Blog Posts from "NESwarrior's blog"

The Shadow of Yserbius and Me: A look at one of the first MMORPGs

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:36:28 -0400

Hey G1s! Today I'm going to take a quick, nostalgic look at The Shadow of Yserbius, one of the very first graphical MMORPGs (along with the original AOL-sponsored Neverwinter Nights). Back in 1991 or 1992, I was an adventure game junkie, absorbing the Sierra and LucasArts classics as soon as I could afford to buy them. While I still played my NES and would soon get a Genesis, whenever I was at my Dad's house (on weekends), I would engross myself in those adventure games like Quest for Glory, Monkey Island, etc. My Dad and I were really into building our own computers back then, and we were among the first people I knew who had a modem and were dialing into the net, even if it was mostly all-text BBS forums back then. But then something came along that combined those two worlds, adventure games and early dial-up: Sierra On-Line's ImagiNation Network. This was a very basic (but advanced for the time) point-and-click interfaced meeting place for people interested in all sorts of activities. There was a Leisure Suit Larry-themed casino, a Red Baron-themed game (didn't play it), a kid's area, just tons of stuff. But the big draw to me and thousands of others was The Shadow of Yserbius, a role-playing game they developed. It really was massively multi-player, although "massively" is pretty relative. I don't remember seeing more than a few dozen players on at the same time. Here is how it worked: when you ran the INN program, it brought up the main dialing screen - you paid by the minute back then - after which you saw this map of the INN world... and in the background, at the very back of the world, was a shadowy volcano, spewing dark smoke. Clicking on that volcano brought you to a dark, atmospheric screen full of purples and oranges and shadows... Extremely enticing. So I clicked on that volcano, and created an avatar (I was a Human Knight, I believe) and ventured into the volcano. Now, I was too young to understand or be interested in guilds, so I didn't have anyone to automatically pal up with. Instead, I had to just type away in the general lobby until someone agreed to journey with me. When you entered the main part of the volcano, you generally partied up with your friends or acquaintances and ventured forth into the bowels of the volcano. I remember the game had a really rich atmosphere complete with a great plot. I'm only hazy on the details all these years later, but I remember an elemental named En-Li-Kil, and an evil wizard trying to tame it, and a dead king... a lot of things. And I remember a lot of the items, like the Harvest Horn (needed to enter someplace or other) or the weird metal you needed to create the much-ballyhooed Flex Sword. Etc. The game had one absolutely devastating spell - Death Darts - which attacked all enemies for huge damage. With multiple wizards casting Death Darts, a couple tanks, and someone who could cast Resurrect if someone went down, a party could go a long, long way. I remember begging people to help me on quests that were simply impossible to do alone, the difficulty ramped up too quickly. The game had a fantastic visual look. Back in 1992 it looked damn good. In addition it had great sound effects and music. Being so old, you couldn't hear any voices of your fellow gamers like you can now, but that never even occurred to me then. Some problems: dial-up connections were tenuous - maybe some of you remember, but if someone called you the connection died and you had to log back in once the call was over. Even worse was when I had made it deep into the volcano with the help of advanced high-level friends... and THEY would get booted off. I was a goner. There was no way to continue, I would get slain the first battle I encountered; the only options were to exit back to the beginning or wait and hope that your friends could make it back to you in a timely manner. Another problem: the age demographics were heavily toward people in middle age. Not many people wanted to play with someone in their early teens. I had little in common with anyone there, so couldn't contribute much to conversations... and was left out (or booted) from many parties because of it. This also affected joining guilds. Lastly: the difficulty level was very high. The game was meant to be played with as large a group as possible, and solo playing - even with a fantastically powerful character - was extremely difficult, perhaps impossible. Once you were paralyzed and poisoned, you were virtually done. I actually bought the standalone version of the game a year or two later, having enjoyed it so much (by that time, INN had collapsed, been sold and never brought back by Sprint or AT&T, whoever had bought it)...and found it nearly unplayable. With a solo character, it's nearly endless level grinding to be able to compete with the nastiest creatures. But the game really changed my gaming perspective. It showed me that there were a LOT of gamers out there willing to play thoughtful games with me. It showed me there were a lot of gamers out there, period! And it was the first game I ever played that had people from across the country playing together ... which was a momentous occasion back then. It was mind-boggling to see all the places listed when someone asked "where is everyone from?" ... really amazing. My dad was as amazed as I was, which is why he put up with the monthly charges for so long, as well as the loss of his son for long hours in the night. I've heard that the game has been brought back in a limited way, but I'm not sure if it's still working, if anyone is still playing. It's a game that would do well on XBOX Live or whatnot, now that modern networking has been ironed out. It would suck down a LOT of hours, guaranteed. It's too bad Sierra never made INN more successful, it was great while it lasted! And now Sierra is dead and gone - what empty shell of a company that now calls itself Sierra is a travesty, a zombie masquerading as the original company, an abomination to the name of good gaming. So that's The Shadow of Yserbius! There was at least one sequel, The Fates of Twinion, but I never played that one. If anyone knows if the original is back up and running and people are actually playing it regularly, PLEASE let me know - I'd love to play it again for a month or two, work through that great story. But the likelihood is that Yserbius is a ghost, one of the first RPGs to realize that the more the merrier. Anyone who is curious should check it out - it's worth a glance or two.

NES Replay: Final Fantasy (An analysis of the RPG genre)

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:00:52 -0400

Hey G1s! My primary gaming system these days is the NES; I don't have any of the current-generation systems (used to have a Wii), and my PS2 is collecting dust in a box in my mom's basement. I have some computer games to eventually get through, but right now I'm working on going through NES games that I never had a chance to the first time around. Mostly I'm playing through games that I simply couldn't find or afford when I was younger, but that are both affordable and easily found now. Lately, I've been replaying through the original Final Fantasy, which I own along with all the original maps, manuals, everything but the box. I purchased it on eBay for pretty cheap ($10? 15? No more than that) and just started playing it about two weeks ago. I did a little research first to find out the best starting party, etc., but otherwise have been flying blind so to speak. It's interesting to replay a game from ~20 years ago and discover that it is every bit as good as today's games. It doesn't just "hold up," it competes favorably against today's RPGs. In short, it reminded me that game success doesn't necessarily increase with each subsequent gaming generation or advance in hardware. All the ingredients of a successful RPG are present: large game world, several classes of characters to choose from and develop, many unique items to unearth and wield, memorable boss fights, NPCs you become curiously attached to, fun and varied quests, varying modes of transport, etc. etc. etc. Perhaps most importantly, it has an easy, fluid gameflow. The game is simply easy to play, easy to get into. I'd like to expound on those elements for a minute. First, the large in-game world. The first game I remember with a truly large game world was The Legend of Zelda, which I tried to play recently but discovered, to my dismay, the game's battery had died, meaning I had to complete it in one sitting - which I just didn't have time to do. My favorite game world from the NES was Crystalis (my favorite NES game, actually), which had a really huge and varied game world. Caves of differing textures, ocean, mountain, fire, ice, swamp, grassland, castles, towns, you name it - everything was present, everything was memorable, everything was different and affected the play, and it all worked perfectly. Another game I remember having a truly immense world was Ultima VI, which I had a ton of fun exploring in great depth. Neverwinter Nights ... The Shadow of Yserbius ... Wizardy 7 and 8 ... and of course, Final Fantasy. That's not to say that a large map with tons of different spaces to explore is mandatory - tons of classic games were pure dungeon crawls - but I think it does help involve the imagination, and probably aids game design too, but allowing more kinds of creatures, graphics, etc. The second item I thought about was the ability to choose your character and develop them. Those are two separate but important elements, I think: there are games where you can't choose what kind of character you are, or who you travel with, but can still develop your character uniquely, and I think that is just as important. Using my previous examples: in the Legend of Zelda you can't help that you're Link, but you can develop Link (upgrading his weapons and health); in Crystalis you don't have control over who you play, but you can select his weaponry, magic, and increase his life and magic by leveling up; in Ultima 6, you have some limited ability to change your main character, but have a set cast of characters in your party, and can improve everyone as the game continues; in Wizardry 8 you can select every element of your character, and that of your party; in Final Fantasy you select everything about all four people in your initial party, and also upgrade their gear as the game progresses. So there is a trend here: successful RPGs allow your alter-ego to grow as the game goes on. Another is the presence of unusual items to discover and use. The most obvious example of this is probably Diablo, which is the action RPG that is simply chock full of weapons of all kinds. Sets, rares, uniques, etc. This adds the dimensions of luck, discovery, and perfectionism to the mix. In Final Fantasy, unfortunately, all the weapons that are supposed to be useful against specific creatures (coral sword against water creatures, were sword against were creatures, and so on) are bugged and don't work; so this sort of backfires, and leaves the player searching for weapons that simply has the most damage. But in general, the idea holds: in games where progress is often defined by killing or defeating enemies, having better equipment is vitally important. And if a game can imbue the weapons with the aura of being rare, or somehow insert them into the gamer's imagination, so much the better. The game world becomes richer, more fun to access, more fun to experience, more fun to explore. Next up: memorable boss fights. This is pretty self-explanatory, and I won't waste a lot of time on it. If you have memorable adversaries, the entire adventure becomes memorable. Case in point: Shadow of the Colossus. That game was memorable in large part because of the incredible bosses. While I'm not sure it classifies, technically, as an RPG (which would be an interesting sub-article on its own) it has a lot of the other elements I mentioned. Colorful NPCs can really enrich a game world also. Final Fantasy has a few (Dr. Unne!), even Zelda did, in a roundabout way, with its Engrish-influenced "Dodongo is afraid of smoke" or however that goes. I remember the talking rabbit in Crystalis (Deo?) and the dolphin, vividly, along with the sleeping guy in the windmill, or any number of NPCs. Ultima 6 had an incredibly rich universe, where a lot of the NPCs really seemed alive and capable of independent thought; excellently written. Wizardry 8 had the same phenomenon, as did Neverwinter Nights. Smart games have smart characters. Memorable games have memorable characters. RPGs, maybe more than any other genre, are dependent of conversation with the world around your alter-ego, dependent on talking to gain information and make progress through the story. RPGs are notoriously talky and text-heavy... and so the better the text is, coming from the mouths of the characters, the better the game. Then, of course, are the quests - both main and side varieties. Since RPGs are plot-driven, the plots better be damned good. It helps if all the little things you do along the way are interesting as well. But it's interesting to note that games with good enough mechanics can get by with little or no plots at all. Zelda on the NES has a vague and frankly uninteresting plot, but the gameplay is so good that it doesn't really matter. Crystalis has a plot that pretends to slowly unfold, but it really doesn't make sense until the final moments. Final Fantasy has a plot but its poorly communicated to the player. In those above games, its the side quests that take over. In Crystalis, its the progression of small quests that advance the larger narrative forward. In Final Fantasy, it's largely the same. On the PC, Ultima 6 was a perfect example (as was Wizardry 7 and of small quests, each fascinating, that slowly built up the main quest. Shadow of the Colossus - if it's an RPG - is a strange anomaly in that the side quests ARE the main quest. Lastly, skipping modes of transport, the gameflow itself. The game has to be easy to play; even if there are a million spells and menus and options, it has to be easy to play. Games that are difficult to play remove the player from the equation, creating distance. Games that are simple do the opposite - draw you in, allow you to immerse yourself in the other things the game has to offer. I know this is very self-explanatory, but I don't think developers pay enough attention to it. Final Fantasy only has a handful of menus and can be very easily navigated with a controller that only has four buttons and a directional pad. It also has the very smart option to make the text scroll faster if the player happens to be able to read very fast - a subtle but important detail that makes navigating the game that much better. Every game I mentioned earlier is easy to play in a fundamental way, whether it's a simple mechanic of exploring (Zelda, Crystalis) or a game with complex stats that are easily managed (Wizardy, Neverwinter Nights) or whatever. A great example of this are the Elder Scrolls games, especially Morrowind and Oblivion. They have complicated game mechanics made easy by a great interface, making a potentially overwhelming game experience easy to pick up, and essentially fun. So Final Fantasy led to all these thoughts; it wasn't the first to do anything it does, and it is derivative of many or most RPGs that came before it, but it puts all the pieces together in an attractive package - it does everything right. It gets the player involved, it rewards exploring, it has all the little things right. It's a model RPG - a standard-bearer to hold up other games against; it's certainly not the only RPG yardstick, but it is a good one. So hopefully you weren't bored by all the facets of the genre that I found thought-provoking! Final Fantasy on the NES is worth a close look - and, of course, has earned quite a few over the years - and sheds light on the gears that move the whole Role Playing Game genre, the architecture of why things succeed, and perhaps why they don't. Perhaps soon I'll do a piece on RPGs that DON'T work... but for now, I'm done. Thanks for reading!

Scared of the Dark: A Review of Dark Fall (PC)

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:39:32 -0400

Hey G1s! I'm home on a lazy Saturday, and am spending my time catching up on my blog here at ScrewAttack! Earlier this morning I blogged about the wild rumors that flew around the first release of Mortal Kombat. Now I'm going to discuss what might be the scariest game I've ever played: Dark Fall, for the PC. Dark Fall is a PC classic and has a sizable cult following, even though it's only a few years old now, and is terribly frightening on several levels. I bought it based on a terrific review I read on an adventure gaming website, and it was cheap, only about $20, and promised to be good. It is a first-person adventure game where you are searching for what happened to your brother, who disappeared in a small town located on a disused train station. In fact, there is NO ONE around anymore, including the students who had recently come to study paranormal events at the hotel at the station. So all the town residents are missing. The lights are barely on (in fact, you start in the dark and have to turn on the lights as one of your first tasks), the locations are empty except for the remains of the prior occupants, and you have a mystery to solve. Well, this is one of those games that is 100% atmosphere, like Silent Hill... Dark Fall takes place mainly in the hotel that is built on the train tracks in this small British seaside town, as you walk around listening to strange noises. Sometimes the noises are your own footsteps, but too often they're not. Shadows flicker or move at the end of a hall, accompanied by a horrible whispering. You hear water running somewhere, although no one is around. The phone rings at one point. You hear the sound of a pen scribbling on paper. The soundtrack, in short, is simply fantastic. It works on you psychologically and is VERY, VERY effective. Everything you hear is unsettling. The graphics also play a huge part. Everything you encounter is dark, shadowed, old-fashioned. You wander in abandoned hotel rooms, some are completely torn apart, others are eerily ordered and well-kept. You wander through an abandoned kitchen and dining room. An abandoned platform. A dark tree-lined yard in the middle of the night. An old, old basement, lined only with bricks from the Roman era. An attic with a ouija board. Etc. The locations, each one of them, is frightening in a unique way. The first-person viewpoint cements the "you are there" feel. The mystery itself unfolds slowly. You have to take a LOT of notes if you want to finish the story. I played through a quarter of the game before realizing I was hopelessly lost. I recruited my wife, who sat with me and was at least as scared as I was, and who loyally took tons of notes and ultimately helped me immensely. We beat the game over the course of about three or four nights... bad idea. Don't play at night. The conclusion of the game is also quite unsettling. After you have all the clues/answers you need, you have a final encounter... but the game never tells you exactly what it is that you are up against, even after it's over. Just as in real life, all you know is that it is responsible for many bad things, would like to be responsible for many more, but you never know where it comes from, what it is, or why it's doing what it does. It's an enigma. This is probably off-putting to a lot of gamers, who want everything explained... but it's much more realistic, and ultimately quite disturbing. I would liken it to the end of The Blair Witch Project. You don't know what is going on, or why, but you have a vague idea ... which is perhaps worse than knowing the details. Dark Fall is a game that is best played with one or two other people, I think. Given the note taking, it would be better to have multiple memories to rely on, and one or even two devoted note takers. One person would be a little overwhelmed... perhaps as they really would, were these events actually happening. It's a game I highly, highly recommend. Among horror games for the PC, it is among the very best. It enforces a sense of total isolation... and then slowly lets you know that perhaps you're not alone, but that you wish to hell you were. Using sound, graphics, and a great story it creates one of the best atmospheres I've ever encountered in a game. There is a direct sequel, Dark Fall 2, that I own but haven't played yet - it takes place in a lighthouse - and the creator of Dark Fall recently released another game, The Lost Crown, which is getting fantastic reviews. So, if you like scary games a la Silent Hill - atmosphere over action - and you like PC games, this is a must try. It still sells for pretty cheap, and has VERY nondemanding computer requirements. Highly advised!

Ancient Rumors from Times Long Gone: Mortal Kombat and Me

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:51:35 -0400

Hey G1s! In my last blog, I talked about how obsessed I was with MK and MKII on the Sega Genesis. I remember literally making notes on how to convince my mom to let me get them, since they were notorious for the blood, the gore, the fatalities, the very high level of violence, etc. All things my mother detested. But what I really want to share today are my very first encounters with Mortal Kombat - both of which are burned in my mind. The first involves the burning rumors about "Immortal Kombat" that spread through my middle school; the second involves my actual first encounter with the arcade machine, and the classic memories that surround that. I was about 12 or 13 (in 1992, 1993) when MK first hit the arcades. Or at least, that's when I first heard of it. In my 8th grade math class I had a friend named Hieu who came in one day bursting at the seams. Everyone said "Hieu, what's up?" and he proceeded to tell us an incredible tale... he had gone to see his cousin that weekend down in Virginia (or up in Pennsylvania ... I can't remember which anymore), and they had gone to an arcade together. That's where his cousin had shown him this wild new game ... "Immortal Kombat." That's how he remembered it, and he described it this way: "It's amazing, just amazing. There are all these gods, like the god of lightning, and the god of ice, and the god of fire, and the god of robots, tons of them. And they all fight, and there is tons of blood, and at the end of the fight you can KILL the other guy. Like, really freaking kill them! Like, pull their head off with the spine attached. Yes, I'm serious. Yes! Yes!! I'm serious, guys. You can totally pull their head off!!!!!" Needless to say, among all the video-game playing males in John T. Baker Middle School, the rumor spread like wildfire. We were all buzzing about Immortal Kombat. Inaccuracies aside (I wonder what he thought Johnny Cage was... God of Movies? And Sonya??), everyone started hearing rumors from their half-brother in New York, or their cousin in Seattle, etc., about Mortal Kombat. Then... it arrived in our area. A kid I knew named Ryan, the younger brother of a girl my age, had his birthday party at a local pizza parlor. In the small accompanying arcade, Ryan reported, they had a brand new, shiny Mortal Kombat arcade machine. And he played it. Nobody knew any moves or fatalities back then, fighting games were more or less still in their infancy, so it was amazing when he told us that "The Scorpion" had a "lasso" and screamed "YOU GET OVER HERE, NOW!" when he used it. Again, misinformation abounds. The other move he and his friends were able to figure out was Kano's 360 degree ball move, and they were able to win a few games against the computer using that and sweeps. Only they thought Kano was "the Terminator, with his eye all exposed and everything, and they gave him a new name because he has to protect his true identity, and he's in the tournament to kill John Conner, and he can shoot lasers from his eye now, and he's like a thousand times more deadly because he was programmed with new martial arts, and he can spin into a ball, and I think Johnny Cage is John Conner hiding behind a new name and the Terminator is going to win this time." I'm not kidding! That was an actual rumor going around, and a popular one, too. Of course, now we know that Kano WAS based on the Terminator with the eye exposed, so I guess their inspiration was apparent. Two more funny rumors about Mortal Kombat that came out a couple months later, as a lot more kids visited that pizza parlor and started learning moves and, eventually, fatalities: "So this guy Raiden, he's Japanese, and Liu Kang is Chinese, and they hate each other and if you play one against the other then Liu Kang turns into a dragon and tries to eat the lightning guy only he's electric and so the dragon explodes." and "Scorpion is really a zombie, and if you do his fatality he takes off his human mask and shows his zombie face and then he shoots zombie fire from his mouth and converts the loser into a skeleton slave, and if you know the right code I heard you can make the skeleton slave fight for you!!" Both of those two rumors lasted at least a month or two. To most of us, who had never played the game, we were awestruck and believed anything we heard. Then, I actually encountered the game... So here is the second part of my tale, when I finally get to play Mortal Kombat myself. My dad works at a local university, and they have a game room with a lot of pool tables, ping pong, and arcade machines. That game room was also the first place I played NBA Jam and Samurai Shodown. But I would always escape there the first chance I got, to watch the older college kids spend their laundry money on the games. I usually had about $1 to spend, which was four plays on most machines. One weekend I run down to the game room and lo and behold, Mortal Kombat has arrived. And the college kids are lined up ten deep behind it, calling their turns and watching the various battles. One kid is already really good and beating most challengers, usually as Sub-Zero or as Raiden. Another kid was really, really good as Sonya, and would knock everyone out of the air with her square jump attack thing, and use that spider leg grab when they least expected it - he was very tricky. Most kids (including me) only knew a couple moves and generally played as Scorpion or Liu Kang or Kano, who were seen as the coolest characters. When it was my turn to play, the really good guy had just been beat (luckily) so I was up against the guy who had beat him. This was a college nerd, probably an engineering or comp sci major, and about ten years older than I was. Still, I knew a few moves from magazines that had been published and my friends who had invested a lot of time and money at the pizza parlor. So I picked Liu Kang and went to work. I used fireballs to keep the guy at bay, used the flying kicks to surprise him, and tried a lot of sweeps and random uppercuts. No luck - he picked Johnny Cage and although I won the first round, he won the next two. I was out. I spend the rest of my dollar fighting the really good guy, who quickly assumed his dominant position. He also used the first fatality I'd ever seen - Kano's heart rip. He also taught me how to do Kano's knife throw and Raiden's teleport. I was impressed, and stayed in the arcade far longer than I was supposed to, my dad had to come claim me, and was a little pissed... even though he was surprised at the sheer number of kids gathered around the MK machine. After that, MK machines popped up pretty much everywhere, most of the rumors disappeared, and life went on as normal. When MKII came out in the arcades there was very little notice given - the first game had sort of used up that shock value, and people by then were more or less obsessed with Street Fighter II. It was at that point that I think the MK series more/less transferred most of its fan base to the home consoles. So there you go - ancient rumors from times long gone. Mortal Kombat, with its gore and new features, caused a LOT of wild speculation, much of it completely hilarious. And then when I actually encountered it, it had a tremendous grip on every arcade it was placed in, memorizing college students everywhere. Thanks for reading! Next up ... a review of the PC game Dark Fall, and the extreme terror it induced!

