Tag Archives: Retro

My retrospective reviews.

Books, Games, Impressions, Nintendo

Console Wars

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Console WarsAs much as I love my well-thumbed copy of Game Over, it’s over 20 years old. Its account of Nintendo’s rise lacks two decades of changing perspective, context, new information that has emerged as people retire, move on and, separated from events by years and expired NDAs, give increasingly candid interviews. It’s from a world where the Atari ET landfill story is apocryphal.

Console Wars’ chosen subject is different, coming in when Nintendo has already risen to its zenith and concentrating on the competition with Sega in the early 90s. There’s none of the smart, nimble Nintendo that came out of David Sheff’s book; this is the empire whose monopolistic tendencies alienated enough third-parties to create the way in that Sega and ultimately Sony exploited.

There’s a major movie in development (at Sony Pictures, amusingly) based on this book, hence the foreword by Seth Rogen, which is extraordinary to me. There’s the kernel of a film here – indeed, everyone knows the snappy line to win an argument in a way that no one does in real life – but while The Social Network proved that the rise of a major tech company can make a fascinating cinematic experience, Blake Harris and the team behind Superbad aren’t David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin. Time will have to tell on that one.

The book itself is solid but unspectacular. The aforementioned tendency for everyone to speak like polished movie scripts can grate, as can the Hollywood stereotypes that uniformly present the Americans as hard-working creatives and the Japanese as stoic, conservative and petty. It may be true that Sega of Japan was the architect of Sega’s post-16-bit downfall, and the book makes a convincing argument for this viewpoint, but a bit more nuance would have been nice.

But I still learnt a lot, even as someone who grew up consuming everything I could about gaming in this period. Did you know, for instance…

  • …that Nintendo was once so big that it accounted for 10% of Walmart’s total profits?
  • …that Sonic 2 was both the first global launch and the first set-in-stone release date in gaming history?
  • …that Sega passed up the opportunities to release the hardware that would become the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64?
  • …that Sega’s Tom Kalinske was responsible for the Nintendo-Silicon Graphics relationship that gave us Donkey Kong Country and the N64?
  • …that Sonic’s iconic silhouette was achieved by combining Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse? And his middle name is actually ‘The’?
  • …that the born-again Christianity of Konami’s president turned Dracula Satanic Castle into the more enduring and Jesus-friendly Castlevania?
  • …that the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Nintendo was completely by accident filed on the 40th anniversary of Pearl Harbor?

Those little snippets are the kind of things that I lapped up. There are enough of them sprinkled liberally throughout that I was willing to overlook the liberties taken by the author. Well worth a look for anyone who honed their debating skills on the school playground in the early 90s.

Game Over’s still the daddy, though.

Games, PlayStation

Retrospective: Silent Hill

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Much of my gaming time over the last couple of months has been spent compensating for this generation’s dearth of creativity by delving deep into the back catalogue, saying goodbye to hardware backwards compatibility by enjoying some of my overlooked classics on the PS1 and PS2. One of these was the original Silent Hill, perhaps not afforded the credit it deserves in the wake of its admittedly better, more widely ported sequels, and certainly in the shadows of Resident Evil in the PS1’s survival horror canon, but one worthy of revisiting.

Silent Hill

As you’ll see above, it’s also responsible for possibly my favourite screenshot ever. (Courtesy of the Silent Hill Wiki.)

Despite its formidable reputation, I didn’t find Silent Hill scary. Its reputation for creeping psychological horror seemed overstated, with nothing that had me cursing it beyond a couple of cheap jump scares – an unexplained window breaking or sound of unseen objects clattering to the floor. Perhaps it’s too difficult nowadays to look beyond the rough edges and see a vicious creature torn from a tormented psyche when they look more like melted cake ornaments. Low-poly ones at that.

Shorn of what is arguably its raison d’être, though, Silent Hill is still worthy of your time. Firstly, a well-documented bug in the PS3’s backwards compatibility and some mixing issues aside, it’s one of the earliest games to have impressed me with its sound design. Akira Yamaoka’s dissonant soundtrack complements the Lynchian weirdness wonderfully and, along with the unsettling industrial sound effects, is by far the aspect of the game that has aged best.

When Silent Hill was re-imagined as Shattered Memories, it dropped combat entirely. This led me to believe that the combat, so often the weak point in games that aspire to more than action, would be terrible, but it’s really not. Ammo is scare enough to be valuable without discouraging you from pulling the trigger when necessary, and relying on melee combat is actually a realistic proposition. Simply by not having combat be a total drag, it outdoes most survival horror games, which is intended to be higher praise than it might sound like.

