Oldschool Hard

This guy is why you can’t have nice things, Gears of War.

“HEY. YOU. FAT BOY. YEAH, YOU, CAPTAIN BALDING. You said you were gonna talk about the mistakes made by games, but it’s been four fucking posts and all you’ve done is waffle on about your unremarkable childhood and poor taste. Get with it, already.”

Alright, shaddap. The first common gaming mistake I’m going to tackle is mostly, but not exclusively, a problem with newer games. It’s one that’s been brought home to me as I play through Mass Effect again, procrastinating on getting to the game pile (aside: procrastinating on playing games, by playing a game you’ve already played, is that the absolute depths of sloth?) so I can refresh on Shepard’s world in anticipation for Mass Effect 2, and get in a Bioware mood for when my crappy download-limited Australian net connection rolls over to next month and I can download Dragon Age: Origins at a speed greater than 64kbps. Makes me a little misty-eyed, remembering that I put up with dial-up for more than 6 years past broadband’s introduction.

Oh, yeah, games. Right. I came to the part where you rescue Liara, at my leisurely sidequest-ing pace, about 8 hours into the game. Because I am terrible at both games and life, it took me about 5 attempts to beat that charging Krogan. Every frigging time having to make the same three or four choices. Again. And watch the dialogue. Again. While I could skip parts of the dialogue, I couldn’t skip the whole scene. And because after the scene you go directly into combat, I couldn’t save. So after I died again, I then had to make the same three…you get the idea.

(At this point I will say: I’m aware Negative Gamer, among others, talked about this first, but they talk about generalities, not specific games. Besides, I like Negative Gamer. They have a similar ethos to mine, but with actual talent.)

Now, one solution is to not suck so much, but most games (ie. not Ninja Gaiden 2 – which, incidentally, also had unskippable cutscenes) are supposed to cater for both the hardcore (you) and the terribad (me). Hell, you don’t even necessarily have to be in the game to have unskippable scenes, do you, Borderlands?. Not allowing me to skip the company logos that show up every time I start the game, not even after the first time I see them? Learn to play nice with others.

Again proving my terribad-ness, if I have to watch a helicopter flyover of General RAAM in Gears of War one more time, I think I’ll snap the disc. I beat the game, got my crappy 100 achievement points, and I doubt I’ll never put it back in the drive again. Too Human was another game which ‘punished’ you for dying by making you watch the elaborate half-minute death sequence over and over again. Not quite right in a game where you there’s no actual gameplay-based penalty for dying. I was already being punished by playing your good idea wrapped up in a crappy implementation, Silicon Knights, please don’t punish me any further. And I know there’s a heap more examples of this in gaming – this is only what I can reel off without having to actually tax my brain by trying to actively remember or my fingers by going past 750 words.

While older games didn’t necessarily have as many/any cutscenes, they tended to manifest the ‘unskippable’ problem in another way – inappropriate save points. One of my PS2 controllers still rattles from me hurling it to the floor, after about the 10th time of doing the half hour run from the last save point to Sin in Final Fantasy X, and watching as a Marlboro (or similar) again cast ‘Confuse’ on my whole party. What drove me to hurling the controller down was not my party dying, but having to SIT AND WATCH for 10 minutes while they killed each other before the game would give me the courtesy of a game over screen. At least the cutscenes were skippable in this one. And it’s a less nerd rage moment than a friend of mine who hurled an N64 controller through a wall. I can’t remember why, specifically, but I bet it had something to do with Oddjob in Goldeneye multiplayer…

Picture again shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. I still cropped it myself.

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Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”

My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.

So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.

Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.

River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez

Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.

This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.

But I didn’t.

So they aren’t.

What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.

Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.

I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.

Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.

My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?

Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.

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One of my characters meeting some dragons.

If you’ve looked at my about page, you’ll see I first started writing about games, or more specifically, a game, on WoW Drama, a website about World of Warcraft. Along with my friend Kingfox, the gracious host of this site, and some other friends and acquaintances, for a brief but eventful period we catalogued some of the ridiculous drama that WoW can bring about. Crying over digital loot, theft of digital loot, threats of lawsuits, trading sex for in-game favours, it’s all there. Unfortunately, distractions happen, and we’ve let the site rot.

This week is the 5th anniversary of WoW‘s release. When it comes to time spent on a single game, bearing in mind the immense amount of time spent with my cartridge games when I couldn’t afford to buy others, nothing even comes close for me. While I initially balked a little at the per-month fee, having played other, earlier MMOs that were less compelling, and MUDs that were compelling but free, that fee has actually saved me a lot of money over the years, because now I usually buy months-old games on discount, with only the few that I massively anticipate getting the cash from me on release day. It’s become the million-pound-gorilla of the gaming industry, shading every game that has come afterwards, MMO or not.

It has added immensely to my lexicon, introducing me to words(?) like ‘kthx’, ‘kgo’, ‘trufax’, ‘pst’, ‘diaf’, and new uses for ‘epic’, ‘wipe’ and ‘fail’, among others. It has also been the most personally relevant example of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, although any game with randoms on Xbox Live can come close (I love when kids tell me what they’ve done to my mother, when their voice clearly indicates that they lack the equipment necessary.)

