This past Christmas/Hanukkah/Whatever, we finally broke down and bought an XBox 360 for the family. We got it with the Kinect Sensor doodad and the big hard drive (since I’m hoping that someday I’ll be able to figure out how to turn it into a backup Tivo) and grabbed a handful of games to throw under the tree/bush/menorah as well. What I learned is that I am now “teh suck” as the young kids today are saying.
The damn controller is just too much for me to deal with. I have a long history of playing videogames, but the XBox has shown me that my gaming days are over.
It all started with the Atari 2600. One joystick with a single button. Perfect for moving and shooting. I wore that thing down, which then led to…
The Original NES. Joystick replaced with gamepad. Fine. Buttons go from one to two. Easy transition. Rocked Mario and Zelda through undergrad and then jumped to…
The Sega Genesis. Stuck with the gamepad, which was fine. Added a third button, which seemed a bit excessive, but was still manageable. Rocked the hedgehog for a while, but Sega eventually abandonded the Genesis, so I moved on to…
The Sony Playstation. Gamepad is still basically the same. Jumped from three buttons to four and added some more buttons to the back of the controller. This was the beginning of the end. I had issues with all the buttons from the start and it took forever to get the hang of it. After spending some time with Crash Bandicoot and this weird alien named Abe who thought Odyssey was spelled “Oddyssee”, it was time to move on to…
The Nintendo Gamecube. Gamepad is essentially gone and replaced with a joystick (yay!). Four buttons on the front, three on the back. Still not sure what that yellow secondary stick was for and I’m pretty sure I never used the gamepad. Overall it was a pretty easy transition from the Playstation and the games were pretty sick. All I can say is that I’m sure glad that Zelda chick kept getting kidnapped. Windwaker is still my all time favorite Zelda game. Eventually though, Nintendo phased out the Gamecube, so I upgraded to…
The Nintendo Wii. Controller is now split into two pieces, with the primary having a gamepad and buttons in the front and back. For certain games you’d have to attach the stupid “nunchuck”. Problems across the board with this controller, primarily due to the fact that most games didn’t seem to have a left handed option. That left me flailing around, trying to punch/stab/whatever with my right hand which is really quite sad. Still though some of the games were fun and it was a new way to play games. We still have the Wii, but after much cajoling from the kids (and on the suggestion of an old friend who said I should get Battlefield so we could play on XBox Live), we bought…
The XBox 360. Two joysticks (which are also push in buttons), a gamepad, four buttons on the front and four buttons on the back. Seriously? Seriously???
So I load up Battlefield 3 and promptly get shot in the head because I can’t figure out how to lay prone. Then I get killed again because I keep turning with the aiming stick instead of strafing. In the first 30 minutes, I believe I got killed about a dozen times. On easy mode. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll catch on eventually, but then some new stupid game system will come out with even more freaking buttons. But at least I can use it to play music while we have friends over playing pinball, pool and air hockey, so that’s a plus.
