Grumpy Old Gamer

Written by admin on 02/01/2010  –  Filed under: Articles

Tags: 360, grumpy old gamer, online gaming, xbox live

I’ve been playing games for 25 years. But despite what the fancy-dan magazines tell you, things haven’t all improved for the better. Why am I left waiting for an age while a PS3 game loads when at least my C64 had the decency to let me play Invaderload? Why do games need five fire buttons when I used to manage with just one? Modern gaming leaves me angry and confused. Thanks to the people at Up To Jump, I get to put this right.

Die You Noob Luser!

When I was a kid, multiplayer gaming meant either 2 player games of Matchday or the exciting world of split screen action such as in Spy V Spy. You’d need a friend to hand to take advantage of this, and unless you had a computer such as a C64 or 128k Spectrum that had 2 joystick ports, whoever drew the short straw would end up on the keyboard.

As gaming advanced so did multiplayer games. First we had games like F1GP which allowed you to take it in turns to race, then we had Super Bomberman and Mario Kart. Gaming became more of a social affair. Then Doom hit Netware networks up and down the country and you could gather lots of friends onto your school or college network and literally shoot their faces off.

But all these still required you to gather lots of your friends into one place. If you were Johnny no-mates, you weren’t going to get much multiplayer action. Of course, with the internet came online gaming, but really this was still for nerds. Half Life deathmatches on remote servers still required you to be a socially inept PC geek to get it all working, but at least you now had people to play against even if, like you, they rarely glimpsed daylight or used soap.

Today we have services like Xbox Live which make online gaming against complete strangers really easy. With the press of a few buttons and the payment of a subscription to Microsoft you have hundreds of thousands of people to play against. This is what we yearned for all along, because even with advances in computer AI there’s nothing quite like playing against real people. If you want to play Gears Of War at 3am in the morning with real human beings, you can. This should be the greatest thing ever, what we spent 25 years waiting for…

Except it’s not. You see, the first problem is that Microsoft decided to give everyone headsets. Why would you want to speak to total strangers? Even if you don’t opt to use a headset, you still have to suffer listening to some borderline retarded boy from Texas screaming insults while you try and enjoy your game. If I want to have insults hurled at me by 14 year old kids, I’ll go hang out at the local shopping centre.

Then, to add insult to injury,  you end up playing against real hardcore gamers. The game suddenly turns into something that feels like the recurring death bug in Jet Set Willy. At least when you are playing with your mates you can have a laugh about it and they’ll give you some tips how to improve. But instead you end up staring down the barrel of a rocket launcher while a 14 year old with the username “SirRimULot” calls you a “faggot” before blowing your brains out yet again.

When you played your friends at Sensible Soccer or played network Doom, chances were all your mates were at approximately the same level as you were. You developed your skills together and if you did manage to beat them you might pass on a few tips. Fat chance of that when your opponent is 4000 miles away in Redneckville Arizona, and is screaming abuse down the headset safe in the knowledge that little can be done.

Of course, you could just opt to play against the people in your friend list. But isn’t that a step back? Has the promise of mass online gaming been a total let down?

The truth is that nothing beats old school action with people you know, or at least trust enough not to cock things up for you. While perhaps nothing can touch a game of Half Life in your company office, as I once played, a game of Halo or Gears online with people who are at a similar skill level to you is a joy.

The answer is of course to allow gamers to choose who to play against. If I only want to play against people over the age of 18 with a decent reputation then I should bloody well be able to have that choice. It’s a premium subscription service, and just as I wouldn’t choose to walk around a rough estate at night, why would I choose to mix with some of the human detritus on Live?

So Microsoft, why not let me decide what kind of people to play against so that I can have all the benefits of your huge userbase without Billy Bob questioning my parentage before blowing my face off? Otherwise I might as well go and throw stones at tin cans in Aldi carpark to achieve the same “social gaming” experience.