360 gaming blog.

It’s only after I was asked to go bowling last week that I realised some things aren’t better in real life.

I think I would rather stay at home and just bowl on the Wii. If you think about it there are no downsides to it. You can invite all of your friends round and save on expensive food and drink. Instead of having the barriers up to avoid gutter balls every other turn you become a bowling master; curving the ball with plenty of spin getting strikes and half strikes all night. To me being amazing at Wii bowling is better than having to suck in front of loads of other people at the local bowling complex.

Also how many times can you restart a frame in real life when your first bowl is a fail? You might ask but I’m sure the staff members aren’t going to keep resetting your scoreboard so that you can get that perfect start, well with Wii you can. Then when you are bored you can move onto Archery, Table Tennis or go flying in a plane, I would love to find a place that has all of that available!

Most game companies try to entice gamers to buy their game by saying that it is more realistic, “it has realistic graphics and game play”. Well most games really don’t as you are just sitting around pushing a couple of buttons to make things happen on a screen, wow that makes gaming sound rubbish.

Obviously the new wave of motion controlled games benefit from appearing to be more realistic by using your whole body to perform actions on the screen but I don’t think the good old core games can ever say they are realistic, but that doesn’t matter. This generation's games may be getting closer to real life with realistic settings and gritty dialogue but they don’t need to try and emulate real life too much when that is what most people are trying to escape from for a few hours.

Another prime example of games owning real life is music rhythm games. Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DJ Hero etc. Many try to learn guitar but only a few go on to master it. I enjoy playing these games because like others I suck at playing real guitar. So why not just skip the learning part and have some fun playing and singing. Rock Band 3 is bridging the gap slightly by introducing pro mode with new more realistic instrument peripherals for those that want help in learning how to play properly but to me they are the games that have made me a rock star if only in my living room.

Then there are some activities that you just can’t replicate on a console. I’m currently battling through Paintball 2009 on the 360 and I’m three quarters of the way through. I got bored a while back but I’m going to finish it for the nice shiny pile of achievements that await me at the end. I wouldn’t say that it is a bad game it just has no chance of replicating the feeling of playing Paintball in real life.

Maybe to get the big games, the FPS to be more realistic they need to introduce something new. I don’t think Kinect would really help with this currently but maybe an extension of the vibrating controller idea. I swear I heard rumours years ago about a vest type thing that gamers could wear whilst playing a FPS and this could be used to replicate getting hit by bullets using vibrations or some sort of shock to be transferred to the player. It could even come with a ‘pain dial’ where you decide how realistic you want the pain to be that day.

Of course this could just make the CODs and Halos worse with camping taken to new extremes by little kids crying in the corner waiting for the game to finish whilst telling their Mum’s that they don’t want to play Xbox anymore. Or is that just an example of where gaming should stop trying to be too realistic, when it starts to hurt.

Arctic Hydra 87