Musings of a bonfire-toffee-chewing old scroteTen signs that you're a grumpy old gamer.
In our series of digg-friendly top ten charts of everything ever, here's one for all you miserable old cusses who grumble and groan about your hobby a lot. If you can say "yes" to more than three of these, I'm afraid you're a grumpy old gamer and are doomed to a life of wishing it was 1982 again and you still only had to worry about attribute clash and tape loading speeds rather than tearing and Blu Ray loading times.
10) DLC is all a bit too "mysterious" and "high tech" to you, and shouldn't be trusted.
You really do want to play those episodes of Siren on the PS3, but you're going to wait until you can go out to a shop and buy the Blu Ray, secure in its case, a tangible piece of evidence of where you've just spent your 20 quid. Your PS3 gaming peers laugh because they think it's very "cute" that people still buy boxed games. This makes you grumpy, because it's a use of the word "cute" you haven't used since you last looked at an MG Midget engine.
DLC isn't evil. It's OK. Relax. Not that you'll ever bother with it even if you overcome your fears because on the wheezing old broadband connection you still refuse to upgrade "because it's too much fuss and trouble" it would take you just over a week to download all the Siren episodes anyway!
9) The first thing you do when starting a new game is go into the options menu and switch all the music off.
Young people's music. What's all that about? Bands named after essential parts of a grandfather clock? Too much bass, not enough meaningful warbling female vocals?
Truth is, you haven't actually bought an album (and you probably still refer to them as LPs) in over a year, and the last one you did buy was a cased CD copy of something you originally owned on cassette. Game soundtrack producers are all a bit too clever by half as far as you're concerned, and even when they do make the odd foray into complete genius (using old Bobby Darin and Inkspots tracks in games like Bioshock) it still makes you grumpy because you think good stuff like that is wasted on kids.
Calm down, and carry on converting all your old cassettes to MP3s using that pig-ugly stereo analogue to digital thing you bought from the back of the Radio Times.
8) You start to get annoyed every time a female protagonist in a game prances around in nothing but a pair of bottle caps and a thong.
"I wouldn't let my daughter go out dressed like that" you probably subconsciously mumble to yourself as yet another videogame heroine disembowels an entire alien species with a well aimed thrust of her Energy Bayonet. You probably pass comments on the impracticality of 12" stiletto heels as part of an outfit to explore the outer regions of uncharted space, and can't quite understand the necessity for acres of cleavage in a deep jungle exploration outfit. Good girls cover up, and you bemoan the fact that there probably won't ever be another intelligent and brainy female heroine like Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. Never mind Gramps, console yourself with the knowledge that someone somewhere is probably crazy enough to bring Thora Hird back from the dead as a digital avatar and slap her into a game where she can exercise her hidden talents for bumbling around and bumping into things a lot while saying "Flippy Neck!"
7) Joypads and controls: Why all the buttons?
In your day it was quite simple. 8 directional movement and one fire button. That was all you needed to control a whole gamut of videogaming excellence. Nowadays the average joypad looks more complex than the flight controls of the Eurofighter, and you often find yourself playing a new game with the manual precariously balanced on your knee because your memory's shot to buggery and remembering more than one menu option could make you need a lie down.
Then there's that Wii thing. All that prancing around waving stuff in the air is a lot of effort for very little reward, and no one, not even semi-naked hardbodies can look dignified while using the Wii so you're damned sure you'll never be caught doing so.
Mind you, her mole was cute. Ach there's that word again.
6) No matter how hard you try, or how long you spend, you'll never get your game avatars to look like you.
Character designers, who bloody needs 'em eh? Back in the olden days of yore, ancient gamers weren't even given the simple choice of what sex they wanted to be in games. Nowadays you have to spend a good hour or two twiddling with every nuance of your in-game character from the shape of their eyebrows to what colour you want their toenails to be painted.
It's all a bit of a pain in the arse, and games companies don't really cater for the slightly portly middle aged gent with a fabulous Bobby Charlton style wind-flapping comb-over combined with a pair of ginger mutton-chops that look like they could quite easily remove baked-on grease from your Lasagne dish.
Best to do what everyone else does then. Choose a random female avatar and get pestered online by priapic teenagers who genuinely think you're a girl with huge tits, despite your Live Tag being "Derek_Smith_1967".
5) You've spent the last 10 years moaning about how short games are now in comparison to the "golden age" but in reality you hate spending more than 10 hours on something.
You had this nightmare last night. Your favourite game series had been adapted and changed by a smart new development team who took the 20 or so levels of the beloved original, spun it around a bit, shook it up with a bit of pizzazz and turned it into a free-roaming sandbox game with a central hub.
You woke up from this nightmare in a cold sweat, gibbering obscenities into the dark night. Truth is, you miss the predictable linearity of level-based gaming and you hanker after those in-between level loads because your base machine had less RAM than your current toaster. All this wandering around in a new virtual game world is a bit like being a bleached-white tourist; stranded downtown in a Latin American city where the only language you share with the indigenous population is the two-fingered salute. Liberty City scares you, and you really would get seriously lost in Far Cry 2's African wasteland. Best to stay at home. Are there any games based in Aberystwyth? If not, why not?
4) No one does a decent game manual any more unless you pay an extra 20 quid for the Brady Games guide.
