Oldschool Hard

OMFG EDITUR PC GAMING IZ DYING, CONSOLEZ ARE EVERYWHAR, HALP?!

I’ve been reading the first few issues of the new Australian version of Game Informer magazine, and so far I like most of what I see. Some of the content comes from the US parent magazine (I recognise the names of some of the writers), but content from both sides of the Pacific seems to fit together well, without any glaring mistakes that come to mind (*cough*Atomic buying content from Custom PC, pulling out reviews for items that aren’t sold here, but leaving reference to the pulled items in other items in the feature – again, I recognise the writers*cough* (Although to be fair, Atomic seems to run on the smell of an oily rag, I don’t think they have a dedicated sub/copy-ed, and if they’re looking for one, I’m available with a reasonable salary request, and I promise I won’t leave parentheses nested in other parentheses in the magazine…)). I can’t say exactly how much content comes from the US, because there’s only a certain number of magazines I can afford to pay import pricing for, and the US Game Informer is not on top of my priority list, not that I recall seeing it very often anyway, except maybe in Borders, which always feels vaguely wrong to shop in, no matter how wide the selection.

On the note of import pricing, I especially like what the Aussie Game Informer has done with their price and design. The newsstand price is aggressive, the subscription price very aggressive in a market that tends not to do very aggressive subscription pricing (lo, I see the US $10/yr Wired subscription offer, and I weep), and the covers are more like the uncluttered design of a typical ‘subscriber’s edition’, not like a typical newsstand cover with a million lines of clutter.

I love magazines. I love to read – I’m not against iPads, Kindles, Slates, JooJoos, or anything like that, but I love the smell of a magazine, the feel of it, the way I can slip one into a bag and if it gets a bit creased, it doesn’t matter. Neither is inherently superior, they’re both just different ways of getting to the same thing – the written word.

What do I read, gaming-wise? Every month: Retro Gamer and any specials they put out, Atomic.
Most of the time: PC Powerplay, US PC Gamer.
Sometimes, depending on if there’s a good feature: Hyper, Edge, Maximum PC.
Never: Any non-PC single format magazine.
Every month so far but we’ll see what happens: Game Informer.

Used to: EGM (dead), Nintendo Power (I grew up), Gamepro (grew up, Grandma stopped subscribing for me), Custom PC (most content I want to read is syndicated in Atomic anyway), Mean Machines (dead), C+VG (also dead, but probably another example of ‘I grew up’).

Outside of gaming I mostly read Wired, except when there’s one copy left and it’s all chewed up. I’m anal about my magazines, and if anyone’s going to dog-ear them, it’s going to be me. I read a lot of books. Occasionally I read car magazines like Motor, Top Gear and Performance BMW (yes, I own a BMW, no, it would not be described as ‘performance’, and being 21 years old and well used, would barely stretch to ‘luxury’ anymore, either), or music and guitar magazines (mostly if Neil Young is on the cover) like Guitar World and Rolling Stone, although the older I get, the less interesting I find rockstar behaviour. Sometimes I’ll read literary magazines if someone I know or have an interest in has a story in there, and very occasionally I’ll read a current affairs magazine, but as political discourse gets more and more hysterical…and I’m completely getting off point.

Ignoring my tangent on what a bunch of people tell you will be gone soon anyway (‘Print is dead, man…’), the point I wanted to get to, even though it will probably make up the minority of this post, is the content of some of the letters in games magazines, not exclusive to Game Informer at all, but brought to the forefront of my attention in there. Even though a magazine’s letters page is far more civil than the crap in most internet forums (I love you fanboys, don’t ever change), I see the same boring, circular arguments every month. Here is but a small selection:

- PC gaming is dying/not dying. PC gaming will never die as long as PCs exist. It will ebb and flow as to what is popular, and how good a value a gaming PC is as compared to what a console can offer at any given point. But as long as PCs exist to do your tax, look at pr0n, or whatever else, there will be games on them.

- Australia needs an R18+ rating for games. Yes, it does. We know that thanks to the way the law works, one guy is cockblocking it. Acting like children towards him just reinforces his ideas in his mind. Eventually the law will change. Be patient.

- Will PS3 outsell XBox 360? Probably, eventually. Does it matter? Play on what you prefer. They’re both above 30 million sales at the moment, which is hardly what I’d call a failure for either. If it’s a multi-format title, my preference is for 360, for the IMO better multiplayer setup, a controller I find more comfortable, and, yes, achievement points. Often 360 versions of games have played smoother/looked better, too, although these days as the developers get a handle on the PS3 it seems to be much of a muchness. It doesn’t really matter. I own both; it’s not the days of ‘Sega do what Nintendon’t’ anymore.

