it, but since that would involve more than a spell check and using said spell check to change every “jsut” into a “just”, then that would take too long. I can't be bothered for that.

Really, what I'm complaining about today hits me in the light of some sad news that has been heard this week. We've heard about the sad news of the break up of our web-comic artist and our writer Chapman (He's the guy who if you had only just started reading the blog, would think was the only contributor, because he is). But although this is sad news and is very strikingly relevant to a close friend's life, that wasn't what affected me the most this week. So what did?

Fucking GTA V getting delayed is such horse shit that I was so bothered by the news, that upon accidentally stumbling upon it while looking for porn, I was unable to masturbate that evening. I just couldn't do it. I stared into the 17/9/2013 written in white bold against a cold black background and I was a broken man. It was like kissing the lips of a drowning love as she sank to the bottom of the lake, although with the added benefit of knowing that she'll submerge in a few months looking way finer than she did before. And that's cool. I don't see why people hate Rockstar for the decision, afterall they are at least trying to improve their product and at the very least even giving you a damn release date and updates unlike some other company of a well loved franchise.

If Nicholas Cage were here he could decipher what the numbers mean.

 I bet they spell out "Fuck You"

So I was bothered by this. And then I went to go see Django Unchained to make myself feel better and I'm ashamed to say I didn't really like it that much, and now because of this any opinion I have will be shunned like an albino child. Then recently I noticed that Sony were giving a press conference on the 20^th February, clearly about the PS4. And then it hit me. It hit me like a huge soggy tit furiously lactating in the warm summer sun of a summer that had now set in the wake of a cold winter. I wrote a dissertation and half heartedly chose a subject, not really deliberating it for that long. But when I heard about the announcement of the PS4 coming up, and read some of the intended specs, I couldn't make up my mind as to whether I would purchase a console from the upcoming generation.

I couldn't come to a decision and I thought long and hard about it. I wasn't sure if they were powerful enough, if console gaming was getting too expensive of a hobby to fund, and whether or not my recent stint into owning a gaming PC had made consoles for the most part irrelevant cause now I got that sucker hooked up to the HD it really has lost any downsides in the comfort region. And even though I should have spent longer on my dissertation, or actually bothered to go out and build a life that had any consequences in any way, instead I had let my life suck. But it sucks in the best possible way. And that sadly, sucks.

And this is what's annoying about the modern world. I know I said I liked it, but there's one big problem that it constantly hits me with, and the real problem is it's not really one problem it's lots of little insignificant problems. When people had problems in the past, they were usually pretty big; Will we eat tonight? I hope my child isn't a witch? Oh my God my children are literally dying in my stomach due to malnourishment and yet I don't really mind anymore cause this is just normal shit. That kind of deal. The people got more comfortable. Couples would live in comfort and worry whether their rock garden was better than their neighbours or if their children were behaving and set to have good jobs.

But then the internet hit. Mass media finally had a foundation to build itself comfortably on. And people like me were born, and we were happy. Very happy. Too happy. Nothing in our lives went wrong. We were always entertained, never confused as to what was happening in the world – we could find out all this information at a google search. Entertainment was a sedative and a comforting virtual companion force feeding me with cat videos and angry video game nerd which drugged me up to impotency like an anti-viagra, and so as far as having relationships was concerned, there was no reason. Baby was happy. It's a simulated life compiling all the best bits of Zero Punctuation and Hardcore Pornography into what feels like a friend.

But here I was, struggling with a dilemma which should never have existed. If there is a god then he is becoming a lazy parent. He's not evil, if anything he's just kindly indifferent gifting his children with all their deepest wishes until eventually they have no drive left in them. I had stopped living my life for myself and instead my problems no longer stem from my own life. I fear for release dates of games, whether companies will go under and that I won't get their products. I fear how the websites and channels I view don't get enough updates to satisfy my thirst. There's not enough news in the world to sustain me. I need another terrorist attack or game announcement or something to keep me going. I live off the checkpoints of life, set out before me by secret Sony announcements and GTA V release dates, and when these are meddled with, it makes me furious. Someone's changed the goalposts around and it's as if I have no power over my life, because I have no life. My life is determined by when products that I want come out.

When people asked me what I was going to do with my life I would simply point to this poster. Now I don't even have that

Now how am I supposed to fill my spring 2013 without GTA. Go outside. That stuff got old ages ago. It's the same old stuff over and over again, just an endless sky and mountains and everything's green or grey. The immediate world is not interesting to look at. People criticize COD for being the same iteration of the same stuff year in and year out, but then why do people love the planet so much, it's just the same, but worse, it's a daily update of the same mundane stuff.

And so the next big moment in my life has arrived. Many people would think about their next step in life. What they want to do, or be, and who they want to be with. We've become adults afterall. But here I am, raised in this time and place and there's only one question on my mind. Should I get a PS4? Is it worth the investment when I have a PC with similar specs? Will the games be good enough to warrant it? Should I get the new Xbox? I've been with Playstation for so long, how do I know I'm not a fanboy? Am I unbiased? I don't even know myself anymore.

But while I'm on the subject then, and seemingly giving into my own nature completely, I am surprised at what a 180 I've made on consoles. The exclusives are great. That's really the one argument where I see consoles still rule the roost. If you're with PC you get all the multiplatform stuff for the most part and anything that is an exclusive will be an android or Mac exclusive, and honestly who could give a shit about that.

 This is Airburst Extreme. 

If you don't own a MAC then please look at it and think about all the fun you missed out on

 The fact the PC has Steam, with it's sales and for the most part excellent service, as well as being completely free (which I'm arguing the PSN and XBLA wouldn't be cause they cost a console to access), is a great reason to own a PC. You get the modding community, who will fix usually any problem with the game, but more importantly, most PC games now have controller functionality with most of their games, so you can sit back with your pc plugged into the TV and play away in comfort. In a lot of regards PC gaming is also a hell of a lot cheaper, with the hardware upgrades taking the majority of the budget, whereas the cheap as hell games from steam will save you enough money to make up for that easily.

Also any new technology, such as the on line streaming services being put forward by Onlive and Nvidia, will be accessible far faster on the PC. The PC adapts quicker to new markets. While Steam was in full swing, the last generation of consoles barely had a recognizable online service that didn't include much more than very empty multiplayer lobbies, which you could only access through an expensive monthly payment and a ridiculous extra block of hardware jammed into your system.

The more I look into it, unless Sony or Microsoft can provide a hell of a lot of exclusives, which are mind blowingly amazing enough that I can't resist them, then I'm really not seeing why I should buy a next gen console. I'll have to wait and see. The horrible thing being that if everyone waits and sees, then Sony will have run out of money before they can wow us with anything, which at least they'd have an excuse for not releasing a great exclusive, unlike whatever the hell lazy excuse they have for the Vita's bare ass library.

So that was it really. Those last few paragraphs were my reasons why PC gaming has completely changed my opinion on console gaming. The consoles have been good to us, but even I get the feeling that they can't keep up now. It's time to let it go. Why tie yourself down with one master who runs your entire console, when you could have any of the free and great software that the internet and your pc have to offer. Unless they release an exclusive game which I literally can't refuse, and without a lot of swearing and violent sexual imagery I am incapable of describing this game, then I'll buy a PS4. But for now, that side of the market has lost me.

Oh and GTA V will be not be on next gen consoles, don't you think they'd announce or release a PC or Wii U version first. It'd be way easier and less risky to develop. What a stupid theory for the delay.