For those of you not aware...

Billy Mays passed away on Sunday; I won't say much more on it than to say that I really enjoyed watching him and Anthony Sullivan on their new show "Pitchmen". Well, I will also say this, when I saw a commercial on the Discovery Channel in tribute of the salesman star I felt a little sad; Billy Mays was only 50 and seemed relatively healthy, I felt much the same thing when I thought about (after seeing the Dark Knight for the first time) that Heath Ledger will never be able to continue his role. I'm not a fanatic like some, I wasn't openly weeping for people I never truly knew, but thinking about all of this got me thinking about another thing.

What happens when the legends of gaming pass away?

Video games haven't yet had the sort of loss that other entertainment industries and arts have; pretty much all of the most famous game developers are still very much alive. The video game industry is very young and unlike other arts and entertainment, illegals drugs and overuse of prescription pills aren't common (at least, not yet); but it is inevitable that Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima and others will pass on. What will be the public's reaction to the loss of Miyamoto (arguably the most famous of game developers)? I have scoffed all week at the Michael Jackson fans that are crying and screaming over his death and at the extended coverage of everything surrounding it; but will I be much the same as these fans when my favorite game developers pass on? Will I weap and proclaim that Kojima was brilliant and there will never ben another like him? Ultimately, these aren't questions we can't answer now (without some sort of murder) but I can't help but wonder how the gaming world will react when tragedies like the ones we've seen in recent days amongst celebrities occur. My personal belief is that we will all shed a tear, say a few words and maybe a few of us will dress up like our favorite character in tribute; a touching tribute in-tune with how their work has affected our lives, just please nobody freak out like some Michael Jackson fans have.

My first blog post is a rant, hurrah!

All right, so first a little history. I stopped buying console after the 16-bit (SNES/Genesis) era for one generation. I got back into the console realms with the PS2, skipping the generation previous pretty much entirely. The previous generation brought about a whirlwind of change, but perhaps the most strike thing to me is the change in the gaming communities. While much of the changes are for the better, by and large gamers are a more mature and diverse group of people then they were a few years before, there is one change that drives me insane; the emergence of the fanboy.

I'm sure you're all familiar with them, the jerks (probably kids) who seems to have a need to prove their system is the greatest system ever, regardless of what anyone thinks. Me personally, I don't care what the system specs are, or which company is making them; I simply care if the games I want to play are on the system. When I log into the forums, I tend to check the latest reviews, then wander over to the forums to see what the latest rumours/facts about the systems (particularly relating to the games on that system) I am interested in are.

The problem I have with fanboys is not that their posts are a waste of space, but that their posts clog out the real news and information. I don't have the time to check the forums ever hour or something like some other posters do, I log in once or twice a day, in an attempt to get the latest info. However, I usually just find (particularly lately) the latest "x system will be the greatest ever" or "x system will suck because..." posts. These posts can, at times, clog out any real discussion going on in the forum for said game. This annoys me to no end. Not only are they wasting bandwidth and precious time with these posts but they are clogging the forums to the point of near uselessness.

Of course, fanboyism doesn't end with the system, but extends to the games too. A lot of user reviews tend to be just the minimum length and a score, without much in the way of real information; with scores either being 9.0+ on many games, which again, is a problem, I myself examine the user reviews when considering buying a game (because I like to get multiple opinions, from both professional and unprofessional sources) and picking out the fanboy reviews from the real reviews is rather tedious.

My question is, what the hell happened between the SNES and the PS2? During the days of the NES/SMS (Sega Master System) and the SNES/Genesis when I was a kid (ie 8-12 or so), me and my friends never argued about which system was better we just played the games that were on our system, or went over to our friend's house to play the games on the other system. Did the world of consoles just get meaner? Did kids growing up with the Internet are just inherently meaner? Is it just that kids growing up with the Internet have an inherent need to be right all the time? I don't really know, but I suspect that it's a combination of the three, which is really kind of sad. If kids (even if these are young teens) can't grow up without having to argue about something as silly as a game system, how are they going to get through life and keep society healthy? Perhaps I'm worrying about nothing, or perhaps I just feel a slight bit out of the loop, but I don't like this trend.

In any case, I'm guessing that these posts will decrease or possibly disappear altogether when the systems are all out on shelves and the numbers and games start to speak for themselves, but until then I'm going to keep fighting the good fight against fanboyism, I suppose; by reporting when they do something against forum rules and doing my best to bring forth facts to counter their (usually baseless) arguments otherwise. Viva la resistance! Fight the fanboy!