Newfangled video games

So even though it's been approximately 53,590 days (give or take a week) since I blogged, I'm back. Instead of blogging about working at home today, I want to talk about video games.

My friend Carly is a kick ass girl gamer. She even writes for a gaming site and participates in lots of stuff to do with video games. So I was telling her the other day about my frustrations with modern video games.

It's the first-person or third-person point of view, you see. I cannot handle that. When I started playing video games, the system of choice was the Atari 2600:



That is the most totally gnarly commercial EVAH. Anyway, on the Atari 2600, for those younguns who don't know, you had no first-person POV. Your little guy (if you got a guy, some games used a dot/square) would go across the screen from left to right. In Pitfall, for example, Pitfall Harry would start on the left, go over to the right, disappear, and reappear on the left. Or vice versa, because Pitfall was HIGH TECH, BAYBEE! Like so:



I could hang with that! Now, later on we got other systems, including the Super Nintendo. On some of these games, the screen scrolled so that you still went left to right, but you didn't do the disappearing/reappearing thing. Observe Super Mario World for an example:



So these games I could play, and quite well most of the time. However, the first-person and third-person POV that are so prevalent today just kill me. For example, Dead Rising 2:



Mr. Snarky tells me this is a third-person POV rather than first-person, because you can see your guy. It really just makes me madder, to be honest. Because then I can SEE how slow the moron runs. And watch him get caught and eaten by the zombies while I scream profanities at him.

I'm not sure if it's the view that I can't hang with or the fact that you usually have to use the thumbsticks on these games. I prefer the D pad, much to Mr. Snarky's amusement. Whatever it is, I suck at them. Give me an Atari, an SNES or any new game I can play with the D pad to move and buttons to jump and fire and I am a happy girl.