Archive for the ‘old school’ Category

Know Your Onions

Sunday, October 12th, 2014

One of my English teachers in high school liked to say that at that level, we’re not actually learning history, we’re actually just learning History’s Greatest Hits. At the time I just laughed it off as a silly joke (he made lots of those), but, over time, I realized he was right. You go through school and get an overview of history (and just about every subject) by hitting the high points so you’re not completely ignorant of how the world and the US got where they are today. But the thing is, there’s so much history (and more of it all the time!) that it’s impossible to know it all. If you’re interested, though, you will go beyond the bare minimum required to pass your high school (and even college) classes. Most of us, though, probably don’t care about that kind of history enough to do more than watch the occasional documentary on PBS, or whatever Drunk History counts as. So, we know some history, but historians, people who love history, know lots more. That sounds obvious, but they do more than watch documentaries in order to feel smart. They do research: they read books (the horror!), they talk to other historians, they visit historic places, and so on. They know that there is more to history than everyone was required to learn in school, and they know that knowledge is out there, they just have to go get it. A lot of times they’ll specialize in one particular area and learn everything they can about it.

You probably think that being a hardcore historian is probably not for you, though. You may not care if Shakespeare actually wrote all his plays or not. You may think that Socrates is just some dead Greek dude who was the subject of a few jokes in the first Bill & Ted movie. Besides, you like video games (well, if you’re reading this site, there’s a pretty good chance that you like video games). Video games are way better than boring old history any day of the week.

But what about video game history?

Felipe Pepe wrote an intresting article on Gamasutra the other day lamenting that a lot of so-called ‘hardcore gamers’ don’t know much about the history of video games past five or ten years or so ago.

That is a disappointing realization.

Video games are becoming (or maybe have already become) a mainstream form of entertainment for everyone, but they’ve been around in one form another since at least the late 1940s. No, that’s not a typo.

Warning: From this point on, I’m going to probably sound like either a hipster or an old man yelling at a butt. You have been warned.

When I say “retro gaming” or “old video games” what do you think of? I’m going to guess that it’s Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda. Maybe just the NES, Super NES, and maybe even the Genesis. Possibly Pong. You may even know that Pong was a big deal in the 80’s. It was, but it was an even bigger deal when it came out in 1972.

You may have heard about the Commodore 64, but do you know anything about it? Can you name five games for it without looking them up? Have you ever heard of the VIC-20? The PET? The Commodore 16? The Commodore 128? The Amiga? Do you know who Jack Tramiel was? Do you know why Bill Cosby is an important figure in Commodore’s history?

You might have heard about the Atari 2600, but what about the reissued Atari 2600 Jr.? The Atari 7800? The Atari 8-bit line? Do you know who Nolan Bushnell is?

Did you know that Texas Instruments had a line of computers that played games? Did you know that the TI-99/4A is actually a revised model of the TI-99/4? Did you know it supported a voice module to enable real actual speech? Do you know who its spokesperson was and why that’s important?

Do you know why games like Diablo are called ‘rogue-like’?

More importantly, have you ever actually played these games that are more than 5 years old? How about 10? 20? Further back? I don’t mean ‘load them up in an emulator and fart around with one for five minutes’, I mean actually play them for a decent amount of time. Try to finish one or set a high score (without abusing savestates, natch). Did you play something outside of the games you’ve heard of (the ‘video games greatest hits’)?

The Problem

While doing some independent research on Ironsword, the game infamous for having Fabio on the label, Wikipedia cites a GameSpy article that says:

You wouldn’t know it from the cover, but IronSword is actually a sequel to Wizards & Warriors. But thanks to the presence of Fabio on the cover, gamers got confused and thought they had accidentally picked up one of their mom’s romance novels.

It also posts a cropped picture of the label (with Fabio’s Fabulous Hair) with the caption that “Anything Fabio is involved in becomes automatically bad.”

I suppose the author was trying to be funny, I get that. But it’s pretty clear that the image was cropped to make that joke, since the full image clearly has, “Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II” at the top of the label. And, I guess I could mistake a video game for a book if I had never seen a book or a video game before. And the game itself is actually pretty good.

The problem is threefold:

  1. Old consoles are hard to find, take up room to store, and emulating games is questionably legal.
  2. A lot of writers for big sites are in their 20s. That’s not necessarily a problem, but a lot of these games came out before they were born, and since old consoles are tough to find, they probably won’t bother. They just rely on Wikipedia, cruddy Youtube videos, and other sources of second-hand (or even third-hand and fourth-hand) information.
  3. Since old consoles are hard to find, and a lot of people won’t bother trying to find or buy them anyway, the echo-chamber effect starts to take over. For instance, Phalanx for SNES usually gets lambasted as having a dumb box featuring a hillbilly playing a banjo. The game must be terrible, whatever it is, right? Wrong. It’s a passable shoot-em-up. Or, ET for the Atari 2600 is the worst game ever made, right? Nope. ET isn’t even the worst game on the Atari 2600 (Sneak ‘n’ Peek, for example). Custer’s Revenge gets a bad rap as one of the worst games ever made (and it is bad, don’t get me wrong), but it was one of those porno games, like Bubble Bath Babes on the NES (don’t Search for these games at work). It was never sitting on the shelf at your local Hills next to Kaboom and Chopper Command.

