Oldschool Hard

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with 3-year-old Custom PC magazines that are, with the rapid advance of technology, now practically useless, full of outdated information about hardware no longer being sold.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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“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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