Not a life-changing classic, then, but another example of a clever, original franchise that has devolved into shooting and jump scares in this generation. People banging on about the depressing frequency with which this has happened may be getting tiresome, but you know how publishers can make us desist? Stop doing it.

Games, Nintendo

Revisiting The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

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My recent purchase of a 3DS brought with it the ideal opportunity to go back to what many consider to be the greatest game ever, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. I’m ashamed to admit that I never finished it first time around, despite poring over magazines for years beforehand and doing everything short of prostituting myself to get my hands on a copy on day one after my preorder fell through; I think the one-two punch of the Water Temple and the Shadow Temple did it for me, and as a result this has never even been my favourite Zelda game – that would be Link’s Awakening – let alone my favourite game overall.

Ocarina of Time 3D

Although I’m playing the 3DS remake, this is going to be a vehicle for my thoughts on the game itself. Plenty has been written by much more authoritative sources on what’s different and how the versions compare, so I won’t bog this down with my hazy recollections of a game I’ve barely touched since 1998.

One thing I do remember is waxing lyrical with a friend about how “cinematic” Ocarina of Time was. It was unusual for a Nintendo game in that respect, as it seemed preoccupied with making games rather than telling stories, with few games having more story than ‘rescue the princess’ or ‘do a barrel roll’. It still is, and along with Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess, it feels different to the others in the series. The Wind Waker, for all the shock that greeted its unveiling, is thematically and stylistically similar to all the sprite-based instalments, and Skyward Sword seems jovial in response to the misery on display in parts of adult Link’s quest, not to mention the plentiful nightmare fuel of Majora’s Mask.

Ocarina of Time 3D

This came out at a time when developers, particularly ones working with the capacity of CD-ROMs, were learning to blend film and game. Though perhaps only in my nostalgia-addled brain, they were better at it then, imitating the mature tropes of film without going too far in trying to find gaming’s own language of storytelling. There’s no real fan service or an attempt to build an ambitious, overall narrative, which is something that has long weighed down the community without adversely affecting the games, even if it was there all along.

I must say, it’s a lot easier than I remember too. This game was a challenging quest to 13-year-old me, but this time I died once, on one of the bosses. I’m going to hold this up next time I hear someone complain about how easy games are these days. Personally, it’s not a bad thing, as I’d much rather make progress through an enthralling 15-or-so hour quest than have it padded out to 20 by making me traipse back to the boss chamber repeatedly.

Having had an uninterrupted run at the game, I’ve come away with an elevated opinion of Ocarina of Time. Best game ever? No, I still don’t think so. It’s certainly a good shout for an inclusion in my top five, though, and is up there with Link’s Awakening in consideration for my favourite Zelda game. If anything, the main feeling it’s left me with is an increased need for Majora’s Mask 3D – one that the years seem to have turned into a connoisseur’s choice of Zelda – as I barely touched that on release, having long since moved on to better hardware.

Look at me. I’m begging Nintendo for more remakes of old games instead of rolling my eyes. I must be starting to like games again.

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega

Pirates or Preservationists?

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There is some good in the ruthless drive of technology, pushing gaming forward into easily defined generations of hardware, in that it’s allowed phenomenal progress in only a few decades. The downside to such rapid development, though, is that the past gets left behind, and without efforts to preserve it, it’s lost.

I can watch any almost any movie from any decade on some form of disc or streaming service nowadays, even if they were produced decades before digital video, the Internet and even televisions existed, and it’s essentially the same experience as anyone who saw it on day one. I can walk into any of a range of high street shops and find popular films from the 30s and 40s, brand new and easily accessible.

Contrast that with games. Try finding a particular game from outside the top 40 new, or anything but the most popular games from last generation. Try finding anything from the generation before that. There are, of course, services like Good Old Games, which are certainly good things, but what happens to games from long-dead developers or ones that aren’t deemed commercially viable? What route is there to play, say, Spectrum games? PC Engine? Almost any system has at least a couple of gems, but it’s impossible to play them without getting lucky on the used market or resorting to piracy, both of which we keep hearing are as bad as each other from the publishers’ perspective.

Some classic publishers like Nintendo and SNK are still going concerns in one form or another and so can offer their older games, and that’s fantastic. I’ll happily support those offerings, especially those that allow me to pick and choose reasonably priced and well-emulated individual games. But for plenty of older material, that’s not an option – it’s not like you can download some C64 games onto Commodore’s latest machine.