What all this means is that we have a lot of people writing authoritatively on things that they know very little about. It’s like if you were writing for a music website, but the only thing you knew about music older than 10 years is the songs from your local radio station’s 80’s dance mix, and you just assume that everything pre-1970 is either The Twist or the Foxtrot.

So, what’s the solution?

Unfortunately, I can’t demand that everyone writing about video games broaden their horizons in any meaningful way (if only). But what I can do is demand excellence, both from myself, and from the publications that I read. At the risk of being labeled a pedant and a hipster and a fogey, I can point out why your top whatever list is dumb and wrong, like this list of the 100 best games of all time that only has one game made before 1990 on it (which is Mega Man II. That’s not even the best Mega Man game on the NES).

I don’t want the industry, the consumers, or the media to forget what got us here. I don’t want the past 50+ years of games distilled down to Pong, Pac-Man, some NES stuff, and then everything else. I want to be able to discuss Pix the Cat as being a cross between Pac-Man Championship Edition and Flicky without someone not knowing what I’m talking about. We need to have one eye on the past and another on the future. And a video camera on the present, I guess? I’m not good with metaphors. Video games have a vibrant history, and a lot of that history directly shapes what we have today. Several of those experiences have not been duplicated. They may have been refined or cast off as the medium evolves, but when we study them, it helps us to know why things are now the way they are.

Posted in Arcade, articles, atari, blog, classic gaming, confessions, conjecture, culture, duh, editorials, games, gimmicks, history, Internet, Misc, Nintendo, old news, old school, opinion, Pac-Man, Pinball, reactions, site news, video games | 2 Comments »

Glitchi-NES

Sunday, October 5th, 2014

Some time back I slapped together some hardware for the express purpose of capturing and streaming video game footage, which I’ve done a fair amount of (and I even managed to raise a couple of dollars for charity).

Lately, though, I’ve been going through some of my old NES games, getting them cleaned and testing them, and capturing some short clips for one reason or another, and then this happened.

The picture started freaking out. I played it anyway for a few minutes just to check out the scrambled mess that resulted, put it on Youtube, shared it around, and had some fun with it.

Then, the next night, I moved on to Castlevania III, and it happened again, worse, somehow.

So, why is this happening? Well, my NES is about 30 years old now, so the age of the hardware could be an issue, but that’s only a part of the problem.

Problem #1 – A worn out internal connector. The ‘Toaster’-style NES is probably the one most recognized by just about everyone who has even a passing interest in the NES. It had a funky method of inserting the games where you inserted the cartridge, and then locked it in the ‘down’ position via some internal hardware. This bends the receiving pins slightly every time you insert a cartridge, and, thanks to metal fatigue, they eventually don’t spring back into place as well any more. This means that eventually, those pins will fail completely and no games will work. Before that, though, they’ll just get intermittent.

Problem #2 – The 10NES lockout chip is fussy. You may not have heard about the 10NES lockout chip, but if you’ve spent a lot of time with the NES hardware, you’re probably familiar with one of the tell-tale symptoms of it being fussy: the flashing title screen. There’s lots of information about it on the Internet if you want to look it up, but most of the information seems to imply that you should just disable the chip completely, which I may do someday (sorry, Nintendo).

Problem #3 – Blowing in the cartridges. This is something that everyone (really, everyone) who played video games in the NES heyday knew about: game not working? Blow into it to ‘get the dust out’. Which, it happens, did work. For a while. Eventually, it stopped working, or it took more and more tries to blow out the ‘dust’. It turns out that blowing in the cartridges wasn’t such a great idea. It worked in the short term because the breath from your lungs contains some moisture, which got on the contacts, and that made them more electrically conductive, to the 10NES chip was satisfied and you went down the road playing whatever. But, electricity plus moisture can equal corrosion, and that’s what a lot of NES games are suffering from now.

