Vidya Thoughts

Note: This is an article by my brother, Drew. He also wrote about Smash Brothers and Astro‘s Playroom for this website! I cosign the overall message here, though I hard disavow the Game of Thrones season 8 comment.

The outlook for the gaming industry looks pretty bleak right now, doesn’t it? If the industry was a physical location instead of just an increasingly smaller pool of executives comparing the potency of their respective ED medicines, it might resemble a decrepit old town like Cairo, Illinois. Cairo (pronounced like ‘care-oh’, not ‘chiro’) was a hub of culture along the Mississippi River during an era in which proximity to water meant something else besides “This is going to eventually damage my property, isn’t it?”.

There are some fantastic videos and articles about the place created by people far more historically inclined and interesting than myself, so I’ll just link those and cut to the chase: They weren’t able to successfully reinvent themselves and now the town is only notable for its ability to cosplay as a post-apocalypse during the pre-apocalypse. 

How did we get here? Well, that is a really complicated question and I’m not smart enough to provide you with an informed answer. I can, however, provide conjecture for which I am prepared to filibuster for at least 5,000 words today, a novel down the road, and a straight-to-Netflix movie starring Glen Powell as Kevin Butler and a tastelessly AI-rendered Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Phil Spencer.

My master thesis is the title of the column that you clicked on, and I know you know what it is because you wouldn’t have clicked on it had I promised a more even-keeled rumination on the state of electronic entertainment. Heck, I know you aren’t even reading this! You just scrolled below to see the bullet points and hot takes. If I said something truly inflammatory here, you would miss it! Subway is better than Jersey Mike’s. Hot dogs are not a sandwich. The final season of Game of Thrones wasn’t that bad.

THE XBOX 360 RUINED EVERYTHING

Important disclaimer: I 100% believe every last thing I’m about to say. You’re trained by the Internet to see a hot take like this and assume that the person saying it is just looking for cheap heat. I don’t care about that! I’m simply here to act as a prophet and correct the history books on what I know to be the worst video game console ever produced and sold to consumers en masse. That stipulation is important because it acknowledges that the Xbox 360 is at least better than the Intellivision Amico and the Phantom. It is, however, still worse than the Ouya, the Game Stick, your uncle’s Plug-and-Play joystick featuring poorly emulated versions of Namco’s arcade classics, and whatever the heck a “Zed Ex Spectrum” is supposed to be.

Everything bad about modern video games begins and sadly did not end with the Xbox 360. It was a Trojan Horse that barged into all of our living rooms, broke down unexpectedly, barged back into our living rooms, and then slowly let out an army of soldiers so smelly and ill-equipped that they weren’t even allowed to join your cousins at the Capitol on January 6th. Where were they on January 6th? They were in your living room making your favorite hobby worse and then gaslighting you into thinking that things were better when they were in charge.

In the time honored tradition of our ancestors, I’ve laid out every piece of evidence that proves the Xbox 360 killed the industry in a numbered list. Thank you for your consideration.

1.) Broken Hardware: Gamers of the time treated the Xbox 360 the same way that an adolescent boy might treat the person who claimed their virginity. Sure, she took up all of the oxygen in your life, ostracised you from all of your friends, made you take her out for Mexican food every other day until your bank account was coughing like a chronic cigar chomper, and forced you to call her on Skype every night after you’d spent every waking hour with her already, but – hey – remember Halo 3? Yeah, we finished the fight, didn’t we fellas? Haha, we sure did. Haha…haaaah…

Really, though, how did they get away with this one? Millions of consoles just stopped working! And people just kept, like, buying more of them? Can you imagine if this happened today? Do you remember how absolutely incensed people got at the height of the “Joy-Con Drift” saga? Hachi machi! 

The gaming media and the wider public’s indirect tolerance of this issue only furthered the notion that it was fine to put out faulty hardware as long as you acted really, really sorry about it and then fixed it down the road with a premium model that you could have for the low, low price of exactly as much as the worst version of the original hardware (more on that later).

Think about this: How many people did you know who purchased the “improved” versions of hardware growing up? Did you actually know anyone with a top loading NES? The Angry Video Game Nerd does not count! Did you know anyone who went out and bought a revised SNES because their old one just couldn’t get it up for Chrono Trigger anymore? Did you have to hunt down a Model 3 Sega Genesis because Vectorman looked more like Segmentman? Did you even know there was a third version of the Sega Genesis?

