An interesting "list" about video game stigmas and their causes

[TrllVl90]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html

I really enjoyed this list. I read it and realized this guy basically just hit the metaphoric nail on its little metaphoric head. This fits the gaming community to a "T". I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. (some nsfw language and links inside so browse with discretion)   

[Kylenz]

Yeah, thanks to my ex poisoning my interest in video games (that they're for losers etc), I don't play them anymore. I've been selling them off. The only ones I've been keeping are the Singstar / Rock Band games, and my Wii games (tennis, Tiger Woods golf etc) in case someone feels like giving me a match someday.

Used to absolutely LOVE playing the old-school first person shooter games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Quake.. was addicted to Quake 3.. our entire flat would be networked together all playing Quake 3 multiplayer together.

But it's not just the girlfriend's bad juju, it's the games in general that have been putting me off. That article mentioned the B-grade quality to the storylines.. not only that.. in an era where the graphics are supposed to be super-realistic, I still find the graphics to be laughable. Even at 1920x1200 with 8x AA 16xAF, when you see a cutscene of 2 characters chatting together and their mouths look like plasticine.. the eyes have no emotion, the features in spite of all the anti-alaising still look pixelated and chunky. It was better in the old Doom days when you knew the characters didn't look realistic - in fact you were more scared by the sounds and screams lurking behind the hidden corners.. nowdays there's zero imagination in an artistic sense - it's Call of Duty 1, 2, 3, Modern Warfare, MW2, etc etc ... no imagination.

The last game I played was Crysis Warhead, but since then there's been nothing on the PC side that is truly groundbreaking. Painkiller was probably the last game I was 'wowed' by in an old-school sense.. fast paced, killing and shooting, amazing physics.. and Serious Sam the Second Encounter before that.. there's nothing like that on the market now.

And with PS3, again, there's nothing that makes me feel 'wow I must get this game'. First person shooters are horrible to play with hand controllers - slow to turn and inaccurate to shoot with compared to a mouse. Driving games are the only real plus to having a console, yet Gran Turismo 5 is taking forever to come out - I had Prologue and played it on my 60" 1080p tv but there's only so much you can do with a handful of tracks and a handful of cars - impressive though they were.

The Wii is lots of fun - yet it's very low res - with motion sensing it would benefit from a high-res full HD treatment but the Wii is incapable of that. Everything about the industry is wrong to me. PC has lost its way. PS3 has nothing innovative or fun. Xbox 360 has the same kind of games, but without a blu ray drive. The Wii has amazing motion sensing tech for a true virtual reality experience, like you're actually in the game (tennis and golf is AMAZING) yet incapable of delivering in native high def. The whole gaming industry has come to a halt for me. :( 

[2 of 3]

Perhaps the speed at which the Wii renders what you do with the controller would be compromised if the graphics got any more complicated or had to be rendered in HD.