This fall has turned out to be a spectacular season for two types of people: gamers and DuPont shareholders. This season seems to have had not just an obscene amount of quality games released, but an equally silly number of plastic devices needed for playing them.

First came Sony’s Eye of Judgment, a strategic card game that requires cards, a camera, a harness for holding said camera, or ice fishing, your choice, and a mat upon which to place your cards, or your newly caught scrod. Basically you place cards on the mat, the camera scans them and adds them to your virtual deck, and based on the card played, the placement on the mat and what your opponent has in his or her deck, you either give a spectacular magic themed beatdown, or receive one. Why you need a camera or even a PS3 for that matter, to play what is basically a souped up version of Go Fish is anyone’s guess. At least when you’re not playing Eye of Judgment, you can use the web cam for more mundane things like spying on Grandma when she’s watching the kids to make sure she’s not nipping too much from the liquor cabinet.

Shortly thereafter, Guitar Hero 3 dropped on every available platform, including that old Casio calculator you’ve had since grade school. This being Guitar Hero, each version of the game came with a new version of the Guitar Hero controller we’ve all come to know, love and purchase with the previous two iterations. Oh sure, those with a PS2 or 360 could use the GH2 controller, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, nor would it score them the coveted wireless controller that shipped with GH3.

The draw of a wireless controller appeared to be a large one as GH3 sold something on the order of eight hojillion units in its first week. Obviously wireless is a big deal as Guitar Hero 3 is completely impossible to play in anything other than a ramrod straight position, completely devoid of movement, lest an errant footstep cause you to fail “One”. The new controller also allows you to switch out faceplates so that you can spend more money on the product. I’m sorry, I meant to say, show you’re abysmal taste in music by buying a Kiss faceplate (bad) or a Panic at the Disco faceplate (infinitely worse). Either way, you’ll be showing how much you live the independent, you-against-the-world spirit of Rock and Roll by whoring yourself out to huge, faceless, multinational corporations. Rock on!

Around the same time Guitar Hero 3 dropped, Microsoft released Scene It! for the Xbox 360. The movie trivia game shipped with not one, but four controllers consisting of a plastic shell and a huge, colored button visible from space. Apparently, Uncle Leo has not only an encyclopedic knowledge of Peter Sellers movies, but a complete inability to look past the various buttons on the 360 controller to find the only yellow one. Thankfully you can use the controller to play other 360 games. Oh wait. Well, I’m sure Scene It 2: Scene More of It will be out in no time.

Even Nintendo is getting into the peripheral mix as this fall shows the debut of the Wii Zapper, a handy gun shell, er, thing, that allows you to place your Wiimote and Nunchuck within it, all so you can shoot a crossbow as Link, or shoot Nazis in Medal of Honor Heroes 2. Remember when the Wii came out and everyone and their mother, including Nintendo went on and on about how intuitive first person shooters would be with the Wii motion controls? Yeah, me too. What’s the word for more intuitive than intuitive? Right, there isn’t one.

The Wii Zapper will allow for unprecedented control over the upcoming flood of crappy arcade light game ports such as House of the Dead, Shed of the Dead, Pantry of the Dead and my personal favorite, Recycle Bin of the Dead. Look also for the inevitable Virtual Console release of Duck Hunt so that we can all be reminded of how much fun it was to be mocked by a dog over our utterly abysmal waterfowl shooting skills. This is actually a model of restraint for Nintendo, who normally by now would have released five dozen versions of the Wii in various colors, patterns and Nintendo character themes. Heck, we should be getting a DS redesign any day now, complete with a button that wires money from your checking account directly to Nintendo.

All of these games pale in comparison to the upcoming Rock Band, a game so big it requires three controllers, a crew of roadies and a raging heroin addiction to play. The drum kit alone has 37 pieces and needs a structural engineering degree to put together. The game also ships with a USB port, which should help take the sting out of the 170 dollar price tag, what with quality USB ports going for upwards of 73 cents on the open market. The kicker is that even with all of these controllers, you still can’t field a full band as you’re missing a controller for the bass player. Luckily, no one gives a damn about bass players, including bass players themselves. Something like ten percent of US oil consumption goes towards the creation of plastic, which is something all of those environmentally proud hybrid owners should think of when they drive their mostly plastic car down to the game store to buy their plastic game in its plastic case with its three plastic controllers. That entire transaction costs the US something like 15 barrels of oil.

The worst part of Rock Band though, isn’t the cost, or the number of peripherals, or the fact that I’ve been spending the past three days perfecting the lyrics to “Wanted Dead or Alive”. No, it’s the fact that when Steel Battalion came out, I laughed at those willing to spend two hundred dollars on a game with a custom controller, and when Donkey Kong Jungle Beat came out, I mocked those willing to play a game with a pair of bongos and here I’m spending two hundred dollars for a custom controller that’s nothing but a bigger set of bongos. Oh well, at least the drum heads are large enough for Uncle Leo to use when playing Scene It. While I have him here, maybe I can convince him to buy Guitar Hero 3. After all, I do need a bass player…