From 2600 to 360

I own a lot of console games. Maybe 200 games over 18 systems,
including hand-helds. I'm not a collector. I don't buy games I don't
intend to play and I don't keep games I don't like. I've tried to
maintain my collection to only games that I'm likely to play or replay
at some point, but fact is, many of these games have sat on my shelf
for years. Some have never been played.

That all changes now. Starting today, I'm going to play every game I
own, in order, starting with my oldest systems and working my way
forward. I'm going to include hand-held games as part of this series,
and I'll probably include Xbox Live Arcade games once I get to the
current generation of gaming. However, I intend to exclude PC and MAME
emulated Arcade boards. Maybe after I've played and reviewed every
game in my library I will go ahead and review every Arcade game ever
made. Maybe that's stupid.

First up is my catalog of Atari 2600 games. The Atari is noteworthy
as being the system I've had parents throw away without my consent 3
times. Despite undergoing multiple involuntary purges, I've still got
a lot of Atari games, many of them awful. I can't wait to dive into
them.

Twelve Rebuttal

I felt the need to respond to Isaac's article about classic gaming found right here.I do admit I love the idea of being able to play my old games on my new systems (ps1 on ps3 or psp etc). I was, and still am, a big fan of using custom firmware on the PSP to play my old SNES, NES, Genesis, and Gameboy games on Sony's beautiful little handheld. Sony hates people like me, I know, but the system itself is shaped like an SNES controller. It's like a childhood fantasy come to life. An SNES controller with a giant vibrant screen, with all the games on it I could ever want to play. Ah, what I would have given for a PSP in 1992. But I digress.

So on the one hand, I agree with Isaac's article. However, there is still a part of me that loves holding the SNES controller in my hand and playing Super Metroid or Illusion of Gaia . In fact, I recently visited a friend at his new house. He was giving the standard new-house tour and we came upon his back room. In his back room was an ancient wood frame TV set like my grandparents and parents owned in the early 80s. Hooked to it, he had his NES and Atari 2600, and a ratty old couch in front of it. He still had an Xbox360, a big screen, and booming surround sound set up in his living room, but the classic gaming room was almost like stepping through a time portal back to 1989. As soon as i stepped into the room, i felt like a kid again. I couldn't say whether or not this room was an accident, but the feeling it brought me was something I honestly didn't expect.

So i guess I'm torn between both worlds. i love being able to play FFVI on my DSlite at the park, but I also love holding a worn out SNES controller in my hand and playing FF3 in the back bedroom. Same game, but almost completely different experiences for me.

As I thought about this, I had to question why they are 2 different things for me. I recently played all the way through Chrono Trigger again on my PSP while on breaks at work. It was great. I spent a lot of time going through the side quests and building up my characters and getting the best weapons. I played it on the PSP for the game (if that makes sense). Yet when I started up the SNES at home a few days later, I loaded up my Chrono Trigger file from years ago (where i had finished it 15 times) and started running through a newgame+ with maxed stats. But after about 10 min, I was no longer in the mood. I had fired it up on the SNES just for the feeling of playing it the way I used to play it. Holding the controller, feeling the callous-causing d-pad on my thumb and the concave X&Y buttons. I remembered that, as a kid, I never liked the X button for some reason. Sitting up on the top of the diamond layout like that. It just felt different than the rest. The point is, I played it on the SNES simply for the experience.

So while philosophically speaking, I agree with Isaac with regards to backwards compatibility and downloadable classics, there is still a 26 year-old gamer here who sometimes likes to relive his youth. My ideal situation, inconvenient (and possibly expensive) as it is, would be to keep all those vintage systems, and hook them up in a different room. Step into that room and sit down on your 1993 couch, turn on your 1993 game system and your standard-def TV, pop on a Metallica CD, and play Donkey Kong Country like it was meant to be played.

Twelve

I need a DVD player to watch all of my movies. With my iPod, I can listen to all my music. In order to play all the video games I own, I have an Atari, an NES, a Super Nintendo, a Sega Genesis, a Sega Saturn, a Nintendo 64, a Playstation 2, an Xbox, a Game Cube, a Game Boy Player, a Nintendo DS, an Xbox 360, and a personal computer.

I’m not a collector. I don’t consider myself to be a “hardcore gamer.” I just like playing older games as much as I like playing newer ones. Why the hell do I need twelve systems? Why can't I play all the games worth playing on the current consoles?

Historically, the video game culture has been very focused on the future, often at the expense of the past. For any given hardware generation, only the largest hits have been kept in print, and once a new generation of systems are cycled into place, the vast majority of the earlier games are never re-released. The few games that do get a reissue are all too often plagued by a hideous need to give the re-released games graphical facelifts or to tweak gameplay, usually making them easier. To make matters worse, backwards compatibility is often unreliable if it is implemented at all.

The bottom line is, as hardware moves forward, older titles are left behind. To play older games legally on a couch, (as opposed to illegally emulated on a computer) one needs to keep and maintain a dozen aging consoles and likewise aging cartridges and discs. That, at least, is the current state of affairs.

However, attitudes have been changing, and things are improving for archivists. The Greatest/Platinum Hits model of republishing hit games for bargain prices has been brilliant for keepings games in print longer. Playstation One games are now being re-released for the PSP. Although poorly implemented, every current system has at least a head nod toward backwards compatibility. And most significantly, all three current home systems have created a means of selling affordable downloads of classic games.