The answer to all of those questions? Maybe! But I’m going to guess that if I changed the questions to be about the PS4, Xbox One, or even the Nintendo Switch that your answers would change quite a bit. I owned three different PS4s, two different Xbox Ones, and three different Nintendo Switches. I didn’t bat an eye! If I saw someone with a launch Xbox One, I would probably stage an intervention of some kind. Did they not know that the Xbox One S supports HDR? But don’t get that model! You want the Xbox One X. It runs the games how they should have run all along. It’s awesome!

2.) Multiple subscriptions to do one thing: Do you remember when a bunch of members of my generation (editor’s note: Drew is 34, I am 38…for like two more weeks) ditched cable because they could just watch all of the frivolous pap they wanted on Netflix instead? And then all of those same people got big mad when Paramount, Universal, and Disney came around looking for a quick influx of cash because they weren’t getting it from the usual revenue streams? We paid up though. It’s practically impossible to only pay for one subscription service. That isn’t normal behavior! It had to be normalized somewhere, and it was.

The Xbox introduced the absolutely criminal concept of paying to play all video games online. People with no idea what they were talking about would often say that this helped cover the overhead required to operate game servers that worked nominally better than the competition’s crusty old network architecture. No! They just wanted you to pay them money for something that was historically free everywhere else, and you did it!

Then, the Xbox 360 continued that tradition and introduced some truly vexing circumstances. To actually watch Netflix on your Xbox 360, you had to both be subscribed to Netflix (duh) AND Xbox Live (???). Two subscriptions to do one thing. Pandora’s Box has been opened, and the contents are bothering you on your Smart TV’s home menu about Chip and Joanna Gaines’s latest show where they see what happens when you take out all of the walls in a house instead of just the one between the kitchen and living room. Thanks a lot, Microsoft!

4.) People who claim that ‘X’ series was never actually good: A bunch of people bought Sega’s giant compilation of 50 Genesis games, played Sonic the Hedgehog 1 up to Marble Zone, and then went online to say “You know what, maaaaaan, Sonic was never good!” Taste is subjective and all that, but have you ever noticed how smug this Hot Take’s biggest proponents are when they espouse this belief? Put your headphones on and listen real close.

“You know what, maaaaaaathe lived experience of people who played the game when it launched is wrong and mine – formed when I bought a used copy of a retro game collection from a yard sale and subsequently played it for the five minutes it took my ham and cheese Hot Pocket to cool down – is more validaaaaaaaan. Sonic was never good!”

Do you see what I mean? Oh, and before you trip over your Series X mini fridge to wag your finger and tell me that this has nothing to do with Xbox, let me tell you why my recollection of events is way more accurate and interesting than yours. The Sonic the Hedgehog games were rereleased many times, most famously on the Gamecube with Sonic Mega Collection. That was a $40 game marketed towards existing fans of the series who were trying to wrap their heads around the idea of the blue blur rolling his way onto Nintendo’s home console and new fans who were – let’s be honest with ourselves, Gamecube defenders – probably ten years old.

Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection came out 7 years later for the low price of $30 on a platform whose audience was primarily composed of frat boys, meat heads, frat heads, and meat boys. It also came with 30,000 other games, including Happy Meal pack-in tier garbage like Kid Chameleon. The point is this: The experience was cheapened (literally and figuratively) and then blasted at a bigger audience out of a shotgun. It was like inviting a bunch of people to Golden Corral and asking them to judge pizza based only on the merits of what they found in the buffet line.

Remove Sonic from the above rant, replace it with Mega Man, Castlevania, Banjo-Kazooie, and it still (mostly) works! The 360 introduced a whole new generation of players to some of our pastime’s greatest treasures, and that generation proceeded to dump all over them after they spent five minutes trying and failing to finish the first level. If someone from said generation is reading: Why are you here? Did my words get aggregated on some kind of short-form video platform?

5.) Per-Controller Profiles: How did people play local multiplayer games on the greatest video game console of all time, the Nintendo 64? Well, they bought a plastic trident at the store, plugged it into the console, and within moments they were Smash attacking and Oddjobbing all over the place. Was it an exciting process? I mean, it was alright. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but nobody could possibly consider it a nuisance.

I’m not a big fan of the word “enshittification”. It’s a shorthand that absolves a situation of any potential for nuance (why are you looking at me like that?), but some situations are not nuanced. Like this one! The Xbox 360 ruined connecting additional controllers. Microsoft enshittified one of the most sacred rituals in all of gaming. When a second user connects their controller, they will be prompted to select a profile. Hey, shithead! I just want to kick back and play Gears of War with my boy. He doesn’t have a profile on my Xbox! We don’t live together! What’s next? Am I going to have to show the high school junior working at McDonalds our marriage license before I buy him a McChicken?

