Steam Deals and Console Fatigue

Today will be an expensive day for you if you want to get all the quality games in the Steam deal. There's honestly nothing I wouldn't recommend buying (apart from Spacechem because I don't really know what it is beyond it being some sort of puzzle game). Everything else will be just a matter of whether you can justify spending the money on it. The highlight of the deal is probably the GTA games, they're all super cheap and all super fun. If you've played them already, the DLC for GTA4 is also there, which pile on some great content, particularly in the Ballad of Gay Tony.

Other than that, I won't go into any detail for the other games there, just that they're probably all worth a look. Another reason is because the Newcastle game starts in fifteen minutes and I don't have time to write something about the dozen or so games that are in the sale today...you can't say I'm not dedicated.

Quickly though, I wanted to share with you a little sentence I heard today that really jarred me. The first Gears of War game came out on the Xbox 360. You might think "...duh, that's obvious". And it is, but I thought about it for a second, and that means that one of the most important video game franchises of the last decade has lived it's entire lifespan in a single console generation. (I'm sure we'll see another Gears game at some point, but the trilogy containing Marcus et al ostensibly ended in Gears 3) Then I got to thinking and realised that the same is true of Uncharted, and there's probably more I haven't thought about yet. That says to me one thing...This console generation has gone on for far too long already, and it's going to be at least a year, if not quite a bit more until new consoles start making their way onto shelves.

2011 has been a fantastic year for games, but with that comes an underlying sadness: Has the quality of games for this generation reached it's peak? Is the next year or so going to be simple remakes of games that we know are high quality, but aren't really putting out any new innovations? I hope I'm wrong and 2012 brings something new and fresh for gamers, at the risk of playing the same old games month after month.

 "Everything's amazing and yet nobody's happy" comes to mind. Hell, I'll still be playing all of them, they're still top quality games right? Don't really know what I'm complaining about.

Thanks for reading.