Problem #4 – Improper cleaning. Since a lot of these cartridges are now quite old and many have not been maintained well, it’s not uncommon to find one with lots of corrosion or dirt or worse fouling up the pins. So, you’ll, of course, want to clean them to give them the best chance (and to not foul your system). The cleaner that I’ve always used and recommend is some isopropyl alcohol, a cotton swab, and some elbow grease (maybe also a screwdriver with a security bit, for good measure). That will take care of most forms of gunk that accumulates on cartridges. If you come across something that that won’t handle, you can work your way up to stronger stuff like pencil erasers, and even high-grit sand paper(!) in extreme cases. Some people advocate using things like stove cleaner as a routine step, but that makes me extremely nervous. I’m a huge advocate of using the least-potentially-damaging material first, and then working my way up to the tougher stuff if needed. Some people like shortcuts, though, and I get that. So, it’s possible that I got a cartridge that belonged to an overzealous cleaner who damaged some of the connecting pins on the cartridges.

Now that I look back on it, with the possibilities of everything that could and did go wrong, I’m impressed that I could even get the NES to work at all. Then or now.

Posted in articles, blog, culture, duh, Misc, NES, not news, old school, opinion, pro tip, relics, stageselect, storage, updates, video games | Comments Closed

I don’t have any gaming guilty pleasures

Sunday, August 24th, 2014

Every once in a while, probably to foster discussion, I see a website or a twitter account ask what gaming guilty pleasures that I have, and my answer is always the same: I don’t have any.

So, what is a guilty pleasure, anyway? A guilty pleasure is something that you enjoy (game, music, movie, activity, whatever) that you feel guilty about liking, and maybe want other people to not know that you do.

That’s odd, right? It’s not just me, is it? You have a thing that you like, but you have to keep it a secret so that other people don’t find out about it, because if they do find out about you liking the thing, then they’re going to think you’re weird. Especially if they all dislike the thing. Then you’ll be the only one in the group that likes the thing that everyone else doesn’t.

Which is not that big of a deal.

Maybe it’s because I grew up at a time where video games weren’t as mainstream as they are today. It was a time where having an interest in computers and video games was something that weird outcasts did, so it didn’t really matter what I liked. The other outcasts and I would talk about whatever games we liked amongst ourselves, and that was pretty much that. We liked a lot of the same games, sure, but we also liked games that the others didn’t, or even that the others had never heard of. But that meant we had more games to try and like or not like as appropriate.

Or maybe it’s because I’m comfortable in forming my own opinions without worrying what other people are going to think. Especially on matters as trivial as the kind of entertainment I like. I realize that this might sound like I’m being preachy or like a chapter out of a self-help book, but I don’t have a problem telling people what kinds of games I like because my friends don’t mind if like something that they don’t. Sure, they might think it’s a little weird that I don’t like the newest Shootymans 3 game or whatever, but I think it’s just as weird that they do like it. Besides, with friends lists, always online consoles, and game collections and activity being on the public Internet, trying to hide a game you’re enjoying playing from your friends is borderline impossible:

Oh, look, I spent 12 hours playing Faerie Solitaire, or I played a video game based on professional wrestling on the Xbox 360, or I imported a cutesy puzzler from Japan to play on my PS3.

So, I’m going to continue on, liking what I want to, and disliking what I want to without feeling bad about it in the slightest or worrying about what other people might think of something as trivial as my preferred video games.

Posted in about, achievements, Arcade, blog, confessions, conjecture, culture, editorials, Japan, Misc, not news, old news, old school, opinion, ps3, Xbox 360 | Comments Closed

So, what’s new

Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

Well, yeah, it’s been a while, sorry about that.

My last post was kind of a downer, and I made it sound like I would never make another entry again because I was so disgusted with video games, the internet, and myself. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way, but then a few days off became a few weeks, and that spiraled into months, and, well, you know how those things go.

I’m still here, doing my thing, but not writing about it a whole lot.

That’s not strictly true, I’ve gotten a bunch of articles started, but only half-completed, and then deleted. This little site turns 10 years old this year, and I started to think that maybe I’ve said all I wanted to say. But I don’t think that’s it. I just haven’t been inspired by much lately.

That’s a weird statement to make, really. Video games and computers/the Internet are bigger than they’ve ever been, which is great, but also, really boring. Maybe now that I’m getting a few years older and my tastes are getting more refined, I’m finding the monotonous grey slurry of so-called ‘entertainment’ less palatable than I used to. We are hot off the heels of one of the biggest gaming events of the year, and for the first time in a long time, I can truthfully say that there was so little announced at the show that I was genuinely interested in, that I’ve already forgotten most of it. The kitschy fun stuff that I still love to play is still out there, I just have to work harder to find it.

And then there’s the Internet.

It used to be reasonably useful, but it’s shifting to the blogs, Top X Lists, clickbaity ‘articles’, infographics, and social media. Clicking around and discovering things used to be exciting and fun, but now if it doesn’t show up in my newsreader or a Google search, it doesn’t exist (and anything I click on, I just read the one article, and never go back). I honestly can’t remember the last time I discovered a site by one method or another and then went back more than once. The Internet is absolutely enormous, and I visit the same dozen or so sites every single day. I’m in a rut, and I don’t like it down here.

