Let me start off by saying that this doesn’t have to do with the specifics of the Xbox One. It also doesn’t have to do with Final Fantasy IX in particular.

For me, this is more a post about the direction that gaming has gone in the past decade or so, culminating (so far) in the unveiling of the Xbox One.

There are a lot of great things that have happened in the past decade of gaming – Hardware technology has increased to an insane degree, giving us almost-real graphics (FFVII and FFXIII were released only 13 years apart; 13 years before VII, the best-selling game was Duck Hunt), and eliminating the need for memory cards (Can I emphasize how awesome this is for a moment? I remember I had SIX memory cards for my PlayStation at one point. Six. Being the messy person I am, a mini-“ohmygodwherethehellaremymemorycardsshitshitshit”-heart attack was pretty much a given every time I wanted to go back to a game I hadn’t played in a while). Thanks to the meteoric rise of the Internet, multiplayer gaming has reached nearly everyone with access to a game console (I’m a Vermonter with shitty DSL, so for me, it’s not quite there yet, but most other people are fine). Technologically speaking, gaming has never been more advanced, and the community has never been tighter (I could talk forever about the evolution of the community, but I don’t have time at the moment, so I’ll sum it up in five words: Steam. Xbox Live. PlayStation Network).

However, there’s something to be said for the simpler technology of the days of, say, the PlayStation. Everything was so simple; you bought the game, brought it home, popped the disc in the tray, and turned the system on. It was done; you were playing. You didn’t have to connect to the internet, sign up for an account, or enter an activation code. Obviously, systems can do more now, and the Home and Menu screens allow us to do other cool stuff, like watch movies and surf the web. I’m just wondering at what price this stuff comes.

I’m going to stop before this turns into one of those “Back in the good ol’ days” posts. It isn’t meant to be that. However, it was definitely on my mind when I saw the Xbox One released.

On a side note, that system looks tragic. Almost as tragic as Nintendo not going to E3 this year. Idiots.