The characters aren’t rendered perfectly enough for ya? F@&# you, man!

It’s that time in-between the annual Madden and Call of Duty releases, meaning that “professional” gaming bloggers everywhere are in full rant mode about the tiny things.  It is an apparent job requirement to spew as much hatred as possible for any popular game title.

One I hear the most often is about character models, animations, rendering, etc.  Drives me nuts.  I don’t really care if my Call of Duty soldier runs a little bit funny as long as the knife I stuck in my opponent’s butt registers when it should, and I can tell stories to these “veteran” gamers who have such complaints.

When I started gaming, kids… we didn’t have such problems.  Oh no no no.  In Atari’s Adventure we had to pretend that duck-looking monster was the dragon they told us it was.  We had to accept that the stick figures on our screen were Clark Kent and Spiderman like the box told us they were.   My Frogger frog was the same size as the cars that could kill him instantly.  Every Pac-Man player out there couldn’t tell what three or four of the bonus items even were.  I still remember 16-bit Madden games where my African American players were white on the field, 8-bit baseball players without faces and even the fact that the original Solid Snake ran around like he had a spork in his jock in a world that couldn’t spell.

But you know what?  We didn’t whine about it every day.  We understood that technology couldn’t yet create the realism that we’d like to see and while we would praise games that were groundbreaking in the graphical sense, we didn’t expect perfection.

Some of these modern day gamers don’t know how good they have it, nor can seem to understand that even the current gaming consoles can’t yet achieve graphical perfection.  They can’t accept that and, I don’t know, have FUN playing a game or something.

Maybe they should try it sometime.