Why The "Hardcore" Console Gamer Has Moved on to a Hand-held or a PC

As I look through my catalog of epic games, they seem to lessen as the year goes on. Growing up in the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 era I was surrounded by some of the best titles and series ever in Videogame history.

I remember my first game for the Playstation being a demo for Metal Gear Solid. The Japanese voice acting was a great surprise at the age of 7 but the game was incredible none the less. I recall running through that demo at least 20 times trying something new everyday until the release on October 1, 1998. The franchise is very successful but a crucial point to my belief.

Metal Gear Solid is a series known for the challenging bosses, incredible story and creative dialogue. The gameplay was revolutionary for its time and the series continued to please the player in many ways. (No I am not referring to the vibrating controller scenes, you sick fucks). Yet, as the series reached its conclusion with Metal Gear Solid 4 (or so the story goes) the game did not challenge the player or seem to be difficult at all. My point is proven by achieving the "Big Boss Emblem-Beat the game on the highest difficulty with no deaths, no alerts, no kills, no recovery items, no stealth suit, no bandanna items, in under 5 hours." As you read this to yourself, not even knowing the series, must be thinking this sounds impossible. Well...YOU'RE WRONG! It is very possible and takes less effort than it should. Metal Gear Solid 4 was much shorter than the games before but delivered to the audience by giving closure to the story and as sad as it seems, that is not expected anymore, :(.

The best example I can give you is, Assassin's Creed. A game with so much hype yet no delivery. Released on November 14, 2007 for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, it was a deemed failure by obvious repetitiveness and a garbage story. The ending was a complete waste of my time with no real closure. Does Ubisoft really expect us to wait another 4 years for a sequel to such a bad game? Well they better, because the new generation of gamers will buy it and make it popular.

After reading so much about how all the challenging good games are now off consoles you must be wondering where have they gone. Well...I now see myself playing remastered versions of the Final Fantasy series on the PSP and Nintendo DS wondering when a game will catch my eye. If you're anything like me, you'll want to pick Chrono Trigger for DS! I also, spend some time looking for new enjoyable MMORPGs. (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games)

There will always be games that will be incredibly fun and easy to pick up and mess around with once in a while, but the game that makes you sit in front of your T.V. for 8 hours straight wondering what will happen next...now thats the game I would wanna play.

---Numba Thr3e