It's a VERY hard time to love video games right now.

In a time where people around the world seem to be watching a lifetime of systems and beliefs around them and in them be challenged and strained, and seem to be falling apart all at once, this seems to be a long-overlooked casualty of world events. While I do care about the larger more important things, I want to address the mouse in the room... goodness knows I'm sick of the elephants....

Be that as it may.

Art was always a close second to video games, I'm not gonna lie.

From the first day I plunked a quarter into the sit-down version of Spy Hunter because it's side panel art reminded me of Knight Rider (my favorite non-cartoon TV show in my day), I've been an avid fan of the media of video games.

This was made difficult by my parents, who were leery of me losing further touch with reality if they shold buy me a home game system. I can hardly blame them. The words "Attention deficit & hyperactivity disorder" were not well known to the layman back then, but they didn't need to be well read to see how flaky I child I was, and how little self-discipline I could muster when I was six (though, to be honest, how many that age can).

They finally bought an Atari 5200 from my brother-in-law's yard sale in spring of 1989, if I remember right, to test the idea. It ended with me only being allowed to play games one hour per school day, and two on weekend days, save for if I had a second player. This lead to them finally caving and buying my NES that Christmas.

All this long-winded nostalgia to say, I've been passionate about video games the proverbial "long-ass time" (and could it not be thick-tailed furries like otters indeed have a long ass? I jest).



Which brings me to one facet of my point: It's difficult to be a fan of video games right now.

The "games-as-a-service" tail the major studios have been chasing was and always will be unsustainable as a main business mechanic for a company; when the servers go dark, whether temporarily from outages, or permanently at end-of-term, the gamers are left with nothing but their memories, without options to open private servers, which many games lack. We saw this in the 2000s with Auto Assault, an early casualty of server games (and one I never got to play but my roomie Zarphus did), which is "what if Mad Max, but the cars are more like the snazzy tanks from Blaster Master NES?"

Fortnite was an anomaly, an exception that many companies have been banking on as the rule, and all suffer for it. What started as a novel idea with a quirky identity of it's own has become a blender of media-tie-ins to maintain the huge momentum the idea it got, launching as it did next to PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds. To be honest I never played it, but I thought the idea was neat. I didn't avoid it to be hipster / contarian / outsider, whatever you want to call it, it just... it looked novel to me, but novelty doesn't get my gaming money alone.

Sony's PlayStation lineage has been a longstanding part of my story from their first one, and I own or have owned one of each of the 5 home systems, and a PSP, in my time. I still have a 5 today. I barely touched it for all the games I had on my Switch, though. My husband and I were late adopters of the PS5, and early of the Switch, given how many RPGs we played on our 3DS systems.

MicroSoft always reeked of cashgrabs to me since I learned to be critical (or cynical, or both), from the day the Xbox was released. That IS a case where I turned a blind eye out of contrarianism, but I caved for the 360 when Mass Effect appeared.

It may be apparent Nintendo usually got my money first, from year to year, since the NES, and I won't deny that system left a good early impression. The marketing magic (and licensing and software rights sorcery) they used to revive the United States' video game market is still potent today in how many, self included, still adore the NES to this day, a full 40 years after it's creation, and more than 30 since it had become fully obsolete.

However all this long-winded ranting to say, I put my money where I want to. I offer no brand loyalty, my tastes are my compass (god, listen to me and my pretentious purple prose).

At last, I directly present the things I see as points towards my thesis statement.

So... NINTENDO.... I say with ominous disdain.

Your beloved place among Gen-Xers like myself for the NES, and your even more devoted Zoomer and whatever's next fans via Switch 1 and 2 is rivalled - and now surpassed - by a history of cutthroat and borderline, or sometimes actually, illegal practices to secure your market share.

For your heavy handed "five games a year" and exclusive hold on manufacturing practices in the NES launch, I have always given you a pass. I'm not an "ends justify means" person on general principle, but it can be true sometimes in moderation: the 1980s US market collapsed because there was no order to the gaming development pipeline. Call it what you will otherwise, Nintendo's rule on the NES was absolute, and it was order we needed to get the hobby back.

