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If his friends are all so great, then why didn't their community hold together? I wonder how many of them even know this guy or are still in contact with him. I know that if I suddenly disappeared, he wouldn't drop my name, which is exactly why I don't give two shits about him.

Crawl and 1OOO wrote:

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Going back earlier in the thread to the "underdog" things, if Gameponders had said things like, "I like rooting for the underdogs, and I like it when other people do, too", that would have been ... less insane than, "It sure is a profound realization that no one at this board, a board that has no Britney Spears fans, defends her when she's insulted."

There's an adage, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." I am beginning to think there was some malice in the way some people were being willfully stupid, though. There was a controlling element to it. This is strange to me, because logically on the surface, it's not clear how being willfully stupid would let you control anything, though it's an empirical fact that humans do it (internet trolls, creationists, etc.)

I asked FO if she had thoughts about that, and she said it comes down to getting people to go along with you. It has nothing to do with, say, seriously discussing the merits of videogame consoles. It has more to do with getting as many people, who may be fans of disparate consoles, to fawn over you.

Crawl and 1OOO wrote:

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People from the Gamepond actually said things like, "It sure is a profound realization that no one at this board, a board that has no Britney Spears fans, defends her when she's insulted." (If you knew that people actually said that, I think what I wrote would have been less ambiguous)

The implication seemed to be that the speaker thought that people should defend things, regardless of what those people thought of them. They said it about other things, too. They were trying to cultivate an environment in which you couldn't say anything bad about any videogames or videogame systems (maybe even videogame websites). So, even though I am not a fan of the 3DO, it's like they expected me to defend it if someone said it wasn't a good system.

I want you to think back to the times when the NES and/or SNES were the big systems of the day. Don't tell me there hasn't been even one time where you or a friend gloated over the graphics of even one of those games. I'm sure many gamers went wild when they saw the visuals of Legend of Zelda when it was first released. The craze for good graphics is nothing new, it has always been with us.

So does this give us any right to criticize new games based on their visuals? Absolutely not! Whether a gamer likes 3D games or 2D games is their choice and a mere matter of opinion. Just like with music, there is no universal standard for good and bad; no sane person should say that one type of music is better than another type of music, because that is only an opinion that is based on that individual. And as the times change, the popular style of music, as well as video games, will change with it, but even the hordes of NES gamers can't really say that the NES is better than the N64, because whether it is better or not is dependant soley upon the opinion of each individual human being.

It did take me a while to realize this, as I would use the "Graphics over Gameplay" argument in those arguments with modern gamers as well. But, putting the opinion of each human being aside, just using that statement would make me a hypocrite, because even I have cared more about graphics than gameplay at least once in my life, and probably still do, once in a while, to this day, even in pertaining to old games. Times change, great games don't. Choose your words wisely and be careful of what you say to others, because you may at one time realize that you are being hypocritica as well or that you are trying to set an impossible universal standard for good or bad taste.

I won't deny that gamers have almost always cared about graphics, (I remember, as a kid, hating the dragons looked like ducks in Adventure, that 2600 Donkey Kong looked like a gingerbread man, and how overall ugly Atari 2600 Pac-Man was), but the NES didn't become popular for its graphics alone. It's a good way to draw people to it at first, but it's the great games that held them there.

For people who like to play games for only a few minutes before they get bored and move on to do something else (otherwise known as the shallow consumers that make up the majority these days), the first thing they look for is great graphics. Needless to say, the most horrible looking Playstation2 game ever made blows away any NES game easily in this category. Except maybe Atari compilation games. One can argue all day about how graphics don't matter, but old games' graphical inferiority is ultimately undeniable. Just compared to it's successor, the Super NES, the graphics on the NES look ugly and vastly outdated