Oldschool Hard

Are you experienced?

Some games have all the luck – high critical praise, strong fan appreciation, and good sales. Most game companies would be more than happy with two out of three, as long as it’s the latter two. Unfortunately for a few of the games on my Top 25 list, due to a quirky and/or unique nature, they seemed to have the first two covered, but not the last one, and similar games are unlikely to ever be released. Games like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango reviewed well, have a rabid fan base, but just never seemed to be able to sell to a more casual audience.

Another one of these sales-deficient games on my top 25 list was Rez. Ostensibly a cross between an on-rails shooter and, to a lesser extent, a rhythm game, Rez is one of those games where the mechanics are fairly pedestrian, but the strongly Tron-like (but brighter and more colourful) ‘vibe’ and what it does with its simple mechanics is what sets it apart. Rez is set inside a mainframe computer run by a (now) rogue artificial intelligence having an existential crisis, which you must liberate it from by giving it back its ‘soul’. You do this by destroying viruses and breaking through a firewall in each level to get to the AI’s central core.

You can go through different stages of ‘evolution’, which transform the look and function your avatar, and serve as powerups and increased health. The game builds through 5 levels to the last boss rush, which deals with the crisis of the AI by (literally) throwing all sorts of existential questions at you. Possibly my favourite level outlines the entire evolution of life from the primordial soup onwards – not the sort of thing you see in most games.

Made with a sort of stylised wireframe graphic look, Rez‘s tagline is ‘experience synesthesia’. Synesthesia, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a condition in which senses can blend together, leading to things like the association of certain sounds with different tastes, or assigning colours to letters based on their look or sound, among other symptoms. The game tries to do this in a few ways: by using bright colours throughout most of the game, matching your shooting to coincide with beats and sound effects in the pumping electronic soundtrack, allowing you to have some control over the music in the game, and with the Japanese release of the game, there was also an option to buy it with an accessory called the ‘trance vibrator’ which, as you can probably imagine, was rapidly pressed into service by female gamers.

Rez takes some elements of Tempest 2000, Tron, and even (the also underrated and undersold) Frequency, and combines them with a sort-of more cyberpunk version of the Tron plot. Originally available on the Dreamcast, the version with which I’m most familiar is the PS2 version, although there is now a HD version available on XBox Live. Although it’s not really a long game, it is highly re-playable, with multiple game modes, and at around 10 bucks, I can’t recommend it more highly.

Image from bit-tech.net, cropped to size.

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Blocky, isometric corporate evil happens here.

When doing some googling for something completely unrelated to gaming, I came across a game called Skyscraper, which apparently came out on PS2 in 2008, is out on PC, and is being adapted to the Wii. Metacritic doesn’t seem to think it exists, and I can’t find a review for it, which probably tells me all I need to know about its quality. Nevertheless, it got me thinking.

I’m an early Generation-Y. While most of my childhood memories are of the 90s, I’m a child of the 80s, the decade famous for, among other things, greed. Corporations were evil and about to take over the world, especially Japanese corporations. Shiny black skyscrapers were the most visible symptom of the malady of these world-conquering companies, evidenced in books and movies like Die Hard, Robocop, and Rising Sun. The whole cyberpunk movement was a response to the seemingly inevitable corporate takeover of the world, leading to books like Snow Crash and my favourite book of all time, Neuromancer. Nefarious things were planned and executed in skyscrapers – what exactly was going on behind that black facade? You can certainly still put forward a case for corporations trying to rule the world (not that they didn’t try before the 80s), but the idea of the Japanese taking over the world fell by the wayside in a fairly spectacular fashion, and near-future fiction has largely moved on to other concerns.

I still love cyberpunk, and I still think skyscrapers are cool, especially black skyscrapers, even if all the people inside are doing is selling paper products. One of my abiding childish dreams in life is own the world’s only full-skyscraper laser tag centre. As a result, I love to see games with skyscrapers featured in them, and I don’t think there’s enough games that use the skyscraper as the centrepiece that it should be. Arguably, games set inside skyscrapers are often just dungeon crawls taken outside of a fantasy setting, but while the mechanics may be similar, the vibe is usually completely different.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of games involving skyscrapers. There’s games with skyscrapers in the background, or forming an incidental part of play, like Arkham Asylum, just about any cyberpunk game (Deus Ex, Syndicate, etc.), the GTA series – well, really any game set in or near a city. There’s games where you’re on skyscrapers, like AaaaAAaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaa (with however many ‘a’s it has) – A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, Crackdown, or Spiderman 2. But what I really love are games set exclusively in skyscrapers.

Getting the rocket to blast open the doors, racing to beat the terrorists as they break the multiple locks, trying to get a radio, walking slower as your ‘feet’ meter goes down after walking on glass, the tension of the sparse music – Die Hard on the NES may have only been half an hour long when done right, but it took many goes to work out exactly what you needed to do. Hard but fair. D/Generation and Corporation/Cyber-Cop both had a dark, creepy atmosphere, with riffs on the same ‘illegal genetic experimentation inside a skyscraper’, although one was isometric and more of a survival-horror type of game, the other first-person and more stealth/action.

There are also borderline cases of skyscraper crawl – the tower crawl during the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII, and the tower in Thief 2, that while not technically a skyscraper, served largely the same purpose in the steampunk style of the game. It’s debatable whether the skyscraper plays more of a role in these games than in, say, GTA IV or Crackdown, but it comes back to that nebulous darker cyberpunk-ish ‘vibe’. Mirror’s Edge is another borderline case, of which some happens in a skyscraper, some on a skyscraper, but doesn’t have quite the same sense of dark art-design that skyscraper crawls seem to have. Again, the ‘vibe’ isn’t quite right. I can’t complain too much, though – any scraper is better than no scraper.

Image from Abandonware Paradise, cropped to size.

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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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