- How can I get into the games industry? Don’t. If you’re a coder, go make database software or something similarly prosaic. You’ll get paid more and work less hours. If you’re an artist or an animator, go work in/for Hollywood. The hours are similarly stupid but you get paid better. If you’re a writer, that alone is not enough to work on games, and if you want to write about games, there’s not many paid positions to do it. You’re better off working in PR or marketing somewhere, writing copy about breakfast cereal. You’ll hate yourself, but you’ll hate yourself in a BMW and a nice suit. Shit, go write for Harlequin if you really want to be a writer, you can churn those out and live very comfortably.

Very occasionally, people love their jobs. You are unlikely to be one of those people. By taking a job that doesn’t have much in common with your hobbies, it just makes your hobbies more enjoyable. In this blog I write about gaming’s problems, and I think a large number of them stem from game makers living in a bubble – working ridiculous hours to make ridiculous deadlines means that they don’t get to play many other games. I know if I was in that situation, the last thing I’d want to do to unwind in the little time I have is to play with what I’ve been working on all day. So, yeah, entering the games industry, don’t.

Anyway, so it goes on, every month, repeat ad nauseum. In the letters pages, the comments on webpages, forums…wasting time that could be spent doing something useful or at least fun, like actually gaming. Not to say talking about gaming can’t be fun, or interesting, or useful. But all this fades pretty quickly when the same points keep being revisited. Sometimes I think this is why gaming turds can be continually dropped – sure, there’ll be a little debate and some complaints about Shovelware 2: Electric Boogaloo for a while, but then the room goes quiet, and someone coughs, and then it’s back to a discussion about whether PC gaming is dying or not…

Image from The Stranger.

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This is not my pile of games, but if all my digital games were boxed copies, this would be about right, if not too small.

I did a clean out this week, for the dual benefit of making a little bit of cash out of what I have lying around, and clearing some clutter. I’ve got an apartment’s worth of stuff crammed into a room, and the saying about square pegs and round holes comes to mind – I can move it around as much as I like, but it still doesn’t fit properly. I have a remarkably hard time getting rid of certain things. I’ll buy, sell, and trade computer equipment without a second thought, but when it comes to games, books and magazines, I just can’t seem to let go. I find it very difficult to part with 3-year-old Custom PC magazines that are, with the rapid advance of technology, now practically useless, full of outdated information about hardware no longer being sold. I keep car magazines talking about cars I will never buy and workshops that have shut down. I have books from my childhood that I will never read again. Perhaps I can justify that by saying that they’re for my children, but I don’t have any of those and am not likely to for quite some time, if ever.

I still have my DS phat from 2004, despite its wrist-breaking weight and size and tiny screens, because I won’t dispose of something that works, and being video-game related, I won’t sell it. The only games I’ve sold in years are games where I picked up another, improved, version, or I picked up another copy in a steam multi-pack and thus have no use for the boxed version anymore. The one exception is Saints Row 2, which I bought on 360 in a one-day sale, played through, and sold for pretty much the same price as I originally paid. And I only sold that because I intended to buy another copy when it got cheaper. And eventually I did, in a roundabout way, buying the THQ complete pack on steam, of which SR 2 was one of the included games. Even when I was a kid I was hesitant to sell games. Before Saints Row 2, the last game I can remember selling was Jet Force Gemini on the N64, and before that, NBA Jam Tournament Edition on Gameboy. Otherwise, I’d trade in systems and my whole collection on that system, towards the new latest and greatest, but only the whole collection, because the endorphin rush of getting something new overcame the regret at selling games, and losing the whole collection at once left no reminder of what I had previously owned.

Now, I keep all my games. If I get a new system, it joins the collection, and I don’t trade an older system to get it. Some games I continue to own just to say I own them – I liked playing through them, but there’s no real reason to keep them other than that they’re rare and it increases my e-peen, like the two Space Channel 5 games and Gitaroo Man on PS2. Or I can use them to say that I own ‘x’ amount of games on ‘y’ system, even if I don’t particularly care about them individually once they’ve been played through. There are some games that are worth keeping, because of multiplayer or that I can go back and replay them – I can play Ico or Rez again and again and still enjoy them, and I like playing Team Fortress 2 or Left4Dead multiplayer, because I’m big into cooperative team games where I can play a part in the success of the team while still being a terrible aimer (and I am atrocious).