I know exciting, interesting, and fun stuff is still out there on the Internet, but just like with video games, I just need to look harder to find it.

And that brings me to Gopher. Gopher is one of the many methods on the Internet to distribute information, and it competed with (and actually lost to) HTTP. You can read about gopher and why it’s still relevant. Installing a Gopher client onto my computer is exciting to me. I can visit sites that maybe don’t have as much eyecandy, or popularity, or a comments page. I can visit repositories of information put up because the people genuinely love the technology and the subject matter, and who aren’t necessarily worrying about driving traffic to their site by resorting to clickbait.

I also have installed a Gopher server at gopher://obsolete.cartridge.technology (also available via http://obsolete.cartridge.technology:70 to do… well, something with. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to put up there, and this site isn’t going away any time soon. But there are so many protocols and networks on the Internet that I just plain forget to use, that I need to actually take the time to check them out. For the first time in a really long time, I’m genuinely excited about exploring the Internet, and I’d say that’s a very good thing.

Posted in about, crummysocks, E3, editorials, General, gopher, Internet, old school, sites, time wasters | 3 Comments »

My Love/Hate Relationship With Video Games Part 3 – Myself

Monday, September 30th, 2013

This is part 3 of my Love/Hate Relationship with Video Games series. If you haven’t already, I suggest you read Part 1 and Part 2 first, so we’re all on the same page. Don’t worry, this article isn’t going anywhere. Probably.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve liked video games for as long as I can remember. Since the first time I was able to operate a joystick to make the character on the screen do what I wanted was magical. From then on, I wanted to experience more. I wanted to explore these virtual worlds and experience as many of these virtual stories as I could. I also wanted to absorb every shred of ancillary information I could find about the games I loved, canon or not. My passion for video games was so intense that even after I cut my left thumb on a jigsaw in shop class (in the Summer of 1992), I spent the next couple of weeks playing through Super Castlevania IV in spite of the agony, which left me with a pretty nice scar as a trophy.

Cutting my thumb open on a jigsaw is not enough to keep me from Super Castlevania IV

Cutting my thumb open on a jigsaw is not enough to keep me from Super Castlevania IV

This helped me out in a few different ways. We moved around a lot when I was younger, and by the time I graduated high school, I had gone to seven different schools. That meant that I was the new guy. A lot. And, as the new guy, I would usually hang out in the back of the class until I could find another kid who liked video games, and then try to make something happen. That mostly worked (not counting that one guy who decided to surreptitiously show me his wiener in the middle of math class (that actually happened)). But being a video game geek through the 1980s and 1990s was tough. I got a lot of grief from people because I might bring a copy of Nintendo Power to read before class started, or I might write a poem about a controller, or someone might start talking to me in shop class out of sheer boredom and make stuff up about games just to see how gullible I was (“Dude, you can totally shoot the dog in Duck Hunt and get a million points!” “If you go over the top of the screen in World 1-4 of Super Mario Bros., like, up by the score, you can totally skip straight to the end.” And so on), or because the other video game geek and I would talk quiz each other about some new game during homeroom, or any number of things. The point is, liking video games was still weird, and if you liked games, you were weird, and if you were weird, chances are, you got bullied.

Now, I don’t tell you all of this for your sympathy (not because I think I’m better than that). But I do think that it’s important to know where I’m coming from so that I can better paint a picture of where I’m going. I could talk about problems I had in my childhood all day, but most of that has nothing to do with video games, and isn’t really on the table today. That’s a part of my life that is behind me that I’ve dealt with and moved on from.

Once I graduated from the public school system and entered college where I didn’t have to deal with bullies and people who just didn’t like me for whatever reason, my whole worldview changed. As long as my work got done, I was free to like whatever geeky thing I wanted to, and nobody cared. I was even able to keep in contact with the few people I knew from public school that also liked video games. We could talk to each other at length (via X-Mail or AIM, or even on the telephone) about the latest and greatest games.

And it was great.

Around this time, I also discovered that LAN Parties were a thing, a place where I could get together with a few dozen people who were just like me (more or less), and we could play games, talk about games, and generally do whatever geeky thing we wanted to for two days or so and nobody cared.

And it was great.

I also started hanging out on my Friday and Saturday nights at one (or more) of the local arcades (back when those were a thing), making friends with all of the other people who hung out at arcades. We played arcade games and Lazer Tag, sometimes all night long, and nobody cared.

And it was great.

All of these things were great because it wasn’t just me experiencing them on my own. We had a community where we could share experiences with the games we were playing together, games we played on our own, and games we were looking forward to.

In short, we socialized. We shared our experiences and enhanced our enjoyment of whatever games we happened to play, and maybe convinced other people who had similar tastes to try out something that they otherwise might not have looked twice at.

