Entry 36: "Violent Reality"

Yo!

My fellow MySpace-icans..... It has recently come to my attention that the way I mentioned last week's blog title, "Britney's Millions," being connected to Richard Pryor, was a tad too discreet and the joke might not have hit as hard as I had hoped for those of you who haven't seen or at the time didn't think of Pryor's 1985 film "BREWSTER's Millions." Memory-jogging info about it can be found at IMDB; Wikipedia has some stuff about the novel on which it was based (as well as the four earlier film versions), and the movie itself is buyable at Amazon HERE. I apologize for any confusion I may have caused.

Now that the explanation and promotions are out of the way, let's get this done. Violence and Video Games have been hand-in-hand throughout the entire history of the gaming industry. Whether players had to eat blue ghosts after consuming certain power pellets or avoiding barrels being thrown at you down a series of slopes by a wannabe King Kong that somehow got the name of a donkey, or picking up prostitutes and killing police officers on the fly or dealing out twenty-six hit combos right before tearing out the guy's spine through his mouth. But it's only during that magical holiday-time, once every four to five years, that the gamers of America inadvertently unleash their primal urges in their quest to get their hands on the latest, lean, mean fraggin' machine on their Christmas list. At any cost.

Seven years ago, the last generation of gaming began with the debut of Sega's last console, the Dreamcast, on September 9th, 1999. One year later, Sony's Playstation 2 was unleashed to the world. Another year later, Microsoft dipped their toe into the waters of "the biz" with their first Xbox, launching three days prior to Nintendo releasing their fourth console, the GameCube. Not one of those four launches suffered the, as Google's "console launch violence" results page puts it, marring of riots on the same level as the big, bad new supercomputer on the block: Sony's trinity-completing, bank-account-slaughtering PlayStation 3.

Last weekend saw the most massive, country-wide onslaught of video game street violence probably ever on record, and the PS3s weren't even out of their boxes yet. Retail outlets scattered across America, from California to North Carolina reported customers taking extreme measures left-and-right, just to keep their place in line as they waited in front of stores for hours, even days in advance of the launch. According to gjsentinel.com, there was an actual shooting before a sale had happened at a store in Connecticut, because the guy didn't want to give up his money and place in line, at gunpoint.

On the one hand, of course it's a good idea to get one of these units fresh from launch if possible, since they turn such a profit on eBay (upwards of $1,000-$3,000 for PS3, not counting the knuckleheads charging in the millions), but on the other hand, the obvious flip side, aside from the violence, is the whole having to wait outside in the freezing winter weather for so long, fork down so much money, and if you're not eBaying it, getting it home and booting it up, praying it doesn't glitch up and self-destruct internally thanks to shoddy manufacturing, like SOME sophomore console efforts. Remember, PS3 was delayed over a year because they fell short of working Blu-ray read lasers to put in the disc drives. Sure, if you're an eBayer, I guess the end justifies the means, but at what cost, and not just monetarily?

GAMERS OF AMERICA! At some point, you have to accept this new technology being so popular is only that way because it's gotten such a positive advertising and word-of-mouth push from the big manufacturing companies that everyone of course will want it. It's all in the advertising, or "plugging." But the instant some newer, fancier hardware comes out that claims to run circles around its predecessor, and DOES IT WELL, then of course that's the new thing to get and fight and almost kill over, hours before launching, yet only six years away from the $49.99 bargain bin at Value City. That's why you never have people rioting about PCs, because it's not make-once hardware, meaning there will be upgrade kits released eventually that can be installed yourself if done correctly.

Think about it: If Dell came out with a special computer, desktop or laptop, that was make-once, meaning it could never be upgraded, and promoted the crap out of it by filming a "behind tha' launch" special and got MTV, Spike or G4 to air it and plug it constantly, who knows what'll happen once the gates open? Well, other than MSN. Besides, what if Sony released the PS3 without a single ad, not a single promotion whatsoever? Last Friday comes and goes, and after the launch weekend happens, how many people do you think would've forked over $600 so willingly, not knowing what it could do, or what it may be able to someday do? More than that, would they have even made the system in the first place without a way to guarantee such an extreme need from the target consumers that no matter how much of a loss they take in manufacturing each console, they could make it back in nothing flat, without having to wait for the cost of the parts to die down? Why do you think Xbox 360's been out over a year without a single penny's worth of price drop? (still $399.99 for premium version, and $100 less for core system, 54 weeks strong) ...And don't give me that "no competition" speech, cause they could've brought down the price at least a month before PS3 and Wii (not a typo) launched and really took them down by now.

Sony gave this console so much of a push, and there was so much hype purposely orchestrated for it, what if--- and I'm not at all pointing the finger at Sony Computer Entertainment of America, the Sony corporation or brand as a whole, the networks, webmasters, board posters, retailers or fellow Bloggers, but I have to mention this conspiracy theory--- what if they pushed this so hard for a reason? They had to know that at some point there'd be so much hype built up that these gamers, so used to virtual violence, that as I said earlier, their baser, well-trained instincts broke out subconsciously, but without a controller in-hand? There was just so much of it, as you've probably heard by now, police had to break out tasers and paint ball guns, to keep the peace, way too much for a simple game console release.

My final MySpace Bottom Line is Microsoft, time to bring the cost down for 360 a little bit. Nintendo: Good launch yesterday, but I'm not sure repackaging old hardware with a new gimmicky look will work in the long run. It didn't work for the N-Gage QD, and I'm not sure it'll work for you. Sony: What the heck were you thinking? I'd love to go all out with what I really think of your latest business practices, but children could be reading! Quit blocking PSP homebrew, and maybe you'll pose a threat to the Nintendo DS. Keep pushing PS3's limited supply this hard, I'll pass on PlayStation 4. Consumers deserve better treatment than that for our money. And time. And lives.


.......................But that's just me.

Thanks for reading, Happy Thanksgiving and as The Simpsons' Krusty the Clown once put it, have a Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Krazy Kwanzaa, and a solemn, dignified Ramadan. Love that Season One DVD. Anyway, be safe during the holidays, and I'll see you in 2007!

-Donn