Now, this rant may make me seem jaded and bitter, I can’t argue with that and won’t. I am jaded, bitter, angry and any other pseudonym you can think of that expresses a state of overall unhappiness. When I was younger, the act of playing video games was something that was reserved for the nerdiest of basement dwelling, Dungeons & Dragons playing individuals around. Nowadays, everybody plays something. Whether it’s some mindless clicker on their iPhones or something more hardcore, everyone has their own game. Nintendo, and to some extent, mobile games are to blame for this. When the Wii first came out, it was marketed as this little, white, magic machine that when bought, would shoot some life into your dreary home situation, like an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. It keeps the kids busy, it gives you something to do with the missus, hell, it even entertains the folks. It made playing video games suddenly seem socially acceptable.

I’m here to argue that this was in fact the worst thing to happen to games since the advent of DLC. Let me just ask you this, any hardcore gamers out there, who were really blown away by anything, anything in the last few years? Anything at all? The biggest surprise hit so far has been Doom, and although Doom is a fantastic game, it misses the wow factor of something truly original. Uncharted 4 was mechanically a great game. Everything from the gameplay to the graphics are absolutely phenomenal, but was it really necessary? It was just more Uncharted, and after playing The Last of us, I felt it fell a little flat. The same goes for Dark Souls 3. Great game, just irrelevant. It seems that the days of triple A developers actually using their creativity disappeared once games became too mainstream. Now everything has to be safe or it won’t sell. Just look at Vanquish, possibly the finest third-person shooter ever crafted. It reviewed well, yet it sold less than 50 thousand copies worldwide. To think that a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 sold over a bazillion copies, just makes me sick.

I’m not saying nothing is creative any more. Indie games still capture that part of the market pretty well, and gods like Kojima also still manage to surprise in this land of tired sequels, and rehashed ideas. After seeing the Death Stranding trailer, I forgave Kojima for the travesty known to all as MGS V, and would once again trust him to preform open-heart surgery on me. I mean have you ever noticed (sorry, this is rapidly turning into a Seinfeld bit) how whenever some twist to an existing mechanic, or an entirely new one arises, suddenly every single game released that year, and the year after that, has exactly the same thing, only worse. One year it was zombies, then the next it was bows, then crafting, then whatever, you get the point. While we are on the subject of plagiarism, what the fuck Capcom? When they announced that Resident Evil 7 was going back to its horror roots, I didn’t think they meant cobbling together some clumsy P.T. clone, to sucker in all those poor people still mourning over the death of Silent Hills, myself included. Again I’m not saying the game will be bad per se, just uninspired, most likely.

So, I suppose my main point after all of this, is that developers seem to have lost the guts to take risks. If a game can’t be likened to another really popular one, they are instantly dismissed, and thrown onto the cutting room floor. It’s Hollywood all over again. But at least thousands of Africans don’t need to starve to death, so that middle-class, fat Americans can enjoy the latest EA/Activison smash hit. Oh wait. Never mind.