Welcome to Crash To Desktop, where I get a chance to talk about whatever my invisible masters tell me to say. My name is Nelson Williams, thank you for stopping by. While you’re here, why not sign up with our Twitter feed? I’ll know if you don’t.
Tonight, I’d like to take a moment of your time to discuss an issue that affects all of us as gamers. A scourge, in truth, a contagious plague that leaps out to strike down the hale and the innocent without regard. As our gaming becomes more social, more interconnected, the disease will only grow greater in scope. Yes, friends, I speak of one thing; console tards.
You’ve met them. Although their kind breeds in the dank pits of Xbox Live, the console tards send forth spores from their subterranean pools of filth to infest and infect all forms of social gaming. You’ve grouped with them in Warcraft, you’ve worn the same colours as they in Team Fortress 2, their touch rimes your headphones and chat channels in ichorous secretions. Console tards are the bane of the online gaming community.
So what is a console tard? It would be easy to lay the moniker on any bad player, but a lack of skill doesn’t necessary mean someone is a console tard. Many players are young, or drunk, or just new at the various games. A console tard is obnoxiously bad, a creature of infinite folly and equally infinite annoyance. Their lives revolve around making you hate yours.
To be fair, a console tard isn’t a griefer. Those foul beasts know what they’re doing, and often spend long hours in study and practice to destroy your enjoyment. Console tards are merely childish, selfish, impatient, uncomprehending, and loud. They also never go away. If someone spends two hours screaming in your ear about starting a new game, that’s a console tard. The Scout in your Team Fortress game who spends the entire round running face-first into a fire extinguisher in the spawn room, a console tard. The Rogue in your raid that insists the boss can’t see through his stealth and runs in to Sap before the pull — for the third time — oh yeah. Console tard.
Worse, the devouring disease that ravages their minds is contagious. Long contact with console tards can transform a normal, promising gamer into one of the shambling horde. Fortunately, there are warning signs. Are you ever overcome by sudden urges to spend an entire match jumping up on, say, a mailbox while your team bleeds out and screams in deathly cries under the enemy guns? Have you ever said the same thing over voice chat six times or more in under a minute? Under ten seconds? In a voice so snotty that a first-grader would gasp at your childish demeanor?
Have you ever spoken in Barrens chat?
A true console tard can never be cured, but the path to that leperous state is not a certain road. If you’re showing signs of the abhorrent transformation, then take these steps toward recovery. You can find a newbie, suffering in his inexperience, and show him the ropes. A console tard never teaches. You can join up with someone, a stranger or a friend, and help them in their quests. Console tards only attach themselves to others as stones around their necks. You can answer honest questions clearly, truthfully. A console tard only speaks in mockery and nonsense.
The sticking mire of console tards ensnares us all. Only vigilance and a constant commitment to be helpful and useful separates us from an endless swamp of detestable incompetence. Help us all. Make the right choice.
In The News…
Champions Online just went to open beta, which means it’s high time for everyone on the planet to jump in line and trash the patch server. Again. If you’re curious about what this new superhero game has to offer over and above the established City of Heroes, now is your chance. If you’re on Fileplanet or got yourself a preorder code, anyhow. The rest of us scrubs will just have to shiver in the dark outside the fence, staring through the knothole of reports and reviews on the forums. Check it out.
Everything has a video game these days, even Swine Flu. Dutch researchers at the Erasmus Medical Center have thrown together a game that sets players to controlling the growing epidemic. In the real world, Swine Flu boasts nearly 180,000 confirmed cases, and almost 1,500 deaths. You can find the game over at thegreatflu.com. Or, you can take a nilhilistic peek at the other side of the coin and destroy the world in Pandemic. I’ll be betting on Pandemic.
Thanks to a slowly sliding gaming market, consoles may be looking at a price drop over the next few months. Of note, Sony is expected to knock $100 off the sticker of the Playstation 3, which will help bring their dark tombstone in line with this generation’s prices. Beyond the console market, the industry as a whole is suffering. You might want to check the stores for bundled deals and price cuts all the way to Christmas. CNN Money has the story.
The Last Word…
That’s all for tonight, thanks again for reading this far. Don’t forget, we’re happy to accept stuff from you, the public, so go and hammer that Contact Us link up at the top of the page.
I don’t have anything strictly gaming-related to close this post with, so instead, enjoy a flame-throwing robot. And remember, save early, save often.
A tad harsh on the general gamer there? I play online games and play my Wii also but belittling console gamers just as you slave away on an online game that never ends may show that a console gamer may actually have a life OUTSIDE of WoW or any other MMOG out there for that matter.
For example my brother and my friend play WoW and LOTRO, and they never see the light of a real day. My poor friend plays WoW six to eight hours a day! I think that’s addiction worse than crack! I know because I used to be highly addicted to Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, as I became severely obese! So when I look at my xbox, wii, or playstation, I can get a good hour or so of good gaming and the get out of the house and enjoy other activities, and actually lost that ‘gaming fat’ I added year by year of inactivity!
One other point I would like to say about console on from developers point of view is that you do not have to upgrade your hardware as often! You have a console and you know for sure that Wii game will run on your console. You do not have to worry about whether Windows Vista plus the Games requirements need to be met, you just know the game will work, also you do not need to download new patches and so forth. So you actually stay out of upgrading Hell by playing a console.
So don’t be so condescending to other players that are trying out new things or new worlds, and maybe get away from the monitor for a few hours and go for a walk.
Cheers.
Thanks for your reply.
When I talk about console tards, I don’t mean every console player. Consoles are great, and so are most of the gamers who ride them. But console tards flourish on console systems more so than PC, and that’s how they got the name.
I think it’s a combination of factors that creates a console tard. Console gamers start younger than computer gamers, which creates a divide between the generations. This results in a lack of good mentors who can raise up the younger gamers into proper human beings, as opposed to the obnoxious troll-monsters they otherwise become.
Also, social gaming on consoles is somewhat different than on PC. Console games lack the controls and corrections that, like a fork shoved into an electrical socket, give younger gamers the feedback they need to know what behaviours are proper, and what are not.
So, you see, not every console player is a console tard. Console tards are simply the sad product of a gaming community that has failed them, and we should keep our own responsibility in mind as we beat them soundly with a bloodstained and dented baseball bat.