There’s something not quite right about today, there’s an eerie silence in the air. The virtual streets of Xbox Live lie still and empty,  as if the battle is over but there were no survivors. Disconnected from each other, we are alone, lost in world where we are misunderstood and our hand-eye co-ordination skills are left unappreciated. Gone are the bodies that once littered the ground and not even an echo of gunfire remains in the blank wilderness that is the 24 hours of Xbox Live downtime.

Apparently though it’s great news! According to Xbox.com anyway, because of course they are purposely putting us through this separation anxiety cause they are soon going to make everything more super awesome than ever before by softening up the 360’s image and saying “Hey, everyone can play on this console you know!” After all it’s a multimedia machine suitable for all the family, yes it’s true, but most people already knew that didn’t they?! It’s taken for granted now that consoles will play DVDs which is why some people that purchase a Wii will try to return it as faulty when it won’t play them.

The new range of 360 T.V. ads are cool, I suppose, if not slightly creepy, ok completely creepy. See for yourself - Warning, 30 seconds of cringe!  Including twinkly “It’s coming up to Christmas” music (Ker-ching) and weirdly smiley happy people who seem rather amused by the fact that the back of their heads have fallen off, who gaze with wonder and awe at the magical fluffy world of the New Xbox experience. I can’t help but wonder though if there’s anyone out there who didn’t know that you can get Rock Band and the Lego games for the 360.

These things happen though, most music genres started out dark and scary to the majority until some big corporation threw money at bunch of pretty people to sing it, toning it down just enough but still keeping a precise amount of edge so it could be introduced to the masses as the next big thing. Enabling teenagers to declare that they are serious punk fans cause they listen to Emo and wear black nail varnish and allowing anyone who has danced to McFly’s sacrilegious cover of Don’t Stop Me Now down the boozer on a Friday night a Queen fan.

That’s sort of what’s happening to gaming, we’re now having to label ourselves as certain types of gamers cause the term is becoming too broad and general, allowing for anyone who owns Wii Play  or a dancemat to think that they are one of us when their consoles are just used as glorified karaoke machines. I know I’m probably being childish but I don’t care. I am going to moan and stamp my feet and throw my teddy bear out of the cot if my third most favourite thing to do (after sex and sleep) goes all different and yukky!

Maybe the new dash will be so fantastically awesome I will take back any negative words I have ever said about my 360 being generalised and maybe I will end up abusing my credit card to death buying MS points to accessorise my brand new avatar. I’m an open minded person, never say never and all that but I trust my instincts and all this just feels wrong. Of course where I’m from we’re barely out of the coal mines and choosing a gamertag is cheesy enough without having virtual dress up dolls prancing around our screens. I personally don’t spend more than maybe 2% of my 360 activity time in the dashboard and I’m perfectly aware that I never ever have to change the way it looks if I don’t want to but… I will still know it is there. I will sense it, like a soaking wet puppy silently huddling in the corner of the room behind me, covered in God knows what crap but so insidiously cute it wont be long before I feel the need to gather it up in my arms and love it.

Gamers of a certain age will be very familiar with the title of this post, a certain age would probably be over thirty, but that’s not to say that if you are younger that you won’t have got to this point in a game.  This only applies to a certain type of game though and will bring many a tear to us old timers, but not because we are sad at the passing of time, no! It’s because the TEXT BASED ADVENTURE games of old were the work of the devil (sometimes also called Scott Adams).

Let me explain to those of you not in the know, back in the day we had no Oblivion, no RPG or JRPG we had the text based adventure and at their most basic level they were indeed just text, no graphics or anything, just text.  The ZX Spectrum was the computer I had and you could get hundreds of this type of game for it, most people would start with the Hobbit and move on, unfortunately I started with an entry in the Questprobe series - The Incredible Hulk.  The Hulk had both graphics and text so it was top of the range, indeed the graphics were quite good for the Speccy, but the game was infuriating to the max, I can’t quote the game exactly but it went something like this (as did most text games):

I am in a room tied to a chair what should I do?

> Escape

I don’t know how to “escape” what should I do?

> Break chair.

How do I break chair?

> Get angry.

How do I “Get angry”?

> Hit self.

I can’t “Hit self” I’m tied to a chair.  What should I do?

> F**k off!

Don’t know how to “F**k Off” What should I do?

And so it went on, sometimes for hours on end until you accidentally put something in and it worked, then you could move on to the next screen.  Some games had under twenty screens some had hundreds and of course some had none, but there was a perverse need to continue and see how far you could get, more often than not you would just loop around for hours on end.  All of the information in game could be accessed by inputting commands, there were no visual clues as to where you were or what you were carrying, this would go something like.

> Inventory

You are carrying a torch, some food and three blue orbs.

If you wanted to know where you were, there were a few options which could go,

> Look

You are in a forest, in front of you is a stream and in the distance there are some mountains, you can exit East, West or North.

Or you could type in “Where am I?” and it would throw up the same descriptions.  You really had to think about things, sometimes it helped to attempt to draw a map as you went along because it was so easy to get lost.  I had many a bit of paper laid out in a grid formation with all the possible exits and the like. Yes it was a bit geeky but entirely necessary.  The thing is when you were playing a text game you had a feeling of superiority over playing other games as they made you think you were smart, you felt that you were using your brain more than say, Manic Miner; maybe you were but I must confess I never completed any of them.

This style of game was hugely popular and went on for years but like most games an evolution was needed, this in some way came in the form of a game called “Heavy on the Magick”.  At its heart this was a text based adventure but it had moving characters on the screen also, if you inputted your directions you would see your character (Axel the Able, if I remember correctly) moving on the main screen or doing magic or whatever he did.  The input method was also greatly simplified where instead of typing in a full word just one letter would do, for example where previously “West” would have been the command, here you could get away with “W”.  It made a huge difference being able to see where you were and what was going on but it could still be as frustrating as the adventures of old with its mind bending puzzles.  The one which springs to mind saw Axel enter a room with a fountain in it, you could not progress until you had dispatched the fountain.  For days I inputted hundreds of commands, use magic, pull plug, freeze etc. none of them worked until in an astonishing moment of clarity I typed in “Water Fall”, the water fell and I could progress.

So all you modern RPG players you can now thank all of us old school players that got this out the way for you.  The modern RPG is a direct descendant of the text based adventure and without us playing them you would still be on them, that is not really a bad thing though, like everything it’s natural progression and sometimes to understand the present you have to appreciate the past.  I do feel sorry for you all though because at no point in Blue Dragon or Oblivion can you tell the game to “F**k Off!”.  We were hardcore!

So while all you lot are off playing your fancy new titles i.e. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Infinite Undiscovery etc. I’m still digging out a year old game to play every night. Yes one whole year! Surprisingly long for a game really, considering how often a game is played for a short time, only to be instantly dropped for a newer title. However, it seems I’m not alone since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare still seems to be the main game taking up most of your average gamer’s time right now.

So what exactly am I still doing on this game?

Well, attempting to finish the campaign on Veteran difficulty - no easy task at all! Especially seeing as I’ve only survived about four of the missions on it. Jumping from Normal difficulty right up to Veteran is something I wouldn’t recommend, although it will definitely eat up your hours… and patience.

Then we have my most likely reason for shoving Modern Warfare into my disc drive - Xbox Live. Multiplayer in CoD4 seems to take forever to get boring, either that or my attention span isn’t very fussy about which game I play. Most of my Friends List is filled with gamers still stuck like me, awaiting titles like Fable II and Mirror’s Edge before beginning their parting with Call of Duty 4 (only to be most likely sucked back in again by World of War).