"In Since the Beginning" - A Potted History of a lifelong obsession with Videogames. Part 5: 2010 and beyond...
At AC Towers, the Xbox 360 hung on in there for a while until its successor, the Xbox one, came along late to the party, bundled with Microsoft's hopeless failure, the Kinect motion control system - and touted as more of a family entertainment centre geared around watching sport than playing games.
Thus, it was ignored by me at launch and I put my money towards the far more interesting launch lineup and amazing console exclusives of the Playstation 4. 
The Playstation Virtual Reality Headset didn't quite have the visual acuity of some of its other VR competitors but it did the one thing most of them had never achieved - it put VR firmly in the hands of consumer-level gamers who didn't need a super-power PC rig to run their Oculus Rift systems.
I have to admit that my daughter had a lot to do with this one. Like most non-Sony consoles I ignored the Nintendo Switch at launch, couldn't see the point in either its portability (it is, after all, just a glorified Tegra-based tablet), its weird little 'snap on' controllers, nor any of the initial batch of games. I picked one up with a bundle of Mario Kart 8 and Zelda and was pleasantly surprised to find that this tiny little thing could deliver big meaty satisfying gaming experiences despite not having the raw power of its competitors.
Sony, it seems, got everything right this time around - learning from the mistakes made with producing an internal architecture in the PS3 that very few developers could get a handle on, and producing a console that had mass appeal to both large studios and indies. The Playstation 4 had plenty of get up and go for the price, and when the mid-generation Playstation 4 Pro was launched I upgraded again, mostly to run this weird contraption below...
That said, there were two things that put a hole in the idea of VR being the future of gaming for me.
1) I got the horrible VR sweats, roiling tummy and eye-ache. I just could NOT get on with the thing at all, and very few games were actually playable for me (Rez VR was one, Tumble was another, but any racing games or first person games were a total bust. Bit of a shame that!)
2) The other reason I couldn't do anything with it was because every single time I put the thing on and got into a game, my wife would magically appear like a mischievous demon, to either stare giggling at her ridiculous looking husband as he flailed around wildly, or worse still to sit in almost total silence at my shoulder, breathing on me to see how long it took before my sixth sense kicked in and I snatched off the headset to find her grinning like a cheshire cat at me.
So along with a ton of other videogaming junk, the VR headset has been consigned to the 'bits cupboard'. I keep threatening to get the thing out again and give it another go but will leave it until my wife goes away for the weekend I think!
The Playstation 4 has almost overtaken the Xbox 360 as my favourite "modern" console. Even now it's been superseded by the Playstation 5 (a console you just cannot get hold of at this point for love nor money) but has plenty of tricks up its sleeve as games are still being released, with the lure of being able to upgrade 'for free' once you pick up Sony's shiny new white knight of a console.
Elsewhere in the decade between 2010 and now I did finally acquire an Xbox One. It became a useful console for playing older Xbox 360 games on, without the clunking noise of the optical drive or the howling cyclone noise of the fans kicking in on the old wheezing console. I did pick up a mere 4 games for the thing (3 of which were Forza Horizon games, the other being Sunset Overdrive - an Xbox One exclusive shooter that was actually way way better than I thought it would be, but sadly didn't win over gamers very much). The Xbox One did feel like a white elephant (ironic as I bought the Xbox 1 Series S - the sparkling white case and white controller version rather than the utterly hideous Kinect-bundled original). To date, it's seen very little action compared to its stablemate in the AV cabinet but thanks to the fact that the thing can play Skate 3, it does still get used.
But the PS4 dominated. Games such as Spider-Man, The Last of Us (the original - the sequel was horribly disappointing and pretty much ruined the storylines established in the first game), Uncharted 4, Watch Dogs 2, No Man's Sky (yes, I liked it!), Dreams (an absolutely brilliant way of building your own games - long the dream of geeks like me who can't code for toffee), Horizon: Zero Dawn and many many more - and the lure of PS Plus and 'free' downloadable games every month cemented my allegiance to all things Sony.