Yeah, you can have the other controller log in as a “Guest”. That’s fine. Whatever! But the point of this screed is that the Xbox 360 ruined everything forever and ever, and I would argue that video game consoles released in the wake of this obelisk made this process even worse. Have you ever tried to play local multiplayer on a PS4? I’ve played games that outright refused to let me play a game at a friend’s house until I spent no less than 10 minutes looking up “how do I play local multiplayer on WWE 2K16 on PS4”. That prompt shouldn’t even be in Google’s drastically decreasing lexicon. Imagine what nonsense Gemini would spit out if I asked that!

Oh, we don’t have to imagine!

I assure you it was not this simple. There shouldn’t have to be a video about it, either! XBOX!

6.) Profiles at all: Now that I think about it, I don’t even like separate profiles existing at all! A home console is a communal experience. I know this would make the online component of new hardware more complicated, but I don’t care. I trust them to figure that out! Well, maybe not Microsoft. Or Sony. Or Nintendo. But someone!

7.) Nonsense SKUs that nobody could possibly want: The Xbox 360 Core, for the person in your life who wants the latest hotness, but would rather have an extra hundo in their pocket than a pesky little hard drive, a wireless controller, or component cables that might actually allow them to read the font in Dead Rising. Also the disc tray is just cheap, white plastic so they know you think they’re not worth much more than a passing thought. In other words, it’s an original Xbox with no HDD and you can’t even play Jet Set Radio Future. Thanks?

8.) Cameos (not Kameo): This is not a dig at Kameo, a perfectly…I mean, it’s alright. Anywho, this industry has gotten too cute with its guest appearances. It made sense when Smash Bros. brought in characters from the extended Nintendo universe. It mostly made sense when Link, Spawn, and Heihachi were in Soul Calibur. 

Wait, did it make sense that Heihachi was in Soul Calibur? Are his fists legal weapons, like Steve Blackman? Could you unlock bigger and/or better fists for him by using him in the single player modes? Now that I think about it, Spawn is kind of a reach, too. I was thinking that Necrid existing was justification enough, but Necrid is another cat from the twisted mind of Todd McFarlane. Also, I don’t like Necrid. He kind of sucks!

Alright, I’m taking this one back. This is not on the Xbox 360, actually! I had this whole thing prepared about how lame it was that they put a Spartan (not even Master Chief!) in Dead or Alive 4.

8 (1).) Rare: Speaking of Kameo, the Xbox 360 marked the official beginning of the end of the Rare of old. They were acquired by Microsoft during the preceding console generation and while those games weren’t awesome (apologies to the three people who think Grabbed by the Ghoulies is good, actually) they were excusably bad. In college athletics, it is generally understood that the first few years with a new coach are going to be awkward. It takes time to build the right staff, recruit the right players, and discover all the fun legal loopholes at your disposal. Heck, I would say by the end of the generation Rare was on a good path. Conker Live and Reloaded is no masterpiece, but neither is Conker’s Bad Fur Day. And you know what? This one was actually kind of fun to play! Things were looking up.

And then came Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Kinect Adventures…Kinect Adventures! Microsoft banished Rare to the Avatar mines, but the only Unobtanium in these mines was the games because, well, nobody wanted to obtain them. Look, I made a funny! 

There’s a nonzero chance that you are seething at Viva Pinata and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts erasure. I haven’t forgotten! Those games were good enough, according to the types of people who play and write about games professionally. Those types of people were wrong, are wrong, and will always be wrong. Walk with me to the next numbered item.

Also this was Viva Pinata erasure. I did forget about it! Moving on.

9.) People who won’t shut up about Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: It was a beautiful spring day in Carterville, Illinois, and when I walked out of my high school a world of potential opened before me. I had just gotten out of class with one of the seven teachers who would go on to become a registered sex offender and I was waiting to be picked up by my brother. His ‘97 Ford Ranger may not have been a looker, but it sure beat waiting on the school bus to pick me up and ferry me six minutes down the road to my childhood home.

When he arrived, I eagerly hopped into the passenger seat (which would soon become the only way to enter, on account of the fact that the driver’s side door would later be broken by a failed lockpicking attempt by the truck’s owner). I took off my backpack, let out a sigh of relief, and turned to face my brother. Instead of a smiling, happy, mostly bearded face, I was greeted by someone who looked as if all of his life had been drained out of him by something akin to the basketball in Space Jam that makes Charles Barkley play basketball like a white guy.

