Unpopular Gaming Opinions

[Bolivar]

Heck, the DS has Chrono Trigger.

As does the PSP.

As well as Chrono Cross

I think when the best argument you can make for a console/handheld having a better library than others is that it has re-releases of previous consoles best games there is something very, very wrong. And I have a PSP and love it for the record.

How does upping the ante on Skyblade's post qualify as the "best argument you can make"? If you mean my original response, I'm sorry, but there's nothing wrong with a fan of the FF series thinking it's tremendous for a handheld to have FFI-IX on one machine (on a drive nonetheless). It's my opinion.

And yes, I do think there are some tremendous original titles on the PSP, games that successfully navigated the dire straights between handheld and console gaming that the system so desperately failed at for the first few years of its life cycle.

Gamestop might like a word on that if their PC section at every store I've been to is any indication. Steam, GOG, and I guess Origin if you really want to include it pretty much are the PC market these days. Is it feasible as the sole distribution method of all games right now? Of course not. Is it feasible as the primary distribution method for games though? Plenty of evidence pointing to yes. And since broadband coverage continues to expand in every part of the world, it's only a matter of time before it's perfectly feasible as the only distribution method.

As for solid state drives, they're a non-issue. Most people don't have them because they're expensive, and those that do, aside from having them in a netbook or Macbook Air or something (where you're probably not looking to play modern games anyway) are going to have your standard drives as a storage drive as well they can run games from. Moreover, the price per GB is always falling on SSD's and I'd say it'll be a couple more years before the amount of storage you get for a reasonable price is more than sufficient to handle just about anyone's gaming needs. And with services like Steam and sufficiently fast internet, you don't even need to store your entire library on the drive all of the time anyway. SSD's are really a non-issue as far as digital distribution, and by the time they've proliferated enough to be an issue, they'll have become cheap enough that it still won't matter.

Even if broadband is one day available in every gaming market on the planet, you will still have large demographics who simply will not pay the monthly fee for broadband internet because they can't afford to. But they build up huge libraries of used games.

PC is difficult, and my answer is changing. In April I bought a new laptop with a 300GB Solid State Drive and a 400GB regular hard drive, both internal. By July, that SSD was full. My digital PC gaming library is only beginning to grow. This is a problem. I had to put Steam on my regular hard drive, much to my dismay. And uncharacteristically of Valve, Steam does not support multiple drives. This also makes storing games on the larger external drive a problem. However, I can agree that this will be partially alleviated over time, as you can already buy 1TB notebook drives for under $100. That's incredible. But I can tell you from my experience with PS3, uninstalling and reinstalling games for space is not fun. And that's from the disc. Having to re-download GB-size updates after waiting for the disc install to finish is a reason to not play the game.

And the PS3 also really highlights why you're wrong. There are PS3 exclusives that have filled up the single layer Blu Ray, and needed to go over into a double-layered Blu Ray. There are a few games that have filled up the dual-layered. 50 Gigabytes. And games are getting larger. I simply cannot believe that we will come to a future where users will be content to download a 60, 70, 80GB file in order to get a game, and then delete and redownload it. Not with every major internet provider having monthly download caps. Not with net neutrality a pipe dream. And certainly not in the low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia, which is my local Gamestop's bread and butter. Granted, a lot of that is uncompressed audio. But as someone who regularly has their console digitally connected to a surround sound system, that's precisely what I expect from an HD-generation game. I desperately want a FFXII re-release, just so we can get a version without the horrible compression filters on all the excellent voice performances. How many decades will I have to wait before all these factors are neutralized and this "inevitability" happens?

For the sake of the joy of gaming, please, let me have my discs.