Gaming Now and Then: SNES versus Genesis - my memories

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:06:35 -0400

Hey G1s! Tonight I'm going to take a trip back in time 17 years, and hopefully bring you with me. The scene: Toys R Us. The time: January, 1992. The cast: Myself, my father. By early 1992, I'd had my NES for about five solid years and played the hell out of it. I was beginning to get lots of problems, especially a recurring problem where green and gray screens would flash rapidly no matter how much I blew on the cartridge (I know, I know, never do that) or wiggled it or cleaned it (my dad just sprayed Formula 409 on the pins and it would work almost every time). So I begged and pleaded and begged some more for one of the new 16-bit systems that all my friends were getting... and for Christmas, I got an IOU for one!! I had a friend who received a Genesis almost as soon as they came out in the US, back in 1989 or so. He was the envy of everyone, and we were just blown away / enchanted by the new graphics. I don't think people these days realize what a monstrous impact minor improvements in graphics had back then. From NES to SNES was like going from a biplane to a turbo jet. The same with PC: from EGA to VGA was like driving a Mazda Protege and then driving a Porsche 911. Those increases in colors and palettes and sprites and who knows what else was absolutely huge back then, maximal impact. But although that friend had a Genesis, and I'd played it and had fallen in love with The Black Beast in all its sleek, glossy sexiness, I was also something of a Nintendo geek and had faithfully nursed my NES through those final months, and was very attached to it. So I had a big decision to make. So there I am, in Toys R Us on a cold January Saturday morning with my dad, trying to decide between the Genesis (which came in a giant box) and the Super Nintendo (which came in a smaller, more modest box). Essentially I had to choose between the known and the unknown. Compounding the problem was the reputation the two systems had - the Genesis was known for fast-paced, pulse-pounding action games, and especially known for its sports titles. In 1992 I was really heavy into sports, and was playing three different sports and talking about them all the time with family and friends, collecting cards, you name it. My choice? The Sega Genesis. It had boxing, baseball (including my pick for the best baseball game of the 16-bit generation, SportsTalk Baseball, which I'll get into a bit later), football (Madden! Montana! which was better? I still maintain Joe Montana '93 was the best 16-bit football game, even though the Madden franchise is now an unstoppable, if boring, juggernaut), shooters, you name it. Plus, my sister loved the fast-paced glitz of Sonic the Hedgehog. The Altered Beast scandal was long over (thank god), and Sonic was cute and non-threatening and easily digested by my violence-worried parents. Looking back, I really regret my choice. I was twelve in 1992, and along with sports I was also really engaging my imagination for the first time, especially through sci-fi and fantasy books (Eddings, Brooks, Anthony, Asimov, etc.). And frankly, the SNES had better titles for thinking gamers. It was much closer to the PC that way; and, ultimately, I got my thoughtful-gaming fix from adventure games on the PC at the time (discussed in previous blogs). So I used the Genesis to satisfy my action fix... and for that, it was perfect. I had all the classics: NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Sonic 1-3, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Golden Axe, etc. I rented or borrowed most others. But I never played the RPGs I longed for: Shining Force I and II, Phantasy Star, etc. And I regret that too. Now, all these years later, I'm really pissed that I missed the 16-bit Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Link to the Past, Castlevania IV, etc. Argh!!! All those classics... maybe it's a case of "the grass is greener," but I think I missed out on the best of those years. But going back: the Genesis really cleaned up among me and all my friends due to the amazing sports lineup. Among football fans, there were only two real options: Madden or Montana. You were either one or the other, and nobody I knew owned both. I had Montana '92 and '93, and I think '93 was the best of the bunch. It had a slew of useful and well-presented camera angles, all the stars you knew and loved, deep playbooks, great gameplay, colorful graphics, decent commentary for the era, it had it all. I had more fun with that game than any other excepting possibly Mortal Kombat 2. I remember that I played it so much, for so many hours, I discovered that there were, in fact, some unstoppable plays. With the Eagles, for example, there was a play where Fred Barnett would go up ten or eleven yards and then cut directly across the middle of the field. If you timed the pass the same way every time, and passed just as he made his cut, the play was impossible to stop. It was, essentially, an automatic first down. And in one version of the Montana series I discovered the 16-bit version of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl ... Andre Reed, the receiver for the Buffalo Bills. He could literally ring the field over and over and over until time expired, while the ENTIRE ELEVEN MAN DEFENSE would chase him around. So, unfortunately, as soon as the player who had the Bills got the ball and successfully completed a pass to the always-wide-open streaking Andre Reed, the quarter was over. He could loop the field, and usually even outrun and outfox a human player. ARGH!! And then there was SportsTalk Baseball, probably also around 1992/1992. I was/am an Oakland A's fan (although this has been significantly tarnished by all the steroids revelations, especially since Canseco - the epicenter of the steroids - was their biggest guy back then), and I can recite from memory, to this day, the SportsTalk Baseball roster for the A's (Henderson, Blankenship, Canseco, McGwire, Steinbach, Weiss, Lansford, Baines, Bordick, Welch, Stewert, Honeycutt, Eckersley, Moore, Slusarski). And back then, live in-game commentary was brand spanking new. In fact, I think that game might have been the very first to feature it. I also learned how to crash the game: there was a button on defense to move your infiend in, out, or leave it normal. You can press the button MUCH faster than the commentator could say "Infield IN! Infield OUT! Infield NORMAL!" and so if you pressed it enough, the game would run out of memory trying to queue up all the talking, and the game would just glitch out and die. And, of course, there was Mortal Kombat 2. I played that game for endless hours, could beat it with every character, could beat all of my friends hands down, and even as recently as last year was able to pick it up cold and beat a friend who still had a working Genesis. I'll leave the Mortal Kombat series for another blog, but suffice to say it was the last major title for the Genesis for me. Eventually a lot of my friends either switched to the SNES (I got to play, with extreme jealousy, Mario Kart, Star Fox, and the first stage from Super Mario World about a hundred times) or stopped playing games altogether. I did too. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was done with consoles until the PS2, and switched my allegiances full-time to the PC. I can't help but wonder: what if, standing in that Toys R Us gaming aisle, I had chosen the SNES box? Would I have played all the games I drooled over (Super Star Wars, for example)? Or would they have been like Shining Force, and I would have never even known they existed as I went for all the high-octane titles? One of these days, I resolve, I'll pick up a SNES after all these years and get to work. I'll pick up all the major titles and dig in. Right now my main gaming system is my NES, and I'm starting in on another classic I wanted badly but couldn't get at the time - Final Fantasy. The moral of my story? I'm not sure. But maybe it's that if you wait long enough, new opportunities arise for the past to be recaptured, if only just a little. You can take those old memories, wipe them off, polish them off, and even build on them a little bit. So that's my tale of the 16-bit era as I experienced it. For better or ill, I chose the Genesis over the SNES, a decision that has colored future decisions: I deliberately chose the Wii because it seemed to have more offbeat titles (as the SNES), rather than the XBox360, which seemed largely action-based (even though I know that's a gross simplification). Stay tuned for more memories and commentary, and thanks for reading!

Return of NESwarrior

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:44:07 -0400

Hello G1s... it's been a long time since I wrote anything of substance here. Lately I've gone through some major life changes, including moving from Maryland into DC - which is going from gaming central to a gaming vacuum. Maryland was chock full of gaming stores, and many times I would go to Target or WalMart or BestBuy and find lines of people waiting to buy a new game or console. The Wii is still impossible to find there (or was last time someone I knew was looking). DC, by comparison, is barren. I've yet to see any store here that specializes in games/consoles/electronics/etc. There's a Best Buy in Columbia Heights that probably sells the usual stuff, but the few times I've been through the selection was poor and the section was poorly attended. On top of that, the only evidence of gaming life I've seen has been commuters on the metro using the DS - and they're all coming in from Maryland. On top of that I have a crap new job. Before I was working two little jobs that were very fulfilling in every way but the paycheck. Now everything has reversed: I hate the job, but I can make ends meet. And there have been tons more big personal things going on preventing me from posting here. In fact, some days I wasn't even able to check ScrewAttack at all. Although I have to thank the crew for keeping me half-sane at work, since SideScrollers and Hard News and all the other features allow me to blow off some steam at what is otherwise an unfulfilling job, and keep me interested. All that said, I feel like I'm way, way out of touch with gaming these days. All my reference points are way in the past. As most of my previous blogs indicate, my main area of expertise is early PC gaming and then the NES. I had a Wii up until I moved (long story) and loved it, but hardly found the time to play it since this summer. I can't afford another system (especially the bloated price of the PS3, which I find the most intriguing), even the $200 base model 360. Continuing that logic, I can't afford any of the new games for the PC and I doubt they'd run on my year-old HP laptop anyway. I have trouble running Half-Life 2 on anything more than the basic settings. However, I do have my NES hooked up and have been messing with that. Lately I've been playing Master Blaster (great!), Legend of Zelda (much better than I remembered!!), Ultima III (extremely time consuming and difficult, but a good adaption of the PC version), Super Mario Bros. (it's easy to see why this game continues to captivate people), and most recently Scheherazade (which is vastly underrated and unappreciated - a forgotten classic). But of course, I think the number of people who still have an NES actively hooked up AND use it for their main source of gaming pleasure are very few. Most people have one for occasional nostalgia and nothing more. Perhaps they run through a game the AVGN reviews out of curiosity... but I'm essentially living in 1990, as far as gaming goes. And I love it!! So today I decided - I vowed - to return to ScrewAttack as a regularly blogging member again. Great! I remain a little discouraged by the entire blogging system here, but I think it's improving, and no system is perfect anyway. I think that the Top g1 Posts list needs to expand to ten entries. Five is simply MUCH too small, especially for people who can only find the time to thoroughly check the site once in a while. Even if I'm able to check the site at night, I've often already missed a ton of posts from the night before, the morning and the afternoon. I also think there needs to be a lot more organization among the blogs. As it is, it's just a ton of people all shouting together, trying to be heard. It would make sense to try and organize the blogs in the same way the forums are organized: sort them, categorize them, date them, anything. Etc. Most of my other complains have been repeated endlessly by other people, and don't bear repeating. So, back to my specialty: rethinking the games of yore, with attention to how they bear on the games of today and how they've affected me and others. In others, as William Faulkner famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Today: The Legend of Zelda for the NES - a game that launched a thousand imitators, an entire franchise, and that lives on in the fond memories of hordes of NES players. I bought a gold cartridge Zelda on the net a year or so ago... and recently discovered, to my dismay, that the battery inside is dead (if anyone knows how to replace that, please PM me!!), meaning if I ever want to beat it I have to try and do it in one go - no easy task. When I recently plugged it in and powered it up, the opening music instantly reminded me of when I was eight or nine and first playing it. The theme - justly famous - is just perfectly written and exactly right for the atmosphere. I created my save file and started up. ZAM! I was right back as a kid again, exploring Hyrule vicariously through link. Some thoughts: first, that game model was hugely influential. The entire world, more or less, is available to you from the very beginning. The enemy types are interesting, sometimes alarming, and vary by terrain. Things just look foreign and fascinating. It encourages exploration. The dungeon entrances are actually fairly scary. The dungeon music - in fact, all the sound effects and various themes - are spot-on. In other words, it has a great feel; no wonder it was copied endlessly. Second: it really is a crude type of RPG. You "level up" in the most rudimentary sense, but you definitely have hit points and the chance for constant improvement, better weapons, etc. It's an RPG in the same way that Crystalis is, and in some ways I think Crystalis (my favorite NES game) is the direct spiritual sequel to The Legend of Zelda. I've read and heard a lot of arguments that Zelda isn't an RPG but a standard action-adventure, etc. ... but I don't think so. To me, at least, standard action games are much more linear, have a replace-weapon-with-better-weapon tree rather than explore-and-find-as-you-feel-like-it, and put much less emphasis on character development. Third: the original Zelda really brings home the point that the game makes the console, not the other way around. With all the talk I've heard about specs, potential, capability, etc. ... I'm unconvinced. The NES was pretty unpretentious even in its own time, and yet if the game is good enough, it compels you to play even in the face of inferior hardware. This sort of goes against what I said earlier, that I'm intrigued by the PS3 (because of the immense graphical potential, among other things) ... but the fact remains. The Legend of Zelda is graphically very basic. Rudimentary, even. And yet it is COMPLETELY captivating, assuming you allow it to be and don't approach it with a jaundiced eye. So it's easy to see what made it one of the five or six most-recognized games of the NES. In case you're interested, I would argue that the others are Contra, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 1/3, Castlevania, and maybe Ice Hockey or RBI Baseball. Those are the games, along with Zelda, that EVERYBODY had or knew. And that concludes my non-awaited return to the ScrewAttack blogging world. I hope you bring you guys a lot more quality articles in the future! And if anyone knows any good gaming hideouts in the District, let me know! Until then...

Blog Day: The Great SMB3 Swap, and Other Tales

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:17:52 -0400

I have several, but the best one was the Great Super Mario Bros 3 Swap. Here's how it goes: I, like everyone else in the world, was feverishly awaiting the release of the sure-to-be-incredible SMB3. But at the time I couldn't afford it, and no holidays/birthdays were coming up. Damn. I was practically panting with excitement, I was like every screaming kid you see in The Wizard. So I hatched a plan... a criminal plan. We had a local video store called Erol's (anyone remember that?), that was actually renting out space in our local People's Drug (anyone remember THAT?) ... and Erol's rented games. Well, Super Mario Bros. 3 came out, and my plan was put into action. I rented it (one night rentals only, back then), played it as much I as could... and then put my horrible game Slalom! (see the great VGV to find out more) in the case, covering up the label with the SMB3 instruction booklet. Now here's the interesting part: despite this hare-brained scheme - and it was REALLY desperate and pathetic, you have to agree - no one discovered my ruse for a solid week. How many other kids were renting the game, finding Slalom! in the box and ... playing Slalom? or what? wtf?! Maybe some of the very young children actually thought Mario was skiing?? I have no idea. But when Erol's finally called my mom, as I knew they must, I had already beaten SMB3 twice (I still love that game, the perfect NES platformer)... so when I returned the game, I was proud and not sheepish. Frankly, I didn't care if I got Slalom! back; I did, and I later sold it to my middle school history teacher (!). But I remember the clerk at Erol's being a little put off that I wasn't ashamed of my daring swap. In fact, I know my mom got really angry when I described beating the game twice in the span... Another interesting facet of the story: they didn't charge us any extra for the additional week (!). So that is the crazy adventure of the Great SMB3 Swap. A couple other great moments: as discussed in one of my previous blogs, I got so furious at Test Drive back in the mid-80s, I took the floppy (an old 5.25"!) and put it up on the refrigerator with a magnet, destroying the disk and all its data forever. HA HA! I was victorious over those damned cops and sheer mountainsides once and for all! Lastly : I once, long ago, fell in love with Solar Jetman (NES) ... to the point where I would down to the house of a kid in my neighborhood who owned it, and basically just push him aside and play the hell out of it, making him get me drinks and food and whatnot. Awesome.

Blog Day - My Guilty Pleasure Is ...

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:46:29 -0400

... Counter-Strike. Although I've managed to stave off this total obsession for a few months now by failing to install Steam on my new laptop, the hours I've lost to Counter-Strike: Source is just unreal. For years and years, it was the go-to game for me when I was bored. I would load up Steam, click on one of the LanFusion.com servers, and get to work. Office, Dust2, Aztec, Italy, Chateau, Dust1, etc. - I loved all of it. I would experiment with various weapons, I would switch teams to try new strategies, new tactics, I would shadow the best player on my team and learn. After I reached the 1,000 hour mark, I decided enough was enough, and de-installed the game for a while. However, that only lasted about six months... and it's been six months now since the last un-install... ::uh-oh::

PC Gaming Nostalgia: The Dawn of Realism

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:48:02 -0400

Alright G1s, your favorite reinterpreter of the Golden Age of PC gaming is BACK, and ready to remix his memories and recall the best, worst and everything in between. Today I want to talk about the dawn of realism - when suddenly, thanks to enhanced graphics and sound, games started infringing the boundaries of the real world and feature characters and locations that were photorealistic... for better and worse. Lately I've been replaying 1995's The Riddle of Master Lu. Before I go on, here are a few screenshots from MobyGames to introduce you in case you've missed it over the years: http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/13/15/242465.png http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/19/21/242471.png http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/23/25/242475.png http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/32/34/242484.png http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/40/42/242492.png etc. Immediately upon viewing these, you can tell something important: it was one of the slew of adventure games to try and integrate full-motion video (FMV) into the otherwise 2D world, in hopes of enhanced realism perhaps. Games like Phantasmagoria and Wing Commander did this do: static, traditional backgrounds had blue-screened actors parading around all over the place, and presumably gamers everywhere said "WOW! AMAZING!" ... ...only in real life, that didn't happen. The only games that pulled this off successfully (Gabriel Knight 2, Wing Commander 3, et. al.) did so not succeed solely because of any enhanced realism, but because the rest of the game was well-balanced, well-developed, fun to play, etc. The sad fact is FMV simply doesn't translate instantly into some kind of immersive element that captures players the moment they see it. At least, no one I ever knew or spoke with. This leads to an interesting dilemma. As graphical power grew so rapidly in the mid-to-late 1990s (and continues to do so with SLI/Crossfire, multiple-core processors, better faster RAM, etc.), many game developers seemed to think the ticket to great game design was simply high resolution graphics, more photo-realistic characters and environs, etc. But is this true? The Riddle of Master Lu falls into this trap. The game is stylish... but despite its style, still comes across a little dull because of the intensely realistic settings. In a game about incredible adventure (the game is fully titled "Ripley's Believe It or Not: The Riddle of Master Lu," and you actually play Ripley, with the famous comic strip featuring heavily into the story), a world of strictly normal boundaries and proportions is perhaps not the wisest move. I know the game designers were trying to push the point In A Normal World There Is So Much Strange and Marvelous Stuff! But I think the game would really have benefited from a more fantastic look: a character who was a sprite, and not an actor; backdrops that came from the imagination and not a photograph; etc. When I suggest these things, I have clear models in mind: games like Grim Fandango, Curse of Monkey Island, Quest for Glory IV, King's Quest VI... or, outside of the Sierra/LucasArts hegemony, games like The Last Express or Legend of Kyrandia or Simon the Sorcerer or The Longest Journey. These are games where style IS substance, and fantastic imagery dominates. Of course, the opposite trend had some big hitters too, the biggest two being Myst and The Seventh Guest. Myst is a juggernaut that still is going strong, with four sequels and some kind of online version that I don't know much about except that people play it. The Seventh Guest was a popular success, despite the absolutely legendarily difficult and disastrous development process that virtually destroyed the company. Both games featured environments as realistic as computers could then feature - SVGA graphics, real-world sound, smooth scrolling from location to location (even if you weren't behind the wheel, so to speak), etc. Clearly, these games hit a nerve. People liked to explore new, different environments that looked authentic. So which is better? Is it possible to say one is artistically more viable than the other? Which is more prevalent today? Those questions are thorny, and provoke a lot of angry answers from the wide spectrum of gamers. Some people simply like fantastic places - think of the amazing success Blizzard has had with StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo - and some people simply prefer realistic places: think Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear, etc. While all of those games are a little bit of a mix, they clearly lean hard one direction or the other. One game I found really intriguing lately was No More Heroes for the Wii. Why? Because it both emulates a real world but at the same time completely violates all the tenets of realism. People bleed explosively, they perform superhuman feats as part of regular life, they don't act normally ... yet they exist in a backdrop that convincingly models a real city location. It was a very clever effect, and worked absolutely. This suggests that perhaps a division between the two isn't strictly necessary, that they're not mutually exclusive. The title of the post is the *dawn* of realism, but in fact the origin of this movement is unimportant. It was inevitable: as graphics got better and better, people pushed closer and closer toward lifelike graphics. The first game I was really aware of this in was Links 386, a golf game my father player, that tried as hard as it could to show perfectly accurate models of famous golf courses, as well as digitized sounds of clubs swinging, balls dropping into cups, etc. And that was 1992! Another series that tried very hard to emulate the physics of the real world in every aspect was the Falcon series of flight simulator games. As graphics got better, those games became more detailed and you could fly over not-quite-real-but-nice-try models of real places. And yet, at the same time, I was drawn to games rooted in pure fantasy: adventure games and RPGs. Both had traces of the incursion of realism: The Riddle of Master Lu, already discussed, or RPGs like Betrayal at Krondor, which had digitized actors all over the place. But most stuck to graphics coming from deep inside the imagination. The logical question raised by these alternating currents in PC gaming is this: are people, therefore, divided up the way scientists tell us we are? Left-brained versus right-brained? Those who naturally gravitate toward simulations of our own world, and those who naturally escape from it? It's an interesting point worth considering. So that's my brief overview of realism in PC gaming; from a change re-encounter with The Riddle of Master Lu, this one idea blossomed into many questions, some with far-reaching consequences.

