I’m no fancy coder. In fact I’m no kind of coder at all. I can fiddle about a bit with very basic HTML, but otherwise I’m completely clueless when it comes to making things happen with computer code. I tried to learn a bit as a kid, but it turned into a dizzying swirl of things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and the can-can music started playing in my head. This is BASIC we’re talking about here, the same language we were forced to use in computer studies, so you can imagine the miserable, though musical, time I had of that particular class. As much as I tried, I couldn’t work out how to get the damn thing to work – and I so wanted to know how it worked. This was the first suspicion I got that I’m a bit on the dumb side.
Still, even now, as a sophisticated* – but still dumb-ish – adult, there’s something fascinating to me about the whole coding side of gaming. It fills me with wonder that they can put together strings of gibberish which coalesce in the characters and worlds floating around on your screen – often trying to kill you. It’s something I’ve always found sort of arcane. I just can’t get my brain around the whole business at all; to the point where I’m almost Rain Man-style punching myself in the head. Nyaaaaaaaa!
Even more fascinating to me are those folk who crack open games and fiddle about with their innards, like mad Roswell autopsy doctors, rearranging and replacing the quivering innards of the game to come up with something different. Not always better, mind you, just different. I’m fascinated by this world, mainly because I don’t have access to it. I just hear things about it on the internet wind, whispered by those in the know or all-capsed by crazies who insist it’s all just the Illuminati desperate for new thong underwear**.
Modding isn’t a new phenomenon (and neither are crazies blurting about why their underwear disappears into their rectums) the early days of home micros had plenty of modding. To be honest if it weren’t for modders, if what I’m led to believe is correct (I refer you to my statement about dumbness above), a lot of games on the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 wouldn’t exist. There were also those who came up with ‘pokes’, the quaint term (and, let’s not kid ourselves, hilariously dirty) for creating strings of code that by-passed the games’ functions to make them easier – you know, a cheat: infinite lives, infinite time, invulnerability or infinite ammo. They were great, when they worked. About ninety-five percent of the time you sat through the loading of your prospective game only to discover the pokes mangled a bit too much and it crashed or, even more infuriating, the game loaded fine, just as if it was running normally, which you soon realised it was. Someone, somewhere was cackling ‘Suckers’ to themselves. Oh, yes, I know their game. Bastards.
Whether the game worked or not, wasn’t the point, the fact was there were industrious folks out there breaking open the code of games, prodding around inside and making changes. Now you have guys prising up the hood of a game engine and tweaking it in different ways. They’re adding their own signature to the game, and going to great lengths to do so.
There are even those who improve games. Our old, buggy friends Bethesda have benefited greatly from those industrious little modders. These guys have swooped in and covered over the cracks in games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games after the company has left the games alone.
How great would it be to have that kind of resource on the consoles? And by that I mean the PS3, of course. If I had an XBox 360† I’d talk a lot about that too, but I don’t, so I won’t. We’ve kinda been left with still-broken forms of the above-mentioned games. Imagine if Sony allowed players to get in and faf around with the code of certain games? What wonders we could behold! A game of Fallout: New Vegas that doesn’t have a fucking seizure when you go to too many settlements. How great would that be?
Of course there would be the other side of the equation: nasty little creeps messing with the code and creating malware. As it is we already occasionally get that with the PS3, like the evening I was playing Modern Warfare 2 online and suddenly the game seemed to decide that psilocybin mushrooms would be good in an omelette. No harm was done to the system, but it did kind of break my game when I was getting millions of XP for kills. I couldn’t really look at Modern Warfare 2 in the eye again after that, like I’d seen it get into a car for money.
We’re never going to see the wonder of modded games (outside of the very limited ways some games will allow) on the PS3, but a man can speculate on the world that could be.
* Okay, I can’t help but laugh at that either. Me, sophisticated, the very idea.
** Fine, it's hyperbole for comic effect, so sue me.
† Or them thar new-fangled PS4s and XBox Ones.
Will
Showing posts with label article. Show all posts
Showing posts with label article. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Does the Future Count?
Note: This was written in and refers to 2012, so just fucking go along with it, eh?
