Video Games Are A Waste Of Time

...In other news, this exists:

...WTF. What does this mean? Has Sega/Sonic Team finally lost every shred of self respect it once held? Is it even worth playing a Sonic game on one of these next-gen consoles? Aren't the developers at all concerned how poorly this is going to date, how silly it's going to look in 4 years? Perhaps they're similarly excited about the Olympic Games being held in Beijing, so the world will be forced to acknowledge China's acid rain and unbreathable air. I don't have a wii (or an Xbox or a PS3) so I can't really answer any of these questions, nor do I particularly want to. I do, however, want to discuss this, badly:

IGN has a preview here, and it's totally full of shit. It's whiny spongeheads like these who ruined the C&C franchise through the first half of this decade, begging for simpler interfaces and snappier graphics. They actually CRITICIZED EEII for having too many useful features! If I wanted to play a game of fucking checkers I would, you know? Games like Empire Earth aren't supposed to be for the casual RTS fan; what I loved about the first two was their complexity, how they required dedication and time to fully understand, let alone to master. We need complex games in the RTS genre - one shouldn't be forced between playing a week long turn-based game of Civ 4 and playing an hour long comp stomp in C&C III. There needs to be a balance for those of us looking for a (relatively) quick game without sacrificing strategic depth, but publications like IGN seem to just keep pushing for a clear divide between highly complex games for the thinking man or woman and fast paced real time strategy with no room for realism or higher thought functions. The worst is that developers seem to be listening to these fucking stooges, too: this year's C&C III and Supreme Commander were both disappointingly simplistic (though Command and Conquer 3's AI is absolutely stunning), and the only other highly anticipated RTS coming out in the near future, Starcraft 2, is in all probability going to take a similar simplistic route. Ugh!