Back in your day, games had manuals you could use as a rudimentary flood defence if your house started to go underwater. Now you barely even get a list of controls and a couple of black and white screenshots if you're lucky. You have this mental image in your head of the smarmy red-spectacled DTP operative that slaps together these uninformative thin slivers of paper into something they laughably refer to as "the instructions". Never mind the fact that games are now so uncomplicated that they barely require the dreadful mundane tutorial section that wastes an entire hour of your time, big thick manuals were great for reading on the toilet during your break after you'd wandered into town at lunch to pick up that Friday's essential release. And what the hell is a PDF anyway? Sounds like some obscure Nazi tank division if you ask me.
3) You've spent nearly two generations bemoaning the fact that females aren't interested in games. Now they are, you feel strangely resentful.
You've seen the same thing happen with Football. No more a manly expression of tribal bonding could there be than gathering round a grease-stained telly in your local hostelry watching the footie (which won't even allow you to enjoy a sneaky ciggie while the match is on any more, the bastards!)
Now your friends bring their GIRLFRIENDS along, and what's more, they know more about Spurs' transfer market than you do! It's not right.
Similarly you keep seeing these female gamers out there trouncing the boys online at Halo 3, and generally taking up positions in the gaming industry that have traditionally been populated either by smart alec youngsters or insidious untrustworthy public school dropouts. It's not right either. Women are frail, delicate mysterious creatures that should be protected from blind acts of ugly violence, not actively partaking in them in online games or for that matter in public tournaments of gaming prowess. Besides, they're all a bit too good and it's getting a bit embarrassing when you see they've got twice as big a gamerscore as you have.
2) The music industry keeps murdering your favourite tunes, now the games industry is raking up and destroying your favourite game series.
Lara Croft has got prettier but duller. Fallout 3 was all glitz and spectacle without the intense periods of stats-wrangling and random battling and who the hell needs 3D anyway? And no one will ever make a decent shoot 'em up again.
Publicly, you announce that you'd love to see someone remake your favourite games. Mech Warrior 2, rendered in a stunning high-definition games engine crammed to the gills with explosive and essential gameplay. Syndicate brought up to date with a Grand Theft Auto style free-roaming futuristic city filled with murderous androids and nefarious hitmen. Carmageddon taken on by the team that developed Flatout Ultimate Carnage, giving the game the destructive and anarchistic controversial update it's crying out for.
Secretly you dread any of this happening. You spend far too much of your free time actually still playing the originals of these games, and despite your claims that "graphics don't matter, it's all about the gameplay" they are looking a bit sad and worn out, the digital equivalent of waking up one Sunday morning with a craving to build an Airfix model kit, running out and buying one from Tescos (supermarkets selling model kits, I mean what's all THAT about) then realising that it's still as big a ballache as it was when you were a kid.
When people tell you to "move on, move up, embrace new IPs and gaming ideas" you give them the same look you give Jehovah's Witnesses when they knock on your front door just as you're settling down to watch the Darts on TV.
1) You continually bitch, moan and grumble about gaming, the games industry and where it's all going to end up. But you still spend 90% of your disposable income on games.
This is what it all boils down to. Whether you're still in the game because you're hopelessly addicted, or more interestingly, because you think that if you quit you might secretly be missing out on something, you're still here and you're still playing games. But don't worry, grumbling about things is strangely soothing and therapeutic. The target of your ire is often some poor code-crunching pressure case who's hanging in there teetering precariously from one project to the next. The constant threat of redundancy and the credit crunch hanging over their heads, while the game's producer turns up to every free lunch and awards ceremony and rakes in the credit. You still feel justified in expressing your disgust at their latest output because A) you paid good money for the product (despite the slightly iffy reviews warning you off) and B) it's your beloved hobby and has been for so long that you feel you know what works and what doesn't better than they do.
To grumpy gamers everywhere, a special salute and a doleful little funereal tune. Bless you and long may your thumbs keep twiddling. You grumpy old bastards.
Peej would like to take great pains to point out that he ticked only 6 of the ten boxes in the grumpy gamer psychological profile, it's up to you to work out which 6.
Bungie vows never to follow the Activision route and charge extra for online multiplayer
(1) (30/07) 
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#1 - Espad - on 16/01/2009 at 09:43 wrote:
edit: i scored 2
#2 - peej - on 16/01/2009 at 09:57 wrote:
The missus inspired this btw. She reckons I should change my gamertag to "Meldrew"
Charming.
#3 - eviltobz - on 16/01/2009 at 17:13 wrote:
#4 - NewYork - on 16/01/2009 at 18:43 wrote:
#5 - nekotcha - on 16/01/2009 at 19:09 wrote:
...the first six, after which he nodded off so the answers to the remaining four are inconclusive. :)
I actually found something to identify with in virtually all the categories actually, had a right chuckle at the 'you can't make your avatar look like you' one too. Great article!
#6 - ilmaestro - on 16/01/2009 at 19:58 wrote:
The avatar one, the manual one and to some extent the DLC one apply to me - and I'm only 26!
#7 - kentmonkey - on 16/01/2009 at 20:43 wrote:
Manuals because they are mainly shit.
Avatars. Don't see the point so I always go for the quickest way of making the most ridiculously camp looking monstrosity I can create.
#8 - NewYork - on 17/01/2009 at 10:18 wrote:
#9 - peej - on 19/01/2009 at 09:46 wrote:
#10 - Rhythm - on 19/01/2009 at 15:41 wrote:
;-)
#11 - DocX - on 19/01/2009 at 17:11 wrote:
Nice read though Peej.
#12 - duncan - on 20/01/2009 at 06:37 wrote:
/hides mirrors