I've been playing video games since the Atari 2600, and have been a platform early adopter more times than I can even recall. Video game technology is one of the things in life which really gets me going-- so I'm really trying hard to be excited while watching this. But I'm just not.

I was just flipping through my Xbox One and PlayStation 4 reviews, and there's so precious little in terms of games which really got me going, or which seemed particularly iconic or defining for their platforms, that it's kind of depressing. Over the past several years, the only two games I played on either system which I really liked were Doom 2016, and Sonic Mania. That's it.

Contrast this with the Xbox 360 days, when I remember not being able to sleep at night because I was so excited for Dead Rising, Blue Dragon, Fable 2, Gears of War, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, and Oblivion. When I got a PlayStation 3, I absolutely had to have 3d Dot Game Heroes, Gran Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet, and Valkyria Chronicles. I never would have dreamed of putting either system in a box for months on end-- yet that's exactly where my PlayStation 4 Pro has been for ages.

And what makes things extra sad is that back during the time, I correctly observed, with bucket loads of specific concrete examples, just how bad that period was versus the golden ages of the 70s through 90s. But through 2019's lens, the Xbox 360 looks like a smorgasbord of creativity by comparison to the hyper-commoditized, absurdly conservative stuff we get today. In other words, things have only gotten worse since 2011. The kinds of tech-pushing "triple A" games I prefer are down to like three genres now.

And this isn't even getting to the $800 I dropped on my RTX 2080-- on which I've played about three hours of games in the entire time I've owned it.

Interestingly and by this metric, Nintendo is a completely different story-- almost the total opposite. For me, the Wii was their dark age, and the Wii U and Switch have been their renaissance. But the problem there is that the technology is so boring! It's that intersection of cutting-edge technology married to games I want to play which gets me going, not just one or the other. The Switch is hardly more powerful than the aforementioned Xbox 360, from 2005!

My worry is that I'll be so tempted, out of pure habit and momentum, into buying a PlayStation 5, or whatever Microsoft's next console is, that I'll lose sight of the risk that those too will wind up boxed in the cellar because there are no games up my alley. What a waste of money! The only hope is that those companies have Nintendo-like revivals-- but given that I suspect increased development budgets due to the technology may be the reason creativity has fallen off a cliff, odds are the next platforms will be even worse.

Stepping back, I suppose this just kind of sums up the state of the world for me today, which seems to be leaving me and my values behind: modern cinema and television shows are ADHD "in your face" with cinematography, and have lots of obnoxious "social justice" themes; cars are commoditized like toasters, with nearly identical specs, and are hell-bent on moving towards hideous "external combustion" self-driving electric designs; computers are so mainstream-oriented and polished that they have long-since ceased scratching my hardcore "geek" itch; and video games... well, read the above.

I mean, just look at when you search for "geeks in underwear"! Chads and thots. None of you are geeks. This is a geek in underwear-- the real deal. Hell, this could have been a direct picture of me in high school, and I'm damned proud of it, albeit I was never quite as heavy as this guy. It's called "authenticity".

I'm really curious to hear what the "real nerds" like me are doing for hobbies these days. But they're surprisingly difficult to find! Although once in awhile I do run across a post somewhere like this, which nails the sequence of events, and how I feel.