But, some things started to happen all about the same time. Home consoles achieved graphical fidelity that matched or exceeded arcade games, and, with the enhanced penetration of broadband, you could find your favorite competitive game and play against an actual person somewhere in the world any time, day or night, from the comfort of your own house. Rendering the big selling points to going to an arcade in the first place moot, and arcades began their slow decline into irrelevance.

Computer games migrated to an increasingly-interconnected model where you either had to be online to play them at all or maybe just for multiplayer. But, again, with current penetration of broadband being what it is, you can find someone somewhere in the world that will play whatever game with you, any time, day or night. You can even buy, download, install, and play through a game without ever interacting with another actual human. It’s great!

Erm, sort of.

Don’t get me wrong. Video games are great. But it’s also great to be able to discuss them with someone. This applies to just about every form of entertainment, too. Saw a great movie? You want to tell someone about it. Read a great book? You want to tell someone about it. Heard a great new song? You want to tell someone about it.

But I’m at a point in my video-game-playing life where my video game tastes have diverged from the tastes of most of my remaining video-game-playing friends. Since the types of games we play don’t overlap much, we don’t usually have much to discuss. Secondly, I do a lot of my gaming alone, mostly due to the fact that I currently live alone, and, since a lot of my friends have gotten married and had kids while I haven’t, means, a lot of the time, we have even less to discuss. So, even on the off-chance that one of my friends is playing a game that we would both be interested in, they usually opt to play it with their significant other or their child, which is perfectly understandable, but that also means that if we want to play through something that I will end up either being the third wheel, or one of us will have already completed a portion of the game and want to speed through the parts that the other hasn’t already played through.

All of that is a long way of saying that: when I’m playing something new, I usually don’t have anyone around that I can share the experience with.

I think that’s why my backlog is so large. I still see and buy games that I want to play as often as I ever did, but without someone or a group of someones to share the experience with, my motivation to actually play through them has all but evaporated. I’ve taken a few steps to work around that with this very website (and a few others) along with the ‘Basscomm and (someone) play (something)‘ series over on Youtube. Which is a great start, but I need to keep moving. I need to keep sharing, keep participating, and keep my sense of wonder and, above all, keep having fun. I don’t need to force myself to play more games and just kind of hope that I’ll get over whatever it is that’s keeping me from making a dent in my backlog (that never works). I don’t need to chase and devour the flavor-of-the-week game as soon as it comes out. I don’t need to comb through mountains of news that isn’t really news and discuss every non-article to death. I don’t need to spend all my time reminiscing about how good things were during bygone days (even though they sometimes weren’t all that good). I need to figure out what it is that’s holding me back, realize that the way I used to do things may not work anymore, and figure out what I need to do to change what doesn’t really work into what does work. Video games have evolved significantly in the last 30 years, and there’s no reason that I can’t make some changes and meet them halfway.

I think I can manage that.

Posted in about, articles, blog, confessions, conjecture, crummysocks, follow-up, General, old school, opinion, site news | 1 Comment »

My love/hate relationship with video games – Part 1 – The Games

Sunday, September 15th, 2013

I find myself in an odd place these days. No, not Indiana, although that is fairly weird.

No, I find myself in the position of someone who used to love video games, and eventually got to a point where they don’t excite him much any more. So he begins to wonder if he really still likes video games or if he’s just clinging to something far after it ceased being interesting in the hopes that by sheer force of will he can make it interesting again.

See? Weird.

This has been gnawing at me since at least the last E3, and probably before. I watched the Microsoft and the Sony keynote presentations and felt… nothing much (Nintendo didn’t even have a keynote at E3 this year, and that should have been a giant, throbbing clue to me).

And why not?

That’s tougher to answer, and while I stuck it in my head to percolate over the next several months, I began to realize that E3 as a whole hasn’t really featured much that I found interesting in several years. The show no longer gets me excited. Not only that, but games that get the most press at the event don’t even register as a blip on my radar. Video games media (such as it is) can’t possibly cover everything, I get that (but when they update 30 or more times per day, I kind of wonder how they don’t), so they logically have to pick and choose what they think that their readership will be interested in. Again, I get that. You have to give your audience what they want so they keep coming back and generating those sweet, sweet page views (and ad revenue).

But what a lot of these sites were covering (both during E3 and the rest of the year) stopped being interesting to me. As a result (partially because of the games they cover, but also partly due to the attitudes of most bloggers, er, games journalists, which we’ll delve into in a later article), I stopped visiting practically every video-game website I used to spend hours upon hours going to, and withdrew almost completely from just about every game community I was even peripherally involved in, even this very site, the site that I had put together on a whim between classes while I was slogging through college. The site that was originally set up to document my love of video games started to languish. I started to unconsciously become convinced that video games as a whole had largely passed me by. They moved on into the future while I was stuck in the past lamenting how things were so much better during the Nintendo 64/Playstation/Dreamcast days.