Xbox Live Arcade. Wii Virtual Network. PlayStation Network. All three systems have a structure in place to sell you classic games for a low price point. This model of selling older generation titles is still new and unproven, but I suspect that it will be huge. Hardcore gamers like to have big libraries. Casual gamers like smaller, cheap games like they used to make. Finally, there exists an economically feasible way of maintaining a body of classic video game work.

This is good. Not only will this allow us to have more robust libraries and richer play experiences, it will also strengthen the art form. Gunstar Heroes and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night are brilliant games that helped shape the face of gaming. How absurd is it that they have spent years out of print, available only to those hardcore enough to pay collector’s prices? How can one discuss the impact those games have had, or learn better design from them if they aren’t available to anyone who wants a copy? As the video game culture finally adapts into a form where anyone will be able to play classic games on current generation hardware, the whole culture is enriched. A deeper intimacy with the entire history and spectrum of video games can only give the culture greater insight, and the medium greater legitimacy.

I don’t have to keep a record player to listen to The Who Sell Out. I don’t have to keep a VCR to watch The Graduate. Why should I have to keep an NES to play Metroid?

E3 - The Xbox Live Arcade Trailer

Well, E3 '07: The Trade Show That Wasn't has come and gone. A few years ago, back when we were living in the present, we'd have to wait a month or two to get coverage of the bloated, glorious Trade Show from the video game magazines. But now that we are living in the future, E3 is boring but we get our show highlights downloaded straight into our consoles. It is a tiny E3 in your living room!

There were lots of trailers to watch, and there were some stunning looking spots for some promising games, but the trailer that blew me away was the trailer for Xbox Live Arcade's upcoming offerings. You can watch it here. It was a peppy little showcase for 20 or so games soon to be available for download for XBLA. In two short, joyful minutes this trailer affirmed everything I love about video games.

You see, this preview had games of every possible stripe. There were old games. New games. New takes on old games. The trailer just kept moving from one mad, beautiful game to the next. Some looks great, some looked awful, some were fresh and innovative, others were classic, inducing nostalgia. And no two looked alike. One had tiny soccer-playing men, others had Mechs, rolling cubes, improbably fast
hedgehogs, space giraffes, colors, numbers, words, anything was possible because with video games, anything IS possible.

Putting all these disparate games together in one reel sparked in me this sense of continuity, a real feeling of connection. Amongst these games were games that had appeared on the Sega Genesis, on Macintosh computers, or in the arcade. There were new takes on old games and fresh innovations and games that hadn't started as video games. But they all shared a single thread, the thing that makes video games
magic: They all tried to be fun. And games need follow no other formula.

Role Playing

I’d been in a bad relationship for almost 15 years: A relationship with video game RPGs. It has taken a long time, but I’ve finally realized that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of our relationship and now I'm trying to move on. It wasn’t the fault of the genre, really. I just kept expecting RPGs to fulfill my needs in a way in which they were never meant.

Now that the love is gone, I’ve noticed that I hate the RPG genre. I hate being stopped every three steps for a random encounter. I hate the monotony of the combat. I hate having to talk to every damn villager. I hate micromanaging spells and equipment and skill progression. I pretty much hate every thing there is to do in these freaking games.

And yet, I kept messing around with them for years. I’ve started things up and not finished over a dozen of these games. I’ve repeatedly, over the years, spent weeks being confused as to why I wasn’t enjoying the game I was playing, before wandering away, always with the intent to return and finish later. To date, I have only actually completed one traditional eastern RPG: the original Final Fantasy.

It was only in this past year that I have realized the terribly obvious fact: I don’t like RPGs. How could I spend 15 years not noticing this incredibly obvious thing? Why did I keep playing them? Why didn’t I know better?

I think the thing of the matter is, there is a coolness to the RPG genre. Now, clearly, I don’t mean that RPGs are in any way actually cool, assuming you define “cool” in the classic sense of you are more likely to get laid if a potential mate sees you participating in the activity. GAMING ISN’T COOL, KIDS. That said, if you’re a nerd, RPG’s have a very tangible appeal. These games let you have epic scale adventures that are also (somewhat) non-linear. You can watch your characters start as wussbags and build them into godslayers. And the choices you make in the game might affect the final outcome. That’s pretty appealing, and back in the cartridge-based days of yore, a pretty good trick.

But the thing is, RPGs are perhaps the most inefficient way to have fun man has ever invented. You play these accursed things for the stories (which are usually bog-standard fantasy boilerplates.), but rather than just tell you the story, the game makes you play the dullest, repetitive, math-iest “game” you could imagine before doling out a small part of story (traditionally told by slow scrolling, badly translated text). And then you get to undergo a few more hours of random encounters and equipment micromanagement. There is fun to be had in this, but it is at staggeringly low levels. Meanwhile, these things take what? 40 hours? 80 hours to get through? That is 80 hours that could be spent playing with your friends, taking in a concert, making out with someone pretty. We've only got so many hours in our lives, people!

If you like juggling numbers, get a job as an accountant. If you like crappy epic fantasy, read a Dragonlance novel. Don’t play RPGs. Playing these games requires a special kind of stupid. A kind of stupid that I now recognize in myself, and that I’ve moved past.

Except.

Except, RPGs are turning a corner, aren’t they? Knights of the Old Republic was a fun, immersive game that rarely felt like resource management. I’ve heard amazing things in the same vein about Final Fantasy 12. And Mass Effect is right around the corner and just might blow all of our minds. RPG doesn’t seem to mean what it used to. They just might be growing up. So, what now? Just as soon as I walk away from the relationship, it looks like RPGs might finally be getting their act together, changing their ways. Do I give them another chance? Or do I make a clean break of it?