Legacy. It’s a word, in this year of the Olympics, we here in the UK have been hit over the head with at almost every opportunity. Turn on the television and WHACK! we’re treated to a face full of legacy-mania. It really makes a guy long for the good old days of nostalgia. Where before it was, “Wasn’t it great when…” now it’s, “We need to preserve…” and, “What will this say about us…?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, apart from the vague future fatigue it brings on.
Though not enough fatigue to stop me thinking about what the current crop of games will be leaving behind for future generations. I mean, I know lots of games have opened up innovative new ways of doing things, leaps forward in graphical capability, wonderful ways of pushing systems to new heights, storytelling that’s never been seen before and interesting, compelling game mechanics. All that stuff’s a given. We’ve gone through some of the biggest changes in computer gaming in the last ten years; that means the influence of games designers and programmers will be felt for several decades to come. That’s all just dandy, but not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about the games themselves.
You’ll have got it into your head by now that I’m some sort of retro gaming nut. I’m not really. I remember some games from my youth (and a little beyond) with great fondness and would love to play them again, but it’s not a carpet love of the past. I’m not one of those weird people who loved (and still love) Manic Miner. I’d heard this game hyped for years when I was a kid. When I finally played it I wondered if the whole world of Spectrum journalists were in on a big prank at my expense. It was terrible in the way that only Spectrum games of that era could be: bright, noisy, stupid and ridiculously hard. There was one of those shaking my fist in anger at the world moments. And, almost thirty years later, who plays Manic Miner? No one, that’s who. I’d bet even the people who claim to have an almost inappropriate love for the game don’t even play it. Or they’re simply crazy people*.
There are, of course older games that I still play, but not many of them are from those far off days of the eighties. Sure, I’ll fiddle about with Chaos if I find it, but so many of the games are so bad, fair poorly against games even a decade older or are simply broken. It’s interesting to discover that when a game won’t work almost instantaneously, it’s just as frustrating as the first time you tried it and, after five minutes of squeaking and wheezing from the tape, you find yourself horrified to be stuck on the loading screen. Sometimes we grow in the wrong ways, I suppose, but I like to at least have a chance of being disappointed by a game. Ah the disappointments: games that promised to be something other than what they were (Blade Warrior by Codemasters still infuriates me to this day, there were no damned blades!) or were missing important and advertised features (like the game in which you were one of two rival wizards looking for spell ingredients without the ability to use the ingredients! now there’s game design for you**). You might offer the excuse that it was a simpler time of experimentation. I think it’s because the eighties were inherently bonkers and a tiny bit slipshod.
Some console games have fared better; Super Mario Bros is a good example, Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but they’re rarefied. They still have life because they were created as franchises that still allow life to flow into characters that would have shrivelled away to nothing (and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they worked). It’s amazing SMB survived the awful Bob Hoskins film – that’s how hardcore the franchise is. You don’t have people picking up the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game or Fester’s Quest, do you?
Of course there are loads of games from the nineties that still have followings. The Final Fantasy games from then are still well-loved and often played. I have Resident Evil sitting on my PS3 hard drive, waiting to release the power of dreadful voice acting on me in a wave of nostalgia-repulsion. I’m fairly sure there are myriad N64s, SNESes and Megadrives, held together with duct tape and Blutack, weeping to be put out of their misery and playing one more game of Star Fox, Super Street Fighter 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog. From the nineties I can feel the love.
This brings me to now, right this second†. Who will be playing the games of the moment in ten, twenty years time? Which games from now-times will people be playing?
Halo and Call of Duty will still be about, but will many people be playing Modern Warfare or Halo 3? Certainly the online play option, sitting as a sad remnant of a glorious time of shooting some stranger halfway around the world, will go unused. Or worse the mad purists who want the unfettered experience of an earlier time will haunt ancient levels murdering the final remnants of the original game’s fanbase like an online version of Highlander that will never end…‡
Games that try to force online and community play will suffer, no doubt. A prime example of this is Little Big Planet. Try playing an online cooperative game of the first one now, go on. All you’ll find are the mad and the terminally annoying. It’s a game that tells you everyone’s supposed to be working together and having fun, but that feels like someone forcing a laugh at a terrible joke made by the boss who’s one bourbon away from sacking a whole department. It’s a game that’s amusing as a platformer for while and it’s supposed to come alive when more people play. What it really makes you want to do is smash your console to bits with your own spleen because the twitchy loons who’ve hooked up with you can’t stop themselves from slapping you. Imagine what the online community’s going to be like in a few years time – a gulag in January would be more fun.