It also means I have a number of games of shame that I’ve picked up, through competitions, clearance (and thus being cheap), or just not doing my research before picking the games up. I not only own the first Getaway game, I own the second one, Black Monday, too. I expected them to learn from their mistakes. I was wrong. Driver, and Driv3r. Still hadn’t learnt my lesson on sequels to crappy games. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, although in my defence, Allied Assault was a good game. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. I thought I couldn’t get enough GTA, at the time. After an hour or two of this game, I could get quite enough, thanks very much. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I liked the first Enemy Territory, being a team-based multiplayer game. I think what I liked most about it, in hindsight, is that it was free. Mission Impossible: Operation Surma. I stand by that one, because I liked the Mission Impossible game on the N64, even though it looked like someone had smeared vaseline all over the screen.

Perhaps the crappiest game I own is Die Hard: Vendetta, the PS2 version. There was a 3/$40 deal going on at the time, and it was one of those circumstances where I definitely wanted 2 of the games on offer, but it was a crapshoot for the third. I played about an hour of it before putting it back in the case, never to come out again. The textures were worse than an N64 game, the mission triggers were buggy, all the faces looked like masks and the level design was stupid. It might get better from that point, but I’m not brave/stupid enough to find out. It’s things like this that let me make posts on this blog with a clear conscience. I’m aware that I’m negative about a lot of games, but, hell, I’ve played enough games to have formed my beliefs through experience. I make bad choices, too, but I’m also prepared to accept any criticism I get.

Now, anyone want to buy some magazines?

Image from EZ-Mode Unlocked, resized.

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This looked like the future, once.

It’s funny sometimes how your gaming ‘career’ is shaped. My early to mid teenage gaming time was spent with a Nintendo 64. I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I wanted one. They were yet to officially come out, but there was a demonstration model in the local Target. It was showing Super Mario 64, and I had to get it. This. Was. The. Future. I begged my parents for one, and they agreed to pay the difference for the system and game, if I traded in my Megadrive to a local game store (now long-extinct) which I eventually did (and took a bath on). My mother asked if I would prefer a PlayStation (smart lady), but I was adamant. I had seen Mario 64, dammit. That was the fucking FUTURE.

I would come to regret the decision when all the sweet JRPGs, a genre that I loved at the time, came out on PlayStation. At the same time, though, all my close friends had 64s, so it was no problem to bring a controller over to anyone’s house and engage in some sweet Goldeneye multiplayer. The 64 also put me off console gaming for a couple of years when the river of new titles turned into a trickle and I didn’t yet have the money (or mentality) to have two consoles.

Although the PlayStation’s library ended up being far superior, I will argue to the death that the 64′s graphics have aged much better than the PS1′s, even with the crappy blurry textures and endless fog. I later caught up on my PS1 rpg backlog when I got a PS2, so my dilemma was eventually solved, even if it was 7 or 8 years late.

Earlier at the same store, before I traded in my Megadrive, one of the staff had generously offered to sell me his first-gen Mega-CD, because I thought it would go much better looks-wise with my first gen Megadrive than the Mega-CD II. It was only through not having enough money (because I had bought so many Basketball cards) that I didn’t get it. In retrospect, bullet dodged.

- Although good, that wasn’t the best local game store we ever had. That honour belonged to a little independent store just outside of the mall, which was a treasure trove – multiple systems set up, ready to test anything, all sorts of obscure and back-catalogue stuff, Neo Geos and their incredibly expensive games when no-one else stocked them, converters for foreign NES games, strange game paraphernalia, and a weird guy, probably the owner, with a mullet, fast-bowler neck chain, and handlebar moustache. While I’m appreciative of the virtues of internet stores, I miss independent and small chain stores filled with the weird and wonderful. To buy games now, at least in the suburbs, all we seem to have are big box stores, department stores, and a few chains, and I can almost guarantee that stock will be identical between the stores.

- For Christmas the year after I got my NES, I got a NES Advantage joystick. It was great – just like the one out of Ghostbusters II! It had a good, solid feel and weight, like an old telephone. Unfortunately, we were staying with my aunt, uncle and cousins on holiday interstate at the time, with no NES. I wouldn’t get to use it for over a month. At that age, that may as well have been a lifetime. I still played fantasy NES with it at least 3 times a week until we drove back home.

- In a visit to a secondhand book store when I was a kid, I got my mother to buy me the Lufia strategy guide, in the vain hope my parents would get the hint and buy me both a SNES and Lufia. I was way too obtuse. The strategy guide is long gone, the SNES and Lufia never were.

