The reason Niche games are always the best

As I've mentioned, I am an avid gamer. I tend to fall in love with the really odd, quirky games no one else either knows about. I'm the type of guy that jumps on a bandwagon, at least in the gaming world, to help get the hype out about how awesome some indie title is.

No greater example of this in my life than Disgaea. I first heard it described, in this little teeny blurb in an Electronic Gaming Monthly which I used to subscribe to, as "Tim Burton-esque characters meet Final Fantasy Tactics." Seeing as FFT is one of my all time favorites ever, I checked it out and ended up making it a first day purchase after reading up as much as I could. Absolutely loved the title because the developers made a solid game with a lovable story with fantastic characters. It wasn't a focus-group tested product designed to sell the most copies; it was simply a passion of some nerdy doods that love that style of gameplay. Luckily it caught on and a 4th installment is due to come out on the Playstation 3 later. Big title? Not in the least. Is it going to be awesome? I guarantee it.

The communities that pop up around every game always surprise me. Another reason I love Indie titles is they usually have the most supportive, loyal, caring fans in the world. It's not a bunch of spoon-fed whiney brats who feel all games need to cater to their specific every need. They tend to draw a more explorative bunch.  I think the best example of this is the dichotomy of Guitar Hero's fanbase as opposed to Rock Band. The first two Guitar Heroes were excellent and developed by Harmonix, a really small company at the time driven by a motto of For Musicians by Musicians. They, meaning Harmonix's core staffers and programmers, were musicians first and gamers second. They decided after the success of the series, they wanted to design a game encapsulating all elements of music in terms of instruments rather than simply focus on the guitar. So Activision, being the greedy evil bastards they are, kicked Harmonix off their roster of developers, gave the Guitar Hero franchise to some hacks, and attempted to cash in on someone else's well-thought-out hard work without considering WHY the title was successful. Rock Band drew a more niche crowd at the time due to the steep price of entry while Guitar Hero exploded, initially, as the new hot trending thing.

Harmonix always kept thinking how to make their product what they wanted, while Guitar Hero started catering to all those clamoring the games weren't difficult enough and needed more challenging songs. Eventually the franchise saw a ton of super difficult songs that were near unlistenable to the majority of audiences. (Sorry, hardcore metal fans, but singers actually emitting real words is inherently better than inane grumble-screams.) It became difficult to the point many gamers were turned off, and Activision never figured out the problem. They decided to release edition after edition of the game with no real differences, while Harmonix only has 3 core titles (RB: Beatles can be considered a 4th as it's music is only in it's own game) and each markedly improved from the last,with all the off-shoots having the ability for their songs to be imported into the core titles so it's more like expansions than "full new titles." The original rock band brought multiple tracks to each song (not just guitar, now, but bass, drums, and vocals. As my brother Colin put it, it's Karaoke on crack), the second brought significantly improved online capabilities, and the third added "pro" modes to accurately learn the real songs on the real instruments as well as a slew of other tweaks to streamline the gaming experience.

I just realized I was getting off track nerding out. Let me get back to my point: gaming communities. Rock Band's tends to be more relaxed, easier going, and enjoys music for music. Guitar Hero's fans just wanted a challenge and didn't care about how glorious a song was if it was too easy. Rock Band is still alive and well, Guitar Hero is officially done as a franchise.

And I tell you all of this to get into the issue that's really eating at me: League of Legends has the single solitary worst gaming community of all time, bar none. Which really sucks, because I love the game from a gameplay aspect and from the potential of awesome some of the other players could be, and really loved it when it was still an indie title mainstream media didn't know about. It used to be somewhat exclusive, back in the days of the beta. The only way to play was if someone invited you or you were randomly selected after applying to get into it. The community was awesome then. Now that it's free to play and so incredibly wide-spread, it's turned into something sinister. 4chan kiddies got a hold of it, which inherently ruins anything. It's nothing but meme-spewing jerks who think they are funny typing "u mad?" every time they get a kill, or a billion other even more obnoxious things. I'm the type of guy who thrives on good sportsmanship and absolutely loses it when people are poor sports. I love telling the other team if they beat me and were a genuine challenge how good they were and it was a pleasure going against them. (If I could, I'd love rematches in those situations too but alas, setting up something like that would require more time and patience than I have.) LOL's community, however, is too hellbent on each person trying to prove their own individual worth it's nothing but jerk after jerk telling each other person how bad they are at video games, how that person should uninstall, how that person should never have been conceived, etc. etc. It gets virulent, positively cretinous, absolutely and unequivocally rude.

And yet I still go back and play it because the good times are worth it to me as I still enjoy the strategy and skill involved. I guess I'm the real sucker. It's too bad I don't have the power and station in the world to call a successful boycott or... I don't even know how I'd go about changing this phenomenon. That's the real problem. Changing the behavior of massive groups of people is near impossible, as anyone involved in the political madness of this country can tell you.

I just hope people could not be so serious and choose to extend a word of friendship to another online as opposed to keeping up the continually overaggressive "I have no social rules to follow online because being an obnoxious asshole on the internet has no social repercussions with me as a person in meatlife" bullshit.