My relationship with online gaming is a strange one.   It began in December of 2008, three days after I purchased a PS3. Up until that point, it was all about the old Xbox, PS2, DSL and me not really caring about playing games over the net. But when that 20mb service came after my shiny new system with a free network service, I became interested.

So here I sit, three years later, asking myself a question: If, for whatever reason, I no longer had the option to play games online, would I care?

The question came to me after an online match in Smackdown vs. Raw 2011, in which a particular glitch froze my character and prevented me from moving. It happened after the opponent performed a finisher , except the finisher never finished and I was stuck in mid-animation, unable to move until touched by another player. I wouldn’t think anything of it but then it happened a second time playing someone else, and it was done using the same finisher in the same place (outside of the ring).   I then laughed, disconnected before the cheater could climb to the top of the ladder, and shut the game off.  That will probably do some stupid shit to my record. Whatever.

My experiences with Madden are even more maddening. (Get it?) Anyway, there were quite a few cheaters there. I’ll never consider myself to be the best Madden player, but I know a thing or two about football and have been playing Madden for over ten years. Usually, if someone is throwing to the same guy over and over again, I figure out a way to stop it. But A-HA! In a football game, you need to depend on your AI teammates to pick up the slack and those damn cheaters know what the AI can and cannot do! How else can you explain 36 passes to the fucking fullback? They also know that if they can force you to change your special teams formation to an onside kick, they can make you to blow a timeout! And don’t ever dare to beat a cheater, or you will be called an asshole and have to read “ur a dick” when checking your messages. Just don’t fall for it when they keep pausing the game, trying to make you quit. They make good cigarette breaks.

I could go on and on but you get the point. I just have one more question:

Why?

Why cheat? I can’t imagine it being very fun for someone to constantly cheat. It must be boring. Doesn’t exploiting glitches and cheapening other people’s experience become stale? I’ve always thought of cheating as something to do when you don’t really want to be playing. That’s fine, if the game’s only participant is you. But when other people are trying to enjoy themselves by playing within the rules and some douchebag feels to the need to ruin that, everything stops being fun. These cheaters are the anti-gamer. They suck.

So to answer my own question….. no. You could rip the wi-fi right the fuck out of my PS3 and the only thing I would miss for ten minutes is Netflix. I say ten minutes because that’s how long it would take me to connect and setup my extra Roku box. Maybe I’m just not a big online gamer.

And now that I’ve ranted on this blog, I no longer give a shit.