Why did I think things were better then? Was it because they actually were better or was I remembering things through my own personal fog (note – “Ew.”) and focusing on the good while ignoring the bad?

I have been chewing on this conundrum for a long time, and it’s been incredibly frustrating that I just couldn’t put a finger on it.

So I just kind of let those feelings continue to fester in the back of my mind, always doubting that I truly still enjoyed video games, forcing myself to play the occasional game that everyone told me was great, but I couldn’t get into. even though I picked up the odd title here or there, and moved on with my life. I’d built a wall of old-school games and whatever nostalgia I had left to insulate me from the World of Videogames ™ at large. It was comfortable in there, and I could take a peek outside once in a while to see if the industry was still chugging along without me. It was. I no longer had a finger on the pulse of what was going on from day to day (or from hour to hour), so I could see everything from a kind-of detached viewpoint, mutter to myself that, “Yep, still don’t like it”, and move back into my hidey-hole.

And I reflected.

I reflected on what got me here. Why I liked video games in the first place. One of my earliest video game memories is playing Super Pac-Man in some local dive, which would have been around 30 years ago (yikes). I loved it. Nothing about the game was based in anything resembling reality (except maybe the food items), and I was able to briefly live vicariously through a character to do something completely impossible in a surreal world. That’s huge. For the price of a quarter I gained the ability to enter the imagination of someone else and do things that either couldn’t happen in real life, or that would get me killed if I tried. And I loved it all. Practically every video game I played offered something unique, and I wanted to keep going to the next game to see what else there was to see, hear, or experience.

Recently, while I was waxing nostalgic, I rediscovered the blog of John Kricfalusi (autoplay sound warning), and began re-reading through the archives. It might sound like a weird thing for a guy like me to do that since a lot of his posts are geared toward cartoon art and design and I’m not much of an artist. But I like old cartoons, and cartoons have a lot in common with video games – besides, it’s fun to take a peek behind the curtain to see how things get made, it’s why I occasionally watch a woodworking show even though I can barely build a shelf. Even though most of John’s posts aren’t really directed to non-cartoonists like me, there’s a lot to be gained from reading about the subject from a guy who clearly loves the medium and wants anyone involved in the process of making cartoons to be better. One post in particular had a passage that really stood out for me:

Why do bland characters exist in the first place?

What is the purpose of characters with no distinctive traits?

I have a theory that I don’t totally believe. Most animated features want to outspend the competition. The films are built on special effects, spectacle, details, crowds and a showing off of how much money they can burn. With that kind of story maybe strong characters would distract the audience from the impressive flying money.

Maybe the film makers think you need a central character with no distinctive traits so that you can piggy back him through the movie and experience the expensive special effects, wobbly cameras and spectacle through him.

You project your personality onto the blank slate and go on a roller coaster ride.

I personally think that is a rotten excuse to have a bland character and to tell you the truth I doubt that’s what the makers of these pictures have in mind.

Why are there blands then if it’s not on purpose? Because the cartoon makers don’t actually think about what they are doing or why. They just do it by rote. I doubt they even realize these characters are bland. They just have watched so many Disney, Bluth and Pixar movies growing up, that they automatically absorb the stock formulas and repeat them robotically when they get their chance to make a film.

If we replace ‘film’ or ‘cartoon’ with ‘video game’ and ‘Disney, Bluth, and Pixar’ with companies like Blizzard, Valve, and Bungie, then we can start extrapolating an interesting conclusion: most video games no longer offer a unique experience. They just take what’s worked before, stitch together bits of plot or characters with traits that have been successful before, changing up a few details just enough that it’s superficially different (so we can increment the sequel counter), and shove it to market. It’s like a lot of games get made by starting with a checklist of things all games need to have and going through the motions to add them.

Once that happens you have a game that is technically sound, but doesn’t actually have any life in it. Take this scene from Gears of War 2, for example. It’s like someone went down the checklist of ‘things to go into an action game’ and made sure they ticked all the boxes:

  • Conflict
  • Loose cannon character runs in and saves the day
  • One-liner
  • Guns
  • Explosions
  • Everything is brown

And the characters? For all the realism they were supposedly going for, the characters look like marionettes. Nothing weighs anything (take a look at the first creature Cole flips over his head, the gun doesn’t even slow down when it gets several hundred pounds on it, and everyone waves those guns around like they’re made of cardboard instead of metal). None of them react to the situation or even each other in a way that I would expect them to. They sound like they just read their lines off a script one at a time in separate rooms and the only direction they got was ‘bland disinterest’. Cole goes from being up on a balcony overlooking the other characters and using a speaking voice (‘In the flesh, baby’), then he breaks through a wall and yells, then he drops down to almost a whisper. Marcus is completely monotone and moves like someone spent a lot of money on motion-capture and wanted to make sure that they got their money’s worth (check out how he starts waggling his head around and shifting his weight back and forth when he says ‘Roger, Control’).

