Oldschool Hard

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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Deja Vu? This could be what all gaming will feel like, soon.

As well as the big pile o’ unplayed games, I keep a list of games that I hear/see/read about, both already released games that I’m yet to get (some examples: Bayonetta and The Saboteur), and games yet to come out (like Heavy Rain, Alan Wake, and Rage). As the examples show, there’s definitely still new stories, new gameplay ideas, and new stories grafted onto old ideas coming out of game publishers. However, these new ideas have to fight very hard to get any traction. On my list of 31 upcoming games to watch, 22 are either direct sequels or part of an already established series. Mass Effect 2, Crackdown 2, Max Payne 3, Diablo 3, Thief 4…

I suppose I’m the sucker; it’s my own list, after all. And it’s probably what a large section of the gaming public wants – why wouldn’t you want more of a good thing? But it makes me wonder, are these games being released in addition to games with original ideas and settings, with as many new properties being released as there has ever been, or are they the replacement for new ideas? I worry when I see things like Activision (oh, you have come a long way since Pitfall, haven’t you) talking about not releasing new games unless they can be “annualised.” That statement does perhaps imply new ideas in gaming, but it implies ‘safe’ new ideas. Does it prevent any resources being put into the next Psychonauts, Ico, or Okami?

Call of Duty, Guitar Hero - these sort of series will be cranked out on a yearly basis, quality or need be damned. As game budgets and therefore the number of units needed to sell to make a profit rise, the will to take on risk evaporates, and thus these sort of sequels or annual installments will be prevalent. GTAIV, as an example, had a lot of ambition, and in some ways its reach exceeded its grasp, but at the core it was largely the same game as every GTA game since GTA3 – and stuck largely to what people look for in a GTA game. I can see the Madden Syndrome threaten to take over before too long, where the game title just becomes ‘Call of Duty 2011‘, and any gameplay changes are minor and incremental. It seems like the only games that will join these existing series’, at least from major publishers, will be games that are derivative of them.

Repitition and sequels are old as games themselves: Look at Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, Galaxian and Galaga. There’s been a million Zelda sequels, give or take, and that’s down to a fine art by now, which is pretty much exactly why I struggle to take much interest in the Zelda series anymore. You can contrast this with the (western versions of the) Super Mario Bros. series, which up to Super Mario 64 (at the very least) did something different in every game. But the development cycles were long, and games were relatively less expensive to make – the pressure was undoubtably there to make a hit, but would be unlikely to sink the company if one game in a series wasn’t quite the blockbuster they were hoping for. There was time to experiment when a game didn’t have to come out every year, and even if games were released annually, they didn’t need the scores of graphic and sound resources that games do now.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t want a good sequel to a game I enjoy, but getting one every year is a bit ridiculous and can make you tired of even the best ideas. I mean, I like pizza, but I don’t want to eat it every night, you know?

Image from Sports Rubbish, done over with my 1337 chopping skillz.

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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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