The graphics, being cartoonish and stylised, have aged relatively gracefully, in the way cutting-edge graphics rarely, but not never, do – for instance, FarCry still looks pretty good, but go look at an original PlayStation game to see how once cutting-edge 3D graphics age. Go on, look, I’ll wait. The rest of the game can creak a little – it chews RAM like it’s going out of fashion, struggles when there’s many people together in a small space, which, being an MMO, you have to anticipate will happen on a regular basis, and the way the patch system works means if there’s a glitch (and there will be), the repair system may or may not work, and even after a fresh install, the patching process will only work if it feels like it, not that I’m bitter about having to reinstall 5 FUCKING TIMES before the patch took after my latest inexplicable glitch.

There’s been some design mistakes over the years. The 7-days-a-week PvP grind of the original honor system. 40 man raids involving 10-20 hangers on, with the logistical nightmare of trying to organise people. Trying to turn WoW into an ‘e-sport’ with arenas was a recent mistake. I personally feel that charging money for race changes, faction changes, server changes, name changes, and so on is pure greed chocolate sauce on top of the sundae made of delicious money, but I don’t have to use any of these services, so that’s pretty much a philosophical difference.

I’ve taken breaks from the game before, due to overseas travels, burnout on raiding or a feeling of treading water, but Blizzard keeps upping the ante, and I keep coming back. I’ve been to Blizzcon – and I live in Australia. I’ve met people from the game – drank with them, slept on their spare beds or couches. It’s not the only game I’ve played that I’ve met people from, but there’s something to be said for anything that can bring you together with the like-minded for a drunkening.

In short, WoW has sucked up more of my time and money than any other game, ever. I can’t see any game, no matter how good, ever having the same time or mind-share for me. And despite its flaws, I love it.

For the record, FOR THE HORDE!

****

This week also brings the 21st anniversary of the release of the original version of Snatcher in Japan.

Having only sold a few thousand copies in the US when eventually released on Sega CD, Snatcher is like the Velvet Underground of games – It’s now revered in hindsight, and influential, but commercially it was a failure.

If you’re not familiar with it, Snatcher drips with atmosphere. Think of a wholesale lifting of Blade Runner with a dash of Terminator and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One of my favourite games of all time, and well worth a play – if you can find a copy.

Happy Birthday, Decka…er, Gillian.

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“What other things?” I hear you ask with bated breath. Well.

Things like the ‘having to wait for the hint book’ thing I mentioned in the last post: what the fuck was that all about? Sure, you can still buy a guide, and for complex games, pictures might be handy, but at least now there’s alternatives. Also, ridiculously arbitrary game rules were everywhere. Limited lives and continues based on an arcade (remember those?) game paradigm. Bottomless pits. Bullets flying from out of nowhere. Uneven difficulty curves (not that that has been completely eliminated, but I’ll get to that.) Bullet hell – I’m still not a fan of either horizontal or vertical scrolling ship shmups to this day. If that precludes me from entry to the UK, spiritual home of the shmup, so be it.

Now I sit in comfort in my loungeroom when I want to game, playing on a wireless, force feedback controller, in high definition, on a 50” widescreen. Or alternatively in front of my computer running approximately 120 times faster than computers back when I first started gaming, in raw gigahertz terms, and several factors more once graphical and other capabilities are taken into account. If I want a new game, I can download it at broadband speed, paying using my credit card. I don’t even have to put on pants. I don’t have to beg my parents and then go down to the store. I can use the same broadband connection to play a multiplayer game at any time of the day or night, and don’t have to worry about my friends being grounded, or having homework to do, or having to go to Grandma’s.

New games have bigger budgets, wider scope, better graphics and sound. The potential for more depth and the ability to add new content into a gameworld I love without needing a whole new game or having to wait years for a sequel (unless you’re Valve, Left4Dead 2 notwithstanding.) If I’m stuck in a game, and generally games are now designed so that that’s fairly rare, I can get on the internet and have the solution in a matter of seconds. Games, like computers, are cheaper – games were 70-100 AUD in 1990, were 70-100 AUD in 1995, except for a few outliers with extra chips and such in the cartridges, and are 70-100 AUD now and, thanks to the wonders of inflation, in real terms that’s a lot less. By most objective measures, new games are bigger, brighter, and better, at a cheaper price.

And yet, new games are often not subjectively better. Big budget games often lack creativity. While there’s perhaps more genres commercially available than ever, each genre gets flogged to death (WW2, anyone?) And there’s a lack of those little things like ‘just one more go’ x-factor – it certainly still exists, in browser games and little downloadables like Puzzle Quest and N+, but it’s not often in the AAA forefront. It can at least be argued that the mistakes made in the early days of video games were made out of naiveity, the personal quirks of programmers in single-coder games, or the lack of prior experience. New games don’t have that luxury. They may not make the same mistakes, but they make mistakes just the same.

I’m not some crusty curmudgeon (well, I am, but not about games) clinging to the superiority of 8-bit against the barbarian invaders that are new games, don’t get me wrong. These last couple of months alone there was Scribblenauts, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Borderlands that I enjoyed, and I’m yet to get to Forza 3, Uncharted 2, Tropico 3, Brutal Legend and Dragon Age: Origins, among others. There’s plenty of good stuff coming out. But nothing is perfect. I may not know everything about games, but I have a long enough history to see the evolution of mistakes. I’m not negative about games; I love games. This is why I have to ask – why can’t we learn from history?

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