Rare, Esoteric and Obscure NES titles: a short essay and remembrance

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:18:31 -0400

I've been doing some thinking over the last week or so, and perusing my (very) small NES collection... and then I stumbled over this (funny) website: http://geocities.com/snester85/ I think all of the titles are fake, but still funny nonetheless. I think I remember the last one - Full House: Tournament Fighter - appearing in an AVGN video. But then I started thinking: what ARE the rarest, most esoteric, most obscure titles for the NES? There should be some criteria: the game has to be mass produced (so limited edition tournament-oriented score-recording cartridges are out) and it has to have been released in the North American market (so Japanese-only and European-only cartridges are out). But either no one bought it, or they made relatively few, or it was made late in the system's life, or whatever. I don't have any actual statistics in front of me, but I can tell you what the three hardest-to-acquire games were from my own childhood: 3) Bubble Bobble 2 - I and a lot of my friends had the first game, cherished the amusing style and great gameplay... and were completely unable to find the sequel at any time. Toys R Us, game shops, flea markets, distant cousins, no one had it. I considered it virtually unattainable; there must have been a mid-Atlantic shortage, because I've since met people who had it. 2) Stack Up - this was a game for R.O.B., like Gyromite. I have a small story related to this. When I was still a young whippersnapper my dad brought me over to the house of a friend of his named Mr Wong. I was about five or six, the very dawning of the Nintendo... and Mr Wong had one. Not only did he have one, he had the whole R.O.B. setup. And he had Stack Up, which I remember vividly. When I got older, and got an allowance, I tried to acquire my own R.O.B. and a copy of Stack Up, for nostalgic reasons (we're talking about a twelve year old being nostalgic for when he was six!!!) ... and simply was unable to find one. I once met a kid at a park who claimed he would sell me his, but it was missing all the trays. I'm sure most of the pieces are now melted down or compacted somewhere... 1) T & C Surf Designs II: Thrilla's Surfari - now, I'm fairly certain this isn't even a rare game. It came out pretty late in the NES's lifespan - '92? '93? - but it looked GREAT at the time. The backgrounds were basically an 8-bit version of Donkey Kong Country (check them out, it's true), and the gameplay looked smooth, fast, and FUN. Unfortunately, this game was absolutely impossible to find. Since my NES-playing heyday, I've met people who owned and played Bubble Bobble 2 and Stack Up. Not so with T&C 2 - I've never met anyone who owned it, played it, most haven't even heard of it. In fact, most people only dimly remember the ORIGINAL game. So that is my personal trio of games that haunted me, elusive ghosts, throughout my childhood. Now I want to hear YOUR stories: what games for the NES were simply impossible to find for you guys/girls? And if anyone has statistics, or just general knowledge, what are the rarest mass-North-American-release games for the system? Let the memories... begin!

Zelda and Link: Seen at the County Fair

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:30:21 -0400

Hey G1s! Sorry for the LONG absence from blogging: I started a new job lately that's taken up all my time - long hours, long commute, etc. But the weekends are still MINE! And I might start risking my neck at work to blog from there. What's life without some adventure? Last week I went to the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair (Maryland), as I do every year. It's a strange holdover from the days when this county used to be primarily rural or semirural; now, the south part of the county is almost entirely urban or thickly suburban, and the middle and northern half is suburban - only the northern and westernmost parts of the county still have working farms, generally. I live in that northern part that still has farms. Now, in addition to prize chickens and rabbits and cows, and award-winning pumpkins and roses and crafts... is an art barn. You can submit almost anything: painting, stained glass, photography, even lego structures and bottle cap collections (!). Well, I was casually browsing through the art barn's section for younger artists when I spotted this: Yup - Zelda and Link! And the red ribbon means second place. I can't remember exactly what age group it was in, but my vague memory is something like 11-13 years old, perhaps. A couple minor questions - what, exactly, is that expression on Zelda's face? Why is Link's left lapel cut so long? What is Zelda reaching for? Just my curiosity getting the better of me... But the point of this find is that not only are gamers creating fine art related to gaming - which is significant in and of itself - but established judges, who could easily have chosen yet another pet dog pastel portrait, or the picture of the tiger attacking, or the landscape with the waterfall (all were about the same skill level), they chose the GAME ART. This is also a major point. First: all throughout art history, artists have painted scenes from legend, whether biblical or Greek or whatever. This small drawing gave me the idea that perhaps now the legends that young and future artists are drawn from games. Everyone seems preoccupied with "Are games art?" But perhaps there is an equally interesting side argument - "How do games impact older art forms?" Because, before today, I don't remember seeing Link's face splashed on a canvas. The traditional graphic arts have always been preoccupied with capturing our world from all possible angles - well, here is a new angle. Now, I know that this is not the first drawing of Link and Zelda ever done - I'm sure that really excellent and serious paintings have been done on game themes. And after all, orchestras are now playing video game themes at concert stages throughout the country (maybe the world). Which leads me to my next point... ...the judges picked it as second best. Now, I'm not an art judge, nor am I a qualified art expert in any capacity; so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that the third-, fourth- and fifth-place entries were just as good. This wasn't clearly the second-best entry in the Fair. And yet it made it. This makes me wonder if perhaps the work was chosen because of the imagination (and guts!) it took to draw from a game and submit. Almost all the other entries were still life, landscape or animals. Very few were not. I noticed, on a side note, at least THREE drawings made of Lego Indiana Jones (!). Maybe that judge realized what I realize - that the potential for making art from games is enormous. Games contain an absolute treasury of visual display - bright color to deep shadow, vivid motion to detailed stillness, human forms and inhuman. The "legend" of gaming is every bit as rich as the old Greek legends, Roman legends, Biblical legends. There are many stories to be told. So the big point of the blog is really to encourage all "traditional" artists - oil, watercolor, etc. - to lend their skills to gaming themes. Not only will it continue to persuade people that gaming is a legitimate art form of its own, but it will show the titanic imaginative effort that have gone into gaming for the last 25+ years. Gaming is obviously too large to ignore; and young artists are beginning to draw inspiration from their favorite games. Do it more! ScrewAttack might consider a non-digital art contest of its own. Painting is a very basic, ancient method of human expression, and will never die out - so it's important to try and transform the standards of painting to include this new set of myths and legends.

PC Adventure Game Alert: Grim Fandango, back on sale! ... ?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:24:53 -0400

Hey all G1s, especially those of you are play PC and like classic games, adventure games, or are curious about the game commonly voted the best adventure game ever made... ... at a local computer store in Gaithersburg, MD, I was browsing around the software section, out of curiosity, when I spotted THIS: Yes! Grim Fandango, the adventure game by LucasArts that defined the genre and is often rated the best adventure game ever made. In every PC Gaming Hall of Fame. Now, I already have my original copy of Grim Fandango, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to own another; similarly, I have duplicates of the Monkey Island games, some of the Sierra games, etc. So I bought it. I'm not sure if you can read the pricetag on the original image, so I tried to blow it up: $29.00! Brand new, still sealed. Here is the only weird thing: I don't remember any edition of the game that came in a DVD-size box like this. My original came in the traditional cardboard box, and I have seen a jewel-case sized edition as well. Does anyone know if this is a reissue? Either way, this is a SHOUT OUT to all PC gamers and gamers in general who might be interested in acquiring a copy of this legendary game! I'll probably review this game for my PC Gaming Nostalgia segment, but don't wait - look around for it wherever you live! It's still around, perhaps reissued.

PC Gaming Nostalgia: Neuromancer

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:23:27 -0400

Hello, G1s! That cheap music you hopefully hear embedded into this review is the main theme to 1989's PC classic Neuromancer, by Interplay. It's actually by Devo, a song called "Some Things Never Change." I captured it right off my PC speaker, and back in 1989 it would have sounded pretty much exactly as you're hearing it - tinny, muffled, indistinct. This is the era immediately before the SoundBlaster cards, remember. Neuromancer the PC game is based on the same-titled novel by William Gibson, which is perhaps the most famous cyberpunk novel of them all. That in-game title screen, by the way, is a scrambled version of Gibson's face - the glasses are the giveaway. The book is astonishingly good, and I heavily recommend it for all readers out there; it won the triple crown of Sci-Fi fiction, the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K Dick awards. Here is a random quote from the book to illustrate its general style - which will give us a clue into the game's general feel and flavor: "And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square... Exponential... Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become... And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore." -Page 195 Neuromancer takes place in a completely dystopian future: many people sell their limbs and organs and get cheap synthetic replacements. Most people live day to day in a miserable fog of injustice, poverty and general misanthropic cruelty. You play as Case, a hacker who is equally at home in the barren wastelands of cyberspace as he is in Chiba City, Japan, the city where the game takes place. The game opens with you waking up with your face in a plate of synth-spaghetti, rudely brought out of your slumber by a bartender whose mouth is, and I quote, "a webwork of East European steel and brown decay." You are then told what you owe, and discover you don't have that much in your pockets - meaning you have to use the PAX built into the wall (sort of an all-purpose ATM with access to the net) to get your funds. Trying to access the PAX, however, forces you to answer a copy protection code - the game originally came with a really cool code wheel, which enhanced the idea that in the future, ciphering was universal and everything worth having is protected, usually requiring passwords to access. These days, a simple Google/Yahoo search will turn up a site or two with the answers to the copy protection. Now, let me digress for a brief moment. Back in 1989, the web was still very, very young. Very little existed other than the BBS system. The very best modems - remember them? - had a speed of 14.4k, but most people were still using 1200 and 2400 baud, including me. So Gibson's idea of a universal world-wide web that was accessible from almost anywhere, and connected all variety of people and places was way, WAY ahead of its time. And I remember thinking when I played the game "This is amazing!" as I jacked into in-game cyberspace from an in-game hospital room. So the game correctly predicts a lot of future computing ideas, including the fact that corporations were going to protect their on-line assets with massive firewalls. Well, in Neuromancer, the corporations go one step further. These firewalls can not only kill you (!), but they are maintained by AIs that are stunningly intelligent. In fact, maybe too intelligent. A few of them have become self-aware... and hostile. The worst are Wintermute, Greystoke and Neuromancer. Encounter them too soon, or without the right software to battle them, and it means an early, nasty death for our hero. This is an idea that The Matrix pays homage to - you jack in to the web, and your life is on the line. So the gameflow involves meeting interesting people, finding and using software and eventually hacking into tougher and tougher sites on the web, coming across these hostile AI who want your troublesome existence ended. The graphics, as you can see from the screenshots I've littered throughout in links, are quite good for 1989. In fact, I was very VERY impressed by them back then. The sound, Devo and otherwise, was excellent. The atmosphere was dark, dismal, and really got you in the mood. The game world was bordering on ruin, and only the destruction of these too-intelligent AIs will permit the human species to continue with any hope. You can find software for all kinds of uses. Coptalk lets you... talk like a cop. This is VERY useful. Evasion lets you run away from AIs that are a little too difficult right now. Philosophy lets you battle these AIs, while Bargaining lets you buy back your body parts (!) for cheaper than usual. Zen heals you during your fights with the AIs. And, uniquely, Musicianship allows you to impress a key individual and hitch a ride to Zion (another thing that The Matrix borrows). These are only a few of the software available in the game, but gives a pretty good idea of what's going on. The game basically has two modes of play. The first is the third-person view that allows you to explore Chiba City. Once you jack into cyberspace, the game switches to a first person view of the network. Both are effective in communicating what they need to, and both allow you to use your imagination to fill in whatever is left unsaid. The game unfolds smoothly, although it is quite difficult - especially for a nine-year old kid (as I was at the time) who didn't really understand the mechanic of attacking a computer system protected by "ICE" - hostile programming. I enjoyed the third-person mode far more, back then. Now, almost twenty years later, I still love the traditional adventure game aspects of the game but also find new appreciation of the hacking first-person aspects as well. A word of warning, before I wave goodbye: too all fans and lovers of the book, the game only follows the plot loosely. Great characters were omitted, the moral depth of the story is largely absent, and much of the richness is missing. Yet it's still very much worth playing, as a quite convincing view of Gibson's world. So, all PC and/or gaming fans, this is Neuromancer: a game that explores a dying world, a game to predicts (successfully) the future of the net, a game that has really enormous implications throughout; a game that has a lot of poetry and a lot of soul. In short, a fairly rare game of high quality and standards - Interplay really got this one right. The game credits go to Michael Stackpole (who also worked on the masterpiece Wasteland, and several Star Trek game), Troy Miles (Wasteland, and several Tolkien games), Brian Fargo (too many to list, click this link) and Bruce Balfour (Wasteland, Battle Chess, and the Sierra games Dagger of Amon Ra, Outpost and the Space Quest series). Neuromancer: seek it out, enjoy it, and then read the book for an even richer experience. A real PC classic, perhaps little known, but very much worth your time.

PC Gaming Nostalgia: Lost and Forgotten Games...

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:56:17 -0400

Ok G1s, usually in my PC Gaming Nostalgia segment I cover a well-known classic like X-Com or Wing Commander or Monkey Island. But today I want to talk about something more unusual and much more sad: games I can only faintly remember, games that YOU can only faintly remember, games that are lost, forgotten, and maybe gone for good. Today I was searching through Home of the Underdogs for games of my distant youth - 688 Attack Sub, for example, or early, early text adventures. I remember "action" games where, literally, everything on screen was a slowly scrolling ASCII character. I would wildly press keys and always lose. One of them involved this weird ankh/arrow shape moving downward through an ever-narrowing canyon. One touch of the walls and you died. Another was a very, VERY early edition of the popular Lunar Lander game. But then I found this page: http://www.the-underdogs.info/want.php All the games that even a ridiculously well-stocked website of abandonware and forgottenware like Home of the Underdogs can't find or locate. And I had actually played a couple of them as a kid (Lords of Chaos and the text game Wind in the Willows), which made the whole thing hit home a little bit more. Now, some games on that list probably deserve to rot in obscurity - after all, at least a couple were probably so bad they either didn't sell, or nobody kept them. Poorly designed, poorly advertised, poorly programmed, who knows. But what about the rest? I'm really bothered by the idea that there are GOOD games out there, from generations past, that are essentially lost to the mists of time. Like baseball cards, they probably are languishing in someone's closet, or in a storage unit, or maybe Mom and Pop through them out when Little Junior went to college. But a lot of these games probably gave their owners and players many good times over the years. I'm sure there are many more gamers like me out there who relish tarnished memories of games long vanished, games that played a big part in making them like games in the first place. Some of the titles on this particular list sound really interesting: Xyphoes Fantasy by Silmarils. Twinworld by Blue Byte. Strategic Craps by Applications Plus (think of the possibilities!). Spirit of Glenmore Castle by On Target Software. Secret of Easter Island by Three Sigma Software. Mig Alley Ace by MicroProse. Mabel Mansion by Datamost. Gulliver's Travels by Spinnaker. And so on... I mention all the developers for a reason: whatever happened to all those programmers and designers and artists? They're definitely the best shot anyone has of recovering these old, forlorn titles. Do they still feel proud about their creations? Is seeing their game on that list like watching a child declared missing? And an artist of various sorts myself, I think it would feel almost exactly like that. Imagine spending many, many hours on a project - working with guys who probably ended up either your best friend or your worst enemy - working under heavy stress and tight deadlines; working in a relatively new and unexplored genre... creating something that was sold to the public, played by thousands of gamers across the country and maybe the world. Now, twenty-plus years later, your game turns up on a list of games that no one can find; in fact, these gamers can barely even remember your creation existing. In fact, it could be that no one at all remembers the game, and they pulled the title from a flier or sales booklet or brochure... I find it pretty distressing to think about. And the worst part is, this same phenomena is guaranteed - guaranteed! - to happen to each and every one of us as we get older. Each of us has some pet game that almost nobody has heard of or played. And that game will eventually get harder and harder to find in the used bins... then it will get harder and harder to find on eBay, craigslist... eventually enough copies will be destroyed that it cannot be found at all. And only you and a few others and the game's makers will remember it. But this lament comes with hope: there is a solution! And its name is abandonware. Sites like Home of the Underdogs - and new, mammoth torrents that combine hundreds of games - are making legions of old games pretty much immortal; and this is EXACTLY what we want. ScrewAttack does its part too - by celebrating the spirit of old games, the soul of retro gaming, the joy of rediscovery. In fact, that's what brought me to ScrewAttack in the first place, and it's a large part of why I stay: a gaming community that appreciates the past without becoming lost in it, without ignoring the present and future of gaming. These are important. However, this rosy hope for acquiring beloved old PC games comes with a rather nasty thorn: legality. Now, many of these old companies are long, long, LONG deceased - and went out of business in a manner that puts their product into the public domain, available for free and universal use. But not so for every title - I know that there are hidden classics that remain hidden because the company that made them was bought out by a larger company, which in turn was bought out by a larger company, etc. etc. - and now some horrible conglomerate like EA or Vivendi technically owns the rights to a real ancient jewel. I'm sure these massive companies pay a few poor stiffs to program bots to surf the net, looking for offending sites and torrents which have old games from the 1980s and 1990s and send generic cease-and-desist letters. At what point should a game become free? When it is no longer actively sold? When the company goes under? When the designer says it should be free? When ten or fifteen years have passed? It's a tricky, complex question of fairness that has no easy answer. And how can we best recover games like those on the Underdogs list? Games of which there may only a few copies, or games that died in beta, etc.? The answer to that is also almost impossible to answer. Essentially, a single good copy has to be found - and with the finite lifespans of those old magnetic media, that is quickly becoming a major difficulty - and that good copy has to be ripped and distributed, the manual scanned and PDFed, etc. It has to be spread to all of us who remember, has to be posted on as many abandonware websites as possible. The more hard disks that have Xyphoes Fantasy tucked away in some remote folder, the better the chances of that game surviving for others to enjoy. So that, G1s, is my plea and my hope: that games we only distantly remember from the earliest dawn of PC gaming are salvaged, dusted off, played again... and that we avoid as much as possible having the same fate befall our current obscure favorites, games that might not be distributed in large numbers... games independently made and released... games that just slip through the cracks; hopefully that Underdogs list will never grow, will eventually shrink, and none of my favorites or yours will ever show up there.