There are scores of games that will last and last thanks to the future iterations of XBox Live and Playstation Store. I’m sure as the years and generations of consoles pile up, so will the games of yesteryear, scrambling for the attention of the game-playing public, hoping beyond fevered hope they won’t get forgotten and lost in the mix. I’m sure publishers will be thinking the very same thing. Will we see a second remake of the Monkey Island games? Are they working on them right now to be encoded right into your brain in 2069? Could be, although I actually hope they’re not, it’s a creepy thought.
We’re in the middle of a golden era for computer games. It just remains to be seen which games from now will carry on into the future and whether they’ll be truly representative of the gaming times in which we live. Then again there’s always the chance tastes will take a huge leap into unexpected territory and everyone in the future will be into games all about sweeping driveways and everything from now will be abandoned, leaving future games columnists to lambast us people from the twenty-tens as a bunch of mental cases who wasted their time on games with action and story. I already hate those future people.
* Okay, I’ll admit I’ve heard of some people who play, but I can’t help thinking, “For fuck’s sake why?”
** I don’t remember the name of this game, and if someone could supply the name I’d be most appreciative.
† Or over a year ago. You know, whatever your level of pedantry.
‡ At least until the someone notices the lecky bill and pulls the plugs on the servers.
Will
Legacy. It’s a word, in this year of the Olympics, we here in the UK have been hit over the head with at almost every opportunity. Turn on the television and WHACK! we’re treated to a face full of legacy-mania. It really makes a guy long for the good old days of nostalgia. Where before it was, “Wasn’t it great when…” now it’s, “We need to preserve…” and, “What will this say about us…?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, apart from the vague future fatigue it brings on.
Though not enough fatigue to stop me thinking about what the current crop of games will be leaving behind for future generations. I mean, I know lots of games have opened up innovative new ways of doing things, leaps forward in graphical capability, wonderful ways of pushing systems to new heights, storytelling that’s never been seen before and interesting, compelling game mechanics. All that stuff’s a given. We’ve gone through some of the biggest changes in computer gaming in the last ten years; that means the influence of games designers and programmers will be felt for several decades to come. That’s all just dandy, but not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about the games themselves.
You’ll have got it into your head by now that I’m some sort of retro gaming nut. I’m not really. I remember some games from my youth (and a little beyond) with great fondness and would love to play them again, but it’s not a carpet love of the past. I’m not one of those weird people who loved (and still love) Manic Miner. I’d heard this game hyped for years when I was a kid. When I finally played it I wondered if the whole world of Spectrum journalists were in on a big prank at my expense. It was terrible in the way that only Spectrum games of that era could be: bright, noisy, stupid and ridiculously hard. There was one of those shaking my fist in anger at the world moments. And, almost thirty years later, who plays Manic Miner? No one, that’s who. I’d bet even the people who claim to have an almost inappropriate love for the game don’t even play it. Or they’re simply crazy people*.
There are, of course older games that I still play, but not many of them are from those far off days of the eighties. Sure, I’ll fiddle about with Chaos if I find it, but so many of the games are so bad, fair poorly against games even a decade older or are simply broken. It’s interesting to discover that when a game won’t work almost instantaneously, it’s just as frustrating as the first time you tried it and, after five minutes of squeaking and wheezing from the tape, you find yourself horrified to be stuck on the loading screen. Sometimes we grow in the wrong ways, I suppose, but I like to at least have a chance of being disappointed by a game. Ah the disappointments: games that promised to be something other than what they were (Blade Warrior by Codemasters still infuriates me to this day, there were no damned blades!) or were missing important and advertised features (like the game in which you were one of two rival wizards looking for spell ingredients without the ability to use the ingredients! now there’s game design for you**). You might offer the excuse that it was a simpler time of experimentation. I think it’s because the eighties were inherently bonkers and a tiny bit slipshod.
