What happened to Consoles?

What the hell has happened to consoles these days?

Back in my day you’d simply plug in a cartridge, turn the console on and away you went. There was no front-end, no dashboard, no Live or PSN shoving advertisements and pay-per-view content down your throat. The worse that could happen is the connectors would be a bit dusty, so you’d take the cartridge out, blow in it, put it back in and you’d be sweet.

Now you need to install games before playing them. Some can take over ten minutes. Big deal, you might say, I’ve installed and reinstalled games countless times on my PC. It might seem all well and good, but doesn’t this completely defeat the plug-n-play nature of console gaming? It seems inevitable that games are only going to get more and more complex and can no longer be streamed off optical media, but then you go and look at the different Xbox 360 models – different sized hard-drives, and one without. Developers now need to make games that can stream off the CD in order to support every 360 model, even when those games so desparately need an install – just look at Mass Effect and its elevators. Why have different models in the first place? I have no idea which PS3’s have backwards compatibility and which don’t. I have mates who will excitedly proclaim to me how they bought a bigger hard drive for their Xbox so they can now install a bunch of games and play them without the CD. I’ve been doing that since Myst. Welcome to PC gaming.

Adding a hard drive and allowing you to install games also opens up consoles to one of the other wonders of the gaming industry they’ve so long been able to avoid: patching. Before this console generation, you only had one shot at getting your game out there. Maybe two, if you were a first party and could afford a reprint. Games were polished, worked as expected, and were complete. Developers are now free to release their games with bugs that they’re completely aware of, then patch it post release. Welcome to PC gaming.

Everyone knows about or has heard horror stories of the red ring of death. Some of you may have even experienced it. Maybe even multiple times.It’s cost Microsoft more than a billion dollars, meaning that the money made by getting a year’s headstart and ignoring manufacturing and testing problems is lost anyway. Console hardware should not fail, especially in such a proportion as this. I’ve had a Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 since 1998 and both still work, as if they were new. When you’ve had your 360 for a while and you start to worry because it could fail any minute now and the hardware will need to be replaced – well, doesn’t that sound kind of familiar? Welcome to PC gaming.

Consoles now have operating systems. Those operating systems routinely recieve patches and updates to not only add exciting new features but ensure continued stability. Except, these updates may brick your console. It’s alright though! You only need to format the hard drive by removing it from the PS3 and plugging it into a computer. Do I really need to elaborate? Welcome to PC gaming.

So, what the hell has happened to consoles these days? They’ve become a PC in your living room. Everything that I used to find attractive about console gaming is now gone. I don’t want to worry about installing games, about getting the latest patches, about whether the latest firmware update will brick my console and cause me to lose all my savegames. I simply want to stick a game in and have it, and the console, work. This used to be the case, but no more.

Of course, there have been numerous positives that come with things like hard drives and internet connectivity on consoles. Whole new types of indie games are being made available to new audiences that would never have thought twice about trying them. Hard drives remove the need for memory cards, and allow developers to release cool downloadable content for games to extend their lifespan. Systems like Live and PSN that integrate friends lists and keep track of stats are something that the PC is only just starting to catch up with. But to me, consoles are no longer what they once were.