NES Memories: 8 Eyes

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:59:22 -0400

Ok G1s, today I'm going to briefly cover a little-known classic. Well, perhaps a classic. The game is 8 Eyes, a rather blatant Castlevania clone with the twist that A) you now have a pet falcon to help you, B) you can choose your level, a la Mega Man and C) the graphics are actually damn good looking. Now, let me get straight to the "memories" part of this blog. My own involvement with 8 Eyes is a little complicated - when I was at my height of NES playing, I commonly traded and swapped games with all my friends. Sometimes it was only for a night or two, or for a week, and if the two (or more!) parties agreed, sometimes permanently. This is how I acquired 8 Eyes - I traded either RCA Pro Am or Super Off-Road for it, I don't remember which anymore. Now, as my previous blog indicates, I was a monster, mammoth fan of Castlevania, despite the rather illogical plot. So the prospect of any kind of Castlevania clone really raised my Hyperactivity Meter until I was bouncing around the house/yard/classroom/car like I just bought flubber shoes. The friend I was trading with had acquired the game from his cousin who lived out-of-state (I actually remember where: York, PA), which only added to the allure of the game - it wasn't just similar to my favorite game at the time, it was from far away. I had to have it. So the swap happened at noon on what I remember being a chilly Autumn day, just after lunch. I stuck the game in my backpack and headed home. Homework? I flung it to the floor. Food? Ridiculous to even consider it. Friends? For the duration of the night, I had none. TV? Tuned to channel 3. NES? Switched on. 8 Eyes? AWESOME. Here is the premise: there's been a nuclear war, and humanity has barely survived. A leader appears: the Great King, who plans to harness the power of the 8 Eyes - eight powerful jewels that appeared in the middle of the nuclear explosions that almost wiped the globe clean. But wait! The King is betrayed! His greedy Dukes steal the 8 Eyes for themselves, planning on using them to ... I don't remember. Wreak havoc, probably. Use them for ill and evil, definitely. You play Orin, a falconer ... and Cutrus, his always-accompanying falcon friend. If you have two players, the second player controls Cutrus (!!!). Your task is obvious: retrieve the jewels, save the world, etc. But wait! There is a final puzzle! Even assuming you can retrieve the jewels, you have to place them in an alter in the correct order, or you lose the game. Luckily, there are hints spread out throughout the game about the order of the jewels, so it's not randomized or anything outrageous. And the names of the jewels are truly awe-inspiring. I used to make up whole stories for each one: The Devil of Zimbabwe. Blood of Tutankhamun. Nail of Nightmares. Fairy of Grenada. Tear of the Nile. Dancing Princess of Frenellia. Wing of Angels. Black Butterfly of Pereshusu. Amazing, even now. And no, I have no idea where Frenellia or Pereshusu are. I tried looking them up in various encyclopedias and atlases, but no dice. I think they're invented. The game looks and plays almost identically to Castlevania. Orin looks quite a bit like Simon Belmont, but the controls aren't as tight - especially in single-player mode, where you have to control Orin AND Cutrus. Having a buddy who's willing to be the falcon full-time is vastly better. And the falcon rocks, make no mistake. Cutrus can attack enemies, retrieve health and power-ups, trigger switches, all kinds of stuff. He's very useful, and the whole mechanic is a real innovation on the Castlevania engine. In addition, there is the Mega Man-like aspect that each boss is especially susceptible to one specific weapon, so it is essential to play through the levels in a particular order. The order becomes clearer, of course, the farther you go and the fewer levels you have to choose from, just like Mega Man. Although I remember one boss battle I could only beat using Cutrus, with Orin just staying on the defensive the entire battle. I think that battle took me all night to beat. ARGH. The difficulty level is considerable. There were a few places I got stuck and almost hurled the game out the window... if it had belonged to me, I probably would have. The graphics are very colorful, and look great throughout. But the real secret to the game is the soundtrack. Each of the eight levels has at least three different themes, and they are all really well done. I can still remember a couple of them to this day. If there are any remixers out there, check out 8 Eyes - there are some pleasant surprises to be found. So finally, after about three weeks, I beat the game. I stuffed the game back into my backpack and traded it back at lunch. Instead of getting whatever racing game I had traded away, I remember getting Double Dribble in exchange. In retrospect, I wish I'd been able to keep the game, but alas - it was not to be. Bottom line: 8 Eyes is a Castlevania clone with a falcon buddy, no whipping, a surprisingly rich story (much, MUCH better than the unimaginative dreck Konami came up with) and an unusual, innovative two-player mode. I recommend this little-known title to everyone who enjoys unusual, well-made platformers from the 8-bit era. Check it out! Other NES Memories: Super Mario Bros. Castlevania

Is Gaming Killing Us? Looking At Games From a Health Perspective

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:04:22 -0400

Hello G1s! While leaving the metro today during my daily commute, I was stopped literally dead in my tracks by the following poster: That's right: The Sofa Assassin. Of course, this is supposed to have a double meaning, since the sofa is supposedly killing the boy. It also sounds like a great name for a character in an Adam Sandler movie... But frankly I was a little offended. Look at the picture closely. "Soda" (or purple drink, if you follow Dave Chapelle)... "Crisps" ... a controller apparently not plugged into the genericized Xbox 360. They pick a kid who is a little pudgy and put a surly, stupid look on his face, have him half close his eyes and get that glazed over tuned-out look... I mean, the ad has good intentions, but transmits its message in a rather mean way. I'm a gamer, I don't look anything like that. I'm a little taller than average, I lift weights and/or run every day, I don't eat chips (or crisps) or purple drink (or soda). In fact, none of my gaming friends look like that completely stereotypical kid. Not a single one; while they may not be the healthiest people, it's not because of gaming. The literal poster boy for overweight teen gamers seems a little over the top to me. Which brings me to my point: since when do games make people unhealthy? This is ScrewAttack, home of the freaking Eating Contests ... salsa, twinkies and more are surely only the beginning ... but I'm sure the ScrewAttack personnel would agree that it's not gaming that is making them eat outrageously - it's the joy of outlandish jackassery, the wild spectacle of competition beyond all normal bounds. It's not tied into gaming in any way. So after snapping that quick camera phone picture, I used the slow ride home to do some thinking. While growing up, I remember, many games revolved around eating food. In fact, most do. Look at Pac-Man - ALL HE DOES IS EAT! By all accounts, Pac-Man should have died from a dot overdose many years ago. But then again, he is also exercising every single moment of his life, and is cautious to balance out his dot diet with carefully selected fruit. In Burger Time, your entire goal is to assemble a hamburger while "evil" food tries to stop you. Mario and Luigi eat mushrooms and flowers (a real hippie!). Ice Climbers try to reclaim their stolen eggplants. Simon Belment eats huge pork chops to recover his health. Travis Touchdown eats pizza to recover health. Leon Kennedy eats red, yellow and green "herbs," along with chicken eggs and fish to stay healthy. Etc. In fact, consuming food to recover power or gain abilities is a cornerstone of many games, if not most of them. But now ask yourself: have you ever, EVER felt the need to emulate any of your favorite characters in the consuming of some specific food?? Of course not. Maybe in a silly moment, I've played out a round of Burger Time on a McDonalds table top in front of my weirded-out friends; but I never ate mushrooms out in the lawn to be like Mario. I never ate any food at all to be like any of my game heroes. OK, wait. I did once try to trap my little sister in a giant bubble I blew, a la Bubble Bobble... But that aside, I think that this sudden urge - on the part of the media, I guess - to blame lack of exercise on gaming is a little premature and misguided. I point the blame in a different direction: easier access to worse food, and less emphasis on exercise. As anyone who has read my blogs will know, I love to reminisce. So I'm going to do it again. The year: 1990. The place: my fourth grade class. The person: me. When I was ten, I was a gaming HOUND. I played, rented, swapped, sold, traded, lusted after and generally worshiped console and computer games. But I was also an avid athlete competing in many sports. And I almost never ate McDonalds or any other high-fat high-starch foods - my family didn't have the money. Now, until very recently I was a guitar teacher at a local music store. And a lot of my students were kids ages 7-13 - prime gaming age, as you all know. So I have seen a lot of what the media seems to identify as misdirected youth. I feel a bit like the late, great George Carlin when I say that these adults are crazy to expect these kids to be out ... what, exactly? Curing cancer? Studying for the LSAT? Rock climbing in the Alps? Parsing Shakespeare's most obscure sonnets? Deep sea diving? Kids ... are kids. And many of us adults wish we were kids again, because of the lack of responsibility and almost endless free time. Gaming provides easy, quick, immersive entertainment that can generate very deep thought as well as a momentary reflex. Gaming is more than some empty pastime, as that metro poster would have you believe. Gaming is a rich, complex activity with an entire culture (which itself has many subcultures) - as ScrewAttack.com is testament to. That's why that ad took only a split-second to piss me off: it makes so many wrong assumptions in such a short amount of time. Now, I know what the ad is TRYING to say: eat less junk food, get some sunshine, stay off the purple drink, avoid the crisps, and plug in your damn controller... well, maybe not that last part. Of course, given the look on the kids face, maybe his TV is off and he's just riding a PCP high late into the night. "The colors... whoa... !!!" But I want to conclude. I think that generally our national health is definitely declining, due to poor food choices, lack of exercise, and who knows what else. I can't tell you how many overweight - some morbidly so - kids I see on a day to day basis. Growing up, I remember maybe two or three in my whole class; maybe a couple dozen once I got to high school. But it wasn't games that did it. Games are not some magic scapegoat substitute for unlucky DNA, for poor diet choices, etc. Games are not unhealthy; on the contrary, games can be very healthy, for your mind, hand/eye coordination, for Autistic children... not to mention the Wii Fit, and Wii in general. Games are neutral at worst; they may encourage motionless activity for a few hours at a time - but during those same hours, your mind might be extremely active, forever voyaging. Or you might be the kind of gamer I am, where my muscles tense up, I scream and shout, I twist around, I fist-pump the air, etc. In other words, the Angry Video Game Nerd type of gamer - the active gamer, who existed in all those 1980s commercials, but who the media quietly ignores. I want to end on a pop culture note. I'm sure almost everyone reading this has seen the famous "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of South Park. This is the episode where they parody gamers - an important point - especially MMO players. When Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny get into Warcraft, they get lost in it, dedicate their lives... and get obese, with tons of acne. The uber-player they're trying to kill is an adult version of them - overweight, bearded, with potato chip dust all over his shirt as he plays one-handed, the other hand in the bag. The episode is hilarious - because it's over-the-top satire. Parker and Stone are playing off the stereotypes and expectations of obsessed online gamers; and, as everyone knows, the kids outside that episode are still really into games - Guitar Hero and the Okama Game Sphere, among others - and still maintain time for normal lives. So clearly, it's all about balance and proportion. Finding the perfect mix is up to each of us, but it's not as hard as the media screams at us - we don't have to drop games forever, drop our favorite foods, and commit to some kind of stormtrooper routine of exercise and ritual purification. Balance. Proportion. Happiness.

NES Memories: Super Mario Bros.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:18:51 -0400

OK G1s, in my first edition of NES Memories, I took a look at the ridiculous plot and various logical problems with the original Castlevania. Today I'm going to do the same thing with the original Super Mario Bros.! So sit back and enjoy a humorous, nostalgic look back at THE game of the mid-1980s. Well, I'm going to pick up where I left off: my sister, three years younger than me, hated Castlevania and constantly bugged me to switch games to Super Mario Bros., her favorite by far. And to be honest, it's not like I really complained all that much. After all, Super Mario Bros. was the first game almost everyone with a Nintendo Entertainment System obtained (unless they bought it late in the run, or got one used)... and because, of course, it was FUN! People still play it today, speed runs are posted regularly on YouTube.com, it spawned COUNTLESS imitators, it sparked the single most recognizable character in video game history (No, Luigi, you wish), it produced probably the most beloved sequel in game history (Super Mario Bros. 3), etc. etc. etc. It was literally the game that made the 8-bit era. I received, that fateful 1987 Christmas Day, the early version of the NES (I still remember the box!) that came with regular Super Mario Bros. - no Duck Hunt, no gun. The basic edition. I was seven, my sister was four, and we were complete addicts from day one. Plugging in that NES and hitting that "start" button was like taking your first hit of crack (or so I'm told...) because there was simply no going back. That rectangle with four buttons and a plus sign sat in your sweating hands, that famous music queued up, and you were taken away to a dream world where you were a fat plumber who stomped on turtles (!) and giant walking mushrooms (!!) all while eating other mushrooms (!!!) on your way to defeat either A) a giant dragon or B) an ugly, grown-up mutant version of the earlier turtles. I've never been 100% clear on what, exactly, Bowser is. He's damn ugly, though, and he breathes fire - which, I suppose, makes him a dragon of some kind. But if he's a dragon, he's actually pretty disappointing. Think about it. Dragons a la St George or Harry Potter are supposed to be huge, mammoth, epic - they span whole acres of ground, they live in freaking volcanoes or mountains, they hoarde treasure, they fly around eating villagers and causing general mayhem. Now let's examine Bowser. First, he's short. Short as hell. Stunted, in fact. He's really not a lot taller than Mario when Mario is "big." His hide basically resembles a turtle shell with big spikes. He's slow, and seems to stumble as he walks. His fire breath is small, makes a wimpy little noise, and is easily dodged. And to defeat him, you basically dump him into a river of fire ... which is, traditionally, where dragons live in the first place. So, logically, you're sending Bowser home. And this is supposed to be punishment for him? He BREATHES fire! Why is dumping him into more of it going to bother him at all??? He's obviously immune to fire, if it's coming up out of his lungs! So Bowser is either a midget dragon, a monster turtle, or both. Maybe turtles are all just really, really short dragons - I've actually known two different pet turtles named Bowser over the years, owned by NES fans. But let's examine the in-game turtles for a moment. The turtles are actually pretty realistic. I don't know how many of you have experiences with snapping turtles but A) they really do have green shells B) they really do bite the $&!# out of you if you walk into them and C) they will retreat into their shells if threatened. But then there are the Goombas. Oh man, where to start!? Basically, the first enemy we see - and try to imagine you're a hyperactive seven year-old for a moment - is a walking mushroom approximately the same size as Mario. Now, try to imagine the following real-life situation: you are walking down the street. You turn a corner. AND THEN THERE IS A SIX-FOOT MUSHROOM WITH EYES, AGGRESSIVELY RUNNING TOWARD YOU. Now, who wouldn't panic? I panicked when I was playing the game, I remember that. "OH MY GOD, what is that, WHAT IS THAT?!" I screamed. I ran away from it until I couldn't go any farther, it touched me, I died. How traumatic is that? And when Mario dies, he doesn't just fall over - he is scrunched up into a horrible little ball - like his bones are crunched up or liquidated or something - and is flipped up into the air, before falling rapidly into his grave somewhere below the screen. When you're seven, this is horrible, eye-opening stuff. So what, exactly, is a "Goomba"? Other than the Sicilian word for friend, pal, buddy? Where in hell is Bowser recruiting life-size walking mushrooms with anger problems? I mean, the whole place is called The Mushroom Kingdom - where is this? As a kid, I guessed France, because the most famous mushrooms in the world - truffles - are found there, and are hunted out with snuffling pigs. And that is something just weird enough that it might occur in Mario's universe. Yet this brings us to another issue that I had trouble with as a kid - why is an Italian plumber dating a princess? And why is a stunted dragon suddenly the king of France? Is this some kind of allegory for Louis XVI, the tyrant king of France who was eventually beheaded? Is this whole damn game some kind of history lesson in disguise? Because if it's pure fantasy... well, someone messed up, bad. Let's analyze the game and separate the fiction from the fact: Italian plumbers with overalls and huge mustaches - painfully real. Stunted dwarf dragons who spit fire - unreal. Turtles who attack you - definitely real. Mushrooms who attack you - definitely NOT real. Flagpoles - quite real. Giant venus flytraps that come out of big sewer pipes in the ground - uhh, not real. Princesses in pink dresses - real. Coins, floating in the air - I wish it was real. Flying fish - real. Warp pipes - well, who knows, really. What a truly strange mishmash of elements, right? As a kid, my sister and I had many hypotheses of what, exactly, was going on here, but we never figured it out. Did anyone else ever noticed Mario can hold his breath for a ridiculously long time, including while he swims and while he dodges underwater monsters - both physically taxing activities? Or that he can miraculously summon fire while submerged in liquid??! And what about the fact that he can jump on clouds - and freaking stay there indefinitely? Or the guy - Lakitu? - who rides a little cloud around and throws eggs that then hatch into some kind of porcupine monsters??? What's up with THAT guy?! I remember that guy gave my sister fits, she went ballistic every time he appeared, and often died just out of panic, trying to outrun him. Horrible, just horrible. Looked at objectively, Super Mario Bros. makes absolutely no sense whatsoever - but luckily, little kids playing the game really didn't care, and just took everything at face value. Good thing, too, because that Mushroom Kingdom is really the stuff of nightmares. So that's my quick look back at Super Mario Bros. - the game that defined the early NES, and the game that really launched the NES. Next up ... ??? I don't know, PM me if you have a suggestion.

