posted 2007/06/11 at 19:45
About a couple of months ago GameStop started e-mailing their weekly flyers to me at my Yahoo! e-mail address, even though I'm positive I've never given GameStop my e-mail address. (I seem to have a lot of people who mistakenly give my Yahoo! e-mail account out as theirs.) Although I own none of the current-generation video game systems and have neither the money for, nor the interest in, any of those systems, I still look at the flyers just to see what's out there. I guess this is another one of those things that's making me feel old, because this is the first time since the 8-bit era where I can remember not buying at least one of the current-generation systems in its first few weeks of release. (In the previous two generations I bought the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 2 on their first day.) Then again, I haven't even had the time to go out to the garage to play my dance video games for several weeks now.
I guess I still have lots of questions about this current generation of systems that would probably be easily answered if I actually bothered to play any of them. For instance, I can remember that in the months leading up the Wii's release, people suddenly went from decrying the strange shape and setup of the Wii controller to suddenly falling in love with it, and I still can't figure out exactly when or why this change took place. Likewise, I've heard all the bad stories about the PlayStation 3 and its current status, but I don't understand why people are now thinking that Sony's lost their "aura of inevitability" when it comes to landing those two or three exclusive titles that most video gamers will, however begrudgingly, buy a PlayStation 3 just to be able to play. For that matter, some of the most anti-Microsoft people I've known have completely changed their opinion of the company based solely on the Xbox 360, which really boggles my mind.
I think that I'm just now getting to the point where any loyalties I ever had to video game companies has just about dried up. My Nintendo loyalty ended back when Square jumped ship to Sony for Final Fantasy VII (hard to believe that was over a decade ago now), and as much as I love Square, I'm just not into them anymore. I can remember back in their early days publishing titles for the PlayStation I bought up pretty much everything they released, but after a while I just got burnt out. I bought both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII on their first days of release and enjoyed each immensely, but I skipped Final Fantasy XI because I don't play MMORPGs, and I bought very few of the scores of other titles they released for the PS2. I'm sure Final Fantasy XIII will be a great game (although I have some reservations about the way they're pursuing it), but I just can't see myself laying down however many hundreds of dollars I'd need to lay down in order to play it.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon