Gaming Rant...Tangents beware~! Interactive Art?

Here I am, enjoying my morning cup of water... (Yes, screw coffee I drink water or highly sugarized kool-aid) When I remember the kick to the nads I recieved not so long ago from the announcement that my beloved, long awaited, game I had so anxiously been waiting for to be released on my PS3 was, in fact, going to be released no longer on solely the PS3, but the 360 as well.

Now I know some of you reading this are rolling your eyes and sighing with the fact that this has been heard to the point of nausea elsewhere, but I'm ranting so if you don't like it leave.

While it may very well be my own fault for placing such high hopes that Final Fantasy 13 would remain exclusive and give me a reason to feel justified in my purchase of a PS3 I still hold the bitterness that came with the announcement of the dual release. After dreaming of the extreme glory that would be achieved by FF13 coming to the PS3 and proving that it can, indeed, perform at greater specs than the 360 it hurt to hear it would not be so. Production of value must have slowed to a crawl when this was announced because they were already hitting things that the 360 might find hard to handle. This means that instead of delving further into the complexity that is allowed by the PS3 they purposely restricted themselves to the means of the lesser system.

There is no reason for more effort to be put forth to exemplify this point, when so much money can be saved by getting lazy and leaving the game as is. Granted this game promises to be great, but my point is that now that it is dual-platform...aside from making almost two completely different games FF13 will no longer be pushed to the limits and those that make it are most assuredly no longer trying to push it beyond the expectations of all it's predecesors... No more revolutionary ideas will be pushed to the brink, no more great ideas will be expanded upon. At least not with this game. Instead it will be as is, continue with what is present, and end with what exists. While this still may mean utter greatness, it means that what could have been will not be for even longer. Instead of pushing every limit beyond measure, it has been decided that it will be released with the as-is notation and that any and all revolutionary ideas will be saved for future things instead of being performed now.

FF13 promised to leave such a lasting impression that it would become a legend... like that of the greatest RPG of all time. Final Fantasy 7. Instead..., while it may still leave an impression, will no doubtedly be foreshadowed easily in the next release of games only months later. While previously being capable of being insurmountable for years it has now been left open to be overtaken by others so very soon of it's release. Perhaps it is too much to continue to expect a company that has produced legends to do so anymore...and maybe it is too much to expect it to be as mind blowing as I hope it to be, but the developers have always had the ability to produce things that even to this day have not entirely been eclipsed in grandeur.

I can just picture how exactly it all went down.

Bill Gates, tired of trying to barter with Square-Enix while being a cheap-skate realized that FF13 would help fuel the 360 sales and help further keep the PS3 down decided to bring an obnoxious proposal of money to make it a dual platform title. Casting all dignity away Square took the money with that crap-eating grin and announced to many's dismay that it would be dual released.

Some people may wonder why this irks me so...so let me delve into my reasoning for my upset.

Atm, (I say this because soon they will upgrade their system and this will be a mute point...) the PS3 blows the 360 out of the water in capability. Keyword, however.... being "Capability". Not to say that there haven't been games to somewhat prove the PS3's superiority in nearly every design category, but none has been able to definely purge all doubts in the general public's mind that the PS3 can indeed perform better.

The problem is that developers are paid to make a company money, no more no less. It is no longer about making a game that will wow for years to come due to depth, storyline, gameplay, and replay value. No longer about creating greatness, but about producing cookie cutter games that are polished to look different and forced upon the public. Now it's about making a game look pretty with some fancy visuals that are present in roughly 10% of the game and leave a lackluster, bland taste in the mouth of those who dish out their hard-earned cash to purchase.

Too many times has the general public been lured in by fancy visuals to have their virtual scrotum be kicked in by the realization that they just wasted $60 on a game they played a few days ago in the bargain bin at their local game store with enhanced graphics and a new feature or two. This comes from actually expecting greatness from those that have actually produced greatness.

Yes, visuals are nice. I like. Do I have to have to enjoy the game? No. Would I like it in addition to a game with great depth and enjoyment? Hell yes. But making a game with visuals alone to hold it up is utterly retarded.

I now have a new name for games of this sort... Interactive Art. Screw calling them games anymore if the true substance is solely in the artistic expression. I, for one, love art, but when I purchase a game that looks beautiful I also expect some kind of fun to usher forth from my purchase. I mean, if a person can put as much work and intelligence into making that game that unbelievably beautiful and complex.... Why the hell can't they add some depth somewhere else? Story? Gameplay itself? Game Mechanics? There is a reason there is a TEAM involved in the production of a game.

1 man may have the idea, but very few can come up with a great idea and bring to the table the best in all departments. That is where other individuals SHOULD come in.

This is how I see the good folks that made Assassin's Creed got together and talked.

(Note: Same Guy Proposing each thing to the board.)

"Here is my art for the game" Response: " Wow that's great I love it, let's do it!"

"Here is my concept for gameplay in the first chapters" Response: "Omg, amazing! Let's duplicate that throughout the entire game~!"

"Here is my concept for the mechanics" Response: "Yeah, that's awesome...Basically Prince of Persia with a few tweaks to make it our own...except...let's let them play with the best they can possibly expect from the get go and hope they are so wowed they actually waste hours upon hours of their lives re-achieving that same lackluster pinnacle."

As you can tell I was not wooed by the brilliance of Prin...I mean Assassin's Creed. Great game...if it didn't end 2 hours into itself. After you assassinate your first real target you have, in essence, beaten the game. You have done all there is to offer and you have done all there is to care about.

Copy and paste that same city, randomize it abit...place it 500 miles that way and recolor a few pieces and you have your next city. Rinse and repeat til the end of the game and you have Assassin's Creed's "amazing and revolutionary" construction.

I'll give it this much.... It was fun as hell...until I hit the brick wall of monotony... The worst part about this is that it is an ACTION game...I should be on the edge of my seat at all times and be enjoying the action that comes from it. Instead I enjoy the few hours I can of silently killing people and merging into the crowds until I get bored, happen to come across some folks I can listen in on to find out there is a guy standing 5 feet from me I need to assassinate. Congratulations.

I play RPG's... and when an Action game bores me...there is something wrong.

Anywho...to get away from that tangent and back to my original complaint... The PS3 is capable of much that 360 just cannot handle. It is just a fact of the construction of both systems. However, due to the fact that gaming has become so much more about the bottom line then actual substance games are created to the specs of a 360 capability and then copied and reformatted to work on a PS3. No enhancements of any kind... No splitting of the processors duties as to allow for smoother gameplay... No increase in detail as allowed by the more capable and numerous processors... No alternate modes of gameplay that could be added as a result of the larger memory storage of a Blue Ray disc.... Nothing.

Some might argue that this is good, because it doesn't force anyone to need to own both systems to enjoy a game etc etc. To those of us that have both systems and obtained them through means other than mommy and daddy, we would like to see some kind of exclusivity to warrant the existence of both systems. When there was Playstation and N64 you knew what kind of games were played on Nintendo's machine and what was played on Sony's.

Now, you are given the same game on two different platforms and aside from the draw of earning achievements for the 360 offer no real incentive to own any specific platform's version. I was a Diehard fan of the Playstation ever since the original, but now... I can't help but be drawn in by the megalith known as Microsoft's Xbox 360. The interface is more user friendly, I enjoy getting acknowledged for busting my ass by accomplishing something out of the ordinary, and I enjoy the ease of virtual navigation through the various services offered.

My PS3 has sat in front of my T.V. since I purchased it and has been turned on a max of 30 times in it's entire life. I occasionally dust it off and whimper quietly as I realize that my PS3 is just not going to offer me what I had hoped. I will play my 360 and enjoy it and remember that my PS3 has disapointed me time and time again and hope that someday I might be proud to own one.

I feel like the PS3 is that child that some people have that just can't achieve greatness no matter how hard they or everyone around them try to help them achieve. I'm a parent of this imaginary child and I will continue to hope that someday I will be proud of my PS3 and that someday I will have no regrets from throwing down such a large sum of cash for such a worthless construction of gaming equipment.