Some console games have fared better; Super Mario Bros is a good example, Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but they’re rarefied. They still have life because they were created as franchises that still allow life to flow into characters that would have shrivelled away to nothing (and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they worked). It’s amazing SMB survived the awful Bob Hoskins film – that’s how hardcore the franchise is. You don’t have people picking up the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game or Fester’s Quest, do you?
Of course there are loads of games from the nineties that still have followings. The Final Fantasy games from then are still well-loved and often played. I have Resident Evil sitting on my PS3 hard drive, waiting to release the power of dreadful voice acting on me in a wave of nostalgia-repulsion. I’m fairly sure there are myriad N64s, SNESes and Megadrives, held together with duct tape and Blutack, weeping to be put out of their misery and playing one more game of Star Fox, Super Street Fighter 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog. From the nineties I can feel the love.
This brings me to now, right this second†. Who will be playing the games of the moment in ten, twenty years time? Which games from now-times will people be playing?
Halo and Call of Duty will still be about, but will many people be playing Modern Warfare or Halo 3? Certainly the online play option, sitting as a sad remnant of a glorious time of shooting some stranger halfway around the world, will go unused. Or worse the mad purists who want the unfettered experience of an earlier time will haunt ancient levels murdering the final remnants of the original game’s fanbase like an online version of Highlander that will never end…‡
Games that try to force online and community play will suffer, no doubt. A prime example of this is Little Big Planet. Try playing an online cooperative game of the first one now, go on. All you’ll find are the mad and the terminally annoying. It’s a game that tells you everyone’s supposed to be working together and having fun, but that feels like someone forcing a laugh at a terrible joke made by the boss who’s one bourbon away from sacking a whole department. It’s a game that’s amusing as a platformer for while and it’s supposed to come alive when more people play. What it really makes you want to do is smash your console to bits with your own spleen because the twitchy loons who’ve hooked up with you can’t stop themselves from slapping you. Imagine what the online community’s going to be like in a few years time – a gulag in January would be more fun.
There are scores of games that will last and last thanks to the future iterations of XBox Live and Playstation Store. I’m sure as the years and generations of consoles pile up, so will the games of yesteryear, scrambling for the attention of the game-playing public, hoping beyond fevered hope they won’t get forgotten and lost in the mix. I’m sure publishers will be thinking the very same thing. Will we see a second remake of the Monkey Island games? Are they working on them right now to be encoded right into your brain in 2069? Could be, although I actually hope they’re not, it’s a creepy thought.
We’re in the middle of a golden era for computer games. It just remains to be seen which games from now will carry on into the future and whether they’ll be truly representative of the gaming times in which we live. Then again there’s always the chance tastes will take a huge leap into unexpected territory and everyone in the future will be into games all about sweeping driveways and everything from now will be abandoned, leaving future games columnists to lambast us people from the twenty-tens as a bunch of mental cases who wasted their time on games with action and story. I already hate those future people.
* Okay, I’ll admit I’ve heard of some people who play, but I can’t help thinking, “For fuck’s sake why?”
** I don’t remember the name of this game, and if someone could supply the name I’d be most appreciative.
† Or over a year ago. You know, whatever your level of pedantry.
‡ At least until the someone notices the lecky bill and pulls the plugs on the servers.
Will
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
The Wii U: A Step Too Far?
Note: This article was written over a year ago, just before the Wii U skulked into the marketplace. Y’know, just so you don’t think I’ve gone fucking doolally, but I think a lot of what I’m saying still stands.
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
Some Minor Points
There are loads of ways to improve our gaming experience. I’m sure there are more than a few out there who’ve happily guzzled some mind-altering drugs and freaked when they came across their first feral ghoul in Fallout 3. You’ve also got those people who like to immerse themselves in the game: from the people screaming sexist and racist insults over headsets while playing [insert FPS of your choice here] to the people who spend mortgage-sized chunks of money to bring their MechWarrior fantasies almost to sweaty life. That’s not forgetting the bunch of mates who get together, have a few drinks and gradually get more sullen with each other over Need for Speed or FIFA 2012*.
Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.
Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.
Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.
Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.
With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.
Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.
Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.
It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.
Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.
Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.
