Oldschool Hard

No, that is not a typo. Welcome to Australia(n pricing).

As I mentioned in my post pondering about what to take with me when (if) I move, PS2 games are locked to a geographical region, split by technology and language into three regions: NTSC-J, NTSC-US, and PAL (Europe/Aus), with other countries being bundled into one of these regions. This can be circumvented, but requires a combination of a chip or chips and a lot of fly leads, making it quite complicated.

Region locking is nothing new, going back to at least the NES, and possibly before. Ostensibly it was about the differences between PAL and NTSC, that scanline differences and different speeds (50Hz vs. 60Hz) would create problems displaying foreign games on your TV. While there were issues with black bars, and slower gameplay and sound, most TVs, once a system had been chipped, or a cartridge put onto a region converter, were fine. Although you had to create a large, precarious stack on top of your machine (DON’T MAKE ANY SUDDEN MOVEMENTS!), foreign games usually worked, without any damage to TVs, game cartridges, or systems. So, more likely, it was instead about being able to control pricing of games in any particular region.

Now, handheld systems have always been happy to deal with multiple regions of games, both as a benefit to travellers, and because there was no ability to make claims about compatibility with TVs, PC games have also always been region-free, thanks to the (relatively) open nature of PCs, and things are changing somewhat in consoles, with the PS3 region free for games (although not for Blu-rays), the XBox 360 leaving region locking up to publishers, so some games are locked and some aren’t, and only the Wii still being locked down tighter than a nun’s proverbial. While a lot of people still use standard definition TVs, most standard-def TVs are, and have been for many years, both PAL/NTSC and 50/60Hz compatible, and HDTVs certainly remove any issues involving scanlines and refresh rates.

Still, you won’t find any overt advertising about the PS3 and its lack of region locking, and the only way to know if a 360 game will work in an overseas system is to either try it and hope, or refer to a range of lists maintained on the internet – the game boxes certainly won’t tell you. Most galling of all, games are still locked into a regional pricing model, with retailers sometimes prevented from shipping overseas or between countries, a patently absurd way to go in the day of ubiquitous internet. While, admittedly, exchange rates fluctuate, it doesn’t always explain the difference in pricing between countries. I laugh bitterly when US gamers complain about games being $60 USD. Considering the standard RRP of a game in Australia is $100-110 AUD, and the Australian dollar has been above 90c US for quite some time, we currently pay the equivalent of $90-100 USD for new games. As a result, I tend to buy most of my games on sale, the only time they’re worth buying locally. Any recent game I want to buy, I buy from either the UK, due to the exchange rate and guarantee of compatibility (for a 360 game) or through Play Asia, set the option to ‘English’ in the menu, and enjoy the extra 50 dollars in my pocket.

At least with a physical product, you can argue about localisation costs, shipping costs, and so on being contributors to an increased price in certain markets. The difference in regional pricing for some games and occasional locking out of sales for certain regions on download services like Steam shows an utter contempt for the consumer, and there is absolutely no technical reason why the prices can’t be the same. The only reason is price gouging. Again, a lot of these issues can be worked around, using VPNs, and false addresses, but with the digital download model, it’s not a stretch to think that if you’re discovered, you’ll lose access to the games you paid for – and you shouldn’t have to be forced into doing this just to get the IMO reasonable option of paying the same price as the US market.

(PS. I’m still waiting for the local release of Demon’s Souls in June, or at least I would be, if, you know, I hadn’t bought it from Play Asia A FUCKING YEAR AGO, like most of the Aussies really interested in this game. What are the odds on it being a flop here and Atlus blaming anything but their own tardiness?)

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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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If you’ve seen this screen before, you probably used the Konami code.

If you’ve played games like Shinobi on PS2, or the Ninja Gaiden series on the 360 (ninjas, why’s it always gotta be ninjas?), you know what hard feels like. The margin for error is slim. The game is unforgiving. The difficulty level goes from ‘hard’ to ‘harder’ to ‘rock hard’ to ‘Superman’s dick’, and will never auto-adjust – you need to get better, the game won’t make itself easier for you.

These games stand out now largely because they’re so rare. Sure, many games on the top difficulty setting(s) are hard, but if you want to get through the game and see the sights, you have a choice. WHEN I WERE A LAD, walking 10 miles a day to and from school, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot, these type of games didn’t stand out: they were the norm. They were Nintendo Hard.

Bottomless pits. Limited lives. Limited continues. No regenerating health. No pointers to guide you to where you need to go – only lots of guesswork – “What the hell do I do now?” instead of “Hmm, what should I do next?” – Like Simon’s Quest with its completely obtuse ‘select the right crystal and then kneel in the right spot’ mechanic. Obtuse is okay in an adventure game where the point of the game is to solve puzzles, not in an action-adventure game where the point of the game is ACTION and ADVENTURE.

Possibly the ultimate Nintendo Hard game is Contra/Probotector. Everything that isn’t a powerup wants to kill you, inadvertantly grabbing a powerup can turn a good gun into a crappy one, and unless you’ve played it so much you could do it in your sleep, good luck trying to beat it without the Konami code.

Some other examples? A Boy and his Blob. Instant death drops, guesswork on how to use items to affect things that are screens away, limited jellybeans, and having no explanation of what each jellybean does until you use them. The worst part is, David Crane said he originally wanted to make it harder and only give you the exact number of jellybeans needed to complete the game.

Battletoads. A friend and I used to play this at least 2 weekends a month for about 2 years. I think the furthest we ever got was level 5, and as far as I know that wasn’t even halfway through the game.

Bionic Commando warms you up nicely with a reasonable difficulty curve, then SKULLFUCKS you towards the end of the game. Double Dragon with no continues and no way to get more lives (being able to beat up on your mate to win the affections of the girl was awesome, though), and Double Dragon III, which looked more ‘modern’ (at the time), but was even harder and a lot less fun. Double Dragon II was at least relatively merciful.

Metroid – what’s a map? Shadowgate, where instant death is the norm and you can be killed just by looking at things. Any of the Simpsons NES games, particularly Bart vs. The Space Mutants, with their floaty controls combined with the need for pixel-perfect jumps. Mega Man, especially if you don’t know the ‘right’ order in which to do the levels. Castlevania. (The original) Super Mario Bros. 2/The Lost Levels. The original Ninja Gaiden series. Zelda II. Milon’s Secret Castle. Robowarrior. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Punch-out. Gradius. And these are just the most famous examples – there’s plenty more Nintendo Hard NES games.

There’s often very little separating the best of these type of games from the worst of these type of games. Really, the only difference is that the best of these games don’t feel arbitrary. When you die, it’s because you made a mistake that you could recognise, not because the random number generator made a bullet fly at you in such a way that avoiding it was impossible. Playing these games does feel good in a certain way, though. Some might call it a feeling of accomplishment, I call it a similar feeling to when you beat your head against a wall repeatedly and then stop.

If you’re silly enough to still like Nintendo Hard games, a modern version of them worth a try is I Wanna Be The Guy. Image ripped from from Games Radar and tweaked to my satisfaction.

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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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