Oldschool Hard

This is the sort of achievement that actually counts for something.

I think Microsoft hit upon the purest form of sweet, sweet digital crack when they came up with XBox Live achievements. How many hours have been spent by poor gamers trying to get the most obsession-required, difficult or obscure achievements? All for a maximum of 1000 nerd points a game, that are worth exactly zero. You can’t trade them for anything. Having more doesn’t get an in-game advantage beyond whatever you unlocked in the process of actually getting them. It doesn’t get you free games, or discounts on your Live subscription, or anything other than bragging rights. And yet I find myself drawn to certain achievements, chasing little orbs or riddle symbols well after I’ve completed a game’s main storyline, for what, I don’t even know. All they are are a modern, complicated version of the high-score table on the arcade machines down at the local fish and chip shop, only with your gamertag attached, instead of cool three letter word like G O D or S E X. Heh, sex. That’s a good one.

The effort required to get the same amount of achievement points can vary widely. My one (and only) playthrough of the original Gears of War netted me a mere 100 points, as most of the game’s points are tied up in multiplayer achievements that I’m not at all interested in. Balancing that out are the easy ones. I’ve received achievement points, just for not skipping a cutscene, in The Darkness. In a game like Avatar (not the movie game), you can get all 1000 points the game has to offer merely by button-mashing, within the first 5 minutes of playing. Perhaps it’s a canny sales strategy – appeal to all the gamer score whores, although I’d say it’s more likely to be the most rented game than a big blockbuster.

I don’t really mind achievements that flow naturally from gameplay (complete this level, kill a realistically-achieveable number of smellies, do x jumps), and even better if they require some skill, but still flow naturally (complete this level quickly, kill a realistic number of smellies barehanded). I’ll even give kudos to the most out-there achievements, like the Six Degrees of Schafer achievement in Brutal Legend, where you have to play with or against someone who already has the achievement to get it (and the first people to get it had to play against the developer, Tim Schafer). It’s the ‘rack up 700 hours online with a 10:1 kill:death ratio’-type of achievement that really annoys me, and while I expect the idea is to try and keep you playing their game, that sort of ridiculous way of doing it makes me want to drop a game like a bad habit as soon as another game comes along.

Now, Microsoft was only the first. In the way of all gaming innovations, others would later come along to latch on. Later to come were PlayStation trophies, steam achievements, WoW achievements…that last one is like sprinkling the finest columbian powder over concentrated crack. It’s so addictive it should be illegal. I’m not even going to begin to tell you the stupid shit I’ve done to get achievements in WoW (nor how annoying it is to not have achievements for things you’ve actually done, because you did them before achievements were introduced). All I will say is that there was a lot of time wasted, a lot of boredom, and yet I did them anyway, like an idiot.

Please, eliminate these wretched things. Not because they inevitably influence game design, not because they serve no real purpose, but because I CAN’T HELP MYSELF AND I NEED YOU TO TAKE THEM AWAY. I won’t do the stupid ones, but if I think something is do-able, I will keep trying to run back and forth across a lake in Shadow Complex for a measly 5 achievement points. Unless, for the love of god, you stop me.

Image from Polygamer.

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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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“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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