The Fungus Feed - The Fungus Feed #3 - Microsoft Makes Like the Latest Call of Duty by Becoming Ghosts of Their Former Selves and Next Gen Violence

Man oh man oh man. No amount of liquor could've prepared me for that Xbox One reveal. Lemme tell ya, I could dedicate several blog posts to Microsoft's latest trainwreck with all the coverage I have to work with (just try and stop me!) Let me summarize Microsoft's Xbox One press conference for those of you who missed the big shindig a couple days ago.

Microsoft unveiled their latest iteration of the Xbox line: the Xbox One, boasting a plethora of features such as the ability to play TV shows and new Kinect commands such as powering on and off the console via voice. The console gets its name since the one thing you can't do with it is play video games! We've got the granddaddy, the big cheese, the supremo problemo of bad consoles here. Everything you didn't want in a video game playing doohickey is all right here in One™ package! Lemme jot down the recipe for the Xbox One here.

• Always-online DRM
• A name that makes absolutely no sense
• A New Call of Duty Dog Models (that is also available on other consoles, including the 360)
• Did I mention this is supposed to be a video game console?
• Four EA Sports games and a partnership with EA
• Hardly any actual video games showcased
• Huge focus on TV and not video games
• Kinect with mandatory usage and always active camera and microphone
• More social integration!
• No backwards compatibility with 360, XLBA games, or original Xbox games
• Non-replaceable HDDs
• Paying full price for used games
• The ability to be hooked up to a cable receiver and then hooked up to a TV to play TV signals, despite the fact you can cut out the middleman and hook the receiver up to the TV itself
• VCR case to enclose the console in
• Voice commands to turn the console on and off which totally won't be abused in online games
• "Visual" DRM which forces you to pay fee if enough people are in the same room while watching a movie purchased through Xbox Live

Pictured above: George Orwell's VCR unit.

Rumor has it that the US Department of Homeland Security has been questioning Microsoft regarding their latest Xbox as they've compiled all the necessary ingredients to create one hell of a bomb. According to a Twitter poll started by GameStopSpot for which next gen console gamers will purchase, minus the Wii U and any PC, the Xbox One received an underwhelmingly low portion of the votes. And that's terrible. This isn't all, Microsoft's dug their grave even deeper with the design of their controller's triggers: they're too close to real-life triggers. This has caused Nick Robinson, author of the article I just linked, to feel uncomfortable about the situation. Do you realize what this means? Somebody on the internet was uncomfortable enough about the Xbox One's controller to write a blog post on the internet. That's also terrible. The latest Xbox's controllers feature triggers that rumble in response to the game. Fun fact: Microsoft is the first company to ever create a controller than rumbles in response to gameplay. Nick goes on to say this is bad because this is the first time we've ever had games that look real (just get a load of that dog model) and controllers that feel like shooting real guns. Nick's got a point here, people. Having games that look real where you shoot people that look real with controllers that feel real is too violent.

We're about to enter a new generation of gaming where shooting that thirteen year old kid in Black Ops will feel like shooting a real thirteen year old kid. With all the violence in modern gaming, Nick has the perfect solution. "This makes me uncomfortable, which is a word I almost never use. I don’t think I want shooting dudes in Far Cry 3 to feel like shooting dudes in real life. I treasure the abstraction. It’s a game! I kind of need it feel to feel disconnected and a little silly," states Nick. He's right, it's all a game and it needs to be silly! What we need to do is to literally nerf violent video games by turning all the guns into Nerf guns and the bullets into styrofoam miniature plungers. Let's take out all those violent sound effects and gory visuals and replace them with cute, squeaky toy sounds and bunnies. And why does the player have to shoot terrorists all the time? We don't want our kids to be exposed to something like that mature at their age. Let's turn the boss terrorist into an evil, yet child-friendly pinata that spews candy when it gets defeated so kids don't have to see blood and guts splattering all over the screen. Like Nick said, we need games to be abstract and unrealistic so our kids don't get the wrong idea that shooting people is okay. How else are parents supposed to know which games are appropriate for their children to play? There's no way to tell, so parents are forced to just buy the games and hope it's-oh hold on, wait a second-

Oh.

Oh.