This is part of a series of blog posts cranked out by my adoring proselytes — erm, I mean, faithful readers. I’m in Utah (er, presumably — maybe the plane crashed, or maybe I was forced into white sexual slavery somewhere in Dubai), so the task of entertaining you froth-mouthed moppets falls to others.

(Yes, today features two posts: but the amount of material received calls for the ol’ double-up. Thematically, this works. Earlier, we talk modern cartoons. Today, we talk modern video games. Nostalgia reigns supreme.)

Today’s post is by Paul DeLaurentis, Jr.

Video games really haven’t changed.

Jumping puzzles.  I hate them and you do too.  Everyone does.  There you are playing the hottest  game on the planet to date.  You’re killing swarms of zombie-dinosaurs with an AK-47 modified to fire molten lava when suddenly BAM the damn game turns into a steaming pile of crap.

Maybe they’re boxes or crates.  Maybe they’re miracle Jesus ledges that hang in mid-air.  Maybe they’re corpses piled up to exact develper heights.  Bottom line: They suck.  Your game has gone from an awesome shooter into a friggin’ test of coordination.  Screw you, EA Games, I did not get buzzed just to have to jump around like a drunken kangaroo on a pogo stick.

You see folks, video games haven’t changed much in the last few years.  Sure…they may look prettier, sound edgier, and be laden with tits, but the result is still the same.  Developers can’t resist returning to their roots.

Take Dragon Age: Origins.  I want to get from Point A to Point B.  The trouble is, some evil bastard has locked a magical secret door along the way and I have to find a way to open it.  Let’s forget for a moment that my mage can summon the magical equivalent of a tactical nuclear blast…or forget that my warrior can puncture a hole in the world with his magical sword of Earth Fucking +5.  At the end of the day it’s just a damn door.  Knock on it and see if someone answers!

Not a Dragon Age fan?  How about Rock Band?  “Rock Band?” You ask.  “Surely a game as innovative and earth shatteringly unique as Rock Band broke the mold!”  This game is so simple to program that you could do it in the old BASIC programming set.  It’s a pretty version of an old Tiger hand-held game.  When the red dot gets to the line, press red button on the controller and execute a strum.  That’s it.  Go ahead and add a few more colors, sync it to music, and make it pretty. Voila: Rock Band.  The game must have cost five dollars and a hot meal for some homeless programmer to code.  Not only is it wicked easy to figure out, but it uses the oldest trick in the book to keep people hooked:  It gets marginally harder each time you complete a level.  Guitar Hero even went a step further and screwed up our social lives (as if we had any) by adding that ridiculously impossible song during the credits by Dragon Force.  Scores of college boys ruined the rest of their lives by trying to perfect this, just as their parents ruined their own lives trying to complete Super Mario Brothers in under 15 minutes.

I mean seriously.  There’s no innovation in games now.  It’s all recycled crap.  Modern Warfare 2 is fun and it’s a great play…but it’s just a pretty version of Quake.  There’s nothing new there. John Madden Football?  The game is a disaster now.  They’ve beat the hell out of it so many times that I long for the days of Super Tecmo Bowl on the NES.

“Well, hold up there, sport!  What about Microsoft and the achievement point system?  That’s innovation!”

Bill Gates has known all along that we are just sheeple. We’re awestruck when the light hits an aluminum gum wrapper in just the right way.   Enter the Achievement System.  You shot a beetle! (No, not John Lennon…though that would have made Beatles Rock Band a lot more interesting)  Ding!  Achievement Unlocked! You beat the piss out a hooker you just nailed and stole back your 50 bucks!  Ding!  Achievement Unlocked! Your brain is getting small doses of orgasmic pleasure from completing tasks that you would have otherwise completed anyway!  All the achievement system did was add a newer dimension to the same old game.  World of Warcraft ripped off the achievement system and it added almost 450 million people as subscribers instantly.  Hell, even I ran around trying to fall off a ledge and survive in order to get the achievement for not dying after cratering 45 feet into the ground…and I spent damn near an hour doing it.  Let’s look at Modern Warfare 2 again.  Take the achievement and title system out and all you have is a repetitive shooter with six maps.  Throw in multiplayer, a bit of controversy, and Russians invading America: Instant 500 Million Dollars [ed: now a billion!] for Infinity Ward.  Achievements simply satiate the human need to be patted on the head.  The sad part is people love it.

“Ok, fine.  What can you possibly say about the Wii, though?  That thing changed gaming!”

I’ll say 3 things.

• Bowling
• Tennis
• Golf

Innovative?  I don’t fucking think so.  Sure the movement controls are a nice novelty.  It’s wonderful that I have to get off my butt and pull the Cheetos out of my chest hair in order to do the tree form in Wii Fit.  After you toss out the motion control… it’s the same old crap.  Even worse, it’s the most basic crap.  How many more times can we reinvent Mario Kart for Christ’s sake?  Starfox Wii?  Pikachu Wii?  Tetris Wii Advanced Modern Warfare?  Where is the new stuff?

I don’t have any clue what developers can do to change this course.  I don’t know if I even want them to.  We seem to thrive on this shit and we’re obviously more than happy to pump 60 bucks a pop into the machine in order to perpetuate it.  So the hell with it.  I’m going to go play my copy of Super Mario Brothers Wii.  Sure it has the same graphics, plot, characters, and controls as the original… but damnit, it’s new.