NES Memories: Castlevania

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:12:59 -0400

Hello, G1s! Reading another post tonight about the Castlevania series brought back a flood of memories about the first game for the NES. I thought I'd share those memories, maybe trigger a few responses like my own. The scene: Christmas, 1987. I was in a near-frenzy after opening the box for my first NES, bundled with Super Mario Bros. My eyes were glassy, my hands were shaking, my voice was pitched so that only the neighborhood dogs could hear me as I shrieked "NINTENDO OH MY GOD NINTENDO." I was seven years old, and I'm sure my parents wondered if someone had slipped PCP into my breakfast. I was beyond excited; I was so hyper and adrenaline-soaked I probably could've picked up the family car and thrown it across the street. Yet even in the middle of my hysteria, I was planning what TV I was going to plug the NES into... But wait! What are those two boxes, hidden behind the shredded wrapping paper? They can't be books, can they? Or worse, carefully disguised sweaters?? I carefully retrieve the two presents - my sister was also rampaging at this point - and speedily unwrap them. As you probably already guessed, they were NES games. The first was Rad Racer; the second: Castlevania. Now I was (and am) the kind of guy who reads a ton. And I had (have) a very, VERY active imagination. So I was no stranger to vampires, spooky castles, evil monsters, etc. I had already heard the book-on-tape of Frankenstein, made by Fisher Price, and read the accompanying comic book illustrated by Marvel. (Side note to all readers who grew up in the 80s or who have kids now or who just like interesting tings: GET THESE TAPES/COMICS NOW!...then make copies for me) So of the three Xmas games I opened, Castlevania was by far the most appealing to me. I opened the box, extracted the game as carefully as if I were performing surgery, had my mom or dad hook up the NES, and went to work. That spooky music came on, Simon Belmont strutted across the screen towards that haunted castle, and the battle was on. Me, versus Dracula. The stakes (bad pun) ... life and death. The obstacles ... various famous monsters. Actually, I had a lot of fun when I was seven trying to figure out just how Dracula had recruited these mini-bosses to come to his castle and just hang out. I mean, they must have had a lot of free time, right? Try to imagine: Dracula calls up his old buddy, Giant Menacing Phantom Bat Monster: "Hey Phantom Bat, how about coming to hang out in the last room of the entry level of my new castle? You can party with the zombie guys, you know, the ones who just run in a straight line? And the pumas, you know, who just sit there for hours? You will? Awesome! What was that? Heroes with axes? No, nothing like that. Just zombies and pumas. What? Yeah, Frankenstein and his monster are coming, I know you guys like to hang. Yeah, the mummies, too. No, Elvira couldn't make it." Or Death, the boss who gave me the most trouble BY FAR: "Hey... Death? This is Dracula. Yeah, I know we don't talk much anymore. Yeah, yeah, I know, I've been a douche about calling. But hey, the phone works both ways, man. Listen, Death, I know you're pretty busy these days, what with the plague and all, but you think you could spend some time hanging in my castle next week? This ****** Belmont guy insists on storming my castle, wrecking all my expensive candle holders. Yeah, those ones, the ones with the little hearts inside. I know, I like them too. What do you say, wanna come hang, watch the game, have a brew, and maybe deal with this Belmont guy? Awesome! Wait, what was that? Boomerangs? No, nothing like that around here...." I had a lot of fun thinking that stuff up. I mean, Dracula must have had a HUGE budget, if you think about it. He had medusa heads (how expensive do you think THOSE are, at whatever HellMart Dracula was shopping at in Transylvania???), double dragon skulls that spit fireballs, those little hunchback guys and the freaking EAGLES that dropped them, zombies, pumas, water gill-creatures, giant spike presses, you name it. Unless they were all personal friends of The Count, then he must have spent a fortune. Maybe I overthought things as a kid, but consider this: where exactly do those zombies and medusa heads go when they fly off-screen behind you? Just fly on out of the castle? Are they going home? Late for a date? Emergency call from the wife? Don't want to pay the babysitter overtime? WHAT, exactly, are they in such a hurry for? If their purpose was really to kill Simon, they wouldn't just rush at him in a mindless straight line. Clearly, they have their own agenda. Another thing - those double skull heads. These: What the hell, exactly, are they? Just two T-Rex skulls sitting on each other? Is Dracula some kind of amateur archaeologist? How did they get there? And their mouths are open in this kind of sneering smile - what's that about? They can spit fireballs, so they clearly have some kind of breathing apparatus - can they talk? If so, what did they talk about while waiting for someone to show up? Why are they so unfriendly - they shoot a fireball at Simon without so much as a "Hey, friend or foe?" or "Who goes there?" I mean, I guess Simon doesn't really look like the rest of the party guests, being alive and everything. But going back, I played the living hell out of Castlevania. I found all the little crazy secrets - jumping past the entrance of the castle to make a little bag of treasure appear, or ducking on a platform on a later level for ten seconds to make another worthless glowing bag of treasure appear, a treasure that by all rights SHOULD be amazing - it looks impressive enough - but that does absolutely nothing for you. It's not like at the end of the game you get a message saying "You found 3/10 secret treasures! Try harder, Simon!" Nope, they are anonymous, worthless, and better left unclaimed. But I had an imaginative answer for that, too. I decided those glowing bags were Dracula's payroll. After all, why else would all the creatures be so pissed at Simon? He's stealing their wages, that's why. Simon picks up this glowing bag, and those dragon bone creatures were like "DAMMIT, that's my rent! I mean, come ON, I need a place to sleep, Simon, what the hell?" ... because otherwise, those stupid treasures would drive you crazy. My sister never liked Castlevania, which meant she bugged me endlessly to switch to Super Mario Bros. whenever I was playing Castlevania. Which, in a game with so many waves of enemies and intricate jumps, means a lot of "YOU MADE ME DIE!" accusations were heard in my basement throughout the late 1980s. Yet her tactics always worked - if I died, I always eventually blamed the game ("Those stupid mummies, throwing their Ace bandages around like they were free... well, there's no mummies in Mario, let's play that") and put in whatever she wanted to play. A big disappointment: there are no secret passages in Castlevania. I mean, what kind of ancient haunted castle in Transylvania has no secret passages!? How is Dracula supposed to sneak up on the innocent ladies he invites to his parties, in order to seduce them and suck their blood? Or, more practically, how is he supposed to get from his TV room to his underground lake without it taking roughly ten years to go down fifty stair cases, jumping over fifty pits, avoiding fifty spike presses, etc.? This castle layout - like that of Resident Evil 4 - defies all practical logic. There is no way this could ever be a working castle. All throughout my childhood I was obsessed with building structures - lego, blocks, 2x4s, tree houses (all failed), houses of cards, simply drawing them, you name it, I did it. So I was acutely aware of how stupid the layout of Dracula's castle was. For example: why are there no bathrooms or bedrooms? I'd seen the classic Dracula horror films, and there were plenty of both rooms in those movies. In fact, Dracula is famous for his hospitality ... at least, until he sucks your blood. But that's always later, after dinner and drinks, and once you've been tucked into your comfy, cozy bed. But Konami's castle is missing these key elements. OK, I thought, maybe this is one of those medieval fortress-type castles, where they only had a barracks and no one really expected any comfort. Except... from a defense standpoint, the castle is useless. Simon literally walks right in the front door, no moat, no drawbridge, no arrows shot from slits, no burning oil poured from ramparts, NOTHING. Dracula's castle has perhaps the worst defenses of any castle in video game history. I mean, what is Dracula thinking, leaving the FRONT DAMN DOOR to his castle WIDE OPEN?!!??! This boggled my seven-year-old mind, and still makes no sense at all. Is he inviting Simon in? Does he expect someone else? Is the door broken, and Dracula is too broke to fix it after hiring one too many red skeletons? Konami never explains. One last memory: I remember getting, finally, to Dracula - probably two years after I first got the game - and being extremely disappointed that he didn't have any dialog at all. I mean, not even "Welcome to your doom, Simon Belmont" or "No, Mr Bond, I expect to you die" or even "Boo!" Nothing. Not a word. He just wordlessly attacks. This is also not in the Dracula tradition. Anyone who has seen the films or read the book knows that Dracula is a tireless windbag - he can't shut up. He loves to speak - I mean, think of his famous speeches: "Listen to them - the children of the night. What music they make!" and "I never drink... wine" and of course "Your girls that you all love are mine already!" which is the Transylvanian equivalent of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. So let's face it - Konami's Castlevania game has a paper-thin plot that doesn't hold up to even a moments scrutiny. But who really cares, right? I mean - the game is fun to play, has tight controls, good graphics and sound and drives my sister up a wall - all the key requirements in any NES game. Next, I'll fondly remember and dismember a few other early classics that I had and thoughts about. Until then!

Walt Disney World's All-Star Sports Resort - Arcade Review

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:37:38 -0400

Hello fellow G1s! Sorry for the lengthy blog absence - I've been on vacation at Disney World in Florida with my wife, who works for Disney and gets us free entry into the parks and mega discounts on everything else except airfare. So we spent the last four days down there, staying at the All-Star Sports Resort. For anyone that's been to Disney World, you probably already know what and where that is, for here is a quick recap for Disney noobs: basically, it's a budget hotel on Disney property that is sports themed - surfing, baseball, football, tennis and basketball - with generous Disney character accents and huge pools. Well, just off the lobby is a small arcade. Before I go further, I should note that I haven't been to a real arcade in years, so a lot of these older games were nevertheless new to me. That said, here are a few pictures with comments: X-Men versus Street Fighter! Machine didn't seem to be running properly - very choppy animation, slowdown was common, the graphics were a bit faded. I didn't even know this title existed, and it looked pretty interesting - the demo included Ken kicking the hell out of Magneto, which was weird to watch. The Star Wars Trilogy Arcade machine was pretty popular. It looked like a rail shooter with fairly oldish graphics - maybe 10 years old? Nevertheless, it looked fun. With only $1 (yup - one dollar) in my pocket, I had to make my choice wisely, and this one looked like it had too steep a learning curve. Also: thank god it meant the ORIGINAL trilogy, and not these last three pieces of dung. Jurassic Park III, the arcade version; it's a light-gun game where you dodge dinosaurs and then shoot the living hell out of them. Maze of the Kings ... this one really tempted me, but it turns out it was more than a dollar per play, so I was out of luck. Apparently you play as an archeologist, killing mummies. The guns you use are WICKED looking. I had never heard of this, so I looked it up. Turns out it is EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY rare: http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=&game_id=12782 On a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being least common, it scored a freaking 2! So any rarity hunters going to Disney, check this machine out!! Yup, some games for the kiddies too. Now here is a weird one: Tux Racer. I used to play this for free on certain Linux systems my dad would build; Tux is the mascot for the Linux operating system. Whose idea it was to turn a FREE game into a COIN-OPERATED arcade version?? Other than my wife - who loves penguins - not a soul even ventured in the general vicinity of this machine. Ah... Roller Coaster Tycoon, the pinball game. This is what I spent my money on, and it ended up being well worth it - with two plays ($1) I ended up unlocking multiball twice, and got two extra plays. And I suck at pinball; so the difficulty is adjusted downward, for sure. Now, you might ask yourself "How in hell does the Roller Coaster Tycoon series translate to a pinball game?" Well... it doesn't. There is no "plot" or "story" that I could discern, just a lot of ramps and targets and pits and whatnot. A lot of fun! Space Invaders / Qix, Silver Anniversary Edition. This one I knew was ultra, ultra rare. http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=13124 On that same scale that gave Maze of the Kings a 2, this game earns a 1 (!!!!). So again, rarity hunters traveling to Florida, check this out! The ubiquitous Star Wars Racer arcade machine. I've seen these everywhere, from movie theaters to pizza parlors, you name it. I think they must give these out free somewhere... Mario Kart Arcade GP ... ?! Another one I didn't know existed, and really caught my eye. Weirdly, while watching the demo I noticed Ms Pac Man and Blinky the Ghost (?!). It looked very fun, and garnered a lot of attention (especially with Mario Kart Wii just released a couple months ago), but was mondo expensive - at least $2 per play, maybe more, I forget. Lil Hoops... this one I include because of a funny incident I witnessed. A group of kids, maybe 10 or 11 years old, swiped their card in the machine and then proceeded to steal ALL the basketballs as the machine released them. They then kicked the balls all over the arcade, until the parent in charge of them discovered what was going on, smacked the lead kid on the ass so hard he started crying in front of his friends (total humiliation!), and then apologized to the arcade employee who was chasing down the basketballs. All of this happened in the span on 30 seconds. Wild times... Lastly, I want to include two pictures from possibly the worst arcade in America: Alien Attack Power Play Arcade, at Orlando airport. Just say the name out loud, I dare you. Bad times ahead. Oh man, was it bad. Here's an interior shot to show how small it was and how few "games" it had: Yup, that's it. The whole place. There was blacklight air hockey, a couple cheap hoops machines like Lil Hoops, and some ancient arcade boxes of indeterminate origin. And yes, the two guys you see in the picture ARE trying to pick the lock on the air hockey machine. So that's my Disney arcade review. Some interesting things in the most unexpected of places! Anyone headed to Florida or Disney should take it upon themselves to check it out... but seriously, avoid that Alien place at the airport.

Travian, Revisited

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:46:45 -0400

Earlier in this blog, I reviewed an online game (technically, a MMORTS ... that is, massively multiplayer real-time strategy) called Travian (travian.us), and concluded that it was fun, but imbalanced. Well, I'm revising that conclusion. It's actually imbalanced and NOT fun. Here, again, is how the game operates. Much like Age of Empires, you start out with a village that has limited resources and some places for you to build things with said resources. A beginner is given nine days (an incredibly paltry amount of time) of immunity while they upgrade resources - wood, clay, iron, wheat - and build buildings such as barracks, marketplace, town wall, stables, and a "cranny," which is a hiding place for you to hide resources in the case of an attack. The game unfolds in real time - when you click on "upgrade clay pit" it tells you how many hours/minutes/seconds it will take until the upgrade is complete. This poses an important problem - players far from you take too long to reach. My sister plays, and her village is nine real-time hours from me. If I wanted to help her, or she help me, it's virtually impossible. I could be attacked twenty times by the time her reinforcements arrived. And often I am. There is one, and ONLY one way to succeed in this game: join a monster alliance. I imagine this is the same as joining a monster guild in a MMORPG. The entire dynamic of Travian is PvP - players raid each other to gain resources they don't have the patience to develop themselves, they raid each other to destroy villages, they raid just because they're jerks. Once that short immunity period is up, there is a 50/50 chance your fledgling village will be instantly annihilated by a powerful veteran. Why? Just because they can. Now, I had some luck, and all the players in my immediate vicinity were more or less benign. I managed to develop my village up to a population of 300+, which is pretty good. I had a decent standing army, was part of a small-to-midsized alliance (my sister's), had a stable economy, etc. Then my sister accidentally attacked, late one night, just once, a high-ranking member of a mega-alliance, one in the top 100 of all alliances. How did he react? Poorly. He didn't send a message, he didn't ignore her (she was less than half his size), he just started attacking, about every three hours or so... with HUNDREDS of troops. Now, it takes about 15-20 minutes to train a single troop... and bountiful resources, to boot. So to keep a standing army of 250-300 troops like he had meant you were a real powerhouse. It basically crippled my sister, ending any and all enjoyment in the game. Then a member of the same monster alliance - a group of jerks called Midgard, a real bunch of lowlifes, may they all get face herpes - started attacking me regularly. I don't suffer fools lightly, and immediately attacked back. Well, his monster alliance sent him hundreds of troops and he wiped me out. I dispatched some choice insults via the in-game mail, disabled my account, and quit. Why? I had no choice. One you are targeted by a stronger player, it's over. You have no other options but to either surrender, try like hell to enter their alliance (and why would they let you, when they can just rape you endlessly without repercussion?), or quit. Well, surrendering isn't an option for me, and I didn't want a part of an alliance that habitually picked on smaller players, so I had only one other choice: exit. This is a MAJOR problem. In a game that is entirely about player-vs-player combat, there needs to be a modicum, the barest minimum, of balance. And Travian has none. In fact, the entire game mechanic rewards imbalance. Once an alliance gets big enough, they can simply pick and choose who to eliminate. I never once saw a major war - one major alliance versus another - which validates my theory: Travian is about veterans preying on beginners, not about veterans challenging each other. Playing Travian for any amount of time, therefore, amounts to watching an adult kick a toddler in the face... repeatedly... for hours... for days. Or worse, a group of adults. Unless you have the good luck to join a monster alliance right from the start, or have an "in," you are going to be the toddler - because the adults are going to prevent you from progressing into a threat. I don't play MMOs, but I've read criticism that the games are hopeless for single players; well, now I understand it. A single player just cannot survive in a game world like that. For a free game, it has some value. Well, no, actually, it doesn't...because there is no sound at all, and the graphics are strange and cartoonish, with predominant yellows, greens and reds. The forums are entirely useless unless you are a power player - they're largely filled with alliance gossip, or technical questions like "How long until a flour mill repays the investment in wheat?" ... which are useless when you never have enough resources to even build a flour mill. So basically I'm warning all G1s (and anyone else reading this) against this highly, highly imbalanced online game. There is zero balance, and thus zero fun. Imagine playing Age of Empires... but after an hour of playing, your village just barely started, the computer attacks you with a well-developed army complete with siege equipment and wipes you out; then proceeds to rape your resources now that you are permanently unable to mount a defense of any kind. Sound fun? That's Travian.

PC Gaming Nostalgia: The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:39:43 -0400

When LucasArts released The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990, they immediately discovered that they had a humongous hit on their hands. Ron Gilbert and his team quickly commenced work on the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge; and this is a loving look back at that wonderful adventure. Released for the 1991 Christmas season, Monkey Island 2 (MI2) was an even BIGGER hit, selling over a half million copies; according to my source (OK, OK, it's MobyGames), that makes it "one of the best-selling adventure games ever." And trust me, it really was that popular. I was eleven years old when this game hit the stores, and I *lusted* after it. Before I get into MI2, let me tell a little bit about my history with the first game. Somehow, somewhere - I no longer remember the exact details - I obtained the EGA demo to The Secret of Monkey Island. For those who never came across it, it has different puzzles, and the goal is to answer a riddle posed by the bridge troll with the secret identity. I was obsessed with wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood and his hilarious quests. I must've played and replayed that demo about ten times before my dad said "Oh, what the hell" and picked up the full game. I still have the game, in the box, with all manuals and everything - it's almost a voodoo-like fetish to me at this point, representing an entire segment of my childhood. Needless to say, I cherish it. I played and replayed the full game of Monkey Island 1 about four or five times (my blog reviewing that game is here). I started seeing ads for MI2 in Computer Gaming Monthly (I think, memory is foggy), and started salivating. However, there was a catch; there's always a catch. At almost the exact same time, Sierra released Space Quest IV: Roger and the Time Rippers. I could only get one or the other. And I also loved, dearly loved, the Space Quest series. One of my fondest gaming memories is staying up all night long at a childhood friend's house and beating Space Quest III with him. Well, I chose Space Quest IV; and I still have that game with the box and all manuals also. And I didn't get Monkey Island 2 until YEARS later, when I was a sophomore in college. So, flash forward from 1991 to 2000. I was living in College Park, MD, in an apartment with three other hard-drinking gamers. For Christmas, I received from my mom one of the most welcome and most random presents ever - a giant multi-CD LucasArts collection containing The Dig, Full Throttle, Dark Forces, a game involving Heaven and Hell whose exact title I forget... and Monkey Island Madness, the relatively rare single-disc collection containing both Monkey Island 1 and 2. So that's when I first played both Full Throttle (INCREDIBLE game, and will be covered by me at a later date), and LeChuck's Revenge. A quick trivia note: originally, it came on a larger number of disks because (!) creator Ron Gilbert didn't think that CD-ROMs would survive more than a couple years (!!). Also, according to fairly recent trivia from my "source," it came on -12- disks for the Amiga, and earned the nickname Disk Juggling Simulator (!!!). So, on to the game. Like Monkey Island 1, it's an extremely humorous third-person adventure game using the same verb-noun system as the first game; that is, you have a verb bank ("WALK," "TALK," "PICK UP," etc.) and an inventory. You click on a verb, then either something on-screen ("WALK TO THE DOOR") or your inventory ("USE THE BREATH MINTS"). Very, very simple - really just a visual extension of the old parser system. The graphics, typical of LucasArts, were beautiful - colorful, detailed, hand-drawn backgrounds, great animations, the works. The sound was also imaginative and had GREAT musical themes. There's really not much to say about the game mechanic; it's simple, it functions exactly as you'd expect it to, it doesn't get in the way, and most importantly it is so natural that it becomes a perfect extension of the player's mind in short time. So, on to the plot, which actually caused some serious controversy due to the wild, seemingly arbitrary ending. At the end of the previous game, you defeat your dread enemy, the ghost pirate LeChuck; you've stopped him from marrying Governor Elaine Marley, and in fact won her love for yourself. At the opening of MI2, something has happened - Guybrush and Elaine are on the outs. Guybrush - finally a pirate (of some sort, anyway) - now searches for the ultimate treasure, called Big Whoop (Ha!). The game follows Guybrush across several different islands as he quests: Scabb Island, Phatt Island, Booty Island and Dinky Island. You sail on two different ships (if I remember correctly), one of them at least piloted by a really hilarious captain. LeChuck is resurrected, and the only way to destroy him (again) is with Big Whoop. So Guybrush goes a-questing. The puzzles are really funny and inventive: the spitting contest is famous and really well done, as is the voodoo doll segment. I also remember a lot of Indiana Jones references ("I hate snakes!") and a very easy-to-spot Star Wars reference. There is also a REALLY funny sequence where Guybrush is narrating the game in flashback, and there is a puzzle where you're suspended over a pit of acid. You can actually "kill" Guybrush here - only, he's telling the story in flashback, so it's impossible that he died. The person he's telling it to points this out, and he backtracks to the beginning of the acid pit scene - very funny! But no mention of the plot would be complete without mention of the endgame. It was, for lack of a better word, notorious. *SPOILER ALERT* LeChuck puts a spell on Guybrush and convinces him that he is his brother, that they are really just kids in an amusement park called Big Whoop, and that they have to go meet their parents. As they walk off, "Chuckie" turns toward the screen and we see his eyes glow with evil voodoo power. Then Elaine wonders where on earth Guybrush has gone... This ending caused a lot of puzzlement among Monkey Island fans. I didn't even own or play the game when it was new, and I remember the storm of fanmail sent to the magazines, and to LucasArts. The ending was surprisingly dark and surrealistic - after all, Guybrush loses at the end, LeChuck succeeds in tricking him, he's separated from Elaine, LeChuck appears to be in control. People were NOT happy. It was really just a step or two removed from the infamous "It's all just a dream" ending that is as cliched as the "It was a dark and stormy night" opening. There is another important item that needs mentioning: Ron Gilbert - creator of Maniac Mansion and then the Monkey Island series and the brain behind the first two games - left LucasArts after MI2. This was a BIG deal when it happened, and fans were very apprehensive about the third game, Curse of Monkey Island (which is actually my personal favorite). Gilbert later went on to create games more geared towards younger gamers, including the wildly popular Backyard Sports series. His colleagues Tim Schafer and David Grossman also went on to big things: Wikipedia tells me that Schafer later made Grim Fandango and Grossman made Day of the Tentacle - two absolute masterpieces and landmark games. So that's Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - a game that always gets a percentage of about 95% when reviewed, and often considered one of the best point-and-click adventures ever made. I HIGHLY recommend you play the whole series, but if you only have access to this one, don't hesitate - install it, DOSbox it, and enjoy! ----------------------------------- And now, a quick series of links to my last few blogs, in case anyone missed them: Wing Commander I, II and Privateer Wing Commander III and IV The Secret of Monkey Island X-Com:UFO Defense Radiata Stories (PS2) The Longest Journey