So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.
* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.
** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.
Will
Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.
Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.
Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.
Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.
With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.
Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.
Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.
It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.
Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.
Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.
So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.
* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.
** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.
Will
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
So, Your Favourite Feature's Gone...
There are some ways in which I envy developers: the money, the fame, the adulation. Mostly the money, though. However having the power to create worlds in which players can get lost for hours is a tempting prospect. Being a writer affords you a little of that, but there’s something mesmerising about how a good game can worm its way into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it at odd times*. A funeral somewhere has to have been inappropriately interrupted by some derp shouting, “Shit! That’s how you kill Crawmerax!”
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Friday, 10 January 2014
Retro Money's Still Money, Boys.
I own a
PS3. Nothing remarkable there – that’s
me and about sixty-four million other people, then. When I’m not being terrible on some online
game or another, I like to go browsing through the Playstation Store. Like most people I do a little rooting around
for new DLC and perhaps some new game that might be good to have a look
at. This can make my poor hard drive
unhappy and my struggling bank account look nervous. Seriously, my bank account is a worried
entity, constantly sweating and sending me pathetically worded letters pleading
for me to stop spending money.
Much of the
time I don’t buy anything, but come away with some ideas for games I might want
to buy in the future and be awful at.
Sometimes, though, I feel a tiny bit disappointed. I get the feeling that there are games that
should be in the Playstation Store, but don’t make an appearance for one reason
or another. Old games. Though, not that old – my first computer was
a ZX Spectrum +2 and just about any game I might want from that era is easy to
get through emulators and such. The old
games I’m talking about are ones that I played on the PS One and Saturn back in
the heady days when I wasn’t crippled by poverty.
They do
have some PS One (and PS2) games in the store and my wife was very pleased to
get a hold of Theme Hospital a while back.
She got hours of fun out of that; it was great. Something bugged me, though. I’ve got Resident Evil: The Director’s Cut,
though it seems that the Saturn version of the game has been expunged from the
history books. There were lots of titles
that maybe should have been present, but there was no sign of them. Like someone had been blindfolded, spun
around in a room full of game titles and those they stumbled on were the games
chosen for the store.
I remember
getting quite excited when I saw that Golden Axe was available for purchase and
then almost cry-vomited when I discovered it was the crummy Mega Drive
version. I wanted the arcade version I
remember sucking my ten pences up like some kind of ten pence devourer when I
was ten or eleven or twelve! What’s
wrong with that? Why can’t we get
similar stuff to what’s on XBox Live Arcade, I cried through the few, errant,
chunks of eye-corn. I haven’t bought Golden
Axe, but I still felt cheated. How dare
they stop me in the desperate and intricate attempt to recreate my
childhood? No, I’m not going to buy an
XBox for that one thing, didn’t you read the first paragraph – I’m poor; it’s a
fucking miracle I have a PS3.
There’s no
R-Type, either. A game I possessed on
the Spectrum and then, some years later, when I had a PS One for a short
time. I’m not very good at it, but it’s
a fun little shooter and can whittle a few minutes of boredom. And it’s not an unpopular game. There are screeds of fond gamer memories
about the little blue starfighter that could.
Yet it’s not there. Sure, there
could be rights problems, but given the money Sony could make by making the game
available that’s something that could be recouped.
Then
there’s the little game, Dark Cloud, that I spent too many hours playing in
even more recent times. I don’t think it
would kill them to give this an airing on Playstation Store. If only just to salve my hurting nostalgia
bone.
A game that
might be less likely to turn up is Exhumed, an FPS in which you’re pitted
against aliens that formed the basis of ancient Egyptian mythology. There was a PS One version of this and I’m
sure it would be seen as a retro treat.
Though, I have to admit, I had the Saturn version of the game that was
considered far superior. What do you
reckon the chances are of that one appearing on Sony’s shop front? A clue: non-existent. That’s one I imagine trying to overcome
licensing wrangles wouldn’t be worth the effort. It’s nice to dream though.
And, really
that’s all this is, in the end, dream upon dream. There is money to be made in dusting down
these retro gems and many more on top of that, but it’s whether Sony, or anyone
else thinks the reward is enough that will determine if they are unearthed
again.
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