Oldschool Hard

From the sublime…to the ridiculous.

Apologies for the lateness of the post, Windows 7 decided to restart itself to install some update yesterday while I was away from the computer, eating the first version of my post, and I needed some time for the rage to die down, and to recreate the magi…who am I kidding, there’s no magic. I just needed time to sublimate the rage.

One of my favourite games of last year was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I thought the game was really well crafted and used the licence really well. The Scarecrow-drugged sequences were great, the sidequests were fun and easy to avoid if you didn’t care for them, the combat made you feel like a superhero without having to remember a million combinations of buttons, and it was probably the first game to properly combine the ‘detective’ and ‘crimefighter’ sides of Batman. Sure, it had its niggles (detective mode was a little too useful to warrant switching off much), but overall it was a great game, certainly in my top 5 for last year. A great example of what can be done in a licenced game. Now, by ‘licenced games’ I mean those whose ideas and characters are taken from other media – movies, TV shows, comic books, and so on – not arcade ports. I don’t have enough ideas that I can just roll something like crappy arcade ports into a post and not use it on its own, when there’s been so many crappy arcade ports over the years…

On the flipside to Arkham Asylum was Terminator: Salvation, one of my least favourite games of last year, more true to the track record of licenced games in general, and a 4-hour-long insult to full-priced games everywhere. I sat down to play this at a friend’s place, and before the afternoon was out, we were done. T:S joins a long list of shitty licenced games. If you want an example, look no further than the bottom 50 on Metacritic‘s XBox 360 review list. Names like Tron, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pimp My Ride, and a number more names stick out – and they’re all from licences. I don’t doubt the situation is very similar on other systems, too. Licenced games tend to be the very definition of shovelware, hastily cobbled together to push out onto the more casual gamer who sees a name they know and like, and buy the game regardless of quality. Oftentimes, they’ll figure out before too long that they dropped good money on a turd, but by that point the publisher has already been rewarded for their half-assery.

It’s a marketing strategy that’s worked since the 8-bit days, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I shall call it the ‘Ocean Strategy’, after the notorious English publisher famous for tons of crappy licenced games (and a few good ones). Ocean games were often known not only for being crappy, but for diverging massively from their source material – giant spiders in Rambo, anyone? Of course, a few games use a licence in a slight tangent to the source material to make a good game. Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 diverged from the movie slightly, but was close enough, and it pretty much incorporated all the set pieces from the movie along with the tangents. More often, though, a tangent to the source material ends up more like Superman 64 – a pointless set of hoops to jump through (literally, in this case) from trying in vain to make something ‘game-y’ out a licence, and failing miserably.

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but please, please, please make developers and publishers -earn- the money that they need to pay back their licence fees. Rent, read reviews, play a friend’s copy – do whatever you have to do, but subject licenced games to the same scrutiny you would subject any other game to, whether it’s got your favourite superhero in it or not. To the Ocean Strategy, Oldschoolhard says NO.

Images from PlayworksOnline and Das Gamer, cooked up into this delicious stew.

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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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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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