It’s when you start looking into community-led preservation efforts that you realise how much better they are than their official equivalents. Perhaps the best example is World of Spectrum, which not only functions as a massive database of information on Speccy games but also offers the majority of them to download or to play in a Java-based emulator directly on the site. Scans of covers, cross-referenced articles from the magazines of the time, meticulous attempts to preserve every version of every game, and all with the admirable ambition of being a comprehensive, free museum for an important period in gaming history. It’s not done for profit, and when actual games are offered to download, it’s done with the permission of the original developers and publishers.

Even for classic hardware without the following to sustain a site of such size – or, perhaps less defensibly, those from a couple of generations ago that are still the subject of poorly emulated and overpriced compilations – chances are a glance at certain more seedy websites will unearth a torrent with every game and an emulator, tied up in one handy download. Illegal or not, until this industry takes a step back and realises how inaccessible its past really is, I’m crediting the pirates there with providing a valuable service.

New games are increasingly encumbered with DRM, sometimes to the extent that the game will become unplayable if the studio and its authentication servers ever go offline. That’s all well and good now, but the experience of the last few years and the fact that it only takes a glance at the big developers of the SNES generation to see how few of today’s will still be around in another decade suggests that the only hope for the future playability of those games is either to hope that studios in their death throes have the wherewithal to produce a patch to nuke the DRM or to let pirates do it. Only one of those options is anywhere close to being a sure thing.

It’s important to note that I’m not going to support those who are pirating current games because they want them without paying, even if it’s those people’s work that ultimately allows the mass archival that I’m championing. The best examples of these projects are done on long dead platforms that aren’t going to cost anybody any money, and taking revenue from the industry – and, arguments over exactly how much aside, it does cost publishers money – will only affect what is left to preserve in the future.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010 #8: Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

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Pac-Man Championship Edition DXGiven that I had precisely zero expectations about this game, and that I only raised my head from my desk in the office to look at it after someone announced that they had unlocked all of its achievements within a couple of hours – I’m still a bit of a whore like that – it must win an award for being a stealth hit. Perfect scores and nights spent trying to one-up friends followed, making it probably the best and most-played score-attack game since the original Geometry Wars.

It’s simple and beautiful, and painfully, painfully addictive, and games like this make me thankful that this kind of thing has been given a revival in the era of online leaderboards, which is the most relevant they’ve been since the original Pac-Man was in the arcades. While the implementation of leaderboards falls short of the high water mark, Geometry Wars 2, this game rivals that one for content and certainly beats it for competitive high scores.

When I play Geometry Wars and look at the top of the rankings, I know I’m never getting up there. In Pac-Man, on the other hand, I’m only a few hundred thousand and, judging by the replays, a couple of eliminated mistakes and some route optimisation short of the top, so small are the margins for error. Let’s be honest: I’ll still never get there, but at least this lets me feel like I’m in with a chance of getting that carrot.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

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Biggest surprise of the year? No need for a vote because this is definitely it. Truthfully I had no idea that this was even coming out, and it’s already only the third game for which I’ve unlocked all the achievements – not too difficult in this one, admittedly – and has sucked up hours on chasing high scores. No score attack game has had its hooks into me like this since Geometry Wars.

In the pantheon of classic retro arcade games, I’ve always had a soft spot for Pac-Man, and feel that its classic high-score-chasing gameplay has held up better than many of its contemporaries. Really, jazz it up with some HD neon graphics and I’d be pretty happy to pay for that, but the Championship Edition gave it a full modernisation, ramping the speed up to sometimes ridiculous levels, giving it a pumping soundtrack, doubling the maze width, and bringing in a host of new mechanics. This DX edition brings in some new mazes and further tweaks, so it’s one of those convenient follow-ups for latecomers that renders the original redundant.

But even with all the modes and mazes to choose from, I’m happy with the new Championship II on the standard five-minute score attack. That’s where the competitive play is, and although I’m unlikely to reach much beyond my current position, skimming the top 1,000, adding a few thousand to your top score and pushing yourself up the ranking is brilliantly intense. Get much beyond about 1,300,000 points and it becomes necessary to get yourself completely ‘in the zone’, and one mistake can warrant a restart – and you’re still miles off the 2,000,000+ scores at the top of the leaderboard.

I’m not the only one who’s gone head over heels for this game, and even if you’re one of the multitude of Call of Duty addicts, this is highly recommended. The five-minute games lend themselves to quick blasts now and again, with the occasional new high score dangling like a carrot the whole time, and as I’ve jumped between my current playlist of Black Ops, Halo: Reach and Castlevania, it’s become the perfect palate cleanser. Work up those reactions for COD after a spot of adventuring, or relieve the pressure of a hard day’s deathmatching before you go to bed.

Or, more likely, some twerp on my friends list is taunting me about overtaking my high score again…