I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the durability of video game consoles. You no doubt are familiar with the issues the PS2, PS3, and XBox 360 faced. Disk read errors, red rings of death… Even the Wii had it's issues with it's System Menu 4.0 update rendering your sleek little Nintendo console a white, slanted brick. High technology sure has it's price.
Rewind twenty years, it's the age of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The old gray box wasn't without it's own issues. Stick a game in, shut the lid, click in the power button and… nothing. What did you do? Power off, slide out your game, blow on it, blow on the console, wiggle things, press down something, insert another game maybe. Everyone had a trick that got the bugger to work eventually.
How about the Wii? If I put a disk in and nothing happens, what do I do? Blow on it? Push the disk in firmly? In this day and age of next gen consoles there is one thing for certain, if it won't work you are more or less screwed. Unless you are the savviest of tech geeks you're either on the phone with Nintendo's Help or in the market for a new console.
I understand that these consoles are much needier devices than the older systems. High end graphics, bluetooth, wifi, and internal hard drives all provide a number of things that could go wrong at any time, whereas the Atari 2600 - 7800, Sega, and Nintendo only had a motherboard and a cartridge slot for the most part, not to mention just simple RF or AV ports and your trust controller ports. Very simple in this age that now lacks RF and controller ports (favoring HDMI, Component, Optical, and USB).
There exists though another reason why consoles have become more fragile, a reason now long forgotten. In the 1980's there was a video game crash of sorts. Customers were't interested in consoles anymore and stores were quickly replacing displays of Ataris, Intellevisions, and Colecovisions with board games and card decks. When Nintendo emerged on the scene here in the States they had a steep hill to climb. There was no room for error as even the slightest slip up would forever doom the market to obscurity. This resulted in the NES becoming a massively popular system, as well as the creation of the current video game era.
Today games are a corner stone of companies like Sony and Microsoft. Major games have productions that rival major motion pictures and release dates that the later schedule around. E.T. on Atari had a six week development time from inception to release, Final Fantasy XIII was in development for over four years, both were highly anticipated titles for their times (ignoring the fact that E.T.'s flop lead to the 80's video game crash). The industry is so huge now there really is little fear of it ever coming to an end, unlike the early days of Nintendo. There is no razor's edge these days, just ups and downs.
The consequence of this is that the same care and attention that went into the NES has been traded for mass production and lowered development costs. What used to take only six weeks to three months takes years now, and in some cases more money than any single Atari or NES game grossed in it's time. Naturally cuts have to be made where they can in order to curb time and lower prices for the consumer. Unfortunately that sometimes means we're left staring at red rings and empty wallets.
It's no wonder that old games are seeing a second life. People are dusting off their old consoles for another go, even in this age of HD and 3D. I think the new innovation in systems need to be reliability, not motion controls. I'm confident that ten years from now I'll be able to hook up my NES and play The Legend of Zelda with a little tweaking. I don't think my PS3 will survive that long. My PS2 is showing it's age already, being unable to remember the date if the power is out even a moment. And my PS2 is a slim, so it's not even as old as some of the others that exist out there.
In conclusion while todays games are very gorgeous and tons of fun, the consoles are definitely letting us down, and I think it's high time we start remembering what it was about games that attracted us all in the first place; Reliability and simplicity. Fun isn't determined by how it looks, but how it's played.
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