“I have some bad news,” he said. Did my dog die (no, she would do that in a few years)? Did the St. Louis Rams announce they were moving to Los Angeles (no, they would do that in a few years)? Did Nintendo announce their follow-up to the Wii was also some kind of weird gimmick that was going to waste another 5-10 years that could be spent making Mario games that don’t play like worse versions of the 2D originals (no, that would take another decade)?

“They showed off the new Banjo-Kazooie.” How could this be bad news? I mean, I saw the teaser. I saw the bear. I saw the bird. They looked great, and they were running around Spiral Mountain grabbing Jiggies like it was 1998 (or 2000, if you’re nasty). How could this possibly be bad news? “It’s about building cars.” Okay, well, that’s a little strange. I mean, Rare made Diddy Kong Racing. They also made Banjo Pilot! There is some precedent there. “Mumbo is a mechanic.” Well, he’s not. He’s a witch doctor, I think, but I can understand the confusion. I’m always shocked when my mechanic taps my car engine with a magic wand and charges me $200 for the courtesy.

It is what it is! “It’s not a platformer, Drew, you just build vehicles, drive around in them, and complete missions like Grand Theft Auto if it was remade to air on PBS Kids.” Huh?! “Also, the character models look stupid.” Take me home! I need to see for myself!

And see I did. What did I see? How can I describe that? How can I describe seeing a beloved childhood friend splayed lifeless in front of my eyes, paraded around IGN like it’s a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade? How can I describe the emotional whiplash of expecting Microsoft to rescue my favorite platforming tandem from a premature grave only to see them whip their body right back into the grave while swearing up and down that they were dead for a reason.

“Nobody wanted them to be alive,” they said. “They belong in the ground, and from their grave will rise an improved bear and bird! A bear with inexplicable weight problems and a bird who spent too much time sipping from Conker’s flask! Their faces will be molded like cheap Play-Doh that has been wrung through the orifices of a plastic husk of a man with holes in his head through which hair must emerge.

No, no. Be strong!

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is not a good game. I say this after having fully accepted on numerous occasions that the games I enjoyed on the Nintendo 64 died with that hardware. Even on its own merits, I think Nuts & Bolts is horrible. The tools, while intuitive, have so many variables to consider that some missions feel like an endless series of trial and error while you figure out which distorted LEGO block will fully pimp your ride.

The vehicles control like the RC Cars in “Slot Car Derby”, a Mario Party mini-game that to this day no human being understands how to play. The graphics…the graphics! Actually it looks pretty good. But what ARE these character designs? Was Rare so busy trying to see if they could Game Jam out the world’s worst crafty-buildy that they couldn’t be arsed with making character models that don’t look like Madagascar concept art? 

I don’t like it. I’ll never like it. I’m tired of people saying that Tears of the Kingdom is “like Nuts and Bolts.” Yeah, it’s like Nuts & Bolts if it looked good, played well, was fun, had solid character designs, had vehicles that didn’t handle like everyone’s favorite least favorite Mario Party mini-game, had a functioning physics engine, was worth the years of anticipation, and didn’t result from a bunch of executives at a table trying to figure out how to make fetch happen.

Hey, jerkface! The number system we use is called “Base Ten”. It is based on ten! That’s why Wii Points were $20 for 2000, which meant that one dollar equated to 100 Wii Points. When you bought a game on Virtual Console like, say, Mario Kart 64, you didn’t need a calculator to figure out that it actually cost you $10.

Alright, so it wasn’t that hard to do the math and figure out that a game that cost 400 Microsoft Points actually cost $5. That’s not the point! It shouldn’t have been obfuscated, and the precedent it set ultimately brought us so many other atrocities like Robux and V-Bucks and 2K’s Virtual Currency. Listen, I know you’re ripping me off. Just tell me the price! My wallet is wide open!

Skip the runaround and make with the nickeling and diming. Daddy needs his thirtieth variant of Triple H that he won’t ever, ever use.

11.) The Three Games of Doom: Wrestl–erm–Sports entertainment fans used to loathe John Cena. Can you imagine? Well, they did! There were a lot of criticisms of him that mostly ring hollow. You know the type: The same type of arguments that you might make when you turn twelve and decide you are too old for Pokemon. Perhaps the least valid of all talking points was the notion that John Cena had “Five Moves of Doom.”

For those not hip to the lingo, it basically suggested that Cena’s matches consisted of the same five moves ad nauseum. If this was true of John at the time, then it is also true of basically every star to ever step foot in WWE’s squared circle. That’s just kind of how they book matches! But I digress.