Weirdly for a long time in the twenteens though I fell completely out of love with gaming entirely. It felt like there wasn't much in the way of excitement or innovation going on. Long term franchises seemed to get yearly games that felt almost exactly the same as their predecessors (many once great series such as Assassins Creed and Battlefield, Need for Speed and others all fell into this category). Then there were the relatively hollowed out games, boxed out at full price but requiring a huge amount of spends on DLC in order to get the 'season pass' - and all the content that should've been in the box in the first place. I stopped buying games at launch, waiting until Sony's various deals hit their store, hoovering games up at that point and polishing them off at leisure. One thing about not fraternising with gamers on a regular basis is that you suddenly don't have that horrible smoker-like peer pressure on you to keep up with the Joneses.
Things have changed again though and I'm finding my way back into games, largely because my daughter (despite my best efforts) loves games and though we have polar opposite tastes (she loves stuff like Animal Crossing, The Sims, Stardew Valley etc whereas I'm still in it for third person action games).
New games are arriving with longer single player campaigns, gritty storytelling, fabulous graphics and (in a lot of cases) just sheer balls-out fun which is, after all, what we all got into gaming for in the first place right? Several bloody noses in terms of huge scale releases with meticulously planned 'season pass' structures built around them that have ended up as colossal studio-ending commercial failures have made the industry sit up and take note, and there's also the fact that Nintendo are still doing what they've always done as well, just serving up great gaming experiences for a diminutive console that has its own fair share of innovation, but still brings back all the old gaming experiences and franchise titles many of us grew up with and have loved for decades.
So the final console purchase of the Twenteens was one of these...
Mario Kart 8 is one of the best versions of that long-running franchise, boasting glorious smooth graphics and plenty of tracks and vehicle options to keep even a cynical old goat like me happy. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is also amazing, a whopping great big sprawling RPG that for once actually feels like a 'free roaming' landscape with tons of options to keep you occupied rather than something disguising its rather rigid set path through the game, as with previous Zelda offerings.
As previously mentioned we snapped up Animal Crossing: New Horizons at launch, and it kept my daughter absolutely riveted to the screen for way longer than we'd like - but also helped her to keep in touch with and bond with friends and my sister and her kids during COVID-stricken 2020 through the Switch's rudimentary online play. Reading around, a lot of folk felt the same way about it and I remember how obsessed a bunch of men who were old enough and cynical enough to normally avoid any games featuring cute animal characters were back in the heady days of being a Eurogamer forumite, the gamecube version keeping people properly hooked once upon a time.
Then my health began to deteriorate in the early part of 2020 thanks to a knackered gallbladder and dangerous pancreatitis. Gaming served the dual purpose of being something that would keep me in one place and occupied for restful lengths of time while recovering from two bouts of hospitalisation and recovery from an abdominal operation, and also to distract my daughter from the awful things happening to me, and to her thanks to COVID. As twee as it sounds, sometimes being able to take yourself out of this world and put your virtual self into an entirely different one for a few hours has huge merits, whether you choose to do so through books, films, comics or games. Games such as Death Stranding (with its surreal other-worldly yet strangely familiar version of Iceland's boggy and rocky landscapes) felt like the only way of getting out into the great outdoors beyond our own neighbourhood, and I got seriously hooked into helping Sam cut through the weirdness of his life, while the real-world tried to match that weirdness like for like.
Elsewhere I've also really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima though it's one of those games that I love one minute and hate the next. It does heavily remind me of my favourite Samurai comics though, and the lush world that Sucker Punch have created really is a treat for the eyes, even if (for me at least) the combat is a bit sucky.
So what will the next decade bring? I have a feeling I won't last out long in terms of picking up a PS5 (shortages are at least keeping me from dropping any cash on one). I am 100% sure I will totally ignore the Xbox Series X right up to the point they release a jaw-dropping Forza Horizon title for it (but if it crops up as an Xbox One title as well, I might just settle for that). It may well be more powerful than the PS5 but IMHO Microsoft still hasn't got a decent enough stable of console exclusives to lure me away from Sony. I've no interest whatsoever in Halo, and it takes more than raw power and high frame rates to impress me - if I wanted that kind of thing from a games machine I'd build a gaming PC again!
With games there's always a surprise around the corner, always one of the mighty studios that still exist gearing up and giving it their all to bring us a few amazing games to light up our lives. So let's see what the roaring 2020s bring and let's catch up in a few years when this decade draws to a close.
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