It’s a combination of the Uncanny Valley, game making by rote, and good ol’ sloppiness.

Once I made these realizations, and really started to think about what I was seeing (and reviling), the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place, and it all crystallized:

I still love video games, so long as they bring something unique and fun to the table (which is why I’m intrigued by the growing Indie developer scene). What I don’t like is a game made from stitched-together tropes developed by rote based on what worked before, but changing one or two details (okay, you guys, we’re going to make a game where you run around and shoot people, but this time, instead of people, they’re giant bugs, and it’s in space, on a planet that looks like Earth, but isn’t). Games that are a copy (sorry, ‘inspired by’) of a copy of a copy that become so far removed from what inspired them in the first place that they’re parodies of themselves and they don’t even realize it. Games who have stories that are nothing but an elaborate setup for whatever Cool Thing(tm) to happen at the end. Games that are made purely to drive profits.

That’s what I can’t stand.

I can hardly believe that so many people who claim to like video games accept the current state of some of the games the Machine puts out to be good or even great, when they’re clearly mediocre. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with mediocre games, or even liking them, but pretending that they’re great does the industry as a whole a huge disservice.

We can do better.

Posted in articles, blog, confessions, old school, opinion | 3 Comments »

LAN Parties

Wednesday, August 7th, 2013

Just over 10 years ago (yeesh!) I did a little writeup of Million Man LAN 2. I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as the first Million Man LAN, and I haven’t been since, which is something I’m going to fix this weekend.

Million Man LAN 2 wasn’t my first event, either (or even my first MML). I first heard about this ‘LAN party’ thing way back in April 2000 and convinced a buddy to pack up our computers, drive to Louisville, Kentucky (a mere 120 mile drive), and pay some people some money for the privilege of using their network to play games nonstop for an entire weekend. It was something called ‘LanWar 7‘.

We arrived to Louisville a bit ahead of schedule, and it was the first time either of us had driven that far out on our own, so we took some time to drive down the main drag and check out some of the sights. And, once we stopped at a local Hardee’s to use their restrooms, we realized that we had crossed into another time zone and we were actually late.

Whoops!

But, we finally arrived to the University of Louisville campus, paid our registration fee and hauled our computers inside. What I saw was mind-blowing: rows and rows of people and computers playing games (Quake 3 Arena, Half-Life DM, and Unreal Tournament? Yes, please). There were also file servers full of interesting files to download (all legal, of course), an IRC server, a projector showing geeky videos on a big screen, etc. etc.

It was an incredible experience. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even blink all weekend as I tried to take it all in, and when the weekend was over I hopped on ICQ and tried to get everyone I knew to go to the next one. We gradually got more and more people interested and even formed a loose-knit group of friends who attended LAN parties regularly. And, for the next several years, we went to various parties around the area. Bi-weekly LAN party in the attic of a PC parts store? In. Local LAN party needs staff members to help pull off the event? I’m totally there. No LAN party this week, but want to play LAN games anyway? Just have a mini-event at my house. No problem.

If this all seems weird to you, you have to remember that broadband was still in its infancy around this time. My home internet service at the time had just been upgraded to a blistering 0.5 Mbps, which was phenomenally fast (10 times faster than my crappy old dial-up modem, anyway). Trying to play multiplayer games on a dial-up modem? Forget about it. It worked, sort of, and you had to tie up your phone line while you played. Forgot to disable call-waiting/someone else needs to make a call and picks up the phone/cat knocks the receiver off the hook? Too bad, game over. So, broadband helped with the reliability problem (connected all the time, and I can still use the phone? Sold!) but trying to find people to play games with was still a bit of a chore.

Downloading the latest Linux distribution (or your other favorite large file) would still take hours (or days), and practically necessitated a download manager to get them all while you slept. So, to find a place where there were not only people playing games on reliable private network, but that there were also the files you wanted, but didn’t want to tie up your Internet connection to get available was an amazing experience. To experience that with hundreds of other people who also loved computers, technology, and video games was just eye-opening.