- I played so much Phantasy Star II while listening to one of the crappy local pop stations, which was playing ‘Earth Song’ by Michael Jackson to death around roughly the same period, that I can’t hear that song now without envisioning a blue grid and feeling a desperate need to draw a map.

- I got all the way to the entrance of the last dungeon in Sword of Vermilion, before realising the inconspicuous key I had been carrying around for most of the game, that didn’t seem to be for anything in particular and I had thus had dropped for the inventory space, was needed to open the final dungeon. Of course, where I dropped it wasn’t indicated by anything on the map. I spent about an hour moving back through the game, one space at a time, and searching.

I never finished that game.

Image from Colour Lovers.

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I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a small TV by today’s standards, 50cm (20″) or so, passing a controller back and forth. It was like Retro Game Challenge, only less, you know, Japanese. At the time, I didn’t own a NES (and it was almost always a NES) of my own, so it was always at one friend or another’s house. We would play for hours, Super Mario, Battletoads or Super Mario 3, TMNT or Mega Man 2, Probotector (the robot-sprite-swapped Contra Australians and Europeans got) or Double Dragon, in between exploring the neighbourhood, getting into mischief and just generally being kids. I wanted my own copy of TMNT, calling a game competition phone line in an attempt to win one, having to make the choices by spinning the dial on our old rotary phone. It was my sincere hope, and probably in vain – we didn’t have a lot of money back then – that if I won a copy of the game, my parents would cave in and buy me my own NES.

Any information we could get about games came from thick, bright guides, red or blue, or the rarer yellow and green ones, whose name currently escapes me (but must have been made by Nintendo Power, considering they had information about games that never even came out) or magazines like C+VG, Mean Machines, Gamepro, EGM, and Nintendo Power. If the magazines didn’t have the cheats or hints we needed, tough shit, we had to wait until the next issue and hope it was in there. We would prod at games for hours, hoping for something, anything, to move us forward, then cast them aside until we could get the next Nintendo Power (or had put enough time between the last time we begged and now so that we could call the Nintendo tip line at a per-minute rate) to give us the obscure little trick needed to advance, like the Simon’s Quest kneeling trick, which I’m sure I’ll get to in a later post. If we were lucky we might get to rent a game for a weekend, and we would play the shit out of that game, despite our parents and their angry calls to ‘play outside!’, but we always came back to our own games, because if we couldn’t complete them, we sure as shit weren’t getting another one until the next birthday or Christmas.

We eventually moved house as my dad got a better job, and I finally got a NES of my own, with Super Mario Brothers, The Adventures of Lolo, and Zelda 2, in Christmas 1991. When the NES was plugged in through an RF adapter, I remember seeing a vague haze of what looked like a video game and getting more and more distraught until my Dad figured out how to tune it in properly, and then we were in business!

(Now my dad makes me do technical things for him – ‘Here, make this work.’)

I slowly built up my collection of games. When I saw the cool plastic cases with the Nintendo logo that the local rental store used, in awesome shades of dayglo yellow, pink, and green, I got my parents to buy me a bunch and threw out the original game boxes – who needs those pieces of shit when I have wicked plastic cases? I cried a few years later when I went to trade in my system towards some Megadrive (Genesis) games and was told I would’ve got more trade value if the games were in their original boxes…

Living in Australia, while we had a few unique games come out, like Aussie Rules Football or International Cricket, we were also denied a range of releases that the US got. Getting my NES chipped at the weird little hobby store run by a guy with a handlebar moustache, fast-bowler (it’s a cricket thing) neckchain and a mullet opened up a whole new world to me: Grandma could spoil me with new games from America. A lucky few friends had PCs at the time, beige monsters with ‘Turbo’ buttons, which also opened up the world of PC games like Death Track, Rampage, Scorched Earth or Prince of Persia. Sometimes, we’d dial into BBSes with an acoustic coupler to play door games. One PC, unfortunately, got taken out by the Michaelangelo virus, from a dodgy pirate swap meet 5 1/2″ floppy – actually literally floppy. These computers cost 2 or 3 times as much as computers cost now in real terms, and much more than that in inflation-adjusted dollars.

I look back on this period fondly, and remember these games well. Some still stand up today: my all-time favourite game is still River City Ransom/Street Gangs, even if I can now play through it in about 20 minutes flat. It’s not the best game I’ve ever played, but my favourite nonetheless.

I had found one of the great obsessions of my life.

However, nostalgia is an interesting thing. It first brings to mind only the good things, and then you once you think a little bit deeper you remember other things…

Post image from Sean Dreilinger, used under creative commons. Original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/3069425637/in/photostream/.

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