So now, 40 years later, when diversity in moderation was just starting to benefit gaming as a whole, and the Nintendo Switch was so popular, even with me, that the release of the Switch 2 had anticipation to rival the Second Coming, in wrestling terms, they now do a full face-heel turn.

Suing pirate sites, especially those carrying games from live systems, or even aggressively trying (and grossly failing) to prevent leaked pirate copies of impending launches, fair play. Thieves shouldn't steal, at least where it will be noticed and missed. that does hurt everyone.

Now, fiercely and transparently trying to twist the letter of the patent law to defeat it's spirit, to shoot an indie studio in the foot for daring to make a game that so closely resembles their most beloved franchise, that is immoral and unethical, in my opinion. Unethical because obviously the "patents" they are trying to claim are just "we own parts of video gaming that make our games work, so you can't make one that works at something better than ours", nothing more. I could point out a dozen game site articles that show this, but this journal is already beyond long enough. Immoral because we all know they're trying to steal more pasture for their cash cow, the biggest golden calf in multimedia since the Simpsons, almost as old, and to be honest, almost as worn thin by the original makers. Nintendo, if nobody was allowed to make the also-ran "same but different" in media and / or art, we'd never grow.

If Robin Hood had been locked down as immutable and inimitable, we'd never have The Court Jester (hes these movies predate me, but still) or Heaven FORBID we'd have had no Disney version with gorgeous floof. If DC "owned" the idea of costumed heroes (which I think they might have tried), we'd have no Marvel, no Image, no anything else. Strength grows in competition, Nintendo. I'm not always into "growth by conflict" but in business it's a must.

Sony... you used to be the cutting edge in gaming, now you're holding a blade to our throats and trying to tell us what we want, intent on taking our money with Concord, a clear case of Incredibles quote meme "if everybody's special, no one will be", a market bullet-point designed game so transparent in it's lack of ingenuity and integrity, it immediately went from transparent to non-existent almost before it was born. I've seen way way more deserving and novel games become vaporware by trying to do too much, and come out too slow, than this which was trying too hard to make you money, rushed to market in a development studio that makes a puppy mill look ethical.

Speaking of which, EA, you used to be so nice... back in the 80s and 90s when you were the young fresh punk upstart. Like many a music idol, once you went mainstream, you sold out so quickly, then proceeded to buy up studios and souls of talented developers like a dictator; annexing any rival state to take what you need, and killing that which you believe has no value. Your current majority shareholders should be no big surprise then, but even so, I'm am truly appalled. If I spent any money on you in my life it would surely stop this year.

Young fresh punk upstarts like Larian, Starfall, and to a lesser degree Inti Creates and Yacht Club seem to be the meek that shall inherit the digital Earth after the strong get done fucking it up, but that's only if we have a place to find them. Which leads me to Valve and Good Old Games, besieged by banks, corralled by card holders, because a small angry collective of conservative mothers in Australia have a whole eucalyptus tree up their ass about content in games.

I love Australia, and a select few Australians in particular, and just discovered the joy of Bluey, but these daffy cunts, to borrow their vernacular, managed to find the lever that moved the entire finanacial world, making the credit card holders try to tell the digital stores what they can and cannot sell worldwide. If that's not making the world parent for you, I don't know what is. Shame on them and shame on the companies for going with it. Haven't they got more bills than they can count already? Do they really need to block the sales of stuff they have no business blocking?

I don't care much for erotic games necessarily, they either fail as a game by being too poor, or fail as porn by being too tame. Please, people, I'm a furry; I've had saturday nights would make Caligula cringe. I respect their right to exist though, unlike those angry mothers in Collective Shout. Someone heard you, and a lot more of us are shouting back "piss off, ya bludgers, we're tryin' to play our games here!" (apologies if any Australian readers find my borrowed slang offensive or inaccurate).

I can't believe I woke up this morning and came to my PC to chill casually on gaming sites, only to launch into this old man typing at clouds rant. If you made it all the way through, I thank you. Time to get on with my day. I think my copy of Megaman 2 still works fine.