The State of Gaming 2013

 What... what has happened? How did we get here?
 Do you remember gaming in the older days? When you bought a game and that was it. You knew, you knew you were getting the whole product. Sometimes, said products would come with cheats, maybe alternate costumes and/or secret characters!. How fun was it to finish a game, and EGAD! a new character! what a great reward!. What do we get now? Achievements. Trophies. Bragging Rights. Air. Nada.
 So, what's it like gaming in 2013? I'm gonna have to break this up, into the worst offenders:

The unholy Evil, DAY 1 DLC.
 Publishers want me to believe that there was "no time to put it into the game before it went into production"? That's bullsh!t. Once or twice, that excuse might've worked, but not today. It's true that sometimes Publishers rush the game developement cycle, but if it was meant to be in the game, why charge us extra? True, sometimes it is free. Sometimes, but it doesn't make it any less tacky. Do you know what day 1 DLC means? It means that if you run out of space on your hardrive, and need to uninstall the game, said extra content is lost forever, until you download it again. Once PSN/XLive is no more, and the retrogamers of the future want to play the game, they'll get a subpar experience. Fun.
 This Evil sometimes comes without an excuse, which makes it even worse. They announce this Day 1 DLC before the game is even finished. Sometimes it's even used as a pre-order incentive. Do y'know that pre-order incentive used to be? An artbook. Maybe a CD with the music of the game, or some keychain or little physical extra. Do y'know what a pre-order incentive is now? Content that was in the game, locked out, on purpose, to ensure pre-orders(Buying new at full price) and that later buyers, posibly when the game is cheaper, need to spend a little more to get the missing content(Which is a 100kb file that simply unlocks the content).

 Then we have another pest, that usually goes hand in hand with Day 1 DLC...
.                                                                                         ..the dreaded DISC LOCKED CONTENT.
 The biggest culprit of them all: Capcom. This is content that it's in the disc that you just bought, but you need to shell out more dead presidents(Money, for those weird foreigners that don't have presidents on their cash) in order to gain access to. Publishers may try to bullsh!t the consumer with excuses, but the truth is: they want your money. Since I mentioned Capcom before, I will use them as an example with Street Fighter X Tekken:
 "The characters aren't finished" -> Data miners found the complete. Even their endings. Their alternate costumes(Which are gonna set you back 1 extra dollar per costume).
 "It's to allow players that didn't buy the DLC to play with those that didn't" -> Right, that's why we need the endings too?
 "It had a separate budget from the main game"-> So, you planned DLC even, even if the game didn't sell well? That's risky, specially for a money-hungry publisher.
Then we have the defenders:
"Get a job and the cost becomes a non-issue"-> Having the money, doesn't mean you have to get ripped off.
"Companies exist to make money"-> Companies exist to make money, yes, but if you think about it, everything is about getting money. Being a doctor makes you earn money, so you are gonna screw with your clients by cutting back on your equipment? Give them a subpar treatment for more cash? Like... giving them a subpar product for more cash? Companies exist to make monet, but they don't need to rip out ther costumers.
 And if there was any doubt left that Capcom wanted your money, later patches altered the Character Select Screen, so even if you didn't buy the DLC, you can see ALL the characters, with the DLC ones being grayed out, as if to taunt the consumer and tempt them into giving them their money. GG Capcom, GG.

Speaking of "Grayed out" brings us to the next topic, one that is a bit more debatable.... LACK OF CONTENT AND MISCELANEOUS DLC.
 As I mentioned at the start of this piece, previous videogame generations included all sorts of bonus stuff. Alternate Costumes, Secret Characters, etc, all included in your initial purchase. Now games seem to shun unlockables in favor of selling you extra stuff. The rewards you get from finishing a game range from a mere new difficulty level to Trophies or Achievements(Which are just bragging rights). Fun. The worst part is that games haven't gotten any more content to make up for it. It's the same kind of games you bought before, with the same base of content, maybe less, but lacking all the extra unlockables. Remember Cheats? They were quite prevalent in the 32 and 64 bit generations. They were fun little extras to mess around. Now they sell you cheats(...Capcom...) or don't include them at all. Cheats were never "needed", but it seems games now are trying to act more... mature? so to speak, "This is not meant to make you have fun! It's to make you think 'cause we so deep, brah" eh, I digress, but I will talk more about that soon. The point is games have gotten more expensive to produce, games now recieve bigger budget, and they get higher quality assets, better textures, more polygons, more work, more DLC.

GAMES IN GENERAL TODAY
 Games today seem to be... trying too hard. They are trying so hard to look realistic. It sounds cliche, but it is true, games today are fond of Browns, Greys and Blacks, shunning away from the more pleasing, less realistic, colors. There are still colorful games, like most indie and anime-games, but they are the lesser kind. Colors do not make a game, but after playing 4-5 current gen games, monotony sets in, Fiction is not evil, Videogames are a form of fiction, yet it seems they are trying to ape movies. Games trying to be what they are not: Movies. Taking elements from said medium is not an inherently bad thing, but it can go too far. Examples of this are Heavy Rain, for it's unusual gameplay and Uncharted, for it's abundance of scripted scenes. I'm not saying they are bad games, but they are games pretending to be other things.
 It's not all bad though! Thank's to the internet, if you lack gamer friends, you can play online! But due to it's more... impersonal nature, it tends to bring out the worst in people, so pray you have a thick skin. But the best thing, probably, to come out of this generation, is Steam(It's older, but still), Playstation Network, Xbox Live and the such. Thanks to this services, games that had no chance of being published, maybe due to it's smaller scale, in content, now can be sold for a more reasonable price. Indie gaming has flourished thanks to this, and this is a VERY good thing.

NOT ALL OF THEM ARE EVIL?!
 Yup, there are great games being made this gen, games that have huge amounts of content and don't try to rip you off with DLC(Most of the time).... Games like:
Batman Arkham Asylum and Arkham City(The DLC is not a requisite, and even without it, the game offers a boatload of content).
Lollipop Chainsaw
Borderlands(The DLC really does feel like the expansions of yore, it's a good amount of content at a reasonable price. And the main game is very beefy)
Infamous 1 and 2
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
These few games are examples of respecting the consumer. They offer more content than your average game, they reward the player for PLAYING and not for PAYING. And what DLC they may have doesn't feel like "A small addition for money" but extra content.