PC Gaming Nostalgia: The Wing Commander Series Part Two - III and IV

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:37:13 -0400

In part one of this nostalgic look back at PC gaming, I reviewed Wing Commander I, II and Privateer. WCI was a breakthrough game that pioneered the spaceflight combat genre, along with fantastic sound and graphics and a surprisingly deep story, with great characters. WCII followed it up superbly, improving on every element. Privateer allowed the player freedom in what had previously been a rather closed universe - and has perhaps the biggest cult following of all. But then came Wing Commander III, a monster release in 1994 that - it can be said in all honesty - changed the entirety of PC gaming, and perhaps gaming in general. It's impossible to understate how huge WCIII was on release. At the time I was frequenting computer shows with my dad, and that was the ONLY game on people's lips. I had friends who were previously console-only come to my house, play the game, and become PC converts. Why, you ask? Read on... We all know the early-1990s flop of full-motion video (FMV) games; disasters like Night Trap gave the whole genre a black eye, even though several high-quality games like Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within were made. But no game did it better than Wing Commander III, though many tried and failed. While it wasn't fully FMV - there were, of course, the generous combat missions which were animated traditionally - the game actually had famous actors play the parts, it had a real cinema-quality story, it had good dialog, it had ... realism at its best. First, the main character - previously either unnamed or named by the player - is now Christopher Blair (his last name being a contraction of "Blue Hair," the name that programmers called him when developing the first two games) ... and he's played by none other than Mark Hamill (!!). That's right, Luke Skywalker returns to space in WCIII. Although Hamill looks a little different than the previous incarnations of Blair, he fills the part quite well. The player easily connects with him, and identifies with him. He comes across as human, understanding, brave, a little cocky but with a good sense of humor: all good qualities in a hero. A virtually unknown Josh Lucas appears in the game as a fellow pilot. And ex-adult film star Ginger Lynn Allen (!!!) stars as the mechanic with a soft eye for Blair. None of the actors fall down on the job, and all have distinct personalities - especially the turned Kilrathi pilot Hobbes. You'd think a video game character in a big humanoid cat suit would be in big danger of coming across goofy, awkward and just silly. But it actually works the opposite way - Hobbes (an enemy pilot who joins the Terran Confederation) is lifelike, and the actor doing his motions and voice makes him seem wise, kind, understanding and entirely sympathetic. Famously at the time, Origin System's budget for WCIII was four million dollars, an unheard-of sum back in 1994. Done mostly on blue-screens and with the best CGI the industry had to offer, all the between-flight sequences are done realistically, with live actors in full-motion video. While this was fairly new at the time, WCIII is one of the very few games to get all the little things right. Because the FMV scenes were limited to story progress or short character interactions, the player never overdosed on it; instead, all the emotional impacts throughout the game were made that much heavier. If a player died because of your actions, it was a significant event. Imagine watching a movie and because of a choice you make, a character dies. The consequences are enormous, and it largely works out. The battle mechanics were more refined than ever. The graphics were sharper, smoother, brighter, more colorful, and the sounds were equally good, especially the voices (both friend and foe) mid-combat. The ships were new and interesting, and it was fun and fascinating to discover what new weapons the game had to offer, what new devices, etc. But enough on the technical aspects: the story that I mentioned before as being so captivating must be explained. The opening scene was incredibly dramatic: it showed a group of human prisoners, captured by the enemy Kilrathi, standing before a military tribunal. They are summarily executed - except one, your love interest from the previous two games, Angel Devereaux. The game then cuts to your character (Blair) and Taggert (callsign: Paladin, played by John Rhys-Davies, best known perhaps as Sallah in the Indiana Jones series) looking at the totally destroyed Concordia, the carrier you launched from in the previous game. So, two huge events right in the opening. You are summarily transferred to the carrier Victory by Admiral Tolwyn, played by... Malcolm McDowell! (Anyone seen A Clockwork Orange?). This plot takes place in 2669, and deals with striking at the heart of the Kilrathi - their home planet, Kilrah, which has some seismic issues that make Mount Vesuvius look like a happy green meadow of peace and tranquility. This is also a play on the title of the game, The Heart of the Tiger: it refers both to the planet Kilrah and it's also the Kilrathi nickname for Blair, since he has proven himself in dozens of incredibly difficult missions and shot down many brave warriors and epic-sized ships, not to mention uncovering the stealth ship plot from the previous game. Now, before I move on the WCIV, I want to reminisce a bit - the nostalgia mentioned in the title of the post. I played this game in the attic of my dad's house, with a beat-up Logitech joystick that just wouldn't die, usually late at night. The joystick had problems with calibration; it was one of those were there were two small wheels built into the base - one for the X axis and one for the Y - and you moved them back and forth until the reticle/cursor stopped moving automatically and stayed put. Except that A) it was very very easy to accidentally brush one of the wheels and completely screw the calibration and B) sometimes, in the middle of a game, the calibration would go haywire all by itself. So more than once I found myself approaching some monster enemies when all of a sudden my ship would slowly start drifting left ... then faster, faster, until finally I was spinning wildly in circles while that Kilrathi pilot taunted me mercilessly, usually about being a hairless ape or something like that. UGH. And I can't tell you how many times my dad would yell up about it being late, and I would reply "Just a minute, I'm only at the first Nav point!" ... and he'd actually understand. WCIII kept me up for hours and hours; it was one of worst offenders in the "just one more mission" club. ...and then came Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, in 1996. Famous for being the second-most expensive game ever made (behind Shenmue), it cost ten million or so to make - or roughly the cost of the original Star Wars, according to MobyGames. And it shows - everything from WCIII is taken to the next level and then some. The cutscenes are smoother, better quality, and longer. There are more characters, more famous actors (Casper Van Dien, Mark Dacascos, and more), more everything, including game discs - it took six full CD-ROMs to install, which was epic length at the time. Later, a DVD version was released as DVD drives just began to appear, but I never had that edition and can't speak for the supposedly higher quality video. WCIV begins where WCIII left off: war is over between the Kilrathi and the Terran Confederation... and we won. However, after thirty-plus years of war, the economy and social structure are undergoing massive flux, and things are going poorly all over the place; especially for now-Colonel Blair, who is a poor farmer scratching out a living (shades of Ulysses S. Grant?). An old friend ... if you can call him that ... from the past comes knocking and recalls Blair to military service. All hell is breaking loose, there seems to be a new menace in town with a new weapon that eats ships up from the inside out, and you are given the responsibility of setting things to rights. Of course. However, very quickly the game takes a very surprising turn: you hear that one of your best friends from the previous game, a man named Eisen, has defected from the Confederation - and you're given the chance to go with him. If you stay, you'll be given one more chance to defect with your friends. If you remain loyal ... you die. The game cannot be won if you stay with the Confederation, which is a fairly interesting twist. You must become what appears to be a traitor to progress through the game, and to discover the ultimate villains involved. This confused and frustrated some players back when it came out... your choice is not at all that clear. This game has a lot of new characters, and a lot of interweaving stories; it's quite complicated compared to the previous games. It also has an enormous dialog tree, and features a very memorable dialog battle late in the game, where you must best an old enemy with your words, carefully choosing what phrases will undo him, what will undermine his arguments and what will advance yours. It was a novel idea, and worked perfectly. In this age of linear, boring dialog trees, I really miss WCIV's system. If you made unpopular choices, the group morale really suffered, and it showed. If you snubbed someone, they remembered it. Things mattered; and people died. This game, unlike the previous, had some fairly generic wingmen who would routinely die on missions. Wikipedia calls them "redshirts," after the Star Trek expendables who usually died while out on missions with Kirk and the gang. And that is what function they fulfill in WCIV. This game also had another interesting plot branch; I already mentioned that you are given the "choice" to defect fairly early in the game. However, if you fail several missions before that defection occurs, you are ... sent home (!!!). That's right, they pack your ass up and ship you back to your little farm, game over, end of story. This actually happened to me back in 1996, and I was furious - since Mark Hamill is still Christopher Blair, I'll use a Star Wars analogy. Imagine if Luke is with Yoda, training to be a Jedi. He tries to lift a big rock, can't do it a few things ... and suddenly Yoda says "Suck you do! To home, you must return," and BAM, movie's over, Luke is back on that lonely desert world where his aunt and uncle were killed, growing turnips and potatoes and wishing Yoda wasn't such a hardass. Granted, Blair is supposed to be this pilot legend who saved the whole human race three times over ... but still, he's been farming, he should be rusty, give the man some time to warm up! Or rather, give the player new to the game some leeway. This game actually had a lot of criticism leveled at it. For starters, the missions were less interesting that before - everything was more or less a rehash of what had come before. Taking on a monster ship all by yourself ... check. Dueling a long-standing foe who desperately needs an ass-kicking ... check. Defeating waves and waves of enemy ships ... check. There were no major advances in the combat system other than the usually much improved graphics and sound. Another thing: the movies were MUCH longer and more involved, and the gameplay was balanced much more heavily towards the film elements than the combat. While in WCIII, the combat was riveting, very exciting and served as the main focus of the game - with the movie clips interspersed throughout to maintain dramatic focus and raise the stakes of the combat, everything was reversed in WCIV. Instead, the combat mechanic felt old, outdated, stale, rusty ... tacked on a sci-fi movie. Many players resented watching so much FMV unfold, then being greeted with rather substandard gameplay which never lasted long, then being thrown right back into the "movie." I also have read here and there some rumors (and nothing more than that, I've never seen any figures) that it didn't sell very well, meaning that Origin never recouped the ten million it dropped on the game, meaning that WCV was never made. I'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense. So there we go: Wing Commanders III and IV, the former a masterpiece of its genre, the latter perhaps a slightly tarnished classic well-worth playing but showing a little wear around the edges, maybe some miscalculation by the design team. (Lastly, if anyone has any classic PC games they want reviewed as part of this PC Gaming Nostalgia series, send me a brief PM and I'll consider it)

PC Gaming Nostalgia: The Wing Commander Series Part One - I, II and Privateer

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:00:42 -0400

Anyone who played PC games in the first half of the 1990s knows, remembers and loves the Wing Commander series, made by Origin Systems and specifically game designer Chris Roberts. Origin Systems is also famous for perhaps the most beloved RPGs of all computerdom, the long-running Ultima series that bit the dust so hard at the end, and of course the instant-classic Crusader: No Remorse. But it is for Wing Commander that they are perhaps best known for - because the games sold like crazy, because the series ended well (unlike Ultima), because of the incredible cinema in games III and IV which featured freaking Mark Hamill (!), Malcolm McDowell (!!) and Ginger Lynn Allen (!!!) - to name but three - appearing as characters. Those are some of the few games that actually deserves their own IMDB page. This half of the review will focus on I, II and Privateer. Lastly, as an aside, I won't be reviewing Privateer 2: The Darkening now or later, because I never owned or played it. So here we go! The premise of the whole series is simple but exciting: humans have expanded into space, have encountered other species who don't necessarily want us in space, and have gone to war. The first game - Wing Commander from 1990 - takes place in 2654 and pits the Terran Confederation (us) against the giant humanoid tigers known as the Kilrathi (them). You play as a nameless pilot with blue hair who flies for the Terran Conderation aboard the carrier TCS Tiger's Claw, and the bulk of the game is done in the cockpit of one of several planes. The planes vary from the usual lightly-armed-but-very-fast to the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none to the monster-gunner-slow-as-hell ... any fan of flying games will recognize the stereotypes present here. At the beginning, you choose a callsign - it's fun to go with something totally unheroic, and watch as people call you, in all seriousness, "Booger" or whatever - and get to work; in a pattern that remains consistent for the rest of the series, you'll often watch a short film regarding the success or failure of your mission, explore the limited expanse of the ship you're on, interacting with the few characters there are, then flying a mission. Sounds simple, right? Right... and wrong. Buried within these few steps is an incredible richness of detail. The characters are three-dimensional and really grow on you; they have feelings, emotions and loyalties of their own, will respond to your dialog choices in markedly different ways, and will go their own way throughout the game. The characterizations alone make you believe you're in a fully alive game world, and no one who has ever played this game will forget Angel, Maniac, Iceman, Paladin, Spirit ... they are all fully formed characters. Second, within the limited space of the ship you're stationed to is a really, really rich graphical and auditory experience. The graphics are beautiful, sharp, with tons of little details. You will be fully immersed, trust me. And the sound was so famously good, it caused my dad and I to go out and buy the first Soundblaster board - back when they were expensive, very expen$ive - to hear them. There may be few things to do during your downtime, but those few things are rendered wonderfully well. However, Wing Commander I is really, at heart, a war game in space; so while the story is good and the characters deep, the real core of the game is the fighting. Which brings me to the actual flying of missions, the heart of the game. Wing Commander I-IV and Privateer use a first-person cockpit view, where you can view the basic radar, armament controls, etc., along with some part of the space immediately in front of you with a reticle in the middle. You can switch to other views, but I never remember having a reason to do so except to admire whatever new ship I was flying in. The games were best played via a combo of keyboard and joystick - I never had any luck at all with the mouse or keyboard when controlling the ship - and were easily mastered, very intuitive. The in-flight graphics were very impressive, excellent for their time, and featured mini talking portraits of your wingmen on the com screen (amazing at the time). And if you died, there was a really memorable and vivid depiction of your death. The bulk of the game plays out in the cockpit, and that's where most of the fun and excitement occur too. The explosions of enemy ships are glorious to behold, and I'm sure many a kid was steered into the Air Force after years of playing these games. You had some limited control of your armament, you had some control over your wingman (hence Wing Commander) - usually basic stuff like "Follow me" or "Form on my wing" and the invaluable "Attack my enemy!" - and, astounding to my ten-year old eyes at the time, as your ship was battered by enemy fire you actually saw the accrued damage in your cockpit, as one viewscreen after another stopped working, panels burst open leaving exposed wires, scorch marks appeared, cracks showed up in your cockpit, etc. It's important to note that Wing Commander featured a win/lose plot tree - every few missions would be a Big Plot Mission - win it, and the Kilrathi would suffer a major setback while the Terran Confederacy advanced into new systems; lose it, and not only do the Kilrathi enter our turf, but the characters begin reacting to you with less than joy in their hearts. There are a few famously difficult missions ("Kurosawa 2" will strike instant fear in the hearts of those who have played), and it was very challenging to stay on the winning path. The first time I played I actually ended up on the losing path, and was mad at myself for days. You can also be promoted - fairly rapidly - an earn medals for your good combat skills. Wing Commander 2: Vengeance of the Kilrathi came out in 1991, the year after the first game, and stepped everything up a notch. Your carrier from WC1, the aforementioned Tiger's Claw, is destroyed right in the opening by stealth fighters - but your character is the only one who sees the fighters, and so no one believes they exist... and your poor character is believed to be a coward who allowed the death of thousands. Ugh. WC2 placed a lot more emphasis on story and character than the first game, and therefore a little less emphasis on the actual flying. In this game, you can name your characters as well as provide whatever callsign you want (I remember fighting with my sister over whether to call him "Nighthawk" or "Goober" ... one guess as to who nominated which one); and you're slightly less responsible for your wingmen, as they now are smart enough to eject if their ships are destroyed - in the first game, they simply died. The bulk of this game takes place in 2665, and deals with your character recovering his reputation as a heroic fighter, as well as battling pompous officials and wooing your love interest. It's a soap opera with a LOT of space battles. Some of the series' most memorable characters appear here: Shadow (her part is brief, but memorable), Hobbes the Kilrathi defector (a GREAT character!), Doomsday, Spirit, Angel and ... of course ... Jazz, who has a major part to play. Another rich cast, each character fleshed out in pieces as the game progresses, lends a huge amount of credulity to the game world. The graphics and sound are both upgraded as much as a year's improvement in hardware could provide, and the enemy AI is noticeably better - when injured, the enemy pilots will now mercilessly stalk you until you're dead. It was a big improvement in every way. In between WC2 and WC3 came Wing Commander: Privateer. I'm going to admit that I played this game until my Logitech joystick broke (!) and I had to replace it at the next computer show. The premise is simple: you are Nameless Pilot with Brown Hair (although I just read that an early Origin press release apparently named him Grayson Burrows, I don't remember him ever being called that in the game), a "privateer" pilot who flies missions for money only - not for loyalty or love or patriotism. Just cold, hard cash money. In an unusual move, the player can be a plain mercenary (run only legal merchandise), a pirate (run contraband like drugs, slaves and the like) or some combination of the two. You're not forced into being a "good" character, which was a refreshing change. You can be as immoral and despicable as you want - and frankly, it was fun AND lucrative to be a pirate. The game's Big Plot involves a space battle waking up an ancient alien technology, and it begins attacking both the Terran Confederacy AND the Kilrathi, and anything else that gets in the way. You eventually get the nod to go and take care of it - for money, of course, and to bring back whatever technology you can salvage. I much preferred the open-ended sandbox gameplay to the fairly linear main plot, but it wasn't bad. I remember the last boss being hard as hell, though. Unlike the other Wing Commander games, in Privateer you used money to upgrade the hell out of your ship, and eventually to buy new ships altogether. This was a big attraction - no more being demoted or waiting for the authorities to iron out prototypes! Now YOU had the power to control what ship you flew in. This was thoroughly awesome. You also bought your own weapons, nav system, torpedoes, everything. The graphics and sound were truly superior for their era. Here are a few quick screen shots, thanks to MobyGames: The hanger bay. New Constantinople. Oxford. Cockpit view. I remember each and every place you can go with vivid clarity. The big allure was that finally you had access to an entire system of the Wing Commander universe, could choose whatever you wanted to do, could fly your OWN ship, etc. Just like in real life, things were best when you had NO BOSS - Privateer equaled freedom back in 1993. Finally, Privateer has been remade by fans several times. My personal favorite is Privateer Gemini Gold but a quick trip to the Wikipedia entry for the game will provide links to the others. So that is my look back at three games from the Wing Commander universe - Wing Commander I, II and Privateer - that completely captured my early adolescence and cost me untold hours of joy and suffering. Next, I'll review the most famous and well-known of the series: Wing Commander III and IV!

