If, like me, you are an old gamer who just can't handle all the different controls, moves, hidden features, etc. on today's games (despite the fact that everyone on the planet under 12 years old acts like they were born to do it), go read today's PVP Online.
Posted by Observer at January 26, 2004 09:52 AMComments on entries can only be made in pop-up windows while those entries are still on the main index page. Sorry for the inconvenience this causes, but this blocks about 99.99% of the spam the blog receives.
I learned on Atari, Frogger and the like, but I have no difficulty with the modern controller (excluding the monster X-Box controller -- madmen and monkeys collaborated to make that and it's just an American fatass, but the S version is ok).
Posted by: Polerand on January 26, 2004 01:57 PMActually, I made this kind of point decades ago.
I have *never* been good at action-type video games of any generation, going all the way back to Pong. Why is that? Because my family had a genuine electromechanical pinball machine in our basement while I was in high school (we bought it when we got back from Germany in the summer of 1971, between my freshman & sophomore years). So my high school waste hours were spent doing that.
In consequence, my perception and reflexes are not just hard-wired, they were finely tuned, to one-gee Newtonian mechanics with friction, spin, sticky bumper switches, knowing just how hard you could shift the machine and avoid a tilt, and so on. That machine went to the Yakima County Dump many years ago, but not before it ruined forever any chance of my being a videogame ace.
My kids got a GameCube for Christmas and one game for it, Mario Kart Double Dash, and while I can more than hold my own in the one-on-one battles (where you chuck bombs at each other, and so on) because I am tactically savvier ("Age and treachery always overcomes youth and skill"), I get dusted when it comes to racing contests. The mechanics are just wrong. Everyone in the family laughs at my body English as I lean sideways with the controller trying to steer the damn little karts better....
Posted by: Really Old Feff on January 27, 2004 12:48 AM