Social networking sites didn’t even really exist yet, and in my hometown, finding tech-minded people was (and still is, sadly) very difficult. Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t even launch for several more years, so to even find people in the larger enthusiast/gaming community (heck, finding that the community existed at all) that you could actually talk to and interact with? It was an experience like no other, and an experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

But, like the local arcades, I’m afraid that LAN parties are not long for this world. Reliable, fast broadband is reaching more homes and more people than ever before, Free-to-play and MMORPG games haven’t quite displaced LAN gaming yet, but they’re getting close. Lots of multiplayer games these days rely on some servers out on the Internet somewhere. Social networking and video streaming sites mean that I can find and virtually interact with anyone with any interest (just about) anywhere on the planet without having to leave the (relative) comfort of my own chair. And the Old Guard is, well, getting older. I’m past the point where tearing down my computer and hauling it a state away has become tedious. I have a full time job now with real responsibilities (geez, when did that happen?), and killing a weekend or so playing games is a tough sell. Finally (I have yet to see this firsthand, since I haven’t been to an event in several years), I suspect that the younger crowd aren’t replacing the folks who aren’t coming any more. Likely, they don’t see the point.

So, tomorrow morning, just over 13 years after my first event, I’m going to tear down a computer, load it in a car, pick up the same buddy I picked up then, and drive back to where it all began for me, to the scene of what will likely be the last actual LAN party that I go to.

It’s been a good run.

Posted in articles, blog, classic gaming, crummysocks, culture, editorials, linux, MMORPGs, old school, opinion, PC, relics, tech, video games | 1 Comment »

Let’s Play!

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Back around 2006 or so, some of the folks over at the Something Awful forums apparently decided to start playing through some video games and providing commentary via screenshots and captions. Which is a great way to vicariously experience a game while you’re browsing the Internet at work.

Then, sometime in 2007, the Video Let’s Plays started to appear. This was essentially the same thing, but instead of pictures and captions, we get full video and running commentary. Kind of like one of those old hint videos in the 80s/90s, but going through the entire game. (Without the commentary, it’s what’s called a Longplay)

There are lots of kinds of Let’s Play videos, but I think I can break them down into four categories:

  1. People who play through games just to get angry and yell/cry.
  2. People who play through games without a specific goal, just to play until game over (they may or may not complete the game)
  3. People who have a vlog, but with a video game playing instead of showing their face
  4. People who play through the game to completion, showing off gotchas, tips, and tricks, while providing interesting commentary

The barriers to making a Let’s Play video these days are absurdly low. All you really need is a game to play, a video capture device, a microphone, maybe some video editing software, and an Internet connection. Since I had all of those things handy (and there are about 7 million Let’s Play videos on Youtube already), I figured I’d dip my toe into the world of Let’s Play as an excuse to play through some of the games just kind of sitting around here, but I didn’t want to do any of the first three, since they’re pretty boring to watch. So, I figured I’d give #4 a try, which you can see below.

So, if you ever wanted to know what I actually sound like, or if I actually have any video game chops, now’s your chance to find out!

Posted in blog, classic gaming, csks, culture, General, guides, machinima, NES, Nintendo, old news, old school, time wasters, updates, video, video games, wii | Comments Closed

Their loss is my gain

Sunday, May 27th, 2012

We’ve all been there, right? Just minding our own business when we find out that a store is going out of business right now, everything is some huge percentage off, and we just have to get there before they close today… forever!

Well, that happened to me today.

Found out that one of the used video game traders in town was going out of business at the end of the day today and that it was all 85% off, so I headed on down and made a couple of additions to the ol’ collection

Now I just need to find time to play these. Good thing it’s Summer, right?

Posted in blog, collecting, Dreamcast, Misc, NES, old school, relics, updates, video games | Comments Closed

Unauthorized strategies

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

A couple of weekends ago I found a copy of the Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo! Game Strategies at my local thrift store for a quarter. It’s got hints, tips, and strategies for around 100 NES games, which is pretty awesome.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Isn’t this the same guy who told us some time ago that strategy guides were contributing to the dumbing down of our game players of today?”

You better believe it! Let’s engage in a thought exercise for a moment for those who might think I’m a hypocrite for loving an old timey strategy guide over new-fangled ones.

Pretend for a moment that there’s no Internet. No GameFAQs, no GameWinners, no IGN, nothing of the sort. You’re sitting there, playing through a pretty tough game, and you hit a section or a puzzle that you just can’t wrap your head around. What do you do? I recommend throwing your hands up in frustration, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, turning off your system, going to bed, and trying again the next day. But what if that doesn’t work? You can get a friend involved to see if you can work together to overcome whatever challenge is standing in your way, or you can run out and grab a hint book, I’ll repeat, hint book, not strategy guide.

A hint book won’t give you step-by-step handholding directions on how to overcome every challenge the game throws at you. It gives you a few pointers and then turns you loose. Heck, one of the most complicated games covered in the book, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, only gets five pages of exposition, and the first page is nothing but a fuzzy screenshot and some data about the game itself.

Which is a large part of why I have the stance on walkthroughs that I do. I view them as an absolute last resort if you’re stuck. Not some holy text to be followed by rote. To sail through the game guided along every step of the way by someone else’s instruction is more of a hollow victory.

Posted in articles, old school | 2 Comments »