PC Gaming Nostalgia: The Secret of Monkey Island

Tue, 27 May 2008 03:38:10 -0400

This is a review that is going to make a lot of people smile as they remember a great game: The Secret of Monkey Island from LucasArts (1990, http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/secret-of-monkey-island) and designed by Ron Gilbert. Many people think the Monkey Island series was the crown achievement of LucasArts, and I am in that group as well. Solo adventures aside - Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, et. al. - the four Monkey Island games was the series that most directly competed with the classic Sierra games, the series that had the broadest appeal, and generally the series with the best sense of humor. Here is the plot: you are Guybrush Threepwood (!!), a pirate wannabe, who begins the game on Melee Island, a Caribbean hideout that's home to many pirates, both the dreadfully fearsome and the totally ludicrous, and ruled by the beautiful and fair Elaine Marley. Guybrush quickly visits the local watering hole, the SCUMM bar - a play on the engine that the game runs on, SCUMM, which stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion" - and encounters the local triad of pirate lords. They each give him a quest that he must complete before he can call himself a "real" pirate. So Guybrush goes all over the island searching for items and solving puzzles, trying like hell to become a pirate. Eventually he meets the lovely governor Marley and the awful sheriff Fester Shinetop (!)... then after a big plot twist (which I'll leave unsaid, in the chance that a few readers haven't played this and will do so in the future, hopefully the very near future), Guybrush confronts the nemesis who will become his dedicated enemy throughout the series - the dread undead pirate LeChuck! So, right from the start, you can tell that the game is a mix of satire, parody and straightforward references to pirates and pirate mythology. There is a Voodoo priestess, a trio of unemployed pirates with a pet rat (moving your mouse over the pet rat repeatedly leads to a great in-game joke!), the ghost pirate LeChuck's first lieutenant who is a hilariously cowering coward, a great prisoner with bad breath you have to free, an old crotchety shopkeeper with a surprising love life, an absolutely hilarious pirate named Meathook who has lost BOTH hands and has hooks instead, a fencing master, some hilarious cannibals (!), a circus troop and, of course, Stan. Stan the used-everything salesman is perhaps the most recognizable recurring character outside of LeChuck, and his initial incarnation here is definitely the most beloved - he is the very model of the ultimate shyster, the cheap con man, the dishonest creep who rips everyone off. So here is a quick look at the infamous Stan: Doesn't he just look the part? And here is a quick guide I found on the web to the rest of the cast: http://www.scummbar.com/games/index.php?game=1&sub=info&todo=3 So now you have an idea of the plot and the overall approach and style of the game. Let me move on to the best part of all - the outstanding sense of humor! One of the most innovative puzzles in the game is the famous insult dueling, and here's how it works: Guybrush encounters a random pirate on the pathways of Melee Island, and they initiate a duel. But before they pit sword against sword, one fighter insults the other. In order to win the swordplay, the one who is insulted has to make a perfect comeback. Here are a few gems: "My hankerchief will wipe up your blood!" to which the comeback is "So you got that job as a janitor, after all." ... "You make me want to puke" to which the comeback is "You make me think somebody already did." ... and of course the infamous "You fight like a dairy farmer" to which the reply is "How appropriate, you fight like a cow." That response about the cow has turned up ALL over the web, and I continue to catch it now and then in strange, out-of-the-way place. Do a search on it sometime, and you'll be surprised where you'll be taken. Also, some interesting trivia regarding the insults: in The Secret of Monkey Island all were written by famed author Orson Scott Card! As for the rest of the puzzles, most are pretty straightforward, although a few require an oblique sense of logic or a humorous mind able to see that sometimes A + B = Z. Many of them are spoken of regularly among Monkey Island fans, including the rubber chicken puzzle, the way to Monkey Island puzzle, the flinging rocks from the mesa puzzle, and of course, the Head of the Navigator puzzle - which is really inspired, I have to admit. The puzzles are all very very high-grade, well planned and executed. This leads to an important point: in The Secret of Monkey Island, as in all LucasArts adventure games, it is _almost_ impossible to die. The results of the puzzles, unlike in Sierra games, cannot kill Guybrush. This sounds exceptionally forgiving, and it is... but it has the result of focusing your efforts on the puzzles, and taking your mind off of any unpleasant consequences of your decisions. There is only one way to kill Guybrush that I know of, and it takes some patience to make it happen (PM me if you want to know how, or if you know more than one way), but it is a GREAT joke when it happens, and is worth the effort to discover. I want to discuss this in a little depth, though - there is a deep schism among adventure gamers as to whether it is superior to die in games or not. There is no easy answer. Sierra games are the most famous in which the player faces death - sometimes quick and painful - at every possible turn. This raises the stakes of each puzzle: fail, and you die and have to start over. It also subtly raises the stress level of the gamer, too: as you come to identify with the character, you begin to dread the death as much as they would. However, each death offers the writers the opportunity to provide some great jokes that go along with the untimely demises! I can remember several great deaths off the top of my head, usually accompanied with clever animations. The opposing camp has a lot of ammo too: if you can't die, then the game is friendlier toward to the player, and is more accessible to players who would be daunted by repeated deaths. It lowers the frustration level considerably, and this is a major point for some players. LucasArts became famous for finding the perfect balance between hard puzzles and good pacing, so ultimately I think the lack of deaths - no matter the personal preference - works out just fine. The music in this game is absolutely wonderful. I am going to provide five tracks from the soundtrack in glorious MP3 - remember, most players first heard them in their original MIDI glory, and I first encountered them via the magic of the original 8-bit SoundBlaster. Here we go: Main Theme SCUMM bar Ghost Ship Shuffle LeChuck's Theme Monkey Island Whenever I read about the great music from some game, my first thought is "Yeah, but is it as good as Monkey Island?" And I can't tell you how many times I've had the LeChuck theme come into my head at some random time and stay there all day. Lastly, if you search YouTube you can find a lot of fan versions of these themes. So that more or less sums up The Secret of Monkey Island; a really wonderful, colorful pirate adventure with excellent humor, excellent puzzles, great graphics and sound, jokes that have become institutions over time (look, a three-headed monkey!), characters who are unforgettable, an insidious villain in the Ghost Pirate LeChuck, a good love interest ... you name it, this game has it all. So with my obvious 10/10 rating, I'll leave you all with three small pieces of interesting trivia. -Did you know that this game was released for the Sega CD? -You can instantly win the game with the command Ctrl + W -Like many other LucasArts games, there is a Sam and Max reference ... hint: it's on Monkey Island itself.

PC Gaming Nostalgia: X-Com

Sun, 25 May 2008 16:56:12 -0400

Like many people my age, the first games I ever played were on a PC. And if you've read my "Gaming Now and Then" posts, you'll know that I've been playing PC games since about 1985, and have an enormous amount of nostalgia and happy memories (and some unhappy) for the PC game industry. So today I want to talk about a real gaming classic - X-Com: UFO Defense, from 1998. X-Com is one of those games that was recognized instantly as a great classic, and many people in the two or three years after it was released had it in the top 5 or 10 games EVER MADE. It was a total, thorough hit and was followed by at least two sequels I'm aware of, though I never played them. X-Com is a tactical turn-based strategy game, based around the following idea: aliens have begun attacking the earth, setting up bases around the globe and patrolling the skies. When they get confident enough, they will eventually enter a city to terrorize the citizens and cause havoc. Your job, as the leader of X-Com, is to provide counter-terrorism of sorts; you build bases, train soldiers, assemble equipment and research new weapons and abilities, all in the name of defeating the aliens and wiping them off of Earth, once and for all. Very simple plot, tried and true, and yet very identifiable also - no one likes hostile aliens landing in their home country, making themselves home, and wasting citizens just for fun. There are several kinds of aliens - some are weak physically but have psychic powers while others have mechanized shells protecting their frail bodies, and still others are physically very strong and fast and will devour you if you stray to close. The worst kind (at least to me) are the aliens who attack you and attempt to transform you soldier (or a citizen) into a horrible zombie-like creature, turning your own men against you. An awful fate, especially when you first see the unholy creatures "hatch." All these different races of aliens provide a lot of opportunity for strategy, as tactics that work against one type will DEFINITELY not work against another. In addition, they simply look interesting and creepy, and provide a lot of atmosphere to the game. The gameflow goes like this: your base radar picks up a flying saucer of some kind. You launch a plane and intercept it, hopefully shooting it down over land. If this occurs, you send another plane full of men and equipment to the crash site, where they disembark, eliminate or capture any surviving aliens, capture their technology if possible, and return to your base. Occasionally the aliens will grow bold and attack a city like Rio or Moscow, and you must fly to defend it or risk losing the support of that nation (more on that in a moment). Lastly, you gain intelligence and ultimately determine where the alien bases are - once you know that, you can send in your now well-trained team to destroy that race's presence on Earth once and for all. Pretty simple. Yet COMPLETELY addicting, and the game has enormous depth and richness. For example, each country in the world contributes some finances to the X-Com project. That means you have to defend all the member countries, or risk losing some money - or worse, having a country pull out altogether and siding with the aliens (damn Russians...)! So you must be sure your radar covers a large area like Europe or Asia or North America and not just the middle of one country - this way, you protect many countries at once and not just a select few. Playing with low finances is an exercise in futility, to be sure - you won't have enough money to outfit the few soldiers you can afford to recruit. The real meat of the game is the turn-based combat when you infiltrate a crash site or a terrorized city or an alien based. You lead your men from the plane they arrive in all over the map, and you have a certain number of "time units" to use for each soldier. You can use these time units to move, to maneuver (crouch, duck, etc.), to fire your weapon in a burst, or in a snipe shot, or a snap shot, etc. So you have to carefully manage your team to make sure that you don't just rush them out into the open, only to have an alien walk right up and kill them because they had no time left for a counter-shot. This "time unit" management leads to some excruciatingly stressful events, like having your soldier post up at a corner, only to have a mutant alien pop around the corner and maul your timeless soldier. So the combat requires a surprising amount of forethought and strategy. The graphics and sound were both very good - the graphics are crisp, sharp and bright, with a really good dynamic lighting system - aliens will deliberately lurk in the shadows until they can strike, and sometimes your only counter is to launch an incendiary grenade into a dark location, hoping there are no innocent civilians there instead. The music is pulse-pounding and creates a very tense mood - not that the game needs to be any more tense. Basically, every aspect of X-Com: UFO Defense was executed successfully by MicroProse/Mythos Games ... the only complaints I could lodge would be A) the battles can take very long times, especially if there is just one alien left and it is hiding ... B) Sometimes the aliens seem to "cheat" and know where you are - even the aliens who aren't psychic - and you can be wiped out ridiculously quickly, even high-level troops who are combat hardened and well-trained. The difficulty curve is also pretty high, and even on the lowest levels most players will struggle at first. Still, these are very minor complaints. There is a reason that X-Com was considered a Hall of Fame game almost immediately upon release - it takes a simple game idea and works it to perfection. I highly recommend digging up a copy if you possibly can and playing through it. The game is very, very small by today's computing standards - something like 12 MB installed on mine - and can be run flawlessly with DosBOX. So go for it! Save the earth from rampaging aliens with your elite troops... and watch out for the damn Russians, who seem to defect to the alien side every time I play...

Review: Radiata Stories (PS2)

Sat, 24 May 2008 03:20:04 -0400

Topic: This is a fairly quick review of the PS2 game Radiata Stories, from September 2005. I'll give my impressions, thoughts, and critique. Enjoy! There are so many games I want to review in the coming weeks, I hardly know where to start. I glanced through my collection and saw a game I absolutely had to give a few words on, since I had really enjoyed it and since I hadn't heard about it hardly anywhere else: Radiata Stories, for the PlayStation 2. To start, the game is an action/adventure with light RPG elements. Your character is Jack Russell (!), son of a famous knight who died before the game begins. You want to join the knights of Radiata - as your father did - but are defeated in the trials by a fierce, independent girl named Ridley Silverlake. However, Jack's father's reputation pushes him through into candidacy, and he joins the knights. Meanwhile, the uneasy truce between humans and non-humans (fairies, elves, orcs, etc) is being strained to the breaking point by a disease called Algandars - the disease makes humans irrational and violent, and makes normally immortal elves die permanently. So, as a fledgling knight, Jack must complete sensitive quests between the humans and non-humans, make important decisions regarding friends, and basically solve all the kingdom's problems. The game mechanic works more or less like this: Jack, in a cartoon-like 3D world, runs around and ... kicks things. You read that right, the main way that Jake interacts with the world is through kicking. You kick a chair, and perhaps something pops out. You kick a bed, and maybe a healing potion (hidden, I guess, under the covers??) is revealed. You kick a bush and who knows what you'll get. You kick a person and ... you duel! Yup, duels are usually initiated by kicking people. Sometimes they only get annoyed first, and you have to do it repeatedly. Once you duel and fight, you get experience and money - and sometimes they'll join you, once you've proven yourself to them. This brings up the most interest aspect of the game - there are literally 177 characters you can recruit to join you (!!). Some only join once you do something for them first - find something, find someone, go somewhere, etc. - some only join when you defeat them in battle, some only join when you've risen enough as a knight, etc. And because halfway through the game or a little later Jack must choose to join the humans or the non-humans, only about half the characters are available on any given play-through. And each of the characters is given just enough story and dialog to be distinct - and often quite individualistic, enough to be memorable to me even years after playing the game. In addition, all the NPCs have their own schedules which they follow day and night, so you have to catch certain characters in certain places or miss them entirely. This results in a world of surprising depth, even though a thinking gamer will recognize the underlying shallowness, it gives the impression of depth - and in this game, that's enough. However, it was the endless (and often frustrating) mechanic of recruiting the best characters in the game that caused me to cease playing it before I beat it; yup, you read that right, I never beat Radiata Stories. I was trying to get the head knight to join me, but the prescribed method never worked. I tried every walkthrough, every strategy guide, everything. Finally I got so angry I said "To hell with it," and switched to a different game. The fact that this happened is sort of important. Whenever a game has a big enough flaw in it that a player doesn't make it to the end ... well, that's obviously a big, big problem. And frankly, the game has many other flaws. For example, the running from location to location is extremely tedious. And the "leveling" requires endless battles - endless, tiring, boring battles. The combat is, sadly, uninspiring and not very fun. Lastly, a lot of the "fetch it" quests are tedious to the extreme. These flaws add up, and several times I found myself pushing myself to turn on the game and slog through a few more recruits and missions. This is a bad sign. Also on the bad side is the plot - which is fairly generic anime-tinged fantasy with elves, orcs, tension between races, a big epic series of dragons menacing the world, etc. I wasn't interested in it and never felt very involved. However, these flaws are salvaged - somewhat - by very attractive music, whose themes are ultra-catchy, and by very colorful, bright, well-drawn graphics. The graphics were a real joy, actually, and made otherwise boring sections of the game somewhat worth pushing through. Also, the RPG elements - raising your strength, speed, learning and choosing from new moves, etc. - worked pretty well, and I enjoyed getting new weapons and new moves, then testing them out on enemies. All in all, Radiata Stories is an odd mix of highly original and highly cliched elements that add up to a very mixed bag. If you have a VERY high degree of patience, and a taste for oddball NPCs who can almost all be recruited to join up with you, bright cartoonish graphics and good sound ... did I mention a VERY high degree of patience? ... then you will like and maybe love Radiata Stories. If you have a low tolerance for repetitive elements, or require a really gripping story, etc., then stay far, far away from this title. Overall, I think I would give it a C+, or 7/10.

Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (movie)

Fri, 23 May 2008 04:21:00 -0400

I know this site has a lot of movie lovers, based on the strong comments that movie-based games generate here at ScrewAttack... and I saw the first showing possible of Indy 4 last night, at 12:01 on Thursday morning / Wednesday night... so I thought I'd share a few quick thoughts with everybody. I will avoid all spoilers that I can, because I know most people haven't seen it. First, I thought the film was closest in spirit to Temple of Doom (among the earlier films, that is) in that the plot is completely goofy and has none of the biblical seriousness of Raiders or Crusade. The plot is going to bother some people, to be sure; it bothered me at first, too. But I thought about it in some depth, and accepted it - especially in context of the more or less equally silly plot of Temple of Doom. However, stunt-wise, it is closest to The Last Crusade... the same types of vehicle chases, swinging stunts, and a liberal dose of humor with the action - they're in the same proportion as The Last Crusade. John Hurt: completely wasted. His character is essentially worthless, even at the very end. He could have been written out with very little trouble, and it probably would've improved the story by tightening it up. I'm not at all sure what function the screenwriters / director / etc. thought his character provided, but it didn't succeed. Shia Labeouf: Much better than I expected. His character, Mutt Williams, comes across very well - a little goofy, tough-as-nails, smart and cagey, quick with the wit, and brave. A good sidekick for Indy. The setting: Indy in the 1950s - I worried about this, but it ended up succeeding. First, the Soviets make excellent villains, just like the Burmese in the latest Rambo. You don't hesitate to cheer when they die a horrible death. Second, George Lucas clearly has a lot of fondness for the late 50s, because there are little details all throughout the film that are pitch-perfect for the culture and the time period. The action: is non-stop, always exciting, and REALLY well-done. Harrison Ford is clearly doing almost all his own stunts, and the CGI seemed to be fairly minimum, which is amazing considering the scope and speed of the various stunts. Very, very good. Cate Blanchett: a good villain, although I felt she got off better in the end than any of the previous villains. She is just as smart and tough as Indy, just perhaps less lucky and less resourceful. Harrison Ford: looks damn good for 65 years old, he looks just a few years older than he did in The Last Crusade, which came out almost 20 years ago (!). Karen Allen: also looks damn good. Lastly, the humor: is quite good, with many memorable one-liners throughout and some very funny set-pieces. A few lines had our whole audience roaring. It's a good companion to the first three films, worthy of the mantle; but the plot - although appropriate to the 1950s and the pulp comic book origin of Indiana Jones - wasn't my personal cup of tea, and so I would put it a close fourth place. Still, being fourth place in the Indiana Jones series is much, much better than being the best something else! I'll provide letter grades for the four films so far, to give some perspective: Raiders of the Lost Ark: A+ Temple of Doom: A- The Last Crusade: A Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: B+ It's possible I could upgrade it to A- after seeing it again... will reply to this post if that happens.

Review: The Longest Journey (PC)

Wed, 21 May 2008 03:19:07 -0400

This departs a little bit from my reviews so far, in that it's a review of a PC game from eight years ago (2000)... but it's the point-and-click adventure that many PC gamers first experience, the introduction to the whole adventure genre. First, a bit of background. By the year 2000, many thought the adventure genre had peaked and was in a steep decline. Sierra had been sold to Vivendi in 1999 (the famous "Black Monday" incident) and utterly ruined; comparing the quality of the games released before the sale and the games released after, there is no other claim that can be made. In addition to Sierra's dismantling, LucasArts made its last real adventure game in 2000, Escape from Monkey Island; a game that I love, but a generally unpopular one among both Monkey Island fans and adventure game fans. Since the two major studios were ceasing operations as far as point-and-click adventuring went, many gamers thought it was the end of the road. While there were a few other quality games made around the turn-of-the-century, the glory days seemed over. But then a game came out developed by the Norwegian company Funcom. Funcom! No one had heard of them. Other games made by them were obscure consolers like A Dinosaur's Tale, Casper, Daze Before Christmas, Winter Gold, Disney's Pocahontas and Nightmare Circus (!). Hardly inspiring titles. But then they released The Longest Journey, which came out of virtually nowhere and became a smash hit. Many reviews hailed it as the game of year, and it sold like hotcakes - 450,000 copies by mid-2002, according to Wikipedia. I actually didn't discover it until my dad picked up in a bargain bin for $5 about three years ago (!), and I played through it with my wife. Now, a quick note on the power of The Longest Journey - my wife has only played through two complete games with me, despite my incessant prodding: Dark Fall, a scary-as-hell horror game for the PC... and The Longest Journey, which had both of us spellbound from opening moment to close. The game takes place in a world of science and technology called Stark; later, it shifts to a world of magic and fantasy called Arcadia. Here is the general plot, without giving too much away: you are April Ryan, an 18-year old art student with a troubled past - especially father issues - who has a very strange "dream" one night, where she visits a dragon who speaks to her of a vast chaos that is coming to devour her world. In the following days, April notices a strange man sitting outside her apartment building. One day he introduces himself as Cortez... and then begins to tell her about her own dreams. After that, things begin to spiral wildly out of control as April learns about an alternate universe, and discovers she can shift back and forth. That is a VERY bare-bones introduction to the plot, and leaves out all her partners, friends, acquaintances, enemies, and more. Anyone who REALLY wants to know more can check out the Wikipedia entry for the game, but be forewarned: the page gives everything away, and I highly recommend against viewing it until after you've played, in case something remains unclear. It might seem strange to leave so much in the dark, when the plot contributes so much to the general atmosphere. Let me say this, then: the plot is deep, rich, and borrows heavily from many other sources both fantasy and sci-fi without seeming derivative of any of them. It has something for almost anyone: betrayal, loyalty, bizarre characters, a mammoth struggle between good and evil, twisted fairy tales, twisted steampunk aspects, you name it. The plot stretches over enormous emotional territory, and does it gracefully. But at least as interesting as the plot are the incredible graphics. Beautiful backgrounds with detailed characters fully animated inhabiting them. I'll thank MobyGames in advance, and let the screenshots speak for themselves: And these four actually don't do the game very much justice. The game is chock full of vibrant, beautiful images of all types, and that contrast wonderfully when you switch back and forth between the sci-fi and fantasy worlds. Very memorable, to say the least - they really create a rich atmosphere full of details. The soundtrack is also worth remembering. There was actually a CD released of the music, and at one time (maybe still?) the soundtrack could be downloaded from the Funcom website. Lushly scored tracks with beautiful, interesting themes seduce the gamer from the opening screen to the credits. The voice acting is also pretty good, with some real standouts. Only a few actors come across as a little corny, perhaps, or over-the-top. And then not so much as to ruin the mood or anything. Finally, the puzzles - the heart and soul of any quality adventure game. This is where the game is occasionally criticized: some of the puzzles are obscure, requiring either non-linear thinking, a sudden leap of intuition or old-fashioned good luck. However, I have to say that I never had a single problem with any of them - even the infamous puzzle in the subway was solved by my wife pretty much instantly. The game progressed very smoothly for me. The puzzles mostly make immediate sense, and when they don't they can usually be reasoned out fairly directly. Even the more oblique of them can generally be solved by combining the inventory in some non-logical way. Logical or not, the puzzles vary from simple to challenging, and will provide a good time for anyone hoping for some good mental stimulation. Overall, The Longest Journey - which, true to its word, is indeed a very long game with many hours of play before the end - is a top-notch adventure game, and a real standout in the days at the end of the Golden Era of adventure games. The sequel wasn't received as highly, and although I own it I haven't played it yet - it's in the queue. I would recommend the first installment to any fan of adventure games ... or, especially, to any non-fan of adventure games who is unsure or curious about the genre, but a little intimidated by the classics like Grim Fandango or King's Quest. The Longest Journey is an excellent introductory game - even with the difficult puzzles and extraordinary length - and should hold the interest of almost any gamer. And in this age of online hints, frustration should be minimal. I heartily give it a 9/10.

