It occasionally falls to me to play Gaming Historian, and as Gabriel is in another of his Retro Moods it was easy to recall the incredibly dark times associated with the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. Living room garottings were commonplace - but our lust for buttons and various bars and XP was so raw, so stokéd, that we just piled them to the side. Oh, eventually MadCatz would offer succor to The Ruined - but that trailing z always made them suspect. It wasn't until the majestic WaveBird lit upon the scene that the future truly began.
You would be shocked at how often it happened, and I don't think it was just at our house. A lot of times you're playing this shit in the dark. But even if you aren't, until you need to go get a Sprite - or expel one, perhaps - you're in a state of quasi-hypnosis. You're looking at some of the coolest things human beings have ever created to look at, and you don't want to not look. Looking is a big part of it. That is why you might not understand that you are hosting an episode of American Ninja Warrior (or some other relevant show) in your house.
In the Interregnum between these eras, one of golden promise and one of mortal urgency, there were mutations. At an event, we were told with some pride that the new Xbox 360 controller had a break-away cable, which it did. Observe:
It seemed ridiculous, a contrivance at the time, the kind of genetic dead-end one finds in the fossil record. And then I got up to get a Sprite, dragged my idiot leg through a skein of cables, and instead of a trove of prized possessions leaping off a shelf to their doom which also would have destroyed our progress, we simply received a polite message as the game gently paused. Only a few months before, a trip like this would have interred you with your treasures, like a pharaoh. I can't stress this enough: I spelled "pharaoh" correctly on the first try.
(CW)TB out.
