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

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.

Will

Riffling some brain folds.

On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films.  I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero.  You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.

I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here.  In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it.  If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.

When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day.  The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying.  When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer^* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax.  I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.

Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years.  There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question.  Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering.  I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.

Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed!  The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog.  Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way.  The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him.  Hacking the school's computer.  He commits several kinds of fraud^** including impersonating a police officer.  Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories.  And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this.  Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron^†.

My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film!  How can this be?  My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it.  He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world.  I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters.  You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.

As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend.  It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma.  For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.

In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding.  I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel.  I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science^‡.  I've even gone in a similar direction.

For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later.  He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane.  He's got a good life.

One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat.  Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life.  Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor.  Tom says she reminded him of his mother.

Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs.  Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future.  Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.

There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character.  I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?

^* Bonus!  Played by Charlie Sheen!

^** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.

^† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.

^‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.


Will

Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.

Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.

I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry.  Let's throw that one out there.  I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot.  As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.

What I do have is a long history with computer games.  I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted^*.  I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer.  Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play ^**.

Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time.  Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other.  It was a golden, very pale time.

The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC.  All dependent on money and my interest.  Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life.  At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend.  Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!

My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games.  After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.

It happens.  Although I've felt it more with modern games.  Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in.  These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off."  These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game.  And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).

I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three.  It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure.  This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years.  And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game.  Pretty cool.

And I want in on that, man.

Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game.  A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game.  One can always hope, though.

^* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers.  Screw that shit.  The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.

^** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was.  Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded.  And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too.  I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised".  Gaaaah!



Will