Gaming: Now and Then (1980s and 2000s) - Part 2

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:57:52 -0400

Topic: In a continuation of my last entry, I'm going to analyze the question "Have games really degraded over the years?" in my usual style; don't expect any hard numbers or gross sales figures, but instead expect a lot of memories, impressions and ideas. I'm going to start with a flashback. The year: 1987. The place: my dad's living room. The game: Nine Princes in Amber (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/nine-princes-in-amber). Nine Princes in Amber was an interactive fiction game which combined CGA graphics (amazing at the time) and text. I won't go very deeply into the game itself, because I was only seven and the story was geared mainly at adults who were familiar with the book it was based on. Not only did I never beat Nine Princes, but I don't even remember getting off the first screen, where you are trapped in a hospital bed. But no matter. Another important aspect of Nine Princes in Amber: the game came with "feelies," props that were included with the game to enrich the gaming experience for the player. Now, interactive fiction is mostly a relic of misty, bygone times at this point, only existing in a small but hardcore community that continues to release sparse but high-quality games every now and again. So for those who aren't familiar, they worked like this: you booted up the game, read some kind of introduction, and then were faced with ... a text prompt. You read that right - you had to deal with a parser, and actually type all commands directly into the game. "WALK NORTH" and "PICK UP LETTER" and "LOOK AT CAVE" and so on. I know in these days of multibutton controllers and fixed dialog trees that most people click through as quickly as possible, a parser is considered almost beyond ancient; and I know most people younger than me can't remember the days when games - believe it or not - didn't use a mouse. In fact, I remember the first mouse we ever got, made by Wang Labs. I must have clicked the hell out of that mouse, just for fun, for hours. I remember my sister sitting in a chair watching cartoons one morning, just holding the mouse and moving the rubber ball absently with her fingers. And when point-and-click adventures came to town - and they were hyper beyond belief, trust me - the parser died a surprisingly quick and ignoble death. Everything was click, click, click: "No more awkward typing! Just a flick of your wrist and a press of your finger and complex commands dissolve into motion!" But, in fact, the parser continues to be a critical step in gaming history, and this is why: the parser established a relationship between you and the game, directly. Unless you had the exact same vocabulary as the designer of the game - which never happened - you had to figure out what words were kosher and which were taboo. This meant you had to get on the same wavelength as the designer, and that for the duration of the game you were forging a partnership with the game in order to continue playing, in order to succeed. You learned, for example, not to type "SPEAK TO THE GOBLIN" but instead "TRADE WITH THE GOBLIN," or instead of "GO UP" you had to "CLIMB ROPE." Etc. This is important: you were hands-on, directly involved with the creation of the entire game world. And combined with the feelies that came with the games, you were really immersed in the environment; unless the game was _really_ badly designed, and then you just sent hate mail to the company and hoped for some kind of freebie. Now, I'm going to flash forward twenty-one years. What is the parser of today? Or in other words, what serves the same function? I make the claim that it's the Wii, with the extensive motion controls. Not since the days of the text parser has a gamer been so close to the designer of the game. Just as you learned to literally share the same vocabulary with the game designer, you now share the same movements. The idea here is to get deeply involved with a game. The Wii permits this to an unheralded degree. Even if you are just sitting on a sofa, you are still moving your hands and fingers wildly, coercing an alternative universe to obey the commands of your body; you are the conductor of sorts. This is an idea that Microsoft and Sony really underestimated: that flailing about like a madman, pressing buttons and executing samurai slashes in the air ... is FUN! The Wii brings the gamer into the game universe just like the old text parser did - by inviting you to discover a new world on new terms; by inviting you to better yourself in this discovery. Returning to my main argument, it seems that this aspect of games, at least, hasn't been watered down or filtered out - in fact, it may be the best we've seen in years. And feelies are also at an all-time high: Guitar Hero being the obvious example. Platinum Gold Ultra Limited Editions of games aside, no game has captured the idea of feelies more completely than Guitar Hero. Without that giant plastic fake guitar, that game would have failed dramatically. Can you imagine "playing" songs by simply executing button presses on a controller? I think if that interface had been chosen, they would be digging a new hole down in New Mexico, next to the tomb where all those Atari 2600 "E.T." copies are interred, for Guitar Hero. Instead, Guitar Hero shrewdly recognized that players wanted to look like guitar heroes as much as they wanted to play a fun, well-crafted game. They wanted to _be involved_ - as crazy as it sounds, Nine Princes in Amber has a lot in common with Guitar Hero. They both come with props that immerse the gamer more fully into the game environment; they both have an interface which invites the player to try new things to command the game world; they both try a multimedia solution (NPIA has those CGA graphics showing you the location that the text describes, while Guitar Hero has the colorful graphics on top of the music). So in this way, too, games are basically the same - when one solution fails or becomes outdated, a new one eventually emerges. This seems to me the sign of a healthy industry, one with a lot of creative wiggle-room left in it. Another flash back, again to 1987. The place: a wintry college campus somewhere in the northeast US, beset by the worst blizzard in memory. The person: A hapless college student whose term paper is accidentally corrupted with data from the College of Alchemy. The quest: to recover your paper, and solve the mystery uncovered in that pursuit. The game? The Lurking Horror, by famed interative fiction maker Infocom (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/lurking-horror). Surely one of the scariest horror games ever made - seriously - this game really got under your skin. God help you if you actually played it at night, in the winter or - worse yet - if it was snowing outside. This game had monumental psychological force. I'm not exaggerating - I don't know if it was the excellent writing, or the plot, or exactly what factors were at work, but that game was creepy to the power of ten. Try to imagine playing Resident Evil or Silent Hill - but only with words, reading about it, letting your imagination fill in the horrible, gruesome details, typing as fast as possible "CLOSE DOOR" or "TURN ON LIGHT" ... and you have a pretty good idea of the power this game wields. The Lurking Horror is the first horror game I ever played, which may account for its massive presence in my mind. I'm going to use it as the yardstick with which to compare a modern game: Resident Evil 4 - Wii edition. Why the Wii edition? Because of my abovementioned thesis that bodily motion is the modern equivalent of the parser. In The Lurking Horror, you are in an isolated environment, with a few people here and there who populate the world, but those few people are often not what they seem ... often grotesquely so. RE4? Check. In The Lurking Horror, the scares are a clever combination of the environments (sometimes wide open, sometimes agonizingly claustrophobic), the lighting (sometimes deceptively bright halls, sometimes the lights fail altogether), the monsters (I won't even go into them, it would ruin too much if one of you decides to play this), and the growing sense of urgency as the plot unfurls into the darkness that grows and grows. RE4? Check, check, check and check. Both games feature absolutely terrible deaths for the player if a misstep is made. There are several key differences, though - Resident Evil 4 is more or less dependent on combat to progress through the game, while in The Lurking Horror you are a rather helpless college student with no military training or any other above-average skills in fighting. Also, Resident Evil 4 features hallmarks of the FPS genre - boss battles, ammo re-ups, etc. - while The Lurking Horror is staunchly rooted in the interactive fiction genre - puzzles which require a certain number of "turns" to complete, timing puzzles, etc. But in many ways, the two games resemble each other - even though one game is completely devoid of graphics and the other has you nailing headshots in high detail - they both have the same underpinnings. So in this respect, too, games haven't degraded at all. Your taste for action mixed into your horror is the only factor which might dissuade you from RE4; but I would argue that today's games have a much higher reflex threshold, something which developed over the years as players got better and more accustomed to action games. Now, one final flashback. The year: again, 1987. The place: my dad's living room, quickly transfigured into a roaring ballpark, with hot dog wrappers floating on the breeze, and tobacco stains on the steps of the dugout. The game: Hard Ball, by Accolade (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/hardball/screenshots/gameShotId,30138/). Too many people ignore early sports games, but they were massively popular. I had a hard time choosing between this and Earl Weaver Baseball, as far as games I played in the mid-late 1980s, but this won out. Hard Ball contained all the seeds of today's games: pitch selection and placement, swing selection and placement, statistics, substitutions and some limited but exciting arcade-type action. This game, as I see it, is only differentiated from today's games by A) the primitive graphics, B) the lack of real players and C) ... ok, there is no C. Frankly, sports games have not changed much in all this time, probably because the sports haven't changed much. The presentation has been upgraded of course: graphics are snazzier, sound is more realistic - although with the awful announcing I've heard, I can't say that is really an improvement - and animations are pretty much lifelike now. Yet, does that really make a great sports game? I'd say no, not really. The core of any sports game is how well it gets the player into the game; therefore, the game mechanic is key. And Hard Ball does everything necessary correctly - the controls are sharp, the sound is very primitive but still suggestive enough to provoke the imagination, the graphics are solid considering there were only four colors out of sixteen available at any given time due to CGA limitations, and - most importantly - it's FUN! So, my original query was to find out if games are any better or worse now. I think that my findings are pretty clear - things are pretty much the same, with one development taking the place of another. The only criticism I can lay is that while games in my past required a lot of imagination to augment the technical limitations, today's games have to some extend removed that - sacrificed to the gods of Realism. But there are games now that call on the imagination just as much as the old ones; just less of them, I think. And those same technical advances have led to some incredible things also - hand-painted backgrounds, amazing spectacles, real frights, etc. I think the ultimate point is that a clever, dedicated, imaginative game designer can make just as much from today's tools and trends as in 1987. Well, thanks for staying with me through this. Next up: I have no idea, but it'll be good. Thanks for reading!

Gaming: Now and Then (1980s and 2000s)

Sat, 17 May 2008 04:43:18 -0400

Topic: this is a rather long blog entry with some thoughts, memories and observations about gaming in the 80s as a young child and gaming in the 2000s as an adult. When I was really, really little - say, five to eight years old - I was already gaming fairly hardcore. I mainly played PC games my dad would buy for me, and would occasionally get a turn on the Atari 2600 that was at my daycare; although that only when the older kids would get tired of it and give us tykes a turn or two. My dad is really the one who I should thank for getting me into games in general. A computer scientist, he was interested in all aspects of computers, games included. Programming computer games back in the early days was still fairly simple, and I think he took a certain fascination and delight in figuring out the architecture and construction of those early games. So thanks Dad, for buying me various games, way back when, that certainly anchored my undying love for video games in general. Let me share a few nostalgia-soaked stories with you. Really they're no more than memories, but they'll give you a fairly good idea of the early days of gaming, PC gaming especially, back in the early-to-mid 1980s. First, the first time I was ever so frustrated that I destroyed a game (!). I'm sure all of us have had this dubious pleasure at one time or another - there are numerous YouTube videos of people immolating, dessicating, drowning, crushing, pulverizing and generally murdering games they particularly hate. And even here at ScrewAttack, games have been sacrificed to the gods if they were bad enough ; ) The game? Test Drive. The very first one, which MobyGames (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/test-drive) tells me was made in 1987, and was also made for the C64 and Atari. I used to play that on the desktop computer in my dad's living room, cobbled together from parts he removed or modified from other computers. I used to play Test Drive for hours and hours - it had, for the time, bright and colorful graphics (here is a YouTube vid exhibiting them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fif3mb3TkKc) and pretty standard sound for the era. Well, one time too many I was either pulled over by cops, missed my goal, or drove over the damned cliff that can be seen in the video. So I exited the game. I ejected the disk. And I took that disk over to the fridge - knowing damn well that magnetism destroyed the data on those early 5.25 disks - and stuck Test Drive to the fridge as if I was impaling it. HA! It was the 1987 equivalent of a fatality. But when my dad found out, later that evening... discovered my new fridge decoration, boy, was he pissed. I was banned from the computer for a month, at least. Another great memory: back in the 80s, computer game stores were MUCH more primitive. And the clerks working there were MUCH more knowledgeable. Let me expain - back in, say, 1986, there were comparatively few systems. The Atari and Commodore 64 generally ruled the roost as far as consoles go - or at least as far I remember - and the PC was more or less dominant - even though the games were fairly primitive, nobody knew anything better back then, so we were all obsessed when CGA progressed to EGA and so on. And on top of that, most games were made for all systems anyway - even when the NES appeared, many games were ported to the computer and C64. So to continue: at the average game store at the mall or wherever - one I remember specifically was Egghead Software, in Wheaton, Maryland - had their shelves organized much like one of today's stores, by system. The shelves were plain white, generic retail shelves, and there were no fancy decorations, or endless rows of the latest big game, etc. Instead, the product was the focus. No huge posters declaring "Trade in 10 games, get $20 off a PS3!!" ... just game boxes. But the boxes back then were much more colorful, often with hand-drawn or hand-painted artwork on the cover. The boxes tended to be bigger, and were more often found in odd shapes or sizes (http://www.mobygames.com/game/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers/cover-art/gameCoverId,958/). This lead to a more interesting, almost artistic environment - although this might be a side effect of my youth. To me, every box contained some kind of adventure. Which leads me to one of my main points - that ultimately, gaming has not changed one iota. Because the thrill I received from plain the simplest of games - something like Tank Wars or Karateka (look them up!) - is very very close to the thrill I get now from playing No More Heroes, Super Mario Galaxy, or any other game I play. It's a rush of imagination, cracking open the box, reading the manual, loading the game for the very first time and studying the menu, listening to the opening notes ... learning the game, competing with the game, mastering the game... hasn't changed at all. So, back to the game stores of yesteryear. In this exotic emporium of adventure, action and alternate identity, the clerks - and even more the shop owners - were _extremely_ knowledgeable. Not only had they played virtually all the games, but they had opinions on all of them, and provided excellent recommendations based on what you bought, or discussed. For example, I remember going to the store to buy The Secret of Monkey Island and having the clerk recommend Loom, the upcoming sequel to Monkey Island, and two or three Sierra games - going into detail about each one, and getting a little misty-eyed about each one. Now, here is the kicker - after we checked out, I remember him talking to the guy immediately after me in line - and talking the same way about an action game of some kind, in the same excited, involved way. In other words, video game store clerks back in the day were more likely to be deeply involved gamers themselves, and tended also to be renaissance men, as far as what they liked. One last story about gaming back in the mid-late 1980s. This one involves one of the great paradises of my childhood - the holy Yard Sale, especially on Saturday mornings. I don't know if yard sales are the same now, but back then you were liable to find almost anything, at any given place at any given time. You were as likely to find some obscure 80s toy - like a Pogo ball (http://www.inthe80s.com/toys/pogoball.shtml) - as your favorite book, or a copy of your favorite game for $1, the possibilities were endless. I was a hawk at yard sales, and after receiving instructions from my dad ("look for books by X, Y, and Z" and "If they have baseball cards, come get me immediately" and "Go look at that sofa and tell me if there are any stains under the cushions" ... thanks, Dad, for that one) I would hunt games relentlessly. The particular memory I'm sharing takes place in 1988. The adventure games by Sierra On-Line were in full swing, and the latest - King's Quest III - had come out a few months earlier, but I didn't have it. I don't remember why anymore, but I couldn't get it. One Saturday morning I went to a yard sale ... and there was a golden box (not literally), full of PC games. I remember The Ancient Art of War at Sea ... Arcticfox (which we bought also, and which I still have) ... Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (which I should've bought, and always regretted) ... and, almost new in the box, King's Quest III. Now, to put things in perspective, all those games were full retail only a few months before. It's like going to a yard sale this summer and finding Mario Kart Wii and Call of Duty 4 in a box for $10 each, virtually unplayed. Days like that almost never happen. Luckily, my dad recognized the rarity also, but only had enough cash to get two games. He chose Articfox, and I got King's Quest III. We got home, I installed it and the next thing I remember, my dad was shaking my shoulder and telling me to go to bed - I had fallen asleep playing it. I think that power - for a game to totally entrance until even consciousness gives way - remains undiminished even now; has anyone reading this ever played so long that they fell asleep at the wheel, so to speak? Now, this may just be a little kid's memories, viewed twenty years later through rose-colored glasses. But I don't think so - because I remember the negative things, too. Games weren't cheap even then, and many was the bitter tantrum I threw when I couldn't get something I wanted badly. Games played via DOS got more and more complicated, and often had to be configured with increasingly difficult settigns - HIMEM.exe, anyone? Extended vs. Expanded memory? Ugh. Around the same time, my dad made an acquaintance via the Computer Science Department of a man I knew only as Mr. Wang, who had a doctorate in Chemistry but whose true love was ... the Nintendo Entertainment System. I went to Mr. Wang's house several times as a kid, and while my dad and other computer gurus talked shop over beers or whatever, Mr. Wang would get a gleam in his eye, and show me the wonders of the NES. To this day, he is the only person I've ever known who had the R.O.B. - I remember playing Gyromite in sheer delight. It was my absolute ecstasy with the NES that led my parents to get me one for Christmas a year or two later. I also fondly remember going to Toys R Us, seeing that big giraffe Geoffrey smiling at me as I entered the huge door, and running straight for the Nintendo aisle, which had countless titles. Nintendo boxes, unlike PC games, were more uniform, a little less colorful, a little less hand-painted and hand-drawn (although classic examples like the first Mega Man, or Bionic Commando, etc. were plentiful), a little less interesting. But again, the delight of picking out a game, taking it home eagerly, holding it in the car like a winning lotto ticket, stripping off the plastic wrap like a madman, and inhaling the manual, the cartridge, the game, even the scent of the fresh dust that came out of the box - dust that had come straight from the game factory. Now I want to fast forward to this year - 2008 - and compare my general gaming experiences with those of my tender youth. One of my biggest complaints - if you can call it that - is about gaming stores. Even though I know it's a general trend in this increasingly globalized society we live in, gaming stores these days are almost all chains and employ kids who either A) don't want to share their own knowledge with you B) only play one kind of game and couldn't care less about any other kind or C) don't even play anything at all, but got sucked in because of discounts on Magic: The Gathering or some other product sold there. I went to an EB Games at a nearby mall in January to look into preordering Super Smash Bros Brawl. Now, entering a store as an adult with the purchasing power to buy, theoretically at least, several games is very different than going as a dependent, knowing that if you are VERY VERY LUCKY your dad might oblige you with the game you want the most. The difference boils down to this: as a kid, every game is potentially magical, and you view each one as infinitely promising and you have to choose what looks like the best match to you. As an adult, whose money is at stake, every game is potentially terrible and you view each with infinite suspicion, knowing that $50 could be wasted in a moment on a game that looked so cool; so instead of finding the best match, you instead go in armed with reviews, rumors, screenshots, videos, etc. etc. - armed to the teeth with research to make sure that you don't go astray. God forbid you should make an impulse buy, like you know you want to; God forbid you revert into that six-year old kid who wanted the first thing he saw ... and the second ... and the third! To summarize this point: old shops tended to be owned or franchised by committed individuals who played all the games, while new chain stores tend to hire seasonal employees have much less at stake and usually want to make a quick sale and get you out of their hair. Now, I know this is a generalization, and I know there are still great stores out there with employees who love and care for games and want you to too. But I think that all of you reading this know what I'm talking about - have had the kind of experience I'm referring to, where you go in and ask "Is this any good?" and get in reply "I don't know, I only play World of Warcraft" or "If it's not Call of Duty 4, it's not any good" or, worst of all, "I don't know, I don't play (insert system here)." But I think the exception proves the rule. I know this is very controversial - and that it probably varies town to town - but with the rise of chains like EB Games and whatnot, it will become more common. My other point is this: no matter how complex and advanced that games become, the joy of playing them stays the same. And so do the horrors - I'll bet kids that are seven now, like I was when playing Test Drive, are equally as tempted to take a frustrating game and take a lighter to it, or some other primitive, satisfying form of game death. Controllers now may have 10+ more buttons than Mr. Wang's NES ... but the wild predatory gleam that kids get when they first encounter a new console is exactly the same. Next, I'll discuss the quality of games Then vs. Now ... and see if, as so many people think, games now are really worse, or diluted in some way, if the system that produces them makes less, or waters them down, etc. And just like this entry, it will be largely nostalgia filtered through my analytic adult mind. Thanks for reading!