Oldschool Hard

FUCK THIS GAME’S LOGIC IN ITS FUCKING FUCK.

Some things are much better in the nostalgic haze of your memory than they are in your current reality. A few years back I won a small competition to do with a Transformers game coming out on PS2. I won the game, a t-shirt with an autobots logo, and a DVD box set of the first season of the TV series, which I had loved as a kid. The game was middling, and I still wear the t-shirt, but after dropping in one of the DVDs to refuel my memory banks, I wished I hadn’t. While the TV series probably got better when they started to make more money, I hesitate to get any more DVDs to try and work this out. This particular DVD was full of a bunch of cheap japanimation, where many scenes are completely static except for moving mouths. It was, in a word, awful. And my 5-year-old self had thought it was the BEST. THING. EVARRRRRRR. It’s why I recommend revisiting any games you used to love as a kid with caution, because some age well, but others are very much of a time and place that you are no longer a part of.

Sure, I rag on new games a lot, but I will admit that a lot of the changes made to games over the years have been for the better. A lot of games point the way to where you need to go, with varying degrees of subtlety. Dead Space was a particularly good example of how to implement this – you only got a prompt when you asked for it, and it was done in a way in keeping with the total user interface, where health and weapon charges were shown in game on your character, rather than as part of a HUD. Even with games that don’t always push you towards a goal, like a ‘sandbox’ game, you have the freedom to walk around and think, in a positive way, “what do I do now?”, because there’s so many things you can do. With a lot of older games, you get one way to go, and if you can’t figure it out, it’s more like scratching your head, and going “what do I do now?” You’d have to wait for the damn Nintendo Power or somehow come across it through complete luck in the midst of flailing around wildly.

The single example I remember most clearly is in Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, where at a certain point, to get any further in the game, you have kneel before a wall while holding the right crystal, before a fucking tornado sweeps you away to where you need to go. I’d love to say that I worked that out myself, but that was a definite example of needing to wait for the guide. You also needed to equip a different orb later in the game to get through a lake without drowning. There is, as far as I’m aware, only one cryptic in-game explanation for either of these, other than that the crystals exist.

Then there is the whole litany of examples from adventure games. I loved and still enjoy (although with less frequency than I used to) adventure games, both text-based and point and click, with moments like the insult sword-fighting in The Secret of Monkey Island still being etched my memory:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”
“How appropriate, you fight like a cow.”

However, some of the puzzle logic involved only made any sort of sense in the hindsight of having tried combining everything in your inventory, just to see what the game designers would let you combine. Note to everyone: the only person whose mind works exactly like yours is you. Further note to adventure game designers: this means that logic puzzles based on threads that are only connected together in your logic are FUCKING STUPID. Also fucking stupid: having to play ‘guess the verb’ with a text parser. I give an exception to the Douglas Adams Infocom games, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, because these are intentionally absurd and frustrating. It’s post-modern, people, post-MODERNNNNNNN!

Some other specific examples of What Do I Do Now: The amount of absolutely necessary to advance ‘secrets’ in Milon’s Secret Castle. Having to guess the right order to do the bosses in to make the game manageable in every Mega Man game. The mazes in the original Metal Gear. The…no, fuck this. I’m angry now. Bad memories. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

Image cribbed from MeriStation.

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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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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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