Not so much the system wars forum here on GameSpot, but that's the inspiration for this post, as I've gotten a few of those threads on my feed for some reason. It amazes me how, even as console gaming enters its ninth generation, how little has changed.

The first console war that I, and I'm sure many people reading this, experienced was the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo (Though I'm sure many in the UK have their share of Amiga/ST and Spectrum/C64 memories as well). Not only were people making things up to justify their system, but they'd denigrate great games on other platforms. But that wasn't the worst of it. People would talk shit about the people who owned the systems, not just the systems themselves.

It seems that in the 20+ years since then, nothing has changed. Well, not NOTHING. The players have changed (Sony and Microsoft instead of Sega and Nintendo), the graphics have changed and the tech buzzwords are even more dizzying, but it's still fanboys making ad hominems, insulting the other "side" over non-issues, throwing insults over acquisitions and games, bragging about boxes that are a lot more similar than the Genesis and SNES were.

And a lot of the people doing it now were doing it back then, which is incredibly sad. How do you go through high school, college and the outside world and still hold onto these puerile instincts? Why do people, instead of enjoying the stuff they like and having fun, spend so much goddamn energy attacking others? Kids, I get, because kids (and teens) can be awful people, but adults? That confuses me to no end.

Funny enough, the people who seem the most level-headed are the ones who stuck with the older games instead, forming the retro community. Perhaps because of how accessible roms are and how out of the current conflict retro gamers are, but when you see their twitches and their vids, they seem so much more chill. Obviously, there are exceptions, but for the most part, it seems a lot more chill the older the games being played get.

Is there a point to this here rant? Dunno. If I had to make an end point, life's too short to be pissy over stupid shit like this is in the end. Instead of hate, fill your life with love, and enjoy what you enjoy. The box you picked won't really matter next gen, and it certainly won't matter on your death bed.