Is it fair to say that Microsoft only had/has three franchises they go back to over and over and over? Has any of this been fair? Yes. I’ve been more than deferential to the upright doorstop of a video game console. Halo and Forza Motorsport occupy two of the three slots. They were good hands during the original Xbox’s tenure, and while they carried the load you couldn’t ignore that Microsoft was out there throwing all kinds of weird ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Fusion Frenzy kind of sucks, as do Mad Dash Racers and Blinx the Time Sweeper.

They were neat, though! With the Xbox 360, it was all Halo, all Forza, and then all Gears all the time. Fable was there, too, but is Fable in the room with us right now? I don’t think so. Watch the latest Xbox presentation, scrub through all of the games they cancelled or laid off the developers for, and all you’ll be left with is Gears of War E-Day and Halo: Combat Evolved III: Return of the Combat. And a reminder that Fable is real, probably (it is not).

12.) Racists: Hey, don’t leave! You’ve been with me for this long, and you owe it to me to see this project through to the end.

Please?

Thank you. So, racists, am I right? You know them, I know them, we all know them. Do you feel like it didn’t quite used to be this way? Not that they didn’t exist. They obviously existed! Our history books are lined with them, as are our grocery stores, our schools, and especially our public offices. But it feels more pronounced, no? Society has undergone a number of changes that could have led us to this moment, but I would argue that no change has done more damage than our willingness to listen to strangers.

When I was growing up, you didn’t fuck with strangers! We had those signs in our neighborhood that showed a shadowy figure who was up to something. You didn’t know what he was up to, but you knew it was probably bad. If a stranger walked up to you and started shouting racial epithets, you clung to your parents a little tighter and walked away. You knew they were wrong because, well, they were strange. And, to be blunt, they didn’t look like someone whose opinions you should probably take super seriously.

Then the Xbox 360 came out. Everyone – and I mean everyone – is playing video games online with voice chat. Inevitably, some of the voices coming through people’s headsets start saying stuff about other races. Your mind says “these guys are racist”. Your eyes, though? They don’t know what to think.

They can’t see the rotting pile of empty hard shell tacos, the meat slurped out sideways while the consumer ranted about those people stealing his job out from under him. They couldn’t see that he was wearing camouflage inside even though there were no trees inside to make that particular article of clothing make sense. Your brain and your eyes work together, and when they are separated? Suddenly, the racist starts to make sense. Not to all of you! Not me (never me)! But, you know, some people start nodding their head a bit, their ears trying to carry the weight of the universe while the eyes look dead ahead at another “exhilarating” round of Oddball in Halo 3.

Racists have been playing video games for a long time. I have it on good authority that some of them go as far back as the Magnavox Odyssey, though from what I gleaned they just used the slip covers to cover up part of the screen when Sammy Davis Jr. kissed Archie Bunker on All in the Family. They probably migrated from that to the Atari, then to the Sega Master System (if you know, you know), the Sega Genesis, the PlayStation (rally cars!), the PlayStation 2 (rally cars AND MX AND ATVs!!), and then they landed on the Xbox 360. And they were home. And they were in our homes. And we let them in! Because Microsoft didn’t give us a choice not to.

__

Before I leave you, some honorable mentions:

14.) All-in-one-Devices: I’m sorry, but the Xbox was a terrible device for anything but playing video games (and even then!). Every console from here until the end of time feels the need to stock itself full of the absolute worst revisions of popular streaming apps. I think I’m alright with Nintendo’s weird refusal to get on board with Netflix.

16.) Devaluing of Games: Every time an indie game comes out, someone online yells that it is too expensive, even if the game is priced at $20. I choose to believe that Microsoft branding its online games as “Arcade” titles – implying some amount of intangible difference between them and real video games – is at the heart of this epidemic. Yeah, Sea of Stars costs $30. It’s better than anything else you’ve ever spent more money on. 

17.) Big ol’ home buttons: I don’t like them. They don’t feel good to press. We could have done better, yet here we are with whatever is going on on the DualSense.

18.) Cross-platform button confusion: There was a period of time when people complained that Nintendo’s controllers messed them up because they switched the placement of the buttons. No! Microsoft did! The 360 was a psi-op and you all willingly participated in it!

20.) White consoles: Too bright. Sticks out like a sore thumb. If you’re going to go for it, do purple. Or spice orange! Everyone is saying that spice orange needs to come back.

THE XBOX 360 RUINED EVERYTHING

I rest my case.